by Galaxy Craze
The stopwatch around Tanner’s neck told me it was still five minutes before six. I glanced in the direction of the chapel. By the sound of the cries coming from that way, and the damage to the tunnel, I was pretty certain the chapel had been destroyed. I doubted there would be any survivors.
Oh God, I thought, what if Mary was in the chapel? What if we’d just miscalculated the time, or they hadn’t left her entrance for last?
“We have to check the chapel,” I said, limping along the passageway that led there. Tanner nodded, following close behind me.
* * *
The sight of the royal chapel reduced to rubble and ash sent a pang of sorrow through my heart. So much history had happened here—weddings, funerals, centuries’ worth of prayers through times of peace and war. And now all of it was gone, replaced by blood and chaos.
Demkoe’s fallen soldiers were recognizable only by their uniforms, their cadet hats and those navy blue shirts badged with red-stitch lettering. Their bodies lay in pieces across the floor.
Those who weren’t dead were gruesomely injured. All those young soldiers and orphans, some of them missing arms or legs or both. I recognized the head of the bald, tattooed pirate who’d thrown Wesley’s body over the railing of the tanker. It was no longer connected to the rest of its body.
I fought the urge to vomit.
The harem girls had worn their best dresses for the occasion, the ones adorned with sequins and silk flowers. There was baby’s breath in their hair.
“Tindra and Ami,” I found myself saying aloud. They’d died side by side, as they so often were in life.
I suppose I was crying, because Tanner pulled me away to a quiet corner where there were no bodies.
“Don’t look.” He brought my head to his shoulder, covering my eyes. “Nothing good will come of it.”
But I had to keep looking. I had to know for sure that Mary hadn’t been present during the blast.
“Where is he?” I heard Silver call out, his usually tempered voice sounding wild.
The rebels were desperately searching through the wreckage, picking through body parts with their bare hands, to try to find any sign of the man who’d been the only real target.
“Nothing so far, Silver,” a young man’s voice replied.
But after a few minutes, it became apparent that Demkoe’s body was conspicuously absent from the rubble. Not whole or in pieces. No general’s uniform or marriage tuxedo was among the debris.
Any sign of Mary, I noted, was also thankfully absent. Tanner met my eyes, acknowledging the same thought. “I think we did it,” he said quietly. “Mary must be safe and sound in her bedroom.”
I nodded. “I think I’ve seen enough,” I said. “Let’s go to her bedroom now.”
“Bring him to me!” Silver’s voice rang out, angry and harsh.
Demkoe? Had they caught him alive? I turned to see for myself.
But the person that the four rebels were dragging into the chapel was Wesley.
“Explain yourself!” Silver demanded. “How could you betray me this way?”
Wesley ignored Silver. The moment that the guards released him, he rushed straight past Silver toward me, throwing his arms around me, almost squeezing the breath from my lungs. But I stepped back, closer to Tanner’s side.
“Eliza,” Wesley said, ignoring Silver, who was hurrying over, still yelling obscenities in his direction. “I was only pretending to support his plan. I had no other choice. He would have never trusted me to plant the bombs otherwise. It was the only way to save your sister.”
Tanner looked on, mentally fitting together the new shapes of the situation.
I was still working it out myself. Wesley was the one who set off the bombs early—just as I’d suggested.
“It was you?” I said.
He nodded. “Seeing you hate me … that was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to live through. I wish I didn’t have to lie to you like that. But I needed him to trust me, completely.” He jerked his chin back, indicating Silver. “Eliza,” Wesley said, his voice the tender one I knew so well, “how could you ever think I would hurt Mary?”
“I don’t know, Wesley,” I said. “I don’t know a lot of things anymore.”
Wesley’s eyes shot from me to Tanner and back again, and I saw my own hurt and confusion reflected in his gaze.
“Thank you, though,” I said, unable to choke back my tears. “For saving Mary.”
