In Human Skin

by Akemi Homura-san

In January, a.t.b. 2010, Empress Marianne vi Britannia, Knight of Two and His Majesty's favoured consort, was assassinated at her residence in the Imperial Villa at Aries. But for Justine and Juliette vi Britannia, her daughters, this proves to be a blessing in disguise... Surrounded by old foes and sheltered by new and unexpected allies, their tale heralds the dawn of a new era.

38. China Girl

The Vermilion Forbidden City, Luoyang, May, a.t.b. 2015

When Priscilla Maldini, Countess of Newfoundland, had approached him with an offer to serve as the military attaché of Her Excellency the Prime Minister, General Andreas Darlton, Marquess of Columbia would readily admit that there had been a number of expectations and speculations that he'd entertained as it regarded the requirements of the position; but while he may have convinced himself that he had actually gotten a handle on the situation after the first few surprises—the first and most memorable of them being, in fact, that until that point, Princess Friederike had not had a designated military attaché, which had led to him using the blanket authorisation his new employer had given him to pull his sons from their own posts and into the formation of the Chivalric Order of Glaston—even the manifold travails of the early days in the Prime Minister's service hadn't actually done much to prepare him for the multitude of absurdities that would be cast into his life as he followed in Friederike el Britannia's wake.

The most recent of which being his current position, standing behind Princess Friederike's seat, in a chamber that was buried deep in the Chinese Federation's most closely-guarded complex, as she treated with a perfumed, pale-faced creature wearing the rough shape of a man, but whose oily manner and form of speech reminded Darlton of no creature so closely as a venomous snake. And while Darlton had never before put much more stock into phrenology than he did into the idea that the phase of the heavens under which one was born, or the type of blood that flowed through their veins, determined their personality, he was currently forced to admit to himself that, given sufficient time and exposure, the High Eunuchs would almost certainly make him into a believer.

Gao Hai was the creature's name, a man-like thing whose slim, vermiculite body cocooned itself in lavish robes and adorned itself with lustrous jewellery—today it was plain gold, but the day before, it had been elaborately-engraved gold with jade and emeralds and rubies and sapphires dangling from rings that pierced his ears and sat upon his fingers. His face was painted in the likeness of his colleagues, as they had seen during their time in Luoyang, and while he was far younger in appearance than the other seven, that youth did him little credit, instead accentuating how nature and his castration had shaped his visage into an allegorical depiction of duplicity and avarice.

And no, Darlton was reasonably certain he wasn't only thinking that because of the man's race; he had spoken briefly with General Cao the previous evening simply to reassure himself that his judgement wasn't muddled, and while the fierce-looking man was clearly an incompetent dullard, Darlton had gotten the impression that he was a straightforward sort, if ambitious beyond the scope of his abilities and thus liable to fall prey to the machinations of more accomplished webweavers. He was certain that what he was seeing was about as undiluted as one could get—and though he'd also heard the old adage about the folly of trusting eunuchs, putting very little stock in it as he did even now, he couldn't help but think that when that adage had been coined, it had been with specimens like Gao Hai in mind. There was a raw hunger for power in his eyes that he recognised from the worst of his commanders over the years, those who used to vent their frustrations on civilians as they passed through, often and explicitly to the point of atrocity.

No, Darlton wagered that he had ample reason to remain on his guard around this man who glutted himself upon the wealth of his nation while his people starved. Not even the most egregious exemplars of the Britannian aristocracy would have suffered such a vast gap between the ruling class and the commoner masses to exist, not out of any altruistic motivation (that word was practically an insult in highborn social circles, Darlton had come to understand), but out of a purely utilitarian sense of practicality; and when the general stopped to consider that fact, even for the space of a moment, even Darlton, who personally knew himself to be about as far from a statesman as one could feasibly get, would say that the picture painted of the group that had chosen Gao Hai to represent them to a foreign power, of a group so accustomed to their luxuries and so hungry for more power, for its own sake and at any cost, was hardly an encouraging one.

The room, in contrast, was nowhere near as opulent; it was a parlour done in that same shade of red the High Eunuchs were apparently so very fond of, with thick, featureless wooden pillars standing to both sides of the doors that led into and out of the chamber in either direction, directly opposite one another. In the middle, then, were two chairs, with a round table in between them at the exact correct height to house a tea service, and though a servant had come through—a boy of about twelve, with sun-browned skin and a shaved head, not a starveling but clearly underfed (years of raising a chivalric order's worth of young boys largely unassisted had given Darlton something of a keen eye for such things)—and poured tea from out of a stone kettle into a pair of thick ceramic cups, the pottery likely crafted by hand, neither Gao Hai opposite them nor Princess Friederike made any moves to take a drink, nor any gestures that might even suggest a willingness to do as much.

Priscilla, the woman whom Darlton had come to know fairly soon into the duration of his service as the Second Princess's paramour, standing to the opposite side of her lover's chair, surreptitiously caught his attention with a side-eye that progressed into a mildly exasperated roll of her eyes, a clear sentiment of 'just another day at the office.' And while admittedly, Darlton felt perhaps a touch too far out of his depth to return the sentiment properly, he could and did certainly appreciate that this sort of situation must have long since lost its lustre and become merely a mundane ritual in the eyes of Her Excellency the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

"And you see, while we certainly appreciate the troublesome time you must be having, what with a sister in danger and a father far away, your highness," Gao Hai simpered, his forked tongue flicking at the air through his thin, painted-blue lips, "we take great offence to the insinuation that we had anything to do with that nasty business with the noble rebellion in your land's southern reaches. Perhaps it is simply that Emperor Charles's grasp is slipping, his rule not as secure as it once was…"

Princess Friederike, who had dressed herself in an eggshell-white silk dress that was native to the Chinese Federation—Mycroft had told him it was called a 'cheongsam' when he'd called to ask—trimmed in gold, white gloves and shoes, and a snow-white cloak with a lilac lining, favoured Gao Hai with a calm smile that could chill the blood of a shark, as she reached up to brush an errant lock of long, unbound pale gold hair from her face. "You disappoint me, Gao Hai. You reveal your ignorance when you suggest that it is the Emperor's efforts alone that secure his reign. I might have expected that the chosen representative of a nation with such a long, storied history would know better than to make such presumptions."

At the very least, Darlton would say that he found his position to be acutely fascinating. His long acquaintance with his erstwhile friend and former employer, Her Highness Princess Cornelia, had instilled in him a shadow of her enduring disdain for politics and politicking, and unlearning that was something of an ongoing process—yet he doubted that even the Andreas Darlton of that bygone era in his life and career would have denied that it was certainly satisfying to see the eunuch's frame stiffen and still ever so slightly as he both puzzled over whether he ought to have taken insult with the Second Princess's statement, if he wished not to seem a dullard, and did his best to conceal that that was what he was doing.

He'd read during his training as an officer candidate that the Prussian, Carl von Clausewitz, wrote once that 'war is merely the continuation of policy by other means,' but he'd be the first to admit that back then, he hadn't quite had the head to wrap around that concept. Here, he beheld the truth in the maxim, the policy that might eventually resort to war to accomplish its ends—the act of force to compel the enemy to do its will, so to speak.

"In any event," the princess continued, interjecting just as Gao Hai opened his mouth to speak. "I find that claim nonetheless difficult to believe, or that genuine offence is taken at my saying what I have. I mean, really. It would be one thing if you'd properly covered your tracks, but this level of transparency? I would struggle to call it anything but amateurish, really. I mean, do you all actually mean for us to believe that His Immaculate Majesty King Shalio lent the rebellion a mercenary force ten thousand strong out of a sense of common cause with the rebels? Or perhaps you meant for us to believe that this was done out of the kindness of his—or rather, his elder sister the Ordained Regent's—heart?"

"Surely you must know that foreign powers are known to contract mercenaries out of Zilkhstan regularly, your highness," Gao Hai replied at last, his pencil-thin brow furrowing slightly. "Such a state of affairs accounts for the lion's share of the kingdom's wealth. You can hardly expect us to believe that you have proof that we have involved ourselves in this particular transaction—it's preposterous, frankly, that you accuse us of such malfeasance."

"It's certainly true enough that Zilkhstan's mercenary companies are the state's sole export of any significant value," Princess Friederike allowed. "And as it's a protectorate of the Chinese Federation, you all have absolutely made a fortune off of that eleven percent stake in every contract as a result. That much, I'll grant you. Which makes it all the stranger, really, that a coalition of upstarts that, let's be frank here, wouldn't have had the funds to contract out the Immortals, the most expensive of Zilkhstan's professional soldiers, if they'd saved their income for a decade and pooled it together, not while also paying for all the other expenses we have on record, successfully obtained their services. Someone else paid that bill, Gao Hai—someone else would have had to—and honestly, do you really expect us to believe, amongst all the other incredible claims that you have made, that Europia had a hand in it? Europia, whose gross domestic product experienced a thirty-two percent fall over the course of the past three years, and whose state armies are so depleted fighting my dear sister, the so-called 'Witch of Britannia,' that they've lowered the enlistment age four separate times over the course of that duration? Truly?"

Gao Hai's jaw snapped shut, his eyes wide.

Princess Friederike leaned her elbow against the arm of the chair, revealing the seam on her upper arm where her glove gave way to flesh, and propped her jaw upon her fist, crossing her long legs over one another and leaning to the side. "My, my, what are we going to do with you, Gao Hai? Hmm? Must we deliver your attaché to your doorstep, piece by piece, before you admit to your wrongdoing?"

"This meeting is over," Gao Hai spat, standing from his chair in an affronted huff.

"Li Xingke," pronounced the Prime Minister.

Gao Hai froze in place.

"Now, be a good boy and sit down, won't you?" commanded the princess, her tone light in a way that made it clear that it was a front; and after a single strangled, indignant moment, the eunuch sat. "Good lad. I certainly hope you understand a little better now, Gao Hai—the nuances of your situation, I mean. It isn't as though Xingke is all that well-known outside of the circles you control most tightly, after all—best not to let the Tianzi's little playmate start getting ideas, especially not ones concerning his ability to rally aid from disaffected groups in other nations, other empires. And in case you were wondering how I know who he is, and where to look for him—let's just say it's very likely to be the same reason why you haven't heard from him in the past few weeks."

Princess Friederike uncrossed her legs and rose from her own seat to her full statuesque height. She was taller than Princess Cornelia had been, standing at just shy of two full metres (one hundred ninety-five centimetres, specifically, if Darlton's memory served), and as her white cloak fell into place about her, it made her stature seem all the more imposing. The Second Princess was a tall woman, even by Britannian standards, and she knew how to make use of every bit of it. "You made mention of my sister a little while ago, Gao Hai. I'll freely admit, she's surpassed even my expectations. It was her, you see, who ferreted the information concerning your involvement from out of the scion of one of the rebel noblemen, and it was just this morning that I was informed that our suppression forces have at last apprehended your man Xingke as the rebels fled the battlefield. He persists under our care for the time being—we don't even need the ledgers that we dug up to prove that the Immortals moved to support the Peninsular Rebellion by your authority anymore. Oh, and you may wish to get someone on the task of informing the Zilkhstani government that you got one of their biggest money-makers slaughtered to a man. The Immortals, I hear, proved distressingly mortal in the end—though frankly, I can't rightly decide whether that would count as tragic irony or poetic justice. I suppose time will just have to tell, now won't it?"

Gao Hai's jaw worked fruitlessly as he stared up, wide-eyed, at Princess Friederike towering over his seated form. "Y-your high… Your highness, I…"

"It's your excellency, actually," the princess corrected the man. "You've made that error more than a few times now, Gao Hai—take care, lest I think that you mean that as a deliberate insult. Well, another deliberate insult, I suppose, seeing as the High Eunuchs have beenattempting to give my paramour the run-around for several months now, to the point where the situation demanded my personal intervention."

