43. Bellus

bellus ~a ~um, a.

1. pleasant, charming

I stare into my egg yolk, the silver cup holding it the antithesis of the golden center.

113 people died in the Endurance attack. Not nobles who killed my mother—just normal people; workers on Theta-7 with lives and pasts and futures. 155 people, if you count the rebels who drove the Endurance into Theta-7. That’s what the vis calls them—rebels against the king, against the Station, endangering us all and putting the imperative at risk. The rebels killed those people and themselves, but I know better. Dravik orchestrated it somehow. This isn’t retribution on House Hauteclare; this is him sacrificing over a hundred people for his unknowable plan. If he wants to take the throne, he’s killing his own people for it…and I’m his rider. We are the villains, but if it means House Hauteclare is obliterated…

Quilliam’s gnarled hand slides me a plate of chicken on wilted spinach, and he grins.

“The chicken or the egg, miss?” he asks. I stare blankly, and he makes a little cough. “Apologies. It’s a silly old Earth saying.”

“What does it mean?”

“It’s an existential question—was the chicken born first, or the egg?”

“The egg,” I answer.

“Ah.” He smiles. “But then who laid that egg, miss?”

At that moment, Dravik enters, dressed in a lavender tunic and his usual aimless smile.

“Good morning. It seems you’ve received an invitation.” He plops an envelope beside my plate. I ignore it. I ignore my egg and the chicken until Dravik notices. “Is something the matter, Synali?”

Yes.

“No.” I pick the envelope up. “Who is this from?”

“Your next opponent.”

The envelope is gilded like scripture, vines and pomegranates in clean gold ink. The wax seal of a serpent beneath a holly crown is already broken. I look up at Dravik as he tucks into breakfast, and he waves a jovial fork at me. “Oh, don’t mind that. Poison inspection.”

The letter is only mildly simpler than the envelope; cream paper—more expensive than anything I’ve written on in my life. I tend to prefer walls, things more permanent. My opponent prefers ink in sweeping, grandiose spirals:

Synali von Hauteclare,

By the grace of God, our time of meeting draws close. It is with His teachings of humility I wish to informally greet you before our conflict. If this agrees with you, please meet me at Atteint at ten o’clock this evening.

Yours i’faith,

Talize san Michel

“Rather pompous, I imagine,” Dravik says lightly, buttering his toast. “All of House Michel tends to be.”

“What is ‘Atteint’?”

“It’s a nightclub. Very exclusive.” He looks up. “You will not be taking this invitation, of course. It’s a very obvious trap.”

“You’ve taught me winning requires wandering into enemy territory from time to time.”

“No. There are too many variables. Talize san Michel could do anything to you in such a meeting. We will not be handing her that opportunity.”

“Her strength is her pompousness,” I say, tracing the word i’faith. “And God. We use it against her.”

The prince goes stiff in his chair. “House Michel is not to be trifled with, Synali; they are an old knight family on the same level of power and influence as House Hauteclare.”

“The entire court stripped Astrix of her queenhood. My enemy is Hauteclare, but yours is all of them, isn’t it?”

Quilliam’s weathered hands pour Dravik a cup the prince doesn’t take, his gray gaze squarely on me. Dravik has two weaknesses: his mother and his own brain. I see the prince’s lip twitch like a smile, once, and then it’s gone.

“You cannot use my own tactics against me.”

“I can try,” I say. “Maybe leave behind the ones that get a hundred people killed.”

“Did you think being a villain meant peace, Synali?” His soft face goes grim as he stands. “I create opportunities. I give people the means, and they take those means into their own hands—just as I have given you yours in Heavenbreaker.”

“So you’re the devil, then.”

His eyes catch on the cross pendant around my neck, and then he starts down the hall. “You will remain here for the evening. Quilliam, prepare the hovercarriage for me. I will be gone until morning.”

“Yes, master.”

I squeeze my butterknife until it bites, until I can’t take it anymore and dart up after him. I manage to reach the front door when Dravik’s outline down the front steps wavers. Unbearable heat suddenly hits my face, and I stagger back just in time to see a sheet of buzzing orange hard-light walling off the doorway.

