CHAPTER ONE

ZANE

The words haunted me.

Five little words, seven simple syllables, twenty-three ordinary letters.

And yet the combination of those words, syllables, and letters had rocked my perspective of, well, everything.

Everything I had always been told. Everything I had always believed. Everything I had always known to be an absolute truth—especially when it came to my family.

Vesper Quill is your sister.

Ah, those five pesky little words.

Kyrion Caldaren had telepathically whispered that thought to me while I had been escorting him to Lord Callus Holloway, the ruler of the Imperium, during a midnight ball at Crownpoint palace. Even now, two weeks later, I could still see the satisfied smirk on Kyrion’s face as he tossed out the revelation like it was the ultimate trump card in the cutthroat Regal game we’d been playing our entire lives. Even worse, I could still feel his bloody smugness with my telempathy, like he was standing right beside me and grinding his stormsword into my ribs one slow, painful inch at a time—

“Lord Zane?” A low voice intruded on my dark thoughts. “Is the solstice suit not to your liking? You haven’t said anything in five minutes.”

A seventy-something man hovered by my side and studied me in the floor-length mirror propped up in the corner. He was a few inches shorter than me, with iron-gray hair, tan skin, and long, slender, nimble fingers that could wield a needle and thread with expert precision. Fergus had been the House Zimmer tailor longer than I had been alive.

Fergus’s dark brown eyes flicked over me from top to bottom as he searched for faults in his work. “Per your instructions, I made the solstice suit a sleeker, more fashionable version of your Arrow uniform.”

A crisp white shirt peeked out from the V at the top of the fitted tailcoat that stretched across my broad shoulders. The front of the coat only came down to my waist, although the twin tails in the back dropped to my knees. Two rows of blue opal buttons marched down the front of the ice-blue coat, while matching blue pants and knee-high black boots completed my ensemble. I almost always wore my family’s colors, even though everyone already knew exactly who I was, thanks to the gossipcasts that breathlessly covered my exploits.

Fergus was wearing a similar tailcoat, although his was dark gray with ice-blue trim and silver buttons stamped with tiny Zs, a sign that he belonged to House Zimmer.

“How is it that you can make the same coat look dashing and distinguished, whereas I always feel like a little boy playing dress-up?” I grumbled.

A wry smile curved the corner of Fergus’s mouth. “Skill, my lord.” He gestured at my tailcoat in the mirror. “Although as you’ve told me many, many times, the ice blue of House Zimmer brings out your eyes much better than it does mine.”

I studied my own reflection in the mirror. He was right. The ice-blue fabric did bring out the similar shade of my eyes. My grandmother and my father both had the same color eyes. So did several of my cousins. In fact, just about everyone with even a drop of Zimmer blood had ice-blue eyes.

Except for my sister.

Vesper had the dark blue eyes of her mother, Nerezza Blackwell, although silver flecks often appeared in Vesper’s gaze whenever she was emotional, using her seer power, or tapping into her truebond connection with Kyrion—like she had during the midnight ball.

The memories erupted in my mind, as sharp, bright, and clear as videos playing on a holoscreen. Vesper and Kyrion in the middle of the throne room floor, yelling and crawling toward each other, even as Imperium soldiers tried to drag them away from each other . . . The two of them lunging toward each other, blue sparks flickering around their fingertips like tiny butterflies . . . The couple finally clasping hands, and those blue butterfly sparks coalescing and erupting into bright, crackling lightning that had danced around them in jagged forks as though they were caught in the center of a violent electrical storm . . .

“Zane?” Fergus asked in a low, hesitant voice. “Is something wrong?”

I blinked and focused on Fergus, who stared back at me, concern furrowing his forehead. The tailor was a true friend, and I had confided many things to him over the years, but I wasn’t about to confess my inner turmoil. Not now. Not until I decided how I felt about having a long-lost sister—and all the tough truths and hard problems that came along with the startling revelation.

“Your design and work are impeccable as always, Fergus,” I replied, forcing some false cheer into my voice.

He opened his mouth to ask another question, but I cut him off and spewed out the first lie that popped into my head. “I was just thinking about the solstice celebration.”