"Your excellency," the eunuch stressed, seeming as if he was halfway to grovelling and only barely managing to hold onto his dignity—and while Darlton thought that he could certainly relate to the inherent difficulty that one would surely experience while in the proverbial 'hot seat' before the Second Princess of the Realm, empathy and sympathy both found themselves blocked off by the knowledge that Gao Hai and his colleagues had brought all of this upon themselves. "I'm certain that we can put this misunderstanding behind us to come to some…some mutually beneficial arrangement!"

"Oho! Did you hear that, Silla?" Princess Friederike exclaimed, looking over towards her lover for the sake of dramatic effect, a pantomime of amused shock splayed across the span of her face. "'Mutually beneficial,' he says! What a funny little man. I suppose eunuchs really do have a sense of humour!"

"Your excellency," Gao Hai prompted, his confusion at the sudden turn this had taken allowing the man to recoup some modicum of his lost composure, almost surely accidentally. "I'm afraid I don't…"

"Let me tell you what you don't seem to understand, Gao Hai," the princess interrupted firmly, but nonetheless calmly. "When you walked into this room, you were labouring under the misapprehension that the goal of my presence here was negotiation. It is not. My goal here, which I shall achieve, regardless of whether your little knitting circle wishes me to or not, is to lay down the law. Not to put too fine a point on it, Gao Hai, but it should not be lost on you by now that I have both you and the High Eunuchs as a whole by your collective nonexistent testes. So, here is how this is going to go: I am going to tell you, Gao Hai, what you all are going to do for me, or—turnabout, of course, being fair play—I give the command to my sister, who holds supreme command over the theatre of Area Six, to make a martyr out of Li Xingke, and then I arm all his little followers that you lot, in all your wretched incompetence, could not seem to prevent the man from accumulating amongst your armies. Do you understand? Deny me, Gao Hai, and you'll have an insurgency armed with the latest and greatest of Britannian killing machines right in your backyard by the time the week is up—the second coming of the Taiping Rebellion. Tell me, how do you think all those militarised zones you keep under your thumb will react to such a development, hmm? How much of your divine mandate do you thinkwill actually survive the instability and turmoil that would ensue? What will the future of that Chinese Federation look like, with all your unhappy vassal-states up in arms, ripe for the taking by any enterprising imperator?"

"…What is it that you want?" Gao Hai asked flatly, dropping all pretence and slumping in his chair with the resignation of a cornered animal whose final flailing had proven quite obviously ineffective.

"In the Militarised Zone of India, you have a woman under close surveillance, along with her team. I can certainly sympathise—one can never quite predict the level of reformist influence a foreign-educated woman might bring to a formerly-docile population—but it just so happens that she is the one I want," the princess pronounced, her words clear and unmistakable as she bent at the waist so that she could better gaze directly into the eunuch's defeated expression. "My demand is this: give me Rakshata Chawla, every member of her team that she desires to take with her, their families, and her younger sister Shanti, or I will bring the Chinese Federation down around your ears, brick by bloody brick. Are we clear?"

Gao Hai's eyes narrowed, and Darlton found that he did not like that expression on the eunuch, not one bit. When he bit out his answer, it was as if he was being forced to chew and swallow shattered shards of glass: "Crystal."

Princess Friederike held the man's gaze for a few tense moments longer, and then she straightened to her full height, smiling serenely as if she hadn't just explicitly threatened the sovereignty of the eight oligarchs who ruled over the third-largest empire in the world directly to their faces. Darlton, for his part, had long since lost any terror he might have had for a woman who could swap modes so effortlessly, to the point where nowadays, he was just impressed. "Lovely! I'm glad that we could come to an understanding, you and I. You have one week to comply, or I give the order. Understood?"

Gao Hai's nod had all the hallmarks of someone grabbing him by the head and forcing the gesture out of him.

"Then I think we're done here," Princess Friederike concluded with a huff, smoothing out a few of the imaginary wrinkles that might have formed in the skirt of her cheongsam. Then, she turned to each of them in turn, to her left and then to her right. "Darlton, Silla?"

"The shuttle should be ready for immediate take-off, your excellency," Priscilla assured her royal lover with a venomously smug smirk.

"The Glaston Knights await your command, your excellency," Darlton added with a half-bow; and as the princess wove her way around the chair and made to leave the way they had entered, the general and the paramour took up their respective places at her side, one step behind her and stood to the left and to the right, respectively—which was, of course, reflective of their roles in her service.

"If we leave now, we should arrive at our destination by the early afternoon, relative time," said the princess, thinking aloud in such a way that she wouldn't accidentally divulge sensitive information where unfriendly ears were sure to do their best to overhear. It was a skill that, according to Princess Friederike herself, she'd learned by sheer force of necessity during her early childhood, a period that coincided with the final days of the Emblem of Blood, and that she'd mastered by the time she officially entered the Diplomatic Corps once she came of age—and while Darlton had been shocked to hear that, back when he asked her about it directly a few months into working for her, and could hardly imagine having the matter of whether he lived or died depend in large part upon how well he learned that skill himself, he'd heard the like about a great number of the otherwise-extraordinary skills that Princess Friederike had developed ever since, and it had forced him to accept that Princess Cornelia seemed to have lived a rather charmed life in comparison to what the average claimant to the Chimeric Throne might reasonably expect over the course of their childhood.

Perhaps that was simply one of the perks that came with having been the chosen protégé of the late Empress Marianne 'the Flash,' the woman who was spoken of as the 'Azure Comet' to this very day.

Either way, it was certainly something that bore consideration.

"We'll arrive just in time to make a dramatic entrance," Priscilla chimed in gaily.

"I'll arrange for my boys to be ready to deploy by the time that we touch down at our destination," Darlton informed them. "Circumstances willing, it ought to go smoothly."

"Well then!" sighed Princess Friederike, as she passed through the ceaseless red of the interior of the Vermilion Forbidden Palace, and out into its private airfield. "This ought to be quite a lot of fun…"

---

Eleven hours was not what one might reasonably believe to be an inconsiderable duration, as far as flight went; but of course, that suited Friederike el Britannia just fine. Her shuttle was as much designed and purpose-built to handle these kinds of long-haul journeys, regular trips from one far-flung corner of the world to another, without denying her any significant creature comforts now as it had been five years ago, when she'd borne witness to her favourite sibling making her first ever friend. It was a sweet memory that brightened up the interior of the shuttle for Friederike, and the tactical recollection of its details had made many a long flight that she'd taken since that day just that much less absolutely soul-crushing; and while the day was soon to come that she would no longer have to consider this flying machine to be her secondary residence, she still had work to do in the here and now. Perhaps today would be something of a swan song, now that Justine and those who were loyal to her (and no, Friederike didn't think pretend otherwise, not even—or perhaps especially not—in the case of Juliette) had effectively strong-armed her into divesting herself of the lion's share of her duties for the sake of her health and her sanity—perhaps she could let this merely be a vehicle after today, rather than a house in its own right, with its own facilities for bathing and sleeping and eating while high in the sky.

It was, if nothing else, a nice thought.

The flight from Luoyang to Paris was eleven hours long. Of those eleven hours a mile or more up into the stratosphere, seven were spent blissfully asleep, and the remaining four were spent with Priscilla, as she ate and dressed, did her make-up and hair… Poor Darlton seemed wholly out of his depth while all of this was going on, but he was at the very least a good sport about it, holding his own with polite banter and his general pleasant demeanour.

To someone like Friede, who had spent her entire childhood in the halls of power and never known anything different, working with Andreas Darlton, someone who was born a commoner and who had become ennobled through his exemplary military service, was unexpectedly refreshing—and not only because he was her first experience with a parent who genuinely loved his children, and harboured no ulterior motives for that affection (which made him a poor nobleman, perhaps, but she wouldn't have been able to trust a 'good nobleman' enough to bring one on in as close a position as Darlton now held, so that much was likely for the best), though she wouldn't deny that that certainly helped. Hearing how he spoke of each of his sons, how his entire bearing lightened whenever he got the chance to talk about one or more of them, seeded an ugly, writhing feeling deep in the pit of Friede's chest, but she did her best to ignore it.

After all, everyone knew that envy was the one cardinal sin that brought no pleasure.

She turned her mind away from such bittersweet thoughts as she gathered herself in preparation for what was to come. Wearing one's hair down as she was, unbound, and as her sister-in-law, Carmilla, liked to do was once considered a masculine style, together with wearing one's hair in a low tail, and while the later yew-law provision's guarantee of material parity between the different genders of children born to the high houses of the realm had done much to divest such styles of their gendered associations, unbound hair as a style had retained a cultural association among Britannians with aggression, and, more broadly, with the resolve to shed blood (with low tails being associated with the gregarious and the sanguine). That she wore her hair this way for what she was about to do would send a message to those among her countrymen who would be watching this—one that would perhaps be lost on the more local audience, she granted, but they were not the true threat to her, her sister, or their allies.

Theirs were not the ambitions that needed warning against.

Her choice to don once again the dress she had worn to announce Odysseus's regency (which had been a product of Juliette's quick thinking—not even with the Carine affair had Friede been so very proud of the younger vi Britannia's vicious political audacity) arose from a similar source—she rather sincerely doubted that beauty is a blade, an aphorism that had arisen from the political realities that arose from the newly-granted ability for women to openly walk the halls of power, when before it had been necessary for her sex to do such things discreetly, had ever entered common parlance amongst the glut of the Europian body politic—and with the addition of a white cape to trail from beneath her feathered mantle, she looked, in her own estimation, like she was dressed to kill.

So attired, she drew herself up to her full, impressive height as the gangplank lowered, and dozens of Gloucester units, each bearing the amaranth-and-bronze livery of the Glaston Knights, arranged into a pair of lines flanking the carpeted path from her shuttle, their EM jousting lances raised and crossed above their heads to form an archway, heralded her arrival into the heart of Europia United. She checked an item off of her mental list: that the current president, Richtofen, wanted to project strength, especially during the course of a war that had by now displaced many dozens if not hundreds of millions of his own citizens from their embattled regions, and to forbid a visiting dignitary an honour guard, even a dignitary of a polity with which the E.U. was currently at war, would have been far too easy to read as an admission of weakness for how precarious Mr. Richtofen's current position truly was.

Satisfied with her assessment, Friede began to descend from her shuttle, and walked down the way, heedless of the heavy press of journalistic bodies that seethed at the far end of the landing strip. Friede was herself no true advocate for the Britannian Broadcasting Company, the state-sponsored news media group, but this situation right here was an illustrative example of why she didn't truly devote much thought to it: the notion of 'free press' was, at its core, oxymoronic; in the face of the reality of consent of the governed, as Robespierre had proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, the flow of information was simply too potent a tool for political gain to leave free and unalloyed. One way or another, any media apparatus was going to fall under someone's control, and she considered it the lesser of two evils for that ownership to come from a visible, obvious source, rather than any number of shadowy private interests that would almost surely make ample use of their private media companies' capacities for obfuscation and manufactured anonymity to shield themselves from even the merest scrap of accountability.

