[i]"I'm fine, Dany."[/i] Redana's face is ashen. [i]"No, that wasn't a yawn! I'm fine!"[/i] The Auspex doesn't even need to tell her that Mynx is telling the truth. [i]"I slept on the wrong side of my bed, your highness!"[/i] Because it's like one of those funny pictures. [i]"If you don't get it, it's okay. I'm sure your tutors will be happy to explain to you again tomorrow."[/i] Where you spend your whole life thinking it's a monstrous face and then one day you [i]see[/i] that it's someone sitting for their portrait at an odd angle, but because it was so small and stuck inside that sprawling gilt frame, you mistook the negative space for a cheek and a screaming mouth, but now you can see it, and you can't see the face again no matter how you tilt your head at it. Because you saw what was really there, even though you'd never been able to see it right in front of your face every time you looked. [i]"There's nowhere I'd rather be, Princess."[/i] Redana is an Olympian. She has also been training with the Coherents, swinging hammers and forcing panels into place and pulling on cables in sync with a hundred other arms. The table is nothing to her. She lifts and throws it like a monstrous discus at terrible speed, and when it strikes the reinforced wall, it cracks and splinters and skitters, pinwheeling, into Redana's bunk, legs shattered and surface ruined. The noise that tears its way out of her throat is something that should belong to the Nemean. It is an echo of her great-grandfather's scream when the flint tore its way into his thigh, when from him came whirling galaxies and entropy and time and blood and love, smeared across the dark. For a moment, there are three shadows underneath the flickering lights, and Ares smiles through bloodless lips at Mynx, and the divinity strains to burst its way out of her bones and her flesh and her skin and smear itself across the [i]Plousios[/i]. And then Redana crumples to her knees, just a girl again, making gross heaving sobs, because now she can see the picture. [i]“We are going to put it back and pretend nothing happened.”[/i] [i]"Bella, this is for you! I’m going to save you and everybody else, whether or not you want to come with me, now stop! squirming!"[/i] [i]"I'm more than that, Redana! I'm so much more!"[/i] [i]"You thought I was useless. You thought I was stupid! I'm so much more than your dumb little pet, Redana! I'm a praetor, you moron! I shot you down, I brought you here! And now I'm going to bring you home because those are my orders, and there is not a fucking thing you can do to stop me!"[/i] Every mistake. Every failure. Everything, on her shoulders, forever, while she tried to pretend she cared for the stupid ditz of a princess who brought consequence upon consequence down on her head. [i]She must have been so [b]scared.[/b][/i] And Dany had just wanted, desperately, for her mother to understand that Bella [i]didn't[/i] have anything to do with it, that Bella [i]shouldn't[/i] be punished for letting Dany escape, that's why, that's why if Bella wouldn't come with her, that's why she had to leave Bella in that closet, and if that was just the worst in a long line of punishments she'd been given over and over, all Redana's life, bearing everyone's responsibility, and if everyone expected [i]her[/i] to be perfect, too, just like Dany, then-- And-- [i]And--[/i] Mynx is at her shoulder now, and Redana grabs at her with sudden violence, in the way that a drowning woman will. She pulls Mynx close, and her eyes are huge and blind with tears. "Where is she, Mynx?" Her voice is quiet in the sort of way that suggests it will be very loud in a moment. It is the sort of voice that proceeds oaths and terrible dooms and declarations to mothers that can never be taken back. It is the voice of someone who is falling forever.