Zura turns to the back of the car.
“Everyone ready?”
A cheer comes from the others as they pull themselves from hiding.
We’re going in to get Boss X.
We pile out of the hovercar, our two Specials carrying Kessa Shard to the door. Boss Charles, Col, and Yandre take up positions around me, their clothes and hiking boots turned Security blue.
I stand among them, my wrists bound, staring at the floor.
As the door opens, the two Specials bolt forward, dropping Kessa like a sack of recycling. Yandre barely catches her before she hits the floor.
The rest of us crowd through, into a small anteroom with a desk facing a dozen wallscreens. The officer who was waiting to greet Kessa is on the floor, out cold.
I look around for cams, my vision implants set for any flicker of reflection.
Nothing, and my badge shows zero dust signal.
As we suspected, Security doesn’t want what happens in their headquarters to go down in history.
Zura has her ear pressed to the other door in the anteroom. She turns to us with a shake of her head.
“Soundproofed. Kessa likes her privacy.”
I scan the wallscreens—the HQ is full of chaos, people running, loading into hovercars. They flinch at every rumble coming through the walls.
“There,” I say, pointing with my bound hands.
One of the screens shows a large room, two dozen Security officers seated at a long table, focused on shimmering airscreens. A bigger version of the dust control room in my father’s tower.
In the background is a door with three stars on it.
“Yandre,” I say, “we could crash the dust citywide from in there, right? Like at the Battle of Shreve?”
They don’t answer.
“Frey,” Col says. He’s kneeling beside Yandre, both of them staring at the screen in the lower right corner of the wall.
It shows a small room—a bare cell.
Pacing the floor is Boss X.
I drop to my haunches. I’ve never seen X look nervous and twitchy before. But he can hear the barrage coming down around us, and he’s helpless.
I throw away my thoughts of crashing the dust.
We have to save him first.
“Can you tell where that is?” Col asks me.
I shake my head. The cell is featureless, no numbers or symbols on the door.
A rush of anger goes through me—none of the other screens show prisoners. Kessa Shard only wanted to watch Boss X, with all his lupine grace and strength, sealed inside that tiny space.
“We go through the control room,” Zura says. “Just me, Yandre, and our prisoner. We’ll get someone to guide us to the cells.”
I shake my head. “Real Security officers would know where to go.”
“We’ll be visitors,” she says, reaching for her sleeve. Her uniform changes from deep blue to black and gray—Shreve military colors.
“You think soldiers would bother with a shoe thief?” I ask.
“They’ll think the shaming was cover for something bigger. You’re a saboteur now, Islyn—look the part!”
I don’t argue, but something in me doesn’t trust this plan. Maybe it’s just my revulsion at being paraded around with cuffs on.
Somehow I feel shame for a crime I didn’t even commit.
“What about the rest of us?” Col asks.
Zura points at Boss X. “Watch that screen. If we get in trouble, storm the control room, then come find us.”
Lodge grumbles about being left behind, but Col and Boss Charles nod their heads. Yandre grabs everyone’s explosives, their control jacks, all the gear we brought to force a cell door.
Col kisses me. “We’re almost home.”
Not really. But maybe my real home is a battle.
Yandre and Zura stand by the door in black and gray. Their fake uniforms have no rank stripes, no campaign patches. But that only makes them look more intimidating, like they’re in some secret unit with no insignia.
I hang my head, letting everything I felt in those moments talking to Dramond show on my face.
The door opens with a gentle push.
As we walk out, everyone in the control room snaps to attention, expecting Kessa Shard. They look baffled to see two soldiers leading out a prisoner.
Someone steps forward—a full colonel, the ranking officer in the room.
He salutes, glancing past us. “Is the commander … ?”
“Busy with an interrogation,” Zura says. “We need an escort to the cells.”
The colonel hesitates. Zura’s accent is shaky, but her military air is unmistakable.
Then he sees me, and recognition flickers across his face.
In that expression, all the contradictions of Shreve tangle before my eyes. My city has killed tens of thousands with its wars but saves its righteous hatred for people who don’t pick up their trash.
I am the enemy. Not the dictator in his tower. Not the free cities catapulting fire and metal from the sky.
The girl who broke the rules.
“Corporal!” the colonel barks. “Escort them to the priority cells!”
As we walk, the stone floor shudders underfoot.
Every few seconds, another barrage convulses the headquarters. No alarms are ringing, but the whole structure feels unsteady.
I wonder how long before the free cities reduce it to rubble over our heads.
How important are a few rebels? Or the exiled heir of a conquered city? Maybe only my presence stays their hand.
And in the end, how important am I? The free cities don’t seem to be leaving me much of Shreve to lead.
It takes only a few minutes to reach the first row of cells. But that’s just the start—hallways of locked doors reach out in every direction, spokes on a giant wheel.
A stack of wheels, it turns out. We descend one, two, three flights of stairs. There must be hundreds of prisoners here.
Or thousands …
In Shreve, you’re only shamed for small crimes. If you do anything that threatens the regime, you simply disappear. All those faces in my father’s portrait gallery—the politicians he supplanted, the resisters he erased, the protesters who were foolish enough to believe Rafi and me.
