I’M OUT THE door before Gal has a chance to explain. The soldiers who escorted us here are only a couple paces down the hall, and none of them seem ready for the sight of a manic Umber deserter streaking past them with a rainbow umbrella tucked under his arm. I’m around the corner before they remember they have blasters on their belts.
I was stupid, so stupid. So fixated on Gal, on Archon, that I forgot we’re not the most vulnerable ones here. We had something to offer the resistance, but Wen had no bargaining power whatsoever. And she was still coming down from those hits she took, and she was so quiet during the negotiation, and I got so distracted by Iral. I should have noticed sooner.
I clutch the umbrella tighter as I plunge down the stairwell. I hear voices, footsteps, people in pursuit, and there’s a wild part of my brain that thinks I can take them because I have Wen’s umbrella in my hand. They can’t dump her back on the streets for Dago Korsa to find. I don’t know how she fits into this resistance gambit, but no one deserves to go back to that.
“Hey, kid!” someone shouts behind me.
It only spurs me on.
I spill out of the stairwell and into the ground-floor corridor to find three soldiers squared up with their guns drawn on me. They give me two merciful seconds to react, enough time to throw my hands up in surrender. The umbrella clatters at my feet. “Please,” I choke through a ragged breath. “I have to speak to Iral—someone—the girl has to stay.”
“The girl?” one of them asks.
“Wen. Wen Iffan. They can’t send her back to Isla. She’s with us—she’s part of our bargain.”
“The junker? The Corinthian?”
I bare my teeth, shaking my head. I’ve always felt doomed to let down anybody who dares to rely on me. I can’t let that happen to Wen—not when I know exactly what she’s been through. “She stays, or there’s no deal.”
I’m not sure what their guns are set on. They could have me in the sights of a killing bolt. My arms start to shake, my lungs shuddering as I try to bring my breath under control.
The soldier at the head of the group cocks his head, listening to something in his earpiece. He lets out a deep sigh and says, “Stand down.” One by one, the soldiers lower their guns. “She’s in the main shuttle hangar. We’ll take you there.”
I don’t trust their word until I see her. Wen sits on a crate at the edge of the hangar, flanked by two guards, running her hands over her wrists like she’s been freed from cuffs. Her face lights up when she spots me—not with joy, but with surprise that she quickly smothers with a look of cool regard. “Ettian,” she says.
“Wen.”
“They tried to, uh—”
I take a knee next to her, glancing at the soldiers. “Wen, I’m so sorry,” I murmur. “I should have been paying attention.”
She nods. Her hair is loose, and she keeps her head bent forward so that it curtains her burns. “Wouldn’t be the first time,” Wen says. Her smile has a cruel edge to it. “My face isn’t so easy to forget, but it feels like the rest of me kinda makes up for it.”
“It’s the last time,” I tell her firmly. “You’re with us, okay? We’re getting you off-world. No one’s forgetting you.”
“You can’t make good on that.”
“Is that a challenge?”
She lets out a short laugh.
“I swear, Wen. You know what? Every person in every system is going to know your name someday. I’ll make it my personal mission. No one’s going to forget Wen Iffan again.”
“Now you’re making fun of me.”
“Someone’s gotta.” I hold out her umbrella, and she plucks it delicately out of my hands, turning it end over end. Her eyes catch on the bloodstains and darken. “C’mon,” I say, standing. “Let’s get you set up here. ID, room, everything.”
Wen rises and grabs my elbow before I have a chance to offer it. The evening outside is melting into night, and in the cool blue light of the darkened hangar, I barely catch her softer smile. “You’re never getting rid of me. You know that, right?”
“I know.” When I first met her, that sentiment would have been terrifying. But I need more constants in my life, and even if this one comes with mob trouble, wields a rainbow umbrella, and nearly blew me up yesterday, something in my gut tells me she’s worth it.
Wen pops the umbrella open, slings it onto her shoulder, and pulls us along the edge of the hangar as the guards trail in our wake. When we duck out a side door, we nearly run headlong into an emissary from General Iral, who offers the general’s most profuse apologies for the misunderstanding. I glance down at Wen, wary. I don’t know if she knows Gal was the one who allowed them to send her away, and I’m not sure if I should tell her. For the sake of Gal’s safety, it’s probably better that I don’t.
“She’s staying,” I assure the woman after an awkward pause. “She goes where we go. And she won’t be stealing anything. Right?”
Wen smiles, pulls a knife, three wallets, and a printed photo of a toddler out of her pockets, and presses them into the emissary’s hands one by one. I give the woman my falsest, most apologetic smile, then march Wen out of her sight before she has a chance to create any more chaos.
I know what’s waiting for me in that dorm.
