Fat snowflakes drifted down this breezeless February morning. It snowed six inches overnight, stopping only long enough for it to be shoveled away. Then it started up again. The four blocks of concrete walkway had been salted to guarantee sure footing for the pallbearers.

Frederika Reichman stared at the closed casket through the gauze of her veil, her grey overcoat clutched close at her throat. She hadn't attended a proper funeral in what, twenty years now? How they used to gather in churches with their majestic vaulted ceilings, listening to spouses and children and brothers and sisters and nephews and cousins and old classmates endlessly recounting all the good qualities of the deceased, distorting the truth to fit the occasion. She remembered how the priests' solemn words would drop over the audience like a shroud, followed by hours of polite chatter over delicate finger foods.

Then how those ceremonies gave way to mass graves, funeral pyres, and corpses rotting in the street. Of course she hadn't seen these things with her own eyes, but the second-hand stories she heard burned the images into her mind just the same.

August's funeral fell somewhere between these extremes, she supposed. The world had lost the art of body preservation; that meant no flowers, closed casket and a quick burial. It had only been yesterday morning that beneath the bed covers Frederika had brushed his hand, cold like a dead fish. She had screamed and screamed until the servants came running to collect her from the floor, turning her head away, stroking her hair.

His death shouldn't have surprised her. He was 78 and had persevered through hardship, but perhaps that's why his passing had given her such a shock. Augustus had always been a fighter. He had fought to keep his business running through three recessions, fought the mobs trying to steal their possessions, and fought for control of the new society he himself had created. For death to steal him away in the night with no chance to defend himself seemed cosmically unjust.

Now there he lay, the center of a ring of jackals poised to devour. Marshall Johnson had arrived yesterday just before sundown, with Barrett Lukowski a few hours behind. They spent the evening in the study drinking cognac and talking around Frederika, who sat in her private fog. Carlo Reyes showed up only fifteen minutes before the service started, but Frederika was shocked he had left the compound at Whitefish at all. But such was the draw of her Augustus, even in death.

Frederika felt her son and daughter pulling her to her feet as the audience rose. To her surprise, an MPD guardsman in a long black coat and crimson hat stepped forward and raised a trumpet to his lips. Katrina whispered that she felt this would be a nice touch. Frederika groaned inwardly as his first warbled blasts shattered the morning stillness, but then he settled into a competent rendition of taps that she found curiously moving. She swallowed hard and laid a red silk rose on her husband's casket.

As difficult as the last twenty-four hours had been, Frederika dreaded what was to come next. Marshall would offer some inane closing remarks and the procession would head indoors where she would be expected to formally receive her guests one at a time, suffering pitying looks from their hungry eyes. How long would they grant her before the challenges began raining in? A day, maybe two? Or would it begin at nightfall, those proposals for how to redistribute power in the wake of the patriarch's passing?

Frederika would need to be strong. She would need to be wily. She would need to be everything that Augustus was but that she wasn't if she were to have any hope of holding the family's position. If she had learned anything from observing Augustus, it was strength came from being swift and decisive. She knew her rivals would show her no mercy. She would need his fight.

But as Marshall closed the Good Book with a delicate whump and a bow of the head, all Frederika could think of was how badly she wished to sleep.