What if they’re all still here?
We walk for long minutes past rows of cells, the young corporal taking quick, nervous steps. He locks eyes with me once, but his gaze isn’t hateful. He feels sorry for me.
He suspects this building is falling down tonight, and thinks I won’t be leaving before it does.
“She’s one of the vandals, isn’t she?” he asks.
Yandre and Zura glance at each other.
The corporal goes on without prompting. “The AI was lighting up all afternoon. Flagging someone every minute. Like all the cliques in the city were messing with us!”
I find myself pleased again that the Futures came through.
“We should’ve known an attack was coming,” he mutters, then falls silent.
Our pace is slowing at last. We’re on the lowest level, on an offshoot of one of the longer spokes, a row of cells with heavier doors. The floor here is bedrock stone, painted a dark, dull red.
“Where do you want her?” the corporal asks.
“With the rebels,” Zura says.
He frowns. “Only one rebel in the priority cells.”
“Okay, then,” Yandre says. “Put her next to the wolf-man.”
The corporal’s eyes go wide. “You know about him?”
“We’re old friends.” Yandre grins. “We were with the unit that brought him in.”
“Whoa.” If the corporal notices their accents, he’s too impressed to care.
He leads us farther down the bloodred hall.
“Is it true, he brought down a heavy battle drone with a pulse lance?”
“Two,” I say.
All of them look at me.
“Two drones, not two pulse lances.” I give them
a shrug. “I was there too.”
The corporal stares at me. “But … you’re just that girl who stole the shoes!”
“Don’t believe everything you see on the feeds,” I say.
He slows to a halt, still frowning. Then he nods at a door. “They’re real careful with him, no contact allowed. I’ve only seen him on the screens.”
“You mean, you never open the cell?” Zura asks.
The corporal nods. “Only the commander’s authorized.”
Zura swears in elegant Spanish—we’ve left Kessa and her retinas behind—then punches the corporal in the stomach.
He keels over, and she pulls a dart from her pocket and sticks him.
Yandre is already kneeling at Boss X’s cell door, a control jack in hand. Its tendrils snake into the wall, searching for the mechanisms of the lock.
I make a fist, my variable blade flitting out to snip the handcuffs, and kneel to take the corporal’s sidearm in my left hand.
Zura sighs. “A pistol and a sword. You look like a pirate.”
“Like that’s a bad thing?” I ask.
Yandre is staring at the jack’s readout. “This door needs two commands to open it—one from out here, another from the control room.”
“Just blow it up,” Zura says.
Yandre takes a moment to answer. “Maybe the outer door, if I use everything we’ve got. But there’s an inner layer—designed to fragment in an explosion.”
“Like a grenade.” I close my eyes, seeing my father’s fingerprints. “If we blow the door, all those fragments fly into the cell.”
Cutting Boss X to ribbons.
Zura swears again. “You mean, we have to go back and take the control room?”
A deep rumble goes through the building, rolling the bedrock beneath us. For a moment, it’s like standing on the deck of a ship.
“We might not have time,” Yandre says. “Maybe if I do it in two steps—a small charge first, to shatter the inner layer.”
“And risk killing a rebel boss in his cell?” Zura asks. “Better to walk away.”
“We aren’t leaving,” I say.
All three of us stand and listen to the distant battle, helpless.
“Finesse, not power,” Zura finally says. “That knife your sister gave you.”
“It’s just smart plastic. It can’t cut through solid …” My voice fades.
My gift for X.
I draw the antique pulse lance. It whirs to life, the blade extending. That familiar buzz in my hands, but a hundred times more intense.
Squeezing the weapon to full pulse, I place its tip against the door. The metal rings out, vibrating in sympathy with the lance.
If X hears that tone, he’ll know to stand back.
I swing the lance straight down, cutting top to bottom.
The buzzing blade slices through the door, flinging out an angry cloud of pulverized metal. The particles swirl around me, the air aglitter, the taste of steel in my mouth.
Two more roaring strokes, and a chunk of the door crashes inward.
The opening is a ragged triangle, its edges glowing.
Boss X steps through, his dark coat shiny with metal dust. His lupine nails are long, his fur unkempt. He’s hardly wearing any clothes, like his captors wanted him to look less human in that cell.
His eyes scan me up and down, taking in my stance, my expression, and the way I hold a pulse weapon.
“Camo-surge?” he asks.
“Yes, Boss,” I say, breathless.
A grin crosses his face. “I thought it might be you. From the first explosion—sounds like Frey.”
Something breaks apart inside my chest.
X knows me, even with this lie of a face. Even though our last conversation was the worst I’ve ever had.
He gently takes the lance from my hands. “How kind of you.”
I hold him in my arms, taking in the strength, the heat of him. His coat smells like rain somehow.
He squints at the others through the swirl of metal dust.
“Yandre, obviously,” he says, and then, “And the Palafox Special?”
“You got it, Boss,” Yandre says, as a distant explosion rumbles the floor.