“Shit,” I hiss. “A fence.”

It’s smaller than the kind they have in the Mid Ward wildlife park—only visible once you get up close. I grab a nearby empty vase and prod at the vibrating wall—the glass edge goes red-hot and sputtering as its paint blisters. Not a fake, then. I scramble around the manse, trying every door handle, but they’re all bio-locked—even the kitchen door. My eyes catch a window, and miraculously, it opens. I heft my leg over first and hear the hissing second—my boot smoking where the leather tip presses into the suddenly visible hard-light. Another window. Another orange barrier. He’s locked the whole fucking manse down.

Quilliam totters by with a cleaning rag and smiles at me. “Is something wrong, miss?”

“Other than the fact Dravik’s locked me down like an animal in the wildlife park?” I drawl. “Not in the slightest.”

Quilliam’s ancient face goes pensive. “Apologies, miss. The master is simply worried for your safety.”

“And painfully overdramatic about it.” I furiously tap my vis. I can’t wait around expecting Jeria’s hacking to bail me out—Saturdays are always busy at the brothel, and Talize’s invitation is for ten p.m. That only leaves me eight hours to find a way out. I pace the hallway, Luna pacing with me. This isn’t about the club anymore, or even Talize. The prince is going too far, caring too much. I will never have a father again, but he’s trying his damnedest. I understand I can’t have certain things, but I will have my freedom.

My eyes fall on Luna, and then on the stainless steel bunker door. If everything is bio-locked…

His greatest strength, used against him.

“Are you thinking about practicing, miss?” Quilliam asks.

I shrug. “Not much else to do in this place.”

Quilliam smiles ruefully, and I wait until his slow dusting path turns the corner to head toward the bunker. The bio-lock registers me like always, and with a rush of relief I pass through the door. Luna follows me down the stairs, tail wagging as I approach Heavenbreaker’s console and open the chest cockpit.

“Wait here,” I tell the dog. It whines as if it knows where I’m going, words beneath words in a different way, and I pet its head softly. “I’ll be all right.”

It waits dutifully on the walkway, and I stride into Heavenbreaker’s darkness. Luna’s true AI is connected to all the systems in the manse…but it’s also connected to Heavenbreaker. A Heavenbreaker that’s currently wounded, the gap in its breastplate from our match with Olric yawning jagged. When the hell is Dravik going to get the pit crew in here to fix it?

My hands shake as I press against the gel solidity of the saddle, the periwinkle light washing over my face and the silver spirals stretching as if they’re waking from some cozy dream. I can’t be afraid.

My silver nosebleed…Sevrith’s lifeless face in the cockpit…I push the fear out. There’s nothing but the four circles left. I am nothing but riding. The nerve fluid gives way, and I slip in.

Heavenbreaker.

I feel it stir in the doorway of our mental connection. Watching. Waiting.

“hello.”

i need your help.

“help?”

It’s a long stretch—I don’t understand AI or how it works. All I know is that Luna’s true AI is smart; it runs through possibilities faster than we do. Faster than Dravik does, hopefully.

can you go inside the manse?

“manse?” it echoes, confusion swirling between us. I close my eyes and visualize Moonlight’s End—my bed, the fireplace, Dravik’s office of redwood and pinned butterflies, the kitchen smelling of baking, the dim labyrinthine halls with their eerie portraits that watch every step. Something like home.

home.

Heavenbreaker flashes me something in return—a memory of space. Not empty darkness but space full of violet light, gas and stars gathered around a hot, white core, and I realize it faintly—that’s a nebula. That’s what Heavenbreaker thinks home is?

“go inside?” it asks.

inside, I agree.

Everything goes numb, and I move. Or we move. We move together without moving, like the hyperreal sensation of plummeting just as you fall asleep, but following a vivid green line. We race through the cavernous bunker room, up the stairs and past the kitchen, and hundreds more lines bloom out—green veins in the ceiling, in the walls, green nodes and webs reaching up into the roof and down into the ground, and I realize what it is: the manse systems. The manse is a dark blur around the green light, but I focus on the idea of paintings. Beds. Windows. Soft sheets and the rough fiber way paint lies over canvas and lastly, hardest—cold, clear glass.

go through.

