The room was well-lit to the point of being painfully bright. Jehan counted twelve lamps and five wall-mounted tube lights, and those were just the ones he could see without turning his head.

Turning his head, of course, was not an option.

Seven quibbling Zanyar and Birhani ministers sat on either side of him, all around the long, rectangular table at the center of the room, snapping and jeering at each other. The meeting had descended into chaos more than thirty minutes ago, and it had been almost a quarter of an hour since Jehan’s vision had begun to swim.

Boredom and sleep deprivation, he was beginning to realize, could be a lethal combination.

The wood-paneled room had the kind of understated opulence that old, important government buildings usually possessed. There was an exquisite marble statue mounted on a platform near the back, presumably of some civil-war hero whom Jehan didn’t immediately recognize.

Which wasn’t surprising, because Jehan had never really cared about the civil war or its heroes. And it wasn’t just because his father kept screaming and wailing about how the civil war had brought ruin to their family. The war had been over for more than ten years by the time Jehan was born, and the only ruin he had ever seen had been brought about by his father himself. Jehan just didn’t think much of wars in general, including the people who fought them.

At the center of the room was a huge twelve-seater oak table. Rajat sat directly opposite him at the head of the table. To his right sat Badal, the Zanyar representative and the current Deputy Prime Minister. And to Rajat’s left sat Ruqaiya Dehran, the Prime Minister’s protégé and the Minister for Science and Technology. Last year she’d been the Minister for Agriculture.

Jehan was reasonably sure that Ruqaiya knew nothing of science or agriculture, and had no particular interest in either. But she did know a hell of a lot about politics, and had connections with almost every power-player in the capital. She was also one of Rajat’s most loyal supporters, and the would-be successor to his post as the Birhani representative. If Rajat were to resign, it would hurt her prospects terribly.

Jehan closed his eyes and tried to focus, which was easier said than done amidst all the quibbling.

One of the good things about the civil war was that it had made everything so much simpler and more streamlined. The Birhanis and the Zanyars had been fighting to go their separate ways and form their own countries. You would think that wouldn’t require much fighting, since both parties agreed on the basic premise of the idea.

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Problem was, nobody could figure out where to put the damn border. It wasn’t as if all the Zanyars lived on one side of the island and all the Birhanis on the other. Both the groups had been spread out throughout the island, living in small communities at the time the war broke out. And while both parties wanted their own country, nobody could agree on which parts of the island were to be the Zanyar nation and which were to be the Birhani state.

And so they decided to try and kill each other to reach a consensus. The side with the highest body count to their credit would get to decide. Or at least Jehan guessed that must have been the plan. Nothing else could explain why two million people needed to die to draw borders on a map.

In the end, some of the most prominent Zanyar and Birhani leaders had gotten together and come to the conclusion that a country inhabited by corpses wasn’t much use to anybody, and maybe living together was better than not living at all.

So the predominantly Zanyar territories of Zanya and Ishfana had come together with Birhan, Sien, and Eraon, all of which were populated largely by Birhanis. And the five states together had formed the nation of Naijan, with its capital in Qayit.

And to ensure that neither of the communities would wield undue power over the other and spark another civil war, the founders had decided that at any given time the country would be ruled by one representative from each community.

Thus, every ten years, an election was held to elect a chief representative for the Birhanis and one for the Zanyars. For the first five years after the election, the Birhani representative held the post of Prime Minister while the Zanyar representative acted as his deputy. This was reversed during the last five years of their term, with the Zanyar representative taking up the mantle of the PM and his Birhani counterpart serving as his deputy.

This system worked well, or at least it had, so far. Not just because it ensured equality of power between the two communities, but also because it forced them to work together in order to survive.

And it wasn’t just that the Prime Minister and his Deputy had to work together to run the country, which of course they did. But the entire nation voted to elect both the Birhani and Zanyar representatives they wanted to send to Qayit Hall, the official residence of the Prime Minister.

So every politician aspiring to the premiership had to ensure that he or she was popular with both the communities. Divisive rhetoric might get you the votes of your own community, but nobody could be elected to the position of chief representative without a substantial support base amongst both the Zanyars and the Birhanis.

If nothing else, this system ensured that no warmongering demagogues got themselves elected to the highest position in the government. In Jehan’s opinion, whichever political scientist had come up with this system was the only true hero of the civil war.