The summer solstice was the first major holiday and event since the disastrous midnight ball, and everyone who was anyone in Regal society was scheduled to attend. Except for Callus Holloway, of course. He rarely left the security of Crownpoint for any reason, preferring to force the Regals to come to the Imperium palace to seek an audience with him. But these days, the greedy siphon had a singular focus: finding Vesper and Kyrion so he could take the psionic power of their truebond connection for his own.

More memories crashed over me. Vesper and Kyrion battling Adria and Dargan Byrne, a pair of siblings who also had a truebond . . . A wounded Kyrion staring at me from the back of the open cargo bay while Vesper steered his blitzer, the Dream World, out of the Crownpoint docking bay . . . The spaceship streaking through the sky like a shooting star, carrying the couple to safety, before winking out of sight . . .

I blinked again. This time, I managed to banish the memories to the back of my brain, although annoyance sparked in my chest at the gigantic bloody mess Kyrion and Vesper had left behind—a mess that I was tasked with cleaning up. The truebonded couple might have escaped Holloway’s clutches, but in doing so, they had caused a multitude of problems for me.

Holloway had offered an enormous bounty for Kyrion and Vesper’s capture, but no one had seen them since they had fled Corios, the planet that was the Imperium’s seat of power.

There was a slight chance the couple was dead. A flight director had reported seeing Adria Byrne slip onto Kyrion’s ship before it had left the Crownpoint docking bay. She could have killed Kyrion and Vesper in retaliation for her brother Dargan’s death, but if so, she would have returned to Corios with their bodies. Adria’s continued absence led me to believe that Kyrion and Vesper had ended her instead.

Holloway also thought they were still alive, which was the only thing we agreed on. He would probably spend the solstice holiday poring over supposed sightings of Kyrion and Vesper and listening to his generals theorize about where the couple might be heading. Arrogant fool. He should be worrying about what the Techwave was plotting next. The terrorist group was much more of a threat to the Imperium than Kyrion and Vesper, but Holloway always put his own dark desires and unending lust for power above everything else, including the people he was supposed to lead and protect.

“The solstice, eh?” Fergus said, drawing my attention back to him. A teasing grin spread across his face. “Wondering how many times you’ll have to dance with Lady Asterin at the solstice ball to placate your grandmother?”

I bit back a groan. Lady Asterin Armas was yet another one of my many problems. “Something like that,” I muttered.

Fergus reached up and clapped me on the shoulder. “Ah, don’t look so dour. Asterin seems like a lovely woman. Dancing with her shouldn’t be a chore. Besides, it’s nothing you haven’t done for the gossipcasts before, right?”

“Right,” I replied, giving him a bright, cheerful smile in hopes of ending this unwanted topic of conversation.

Fergus’s dark eyes narrowed. My patented smile might dazzle the gossipcast reporters, but he’d known me too long to be so easily fooled. Fergus hesitated, then squared his shoulders, as if bracing himself for an unpleasant task. “I’ve noticed some . . . tension between Beatrice and Wendell lately.”

I dropped my gaze from his and tugged down my right sleeve, even though it was already perfectly in place. “What sort of tension?”

“Wendell seems to be greatly upset with your grandmother for some reason. Of course, I’ve asked Beatrice about it, but she said it was a minor squabble. Some new design that your father is having an issue with that she doesn’t approve of.”

I tugged down my left sleeve with a sharp motion, almost ripping off an opal cufflink. “You know how cranky my father gets when he’s stuck on a project, and how much crankier my grandmother can be when she doesn’t immediately see the results she wants. I’m sure they’ll both figure it out soon, and then things will return to normal.”

The lies dripped easily off my tongue, although guilt knotted my stomach. Fergus was a dear friend, and I hated deceiving him, but it was a necessary evil, like so many other things in my life, both as an Imperium Arrow and as the heir to House Zimmer.

I raised my gaze back to Fergus’s and gave him another false smile. This one must have been much more convincing than the last, because some of the tension and worry eased out of his wrinkled face.

“Good to know,” Fergus replied.

He smiled back at me, then gathered up his pins, scissors, spools of thread, rolls of fabric, and other supplies. Unlike many Regal tailors, Fergus eschewed magnetic and robotic technology in favor of simple, old-fashioned tools. His designs, like my beautiful tailcoat, often took hundreds of hours to complete, but the fit, stitching, and other details were exquisite and well worth the wait.

Fergus packed everything into a battered wooden sewing box, which he hoisted into the crook of his elbow. “See you at the ball, Zane.”