Heavenbreaker tries, my stomach lurching as it lurches forward, skin burning with the hot sheet of orange light that springs up in front of the pane.

“can’t,” Heavenbreaker says mournfully.

you can. i trust you.

“trust?”

I falter. I’ve never once truly trusted it, have I? I wrenched it around in Olric’s fight in total disregard of its feelings. Who was the last person I trusted?

friend, I say, and I think of Jeria, of the nights she knocked on my door and asked if I was all right even if I pushed her away. Rax and Mirelle come, forbidden and impossible—the two of them helping me out of the conference room. Not friends, but…gratitude. Dravik even makes an appearance in my memories—the Dravik who trained me, not the one who avoids my every question now.

This time, I purposefully lay my memories open, and Heavenbreaker watches. Absorbs. The watching feeling changes—loneliness. There’s a deep, inky loneliness that goes on forever in the saddle, but something glitters at the bottom—the word friend. The idea-motion-marrow of it, the steel-cut meaning I grasp with all fingers begins to shine through, and the steed chimes happily:

“go through with friend!”

We move together again, swiveling our head—or wherever the locus of our senses is—around the manse. One of the many green nodes in the ceiling turns orange, and I feel Heavenbreaker reach for it—a hand without a hand—and crush it. The thing resists, flickers fast and bright, and then shatters into a thousand pieces of orange light. I pull myself out of the steed and dash across the gangplank, Luna waiting with a happily wagging tail on the other side. I bend to pet it.

“See? That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

It barks, the metallic sound reverberating around the cavernous bunker, but its sapphire eyes aren’t on me. They’re locked behind me. On Heavenbreaker.

I turn and see it; the cockpit gash is gone.

The massive tear over Heavbenbreaker’s breastplate…is smooth again. Not welded smooth, but smooth as if the gash never happened in the first place. Healed. My brain races; I was only in it for a few minutes at most, and the entire manse is locked down—no pit crew could’ve come by or fixed it that fast. Luna? No…Luna’s a sentry dog. I might not know much about AI, but I know it doesn’t fix things like this. This is…

Impossible.

Am I hallucinating again? Maybe, or maybe not. Heavenbreaker is different—it talks to me. If it can fix itself, then that would explain why I’ve never seen the pit crew and why Dravik’s so cagey about them. How? Why? In all my time studying the databases, I’ve never heard of a steed fixing itself. Each steed requires a pit crew of twelve people at minimum, engineers and programmers and physicists and lucitricians—

Focus. There’ll be plenty of time to think on this later, but I only have a few hours to plan for Talize’s trap.

Nightclubs are not only for nobles.

There are many in Low Ward and more in Mid Ward, all of them blaring lute-and-synth music from their speakers loud enough to shake entire neighborhoods—the nobles can just afford better soundproofing. I stand in front of a clean white marble building, a muffled beat rumbling beneath my silver-tipped shoes; I waited until sunset to change into better clothes and sneak out so as to not alert Quilliam, who would no doubt alert Dravik. ATTEINT is spelled in anti-grav water like a sign over the club’s entrance—a sign like mockery when people beg for water miles below where I stand. I grasp Mother’s cross pendant hanging beneath the cravat that matches my silver breast coat.

Forward.

The entrance quickly gives way to a long hall of darkness—thick, warm darkness, the kind for growing plants or children or mold. Jungles. Earth had them once, and the club reaches for a lost nostalgia we’ll never know again: palm fronds, pitcher plants full of acid, fragrant orchids engineered to glow all colors in the dark. Plants fed on corpses, I know now.

Forward.

The atmosphere creaks alive with unseen insects, little animals making sore-throat noises and jumping erratically. Frogs, I think, but not the dull green things in textbooks; these glow neon and stick to every surface. Nobles infest the walls in skintight leather jackets and corsets. Holographic bustles and capes flash with moving butterflies, ocean waves, flowers. They wear fool masks and maiden masks and plague-doctor masks of polished whitewood, and they watch me.

