61. Omnino

omnīnō, adv.

1. in all things; utterly

I retreat to the ice tunnels and follow the warmest air I can find to a balcony.

Water drips as the ice fantasy meets reality. The clear ceiling of the Station lets each ice-melt pool catch diamond points of starlight—Low Ward and Mid Ward a faint smoky memory far below. At the marble railing lingers a familiar boy in a hoverchair, a familiar girl by his side. Their reflections in the massive pools of water are perfectly inverted.

A drop falls from above, rippling the mirror world. The boy turns and smiles.

“Ah, Synali—you seem to find us quite easily. Or is it we who find you?”

His grin is simple and clean. He wears their halo, but he is not one of them. I know that much. That’s all I know about him. Crown Princess Leyda Esther de Ressinimus is at his side. Her halo is bright blue, green eyes identical to his, her hair copper and fire. She wears a silver dress made with swan wings—real ones—attached to her back. Something has died for her.

“Synali! Wow, you came…and with such a sweet puppy! I thought I’d see you a lot later, but this is great, too! C’mon—join us! The view’s really beautiful tonight.”

My boots move over a different kind of chessboard, water rippling with every step. I choose to stand between them. Luna settles at my feet but stares directly up at the boy, wagging its golden tail furiously against marble. Clank clank clank. No one says anything for a long while.

“Forgive me, you two,” the boy says suddenly. “But I fear I’m intruding.”

The princess squirms mightily. “Aww, you’re not! I promise!”

His hoverchair hisses as he turns to her. “Not everything can wait until the tournament. You should talk to her here, now.”

“But here is boring!”

This elaborate ice fantasy made especially for her—boring? I start to bristle, but the boy’s voice goes stern for the very first time. “Leyda.”

“Allll riiiiiiight.” The princess huffs. “Bye, I guess.”

The boy turns to me, gaze resting on Luna for a moment. “Goodnight, Synali—and good luck tomorrow.”

His hoverchair hisses past, the vented heat on the underside evaporating a pool as it goes, and something irrational in me begs to touch his hand. To hold it like the A3 and A4 held each other’s.

The hoverchair stops, and he speaks. “It’s strong, isn’t it? The urge to hold hands.”

My stomach drops. “How did you—”

“I can see why they like you now. You’re like them. Like me. Like us.”

I study his face frantically—what does he mean? I notice the pixels in his green eyes, then—color contacts made to look like the king’s hue, Leyda’s hue. He adopted their eyes. The hoverchair jets start up again, and he leaves. That irrational something in me is terribly sad to see him go, and I pivot. “What’s your name?”

He inclines his head over his shoulder. “Hush, dearheart. Not yet.”

Dearheart—Mother’s name for me. How does he know that? He saw the A3 and A4 memory. he sees memories in the saddle, too. He saw mine. He’s the one. He’s the one who sent the daises and blue hyacinths—he’s the one who sends the flowers, always.

He leaves behind silence. I know what I want to say to the princess but not how to say it. “Your father’s killed so many.” “Your father continues to kill so many.” “Your father is the reason my mother died and the reason my father died.”

The princess doesn’t seem to know what to say, either—too deep in mourning the boy’s absence to consider me worth speaking to—but somewhere after huffing and sighing is her cheery recovery.

“Your dresscoat is so pretty. Who made it—der Viskamp? No, wait, lemme guess—Felmorrat! The tailoring work is definitely Felmorrat.”

“I don’t know,” I admit. “And I don’t particularly care.”

“Well you should! My brother put a lot of effort into getting that for you, probably. Did he give you a present for me?” Her little hands suddenly jut into my pockets, and Luna barks and I stumble back, but in a flash she pulls out again, fingers clutched around a paper-wrapped candy. “Aha! See? I knew it—these are the same ones he used to give me when I was a baby.” She pops it in her mouth, squirrel cheek distorting her words. “Strawberry’s my favorite.”

I go quiet. She turns to the railing with a sigh.

“Papa says it’s a bad thing Brother’s back. But I don’t want that to be true.”

A church barge floats by. A fog of incense follows it as priests circle the deck, chanting vespers for the poor and unfortunate suffering miles below them in the smog. Princess Leyda idly smushes her hand against her other cheek.

“Papa says on the other six Stations, people worship a hundred gods, or ten, and some worship none, and some worship their ancestors.” She thinks for a moment, then looks over at me. “But the priests keep telling me there’s only one God. So…how can that be right?”

We watch the LED cross on the barge fade into the sky.

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” I say finally.

“Mmm.” The princess makes a noise of agreement and then a crunch as the candy goes down. “Probably nothing’s that simple.”

The shallow pool shivers beneath our feet in stars and melting frost.

“I wish you could meet Mum,” she says. She means her mother, not Astrix—the queen cloistered for her fragile health.

“She’s ill, right?”

“Yeah. I didn’t get to see her much.” She frowns. “That’s why J made her for me.”

I blink. J—is that the boy’s name?

“‘Made her’? What do you mean, ‘made her’?”

“He made her overload in Hellrunner, and now I get to see her all the time! Way more than when she was sick. I had to sit in its weird saddle for a while, though.” I stare at her in disbelief. At last, she giggles. “Oh geez. Wow. You don’t know, huh? I thought Brother would’ve told you by now.”

“Told me what?”

“They don’t die. The enemy.” She flips her hair and sighs when I stare at her blankly. “If their bodies get hurt, they go into, like, hibernation—turn into nerve fluid. But they can grow back if they get food. And their food is memories. Brain stuff—stuff we give them in the saddle. And growing back makes, like, a lot of energy. That’s what the saddle is—us feeding them, them trying to grow back and making energy.”

My breathing stops. The princess rolls her eyes.

“How did you think the steeds moved? Plain old electricity? That’d never be enough.”

“The nerve fluid is dead.” I numbly repeat what Rax told me over Sevrith’s bed.

“That’s what the steedcrafters tell people so they don’t freak out. They’re still alive—the little wiggly things. If you overload in the saddle, they eat all of you, and they remember you. Keep you there. They’re not allowed to grow back, obviously, because then they wouldn’t keep making the energy. They’re like…babies.” She giggles. “Battery babies who never get to grow up.”

The way she explains it…it doesn’t sound serious. But it’s too specific not to be. And of all the people on the Station who would know information like this… The princess’s hand rests sweetly on mine as her eyes move to an empty space on the balcony behind me.

“I’m looking forward to tomorrow—it’ll be fun, right, Mum?”

Luna’s tail wags at the balcony where no one stands.