Chapter 11: Commander

Nobody understood it at first.

They saw a woman in a ruined black dress walking between two lines of soldiers, and they waited for the commander to come in behind her.

Thayer was still smiling at the doors over my shoulder.

Then my second, at the head of the left line, called out the way he's called it on a hundred decks.

"Commander, Ironwatch!"

Twelve right hands came up in a salute and held.

I walked past every one of them.

The roommate was standing by the champagne tower with her mouth open.

Her glass tipped in her hand and wine ran onto her sequins, and she didn't notice.

The girls beside her had stopped breathing.

Somebody at the insurers' table said, very clearly, "Oh, shit."

I went up the three steps onto the stage.

Thayer was standing behind the podium.

He'd stopped smiling at the doors.

He was looking at me now, and his face was doing something I'd seen on men in the moment the boarding ladder hits their rail.

"No," he said. "No, that's not..."

"Mr. Ellery." My second came up beside me with a leather folder under his arm. "You asked for a meeting with the commander. A dozen times."

"She's a janitor."

"She was," I said. "In September you handed me your room service tray outside a suite on nine and told me to hurry up. You didn't look at my face."

Carina's phone was up again.

Her hand was shaking.

Old Whitlow was staring at me with his mouth working under his mustache.

"You're the Warlord Queen," he said.

"That's what your captains call me."

Thayer came around the podium.

For a second I thought he was going to take a swing.

Then his legs just stopped holding him.

He went down on his knees on the stage in front of the whole Boston waterfront.

"Commander," he said. "Ma'am. I didn't know. Nobody told me. If I'd known who she was..."

"If you'd known who I was, you'd have dumped my sister in private?"

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