I throw out a hand just in time to catch Wen across the chest. “Easy,” I mutter.
She bristles. “I’m starting to understand why you cut loose on her face,” she murmurs back.
Hanji raises a stiff eyebrow at us. “When’d you two get so friendly? Would have thought the new empire’s most valuable prisoner and its most valuable player were kind of on opposite ends of the spectrum.”
“Long story,” I grumble as I set myself in the seat opposite her.
Hanji shrugs. “I’ve got nowhere else to be. Unlike some of us, Ettian doesn’t let me walk around freely.”
I give her a withering look. “Probably has something to do with the fact that I haven’t shot him through the gut.”
Hanji’s smile stays, as ever, but her features darken. “See, that’s the crux of the thing I’m trying to understand. Why isn’t he afraid of you? You were always the foolish one, not Ettian. So why’s he letting your leash get so long?”
Wen steps up to the table. “This isn’t a two-way street,” she says, looming over Hanji—a feat possible only because our prisoner is seated and cuffed to the table. “You’re here to answer questions, not ask them.”
“Look at you.” Hanji leers, squinting at Wen. Belatedly, I realize she must not be allowed to wear her glasses or any sort of corrective lenses. “Ettian’s little firecracker. What’s your story?”
Wen straightens, her muscles going taut with wrath. But she’s smart enough not to take Hanji’s bait and snap back with something like, I said no more questions. Coaxing her into cooperation is going to take a clever hand and more than just gut reactions.
Still, the look on Wen’s face would have almost every cadet at the academy pissing their pants. Hanji just smirks, her gaze shifting slowly and deliberately back to me. “Cousin.”
“Dream big,” I spit back.
She scoffs. “I may not have a title to flash around, but I do have blood ties to the Gordan System. We’ve got a great grandparent in common, dipshit. But I’ve got an older sister who’s taking the bloodright and four vicious younger sisters who’re intent on taking it out from underneath her. All I wanted was a cushy officer’s appointment that would get me clear of that mess and give me a few dreadnought batteries to point at any of the little monsters if they try to come for me. And do you know what I got because of you, cousin?”
I tilt my hands as I shrug, making sure she sees the glint of the platinum cuffs around my wrists.
“Did Ettian ever tell you how he made it to Trost from the academy during the invasion of Rana?”
I give her a flat stare, Umber imperial for no.
“Ettian used me and Rin. Tracked us down during evac operations and told us he needed to get to you and he needed a big distraction to do it. We set off Ollins’s fireworks, which was…not appreciated in the middle of that particular situation, let’s just say. And that bit of dumbassery came back to bite us in a big way when our mutual friend decided to drop the fact that he was the ruttin’ Archon heir.”
Hanji kicks the table, straightening abruptly. I startle, then scowl—first because it brings a merry spark to Hanji’s eyes and then deeper because I realize Wen didn’t even flinch.
“I went down,” Hanji snarls. “Rin went down. Ollins went down just for welcoming Ettian on the base when he landed. Hell, Rhodes even got busted for helping us make those goddamn fireworks. Ettian Nassun—Ettian emp-Archon—rutted over everyone he called a friend. None more so than you, if I may be so bold as to point out. But unlike you, we got held accountable for our failures right away. The four of us got handed guns and thrown to the front while you’ve been sauntering around a stolen dreadnought like you own the ruttin’ place—”
I snap my fingers. And startlingly enough, Hanji Iwam—the very same Hanji I once saw mouth off to the academy head when he made a comment about her refusing corrective surgery for her eyesight—falls immediately silent. Her smile takes on a bitter tilt, and next to me, Wen makes a small, surprised hum. “Enough of that,” I say as lightly as I can manage. “So you’ve been on the front for the past several months. Made your way to Ellit. And what, just took it upon yourselves to assassinate the emperor? Why you?”
Hanji’s expression darkens, her lips pursing as if she’s just swallowed a sour candy. “Berr sys-Tosa is a coward, but the nice thing about being a coward is that it teaches you how to stretch your resources. There’s always got to be someone left over to throw in front of you when shit goes sideways. So he saves the pros for when he needs the pros. And for jobs like this, there’s dipshits like us.”
“And where’s the rest of ‘us’?” I ask.
Her gaze slips past me to the mirror at my back. “I would like to tell you, Your Highness,” she says carefully. “But I would rather discuss the matter in a black box where our enemies aren’t listening in on all sides.”
“Am I not your emperor?” I ask, letting a dangerous edge bleed into the words. She let herself be silenced with a snap. She let me beat her to a pulp and didn’t raise a single hand against me. She should be tripping over herself to answer my questions.
“You’re the Umber heir, jackass,” Hanji says. “But from what I’m seeing here, you’re compromised by the enemy. I can respect your station, but I don’t have to give up my friends’ lives just because you snap your fingers at me.”
I glance sidelong at Wen. “How hard would it be to set up a black box for the two of us?”
“I believe it’d be a little bit easier to start chopping off fingers,” Wen replies stonily.
“Oh, come on, where’s that stodgy Archon honor?” Hanji jokes.
