“You good back here?”
I jerk my head up to find Ettian leaning out from the cockpit. He looks steady, or maybe it’s just the comfort of finally being in a small craft again. They were always where he was most at home. Before I can answer, he slips fully into the hold and plunks himself down on the bench opposite me.
“Not gonna talk the pilots into letting you do a few loops?” I ask. My attempt at nonchalance rings false, but I plow ahead anyway. “Can’t believe you got so close to a pilot’s seat and didn’t use that fancy imperial title to put your ass in it.”
He quirks an eyebrow. “Maybe I thought about it, but I didn’t want to leave you alone back here. No telling what you could get up to with no one watching you.”
I roll my eyes, spreading my hands until the cuffs I’ve been bound in bite into my wrists—which isn’t very far at all. Some bullshit security protocol has decided that in addition to being trapped in a small ship in the middle of nowhere while a battle that could decide my fate plays out, I need to be trussed up like a bird ready for the oven. On the one hand, I feel like the danger I pose is being properly respected for once.
On the other, it’s putting me right up on the edge of a panic attack.
Ettian notes my predicament with a smile that’s far too sympathetic for my liking. Everything about him in this moment is far too sympathetic to begin with. He has just as much riding on this moment as me, and just as little control. He can’t even commandeer the shuttle from the soldiers—not when he’s already tied up in the oh-so-thrilling task of babysitting me. “I wish those weren’t necessary,” he says, nodding to the cuffs with his voice pitched low as if he means to slip by the ears of any eavesdropping coming from the fore.
So I reply, loud as I please, “Oh come on. If you didn’t like me tied up, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.”
He gives me a tight, annoyed look, then pulls a datapad from the inner pocket of his jacket. “Work with me, asshole,” he mutters. “We’re five minutes out from the start of the operation.”
I draw a deep breath, trying to still my shaking hands. With the cuffs, my tremors are obnoxiously obvious, the chattering of metal a dead giveaway. I’m better than this. I was raised better than this, raised to ruthlessly helm an empire—or maybe I’ve equated that with being so far above consequence that the prospect of it is reducing me to a nervous wreck.
Ettian tips the datapad my way, and I eye him warily. This feels like a mistake he’s too smart to make, which means it’s almost certainly a trap. But after a full five seconds of blank staring, he shoves it into my hands. “Look, I’m betting it’s going to make you feel a lot better if you have something to do,” he huffs. “So you tell me what’s happening.”
“If anyone in your administration saw this, no victory is going to save their respect for you,” I warn him as I gingerly spin the datapad around on my knee.
“Then it’s a good thing no one’s seeing this,” he replies, though his eyes dart briefly to the cockpit door to confirm both pilots are still on-task.
I shake my head, then pull up the model of the battlefield. A network of stealth satellites is keeping it up to date by the second, and the three points at which Archon dreadnoughts will drop from superluminal are highlighted in pale pink. “Thirty seconds to the jump,” I murmur, zooming in on the Reach, the blockade dreadnought Archon has elected to claim as its primary target.
Its rear flirts with the edge of Ellit’s atmosphere, its rows and rows of fore cannons arrayed toward the stars. It gives no sign it’s aware of what’s coming, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is. At minimum, Umber scouting must know that the fleet is mobilizing, that the superluminal drives of three dreadnoughts are preparing for an immediate jump, and that Ellit is the next logical target for the uprising. But the Reach remains silent, the guns watchful, the bay doors down.
“Three. Two. One. Mark.”
Three dreadnoughts blink from the black, lined up in perfect syzygy against the pinpoint of the Reach. They immediately swap from superluminal to reactor power, plunging forward while maintaining their alignment.
The mission clock has just hit two seconds when the Reach opens fire.
“Confirmed discharge,” I announce through gritted teeth, and in my periphery, I see Ettian’s shoulders wind a notch tenser. The first Archon dreadnought takes the fire with aplomb, its thick metal shielding flaring hot as heavy boltfire chips into it. Its own cannons—the lighter ones, the ones that can afford to miss—chug a silent, steady barrage in retort, targeting the Reach’s gun mounts.