The time it takes to get Wen her own badge and room gives me plenty of chances to envision the way this is about to go down. I stand on the edge of the intake office with my arms folded as she flashes the camera a toothy smile, trying my best to get a handle on the simmering fury inside me.
Gal needs me to be calm. He needs me to be rational.
But then Wen gets her card—a legit ID, maybe the first one she’s ever carried. I escort her to her first comfortable bed in months and watch over my shoulder as one of the soldiers points her toward her first hot shower in years.
And then I blow into our room like dreadnought boltfire.
“How the rut can you justify telling them to send her away?” I roar.
Gal startles—his datapad topples out of his hands, and he scoots back against the head of the bottom bunk. “Ettian—”
“Don’t…Don’t try to…” I rub my hands over my face, feeling the furious heat that’s built up in my cheeks. “She was lucky to get away half-burned. She has an entire army of mobsters out for her blood in that city, and you tried to send her right back to them alone.”
“Wen can handle herself,” Gal says, straightening up. His hands are balled into fists at his side. He’s holding something back.
I’m not. “That doesn’t mean she should have to! What the rut is wrong with you?”
Gal moves so fast that not even my Viper-honed instincts have time to react. In the blink of an eye, he’s on his feet, his hands catching me across the chest as he shoves me back against the wall. My head throbs where it hits. Gal’s forearm digs into my collar, making my breath go shallow.
He leans up slowly, carefully, his lips curving around to my ear. “I’ve checked every inch of this room for bugs and cameras, but I’m not taking any chances,” he snarls, the words barely audible over the rush of my blood in my ears. “If you insist on an explanation, I’ll explain.”
Logically I know I’m bigger than him. A better fighter than him. I could overpower him easily. But I’m so goddamn afraid of him in this moment—of that vicious rage, the blood of his mother—and it freezes me. A terrible question roars in my heart, one that started on the wiretram and has only gotten louder since we made it to the base.
Are we strangers? Are we strangers? Are we strangers?
I stammer, and Gal shakes my shoulders. “There’s only one goal in all of this that matters. If I lose sight of it, I’m dead. We have to get home to the Umber interior. And I can’t afford a liability like that junker girl.”
“She got us to the resistance,” I hiss. And because I can’t think of any other way to fight back, I slip my hands up around his hips. If anyone is watching, they’ll get a very different idea about what’s going on in here.
Gal barely blinks at the contact, but a line in his neck goes taut. “Yeah, she walked us into an active military operation that would string me up if they knew what I am.”
A slow, sinking feeling is dragging down my stomach. A familiar fear, one that’s been eating at me ever since we left Jana behind at the academy. “She doesn’t have to have utility to be worth saving, Gal,” I snap. “Is that all we are to you? Tools to get you to your throne?”
His grip on me loosens. My grip on him tightens, and I lean back to look him in the eye as he grapples with the question. “I’m not…You’re not…”
“What? I’m not like her?” A cruel smile edges out of the corner of my lips. I let it sit there like armor.
“You’re my best friend, and she’s a girl we met yesterday. You’re nothing like her.”
My smile vanishes, and I catch the flash of fear in Gal’s eyes as he realizes how deep his words cut. “Not true,” I say, low and dangerous. “And if you had any idea what that’s like, it wouldn’t even cross your mind to put Wen back on the streets.”
“You don’t know what it’s like!” he shouts, then claps a hand over his mouth as our tiny room throws the sound back at him. After a moment of stunned silence, he bends his head forward, reeling me in with a tug until his forehead brushes my shoulder. He’s shaking even harder than he was in the interrogation room—no reason for him to hide it now. “When I agreed to come here, I thought it would be spies, instigators, a few stolen shuttles. Not a base this huge. Not General Iral. I…I couldn’t even leave the citadel when he was still living, and now I’ve looked him in the eye. And you think I can keep track of a junker girl with a death wish while that’s on my plate? She’s permanently scorched from the last bridge she burned, and I have an empire’s future—”
He pauses, and when his voice is strong enough to come back, it’s suddenly drenched in despair. “I could feel the blood inside me boiling back there. I understood my mother. How she could…How she keeps…”
My hands go soft at his hips, and I slip them around until I’m pulling him into the embrace he so desperately needs. The last notes of my anger rattle through my skull, but the broken fear in Gal’s voice is more important than anything I could yell at him.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” he repeats, the words pulsing against my neck. “No one knows what it’s like. To be alone like this and know it’s never going to change. To be raised for shaping the galaxy, to know that nothing else matters beyond surviving to eighteen. So many people out there are hell-bent on making sure that doesn’t happen. And now—”
His voice catches, and against my better judgment, I hold him tighter.
