The words came out quietly enough that the legal aide leaned closer, but he wasn't speaking to her.
They had been so far ahead of him. While he congratulated himself on keeping America's most troublesome young guild within reach, they had secured a world he couldn't enter and protections that stopped him treating its people as invaders.
"I stood there and sold this to the country," he said. "I smiled for the cameras."
Nobody offered to remind him what Eclipse had promised in return.
Vespera's voice returned to him with horrible clarity. She was ready to declare war on his nation. She had told him to do his worst, then gone through his donors' properties while he listened to their pleas for help over his private phone.
Now her son was offering his citizens somewhere else to live.
The President wiped the sweat from his neck. He wanted to believe that people would recoil from the price, that giving up their humanity would make them close the broadcast in disgust.