The two cityships tucked in the first dreadnought’s shadow wheel their guns for a more distant target—the Valiant, positioned over Ellit’s north pole. At this angle, they don’t risk making landfall with a missed shot, and so they fire their biggest guns freely, their potshots striking with a relatively low success rate. I zoom in on the Valiant, my breath caught in my chest.
This is the moment that decides the entire battle. The moment that our strategy hinges on. We have a fallback—Iral’s plan, a bloody, brutal assault that will decimate Archon’s fleet. It has its own art to it—I respect Iral’s skill as a strategist too much to discount it entirely. But if we have to revert to the battle plan he concocted, Archon reverts to following their hallowed general.
And they’ll follow him right into separating my head from my neck.
“Come on,” I groan through my teeth, eyes fixed on the Valiant’s bulk. “Turn, damn you.”
And like it’s heard my command and bent to the will of its future emperor, the Valiant begins to pitch its guns toward the thick of the fighting.
I pump my free hand, nearly knocking the datapad off my knees, and Ettian startles. “The Valiant’s begun its rotation,” I explain, lifting my eyes from the battle just long enough to catch the complicated expression he flinches into. I mirror it—equal parts joy, because we were right, because now the true battle can begin, because now Archon has its opening to take Ellit, and fear, because now that the fleet is bound to commit to our strategy, that strategy has to work.
“How long until the runners are go?” he asks, leaning in to peer at the datapad. The greater weight’s been lifted from his shoulders at the news that the Valiant is behaving as expected, and it seems he’s finally ready to actually look at what’s happening.
If we make it through this, I’ll try to unpack thoroughly, but for now I just tip the pad so he can see better and tell him, “Five minutes, at the current rate of rotation.”
It feels like an eternity. For five minutes, the first in the trio of our advance dreadnoughts has to bear the Reach’s battery, shielding its two brethren with its sheer bulk. The rendering on the datapad can’t possibly do it justice. I watch the destruction with bile in my throat, trying to come to grips with just how punishing the full force of dreadnought fire is. It seems a miracle that it’s not punching a hole clean through the Archon cityship’s structure.
Ettian watches steadily, and for a moment I wonder how he could possibly ingest the sight with so much calm. I shouldn’t be the one more affected by this—he’s the one whose ships are on the line here. But it dawns on me slowly that I am far less familiar with the destructive power of a dreadnought than Ettian. I was safe in the Umber Core at ten years old, shielded from the War of Expansion. Ettian survived it.
He’s never really told me how much of it he saw, but now I think I don’t have to ask.
At the one-minute mark, a lucky shot from the Reach tears through the bridge of the first Archon dreadnought. Their communications drop out, but the ship remains mostly intact, mostly effective at providing coverage for the rest of the advance team. The surviving Engineering crews throw it into a turn of its own, forsaking the potential of its main batteries to wheel its rear engines around to face Ellit. At its current momentum, it will take a full hour to reach a point of no return with
the planet’s gravity, but if it’s allowed to fall, it would wipe out life on the planet entirely.
Ettian shifts uncomfortably, his hands clenching together. “Time?” he asks hoarsely.
I wrench my focus back to the Valiant, which has already opened fire on the three Archon dreadnoughts with its ancillary batteries. “Any second now. Any—shit, now.”
On the screen, the blockade runners bloom at the Valiant’s rear, screaming out of superluminal as close to the planet’s hard atmosphere as they dare. To its credit, the Valiant takes barely five seconds to open fire with its rear batteries, but the ships we’ve fronted here are the fastest in the fleet, and they pour past the blockade like iron rain. Their shielding hits the atmosphere, flaring bright—brighter still, where the Valiant’s boltfire strikes true. But it will take another five-minute turn for the Valiant’s main batteries to wheel back around, and at that point the blockade runners will be far too close to Ellit’s surface for the dreadnought to risk firing.
