"What are you going to do, Peter? Hit me? I'm ready. I think I can take you down."
Peter sat back down. "Go," he said. "Go into space. Shut down Demosthenes. I don't need you. I don't need anybody."
"That's why you're such a loser," said Valentine. "You'll never rule the world until you figure out that you can't do it without everybody's cooperation. You can't fool them, you can't force them. They have to want to follow you. Like Alexander's soldiers wanted to follow him and fight for him. And the moment they stopped wanting to, his power evaporated. You need everybody but you're too narcissistic to know it."
"I need the willing cooperation of key people here on Earth," said Peter, "but you won't be one of them, will you? So go, tell Mom and Dad what you're doing. Break their hearts. What do you care? You're going off to see your precious Ender."
"You still hate him," said Valentine.
"I never hated him," said Peter. "But at this moment, I certainly do hate you. Not a lot, but enough to make me want to piss on your bed."
It was a standing joke between them. She couldn't help it. It made her laugh. "Oh, Peter, you're such a boy."
Mother and Father took her decision surprisingly well. But they refused to come with her. "Val," Father said, "I think you're right--Ender won't be coming home. It broke our hearts to realize it. And it's wonderful of you to want to join him, even if neither of you ends up going with a colony. Even if it's just a few months in space. Even a few years. It's a good thing for him to be with you again."
"It would be better to have the two of you out there, too."
Father shook his head. Mother pressed a finger to each eye--her gesture that said, I'm not going to cry.
"We can't go," said Father. "Our work is here."
"They could spare you for a year or two."
"That's easy for you to say," said Father. "You're young. What's a couple of years to you? But we're older. Not old, but older than you. Time means something different to us. We love Ender, but we can't spend months or years just going out to visit him. We don't have that much time left."
"That's exactly the point," said Valentine. "You don't have much time--and still less time to get a chance to see Ender again."
"Val," said Mother, her voice quavering. "Nothing we do now will give us back the years we've lost."
She was right, and Valentine knew it. But she didn't see the relevance. "So you're going to treat him as if he's dead?"
"Val," said Father. "We know he's not dead. But we also know he doesn't want us. We've written to him--since the war ended. Graff--the one who's on trial--he wrote back. Ender doesn't want to write letters to us. He reads them, but he told Graff that he had nothing to say."
"Graff's a liar," said Valentine. "He probably hasn't shown Ender anything."
"That's possible," said Father. "But Ender doesn't need us. He's thirteen. He's becoming a man. He's done brilliantly since he left us, but he also went through terrible things, and we weren't there. I'm not sure he'll ever forgive us for letting him go."
"You had no choice," said Valentine. "They would have taken him to Battle School whether you liked it or not."
"I'm sure he knows that in his head," said Mother. "But in his heart?"
"So I'm going without you," she said. It had never crossed her mind that they wouldn't even want to go.
"You're going to leave us behind," said Father. "It's what children do. They live at home until they leave. Then they're gone. Even if they visit, even if they move back, it's never the same. You think it will be, but it won't. It happened with Ender, and it'll happen with you."
"The good thing," said Mother, who was crying a little now, "is that you won't be with Peter anymore."
Valentine couldn't believe her mother was saying such a thing.
"You've spent too much time with him," said Mother. "He's a bad influence on you. He makes you unhappy. He sucks you into his life so you can't have one of your own."
"That'll be our job now," said Father.
"Good luck," was all Valentine could say. Was it possible that her parents really did understand Peter? But if they did, why had they let him have his way for all these years?
"You see, Val," said Father, "if we went to Ender now, we'd want to be his parents, but we don't have any authority over him. Nor anything to offer him. He doesn't need parents anymore."
"A sister, now," said Mother. "A sister, he can use." She took Valentine's hand. She was asking for something.