"I know the feeling," I said.

"I'm sorry," Dad said. "I'm getting both abstract and depressed."

"It's not abstract, Dad," I said. "You're talking to the girl whose life is a treaty point. I know what it means to be valued for what I am rather than who I am."

Dad gave me a hug. "Not here, Zoë," he said. "We love you for you. Although if you want to tell your Obin friends to get off their asses and help us, I wouldn't mind."

"Well, I did get Hickory and Dickory to swear not to kill you," I said. "So that's progress, at least."

"Yes, baby steps in the right direction," Dad said. "It'll be nice not to have to worry about being knifed by members of my household."

"There's always Mom," I said.

"Trust me, if I ever annoyed her that much, she wouldn't use something as painless as a knife," Dad said. He kissed me on the cheek. "Thanks for coming to tell me what Hickory said, Zoë," he said. "And thanks for keeping it to yourself for now."

"You're welcome," I said, and then headed for the door. I stopped before I turned the handle. "Dad? How long do you think it will take before the Conclave is here?"

"Not long, Zoë," he said. "Not long at all."

In fact, it took just about two weeks.

In that time, we prepared. Dad found a way to tell everyone the truth without having them panic: He told them that there was still a good chance the Conclave would find us and that the Colonial Union was planning on making a stand here; that there was still danger but that we had been in danger before, and that being smart and prepared was our best defense. Colonists called up plans to build bomb shelters and other protections, and used the excavation and construction machinery we'd kept packed up before. People kept to their work and stayed optimistic and prepared themselves as best they could, readying themselves for a life on the edge of a war.

I spent my time reading the stuff Hickory and Dickory gave me, watching the videos of the colony removals, and poring through the data to see what I could learn. Hickory and Dickory were right, there was just too much of it, and lots of it in formats I couldn't understand. I don't know how Jane managed to keep it all straight in her head. But what was there was enough to know a few different things.

First, the Conclave was huge: Over four hundred races belonged to it, each of them pledging to work together to colonize new worlds rather than compete for them. This was a wild idea; up until now all the hundreds of races in our part of space fought with each other to grab worlds and colonize them, and then once they created a new colony they all fought tooth and nail to keep their own and wipe out everyone else's. But in the Conclave setup, creatures from all sorts of races would live on the same planet. You wouldn't have to compete. In theory, a great idea—it beats having to try to kill everyone else in the area—but whether it would actually work was still up in the air.

Which brought up the second point: It was still incredibly new. General Gau, the head of the Conclave, had worked for more than twenty years to put it together, and for most of those years it kept looking like it was going to fall apart. It didn't help that the Colonial Union—us humans—and a few others expended a lot of energy to break it up even before it got together. But somehow Gau made it happen, and in the last couple of years had actually taken it from planning to practicality.

That wasn't a good thing for everyone who wasn't part of the Conclave, especially when the Conclave started making decrees, like that no one who wasn't part of the Conclave could colonize any new worlds. Any argument with the Conclave was an argument with every member of the Conclave. It wasn't a one-on-one thing; it was a four-hundred-on-one thing. And General Gau made sure people knew it. When the Conclave started bringing fleets to remove those new colonies that other races planted in defiance, there was one ship in that fleet for every race in the Conclave. I tried to imagine four hundred battle cruisers suddenly popping up over Roanoke, and then remembered that if the Colonial Union's plan worked, I'd see them soon enough. I stopped trying to imagine it.

It was fair to wonder if the Colonial Union was insane for trying to pick a fight with the Conclave, but as big as it was, its newness worked against it. Every one of those four hundred allies had been enemies not too long ago. Each of them came in to the Conclave with its own plans and agenda, and not all of them, it seemed, were entirely convinced this Conclave thing was going to work; when it all came down, some of them planned to scoop up the choice pieces. It was still early enough for it all to fall apart, if someone applied just the right amount of pressure. It looked like the Colonial Union was planning to do that, up above Roanoke.

Only one thing was keeping it all together, and that was the third thing I learned: That this General Gau was in his way a remarkable person. He wasn't like one of those tin-pot dictators who got lucky, seized a country and gave themselves the title of Grand High Poobah or whatever. He had been an actual general for a people called the Vrenn, and had won some important battles for them when he decided that it was wasteful to fight over resources that more than one race could easily and productively share; when he started campaigning with this idea, he was thrown into jail. No one likes a troublemaker.

The ruler who tossed him in jail eventually died (Gau had nothing to do with it; it was natural causes) and Gau was offered the job, but he turned it down and instead tried to get other races to sign on to the idea of the Conclave. He had the disadvantage that he didn't get the Vrenn to go along with the idea at first; all he had to his name was an idea and a small battle cruiser called the Gentle Star, which he had gotten the Vrenn to give him after they decommissioned it. From what I could read, it seemed like the Vrenn thought they were buying him off with it, as in "here, take this, thanks for your service, go away, no need to send a postcard, bye."

But he didn't go away, and despite the fact that his idea was insane and impractical and nuts and could never possibly work because every race in our universe hated every other race too much, it worked. Because this General Gau made it work, by using his own skills and personality to get people of all different races to work together. The more I read about him, the more it seemed like the guy was really admirable.

And yet he was also the person who had ordered the killing of civilian colonists.

Yes, he'd offered to move them and even offered to give them space in the Conclave. But when it came right down to it, if they wouldn't move and they wouldn't join, he wiped them out. Just like he would wipe us all out, if despite everything Dad told Hickory and Dickory we didn't surrender the colony—or if, should the attack the Colonial Union had planned on the Conclave fleet go wrong, the general decided that the CU needed to be taught a lesson for daring to defy the Conclave and wiped us out just on general principles.

I wasn't so sure just how admirable General Gau would be, if at the end of the day he wouldn't stop from killing me and every single person I cared about.

It was a puzzle. He was a puzzle. I spent those two weeks trying to sort it out. Gretchen got grumpy with me that I'd been locked away without telling her what I was up to; Hickory and Dickory had to remind me to get out and work on my training. Even Jane wondered if I might not need to get outside more. The only person not to give me much grief was Enzo; since we got back together he was actually very accommodating about my schedule. I appreciated that. I made sure he knew. He seemed to appreciate that.

And then just like that we all ran out of time. The Gentle Star, General Gau's ship, appeared above our colony one afternoon, disabled our communications satellite so Gau could have some time to chat, and then sent a message to Roanoke asking to meet with the colony leaders. John replied that he would meet with him. That evening, as the sun set, they met on the ridge outside the colony, about a klick away.