But now she needs to run.
And fast.
“Please go,” I beg. “Disappear and keep yourself safe.”
She finally listens, her lips kissing my right cheek, then my left. “They can’t touch me,” she whispers. “Not even in death.”
And then she’s gone.
My sweet friend.
I turn on my heel and race down the hall, running as if I could escape it all—my fear for Tirza, my fury at Athan, the realization that my words have done more than I ever imagined and that seeing those Safire tanks burn was a wonderful, beautiful, desolate delight.
Nothing is how I want it to be.
At the grand doorway of the gala, panicked disaster greets me. People bleed out on the ground—Landorian and Savien and Resyan—and Jali cowers in the far corner, her mouth caught in a scream, yet somehow also victorious, like the madness round her is some cataclysmic validation for her entire life, for everything she believes. The “commoners” rising up to steal from the rightful heirs.
“You see,” she seems to say with her arms up in surrender, “the Nahir are everywhere!”
But I don’t see any fighters. And this is far bigger than just the Nahir—I’ve roused an entire defeated kingdom. Who knows how many are now in revolt?
Hundreds?
Thousands?
Everyone important has fled the room, leaving the wounded behind, and I run through the trail of carnage, passing a footman with a hand across his gut, blood leaking between his fingers. Mother is nowhere, and my panic grows. I race for the patio to the main gardens, then stumble to a heart-stammering halt at the shattered glass doors. Spotlights flare. Voices shout roughly. The Commander is there, Safire soldiers shoving men against a wall, their backs to me. The ones lined against the wall face my direction and I recognize Officer Walez.
My Resyan officer.
He’s placed defiantly before Safire guns, and I realize, at once, that this entire night is stretching much too far. Even the defeated army officers have joined the stand. A furious force rushing up from the ruins of surrender, to drown the victorious invaders.
Walez waits for the bullet, his chin raised.
I can’t let them do this—he helped me—and I’m ready to run forward, to throw myself at the Commander in a fit of wild rage, but someone grabs me from behind, dragging me backwards into the shadowed gardens.
“Think,” Athan orders into my ear. “Just think for a moment!”
I struggle against his iron grip. I don’t care. I’m going to save Walez, somehow. This night is on me. My words. But then the report of guns echoes out of sight, too late, and I want to scream into the cold sky.
This is all wrong, no rules of honour or nobility.
War has none of it.
“We have to get out of here,” Athan hisses again into my ear, still holding me against his chest, refusing to let go.
I’m struggling in vain when a fresh shot pierces the air—far too close—and he pushes us both down onto the grass behind a stone fountain. I gasp in pain. My side throbs, shoved against cement, and Athan Dakar’s nearly on top of me as I peer up into his terrified face. His expression is the greatest and worst thing to see at once. It’s too pure. Entirely honest in its fear. For me. Proof of his love—however twisted and mangled.
I glance backwards.
A Safire officer slumps beside a nearby rosebush, his pale temple blossoming red. A sniper’s flawless shot. Was that the shot we just heard? The dead man’s eyes gaze up, still open, and Athan finally loosens his grip on me. Cyar and another Safire boy are crouched behind him. I despise him—and them—but I also don’t want us all to die.
Not like this.
There’s no time to think, and I leap to my feet, the Safire trio looking petrified in the palace lights. “Get up,” I order at them. “I have a way out.”
They don’t move, still cowering while I stand above. Who knows which window the bullet came from, but given the fast progression of this battle, I don’t think they’ll be lingering in any one place for long. I wouldn’t.
“Get up,” I repeat sharply. “You can follow me or face the Nahir yourself.”
“Where?” Cyar asks.
“Your airbase. Then south.”
When in danger, go south. That’s what Lady Havis said.
But Athan shakes his head. “It’s gone. Those were the first explosions.”
“How do you know?”
“Him.” Athan points at the dead officer in the rosebushes.
The corpse still bleeds, bubbling in little spurts. Feeling suddenly vulnerable, I reach down and take the pistol from the fallen man. Athan looks apprehensive, but I click it in defiance. “We both know I can use this. And I’m not leaving without one. Where’s my mother?”
