3

We don’t know, Highness,” he said finally.

“Memz was on my crew for years. Someone offered her something worth killing me for.” I let a brief smile flicker through even though I’d never wanted a drink so badly as in that moment. “Or trying to kill me. Am I correct in assuming whoever it was, they’re responsible for the deaths of my sisters?”

“It’s likely, Highness.”

“You can understand my hesitation, then, Tracker, to just throw myself at your mercy.”

“I am loyal to Indrana, Highness. I swore an oath to Princess Cire to bring you home and keep you safe,” Emmory whispered, and gods damn but he looked hurt. He took a step toward me, his gloved hands held out in supplication.

“Bugger me, I don’t know you!” The furious reply slipped out, and I wasn’t in the mood to lie to him so I went with it. I swallowed, glared at him, and continued, “Either of you. I’ll trust you both as far as I can, but you drugged me, kidnapped me—”

“I retrieved you. As I was ordered to do.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “As your sister ordered me to do.”

“Ordered! Don’t talk to me about orders. Portis was ordered to lie to me and babysit me. It’s all sophistry,” I snarled, advancing on him. I jabbed a finger into his chest and then pointed it at Zin.

I thought I’d been free. I’d thought that my life was my own. The one thing I really wanted, the thing I’d given up every piece of my life at home for, had turned out to be a lie. I choked on the sudden tears and spun away before they spilled free.

“Highness—”

“Fine, you were doing your job. Give me one reason I should trust you.” I looked up at the ceiling, blinking the tears away before I faced him.

“You don’t have anyone else,” he said. Brutal honesty cut right to the heart of things. “And you need us.”

He was right. I didn’t want to set foot on Pashati without someone I could trust. I scrubbed my hands over my face and muttered a curse that had Emmory raising an eyebrow. “When did Cire die?”

“Yesterday afternoon. We were already off-planet. She’d wanted to make sure your empress-mother couldn’t stop us.”

“Why did she send you after me? What is going on?”

“She needed you, Highness. I don’t know how much you’ve been paying attention, but things are bad.”

I hadn’t been paying attention at all lately and it was about to bite me in the ass. “Dump the title, Emmory. We don’t have time for it.”

A smile fluttered to life on his face, vanishing as quickly as a flame in space, and I got the feeling he was going to ignore my order.

“The empire is in chaos. Things are falling apart even more rapidly than your sister feared. Read the files she sent you, and I’ll catch you up when I can. We’ve been off the grid for too long already.”

“Who’s responsible? Who blew up Cire? And Pace—” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. “What in the Mother Destroyer’s name is my mother doing about it?”

“Your Highness, we don’t know.” Emmory held a hand up before I could say anything. “We’ve been off camera for too long, we’ve got incoming. We need you to come home.” His voice was abruptly distant.

It was my turn for a sharp nod as I bit my tongue and swallowed back the hundred or so questions I desperately wanted to ask. We were apparently back on camera. Besides that, now wasn’t the time, and I knew it, even though I hated it. Hated falling right back into the politics and politeness.

I wasn’t going to get stuck. I would go home, find the bastards responsible for murdering my sisters, and then figure it out from there. I gave Emmory a second sharp nod. “I’ll come home with you.”

“The empire is in your debt, Highness.” Emmory’s bow was formal and I barely managed to keep from rolling my eyes.

The empire can kiss my ass. I’m only doing this for my sisters.

“It’s a pleasure to do my duty,” I said out loud.

“We’ll be in warp for several hours yet,” Emmory said, still sounding stilted and formal. “I’d suggest some sleep. We could all use it. Shall I send Sergeant Terass in?”

I locked eyes with him, recognizing the test for what it was, and nodded. Emmory nodded back and the door slid open. A slender young woman with burnished copper hair came through. She was barely over a meter tall, a fragile-looking waif of a girl.

I didn’t have to see her pointed ears hiding among the curls to know what she was. Her stature coupled with her wide, round eyes and heart-shaped face was more than enough proof.

Farian.

Only my pride kept me from stepping back.

“Highness, Sergeant Fasé Terass.”

“Your Imperial Highness. It is a great honor.” She bowed, keeping her golden eyes on me. Her lilting voice was the same one I’d heard while lying on Sophie’s deck.