“I wouldn’t miss it, especially when I look this good.” I winked at him, then spun around, making the tailcoat flap against my legs.

Fergus chuckled, then left the room.

As soon as the door shut behind him, the smile dropped from my face faster than a meteor plummeting toward the ground. I stepped down off the raised dais, moved away from the mirror, and wound my way past the tables, chairs, and settees piled high with books, weapons, plastipapers, and wayward tea mugs that filled my tower library. The housekeepers always clucked their tongues about the mess, but I found the clutter comforting—and I needed all the comfort I could get right now.

I went past a long table covered with chrome appliances, including a brewmaker and a beverage chiller, both designed by Vesper, and stopped in front of one of the windows. In the distance, catty-corner across a busy thoroughfare, Imperium soldiers were stationed in front of Castle Caldaren, an enormous, hulking, dark blue stone structure that looked as grim and dour as its absentee owner.

The soldiers had been guarding the castle for two weeks, more than long enough to know that Kyrion wasn’t coming back anytime soon, and they shot bored looks at the horse-drawn carriages that rattled over the Boulevard, the wide cobblestone avenue that fronted many of the Regal homes, including my tower in Castle Zimmer. Several more Imperium soldiers were stationed nearby at the edge of Promenade Park, their bloodred uniforms and silver blasters making them resemble man-size flowers with metallic thorns that had sprouted out of the park’s grassy, rolling lawns.

My tablet chimed. Time to finish getting ready for the solstice celebration.

I turned away from the window and went over to a nearby table. A small weapon that was a cross between a hairpin and a dagger rested atop an uneven stack of paper books. Blue opals and sapphsidian chips adorned the butterfly-shaped hilt, although dried blood crusted the thin, sharp silver blade, marring the weapon’s delicate beauty. I’d been so busy chasing down leads for Holloway about where Kyrion and Vesper might have gone that I hadn’t had a chance to clean Dargan Byrne’s blood off the blade yet.

More memories drifted through my mind. Taking the weapon from my mother’s jewelry collection before the midnight ball . . . Handing the butterfly dagger over to Inga, one of the Crownpoint servants, so she could secretly slip it to Vesper . . . Vesper yanking the butterfly dagger out of her hair, whipping around, and stabbing Dargan with the blade . . .

For the third time, I blinked and pushed the memories away. I hadn’t known about my familial connection to Vesper when I’d arranged for her to receive the dagger. I’d just wanted to ease my own guilty conscience and give her a sporting chance to escape the horrific fate Holloway had in mind for her. Without risking myself, of course.

But now . . . now I wondered if my subconscious had known the truth about Vesper all along.

I was a psion, a broad term that also included seers, siphons, spelltechs, and other people with telekinesis, telepathy, telempathy, and other extraordinary mental abilities. No one knew exactly where psionic powers came from or how to consistently replicate them with science and technology, which was why many folks referred to such abilities as magic. I was a particularly strong telekinetic, able to move objects with my mind, but perhaps something else in my psionic powers had whispered a warning and prompted me to act so recklessly. Either way, Vesper Quill had caused nothing but trouble ever since she’d burst into my life a few months ago.

I glared down at the sparkling jewels, then reached past the dagger and grabbed my stormsword off an even larger and more haphazard pile of books. The long, sharp blade was made of lunarium, a precious mineral that enhanced psionic abilities and could even transform them into physical elements like fire, ice, lightning, and wind. The opalescent blade gleamed with a pale blue sheen in a reflection of my own psion power, but the bits of sapphsidian embedded in the silver hilt seemed to soak up the late-afternoon sunlight, making the jewels look black rather than the deep blue they truly were.

I traced my index finger over a piece of sapphsidian nestled in among the many Zs that were carved into the hilt. Perhaps it was my imagination, but the jewel looked like a wide, open, accusing eye embedded in the silver, like Vesper Quill herself was staring at me from somewhere deep inside my own sword. She was a seer. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that she could be psionically spying on me.