Well, some watch. Most are…enjoying. It’s the telltale writhe of any brothel, the telltale milk-glazed eyes of someone who’s inhaled dust—the exact same writhe as Low Ward, just with brand names and surgery instead of rags and plague. The bouncers are less bouncers and more poorly disguised off-duty guards in their civilian clothes. The music seethes louder the closer I get to the club’s innards, and the guards shift as I approach, blocking the door farther in.

“Move,” I command. The beat pumps into the darkness, unrelenting. The guns and hard-light daggers in their holsters glint at me, eyes glinting at me, and then one of them nudges the other. They part.

The club is a massive black glass cavern seemingly carved out of the faux jungle itself; three tiers of it, three sets of glittering stairs. There’s a stage in the center on which a metal tree sprouts mandolins and flutes and drums, the DJ at its LED roots queuing each instrument skillfully. Strobe lights pulse in all colors, refracting the brilliance onto jasmine vines and banana plants. Animals I can’t name perch on noble shoulders—golden monkeys with scales, candy-colored parrots. And the crowd. God, the crowd.

I never see the arena crowd, I only hear them, and the crowd sees me only as a hologram projected directly into the arena’s center. I go to the Lithroi hangar and ride, shower after it’s over, and muscle through the reporters back to Dravik’s. But there’s a proper crowd here, real and alive and undulating in all directions on the dance floor to the screeching music.

I lace between the crowd and move to the second-floor stairs to get a better vantage point. Talize didn’t dictate an exact meeting place, but I know what she looks like, at least. I press myself into the projection railing to look over the side, and my hand recoils from a little neon frog as it hops on the rail.

“Oh, no.” A noble next to me laughs, the sound nasal through his plague-doctor mask. “It’s way better when you smash them.”

Before I can blink, he slams his open palm down. Fragile bones snap; neon guts smear. A living thing. I watch in horror as he giggles, rubs his hands together, and spreads the glowing innards to his every fingertip. Without thinking, I fling my fist and shatter the nose of his thin wooden mask—splinters in my knuckles, blood dripping down his exposed lips. A fresh wave of horror starts when he giggles again, his friends giggling behind him. They catch him as he staggers back and smiles at me as if I can’t do anything to him, and the horror twists to rage as I start forward—

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Someone’s hand drops on my shoulder, voice thrumming under the music. “Easy there.”

I rip the palm off and whirl only to come face-to-face with Rax Istra-Velrayd in a brown doublet and crimson fur cape, looming like a streak of blood above the crowd. His brows shoot up into his carefully disheveled platinum hair. “Hauteclare? What are you—”

I jab my finger at the smear of the frog. “Why did they do that?”

His eyes stutter, neon catching redwood. “Drugs—the frogs are full of ’em. If they touch your bare skin, you get some in you.”

The neon smear twists at my insides—a living thing, used. I throw a glare at the broken mask, but he’s long gone, and I peer into Rax’s eyes—no milk in them from dust, if the drug inside the frogs even is dust. He seems steady on his feet, but looks can be deceiving.

“I don’t do that shit, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he offers. “Makes riding harder.”

“Then what exactly do you do here? Other than get in my way?”

“Punching people indiscriminately isn’t gonna make you friends.”

My drawl is venom. “I don’t want friends.”

His massive body is an echo chamber of our kiss, his throat and hair and eyes filling in the gaps my brain has been longing for. After that day, he must think me weaker and frailer than ever—vacillating, too lustful, unable to control myself.

“Okay, no friends.” Rax ruffles his hair, biceps straining against doublet sleeve. “How about drinking buddies?”

My vis suddenly vibrates its ten o’clock alarm, and my eyes snap to the upper level. I whirl to leave.

“Going so soon?” a new voice says.

My boots freeze. I turn. Mirelle’s waterfall of chestnut hair gleams almost as brightly as her golden snakeskin dress. Her gold eyes prickle back at me with gold eyeshadow. She comes to stand beside Rax, her arms crossed and one shoulder dropped casually—yet her face is anything but. Snapfrost splinters between us—a different sort of danger than Olric.