I answered the bow with a nod, palace manners so ingrained in my being that the years away couldn’t wipe them out. Fighting down my instinct to bolt, I smiled at her instead.

Fasé offered up a tiny smile in return. She tugged the glove off her right hand and my heart pounded so hard it bruised itself against my ribs. “Death you deal and death you shall become,” she whispered the edict, holding out her hand. “I am loyal to my gods and to you, Highness. I will not harm you.”

I swallowed, and laid my hand over hers. I fucking hoped she was telling me the truth. Otherwise, I’d just committed suicide.

I’d been healed by a Farian a time or two before, most memorably when Cire had blacked my eye. I’d gone one taunt too far about her short legs and the resulting punch had been brilliant.

Being healed is similar to weightlessness. A strange floating, slightly out of control feeling. I often wondered what the Farians felt, but I’ve never had the guts to ask. These strange aliens were among the first to welcome humanity to the stars, but though they’d integrated themselves into our lives so seamlessly, there was very little we knew about them.

They spent time with humans as part of some pilgrimage. An offering to the Tuesday god who’d given them the gift of healing. It was a double-edge sword of a gift, packed with the ability to kill, and if they hoarded the gift instead of sharing it, they would die. Hao had explained it to me as if a battery was being charged with no fail-safe. The energy just kept building until it burst.

As the ache in my face subsided and all my other minute complaints vanished, I released the breath I’d been holding. A second smile, shy and tired, fluttered at the corner of Fasé’s pale mouth.

“May you feel better, Highness,” she whispered the benediction and pulled her hand from mine. With another quick bow, she left the room, leaving me alone with Emmory and Zin once more.

“I brought you your boots,” Zin said as though nothing about this scene was out of the ordinary. “You won’t have much of an occasion to wear them in the palace, but I figured good boots are hard to find.”

“Thank you,” I murmured, earning a smile.

Emmory bowed his head a fraction. “Sleep well, Highness.”

I thought of a dozen pithy replies before I said, “You, too.” And as they left the room, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be the only one staring at the ceiling all night.

I didn’t actually stare at the ceiling the whole time. Most of it was spent reading through the files Cire had attached to her message and silently cursing myself for the last few years of near obsessive avoidance of Indranan politics.

The empire was crumbling, and as harsh as it sounded, my sister’s death was simply one more awful thing in a string of events that were knocking the foundation of Indrana out from underneath her.

I paced as I listened to Cire. What had started with civil unrest and ended with mounting tensions with the Saxon Kingdom was a tangled mess of economic failures, political demonstrations, riots, and the assassinations of three members of the royal family.

None of it was as shocking as the medical report attached to another short message from Cire.

“Mother has Shakti dementia. She started presenting symptoms about six months ago.”

Space madness.

A genetic mutation triggered by exposure to radiation in the early days of space travel had resulted in a new form of dementia that none of the known cures could touch. We said those who had it had been “touched by the Mother Destroyer” and were lost to her unforgiving hands. Once it manifested, it moved fast. Shakti dementia was what had killed my distant ancestor-grandfather when we first landed on Pashati. Men were more likely to suffer the effects, and the initial colonists struggled to overcome the onslaught. The balance of power shifted enough to allow my ancestor-grandmother to take command. Though the priests liked to say it was the will of the goddess that started the whole thing.

It started with wandering attention and an inability to focus. Then speech issues—forgetting words, garbled and unfinished sentences. As the disease progressed, there was memory loss and confusion of time where the victim started living in the past.

It was genetic and there was no way to test for the risk, no way to guard against it except to never leave the planet surface—something that was damn near impossible for members of the royal family. Still, since my ancestor-grandfather there had only been three other incidences of the dementia in my family.

“Ven noticed first and told me. I had Dr. Satir run some tests and she gave me the bad news. We haven’t told her yet. I decided it was for the best when the doctor said it could make the disease progress faster.” Cire looked haggard, but it was impossible to tell if she’d recorded this vid before or after the other. “You’ll have to tread lightly, Haili, at least until Atmikha is crowned. She has her good days, but she’s twitchy and the slightest thing can set her off. I remember how you and Mother were.” A smile flickered to life on her face and it made my heart ache. “Try not to piss her off too much.”

“I’m not making any promises,” I whispered.

I kept reading files until I passed out, dropping into a fitful sleep in the middle of a memo about troublesome Saxon activity on some of our border worlds. My dreams were spotty, filled with images of Portis dying, Cire vanishing in flame, and Pace choking to death on her own blood.