“The general got right under my skin,” Gal admits. “When I was a kid, I had nightmares about what he’d do to me if I ever fell into his hands. Even after Archon fell, he was unstoppable. The biggest threat the Umber Empire ever faced was Maxo Iral’s revenge. And then we crucified him in front of the citadel, and I thought it was over. I never dreamed…”
I close my eyes and nod, mostly to keep him from stammering through an explanation that’s only going to shake him more. Gal never dreamed that the threat General Iral posed wasn’t over. He never dreamed that the Shield of Archon had escaped the Umber Empire’s reach. He never dreamed that man could amass a new army among the refugees with sponsorship from the Corinthian Crown itself. And now we’re stuck on this base, bound by the promise to give Maxo Iral critical information—information he could use to launch a whole new offensive.
“It’s my responsibility,” Gal whispers. “Billions of people live in the former Archon territories—people who depend on what we’ve built for them, people who were starving under Archon rule.” An urge to correct him lodges in my throat. He’s too freaked out to react well to any attempt to untangle the propaganda he was raised on from the facts. “I have to stop this somehow. I have to protect them from what’s brewing here, from him. I can’t bring them another war. It’s only been seven years.”
I stiffen, trying to press down the wild mess of thoughts threatening to overtake my head. Gal’s breath hitches, and he draws back slightly. My eyes open and find his, dark and searching, as if he can extract all of my secrets from a look alone.
“Ettian,” he whispers. “I know…I know you were born on Rana. I know you don’t have anyone left. But I need to know…”
I should tell him. It was so easy this morning—when Wen asked, the truth slid out clean. I thought that step meant more would follow. I thought I might be able to talk about those two years after the collapse of the old empire without feeling like the scars were being hacked open. But being here, surrounded by a small army dreaming of reclaiming the Archon territories, is like having the blade still buried in my flesh. There’s no hope of closure. It only gets deeper. It only gets worse.
“You know enough,” I say, the words laced with bile. “You know I shattered with the empire. You know I built myself back from what was left.”
I catch the flicker of disappointment in his eyes. Something twists in me, equal parts guilt and anger. I don’t owe him my history, but I feel like I should, especially now that Wen knows more than him. He’s shared his own story with me, after all. Twelve years in the citadel, three on Naberrie, and two and a half as my roommate on Rana. But for him, my story starts on the day he took the top bunk. Everything before that moment is lost in a fog.
I can’t stand to be touching him anymore. I pull away and cross to the bottom bunk, where I drop on my haunches as the weight of the day comes crashing down on me. My mind is caught in the tumult of a zero-G spinout. I pull over my pack and dig through it until I reach deep into an interior pocket and find my velvet bag with its drawstring still knotted. I squeeze it in my palm, letting its familiar weight ground me.
Gal sets himself down on the edge of the bed, and suddenly the bag is scalding in my hand. I stuff it back into its pocket, clamping down hard on the shame and nausea roiling through me. He leans close, and for a moment I’m seized by the irrational fear that he’s going to try to kiss me again. “I’m sorry,” Gal whispers against my ear. “I shouldn’t have…I’m sorry.”
“No apologies,” I mutter.
The silence hollows around us, inside us.
“Please don’t blow up at me again, but…” Gal says quietly. “You’re with me, right?”
I close my eyes. “Of course.”
“You’re sure?”
I hate that he has to keep checking. When I overrode him on the tarmac earlier, it was like something came over me, ripping out the lacing that’s been keeping me together for the past seven years. And if that wasn’t enough, I had to look General Iral in the face as the man I’ve idolized since childhood laid his hope on our shoulders. I may hate that Gal has to keep checking, but there’s no question why he feels the need to do so for the second time today.
But through all of this, through every part of this mess, the only thing that’s ever mattered is Gal. There’s only one side that has my allegiance. It’s not Archon, which fell and fled, or Umber, which conquered and reshaped. It’s not the past. It’s that possibility of a better future. It’s only ever been Gal.
Gal emp-Umber, but that isn’t exactly helpful at the moment.
“I’m sure,” I tell him. I’ll tell him as many times as it takes. “No matter what, I’m with you.” The pure relief of that simple truth cuts through the confusion. I was caught in the swell of an ocean wave before. Now I’ve found my footing in the sand. “But we need to decide what we’re going to do.”
He takes his time before answering, his fingers tangling in his lap. “There’s no way out but through. If we withhold information from the resistance, they’ll get suspicious. They’ll investigate. And if they find out who I am, we’ve handed them the greatest weapon they could possibly have. With the right negotiation, they could probably ransom their ruttin’ empire in exchange for me.”
The urgency in his voice has brought him right up against my ear, and I slip my arm around his shoulders to steady him. He doesn’t tense up at the contact—instead, he relaxes right into it, melting against my side in a way that has me tensing at how easily we could topple into something out of control. “So we have to feed them information,” I whisper, trying to get my thoughts back on track. “The kind that forces them to keep us. Maybe even…the kind that gets them moving where they’re headed.”
