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voting in his stead, but the bylaws hadn’t.) But the director had clearly wanted verisimilitude in politics, such as it was, unfolding in a movie-ready Assembly Hall twice as grand as the real thing; the Assembly hadn’t let them film, and the studio had clearly balked at reconstructing an awkward, drafty room with inexplicable bubbles in the carpet.
    But for all that, it was engaging: it even had a Peruvian and a Brazilian Face—not important enough to have names, but their countries were subtitled in a very serious font as they were recruited to the Second-Wave Seventy in montage.
    â€œYou all right?” whispered Ethan.
    She hated him. It still astonished her how much she could, out of nowhere.
    She held still a breath longer, grateful for the dark. (It subsided—she forced it to, she wasn’t good enough to wholly despise him and still sleep with him—but when it rose it buried everything.)
    â€œOf course,” she said after a pause she knew was too long. She smoothed her hand where she’d been picking at a loose thread on her loaner dress; the scented shimmer Oona had spread on her arms had left a spot on the black, a comet on a star map. Horrible tell. Hakan would have been mortified. “You try sitting through a movie in a dress this tight.”
    He huffed a laugh; he glanced at her, then away like he hadn’t meant to. A moment later he took her hand.
    She let him. She spread her fingers slowly, let them sink between his fingers as his breath caught, let the tips of her fingernails just barely scrape the underside of his palm as he curled his fingers around her, brushing the last of the sparkles off.
    She’d stepped on her anger, and all was well, and the end of all this was too far away to start counting the minutes now.
    Ã— × × × × × ×
    The theater lights came up slowly enough that Suyana could gauge the mood of the room without getting caught actually looking around. India and Finland and the rest of the Founding Fifteen looked pleased with themselves. Exceptions: Ethan, who straightened the hem of his jacket twice in a row as he stood, and Grace, who was already sidling toward the exit next to Martine.
    ( THE INTERNATIONAL ASSEMBLY REMAINS THE MOST POWERFUL DIPLOMATIC ASSOCIATION IN THE WORLD. IT INCLUDES 227 COUNTRIES AND HOLDS AN INTERNATIONAL STANDING ARMY , the closing title read. Suyana wasn’t sure if that was praise or disappointment. Grace seemed to have decided.)
    â€œI’m starving,” Suyana said. “Do we know the menu atBridge View?”
    â€œSalad of microgreens and spiced nuts,” Ethan recited. “Then sea bass for me, with slices of sweet potato, I swear to God just because Harold doesn’t trust me with any food that could roll off the plate. For you, eggplant medallions with potato puree. Fruit sorbet. Champagne.”
    There was something about the dip in his delivery right around “puree” that made her look him in the eye. “You want to skip it and get pizza?”
    He considered it for three seconds, looked at his wristband for another three. Tallying messages, maybe. Maybe calculating the logistics of redirecting the cameras waiting outside the restaurant.
    â€œYeah,” he said, mostly to the wristband. The gesture looked strangely serious, even though he was smiling. “Let’s ditch and get pizza. We can still make cocktails, right?”
    â€œOh, the UARC has two cameras scheduled at cocktails. Magnus would shoot me if I wasn’t there.”
    His head snapped up. “That’s not funny.”
    He was wrong. His vigilance about the S word was one of the few things about him that didn’t feel grown in a lab.
    â€œWe’ll be back by then,” she promised, trying not to grin so close on the heels of the shooting joke.
    He tugged on his jacket (third time, she set her teeth against something without knowing what) and took her arm.