The copy didn’t flinch. Its outstretched hand didn’t waver, and the gentle, paternal warmth in its gray eyes didn’t dim by a fraction of a degree.
“Deren Vey was a fool, Len,” the creature said softly. Its voice carried the intimate, unsparing honesty that an older courier uses when speaking to a younger partner over a camp fire. “He thought that if he broke the wheel, the council would see the error in Ansett Rill’s mathematics. He thought that if he sacrificed his wrists, the state would open the borders and let the mail go through.”
The creature took another half-pace forward, closing the distance between them to five feet. The air coming from its mouth smelled faintly of chicory and dried apples. The exact ration scent Deren had carried on his breath. Just then, he came home from the long hauls across the Cloudford pass.
“And what did his sacrifice buy?” the copy asked, its tone low and sorrowful. “Seven years of darkness. A sister who mortgaged her delivery cart to pay his unfulfilled freight bonds. A nineteen-year-old son who crossed an armed border with a broken arm to carry medicine that arrived eight days too late to save the children in the Tram nursery.”