The fact that the United Republic of Europia did in fact uphold the right to private ownership of its news outlets, however, was nevertheless a state of affairs that Friederike would be only too happy to use to her direct advantage, as she had done on several occasions in the past. After all, she thought to herself, though not at all without humour, too hard of a yank on the leash would dispel the illusion of freedom. And we can't have that, now can we, Mister President? Not with your foundation held together through brute force alone, your grip slipping further with each young soldier shipped home in a body bag…

Thus it came to be, that with an unhurried stride, peerless decorum, and an unflappable demeanour, Friederike el Britannia, the Second Princess of the Imperial Family, weathered all the flashing lights and all the meaningless, amorphous chatter that began to surround her as she, Priscilla, and Darlton strode into the building ahead, treading a clear pathway that cut through the clamouring chaos, at the end of which rested a car to ferry them from the airport to the Hemicycle building, a short trip through the streets of Paris away. She noticed that Darlton was a bit stiff in the face of all this press coverage—she'd forgotten that this was most likely his first time experiencing such a hectic 'welcome' in all the time he'd spent working for her, given that this was the first time in several years that she'd actually set foot in Paris for any sort of business she might have had, official or otherwise. She was well-aware that the only reason she was allowed in the city now was because Richtofen, or perhaps merely those who worked under him in his administration, wanted to use her presence, and her address to the Hemicycle, as a means of fuelling their propaganda apparatus, of course—she wouldn't have survived for very long in this line of work if she'd been truly stupid enough not to have known that already—but that was well enough; in fact, it served her purpose marvellously.

At the end of the pathway, the car awaited them—and, predictably, the black-suited driver who was standing in front of the automobile's front door was just the sort of person that Friede had been expecting them to be.

"Your excellency," the young woman in question greeted her with a deferential bow at the waist, her chin-length inky black hair and wrap-around polarised sunglasses rendering her unremarkable and easily-overlooked. "I'm to see you and your entourage to the Hemicycle."

"Very well," Friede acknowledged with a brief nod. And then, purely because she knew from quite a bit of prior experience that there would be more than one journalist who had gotten close enough to hear them, one way or another, she asked the young woman, "How old are you, exactly?"

The driver stiffened—clearly, her age was a sensitive issue—but, to her credit (as well as the credit of the one who trained her), she did not rise to what she surely must have interpreted as bait, or at the very least would have under different circumstances. Instead, she straightened out of her bow, and replied, very coolly, "Fourteen this year, your excellency."

"I see," she remarked, her tone purposefully inscrutable. Then, she looked towards the vehicle, and as if reminded by the direction of Friede's gaze, the driver opened the door to the rear passenger row. Silla slipped in first to take the window seat, and Friederike followed her in, with Darlton, the third and final passenger, bringing up the rear at the right-side rear window, before the driver closed the door behind him. Now with a moment to themselves before their driver joined them in truth, Friede leaned over towards her military attaché, and said to him, as surreptitiously as she could, "Dealing with journalists is very similar to dealing with courtiers in my experience, Andreas: don't let them see you flinch."

"'Andreas,' your excellency?" Darlton asked with a raised brow.

"Do you mind being addressed by your given name?" Friede returned, with her golden brow every bit as arched.

"…Suppose not," the ennobled soldier replied after a moment, shrugging. "It's just a bit surprising, that's all. Princess Cornelia never called me that in all the years that we knew each other."

"Yes, well, I'm frankly not convinced that Cornelia could call her knight by his given name even if they should be in bed together," Friede said wryly. "And besides. I'm not her."

"Clearly," Andreas chortled.

"And, should it please you, you may address me as 'Princess Friederike,' or even just 'princess'," Friede offered with an off-handed shrug. "It's only fair."

"I'll think about it," he replied, bemused; and it was at that point that their driver finally deigned to join them—having just hashed out logistics with her security detail in the form of the Glaston Knights, if Friede wanted to venture a guess. She slid into the driver's seat, the young woman they'd fortuitously been assigned, and closed the door behind her, starting up the automobile and peeling away from the curb.

There was silence inside the vehicle for a few moments; then, once the makeshift motorcade was at last underway, with the Gloucesters of the Glaston Knights surrounding the car, Friede at last broached the subject that had been on her mind since she caught sight of their driver. "Kōsaka Ayano, I presume?"

The driver stiffened behind the wheel for a moment, and then relaxed. "Yeah, that's me. It's nice to meet you, your excellency."

"I see you're not particularly surprised that Miss Shinozaki told me to expect you," she observed in an attempt to break the ice a bit—a jumpy informant, even for an operation as tightly-run as the Shinozaki Clan and its vassals, was of use to no one, not even themselves.

"No, my cell leader was pretty up-front about all of that," the girl replied with a shrug. "And before you ask, we've got the payload delivered. Yukiya's on standby, awaiting the signal to release it."

"Excellent. Well done," Friede praised as genuinely as she could manage—in another world, she found it only too easy to imagine how she might have forgotten how to be genuine entirely. "And your cell leader, the head of the Hanzō Clan, correct? Where's he in all of this?"

"Akito's embedded in the ranks of the military, a staff officer to some new-blood who's caught the eye of General Smilas," Ayano said casually. "And it's the Hyūga Clan, your excellency. You'll have to try harder than that."

"Ha! Spirited, aren't you?" laughed Friede, bemused and amused in equal measure. "Well, at the very least, I know you're the genuine article, so it's served its purpose, no?"

"Sure it has, right up until OpSec's been compromised to the point where infiltrators slip right past questions like that," Ayano shot back.

"If the Shinozaki Clan's shadow network's operational security is ever compromised to that extent, Miss Kōsaka, I daresay we'll have bigger problems on our hands," Friederike quipped drily.

"Mm. Fair enough," the girl shrugged. "You've got a point there, at the very least."

"I wouldn't have gotten very far in this line of work if I didn't," Friede said, halfway serious. "But I was told that your cell is made of four members, not three. What about the whereabouts of Sayama Ryō?"

"He's undercover at the childhood home of that rising star I mentioned a little while ago," explained Ayano, as she kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead. "The Euros aren't exactly fond of us Elevens, so when Akito wound up in her unit, we staged a little show where Ryō went and mouthed off to a frontline unit that'd just been rotated back to the home front—a battalion reduced to single digit survivors, you know the sort—and got himself beat up in front of her as she passed. She put a stop to it and offered Ryō a position as her body servant. Apparently her family's really fucking loaded…"

"Oh? A bit unusual, isn't it, to expend so many resources on a mere protégé—even that of someone as influential as the E.U.'s commander-in-chief?" the princess prompted, mildly surprised.

"Yeah, well, we're kind of a small cell, so we like to look out for each other," said Ayano, and once again, Friederike had to commend the young lady's professionalism—she could quite easily have chosen to take offence to how Friede had worded that, and frankly, she wouldn't even have blamed the girl for doing so. But the (nominal, at least) shinobi hadn't risen to Friede's admitted insensitivity after all, and had instead maintained enough of her composure to reply with a level of flippancy that the blonde understood to be the norm, in her case, while also keeping a relatively even keel. "Plus, because we're so small and in such hostile territory, the higher-ups give us a degree of leeway in terms of how we're supposed to tackle ops, so long as nothing we do risks blowing the cover of the larger network. So…"

"A sensible provision," Friede acknowledged with a nod. Then, a thought occurred to her. "If your friend Ryō is the promising young lady's body servant, then why is he in her childhood home, instead of by her side? I'm assuming she doesn't spend much, if any, of her time away from work, not if she's caught the eye of General Smilas…"

Ayano's wince was obvious even through her wrap-arounds. "Ah…yeah… About that… Apparently the lady's adopted, and her adopted family's youngest son, Ioan, is set to marry her, and everything. But the guy's kinda-sorta super-duper far in the closet about his preference for men, and…well…Ryō's a kunoichi, not a shinobi like the rest of us, so he took advantage of the opportunity when he saw it."

"Ah," Friederike nodded in understanding. She'd spoken enough with Miss Shinozaki about what it was that she did over the course of the years since she and her clan uprooted the leaderless Office of Secret Intelligence and supplanted it that she immediately grasped what must have transpired. So, in an attempt to lighten the mood, she asked, "And is it your friend, I wonder, or the brother who bites the pillow?"

Ayano laughed, and though it sounded startled, Friederike also knew it to be genuine. "Rich Boy's a huge brat, according to Ryō. Not like that's surprising, though. He looks like a trashy French Dorian Gray."

That rang a bell. "Wait, this Ioan person—long brown hair, tastelessly ostentatious wardrobe, never shows up to an event without a prostitute on either arm?"

"Didn't know you knew him, your excellency," Ayano rejoined with a shrug.

"Unfortunately," Friede admitted with a heavy sigh. "Though, I suppose it would perhaps be more accurate to say that I know of Ioan Malcal, than that I know the man directly."

"Told you he was a Sodomite," Priscilla teased her. "No other reason for a man that pretty to be both that confident and that utterly charmless."

"Yes, yes, you'll get your tenner when we're back on the shuttle, Silla, you were right," the princess sighed again.

"…Would it be presumptuous of me to ask if there's a story behind that?" Ayano asked.

"It would be, yes," Friederike replied as she rubbed at the bridge of her nose, thankful that this outfit didn't include gloves she could accidentally smear part of her make-up on. Tempted though she might have been to mess up the appearance that had taken her insufferably smug paramour quite a considerable amount of time to get looking just right out of spite, it would ultimately have been a very bad idea. "But, if it would satisfy your curiosity, Ioan Malcal once approached both Priscilla and myself at a party after a summit, and clumsily propositioned us for sex."

"He propositioned you for sex," Priscilla corrected, her tone still insufferably smug. "It was only after you made it clear that we were together that he proposed a…what is it that the French call it, again? A ménage à trois?"

"Does that happen…often?" Andreas asked; from the tone of his voice, it was abundantly clear that the question came solely from a place of morbid curiosity.

"Not so much anymore, no," said Friede, gesturing airily with her free hand towards the spectre of her past. "Before I'd built my reputation? Certainly. But ever since I made my name, most people have had the good sense and self-preservation instinct to keep the thought of bedding me very far indeed from their minds, let alone their mouths. And besides, Silla gets awfully jealous…"

She kept a straight face as she slipped that barb, but she and Priscilla had been together long enough for her lover to know exactly how self-satisfied she felt to turn that back around on her, and slapped her on the shoulder over it, playfully.

"Well, I don't know about you all, but I'm pretty sure we've arrived," Ayano piped up. "And, speak of the devil… That's General Smilas's motorcade up ahead, so he's probably here. You're likely to run into Akito and his C.O. in there, just as a heads up."

"I appreciate the warning," Friederike said with a nod as the vehicle slowed to a stop, and the squad of Glaston Knights who'd served as their escort and security detail came to a halt behind them. "Oh, and…I would advise that you keep an eye on the Hemicycle session on the television as it progresses. I'd imagine you'll easily be able to tell for yourself when we'll be coming out to get picked up."

"Noted," Ayano replied, as one of the uniformed valets out in front of the Hemicycle strode towards the automobile to get the door for Friede and her party. "A pleasure to meet you, your excellency."

"Likewise," the princess replied, and was only mildly surprised to find that she meant it. "If nothing else, you made for some scintillating conversation."

And that was the end of what she could say freely, because the valet who had strode through the full span of the mass of journalistic bodies that awaited them here, as well, with cameras brandished and half a hundred leading questions to probe and prod eager to come leaping from off of their wagging tongues, had reached them at last, and opened the rear door to let them out.

Friede afforded Andreas a surreptitious bump of her elbow as he began to climb out, and she looked on with pride as he forced the stiffness out of his bearing. He'd clearly taken her warning to heart, and now, even the shadow of weakness no longer lingered about him, his large, sturdy mountain of a body shifting into a portrait of natural-seeming ease, however artificial it might have truly been. He moved to stand to the left, then, the position of a Knight of Honour, and, in a truly inspired bit of improvisation, offered his hand to aid her out of the vehicle in full view of the frothing press. Following along with it, she placed her bare fingers into his white-gloved palm, and allowed him to all but lift her out of the rear of the vehicle and onto her feet upon terra firma once more, with Priscilla disembarking in her wake to stand at her right; and the moment that all of them stood together, Friede led the way through the glare of the flashing lights and the tidal wave of intrusive sound, past the pair of uniformed doormen, and into the front door of the Hemicycle building in an immaculate flourish of white.