“I’m Corinthian, longshot,” Wen replies. I swear Hanji’s tan skin grays slightly. “And your rusting ass can fry for what you did to Ettian, for all I care.” She grabs me roughly by the shoulder. “This interview is over.”
But when she yanks me out of the interrogation room and slams the door forcefully behind us, Wen is wearing a triumphant smirk.
And I’m wearing one to match. Sure, Hanji sniped and grinned and prodded every single button we have. And sure, it looked like Wen stormed out in a huff, dragging me with her. But she did so right after Hanji named her terms—and after she divulged that more of our classmates are out there, still plotting against us. Not only do we have the condition under which Hanji will talk, we also have the motivation that will guarantee it’s met.
“Black box?” Wen asks with a nod.
“Name the time and the place.”
* * *
—
Sometimes it astonishes me how quickly Wen’s picked up the Torrent’s system. She’s memorized every tree of the command structure and the exact levers it takes to shuffle them to her will, all while flying under Silon’s radar. I’d assumed when she set out to get a black-box interrogation room set up, it would take a few days to shunt the request through the narrow tunnels of dreadnought bureaucracy.
It takes three hours.
Hanji’s brows furrow when I walk into the new room unescorted. As the door closes behind me and I set myself gingerly on the uncomfortable metal chair opposite her, she tenses up, pulling cautiously at the cuffs that thread her through the ring in the center of the bolted-down table.
“Wen’s the one you should be scared of, not me,” I tell her, tossing a datapad down on the table. “I’ve already had my shot at you. She’s still waiting on her turn.” I push it in range of her cuffed hands. “Black box is set. Nothing goes in, nothing comes out. They’ve given me this datapad with root permissions unlocked. I’m giving it to you. You get to choose how much of this conversation we record and how much we don’t.”
Hanji’s eyes brighten with obvious interest, but she waits until I’ve leaned fully back in my chair to scoop up the datapad. She fiddles with it for a few silent minutes, her clever tower-tech fingers dancing rapidly over the interface as
she checks the processes running on it and throws out a few quick pings to confirm that we’re locked up tight in here. Once she’s satisfied with the security, she tosses the datapad carelessly back on the table.
“Up to your standards?”
“Well, if you start beating the shit out of me again, no one’s gonna know,” she says with a shrug.
This isn’t the Hanji I faced off against just a few hours earlier, the cavalier sniper with her feet up on the table. Sure, that move was one hundred percent her, but she presented us with a single face throughout the entire interrogation. This is a few shades closer to the Hanji I left behind at the academy. The Hanji I knew beyond the cocky facade.
And she’s scared of me—with good reason.
“This was your proposal,” I remind her. “You said you’d talk if it was you and me in a black box.”
“And you put it together suspiciously fast,” she notes.
“Blame Iffan, not me.”
“A Corinthian street rat gets shit done faster than a guy our classmates literally nicknamed ‘The Negotiator’?”
“An Archon lieutenant gets things done faster than a literal prisoner, you mean?”
“Prisoner,” she snorts. “Right.”
I suppress the urge to object outright to her dismissal. I may wear cuffs on my wrists, but I’ve never set foot in this brig before today. I have to respect that distance if I want to get anything useful out of her. “Hey, you could do it too,” I say slyly. “You might be smart enough to pull all the right strings.”
Her gaze sharpens, and for the first time since I entered the room, she leans forward. “Sounds like you’ve been busy.”
I shrug. “It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but then again, that’s the point of it. Most people in this administration think I’m so ineffective that it hardly matters whether they put me in chains or not. Everything that’s happened since Seely and his Wraith Squadron tried to kill me has been either me stumbling into trouble or Ettian yanking me out of it. All they bother with is these”—I clink my cuffs together—“so no one forgets for a second what I am.”
I swear I see a flicker of pity in her eyes, but it’s gone just as quickly as I register it. “And what have you been doing with all of your apparent ineffectiveness?” she asks.
“Pushing here. Prodding there. Making sure Ettian’s doubts are well fed. Wen’s too.” And sacrificing entire planets in the name of baiting the Imperial Fleet into this fight, but I’m not bringing that up just yet. “They don’t see me doing it. They never look at the friction in their administration and realize it traces back to me.”
Hanji nods. “So you’ve been busier than I gave you credit for. I’ll let you slide on that. But then there’s…this.” She points two fingers at the mottled mess of her face. “If I’m going to trust you to take the information I tell you here and not run it back up to the people holding your chains—if you’re really on my side here—why the rut did you try to beat my face in?”
“A moment of weakness,” I tell her, which is as honestly as I can frame it anyway. And because no one’s watching, I sigh and slump in my chair and rest my head in my aching hands. “Remember that night in the cantina on Trisu? When you caught me looking and then needled me nonstop until I admitted my feelings for Ettian went a little deeper than ‘roommate and best friend’?”
I peek up at her between my fingers. Hanji, too, has loosened a little bit, her stare gone somewhere far beyond me. I think for a second we’re both propelled back into a galaxy where I wasn’t a prince, neither of us had seen a war firsthand, and my feelings for Ettian were the fragile, hopeful, harmless beginning of something.
“You were the first person I ever told. You know how long this has been going on. And you put a bullet in him. Not even boltfire—a ruttin’ bullet.”