Silver had found his fists by this point. Overcome by fury, he had wound back to punch Wesley in the chin—but Tanner caught Silver’s fist with his wide-open palm and shoved him backward.
Wesley blinked in a surprise equal to my own. Of all the people to stick up for him, Tanner.
The two of them, Wesley and Tanner, braced themselves for a fight. They raised their fists like boxers, like brothers who suddenly had each other’s back.
By the looks of the surrounding rebels—the way they shifted their weight and their eyes—I got the sense that if this conflict of wills spun out into hand-to-hand combat, they would side with Wesley over Silver.
Silver seemed to sense it, too. He backed down and went back to shouting orders. “I want Demkoe dead or alive! Find him. He couldn’t have gone far!” Then he looked at me. “I hope you’re happy,” he said. “This was all for you.”
It occurred to me at that moment that although I was right about Mary being saved by setting the bombs off earlier, Silver was right, too. Because setting the bombs off early had saved Mary, but it also spared Demkoe. And now the most dangerous Ryker of all was still out there.
Tanner stepped forward to join me on my right side, Wesley on my left.
“Murdering the queen of England should never have been part of the plan,” Wesley said.
Silver stormed away as the rebels returned to their search for Demkoe.
“Don’t listen to him, Eliza,” Wesley said. “It’s not your fault Demkoe got away.”
But my mind was already racing ahead. “We have to get to Mary,” I said. “If Demkoe is still alive, and still in the palace, we need to find her. Now.”
31
As I ran through the hallway and up the carpeted main stairs of the palace, through assorted packs of rebel soldiers, it struck me that my home was still occupied—just by a different set of uniforms.
As Silver had planned, the rebels had moved into the palace quickly and efficiently. On the whole they may have been a ragtag group of young radicals, but Silver was successful in harnessing them into an effective unit. By the time Tanner, Wesley, and I were nearing Mary’s bedroom, whatever Ryker soldiers hadn’t been killed by the rebel forces had thrown down their weapons and surrendered.
The rebels were good. Demkoe’s Ryker army was bad. Right? So these guards now stomping through the palace should have felt good, on my side. But once blood started spilling, once the bodies began hitting the ground, once one leader had been displaced by a new leader … Who could tell the difference? Would Silver and these rebels really turn out to be any less power-hungry and evil than Demkoe’s Ryker army?
It would take Mary’s light touch to know just how to reclaim our home for ourselves, while leading England in a way these rebels—and even Silver—would deem fair and just.
Mary could do it, because she was different. She’d already proven that once. And when the dust of this terrible day settled, when the palace floors had been scrubbed clean of blood, Mary would rise up as the queen that England needed, just as she had after the tragedies that led to her coronation. She would rebuild England a second time over, piece by piece, leading with strength, not force, leading as she always did—by example.
There was nothing Mary wouldn’t do for her country. I just wished, for her sake, that she wouldn’t have to do it alone. If only Eoghan had gone to Scotland with the boys, instead of recklessly trying to rescue us from the palace.
I reached Mary’s bedroom, with Wesley and Tanner running alongside me. I stopped for a moment, hesitating, and glanced at both of them
. After all these weeks of considering them at opposite ends of a spectrum in my mind—one alive and one dead, one dark and one fair, one standing by me and one betraying me—after all that, it felt strange to see them side by side, unified by a single purpose.
No one was guarding Mary’s bedroom door from any army. “Do you want me to go first?” Wesley asked, just as Tanner said, “Let me lead, just in case.”
I couldn’t answer either of them. I just placed my hand on the doorknob and turned. It wasn’t locked. The heavy wooden door flew open easily.
Mary, in her white lace wedding dress, was sprawled out facedown on the floor.
“Mary!” I screamed, but she didn’t lift her head at the sound of my voice. She didn’t move at all.
I ran to her.
I thought she may have been crying, or worse, that she’d been hit and knocked unconscious by a piece of debris sent flying by the blast of the chapel. But her bedroom appeared unaffected by the bombs. There was no sign of a struggle, and there was no sign of injury anywhere to her body.