“Can you run?” Zura asks.
“Of course,” X says. But he doesn’t move.
“Come on, then,” Zura says. “This whole place could come down any second!”
“I know.” X’s eyes travel down the row of cell doors. “That’s why we have to let the rest of them go.”
Yandre is the first to speak.
“We can’t blow the doors, Boss—they’re booby-trapped. But there’s a control room, maybe twenty officers on duty. If we can capture it, we can open the cells.”
“Is it just us four?” X asks.
“Three more,” Yandre says. “Boss Charles, Col Palafox, and a Special, standing by near the control room.”
The two of them ignore me and Zura, speaking a shared tongue of certainty—ally or stranger, rebels don’t leave anyone in a cell.
I realize again that I’m not one of them. (Would my sister, Boss Frey, pause to rescue them all?)
“We can’t save hundreds of people,” Zura says, not realizing that arguing is pointless. “We’re in the middle of a war!”
“The perfect time.” X checks the charge on his pulse lance. “And the perfect place—surrounded by the enemies of our enemy.”
He takes a few steps down the corridor, the lance buzzing back to life in his hands.
With one elegant cut, he cleaves a perfect hole in the next door. A few steps later, the one after that.
Soon the hallway is full of choking clouds of metal dust. The roar of the pulse lance blends with the distant thunder of explosions, until it sounds like the world is crumbling.
Stunned, half-awake prisoners begin to step from their cells, discovering that they’ve been rescued by a half-naked wolf-man wielding a shrieking blade.
“You think the control room is seeing this?” I ask Yandre. There could be scores of Security officers still in the building.
“Yes.” Yandre steps through the hole into Boss X’s cell, looks up at the corner, and makes two rebel hand signs.
Back in Kessa Shard’s office, Boss Charles has her orders.
X’s pulse lance is running down. He decides to save what’s left of the battery, waving us down the hall after him.
He’s the boss now.
His crew is me, Yandre, and Zura, along with the motley gaggle of priority prisoners. I recognize a few—my father’s political rivals from a decade ago, walking stunned through the rumbling corridors. A handful are Victorian army officers, who still look battle-fit. Yandre and Zura give them what weapons they can spare. I recognize a member of the Paz post-quake resistance and hand her my pistol.
As we move down the hall, the last prisoner in line is an older woman in a gray kimono. Her frame is slight, her movements elegant. She looks too frail to have threatened my father.
I take her arm, and she turns to me …
My heart skids.
It’s Sensei Noriko.
When we were little, Noriko was Rafi’s etiquette master.
She taught my big sister the tea ceremony, how to use a fan, how to wave to crowds. All the precise degrees of bowing, to greet the more and less powerful of our father’s business partners. And also subtler arts, like how to graciously apologize.
I copied many things that Rafi learned from Noriko, but I only met the woman once. There was a curtsy I could never get quite right, so Rafi convinced me to take her place one day in etiquette class.
With her perfect eye for movement, it took only a few minutes for Noriko to see that I was an impostor.
The next day, she disappeared forever.
That was eight years ago.
“Thank you, young lady,” she says, her weight leaning into me. “It’s been some time since I’ve taken a walk.”
I open my mouth, with no idea of what to say.
Do I re
veal who I am? Blame my sister for the trick that cost Noriko everything? Tell her that my father, her true tormentor, may soon be in a cell himself?
My only certainty is that I’m the last person she wants to see in her first moments of freedom.
“Lean on me all you need,” I say.
There’s a shout from ahead.
Gunfire erupts.
I cover Noriko with my body, but the firefight lasts only seconds. Then we’re moving again, the two of us straggling behind the rest of the crew.
For a moment, I wonder why my father put her in with the priority prisoners, an etiquette master among soldiers, politicians, and freedom fighters.
But she knew his greatest secret—me.
I stare at the cell doors stretching out before us. How many other secrets will we unleash today?
The walk back to the control room takes longer than the way here. We’re a crowd, negotiating stairways and blind corners, fighting stray Security officers in our path.
But there are no coordinated attacks, no sentry drones; there’s no knockout gas coming through the vents. Col and the others must have taken the control room.
Security is a snake with its head cut off, writhing around us.
Or maybe not.
“Do you hear that?” Noriko whispers beside me.
I almost think she’s joking, with a war in its birth pangs all around us. But then I hear them—running footsteps from behind me.
We’ve just passed a junction of two corridors.
“To the rear!” I cry out.
I charge back at the junction, making a fist to summon my variable blade.
They step into view before I can reach the corner, half a dozen Security officers. But they don’t have shock wands or pistols—
Five of them are armed with autocannon, rotary machine guns as wide as firehoses. The staple of Shreve’s crowd control, they can spray a hundred rounds a second.
Those five fall into line across the hall, ignoring me. Another officer stands behind them, ready to give the order.
This corridor has no cover, no bends, no place to hide.
Within seconds, they’ll kill us all.
I skid to a halt, turning back toward the prisoners.
“Hold your fire! Everyone!”
Most of them freeze—they’re unarmed, still dazed from the shock of freedom.
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