And then the melt.

“You should have a drink with us,” she says.

Us. Him with her.

It clicks into place in my head; they haven’t just slept together—they are together. When they stand side by side in their tall regality, it makes perfect sense. I kissed a man now promised to another. Still, the devil’s temptation lingers.

it would be nice to have a drink with someone my age.

Heavenbreaker is lonely. And I realize then, in this thumping club, that I am, too.

“You don’t want to drink with me,” I say. “I’m the bastard who’s murdering your family.”

Mirelle shrugs one shoulder. “You won’t be murdering anyone else; we’ve tripled our security. Besides, I didn’t particularly like Raoulle or Palissa—craven, power-hungry hypocrites, the both of them. And don’t even get me started on Balmoran—he beat his wife. It’s a miracle the twins were born at all.”

My jaw sets. Is this a trap within a trap?

“You’re a murderer; I won’t argue that. But you’re a rider first, and in the War it was tradition to toast when three riders met. Come.” Her gold dress slithers behind her as she walks toward the bar.

I glance at Rax, but he just grins resignedly and follows, muttering into my ear as he passes: “She’s obsessed with knight stuff—reads old War books all the time. Just go with it.”

He’s too close—clean herb soap and soft shadows on his throat. Pull away. Linger two steps behind him as he approaches the small table Mirelle’s chosen. We wait. I look away—anywhere but at him and then right at him, accidental, but he just smiles. My brain screams opposition when Mirelle returns and slides the neon shot over to me; it could be poisoned. She could be seething hate under her cool facade—trying to kill me like all the rest. Rax sees me pause.

“What’s up? Don’t like gel shots? I get that—the texture’s kinda like eating a weird jiggly fish or something—”

Mirelle’s smarter. She snorts, gold nails quickly switching the shots around on the table so we all have each other’s. “There. Satisfied?”

Not nearly. But Rax mends the quiet between us as he holds his shot up.

“So! What’re we toasting to? Friendship? Everlasting honor? Wait, hold on, let’s go for something more realistic, like…”

“You shutting up for two seconds,” Mirelle drawls.

“Me shutting up for two seconds,” he echoes, grin going sun-bright, and then he frowns at her. “Oh, c’mon—you know that’s never gonna happen.”

My snort explodes carelessly. Rax smirks at me, and it feels like fire down my spine. Fuck.

Mirelle holds her shot up, eyes straight and true into mine. “To the victor,” she says.

It’s a simple toast—no feelings, just fact; all three of us are riders. All three of us are fighting in the Supernova Cup, but only one of us will win it all. Rax’s smirk fades, and he holds his shot higher in wordless agreement. It’s strange to sit at a table with people who are also young—to do something not to move forward but just because I want to.

“To the victor,” I say.

We clink our glasses together and swallow. The gel burns going down, fruity and searing, and I choke a little, and Rax thumps my back unhelpfully.

“Is it your first time drinking?”

The fire in my throat goes cold when Mirelle scoffs. “You killed people before you ever drank? What a twisted way to live.”

“Hey Mir, wh-whoa—”

“She’s right.” I cut Rax’s sputter off. What did I think would happen here—friendship? I stand and turn on my heel, but Mirelle’s voice clears the room. It clears the bass and mandolins out of my eardrums—the crowd’s cheering, glasses clinking—everything falls away in the velvet chill of her tone.

“There was blood on the suit you stole. Uncle Farris’s blood. They said that it was related to yours.”

I look over my shoulder. Rax’s gaze darts from me to her and back again. Mirelle stands as a streak of gold, waiting, the whole world waiting on her next sentence.

“You murdered your own father, bastard. You destroyed him.”

no. his house is still standing. half her killers are still alive. you are still untouched.

My fingers itch for something to hold on to; the railing, the neon smear. you’d be a neon smear if they had their way. Rax’s eyes on me slowly harden, and something inside me panics at it. He knows now. No honor in any of this—no hope in any of them.

I make a Dravik smile.

“No. Not quite yet.”