Vesper seemed to be quite powerful in her own right, and her truebond with Kyrion would make her even stronger, since the connection would allow the two of them to share thoughts, feelings, and instincts, along with strength, fighting skills, and psionic abilities. During the midnight ball, their combined psion power had ripped through the Crownpoint throne room in a vicious shock wave, toppling bronze sculptures off the walls, cracking the white marble floor, and knocking over Regals, servants, and guards. Vesper peering at me through a jewel in my own sword would be child’s play compared with that previous decimation. Or perhaps it was just my own turbulent thoughts giving life to such fanciful musings.

I had always been so bloody proud that my sword bore the Zimmer family sigil, just as I had always been so proud to wear the ice-blue color of House Zimmer. But now . . . now I didn’t know how I felt about my family tree, especially this new, unexpected branch.

Holloway might be focused on where Vesper and Kyrion were going, but ever since they had fled from Corios, I had been secretly retracing their steps, trying to learn everything I could about my wayward sister and the rogue Arrow who had been my former boss.

I didn’t have all the details, but someone—most likely Daichi Hirano, Kyrion’s chief of staff—had discreetly hacked into the Regal archives a few months ago to compare various DNA samples. Daichi had hidden his tracks well but not quite well enough. According to the time stamps I’d found, Daichi—and by extension Kyrion—had been trying to figure out who Vesper’s father was for months, although they hadn’t matched my DNA to Vesper’s until after the midnight ball.

I had no idea how Kyrion had figured out that Vesper was my sister without the DNA confirmation. Perhaps I would ask the smug bastard when I finally caught up with him.

But the more important question was: What did Vesper think about the information? That she was a Zimmer? That Wendell was her father? That I was her brother?

Most people would have been absolutely thrilled, especially since House Zimmer was among the most powerful Regal Houses, with an abundance of wealth and influence. At the very least, Vesper could have engineered a hefty payday out of the information. Many Regal lords and ladies were known for having ill-advised dalliances, especially when they were away from their home planet of Corios, and it was quite common for Regals to pay off unwanted children to disappear back to the tourist planets and other distant reaches of the galaxy from whence they came.

But so far, there had been no communication from Vesper. No demands for money, no threats to sell the scandalous story to the gossipcasts, no dire warnings about all the ways she was going to torture us with the information.

The silence worried me. I didn’t know Vesper Quill very well, but she was smart, strong, and more than capable of causing immense financial pain to House Zimmer and severe emotional trauma to my family. More so than she had already caused by simply existing.

My tablet chimed again, a little louder and sharper. I sighed. Like a prince out of an old-fashioned fairy tale, it was time for me to attend the ball, whether I wanted to or not.

So I shoved my stormsword into a slot on my belt and stomped out of the library, secrets and schemes still swirling around in my mind.

I went downstairs, knocked on an open door, and stepped into the enormous library that was my grandmother’s domain, and thus the heart of Castle Zimmer.

Beatrice’s library was easily five times the size of my own cozy, cluttered tower and was far more ostentatious, with polished wooden tables, glittering jeweled knickknacks, and delicate, spindly chairs and settees covered with velvet cushions and plump pillows. The area was absolutely immaculate, with everything in its place and a place for everything, from the perfectly aligned books on the shelves to the fresh blue-moon peonies standing tall in their vases to the three separate tea sets arranged on three separate tables, complete with serving platters, silverware, napkins, and delicate porcelain bowls brimming with Z-shaped sugar cubes.

Even my grandmother’s desk was spotless, with a fresh pad of ice-blue paper, a pot of dark blue ink, and an old-fashioned crystal ink pen resting on a white lace doily. Seeing the House Zimmer colors on her desk further soured my mood.

My father, Wendell Zimmer, was already in the library, standing in front of a large silver-framed painting that hung between two bookcases. In the portrait, my father beamed at my mother, Miriol, who beamed right back at him. My mother had been quite lovely, with light brown hair and eyes and pale skin, although I had my father’s blond hair, tan skin, and the ubiquitous blue eyes of House Zimmer.

Miriol had died of a sudden illness a few months after I’d been born, so I had never known her. Even now, thirty-eight years after her death, my father didn’t talk about her much, as though simply saying her name was still too painful.

“Your mother always loved the solstice celebrations,” Wendell said in a low, wistful voice when I stopped beside him. “That’s how we met. At a summer solstice celebration. Miriol had flowers and ribbons in her hair, and she was dancing with her friends like she was a fairy goddess come to life. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I desperately wanted to talk to her, but I was so nervous and awkward that I couldn’t make myself approach her. I was still working up my nerve when . . .”