“With my father.”
My heart staggers, and he must see it, because he shrugs desperately. “This whole thing happened too fast and we’re all in danger! Not much choice how we get to safety.”
I want to laugh. Clearly. No one here is safe, certainly not if my mother has been forced to escape with his father. At least I know now she’s capable enough of dealing with him. A woman who can surely protect herself.
“Well, I’m leaving too,” I announce. “And I have an aeroplane.”
Athan still doesn’t move and I realize, right then, he doesn’t trust me any more than I trust him. How quickly our tender certainty has evaporated. One moment true, the next, only a myth. A memory.
But the third boy scrambles to my side out of nowhere, a half-terrified grin on his tanned face. “An airplane? I’m in!”
Cyar looks briefly annoyed, glancing at Athan, but hurries up as well. “Me too.”
Athan is the last one.
He’s deeply suspicious, but there’s a battle beginning in this city and he has no choice. We count to three, then burst full tilt through the gardens. It’s the way Tirza and I always went, through the rear garden wall.
“Where are the rest of your aeroplanes?” I ask Athan over my shoulder as we hurry out into the darkened streets of Madelan. The warm night pulses with energy, the sky alarmingly silent.
“Our nearest base is thirty miles north, but they’ll be on their way.” His meaning is clear. When the bombers arrive, perhaps little in the city will be spared this time. Targeting an unseen enemy who could be anywhere. “If we can’t fly, then we need to take shelter and hide, Ali. We need to wait until—”
“No. I’m taking you south.”
“With what airplane?” Athan demands, stopping us abruptly, his hand yanking on my arm. “There’s nothing left at that base and no Resyan is going to give me their plane!”
“One might.”
Athan looks like he’s not going to move another foot until I can prove it, so I grab Cyar and pull him after me. A willing hostage and Athan surrenders, following. We run down the steep streets of the city, ones I know well now, taking us away from the main avenues. Terrified faces peer from windows. Smoke drifts through the sky. Soon enough, Safire bombers will arrive. The rain of death once more. Panic struggles inside my chest, the awareness that down here, in these alleys, we mean nothing to those beasts of the air. We’ll be consumed. The Safire boys seem to realize the same thing, and their sprinting becomes more insistent.
When my destination appears, I’m not even sure if anyone will be here at this hour, but I bang on the metal hangar door of the civilian airfield. My thumps echo. I’m about to tell Cyar to just shove it open—we’ll figure out how to get the aeroplane once inside—when it swings wide, the old mechanic peering at me nervously, a wrench for a weapon in hand.
“Wandering Girl!” he exclaims.
Thank the stars he recognizes me, even in the weak light of the lamps hissing above. A partially eviscerated engine sits behind him.
“I need one of your aeroplanes,” I plead in Resyan, hoping to woo him, to remind him we’re the same.
He gapes. “You can’t fly! The radio said to stay inside and—” He stops, seeing the
three Safire uniforms behind me, a twitch of anger surfacing. Hatred. But then his eyes are on my face again, and I’m sure he sees the genuine fear in all of us.
“Please, we have no time, sir. Let us fly one of your planes and I’ll give you any reward you ask.”
“I can’t just—”
I pull out my Safire pistol. It glints, pointed at the man’s chest, and finally he sees reason. Swift and true. I don’t dare look over my shoulder to catch the reaction from Athan or Cyar. I don’t care what they think of me right now—they’d do the same.
Sometimes, you need a gun to make a point.
And fast.
Surrendering, the old man waves us into the hangar. It’s tiny and filled with uninspiring planes. No wonder it was spared any attention by the Safire when they arrived to occupy the city. The one he gives us is the largest and most impressive of his small supply. Propellers on either wing with a lumbering body that looks decent enough.
The Safire pilots don’t share my optimism.
“We’re supposed to fly that?” Athan asks.
“It looks like an ugly hippo,” the third boy offers.
“If it has wings, I’ll take it,” Cyar counters. “Ours should be here in about five minutes?”