I turned her over, took her face into my hands. Her cheeks were blushed with rouge. Her eyes were delicately lined and beautifully shadowed. I could see the care Ami and Tindra must have taken to blend and shade layer after layer of rose pink and lavender, soft beige and plum, to create a shimmering mauve that framed Mary’s eyes like freshly bloomed hydrangeas.
I searched her smooth pale wrist for a pulse. “Mary!” Why wasn’t she responding?
And then I knew. But I tried to push away the knowledge, keep it at bay for a few moments. I shut the door on it, refused to acknowledge it, but it scratched at the door like an insistent, hungry wolf. A familiar and ominous dread filled my chest and limbs, as if my physical body understood what was happening before my brain did, because it remembered the feeling of this—this sensation of tragedy.
Mary was dead.
How many people would die before my eyes? My mother. My father. Wesley, though he had somehow come back to me. And now Mary. Sweet, strong, brave Mary, my big sister and my best friend.
“Eliza,” Wesley’s voice said, but he sounded very far away, like he was speaking to me through a long tunnel.
He knelt down and picked up a glass bottle from the floor. It was small and square, with an eyedropper for a top.
“It’s poison,” Wesley said, as if I hadn’t recognized the sinister bottle for what it was. “And it’s empty.”
But I refused to look at it. I would look only at Mary for these last few moments, so that I could remember her like this, her cheeks flushed as though she were just asleep. Her body was still warm.
The neckline of her wedding dress dipped down at her chest. The skin there was flawless, like sweet cream. I placed my hand over her heart and waited, hoping against hope.
Nothing. Her heart was still.
Tanner stood over me. He had a wrinkled piece of parchment paper in his hand that he’d found on Mary’s desk. “Eliza,” he said, in the same tone Wesley had used to say my name. He held the paper out so I could read it.
I told you I’d rather die than marry you.
It had been scrawled hurriedly in black ink, by Mary’s hand.
“But she’s still warm,” I cried out.
And then I realized that once again I had failed Mary. We’d arrived too late. Just barely too late.
Now I had all the time in the world to sob over my sister’s dead body.
Wesley and Tanner stood back, knowing to just let me cry, to leave me be. But they watched me carefully—so carefully in fact, they missed the quick footsteps approaching from behind. They never even saw what hit them.
All I heard was the double thump-thump of the butt of a gun to each of their heads, followed by the sound of their unconscious bodies hitting the floor.
32
Wesley and Tanner were out cold on the ground, my sister lay dead in my arms, and it was just Demkoe and me, face to face.
“What a shame,” he said, clearly not caring at all. “I guess that leaves just you and me now, Eliza.”
His long blond hair had been slicked back with a shiny gel. His pale blue eyes looked translucent. I could almost see the light passing through them. I felt like if I looked close enough I could see straight through to his brain—to his warped, psychopathic thoughts.
“I suppose you’ll have to do,” he said. “As my bride. Though you’re not nearly as pretty as your sister.”
He took a few steps closer. The gun he’d used to knock out Wesley and Tanner had been returned to his belt.
“I’d developed a real affection for Queen Mary,” he said. “To be quite honest, I was truly hurt by this.”
He dropped his fingers toward Mary’s dead body and the note still at her side. “I told you I’d rather die than marry you. It’s true, she did tell me. But who knew she was telling the truth?” He threw his head back and laughed. “Leave it to Queen Mary to keep her word, I suppose.”
Kneeling down slightly, he beckoned me with his long index finger. “I’m going to need you to come with me, Eliza. And announce to these rebels that we—you and me—are in charge here.”
He was wearing the full dress uniform of a naval commander. A uniform permitted only to a member of the British Royal Navy. Ornamented with stately braids, gold and silver medals, and a sash, the navy blue coat hung heavily on Demkoe’s tall, thin frame. I knew its every ceremonial button and ribbon well. It was the same suit my father had proudly worn when he married my mother.