Gal stiffens. It’s no innocent comment coming from my lips, not when he’s seen firsthand what this place seems to awaken in me. I can’t want the resistance to launch an assault. I don’t want the resistance to launch an assault. Not when our friends would be caught in the crossfire. Not when it’s only been seven years since the last war.
I take a deep breath, trying to sort through the facts. First, we have to give the resistance information. Second, we need the resistance to make it back to the Archon territories.
But a third fact slips into my mind, one with ramifications that go far beyond the crisis we’re facing. Third, and maybe most important, Gal needs to return to his empire with a show of strength. Something massive, something bloody. Something that will leave a mark.
And this plan doesn’t need the resistance to win.
“So we give them information,” I say slowly. “But not all of it. And not always the right information. We know the interior defenses inside-out.”
Gal straightens, inhaling deeply. I turn my head to find his face taut, his hooded eyes pinched shut. I know he doesn’t want me to go on. I also know he doesn’t want to finish the thought out loud himself.
So I lean forward, my lips skimming his ear. “We could convince them it’s possible to win Archon back. And then we walk them into a trap. Iral only escaped the first time because he had a trick up his sleeve that can’t be repeated. Imagine telling your mother that you didn’t flee—that you came here to pursue the Archon uprising that tried to out you as heir and obliterate you. You could take the throne with the defeat of Maxo Iral and his final rebellion on your hands.”
He stares at the crooked nest of his clenched fingers, and hangs his head. “The galaxy would bow to me. If…If I…”
If he brings her Iral’s head. If he stoops to the violence it took for Iva emp-Umber to claim her legacy and outdoes her a thousandfold. If he finishes what she started, crushing the Archon Empire before it has a chance to rise again.
“It’s necessary,” he says, but the words are more question than statement. “We have to stop all of this. If we start a war, the death toll would easily outnumber the people on this base. But then that makes me an asshole if I choose to see it all in sums, using the math to decide who lives and who dies. And I don’t want…I know what my mother’s blood makes me capable of. I could come at Iral with every ounce of hate in my heart for the way he dragged out the destruction of the last war for another two years. If he had laid down arms when his imperials did, so many lives would have been spared. And I can stop him from doing it again, but then what does that make me? And…why are you looking at me like that?”
I’m looking at him like that because this is the Gal I know. Iva emp-Umber’s brutal reign will cede to a boy whose heart is torn in half at the thought of destroying the man he’s feared since he was small. Gal and his uncertain heart will steer Umber away from a legacy of conquest and bloodshed, away from the ruins of his parents’ war.
And I’ve also realized something else. Something I can never tell him, because it’s only going to shatter us completely. It sits on the edge of my tongue like a lit fuse. And Gal is looking at me expectantly, waiting for something. “I…can’t process all of this,” I tell him, because adjacent truths are more manageable. I keel backward, pulling away from him and stuffing the pillow over my head.
“Yeah, okay.” The mattress bounces slightly as Gal pushes himself to his feet. “We need some real sleep. And then we’ll figure this out.”
I listen to him puttering around, getting ready for bed. I know I should change and shower, but I can’t even bring myself to sit up again. I feel like the weight of this day is pinning me to the bunk. Everything I’ve done, everything I’ve learned, everything I’ve chosen. And yet, I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep—not with all of that tumbling through my thoughts nonstop.
On the other side of my eyelids, the room goes dark.
And then there’s a slight dip in the mattress again, the pressure of a single knee sinking in like a testing of the waters. “I know it’s weird, but…” Gal murmurs.
Wordlessly, I roll to the side.
Now I really can’t sleep.
Gal dropped off in a matter of seconds, his back turned to me and his breathing deep and steady. The gulf between us feels charged, and even though I have so many things to keep my mind off it, I can’t help but fixate on the bare inches separating us in this narrow, narrow bed.
I lie on my back, staring at the underside of the mattress above me. The thin light that comes through the crack beneath the door barely illuminates the geometric patterns of the stitching that holds it together. I try to count the stitches, but I keep losing track.
Tomorrow morning, we’ll be expected to give the resistance information. Tomorrow we’ll start the slow, deadly process of poisoning them from the inside. I’ll let Gal do the talking, but he’ll be guiding them into a trap that’s ultimately my design. My idea. My fault.
But I don’t believe in the empire that pulled me out of the rubble and glued me back together. And I don’t trust the empire that crumbled to dust and left me to die. My only allegiance is to an empire that doesn’t exist yet, to the possibility of Gal’s future rule. Maybe that makes me a traitor. Maybe it forfeits my soul. But for him—for this disastrous boy sleeping next to me—I would, I will.