“. . . when she danced right up to you, gave you a crown of braided flowers, grabbed your hand, and pulled you along with her. Naturally, you fell in love with her right on the spot.” I finished his thought in a gentle voice.

A faint smile flickered across his face. “I might have told you this story before.”

“Just a few dozen times,” I said, keeping my voice light.

Father smiled again, but the expression quickly wilted. “But I’ve never told you much about what happened after your mother died. How . . . distraught I was. How I . . . lashed out at the galaxy at large. How I made some . . . foolish choices, especially when it came to the company I kept.”

Wendell looked up at the portrait again, but his eyes were dark and distant, as though he was peering back into his troubled past.

I tensed. He had to be talking about Nerezza Blackwell, Vesper’s mother. I’d made some discreet inquiries and had my spies and other contacts dig up all the dirt they could find on Nerezza. As a teenager, she had been a poor nobody from a Temperate planet, but the Regals were always looking for psionic outliers to bolster their numbers and bloodlines, and Nerezza had had enough power and potential to be invited to attend a prestigious academy here on Corios. Somehow her path had crossed with my father’s, and Vesper had been the result.

“What sort of company do you mean?” I asked in a careful voice.

Father opened his mouth, then stopped and cleared his throat, as though he wanted to tell me something important but wasn’t quite sure how to phrase it.

How did one reveal he had a daughter he’d never known about? Even among the Regals, with all their archaic societal rules, there was no procedure for such a thing. For once, even my grandmother, with all her conniving, didn’t have a Regal rule book she could follow, no accepted or proper or patented method to break the shocking news. Or perhaps she was determined to keep me in the dark along with everyone else, to quietly sweep aside this untidiness with Vesper the same way the servants removed the smallest specks of dust from her library. Hard to tell. Beatrice was always playing her own games, even within our family.

Either way, neither my father nor my grandmother had revealed that I’d gone from an only child to a big brother overnight. At first, I thought they had been as stunned as I had been, but as the days had gone by with no confession from either one of them, and not so much as the smallest bloody hint that anything had changed, their silence had begun to anger me.

“What do you want to tell me, Father?” I asked, my voice rougher and more insistent than before. “Just go ahead and say it. Whatever it is, I will understand. I promise.”

Especially since I already knew his deep, dark secret, but I was determined to be as kind as possible. My father might be second-in-command of House Zimmer, but he wasn’t brash and ruthless like me and my grandmother. Wendell was a kind, gentle, sensitive soul, and he would have been quite happy to spend the rest of his life puttering around in his workshop rather than dueling with the other lords and ladies in Regal society.

Father looked me in the eyes, sucked in a breath, and opened his mouth—

“Sorry I’m late,” a familiar voice called out. “I had to make sure our gift had arrived.”

Heels clacked against the stone floor in a high, sharp drumbeat. My father flinched and snapped his lips shut.

Beatrice Zimmer, my grandmother, swept inside the library with all the grace and elegance of a queen, and her long ice-blue gown swished around her legs like a bell swinging back and forth, softly announcing her arrival. Her silver hair was piled on top of her head, and blue opals glinted among the curls like a hidden crown. Her skin was more rosy than tan, but her eyes were the same ice-blue as my father’s—and just as cold and calculating as mine.

Beatrice’s gaze zipped between my father and me before shooting up to my mother’s portrait on the wall. She raised one eyebrow in a chiding motion at my father, who glared right back at her. I didn’t have all the details, but from what I’d overheard, Beatrice had kept Vesper’s existence a secret from my father, something Wendell was furious about. Most of the Regals might shun their bastard children, but my father was too softhearted to ever do anything that cruel. If he’d known about Vesper, he would have immediately welcomed her into our home, scandal be damned, and doted on her as much as he had always doted on me.

Beatrice stared at my father. When it became apparent that he was going to keep quiet, she strode over and thrust a box into my hands. Delicate silver filigree ribboned across the pale, opalescent lunarium in elegant whorls and scrolls. Not just any box but a jewelry box.

My gut twisted with dread, but I cracked open the top to reveal a wide silver choker studded with large blue opals. Even by Regal standards, it was an impressive, expensive piece, and I let out a low, appreciative whistle.

“Aw, Grandmother, you shouldn’t have,” I drawled. “Although it will look absolutely marvelous with my new tailcoat.”

