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“Sohee, you’re on watch, and Jandi is your second,” Rahee said, nodding at the woman to Jandi’s right. “You know what to do.”

Jandi froze. Um… No, I don’t?

Taking pity on Jandi, Sohee patted her knee. “Don’t worry too much. That just means I’m keeping an eye out for anybody who comes too close, and you’ll be an extra pair of eyes and ears in case I miss anything. Anybody gets close enough to hear us, you start describing the first ridiculous fashion trend you can think of to scare them off.”

“Got it.” Jandi swallowed. Did she even know any fashion trends to bring up in case of emergency? A quick glance over Sohee’s head showed the men clustered around the platform in the front. A huge cheer went up, and an enthusiastic round of back thumping commenced, although Jandi couldn’t quite spot who was in the middle.

“Looks like the votes from the first district are in.” Yuna squinted at the crowd. “Jandi, that’s your husband, isn’t it?”

Indeed, Kyungsoo was now just visible in the center of the crowd, exchanging handshakes with colleagues - she could just barely glimpse the familiar side profile of his face. “I guess so.” She swallowed. Jandi didn’t want to think about Kyungsoo right now - she couldn’t shake the memory of the look in his eyes when she broke her promise.

Will he understand why I did it? she wondered. If he were in my situation, I imagine he hardly would have been content to sit back and play the meek little wife.

“First order of business,” Rahee interrupted her thoughts. “Park Chanyeol has been sniffing around my husband and me far too much for comfort. I caught him hiding in the shrubbery behind our garage with his camera the other day. I doubt he knows exactly what’s going on there -”

“He doesn’t,” Yuna confirmed. “He thinks your husband has been smuggling cigars into the Capital and wants to be the first to report the scandal.”

The woman sitting next to Rahee rolled her eyes. “Heavens, the amount of truly scandalous affairs in this empire, and smuggling cigars is what the media considers news-worthy?”

“Even if he doesn’t know,” Rahee continued, “I don’t like it. If he snaps a photo at the wrong time and there’s something in the background, our entire operation could collapse. I move to transfer the package to a different location.”

“The package?” Jandi echoed, lost. “What - what’s in the package?”

“Nobody knows,” Sohee said with a shrug. “At least nobody here.”

This is starting to be a pattern with this organization, Jandi realized. Even insider knowledge isn’t really knowledge.

“It was delivered by a messenger late last week,” Rahee said. “No instructions other than to pass it along to the next station at the Golden River.”

“I could take it.” Yuna leaned forward. “Hide it from Chanyeol in plain sight. I’ll put it in the laundry basket or something, the lazy bastard would never look there!” Jandi stifled a snort, suddenly reminded of Raina, and received a wink from Yuna in return.

“Are you going to the Golden River within the next week?” Another woman spoke up. “That’s the deadline for passing on the package. Mail won’t be safe, and the whole point of stationing it with Rahee was so she could take it with her when she goes to visit her grandchildren next week.”

Brow creasing, Yuna shook her head. “No. But I could slip it in with Chanyeol’s bags when he leaves to cover the campaign trail and arrange for someone at the River to pass it along.”

“Too risky.” Rahee waved her off. “Conditions are too unstable at the River for us to trust that the hand-off will be made securely. No, we need one of us to stay with the package the entire time.”

Another wild cheer went up in the ballroom. “Do Kyungsoo, my good man!” someone shouted to a round of whistles.

“That must be District Two,” Jandi mused.

“Nah.” Sohee glanced over her shoulder. “District Four. Two went to Park Jungmo and Three to Im Hyunsuk earlier.”

“What?” Jandi craned her neck. She hadn’t heard a peep out of the men who were now raucously pounding her husband’s back. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“Two and Three are small districts with little sway, not like Four,” the woman to Jandi’s left explained. “They’re only really important for tipping the balance, and neither Park Jungmo nor Im Hyunsuk are projected to be anywhere near the top. Nobody cares too much about Two and Three's results unless they're for the top two candidates.”

“Now District Seven,” Yuna added with a quirk of , “District Seven is the one everyone will be watching this time around, thanks to you and your husband.”

District Seven. That was Jandi’s district, Geumdo’s district. It was the smallest, poorest district of all seven in the empire, but it had been allotted a disproportionately large portion of the overall votes in negotiations between the government and farmers over a century ago. Negotiations that had been so deeply embedded in the farmers’ collective memory and pride that any changes to the vote allocations would surely incite a riot.

This election, District Seven would be all the more significant because of her marriage to Kyungsoo. Time to see if Do Mansoo’s gamble will pay off, she thought, not noticing her fists clenching in her dress. Time to see if I was a good little pawn.

Sohee patted her knee, offering a sympathetic smile. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she said. “None of this will matter soon.”

The other women shifted, skirts rustling. Jandi stared at Sohee. “What do you mean?”

“Sohee, don’t speculate on things we don’t know,” Rahee said sharply. “Only a select few know the true destination of the Railway, and we are not so privileged as to count ourselves among them.”

Chastised, Sohee looked down. “I apologize. It’s only that - well, we’ve all felt it, haven’t we? There’s unrest in the Capital. Something is coming.”

“But we don’t know that it is the Railway,” Rahee said, eyebrows drawing together. “None of you may remember the last uprising, but I do. For every organization like the Railway, there were ten more with different ideologies, different plans that sprung up out of the woodwork. We didn’t know any of them existed until it was far too late. To assume that what we see is the work of an ally would be foolish.”

The circle went quiet at the reminder of the last failed rebellion. Even Rahee seemed to sag, her lips tight and face pale. “For the sake of us all,” she said quietly, “let us not make the same mistakes this time around.”

“Yes, let us not,” Sohee said loudly, startling them all. “That fad with the pink ostrich feathers was a severe misjudgment on our parts. Awful! Horrendous! A blemish upon my otherwise pristine reputation as a fashionable lady of the Capital.”

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