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Diana put her face into her son's hair and, for exactly three seconds, stopped being the woman steering the corridor. Then she lifted her head. Three seconds was all she'd let herself have.

"Thank you," she said, and she meant it.

"Later. Right now, that boy is not leaving your arms, and nobody's going to make him." Athena's eyes went to Kavren, dust-grey and bleeding at the shoulder, standing a little too close. She read all of it in one look and set it aside for a calmer day. "The D'Karr's three levels up trying to run an evacuation with half his court screaming at him. You're the only person I've ever watched shut that room up. Take your son and go do it. I've got my girl."

They didn't get far. The up-ramp was blocked.

Not by the collapse. By men. A knot of young warriors stood across the mouth of the ramp, a dozen of them, and the biggest was up on a crate with his voice raised over the crowd. Diana caught the shape of what he was selling before she caught the words. The sky was dying. The humans had angered it. Every mouth of grain that went to the aliens was a mouth stolen from a true son of Dobromia, and now the sun itself had said as much.

"Jadirel," Kavren said, low, at her shoulder. "The one on the crate. I told you his name was moving through the barracks."

"He picked a fine night to test it." Diana settled Plovus on her hip and didn't slow. "There are families who need that ramp."

"Let me clear it." Kavren was already shifting his weight toward the crowd, one hand loose at his side.

"No." She put her free hand flat on his chest without breaking stride. "They'll hear a blade coming and it turns into a fight, and I'm holding a baby. This one's mine to talk down." She lifted her voice to carry without a shout. "You. On the crate. You want to be useful, or you want to be loud? Because I can only see one of those getting anyone up that ramp, and the sun doesn't care which you pick."

Jadirel looked down at her, and the crowd became quiet to watch. "The human. Of course. Come to tell us the sky is fine."

"The sky is not fine. The sky is a catastrophe, and you're on a crate in front of it giving a speech." She held his eyes, her son on her hip. "There are a hundred people behind you who need this ramp, and every second you spend blaming me is a second none of them are climbing it. So here's your choice, and it's a real one. Be the man who blocked the evacuation on the worst night in living memory, and let every mother here remember your face for it. Or get down and carry a child up, and be something else. I don't care which. Decide now."

For a moment it could have gone either way. Then an older warrior behind Jadirel simply turned, scooped up a wailing toddler and started up the ramp. The moment broke. The knot came apart, and the men found children and bundles to carry, glad of something to do with their hands. Jadirel got down off the crate last. He gave Diana one long look on his way past, and she filed it away. She'd just made him small in front of the men he wanted at his back, and she didn't think he was a man who let that go.

Then she carried her son up toward the high chamber, and Kavren walked at her back the rest of the way.

*** Boradrith ***

Boradrith had been king for thirty years and he'd never once had a night like this one, and he was old enough to know he'd have more of them before the end.

They found him at the heart of the crisis, in the high chamber where the evacuation orders went out, and the chamber was a wall of voices. He was letting them shout. He'd sat through enough of these to know the noise had to wear itself out before the room would take an order. So he waited for it, tired in a way sleep had stopped fixing a long time ago.

Then the doors opened and the human walked in with his son on her hip and the Dowager's lost blade at her back, both of them gray with the dust of a level that had come down on them, and the chamber went quiet on its own.

"Diana," he said.

"Your lower levels are gone or going," she said, no preamble. She'd never once wasted his time, and she wasn't about to start tonight. "The core will hold. The surface is finished for good this time, not in a generation, now. Which means the alliance isn't a strategy anymore, Boradrith. It's the only door out of the room. Everything Earth can send, every ship, every berth on every ship, that's the difference between your people living somewhere and your people ending here. You need Marina's models and Toren's governments and the one human on this planet the humans still trust. That last part is the part I can help you with, and I can't help you with it from a cell."

A councillor started to object about the seat and the scandal and the line. Boradrith lifted one hand, and the man stopped. Even tonight, that reflex held.

"Be quiet," the king said, almost mildly. "My mother's quarrel cost me the crust of my own planet tonight. I don't have the room left in me for it." He looked at Diana, and then at the soldier beside her, at the shoulder that was clearly broken and the wing he was holding wrong. "You carried a ceiling for her."

"I did," Kavren said.

"My mother made you to be a blade and you turned yourself into a door she can't get through. I should be angrier about that than I am." Boradrith's mouth moved, not a smile, but close to one. "I find I don't have the energy for it. And I've run clean out of pride, somewhere around the third level coming down." He raised his voice so the chamber caught it, his mother and every councillor with it, so none of them could pretend later they hadn't heard. "The consort's confinement is lifted. She sits again at this council, tonight, because tonight this council needs her more than it has ever needed anyone. The guard Kavren is reassigned to her protection at my word, not my mother's. If anyone in this room would like to argue the point, the corridor is open and the surface is on fire. Take your objection there."

No one took it there.

*** Diana ***

It was nearly dawn, or what passed for dawn now, before the shaking stopped for good and the last of the lower levels had given up whoever they were going to give up.

Diana worked all of it. It was the one part of a disaster she actually knew how to do. She placed families in the core. She got Rodriguez and the relay moved to high ground and a message onto the last working channel to Earth, four words that would set an entire planet's rescue in motion. She stood at Boradrith's side and turned a panicking council toward the only future it had, one hard sentence at a time. She didn't sit down. She didn't cry. And not once in all those hours did she get to hold her son for more than a stolen minute.

But every time she looked up, Kavren was there. At her back, at her shoulder, one wing strapped and useless and the other still angled a little toward her out of a habit twenty years deep. He'd been told to guard her by a king this time instead of a Dowager, and it was the first order in twenty years he'd have given anything to be handed.

Near the end, in a quiet seam between one crisis and the next, he came and stood close, and for a moment neither of them was on duty.

"You talked down a mob with a baby on your hip," he said. "I've decided that's the most frightening thing I've ever watched a person do, and I once watched you argue tariffs."