And the eight people in this room—who wouldn’t meet my eyes when I looked at them, who’d known what they were really doing—they’d told themselves a different story: Ophelia’s story. The story that every council member in every enclave had been telling themselves for thousands of years, since the very first time someone had built an enclave out of death instead of gold. It was their responsibility to do the terrible thing for everyone else. To bear the scars of it like a burden, as if there was something noble in doing something so horrible that most people couldn’t stand doing it, for the sake
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