Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2)

by Yoon Ha Lee

In Brezan’s experience, assassinations never made the situation less chaotic.

The best one came from an analyst whom Zehun kept trying to fire. Zehun was correct, but the analyst in question came up with the best scenarios. Her latest suggested that Jedao had induced an army of ghosts to possess the swarm and that an assault on the laws of entropy was next. The woman was wasted in intelligence. She should be writing dramas, but Mikodez was too selfish to let her go.

You couldn’t pull the hexarchate apart and exchange it for something better. The fact that the heretics always lost was proof of that. So you had to do the next best thing, the only thing left: serve, and hope that serving honorably made some small difference.

“I don’t care if Cheris never had a chance against the hexarchs. I wanted to die having seen that someone believed in a better world enough to fight for it.”