It was quite a bit calmer within the building, once they'd passed the threshold—the movement of journalists and reporters faced far heavier restrictions inside the Hemicycle than upon its doorstep—but the moment Friederike had stepped out of that car, she had her guard up, the truth of herself concealed beneath successive layers of well-loved masques fashioned for this specific purpose, to give nothing at all away in a hostile environment. Even before she'd known for a fact that the Hemicycle was crawling with ears ranging from the unfriendly to the merely unscrupulous, she had made a point never to think to speak freely while within the walls of these sorts of places; and thankfully, Andreas took his cues from her every bit as easily as Silla once did, remaining silent as she led them through familiar cream-coloured halls and down ivory shortcuts that she was almost certain that some, if not most, of the delegates of the Council of Forty, the governing body of the entire E.U., were even to this day unaware of, closing in on the entrance into the council chamber for visiting dignitaries.

This was not the first address she had made to these people. It was likely not to be the last.

Then she turned a corner, and recoiled very slightly in shock, as Priscilla and Andreas came up short in her wake—the shinobi, Ayano, had warned her, of course, that this might happen, and had done so only a mere ten minutes ago, if that, but it was an unexpected convergence nonetheless.

"General Smilas," she called out to the tall, bearded man in his country's blue uniform—whom she would imagine that some might find rather handsome, in a rugged, square-jawed sort of way—as she made to approach, plastering her most winning and disarming smile across her face as she did. "It's been entirely too long. How have you fared? I imagine these past few years have been quite trying, to say the least."

Gene Smilas, the commander-in-chief of the E.U.'s armed forces, clicked the heels of his knee-high black boots together, and pivoted to face her and her companions as they approached. His tousled black hair was shot through with nascent streaks of grey, though his grey-flecked black beard remained as deceptively well-groomed as it ever was, and his double-breasted blue uniform coat seemed to hang just a little bit more loosely about the span of his broad shoulders than it once did, for all that it remained immaculate. The bags that had formed beneath his narrow grey eyes, hard and intense (but pitifully inelegant, she couldn't help but qualify, if only within the confines of her own mind), and the slight sallow tinge to his chiselled cheeks unified the seeming incongruity of the image of the man before her, then, into an evocative depiction of a man who had been working himself to the bone for perhaps several years on end by now, but nonetheless refused to release his grip on his military discipline even slightly.

Hell, she wouldn't be surprised if it was the only thing keeping him standing, some days.

"Your excellency," Smilas replied cordially, with a taciturn nod in her direction, his expression stoic, but not to the point of rudeness. The man seemed to believe himself to be difficult to read—and perhaps he was, by the standards of Europians—but Friederike was a Britannian princess through and through, and so his naked, all-consuming ambition was as good as sewn right into his coat in bright red letters, as far as she was concerned, layering itself into dozens of different nuances of how he held himself that she only barely registered on the periphery of her perception, and much more strongly intertwining itself with every word he spoke in his prominent Occitan accent, which he seemed to have done his best to scrub of more specific identifiers while also resisting full assimilation with Parisian modes of speech. "Always a pleasure."

"Oh, where are my manners!" she exclaimed with a mild gasp, putting a little kick of exaggeration into her tonality to better sell it—if he wanted pleasantries, then pleasantries he would get. "You've already met Her Excellency Priscilla Maldini, Countess of Newfoundland and Minister of Foreign Affairs, and this is General Andreas Darlton, Marquess of Columbia, Grand Master of the Chivalric Order of Glaston and my military attaché."

Smilas seemed to straighten and perk up, his eyes scanning over Andreas's strong build and pristine uniform without all that much in the way of subtlety. She watched as his gaze seemed to linger over the prominent scar that ran across the commonborn general's sun-weathered face, and Andreas, who'd chosen to stand at parade rest, met Smilas's open assessment evenly, in a sort of military man-to-military man style of communication. Then, seemingly satisfied, the Europian general nodded once, and gestured to the young pair whom he'd been addressing when Friederike had rounded the corner. "I see. If I may, your excellency, allow me to introduce Captain Leila Malcal, and Warrant Officer Akito Hyūga."

"Hyūga Akito, sir," the young woman who had just been introduced as Captain Malcal interjected to correct, her tone respectful and deferential, but nonetheless firm.

"Of course," Smilas acknowledged with a nod. "My mistake."

Friederike afforded herself a moment to look over the two officers—the boy, Akito, seemed to have no trouble with meeting her gaze evenly with his dispassionate cobalt eyes, framed by a mop of blue-black hair that tapered into a long braid behind him, but that was more or less precisely what Miss Shinozaki had told her to expect when she met with the last of the Hyūga Clan, whose older brother had massacred the rest of his family wholesale through some unspecified means, all right in front of its sole survivor. According to Miss Shinozaki, he was a remarkably capable shinobi, a prodigy in any other setting, under really any other circumstances, but as it stood, the boy lacked any significant sense of self-preservation and had a tendency to lapse into uncontrollable fits of berserker rage when truly pressured, both of which held him back heavily from reaching the upper echelons of mastery of which the head of the Shinozaki Clan believed him capable, and thus, when Friederike looked him over, neither the hollow emptiness that seemed to swallow every mote of light in those eyes, nor their sheer capacity for vacancy disturbed her to any great degree.

The true surprise was the young woman, Leila Malcal—and not solely on account of her uniform shirt's decidedly non-uniform frilled cuffs, though Friede would be lying to herself if she tried to make herself believe that that wasn't at least part of it.

The accent that had shaped her words was Parisian, through and through, bearing the hallmarks of a degree of refinement and education that was really no surprise, given the level of wealth and influence that her adopted family enjoyed; and yet, though she was clearly very beautiful, in an almost Boticellian sense, her features weren't French, not to any degree that Friederike had ever seen. Her hair was pale gold—a paler shade, even, than Friederike's own, surprisingly enough—with large lilac eyes that seemed only to throw her vaguely, irritatingly familiar non-French features into even sharper relief. For Friede, it was the irritation of a word that insisted on lingering upon the tip of her tongue, and while a part of her wanted to mentally juxtapose the doll-like qualities of her appearance with that of Justine prior to the death of the late Empress Marianne—a part that she knew would never truly forget her inaction during that time, and the consequences it had very neary reaped—it was a more distant memory that reacted with magnetic attraction to the resemblance that her subconscious spotted in Captain Malcal's face.

And then, it clicked.

"Forgive me if this seems an impertinent question for me to ask, but," Friede ventured to ask at last, though it had been perhaps no more than a second and a half since the introduction had taken place, "do the names 'Bradow and Claudia von Breisgau' mean much of anything to you?"

"Y-yes," the young woman replied, recoiling in shock—though Friede couldn't help but notice that it never reached her eyes, and so left the eerie doll-like quality of her features unperturbed, a mimicry of life and genuine emotion that failed to alleviate the pervasive glassiness of her gaze in a manner that, if she was being entirely honest with herself, was far and away too familiar a sight for Friederike to be anywhere near comfortable with looking upon it. "They were my birth parents…"

"Ah, I see," Friede hummed. The House of Breisgau, a defunct highborn lineage that had made the entirely-too-common mistake of backing the wrong horse when it came to succession, and had fled into the arms of Europia United to escape the merciless, relentless culling hand of Marianne vi Britannia. Friede had been little more than the merest slip of a girl when they'd fled, and freshly into the ranks of the Diplomatic Corps when the Breisgau patriarch's rapid political ascent towards the presidency of the E.U. had met quite a grisly end in the midst of an alleged terrorist attack. But of course, she could say none of that, not without consequence and certainly not here, of all places, so instead she inclined her head towards the girl, and said, "Your parents were remarkable people, and you can be certain that many a tear was shed amongst the ranks of His Majesty's Diplomatic Corps when the news of their deaths broke. I confess, I didn't get the chance to know either of them all that well—perhaps, in another world, it would have been him I treated with, instead of Mister Richtofen—but, seeing how well you've done for yourself, making captain at such a young age, well…I'd like to think they'd be quite proud of you."

"You honour me," Captain Malcal replied, clicking the heels of her boots together and bowing from the waist; and while that hid the young lady's gaze from Friederike, she'd have been very surprised, indeed, if this expression of emotion reached her eyes any more readily than the previous one. "Thank you…your excellency."

"I've done nothing of the sort, I assure you," Friede said, brushing off the gratitude, and she snuck a meaningful look in the direction of the last of the Hyūga, before returning her full attention to Smilas, who stood there watching her with an expression that she rather thought might best (albeit crudely) be described as 'emotional constipation.' "My dear General Smilas. I never got the chance to thank you, I don't believe, for that priceless gift you so graciously bestowed upon me when last we met, before this whole mess with the war really began. You may rest assured, if ever you had cause to doubt it, that that particular painting now occupies a place of highest honour within my dear younger sister's marital household. So, once again, you have our gratitude."

"You are very welcome, your excellency," Smilas replied with a bow, and she could read upon him no indication at all that the prior gifting of The Triumph of the Hel-Queen was something he considered to be particularly sensitive information. This left her with two options: either Smilas was a deeper plotter than she'd given him credit for (which was highly unlikely, to say the least), or that his was such an unsubtle disposition that the gift had been given in good faith, with no ulterior motive behind it. This latter case she found far more plausible, and internally, she sighed at once again having misjudged the intrigues of Europia and its 'movers and shakers', so to speak—though, in this case, as in prior cases, such had ultimately been a misconception of no material consequence.

"Indeed," she said, her tone almost cloyingly pleasant—and intentionally so. "Well, it has been quite the unexpected pleasure, General, but unfortunately, time grows short, and I am expected elsewhere. It was wonderful meeting your protégé, of course—and, though I'm generally quite loath to dictate to someone the means by which he might best conduct his affairs, I will advise you to keep a close eye on this one. Captain Malcal is going places, after all, and in such cases, 'tis better by far to be an advocate than an obstruction."

Before the general had a chance to reply, she nodded towards him, and brushed past him and his two young officers, Priscilla and Andreas in tow, as she headed directly towards the rich mahogany doors into the auditorium—where, for the first time in nearly three full years of ceaseless bloodshed and total war, she would finally get to address the Council of Forty, personally.

---

Leila Malcal was a dead woman walking.

Ever since that dark day, now almost a decade past, when, in the depths of winter, she'd lost both her parents, and then fallen through the ice in her haste to escape the wreckage of the car bomb that had murdered her mother, the phantom sensation of the cold, still lake-water all around her sapped the feeling from her heart and spirit, just as the water itself had stolen the breath from her lungs and the fleeting warmth from her limbs. Whoever her mysterious rescuer actually was, the hazy memory of the green-haired woman with honey-gold eyes that the passage of years had her half-convinced was nothing more than a dream of her exposure-induced delirium, had not saved her quickly enough for her to have kept all the childish dreams and passions that might otherwise have grown into the joys and sorrows of adolescence and adulthood from spilling out of her lungs alongside her last, desperate gasps of air.