Hanji sits with that for several agonizing seconds, her tongue probing the inside of her cheek. It’s not enough, my brain screams at me, and I have to force my expression to hold steady. Nothing gets done until she understands why I tried to beat her senseless—and decides that despite that, she can still trust me. “That whole day is a blur for me now,” she says at last. “Which might be because of the head trauma, I dunno. But I look back at the moment I was lining up that shot and I wonder why I didn’t go two feet higher with it. I wonder if I could have, and I just…didn’t.”
“Well, you almost got the job done anyway,” I reply drily. And then, because I can’t help my morbid curiosity—“You were a tower tech. You always said you were happiest directing the action from a distance. How’d you turn out to be the one who took that shot?”
“It’s like I said.” Hanji sighs. “After the academy head let Ettian slip through his fingers, he needed scapegoats. He found the four of us—me, Ollins, Rin, and Rhodes. I mean, we’d spent the past three years making as much trouble as we could humanly manage while still passing our classes. So the bastard was thrilled, of course, that he could set us up to take the fall.”
It’s hardly a surprise that they all fell together. The four of them operated as a single unit of mayhem throughout our time at the academy. If one was clearly complicit in something, it was always a safe assumption that blame fell equally on the other three.
“See, I meant what I said about Berr sys-Tosa being smart about his resources. He had four kids who knew the Archon usurper better than anyone else in his grasp, had nearly three years of academy training under their belts, and worked together like a pack of demons. So he put us under the supervision of a man we only ever knew as the Quartermaster. And the Quartermaster threw us into every single hell he could find at the warfront, waited for us to accomplish whatever task he’d set us to, and scooped up the pieces. But there were always two grander tasks—the reasons our little squad was put together in the first place. The first got me chained to this table. The second’s staring me dead in the face.”
It takes me a full second to realize what she’s implying. “Well, this is some rescue,” I scoff at last.
“Isn’t it?” she asks, looking far too pleased with herself. “For months, no one could even get near you. And now we’re in a black box together.”
I force my eyes to brighten. Force myself to lean in just enough to make her ease back. Play it like I’m eager to get the rut out of here, like I didn’t just talk Wen down from tucking me under her elbow and running barely a week ago. “And what’s next?” I ask around the shape of a wolfish grin.
She beckons for the datapad, and I hand it over. “I’m going to tuck an extra line in the comments of one of your config files. Do you know what that means?”
“Come on, I sat next to you in comms tech.”
“Yeah, and that class was right after morning drills. I remember your snores.”
“Just stick it in and tell me what to do.”
Hanji fixes me with a stare. For a second, I’m not sure what she means by it, but then she wiggles her eyebrows and I nearly smack her on the shoulder.
“Rut right off, Iwam,” I grumble.
“Yeah you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I can’t decide if I wish I was more related to you or less.”
She snorts, and for my part I can feel the laugh building inside me—the release I’ve needed so badly ever since the bullet bent Ettian in half. The fact that I’m sharing it with the girl who shot him only makes me want to laugh harder at what a mess my life has become.
“Okay, but seriously,” she says, tamping down her smile. “I’m encoding this with a Nazyalensky cipher. Decoding it will get you the frequency of my squad’s secure line. It’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to broadcast, but if you need to talk through some options, well. You know where to find me. Once you make contact with them, I’m sure you can make all sorts of magic happen.” She makes like she’s going to pass the datapad back to me, then hesitates.
My heart stutters, certain I’ve just given something away.
“I…I get that I’m stuck here,” Hanji says, staring down at the screen in her hands—or maybe at the cuffs rubbing red circles on her wrists. “I don’t expect you to change that. Like I said, I came here with two missions. I’ll settle for completing one.”
With that, she slides the datapad back across the table. I take it, half expecting it to burst into flames in my hands.
All my life I’ve been told that my people exist to serve me—that my will is the gravitational center of their orbit. It’s one thing to see it in action among the guards assigned to me at the academy, who entered the service knowing full well what it may entail. It’s another thing entirely to see that sacrifice coming from a girl who was pressed into service by Berr sys-Tosa for her ties to Ettian. I once considered Hanji one of my closest confidantes, and now I have to watch her resign herself to Archon custody—a custody she might not survive, given that she put a bullet in their emperor—for the sake of my potential escape.
It weighs me down like a stone around the ankle even after I’ve exited the black box and handed the datapad off to Wen. “Nazyalensky, in one of the config files,” I tell her, praying the words stick in my throat and hating myself when they don’t.
CHAPTER 20
There used to be a precarious balance to the Torrent’s bridge. Iral’s grandeur weighed against Ettian’s greenness. Silon’s prim, proper hand countered Esperza’s improvisational whims. I snuck in for as long as I was allowed, and Wen sat on the fringes, watching and learning as best she could.
Now she’s taken Ettian’s place at his station, and she’s doing her damnedest to hold the floor as the balance tips inexorably toward Iral.
“This empire cannot afford to wait for its ruler to heal,” the general thunders. “We have a window—an opportunity to drive Umber out of the former core once and for all.”
Oaths of Legacy Page 20