Once, during the War of Expansion, a dreadnought that broke through the blockade on Rana fired what became known as the Warning Shot, punching a crater into the planet’s surface just north of the capital at Trost. It choked the air with particulate for days, even with the winds sloughing off the nearby mountains to diffuse the fallout. That was short-term compared to what the Valiant’s boltfire could wreak on Ellit if it fires on the northern ice caps.
And it has me by the throat, the fear that it might. Being Umber means being ruthless—I’ve known this since birth. I’ve trained my whole life to bring that ruthlessness under my heel the same way my mother once did, but I’ve never faced it as an opponent like this. Never feared the decision of one of my dreadnought captains, not because it would be strategic, but because it would be cruel.
This is not the time for this, my brain rages at me, even as my mouth is halfway through blurting the words that betray me completely. “Bloodright’s a funny thing, isn’t it?”
Ettian’s eyes snap up warily from the battle. No doubt he’s been waiting all day for me to try something. No doubt he thinks the moment has finally come.
But no, this is apparently just me finally short circuiting, because I carry on. “It’s a seed we carry, but we only earn it when we bloom. Or at least, that’s how my mother tried to explain it.”
“How old were you when she explained how her particular seed came into bloom?” Ettian asks levelly.
“Doesn’t matter.” I shrug, though the true answer, Seven, might as well be written across my face. I was seven years old when my mother explained that she’d had an older sister named Ximena who stood between her and the crown, and that the seed of her own right to rule had bloomed with a blade across her sister’s throat. It took years for me to fully grasp what that act had meant—at seven, my immediate concern was that my mother would one day expect me to kill her.
Dear one, it doesn’t work like that, she’d explained, stroking my hair. In later years, she’d elaborate. You are my bloodright’s logical continuation. I’ve earned you your place on the throne. But you must be careful never to lose your people’s faith that you hold the right to rule. Never let them think that they could possibly carve out their own portion of what is meant to be yours.
An overwhelming prospect for a kid, but I was a kid who’d spent my entire life safe within the citadel walls, knowing only my mother’s fierce promise to bring me into the same blossoming. Now I sit across from the very usurper who threatens to knock out that trust and supplant it, watching as he deals yet another blow to my future regime.
Watching and doing nothing to stop it. Watching the Valiant pick off runners one by one, each flare a twist in my gut. Watching, realizing that the critical moment has arrived and I have no idea which outcome I should be praying for.
The tremor’s worked its way back into my hands. I’m helpless against it, the datapad jarring unreadably in my grip. My internal turmoil is rapidly becoming an external one, and the only thought I can manage outside of the panic is gratitude that no one but Ettian is here to see the moment I break.
But before I can tip over the precipice completely, a pair of warm, rough hands slide around mine, pinning them gently against my knees. I stare at them, because the alternative is to meet Ettian’s eyes and confront the fact that he’s just leaned across the hold to comfort me.
I should tear myself away. Should remind him that there are two pilots at the fore of this ship who could check in on us at any second. Should hold the line I drew when we first came to the front, the line I’ve been daring him to step over ever since Wen shut me out of the Torrent’s operations and I had to invite Ettian back into my orbit.
But in this moment, we’re too much the same to do anything but hold on to each other. We’re trapped in the uncertainty of watching this battle plan we devised unfold, unable to do anything to affect its outcome. The only assurance we have is our own reckless confidence that the strategy will work. So I let out a long breath and give myself over to the sensation of his hands pressed carefully against mine. I can still pick out the calluses he earned on the controls of a Viper, still remember the echoes of the fantasies I had about that rough skin against my own. I push beyond the hook-in-the-gut instinct to chase those wanton thoughts and instead focus on the thought of how steady he flies with those hands.
How impossible it always used to be for him to steer us wrong.
My eyes, against all odds, drop closed, and I feel Ettian’s breath sync with my own. Slow. Steady. Unrushed by the pixelated flickers of violence that chime tantalizingly beyond my eyelids.