In all that followed over the years since, beginning with her adoption into the Malcal family and all its extraordinary wealth, and progressing throughout the span of her education in the halls of only the most prestigious private schools in all of France, Leila had grown quite adept at the mimicry of humanity. She'd always been a quick girl, so it hadn't taken her very long to learn how to smile without joy, how to weep without sorrow, how to joke and jibe and charm, how to seem angered or contemptuous or disdainful… She had learned them all, and could reproduce them without fail, without anyone detecting the truth beneath the falsehoods she had taken such pains to learn and to perfect over years of practice and repetition. She'd even managed to meet people who called her 'friend,' as unexpected as that was—Anna Clément had been of far greater help than she might ever know, with the sheer magnitude of her expressions, as well as her strange willingness to wear them all upon her sleeve, acting as Leila's saviours as they progressed through all of the shifting tides of adolescence, when emotions were meant to grow more complex and layered, to the point where Leila had to figure out how to grapple with the fact that a smile was not a smile was not a smile, that a person could feel several things at once, and each with its own broad expanse of nuance.

Some days, Leila imagined that there must now be more of Anna Clément in her than there was of either of her birth parents; that when she smiled, it would be as Anna Clément smiled, or as any of a dozen other girls with whom she had attended school smiled, and not as her father or mother might have smiled. It was a thought that she knew, intellectually, ought to have brought her some measure of distress; and that it did no such thing was perhaps a sign of just how much of her was still trapped in that same lake, drowning for all eternity beneath the surface of the water, as it froze and thawed and froze all over again. Perhaps she was not herself Leila Malcal, Leila Breisgau, at all, she'd thought more than once over the years—perhaps she was merely some German creature, the doppelgänger, that had stolen her face and her life. Perhaps she was really that little girl's reflection in the water's surface, an apparition that had switched places with her, a soulless spectre whose own conduct would inflict itself upon the girl's immortal soul, looking out for ever at something that performed a grotesque mimicry of the life that she had stolen, much like Dorian Gray and his eponymous painting.

None of these ideations irked Leila, these fancies that were circuitous in their nature, and thus could truly end nowhere. Cogito ergo sum—in truth, she was the only Leila Malcal that she had ever known; and so, for all practical purposes, she could be no one else.

It was none other than this inner death, the vacant cavity where she had always heard a soul ought to be, that had drawn her to Hyūga Akito, if she was being honest with herself. In him, she'd sensed a similar sort of desolation, a parallel chthonic sense of a robbed grave walking abroad, and she had thought that that was what she needed, to find a companion—perhaps romantic, perhaps merely sexual—who understood, as she did, what it was to be the dead amongst the living, the corporeal ghosts lingering amidst all the heat and love and hate of humanity, clear to see, but ever-distant of touch. Already, it was a secret that had mended a bridge between her and her fiancé, her adopted brother Ioan, that she would aid him in concealing the truth of his male Eleven lover, Ryō, if he would do the same for her in her pursuit of Akito—and when at last the two of them bedded down together, and their cold bodies and dead hearts moved and knew and became one, she had surprised herself with the secret hope she had held, that where the living had failed to stir her heart, another dead thing might succeed.

It was a hope that had only revealed itself upon its disappointment.

There was an element of physical release, perhaps—but their coupling had all the life and vigour of the stations of the Cross, a recreation of an event and not an event in and of itself. The flat death in his eyes stirred as little as her own heart even as their bodies entangled, and she knew then that there was no love between them, and there could never have been—and this, too, was a hope she had held, that had revealed itself to her only upon the occasion of its disappointment.

She supposed it was only fitting. The poets spoke of undying love—but then, there was nothing that truly lasted forever, and so why should love have been any different?

Two dead things trying to love—it was the quintessence of the danse macabre. Their understanding of one another had fed upon itself, festering like a wound and only succeeding in binding them more tightly to those graves from which they had been stolen in the first place. Living, yet unfeeling corpses—a fate, she knew, to which Akito was consigned, with which she thought she had already made peace, herself.

And yet, their coupling had taught her otherwise.

With the loss of her virginity, Leila Malcal had gained new knowledge of herself, and it was that she was, in spite of all good sense and practicality, a dead thing who wished for nothing more than to live again. And perhaps it was this wish that had required understanding, that might have sparked something between her and Akito if it was in any way shared, if he was in any way as foolish as she. But there was nothing for it, she supposed—after all, even a child would come to know that it was simply not possible for the dead to return to true life. Resurrection was a thing of scripture and fable, not the reality where strife and horror and tragedy and pure, simple bad luck killed men in droves, day after day after day.

She'd stayed with Akito after that out of simple inertia—and she suspected the same was true of him. He had a few friends who loved him, and perhaps one of them, a spirited Eleven girl Leila knew of but did not know, loved him in the way that two living beings (those with a desire for romance, at any rate) might have loved one another; and yet, night after night, they shared the same bed, the same coffin—the same black-soil pit of earth, two feet wide and six feet deep.

During the day, she kept him by her side, while she engaged in her pantomime of life, though Akito wasn't inclined to bother, and they advanced through the ranks, his career right on the coat-tails of hers; and so far, she was convinced no one had noticed, was secure in her knowledge of the act that she put on as one utterly without flaw—until today, when, purely by virtue of simple happenstance, she, Akito, and General Smilas crossed paths with none other than the prime minister of the Holy Britannian Empire, Friederike el Britannia, in the halls of the Hemicycle, and the tall, gorgeous older blonde, regal and statuesque, looked at Leila like the princess knew precisely what she was.

It was the closest Leila had ever felt to genuine disquiet since the day she died.

General Smilas had left them in an ill-disguised hurry once Princess Friederike and her companions, that scar-faced mountain of a man and that beautiful viper of a woman, brushed past them into the main hall of the Hemicycle, where the Council of Forty—the Highest Assembly, some called it in France, and France alone, of all the Republic's many member-states—was in session. He had muttered some excuse that Leila didn't care to commit to memory, and like that, she and Akito were alone.

She dropped her act, then—she always did when they were alone, when she had no one to perform for, no one to deceive—and offered, "Café in the café?"

Akito shrugged. "Sure."

Her wordplay was lost on him, of course, but that was fine. They'd known each other for more than long enough for her not to have any realistic expectation it would land.

The Hemicycle wasn't the sort of place one would think of when it came to good coffee, of course; but it was an open secret that the individuals who worked here, and more than a few members of the E.U.'s main governing body, practically lived on the stuff—not to mention, the building was located near the heart of Paris, and while modernisation had changed quite a bit of how the city looked, the fact remained that that still meant something, and part of that meaning was that the location had its advantages. The cafeteria of the Hemicycle building, therefore, had some of the best coffee for several city blocks, and so it was to that part of the building that they went, through corridors floored with carpet and metal and stone, across the decades of renovations and refurbishing the place had undergone since the days of Napoleon and Robespierre.

It would be more accurate, perhaps, to consider the place a food court, where a number of popular bistros whose main locations were elsewhere in the city held their own mini-branches, all but hawking different varieties of food and drink across the expanse of cast-iron tables and chairs that made up the area for eating, and the television screens that ringed the dining hall were occupied with different news channels, and one that was showing the feed from the cameras filming the Council session from the second level, the feed that the rest of the news stations on the other screens would use for their own reporting whenever any of the politicians responsible for representing their member-states did something 'newsworthy' on the floor of the chamber. Today, President Richtofen was in attendance, along with his toadies, and though Princess Friederike and her two-person entourage were also present, it was clear at a glance that the man was going over points of order with the chamber and making the Britannian prime minister wait her turn to address the Council in some sort of petty display of dominance.

Princess Friederike did not seem bothered, which Leila imagined must have frustrated the president a great deal—his heavy brow, one of the few notable markers of his illustrious lineage, made famous by the E.U.'s top pilot during the Great War, Major Manfred von Richthofen, furrowed slightly, thus wrinkling his broad forehead (another marker) in the process. But regardless, Leila judged that she and Akito had enough time to get coffee and find themselves a seat to watch the proceedings before the woman who was perhaps Britannia's most infamous living daughter kicked off her address, so she led her friend and subordinate by the arm to the counter, and deliberately slipped herself back into her act of humanity so that she could have it firmly in place before she drew close enough to anyone in the (currently) somewhat sparsely-populated room for them to read the truth of her nature upon her face. She'd been seen through once today, and that was, in her opinion, one too many times already.

There was an art form to cultivating an image, Leila had learned relatively early on. The key of the deception wasn't just in how she looked and how she acted (though those were certainly large parts of it), but also in the kinds of media she pretended to like, the food she could force herself to choke down, and the drinks that she had to pretend to taste. There wasn't really much of a meaningful difference to her between dark roasted black coffee and the most sugary, milk-laced coffee derivative imaginable, but too much of the perception her existence invoked in the eyes of others rested upon the strength of her ability to pretend as if there was for her to neglect that part of her performance in good conscience. As such, the coffee order she put in was something memorised to the point of thoughtlessness, the kind of coffee people who didn't really like coffee all that much got just so that they could pretend to enjoy it themselves (so perhaps it was fitting, in a sense), and she made sure to smile and be gracious with the server, to reaffirm the perception of her as some pretty, bland little rich girl, whose compassion came easily and without provocation to think any more deeply upon the inner life she might have than what treaded water at the very surface of her appearance. It would be surprising to most for such a girl to enjoy the taste of coffee unaccompanied, just as it would for such a girl to fail to shed a tear at a funeral, to not sigh in long-suffering exhaustion at a casualty report that wouldn't cease to be little more than the numbers inked upon the page for all the impact it would have upon her, even were she to stand upon the battlefield and witness all the corpses strewn about the place herself, many of them mangled to the point where they were barely recognisable as having once been human.

There was a great deal of thought that went into every aspect of her mimicry, so much so that there were times when she wondered if Akito had the right of it, to think of even making the attempt as a waste of time and energy, and to dare all others around him to remark upon the vacancy of his gaze, and the cold and silent absence of his still-beating heart. And yet, such thoughts were the sorts of considerations that she never gave genuine credence to—she subsisted as she did, with the resources she had, through sole virtue of the effort she put into acting as if she was still a living, breathing member of the human race, while no one, it seemed, cared much to examine the psychological condition and moral heart of a 'lowly' Eleven. It was almost ironic, Leila mused, that the prejudices of others granted Akito a level of freedom that Leila herself could only dream of, if indeed she dreamed at all, or of anything beyond the cold, still water all around her.

Akito gave his own order next, brief and perfunctory; they paid, and slid over to the side, until such time as the server behind the counter gave over their orders in towering ceramic mugs that they would have to return, and the pastry that Leila only barely remembered ordering—sweet people had sweet teeth and ordered sweet things, as the preconception went—which they collected, before wandering over to a table of Akito's choosing, with a clear view of a few of the flatscreen televisions.

Their timing, as Leila realised soon afterward, was nothing short of impeccable; no sooner had they taken their seats than did President Richtofen run out of points of order that could credibly be used to make Princess Friederike wait much longer, and he begrudgingly waved for the chief secretary to do the honours.

"This council hereby recognises Her Excellency Friederike el Britannia, Prime Minister of the Holy Britannian Empire, and her right to address," pronounced the aforementioned chief secretary—who was a balding, bespectacled, withered creature from the Member-State of Austria, a man who counted himself as a member of the president's own party, the Weimar Coalition.

"My thanks to the honourable Chief Secretary, and of course to President Richtofen, himself," spoke the princess, as she stepped forth from beside her entourage at the far side of the room, and directly into the centre of the chamber, in a flourish of fine, immaculate white fabrics. "And my fondest regards to all of my honoured colleagues herein present today. It has been quite some time, has it not? But then, we are not here today to speak of pleasantries, are we? No. We are gathered here today, my fellow statesmen, to speak most urgently of peace—or, perhaps more pointedly, of that most grisly of enterprises which we call 'war.' It is, I believe I may say without the slightest measure of hyperbole, a subject matter in which we Britannians are exceedingly well-versed indeed. It was, after all, the crucible that sparked the formation of both of our nations, and that which only narrowly foiled the imperial ambitions of Napoleon, in the end. Indeed, are we of Britannia and of Europia both not misfit twins, whose violent, antagonistic births have driven us to shed each other's blood, time and time again over the course of the past ten-score years?