Beatrice rolled her eyes. “It’s for Lady Asterin. A summer solstice gift from you is appropriate at this stage of your courtship.”

I rolled my eyes right back at her. “This is not a mere gift. Why, there are enough jewels on this thing to feed everyone in the city for at least a month. Two months, if you only dish out porridge and gruel.”

My grandmother rolled her eyes again. “Your exaggerations are excessive, as always. No one serves gruel anymore.”

“Why are you so determined to snare Asterin? I’ve told you numerous times that she openly despises me. I feel the exact same way about her, although I, of course, am too much of a gentleman to let such animosity show.” I finished my thought with a haughty harrumph of disapproval.

My father snorted in disbelief. I winked at him, which only made him snort again, this time with laughter.

Beatrice ignored us both and jutted out her chin in a defiant look I knew all too well. “Asterin might despise you, and you might loathe her, but her family greatly admires the House Zimmer name, fortune, and connections, especially now that you are the head of the Arrows, as you should have been all along.”

Her chin jutted out even more. “Besides, you know I have a sense about these things. You and Asterin will make a lovely couple.”

I groaned. Beatrice was a very powerful telempath who could easily sense other people’s emotions, even over great distances. Every once in a while, she would also have a vision of the future, just like I sometimes did. But worst of all, she considered herself a bloody matchmaker, claiming that her strong telempathy gave her insight about which lords and ladies would be perfect for each other.

Beatrice had crowed so loudly and consistently about her supposed gift that some of the other Regals now came to her for advice when they were trying to marry off their relatives. But it was all simply another sly scheme on my grandmother’s part, a way for her to subtly push certain Regals together and form alliances that would ultimately benefit House Zimmer in some way.

“You should listen to your grandmother,” Wendell chimed in. “After all, she always knows what’s best for our family, even when we don’t know ourselves. Isn’t that right, Beatrice?”

She bristled at his snide tone. My father only called her Beatrice when he was upset with her, something neither one of them thought I noticed. They glared at each other again, and the air crackled with so much tension that I would probably get a violent static shock if I brushed up against either one of them.

“Oh, yes, family is the most important thing. Family first, then House Zimmer, then the galaxy can take care of everyone else,” I drawled again. “Isn’t that what you always say, Grandmother?”

Beatrice’s eyes narrowed, the wheels clearly spinning in her mind as she tried to figure out what—if anything—I knew about Vesper. I gave her the same dazzling smile that I always gave the gossipcast reporters.

She arched an eyebrow at me in the same chiding motion she’d used on Father earlier. Like Fergus, my grandmother was not so easily fooled.

“Come,” Beatrice said, smoothing her hands down her skirt. “The carriage is waiting. We don’t want to be late.”

“Oh, no,” my father said, his voice still snide and bitter. “We wouldn’t want to appear to be anything but the perfect Regal family we are.”

He glared at her again, then stormed out of the library. Beatrice watched him go, her lips pinching together into a tight line.

“Father has been upset with you for weeks now. Anything you want to tell me?” I asked, hoping she would finally just admit what was going on.

Beatrice’s lips parted, and she drew in a breath. Then she shook her head, and her breath escaped in a soft sigh. “Nothing for you to worry about, my darling. Just an old problem that has reared its ugly head yet again, despite my best efforts to contain it. Don’t fret. I’m sure everything will work itself out for the best.”

She nodded at the jewelry box in my hand. “Make sure to give the necklace to Asterin during the celebration.”

Beatrice hesitated, then stepped forward, reached up, and patted my cheek, her fingers warm and firm against my skin. “I’ve always done what I think is best for our family, and the best is all that I’ve ever wanted for you and your father. I want you to know that, Zane.”

“Of course,” I murmured.

Beatrice patted my cheek again, then left the library.

I rolled my tense shoulders and shut the necklace box. The sharp snap of the lid closing rang out as loudly as a Frozon bear trap clamping around my ankle. Despite all my protests to the contrary, my grandmother was still determined to shackle me to Asterin. I wasn’t a seer like Vesper, but for some strange reason, I felt like the trap had already been sprung, and all I could do was snarl and flail helplessly in its tight teeth.

Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps the solstice celebration would go better than the midnight ball had.

I bloody hoped so—for all our sakes.