That’s the observation we need, and we all break for the hippo. Athan and Cyar swing up into the nose to fly it, and the third boy tugs me into the side door. He pulls out a map for coordinating with me and we sit behind the cockpit, in the empty space that’s dirty and sparse.
“I’m Trigg,” he greets, far too cheerful for the situation. “Where are we going, Princess?”
I point out Sanseri, where Lady Havis fled to, but truthfully I have no clue what we’ll find there. I only want to get us away. Anywhere but here.
“We’ll figure it out,” Trigg assures me in Landori as the aeroplane comes to a complaining start. Everything rattling round us. “So, I heard you had a thing with the Lieutenant? Hajari says you like him but not the whole ‘son of the General’ bit, which is understandable. If you still hold any admiration for we Safire pilots and our skill, I’m pleased to say that I actually did grow up on a farm. A real farm, I mean. I’m not making it up. Do you like cows?”
It takes me a moment to realize what he’s saying.
Right now.
In the middle of our escape.
Athan growls at him in Savien—something I suspect isn’t nice—and Trigg obeys, slithering into the narrow cockpit to show them where we’re headed. Cyar pulls back on a lever, the wing flaps creaking sadly.
He tries it again.
More creaking.
Athan draws a breath and glances over his shoulder at me. “Is this because of that damn flower? Because you can have your bad luck back. I don’t want it.”
I hate him for mentioning the orchid, for reminding me of our life before all of this. But it still pulls a tiny, nervous smile from my lips, because he’s right.
I don’t want it either.
We lurch forward, Cyar and Athan arguing away in Savien. The snippets I catch don’t inspire confidence. Trigg motions for me to grab on to whatever’s nearby, and I quickly oblige, gripping stiff leather straps hanging from the metal wall. With a shudder, the old transport plane springs down the runway, surprisingly perky for all its griping. We soar up into an uncertain night sky, a thousand stars beyond the cockpit window. This isn’t the smooth aeroplane Havis brought me in on. This one clatters and reverberates, the propellers a thudding roar against my head. The empty space amplifies the sound.
We’ve only been airborne a moment when Trigg peers out the side window. “Shit.”
It’s in Savien, but I know that word now thanks to five days with Athan.
Athan and Cyar don’t hear with the racket.
“What is it?” I demand, hoping the answer isn’t a disastrous one.
“I think we’ve got friends arriving at ten o’clock high.”
“Friends?”
I don’t dare ask who, or how he can even see anything in this darkness. Nahir. Landorian. Safire. None are ones I want to meet in this grumbling hippo.
“Oh, shit,” he repeats.
“What?”
“Twin cannons!” He turns from the window and flings himself at the cockpit. “Get moving, Captain!”
He changes to Savien abruptly and a very unpromising debate ignites, an unintelligible raucous in the eternal roar of the propellers. It’s all panic. Shouting. Angry things that sound mostly like “I told you so,” and I holler at them to speak in Landori, so at least I can know my own fate, then grip the leather straps and resign myself to death in the air.
Truly, I’d hoped for any other way than this.
At least it might be quick.
I’m about to demand more information when Athan yelps at me in Landori—“Get down!” Trigg dives and pulls me to the metal floor with him. I have only a moment to register the grit poking at my cheeks, the smell of sharp fuel in my nostrils, before fireworks explode above my head. Flashes of colour and light. Obliterating sound. There and gone, and I feel myself beginning to laugh in rebellion of this whole mad death of mine.
Who would have thought?
After a moment of only propellers again, Trigg and I sit up, both of us trembling. Three-inch holes stagger across the far wall of the plane.
“What the hell was that!” I exclaim.
“Nightfoxes, if I had to guess,” Trigg replies. It means nothing to me. “Those shithead bootlickers clearly have terrible aim.”
I almost remind him that it’s pitch-dark out, and it must be difficult to fire anything accurately, but then I don’t know why I’m defending the ones trying to kill us. Athan yells something in Savien over the radio in his hand, Cyar desperately searching different airwaves, but Athan gives up and throws the thing down.