"My lord father, His Imperial Majesty, would contend that as it is our shared origin, it is in both of our natures—it is in our very blood, he would say, to spill each others'. I daresay a similar sentiment would be tendered, in fact, by certain members of this council, though they would perhaps launder it through those most elemental of human substances: blood and soil, I believe," the Britannian prime minister continued, a spectre from a bygone age returned in the flesh—and if nothing else, Leila had to admire the ease and speed with which the woman claimed command of the room. "And yet, here before you I stand, my honoured and illustrious colleagues—a daughter of Britannia, of the Imperial Family, come to speak of peace, and of how I have championed it."

A cursory glance to either side revealed to Leila the various news stations having cut to live footage of the Britannian princess's speech, as well as the scrolling text at the bottom of either screen: PM of HBE: 'I have championed peace,' disavows Dead Zone? WARMONGER! PM of HBE derides Highest Assembly, compares Council of Forty to Holy Britannian Emperor… And others besides, all variations upon that same theme tessellated over and over again.

"Peace, aye—a strange thing, perhaps, to hear from out of the mouth of the princess who threatened your homes ahead of a pre-emptive strike upon a former member-state, now the Dead Zone, I'm certain you all are thinking to yourselves, even as I speak," the golden-haired princess continued after a brief pause. "It must seem like the very highest of hypocrisies, I daresay, that such words should pass from betwixt my lips. Indeed, I am certain that you all have been told of this weapon that has laid waste to the land of what was once one of the cradles of global civilisation, in the days of antiquity. Perhaps I would say that it was not at all a weapon, but a simple ecological disaster? I shall not. It was a weapon that committed this atrocity, my colleagues, I shall not deny that. A terrible and monstrous weapon, levelled against a point of little strategic value, but nonetheless possessed of a degree of symbolic weight that would be nigh-impossible to overstate. A terroristic action, one might contend, though such a mechanism is surely quite far beyond the ken of mere terrorists. And indeed, should Britannia have been culpable of such an act, to engineer and utilise one such armament, it would be such an atrocity as to transgress beyond the bounds of the word itself."

Leila didn't bother to read the news scrolls again. She knew well enough what they would say, what the magnates and moguls who believed themselves positioned to gain a great deal from the strengthening of the Richtofen Regime would instruct them to shovel forth. It was an obvious game, concealed beneath only the most insubstantial of veils out from the view of the public—and yet it had nonetheless proven broadly sufficient, to some extent.

"And indeed, it has been Britannians who have used such a horror to their own ends," said the older blonde, gesturing dramatically, and yet with remarkable restraint. "Though I speak, I must clarify, not of the Dead Zone, as you all may be thinking, but instead of Britannia's own territory, employed by a rebel faction of provincial nobility against my sister, who so valiantly fought in the name of peace and order to quell this would-be Neo-Spanish Empire, emboldened as they were by interests abroad who sought only to weaken a sovereign nation's stability.

"I ask you this: who among us stands to benefit from both of our nations being so weakened? What power attains the upper hand as children are sent to the slaughter over this mysterious weapon? What army grows in strength by the day, and does not expend itself in armed conflict as both of our nations pile our bodies high towards the heavens? Whose voice, I ask you, normally so verbose, so loquacious, has in all of this mess remained so conspicuously silent?" Princess Friederike paused for another beat. "For while I have spoken for my nation abroad, as Mr. Richtofen surely does his own, in domestic matters as certainly as upon the world stage, our absent partisans may count themselves spoken for eight times over; and yet, despite that fact, I ask you, have we heard so much as one of those eight speaking on behalf of their citizens? No, I should think. No, we have not. Have we truly become so focused upon one another, so eager to play the part of inheritors to Bonaparte's Grudge, that we have not thought to pose such questions? So committed to this folly of a war that, unbeknownst to all, that Dead Zone which has been your casus belli has played host to a troupe of interloping guests?"

What is she talking about…? Leila wondered to herself. Clearly, she's claiming that the Chinese Federation had a hand in all of this, but…she must know that the people who own the press are going to do their best to squash and smother any proof she might tender…

"Hm…" Akito murmured from beside her.

She turned to regard him. "What is it?"

"Social media's blowing up," Akito replied flatly. "Someone posted pictures of people in what looks like the Dead Zone wearing hazmat suits—and with Chinese Federation military vehicles in frame…"

Comprehension dawned on Leila just then. So that's what you mean to do…

"How widespread are they?" Leila asked.

"Well, it's been a little under half an hour, far as I can tell, and it's already trending, so…" replied Akito, tilting his head to the side ever-so-slightly as he spoke. "Pretty widespread, I'd say. Though, it'll be a lot easier to tell once everyone agrees on what the tag's gonna be."

"Half an hour? You're sure?" she pressed.

Akito looked up from his phone at her, and nodded. "Yeah, the earliest post I can find looks like it's twenty-eight minutes old. Seems like there were already a ton of people who were online talking about the PM's speech, as well as her appearance, so…"

"So when whoever originally posted those photos sowed the seeds enough for the site's algorithm to pick it up," Leila summarised, "and then, when Princess Friederike mentioned the subject matter just now, it was like blood in the water…"

"Looks like it," Akito confirmed blithely. "Also, heads up. Looks like the prime minister's about to start talking again."

Indeed, the murmurs that had overtaken the council chamber died down swiftly indeed; and once it did, it seemed as though Princess Friederike had more to say. "Britannia had no part in the manufacture of a weapon such as this. Why would we? Even the revelation that we had a working prototype could well have been tantamount to declaring war upon the entire world, which would have been foolhardy even were such a rebellion as the one I have mentioned not alreadyfomenting in our southern territories. There is little and less that we of Britannia stand to gain from a prolonged war with Europia United, let alone with both the E.U. and the Chinese Federation. Ours are not the sorts of internal dissent that we would seek to quell with yet more war abroad. Nationalistic fervour and narrativized jingoism, in Britannia's collective experience, serve as rather poor camouflage for internal strife and corruption, or for any of the entirely foreseeable outcomes of an exceedingly ill-advised truncation of our administrative apparati.

"And yet, such a weapon found its way into the arsenal of our domestic enemies nevertheless." The golden-haired princess, the statuesque prime minister, visibly collected herself, and then continued. "It is an open question, in my estimation, of how deep the machinations surrounding this armament, this weapon of mass destruction, truly run. But I must seriously question the judgement of any who would blame Britannia for its conception, Britannia for whom that is so thoroughly contrary to how and why we make war that the introduction of the weapon of mass destruction onto the world stage can only ever frustrate our endeavours; and, as the invention and deployment of the weapon in question was the seminal grounds upon which your esteemed President Richtofen and his administration saw fit to declare war upon us, it is the position of the Holy Britannian Empire for it to be in both of our national best interests, Europian and Britannian, to draw this senseless war, which was declared upon false pretences from the first, whether knowingly or not, to a close. Let no more of our children bleed over such folly in the wake of catastrophe beyond precedent. All this, I implore you: choose now at last the path of wisdom, lest ruin befall us all. Thank you."

With that, Princess Friederike turned upon her heel in a dramatic, almost operatic flutter of her pure white cape, and strode from her speaking position back towards her entourage, leaving the assemblymen in the chamber, President Richtofen and his cronies included, speechless and silent. And upon the screens that displayed the newscasts, the feed cut back to the anchors, who seemed themselves uncertain upon how they ought to best proceed—until, one by one, they muttered scattered platitudes and cut to commercial breaks.

"Well," Akito remarked. "That was certainly…something."

"I suppose it's true what they say," Leila mused aloud, picking up her nigh-forgotten mug and taking a heavy draught from the cavity-inducing concoction contained within.

"What do they say?" asked her friend and pseudo-lover.

"'No one plays the game of power quite like a Britannian,'" Leila replied, placing the mug down upon the table once again. "According to Ioan, that was what his father said to him when he found out we were supposed to be engaged."

"Wow," Akito scoffed mirthlessly; and he took a drink of his own coffee with a mild grimace before asking, "Why is it that the more I hear about Sébastien Malcal, the more he sounds like a complete tool?"

"Probably because he kind of is," Leila replied with a shrug, as she took a bite out of her pastry, and tasted nothing but flaky, sticky, cloying ash. She sighed heavily. "C'est la vie."

---

The Iberian Peninsula had certainly seen far better days.

The bloody toll that the ravages of war had wrought upon the land were clear to see long before the car reached the front, let alone the battle line that Cornelia had established, spanning from Orense and León in the northwest, to Salamanca and Madrid in the centre of the Member-State of Spain, all the way to the city of Valencia in the southeast. It was a drive of nearly half a day on its own, to proceed out of Paris south across the Pyrenees and into Spain, and it gave ample time for the three of them, as well as their oh-so-very helpful driver, to take in the sights of Cornelia's handiwork while the destitution of the evacuating refugees deepened by the kilometre—and while she would normally have elected to take a route through the skies, it had been Andreas's irritatingly astute observation that the two-hour flight was likely to run afoul of E.U. anti-aircraft batteries. Taking the road and employing the use of an automobile, while a great irritation and a moderate inconvenience, was nonetheless a comparatively much safer option, and came with the additional benefit of giving them ample time to let events play out, which might well serve to simplify what was yet to come—the last of those tasks that Friederike had come out here, first to the Chinese Federation and then to the E.U., to set to rights.

The Glaston Knights had their own energy filler lorries, courtesy of her patronage, and with them in the motorcade, she didn't even have to shed her security detail as Ayano drove Priscilla, Andreas, and her to their destination. They stopped shortly after nightfall, finding lodging in Biarritz—a shinobi she might have been, but their driver was still little more than a child, and Friede luxuriated in the excuse to give herself a decent night's sleep, as well as a long-overdue date night between herself and Silla to boot—before setting out once again shortly after dawn the next morning, with their entire motorcade in tow. The sun rose high in the sky above the isolated and beautiful Basque region, and by the time that the car crossed the E.U.'s lines, which were currently stood down by the order of General Smilas, just as Friederike had predicted—winning her the tenner from the day before right back off of Priscilla, over which she not-so-secretly gloated—it was already midmorning.

Late morning saw the E.U. vehicle escorted by Britannian vehicles and Knightmare Frames into the city limits of Madrid, where Cornelia, predictably, had seen fit to set up command. Not that she was judging her bullheaded half-sibling (in this specific case, at least)—far from it. It was centrally-located, its position gave it a commanding presence upon the largest intersection of the region's rail lines, and the robust local infrastructure, which had been used to evacuate refugees until the last possible moments, gave the issue of how to maintain coordination along such a broad expanse of land a deceptively simple solution.

But of course, that did mean it was a simple thing to receive news that made her morning.

Friederike had to admit that it was an impressive bit of legerdemain, the impromptu live drop that characterised their motorcade's passage through the checkpoint into the city—and really, she was only more impressed with her new sister-in-law's choice of servants, once Ayano took a moment to decode the cipher on the piece of paper she had been handed, working it out by sight alone, and leaned her head back against the head-rest to tell Friederike (who had been midway through a thrilling recollection of the espionage and the subterfuge that had made up the bulk of her and Silla's very first date to a remarkably attentive audience in the form of Andreas), "They got her, your excellency. The Federation forces moved on them, just as you predicted, but now the good doctor and her team are safely on their way to their new home in Area Eleven."

"Wonderful," Friederike said, grinning in satisfaction—after all, she wasn't such a dullard that she had failed to notice the magnificent target she had as good as painted upon the backs of the Chawla sisters and their coworkers simply by naming them to Gao Hai, nor was she so naïve as to believe for so much as a moment that the High Eunuchs would keep to their end of the arrangement, not when attempting to call her bluff was an option: after all, the rampant and unchecked lust for power invariably eroded one's capacity to properly evaluate threats.