The last was too much and had me waking with a gasping sob that I muffled in the bedsheets. I rolled out of bed and stumbled to the bath. My stomach didn’t care about the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything for a good thirty hours and tried to empty itself repeatedly.

“Water?” The appearance of a cup over my shoulder startled me as much as Zin’s voice did, and my jerk almost resulted in the offered water being dumped over my head.

Zin swung it out of the way of my flailing arm and dropped into a crouch to offer it again.

“I hope your expectations of your new empress aren’t set too high,” I said after rinsing my mouth out and spitting into the toilet. “Because you’re in for a shock, Zin. I was a disappointing princess, according to my mother. I doubt I’ll be much better as empress.”

Zin smiled and offered me a hand up. “I try not to put expectations on people, Highness. It’s not very fair to ask them to conform to my ideas of the way the world should be.”

“Pretty words.” I leaned against the counter once I was on my feet. “So you’re the philosopher and Emmory is the sword?”

“We take turns, Highness. I brought you breakfast, if you think you can stand it.”

“Might as well try.” I spotted Emmory by the door as I made my way to the bed and poked at the food on the tray for a minute before I looked up at Zin. “My mother has space madness.”

Emmory nodded. “Yes, Highness.”

“It’s not public knowledge, though?”

“It is now,” he said. “The news leaked a few hours ago at home.”

“Does my mother know?”

“I believe Princess Cire was going to speak with her after we left, Highness. I am not sure if that happened.”

“Bugger.” Slowly I could feel the noose tightening on my neck. My plans to hunt down my sisters’ killers and then leave hadn’t included my mother’s failing health. “Well, I’m going to need something to wear besides this, Tracker. I don’t suppose you’ve got a spare uniform floating around?”

Zin frowned, glancing behind me at the now destroyed wardrobe. “You can’t—”

“It’s this or a uniform.” I gestured at my now wrinkled pajamas.

“Highness, that’s hardly appropriate attire.” Emmory’s voice was pained.

“I know, but unless you want to get into a wrestling match, I’m not putting on any of the clothing in there.”

“Your Highness.” He stopped and took a breath, letting it out slowly. I already recognized it as the sign of him struggling for composure. “We cannot present you to your empress-mother dressed in pajamas.”

He sounded so exasperated, I had to bite back a snort of laughter. I wanted to let it loose in the air just to see what he’d do, but I didn’t. I was the gunrunner they all expected to see and I’d bow to Mother in clothing of my choosing or not at all.

“You should find me something else then, Tracker. We’re about the same size.” I waved a hand at him. “And it’s better than pajamas.”

“That is debatable, Highness,” Emmory replied, but he vanished back out the door. He was right, of course. About the only way I could insult my mother more would be to show up dressed in the cheery yellow sari reserved for outcasts.

“Setting the tone early, Your Highness?” Zin hadn’t moved from his spot against the wall. “Coming home in military dress is going to raise eyebrows.”

“You probably should have thought about that before you came to get me. Bringing me home at all is going to raise eyebrows. Prodigal black sheep and all that.”

“It was an order, Highness.”

“Do you always follow orders?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So if I ordered you to kill your partner when he came back in the room, would you do it?”

Zin froze, his eyes desperately seeking a sign that I was pulling a horrible joke on him, and when he couldn’t find it, he fell back into the safety of formality. “Your Imperial Highness, I know my partner has behaved improperly to you, but he is only doing his duty.” He dropped to his knees and bent over, arms outstretched and palms facing upward, his face against the floor. “Please—”

I immediately felt like an asshole, and the feeling grew exponentially when Emmory walked back into the room. He froze, a uniform in unrelenting black in his hand.

“Highness?”

The request for information was tentative, and the reality was that I didn’t have to explain myself. Not only was I the Crown Princess, but I was a woman. I could do what I pleased and there was nothing these two could do about it.

I’d hated that twenty years ago and I still hated it. The inequality, the absolutism that bred contempt and hatred for a whole group of people simply because of the accident of their birth.

“Emmory, if I ordered you to not take me home, would you obey me?”

“No, Highness.”

“You’re going to want to explain why to your partner,” I said, grabbing the uniform out of his hand and heading for the bathroom.