“Hang on!” he shouts in Landori.
“Please remember this isn’t a fighter!” Cyar shouts back at him. “We can’t—”
I have only a brief second to seize the straps again before my stomach flies up into nothing, the floor falling away beneath me. The sensation sifts through my limbs, a growing weightlessness. My head throbs and grey edges into the picture of Trigg across from me, also hanging on for dear life. The propellers hit a high-pitch whine of protest.
Then the dive stops, and the whole thing flings another direction.
I start to slip—up or down, backwards or forwards. I have no clue. I only know that I’m escaping myself, plunging through a place I don’t belong, and something warm and firm grabs my hand. Trigg. He reaches across the little space, trying to say something to me, our hands connected in shared terror, but none of it makes any sense. He might be speaking Savien.
The fireworks hit somewhere behind for a second time.
The tail?
We’re going up again. Things slide backwards, including our map, which Trigg manages to save with an impressive dive and catch. I dare a glance out the cockpit window. All stars. Higher and higher at a mad rate.
This poor aeroplane.
“That was a nice move, wasn’t it?” Trigg calls breathlessly, mustering a brave grin as we level out. “Didn’t think this thing would get up the speed. But look at us go!”
“Where are those foxes now?” I ask, terrified of a repeat.
“Foxes.” He laughs, then stops. “That’s funny, Princess. I don’t know. Might be following us. Might not be.” He squints out one of the three-inch holes. “Hopefully they have more important things to do than tail an unmarked freight train. Hey, Captain? Can you write them up for this?”
Whether Athan does or not, I now have a firsthand report for my notebook. Yes, I was in fact chased by a Safire squadron while in a civilian aeroplane without a drop of armament on it.
I try to steady my panicky fury as we fly straight, the smooth darkness an overwhelming relief. The numb respite before the bruise begins.
Minutes slip past, on and on, when Athan finally says, “Twenty miles out from Sanseri.”
Cyar adjusts the headset, fiddling with the radio. “Hello, hello, can you read? We’re coming in from Madelan, in a … a…”
“A hippo,” Trigg supplies, kneeling between them in the cockpit.
Cyar makes a face at him, and pretends instead the radio is hitting static, obscuring whatever it is we’re flying. “We need to put down immediately,” he says in Landori. “Losing fuel at 3,000 feet.”
I’m glad I didn’t know that part before.
“Damn stupid thing,” Athan mutters.
One of the engines sputters pathetically in retaliation.
A propeller slows.
“Talk nicer to it,” Trigg scolds. “You’re being mean.”
He begins to stroke the metal sides, murmuring, and I’m truly not sure what to make of him.
“Oh, I’ve got someone!” Cyar says, excitement renewed. He listens. His smile fades. “And they’re not letting anyone land.”
“But we’re local,” Athan protests.
Cyar looks at him pointedly.
“At least we are until we land,” Athan amends.
“Now they’re jabbering at me in Resyan.” Cyar drops the mouthpiece. “What the hell do we do?”
“Give it to me,” I order, crawling forward on my knees. I push Trigg out of the way and take his spot between them, trying to reach for the headset.
Cyar glances at me skeptically.
“Give it to her,” Athan tells him.
He relents and I quickly have the earphones over my head. I shout rather aggressively in Resyan for someone to listen to me. I have no patience left.
There’s a lengthy pause, then a hesitant voice. “I copy you. Resyan plane?”
“Yes,” I say, curbing my frantic frustration. “We’re mostly Resyan on board and we’ve escaped the attack in Madelan. Please. We’re low on fuel and need to put down.”
“Losing fuel?”
“One propeller has almost stopped. I’m sure things are worse than that, but I don’t know what to tell you. I never fly. I hate flying,” I add, hoping a distressed girl on a doomed aeroplane is enough to move them to sympathy. “I’m friends with Lady Havis?”
It’s a last-ditch effort. Maybe someone in Sanseri knows her.
“What’s he saying?” Athan questions, beginning to struggle now at the controls.
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