Chapter 24: Zeus Without the Stake

The vote closed at 9:23 AM.

I know this because I was watching the digital clock on the wall behind Zeus's left shoulder, which was the only surface in the room not trying to communicate power, and because I had made a private bet with myself that it would take longer. I was wrong by eleven minutes. The arithmetic was cleaner than I expected once Neptune's division had its voting rights restored and the instrument number was on record and Anna's counter-filing had been acknowledged into evidence by the chair of the governance committee — a small, precise woman named Hera Calloway who had not looked at her husband once during the entire proceeding and who ran the procedural mechanics of the vote with the focused attention of someone who has been waiting a long time to do something correctly.

The final count was seven to four, with one abstention.