And so she'd arranged for the Shinozaki Clan's assets to prepare for a timely extraction, just as the High Eunuch's cronies and cat's-paws made their move to neutralise the scientists and gain for themselves whatever it was that Friederike desired of them so greatly—timely, that is, in the sense that there would not have been even a sliver of doubt about the fact that the Ever-Victorious Army was coming for their heads in any of the scientists' minds before they were extracted. A dangerous operation, to be certain, but when she had posed the possibility to Miss Shinozaki, the brunette had seemed to relish the challenge—so to say that Friederike was pleased that her confidence in her shinobi seemed not at all to have been misplaced was a bit of an understatement.

"Silla, do you think this ought to count as a belated wedding present?" she asked her paramour. "Or should I present it as an early birthday gift for Carmilla instead?"

"Why not both?" Silla countered with a flippant shrug—and a mild wince, with which Friede found she could empathise. The relative languor of ground trips was by no means the only reason she chose to use her shuttle so often, instead of a car, or even her designated flagship, the aircraft carrier that she had named after her then-favourite pastry as a joke. "Regifting may be a touch gauche, admittedly, but I hardly think Princess Carmilla or Princess Justine would be inclined to care."

"A fair point, I suppose," Friederike allowed, as she leaned over to rest her head against her lover's shoulder—while also relieving the pressure on a developing ache in her hindquarters. Honestly, the thought that there were certain people who took long trips like this, just driving someplace in an automobile, was actually acutely horrifying. "Andreas, I wouldn't want to disparage you through the implication, but I do in fact need to verify—you'll be alright with what's coming?"

"With seeing Princess Cornelia again, you mean?" Andreas asked rhetorically. He shrugged, and let himself sigh. "It was her decision to distance herself from me, to view me with mounting distrust ever since she fell out with Princess Justine at the end of the Second Pacific War. If the current state of affairs irks her, then she has made her bed and must learn to lie in it. It's a hard lesson, but I've had to teach it to more than one of my sons over the years."

"Cornelia has never been entirely rational when it comes to Euphemia, I'm afraid," Friede admitted, with a shrug of her own for good measure. "It was an inevitability, really, that the situation would come to a head at some point, so instead of dwelling upon it, I choose to be glad of the fact that when it did, it did so in a way that it didn't mark Euphy as collateral damage."

"I bear no resentment towards her, your excellency," Andreas refuted gently. "Those years I spent at her side were years I served with distinction, and I do not regret them. That we have gone separate ways in our careers is simply a part of life; and, once again, if she finds that reality to be bothersome, it reflects not at all upon me or mine, neither well nor ill."

"Very well," Friederike nodded slowly. "I may have to speak quite harshly to her. I ask only that you allow me to handle this."

"She's your half-sister, your excellency," Andreas replied simply. "The situation is yours to handle."

"Thank you," Friede said, just as simply; she forced the remaining tension out of her shoulders, and allowed relaxation to take its place, as Ayano drove the automobile deeper into the city's fortified streets, leading the entire motorcade towards the commandeered Palace of Moncloa, where Cornelia's staff officers and she coordinated the bulk of her war effort.

It didn't take very long at all for Ayano to find her way into the vicinity of the palace that had once served as the official home of the executive head of the local Spanish government, cutting through the sea of suspicious glances they garnered from Cornelia's troops seemingly on every street corner to the heart of the beast that was the collection of Cornelia's armies. She knew, of course, that Europia's military, purely as a point of protocol, drew a much firmer distinction between flag and field officers, that really, neither a man like Gene Smilas, nor any of the higher officers under his direct command, would ever see the business end of a battlefield ever again; Cornelia would never have met her match, would never have crossed blades with one of General Smilas's staff officers taken to the field, simply because that was not at all the way that the E.U. made war.

Britannia, however, was different; for all that they hated and reviled Napoleon, the Great Enemy, no one knew more intimately than Britannians how closely interwoven revulsion and admiration could truly be under the correct circumstances. In that regard, Britannia was practically a perfect storm—there was more of Napoleon's methods of military doctrine in the memetic makeup of Britannian martial culture than there was in Europia's, ironically enough, which was a statement that Friederike was very confident in making, without even the slightest hint of hyperbole. Staff officers like Cornelia could take the field, and there was no point of procedure or of protocol to bar a flag officer from leading their commissions from the front—far from it, in fact, given how reliably Britannian culture lionised such figures, from Theodora, to Xavier, to Julius, to Agrippina, to a dozen other imperators and claimants besides, illustrious commanders out of the halls of imperial cultural myth who had led their loyal men along with them into the annals of the Homeland's ideals of martial heroism.

That was why she was not at all surprised to see the flood of high-ranking commanders flowing out of the palace that served as Cornelia's military headquarters, captains and colonels descending the front steps practically arm-in-arm with major- and brigadier-generals, as Ayano got out of the driver's seat of the parked car and came about the vehicle to open the door, allowing Andreas to disembark the vehicle and to stretch his limbs, followed swiftly thereafter by both Friederike herself, and Priscilla hot upon her heels. In recognition of how ably she had acquitted herself over the course of all of this, Friede waved Ayano over, and asked her, "Do you have a means of egress arranged? Or shall I intercede on your behalf?"

"The cell out here knew I was coming, your excellency," Ayano refused, shaking her head. "They'll get me back to my cell in Paris just fine."

"Then in that case, it was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Kōsaka," Friede told the girl honestly. "I'll be looking forward to our next meeting, should our paths ever have occasion to cross again—though, of course, I can't imagine they wouldn't."

"Likewise, your excellency," the fourteen-year-old girl replied with a bow. "I wish all three of you a very boring flight."

"Would that such a thing were assured," Friede chuckled. "But I daresay that we shall do our best. And, of course, my highest compliments to your hacker friend, Mister Naruse."

"I'll make sure to pass it along," Ayano assured her, before returning to the driver's seat of the black limousine and guiding it from the curb, out of the courtyard, and into the streets of Madrid until it vanished around a corner, out of sight.

"Well then," Friede sighed, looking to Priscilla and then Andreas in turn. She motioned towards the steps, attired just as she had been upon addressing the Council of Forty, and prompted, "Shall we, then?"

Rather than replying, Andreas stepped forth and began to ascend the steps, leading the way towards the threshold and holding the door open for the two of them to push through the rush of commanders and at last into the building proper. And just in time, too—just as they entered, so too did Cornelia emerge from out of the other side of the entrance hall, wherein lay the stairwell to the left of the foyer, her faithful Lord Guilford right on her heels. Friederike took a moment to observe the marks of dishevelled fatigue about the eldest of her younger sisters, the reliance upon concealer applied inexpertly, the darkening bags that the cosmetics had been purloined to conceal, the way her fuschia hair, bound back in a high tail, hung darker and less lustrously than usual—in all honesty, what she had come here to do was practically an act of mercy at this point.

"F-Friederike…" Cornelia stuttered, wide-eyed and astonished at her presence. Friede couldn't help her reaction, her thoughts overrun with admonitions. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy, Cornelia—you cannot afford to make yourself Justine's enemy and still be so very sloppy!

Instead, she tilted her head—very deliberately invoking that strangely avian gesture that was so very characteristic of her little sister—and adopted a placid smile. "A good morrow to you, as well, dear sister. It has been entirely too long, hasn't it? How have you been?"

"—!" Cornelia snapped her jaw shut, and hastily assembled something that would pass as decorum at a gathering of the gentry. "Why are you here?"

"So inhospitable! For shame, Cornelia," Friederike chided, taking two steps forth; the urge Cornelia felt to step back, to retreat, showed clearly upon her face, but she smothered it, and stood her ground. "But I do suppose that time must well be short, so I shan't take too great an issue with your tone. Have you a room in which we might speak with some modicum of privacy?"

"I have this under control," Cornelia protested firmly, taking a step forth and angling her shoulder, a stance of clear hostility.

Friederike couldn't have pretended to be impressed by that if the fate of the world depended upon it. Too little, too late. She had intended to wait until they were in a private room, but if Cornelia was going to insist so firmly upon making an ass of herself out in the open like this, Friede was in no mood to deny her that dubious honour. "Oh? Well, then, pardon me! I suppose I must have simply imagined Europia's rabble forcing your soldiers out of Barcelona at the beginning of the month. Clearly you must have just managed to reclaim it, and it is not now the end of the month, with your armies still at a stalemate, not a hair closer to regaining that ground than you were the day you lost it. I must say, Cornelia, you do appear to be forming a nasty habit of creating situations that force others to win your wars for you."

Cornelia stiffened, oh so very predictably. But then, the fact remained that even if she did rise to the position she so obviously coveted, she would still be beneath the Minister of War in rank, and as such, beneath Friederike—it would be so very easy to take her building outburst, interpret it as insubordination, and dash her ambitions upon the rocks.

It was almost a shame that that wasn't on the table right now.

To her credit, though, Cornelia did find a target of her ire that wasn't immediate career suicide—she turned her glare upon Andreas, instead. "Darlton, you traitor…"

"With respect, your highness, I did not betray you," Andreas replied, cordial and collected; and true to his word, there were no estrangements, resentments, or hard feelings in his tone. If anything, the emotion that prevailed as he spoke was a deep and resigned sorrow. "You set me aside. And just as you once felt that you must protect Her Highness Princess Euphemia, so too am I honour-bound to look after my sons."

"Andreas…" Lord Guilford began, but Friederike could tell even without so much as looking at him that the commonborn general had nothing more to say to either of them.

"In any event," she interjected, albeit perhaps a touch too pointedly. "Effective immediately, you're being recalled to the Homeland."

Cornelia's rage and affront melted right back into shock. "I…what? But…"

"If you have an operation in the works, call it off," Friederike ordered firmly. "If you do not comply, I'll be forced to undermine you."

"You come here to my headquarters, you mock me for my failure to reclaim Barcelona, and now you tell me to stand down?" the younger, shorter woman replied incredulously.

"Were you not listening?" Friederike asked rhetorically, cocking a brow. "I told you, Cornelia—I've won your war for you. No thanks to you, of course—the cities and the towns and all the decades' worth of agricultural infrastructures that your forces have put to the torch and the monetary value of the reparations that would be required to rebuild them might well wipe out part of our initial advantage of the E.U. being the aggressor in this war at the negotiating table…"

"You instructed me to bring them 'total war,'" Cornelia complained, quite flatly.

"Yes, I did," Friede said, not bothering to conceal some measure of the depths of her exasperation with her hard-headed half-sibling's insistence upon being obtuse as she did. "But it shouldn't have taken much of a towering intellect to understand how an insignificant little development like one of the E.U.'s member-states being scoured clean of life, down to the lowliest microbe, only for the E.U.'s government to turn around and lay the blame upon convenient Britannia and its so-called 'top secret weapon', might well have altered the political landscape a touch, leaving the conditions of the battlefield, both the literal one and the figurative, perhaps a mite unpredictable, to say the least.

"Let me remind you, Cornelia: your task here was to undermine the Richtofen Regime through your performance upon the battlefield, but all you wound up doing was reaffirming it, until the E.U.'s civilians were willing to send their children to the front lines, all to sate the antagonism your ill-considered actions stoked," Friedrike sighed, reaching up to brush some of her hair back from her face. "And in spite of that, it has taken me an afternoon to accomplish what you have failed to do with almost two full years of aimless flailing. I will admit to giving you counsel for a political situation that lasted for perhaps a matter of hours after I said what I did, a political situation upended by an unforeseeable catastrophe, yes. But I ask you, Cornelia: if I must hold your hand through every last decision, dilemma, and adjustmentthat you must make to adapt to a changing situation, then whatever is the point of you?"

