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Leon nodded. “I probably did.”
Sebastian didn’t look at him fully, just kept messing with the gun in his hand. Leon wondered if it actually needed any servicing or if Sebastian just needed something to do with his hands. “You don’t sleep through every night, do you?”
Leon huffed a humorless laugh at the question. “No, I do not.” He wasn’t sure he could even remember the last time in his life he regularly slept through the nights.
“I took a look at your speech notes.” Sebastian holstered his weapon and put a hand on his hip.
Leon glanced at his bag, which was hanging open with his notes hanging out. He raised an eyebrow at Sebastian. “You went through my bag?”
“I recognized the paper.” Sebastian shrugged a single shoulder in that casual, almost disrespectful way Leon had always been strangely attracted to. “From yesterday morning. I was curious.”
“And what did you think?”
Sebastian lifted his chin. “That you’re a shameless hypocrite.” The hand on his hip flexed, he seemed to hesitate, and then he took a sudden step toward Leon, hands spread wide in front of him, beseeching. “Why are you like this, Hess?”
Leon recoiled from the sudden advance but managed to keep himself from backpedaling. “Like what?”
“Like…” Sebastian waved a hand violently at the bag, and his face screwed up with a frustrated scowl. “You used my words. About the gas. About how it was a distillation of everything terrible about the occupation. You listened to me.”
“Of course I did.” Leon frowned, and his hand twitched to reach out to Sebastian before he thought better of it.
But Sebastian saw, and he glanced at Leon’s hand before glaring back up into Leon’s face. “But you’re still going to use it yourself.” Sebastian shook his head slowly. “You get it, but you don’t…care? Really?”
“Of course I care, Sebastian.” Leon grabbed Sebastian’s wrist just before Sebastian stepped away, his own frustration flaring up. “How can you really think I don’t care? I just—”
“You just don’t act like it.” Sebastian shook off his arm.
Leon clenched his fists. “I just have more responsibilities than feelings.”
Couldn’t Sebastian understand? Couldn’t he at least try? He’d fought for their cause for years too. He’d sacrificed himself and others and ran intolerable risks, but he drew the line here? Right at the finish line?
“It’s not about feelings, Hess, it’s about—” A loud horn sounded, then a muffled cheering and applause. Sebastian visibly deflated, sagging. “That’s your cue. Go on and give a rousing speech condemning a weapon you’re planning on using.”
“Sebastian…” Leon rubbed a hand down his face. He shouldn’t get so worked up about this. Sebastian had always fought his decisions. He’d always followed them. And he’d never cared for Leon. And Leon had gotten on just fine. He didn’t need Sebastian’s blessing now, wasn’t that exactly what Martha had been trying to tell him? He had to stop caring about what Sebastian thought of him and focus on doing what he had to do. “Fine.”
Leon lifted his chest and his chin and hardened his face. He shrugged on the mantle of ideology and leadership and everything Farlon had left him.
Sebastian looked again out the window and then nodded at Leon. “All clear.”
Leon threw open the double doors and strode out onto the balcony into a wall of cheers and blinding sunlight. For a moment, he couldn’t see anything as his eyes adjusted, but he didn’t dare blink, just stared out into where he knew people were gathered.
He planted his hands down on the banister before him and leaned into the transparent microphone set up for him. “We have already thrown ourselves over the precipice.”
The words flowed on as his eyes adjusted, and he began to see the crowd of people gathered before him. People standing, some dirty, some clean, all looking gaunt, tired, and fierce, filled the courtyard in front of him. Some were his soldiers. Some were civilians. They all looked up at him with fire in their eyes.
There were a few qesh, and a handful of klah’eel, but most were humans. Humans like him who were trying to make a life and had been foiled by their own grabby species state and then abandoned to the clutches of another.
But not for long.
Behind the crowd, sitting on the top of armored vehicles for the view with a quick getaway, were the Ralscoln elite. The old money of Ralscoln who had been here longer than almost anyone and who would be here much longer afterward: the Harons, the Wells, and the founding family themselves, the Ralsdis. The Ralsdis sat front and center of the old money families: attractive wife and husband striking a regal pose with their pretty daughter, Sarah, sitting next to the ever conspicuously empty fourth seat where the killed son used to sit.
“They have always had one weapon they wielded more often than all others.” Leon paused to let them all consider what that weapon was. “Fear.”
A ripple of agreement and resentment went through the crowd.
“They have made us afraid to lose our homes, our lives, our loved ones.” Leon clenched his fist in front of him. “They have made us fear them, fear each other, and now they have found a way to make us fear just for the sake of it.”
Leon saw Sebastian moving out of the corner of his eye. Sebastian had followed him out onto the balcony, the better to keep an eye on the surroundings and the crowd, but he stayed mostly out of Leon’s field of view.