I stood up and stared him down with fury. My legs shook. There was a sound in my head, only in my head—a whoosh. It was the sound of a mind ignited, burning fast toward explosion. I had no weapon, but that made no difference to me.
I lunged for his face, his icy-blue eyes, with my fingernails.
He was stronger than me, a trained fighter, but that made no difference. Pure rage, with nothing to lose, is unstoppable.
I remember nothing.
But when it was over, my body was sticky with blood not my own, my fingers were all broken, purple and throbbing. Demkoe was dead, a horrific pile of gore lying not far from Mary’s body—which by now must have finally begun growing cold.
There was a knife on the ground beside my feet. It was pulpy with flesh, spattered with blood and bone. It must have belonged to Demkoe. I must have gotten it from his holster, or wrestled it from his hand.
The room started to spin. A sound like a blaring siren filled my ears, bringing me down to my knees. I got the sense that I’d turned invisible, that I no longer existed at all. It was the last thing I remembered before everything disappeared in a soft, velvety veil of darkness.
33
A white gauze curtain fell across the window’s glass, muting the pale afternoon light. The sky appeared clearer to me than I’d seen it in a long time. It took me a second to realize that there were people working on the palace grounds, and the land surrounding it. They were sweeping, sowing, putting broken pieces back together. Regular people in normal clothes. No uniforms were in sight, no weapons. Only the tools of rebuilding.
I felt my shoulders settle. I was in my old bedchamber in the palace, and despite all the terrible things that had happened, the worst was over. It had to be.
A knock at my bedroom door took my attention from the window.
“Eliza?” a familiar voice called out.
I turned quickly to see Polly, back from Scotland. I ran to her, wrapped my arms around her. I tried to speak, but no words would come, only coughs of sadness and relief.
Polly smiled sadly, revealing the gap between her two front teeth.
“They radioed us right after everything happened,” she said.
I couldn’t remember anything since I attacked Demkoe. “How long has it been?” I asked.
She looked at me carefully. “Two days, I think. You were out pretty hard after everything that happened. They said it was shock.” She paused. “We got here as quickly as we could.”
“We?” I looked to th
e doorway to see who was with her.
“Jamie’s downstairs,” Polly said. “With Aiden and Liam. He’ll be up in a minute.”
Jamie and Aiden and Liam were all okay. And then I remembered that Aiden and Liam had no parents anymore, no Eoghan or even Mary to take care of them, and I felt a deep, hollow ache inside my chest.
“How is Jamie?” I asked Polly.
“As well as can be expected, under the circumstances.” She was still holding me in her arms.
I dropped onto my bed, resting my back against the headboard and drawing my knees in toward my chest. Polly scooted up to sit next to me, just the way we always used to when we were little.
She pulled her reddish-brown hair back and twisted it into a bun, frowning in concentration. I focused on the familiar constellation of light freckles across her nose as she held both my hands.
“Mary’s funeral has been scheduled for tomorrow,” she said. Her round green eyes watched me for a reaction.
“Okay.” I nodded.
“We’ll get through it together,” Polly said. “I know it’ll be difficult. But you’re not alone in this, Eliza. And once you’re crowned you’ll …”
Just then a figure appeared in the doorway, lanky and leaning, unsure whether to enter or knock.
“Jamie,” I said. I had never been so glad to see anyone in my whole life. “Thank goodness you’re safe.”
He had a small backpack on his shoulders, which he dropped onto the floor. He remained in the doorway, staring at me with his wide blue eyes, as if he couldn’t believe it was really me.
“Well, don’t just stand there!” I said, opening my arms to him. “Come here and hug me!”
That brought a smile to his face. He looked tired and sad, but healthy. His cheeks were round and full, and his hair was thick and shining. He stood up straight, with the posture of a full-grown man even though he was still just a boy. I said a silent prayer of thanks that he was all right, that neither dark-star poisoning nor the Ryker invasion had managed to destroy him.