Cornelia clearly wanted to say something,glaring as intensely as she was; but while one could call Cornelia li Britannia many things, and have many of them be entirely accurate, Friede knew that she wasn't a complete idiot, and that she was at the very least intelligent enough to know when any of the thoughts that swarmed through her skull then would only manage to dig her a deeper grave if given voice. And just then, at that moment, Friederike allowed herself a moment of honesty that Cornelia would not have been able to take as it was meant even if she was entirely cool-headed, and the wedge between them was not so great or visible, as it had been years ago. The truth was, the fault may well have lied with her—it seemed likely that she had misjudged the situation, and thought a battering ram like Cornelia was the correct tool for the job, when really she ought to have employed siege towers. Or catapults that shot decapitated human heads over the city walls. The siege engine metaphor had admittedly worn thin the moment she searched for an object to keep in theme with the battering ram, but of course, it wasn't like she would be saying any of this aloud, so she didn't see much of a need to feel self-conscious about that, for all that she knew that it was almost a certainty that Silla had already sussed out the lay of her thoughts and would tease her for it without relent over the course of the next week.

The point was, Cornelia was, in retrospect, a magnificently poor choice to fight such a transparently political war like this one (and yes, she thought towards her recollection of Justine, she already knew that all war was political, thank you very much), and so it would be entirely unfair to claim that the sum total of the fault for Cornelia's spectacular failure in this nuanced arena rested squarely upon her shoulders. Honestly, now that Friederike had finally made the decision to take a step back from the morass of her duties and delegate, it seemed as if the cosmos was conspiring to rub her face in proof that it was a decision that was long overdue; she was lucky, really,that this situation hadn't combusted in a more egregiously ruinous fashion—and luck, it was said, was the final refuge of the slovenly and the senseless.

In equal measure did Friede both look forward to and dread witnessing the effects that a (for once in her career entire) consistent sleep schedule would have upon her productivity, and the quality of her work.

"In any event, you have not been recalled for the sake of a reprimand, and nor was that my primary goal in seeking you out, as difficult as you may find that to believe," she relented at last, offering Cornelia a verbal olive branch, albeit buried under a paper-thin layer of subtext. "His Majesty is indisposed, and in his stead, Odysseus has asked that, once this war is over, you return home to aid him with the issue of the Chief General. He believes he needs a military perspective close at hand, you see, and for all the many hats that I have been obligated to wear over the course of my adult life, that—thankfully—has never been one of them. No offence, Andreas."

Andreas shrugged. "Some taken."

Friede didn't see the need to suppress the chuckle that his quip drew out of her, but she did leash it when it tried to progress into a full-throated cackle upon witnessing Cornelia and Guilford both looking at their former friend as if he'd just grown a pair of extraneous heads. That wouldn't do at all—not here, at the very least.

"Wait a moment," Cornelia bade, being the first of the pair to return to their senses. "What issue is there with Field Marshal Hargreeves?"

This time, it was Friederike's turn to be struck dumb. She blinked twice, and once again, even if the fate of the world had depended upon it, she could not have kept the exasperated admonition out of her tone. "Cornelia, really… I already knew about your dangerous disregard for political nuance, but the news?!"

"I've been a little busy fighting a war, here, Friederike," Cornelia snapped back.

"Correction: you've been wasting time piddling about and treading water, clearly," Friede sighed. It was a reminder, perhaps, of why she and Cornelia had never been all that close, not really: her half-sister, as a rule, was infuriatingly monomaniacal—and had Empress Desiderata's eldest been unfortunate enough to have been born into a Britannia that had not suffered the events of the Emblem of Blood, she wouldn't have made it to adulthood alive, even had a miracle or deity from on high chosen to intercede on her behalf. "In any event. Your mentor, Reginald, Marquess Hargreeves, Chief General of His Majesty's Imperial Army, is now under investigation for corruption and high treason, and has been for some months now."

"What…?" the younger princess nearly gasped in shock.

"The evidence against him is quite damning—he and the president of HCLI, Floyd Hekmatyar, have both been implicated in a plot to sell Britannian military technology and state secrets to the E.U. and to the Chinese Federation in exchange for favourable terms for their enterprises, including the waiving of all tariffs, as well as pledges of foreign support in the event of a coup d'état to usurp His Majesty," Friederike explained pitilessly. "Suffice it to say that neither of them are going to come out of this unscathed, and the court of public opinion—that is, the majority of the Imperial Court—is so convinced of their shared guilt in the face of what proof has already been disseminated that they are, for all practical purposes, persona non grata, and I daresay that any meaningful form of exoneration would be an impossibility at this point. The co-conspirators that have so far been exposed include large swaths of Hargreeves's command staff, primarily those native to his lands, as well as several key members of President Hekmatyar's Board of Directors—including the man's own son, the Chairman of the Board, Kasper."

"B-but…Field Marshal Hargreeves is an honourable man, Friederike!" Cornelia protested fervently. "I've known him for years now! Worked with him, under him! He would never have done anything so…so underhanded, so dastardly!"

"That man survived the Emblem of Blood, Cornelia," Friede disagreed calmly. "I daresay that the man is far more capable of underhanded and dastardly acts, as you so eloquently put it, than you give him credit for."

But Cornelia would not hear it. "Who is it who has been smearing his name, Friederike? By whose authority is that sham of an 'investigation' being carried out?"

"The investigation is being conducted by the Chivalric Order of Glinda, and it was ordered from the office and on the authority of the Minister of the Interior," Friederike told her half-sister.

This seemed to confuse Cornelia further, even as it angered her. "Why would you…?!"

Friederike raised a hand, a wordless call for silence that Cornelia was obligated to heed immediately and with utmost haste—which, thankfully, she did. "I am no longer responsible for the operations of the Interior Ministry, Cornelia. In the face of your failure to achieve meaningful gains against the E.U., I was to be held accountable, as I was the one who ordered Lord Hargreeves to send you. It was determined that my judgement had become compromised under the volume of my duties, and so I was…strongly encouraged to delegate some of the offices I formerly held. The Interior Ministry is now under our sister Marrybell's jurisdiction, and the Chivalric Order of Glinda was formed with Dame Oldrin, her knight, at its head, to aid in the performance of its duties and the enforcement of its authority—just as Priscilla is now the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and soon enough, I shall be ceding the position of High Chancellor as well. The office of the Prime Minister will remain mine, of course, but only that; until such time as His Majesty returns, I shall be quite occupied with assisting and advising Odysseus in the discharge of his duties as the Lord Regent."

Cornelia's brow furrowed. "Euphy's…!"

"I am quite certain that Euphemia is nothing short of exceptionally proud of both of her lovers, as well as of how serious an attitude they have taken thus far with respect to the duties and responsibilities of their respective offices," Friederike said, with a note of warning. It was a blessing, perhaps, that Clovis was such a shameless gossip-monger—even Cornelia could not have avoided the knowledge of her little sister's romantic attachments, though the blonde was reasonably certain that the lion's share of their pink-haired sister's amorous escapades yet evaded her knowledge. So much the better. "But I hope this has impressed upon you exactly how important it is that you return to the Homeland."

"Be that as it may," Cornelia stressed. "I cannot simply abandon my men!"

"I've spoken already with the Minister of War," informed Friederike with a shake of her head. "He's dispatched one of his top commanders to relieve you, and to oversee the de-escalation of this conflict ahead of more official armistice negotiations, so they'll be looking after your troops and your materiel in your stead. As for the chances of the resumption of hostilities, President Richtofen is, to put it bluntly, quite thoroughly finished; so it's high time we turned to thoughts of peace, however temporary it may ultimately prove to be, and of how we might work to aid our elder brother in his attempts to disentangle the untenable chaos of our domestic circumstances. The other nations absolutely cannot be allowed to smell the blood in the water, not if we are to survive. Am I understood?"

The bristling fight flew out of Cornelia's bearing more and more as Friederike spoke, and each word sapped away her hostility further and further until finally, her posture slackened entirely. "Yes, Friederike. I understand. When do you mean for us to depart?"

"As soon as we can. My shuttle should already have arrived by now—" Friederike began to explain; but her ears caught the sound of movement a moment before her eyes caught sight of the manic visage of a man, with a cleft chin and brown hair done up into a style that could only ever have belonged to a newscaster, as he burst into the entrance hall from a room off to the side, sprinted headlong past the pair of princesses and their respective entourages, and rushed out the front door at top speed, a delirious gleam in his narrow eyes; a number of commoners, judging by their garb, ran into the foyer after him, had the good sense to give up a few deferential pleasantries, but nonetheless left the building in what was presumably pursuit of him, and Friede couldn't help but notice that they were carrying a not-insignificant load of what looked to be camera and audio equipment between them. "…Ah…who, exactly, was that?"

"Diethard Reid, the journalist who was embedded into the task force," said Cornelia, seeming just as shocked as Friederike herself. "Though, I've never seen him move or act with such…vigour…"

"Something he just saw must have brought that out of him, I suppose, much to the chagrin of those whom I presume to be his production crew?" Friederike opined, as Cornelia confirmed their identities. She looked towards the door through which Mister Reid and company had just emerged, and turned back to her younger sister. "I suppose we have a bit of time. Come, let's go see what got them in such a hurry…"

"As you say," Cornelia replied, her tone laced through with the same morbid curiosity.

It didn't take long for the group to trace Reid's frenzied strides—he didn't seem to have cared much about leaving a trail to follow—and they came swiftly to a conference room, the far wall of which looked to be all but dominated by a large flatscreen television, with the channel turned to a Hi-TV newscast that drew them all up short.

It wasn't the presenter who had struck them all dumb—it was a woman, pretty enough in that bland, mass-market way that it seemed most lowborn women who eventually found themselves with an on-screen role in the journalistic process were, her black hair pinned up into an inoffensive bun, her almond-hued skin radiant with a manufactured lustre beneath the strong southern sun of Area Six, her make-up very much by the numbers, displaying very little in the way of flair or unique expression, her voice clear and crisp as she spoke, with the tag at the bottom of the screen displaying her name, 'Clarisse Moulinier.' It wasn't the fact that this was the first that any of them had seen of Area Six since the beginning of the rebellion, nor that the unit within which the presenter had been embedded clearly displayed the livery of the Knights of the Round amongst their signifiers. It wasn't even the sight of the ghettos surrounding the city the army was entering, which the news scroll at the bottom of the screen helpfully told them was the provincial capital of Area Six, the Rio de Janeiro Settlement. It wasn't even the announcement that came along with all of that, the new at the beginning of the text crawl that informed them all that the rebel leaders were in custody, that the force in which the presenter was embedded was currently on its way to link up with the 588th Irregulars, Justine's command, and apparently the unit that held supreme command over the theatre of war.

No, what so arrested their senses was the path down which that army travelled, and the nature of the posts that were used to define that road, cutting what seemed to be the most direct path possible from the gates of the city to the palatial government bureau at the settlement's heart—the sight of which had the presenter ashen, and had already provoked several surrounding soldiers into profuse vomiting. Friederike couldn't very well blame them, not when all any of them in that conference room could do was look upon that televised image from half a world away in wholly astonished, and, in some cases, thoroughly horrified, silence.

They stayed that way for long, pregnant minutes, watching the path go by, as the regulars' progress grew increasingly hampered by the reactions of many of the soldiers to the structures that hemmed them in, shepherding the lot of them through the slums, and into the settlement proper.

It was Priscilla, unsurprisingly, who shattered that silence like a pane of glass.

"Well, then," Priscilla remarked wanly. "That… That would certainly do it…"