This will work. I nearly flinch, realizing the voice in my head is my mother’s. Are my palms going damp under Ettian’s? Does he feel the moment my thoughts skew out of alignment with his own? I’ve been so careful these past few days, playing the perfect victim, the perfect terrified little prisoner, so bent out of shape about the general that I was willing to help Ettian concoct a battle plan to usurp Iral’s command. I figured out all the points where our goals aligned and built myself a careful lattice between them.
It’s too late for it to crumble now. I peek at the datapad through half-closed eyes, watching as runner after runner confirms safe landing on the frigid ice below. Within a minute of stable touchdown, their holds split and peel back to reveal their cargo. Massive surface-to-atmo cannons wheel up from the darkness within them, prickling against the sky like the sharpened blades they are.
When those cannons go hot and the second front of this battle opens, the rest is inevitable. When the Torrent and the remainder of the rear guard wink out of the black at the Valiant’s exposed flank, it’s already over.
We’ve won.
I’ve won.
Archon’s victory here could never be the messy bloodbath Iral would have inevitably led them into. It had to be decisive, overwhelming, unquestionable. And it had to be credited to Ettian emp-Archon, to establish his bloodright claim as legitimate, to prove this rebellion might truly be capable of reclaiming not only the system but the entirety of the Archon territories, uniting them under his throne. Claiming Rana through Tosa’s cowardice may have been a fluke, but this victory legitimizes them as a worthy opponent.
One my mother will have to mobilize the Imperial Fleet to stamp out.
And yet. The triumph just won’t stick in my heart the way I thought it would. Ettian’s hands are still pressed carefully around my own, reminding me that no matter how good this outcome is for my own plans, it’s the one he’s been hoping for too. We were joined in anticipation of this moment, but now that it’s here, it’s impossible to ignore that we’re on opposite sides once again.
On opposite sides—and he’s the one who gets to wear this openly as a victory. Meanwhile I’ve just condemned a planet that was supposed to be my inheritance to Archon occupation. It was mine to do with as I pleased, and this is how Ellit best serves me. The thought wa
s easy to stomach in speculation, but now it sours so much that I feel a genuine pang in my stomach.
It’s a feeling I should be above. A feeling that has to be the fault of spending too much time around Archon leadership philosophy. It’s not my obligation to serve the people of Ellit—it’s the other way around. Has Ettian corrupted me so thoroughly already?
The warmth of his hands on mine is unbearable. I jerk back, and he immediately flinches away, his deep brown eyes going wide with surprise. I toss the datapad into his lap, twisting my cuffed wrists so I can tuck my hands safely in the pits of my arms, far from his comfort and the unbearable confusion it brings. “There,” I mutter. “Your planet, Your Majesty.”
Let the Imperial Fleet come fast. Let them rip through the Archon forces, pluck me from the wreckage, and take me back to the citadel’s safety, where I can wash my hands of everything I did to get there.
Ettian’s mouth slips open, but I’m in no mood to enlighten him on what’s boiling over inside my head. I turn my shoulder to him, burning my gaze into the rivets of the Caster’s rear door. Ettian gives me a second to decide this is what I really want to do. When it’s passed, he rises slowly from the bench and slips back into the cockpit without another word.
The cold creeps in not long after.
CHAPTER 17
It’s been difficult to lose time during my imprisonment. Every second in platinum cuffs seared into my memory at the beginning of it and every day felt like another tally mark scratched into my skin.
But after Ellit falls—after I betray it—it feels like I blink and find myself aboard an open-topped truck, swept through the streets of the planetary capital in the midst of Ettian’s triumph parade.
The parade’s route takes us down a wide avenue, flanked by skyscrapers built tall and clad in elegantly curved metal that surely should have been stripped for use in starship construction after the planet ceded to Umber in the War of Expansion. Archon’s waste of its resources never ceases to amaze me, but there’s something oddly pleasing about the sight of something so strange, so impossible where I come from. A now-familiar ache pangs in my chest at the thought of how large this galaxy is and how much of it could still be new to me.
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