by Ada Harper
“Wolf berries,” Lyre muttered with an amused snort. “You named it after wolf berries.”
Well. There was that too. Sabine wasn’t above a good play on words, after all. “I did.”
“No one’s going to take you seriously if you keep that thing around,” Lyre said.
“Perhaps. The Court hasn’t taken me seriously before. It didn’t work out well for them.”
Lyre’s lip twitched. “I remember that. Good times. But the name is just calling attention to it.”
“Strange criticism, coming from one who named herself Liar and went into the intelligence trade,” Sabine pointed out.
Lyre gave an expansive shrug. “Name’s a name. Not my fault if people—”
A leaf-furred wall thudded into her knees. Lyre and Goji froze in the same breath, forcing Sabine to throw out a hand to avoid a collision.
“What is it?” Goji was already shifting her feet anxiously and slowly but surely pressing Sabine against the wall.
“Don’t.” Lyre shoved Sabine by the shoulders until they were wedged in a rusted crack of rubble.
A flare of anger bit up Sabine’s spine. Since the coup, people thought they could herd her, lay hands on her. As if she needed to be taken by the elbow through life. Lyre hadn’t been one of them before. “I haven’t done—”
A frustrated growl came from Lyre before long fingers covered Sabine’s mouth. Her lips, caught around a word, were open on warm skin. Lyre’s hand was gritty with silt and dirt, but beneath that, her pulse was shivering. Sabine wanted to kiss it. Surprise drained her anger, and replaced it with a muddled sort of release. It succeeded in making the air still in Sabine’s chest.
It was only with held breath she noticed it. The glow of the walls shifted, and a distant, tiny ball of bioluminescence appeared down the tunnel.
“Don’t talk. Breathe. Anything.” Lyre was so quiet that Sabine only heard her as a tickle of breath against her ear. Lyre’s lips ghosted against the shell of her ear as she pulled them into a crouch. Goji hunkered down, a solid wall of fur and flowers until half Sabine’s vision was blocked by tiny purple flowers. They twitched nervously against her nose, telegraphing the wolf’s fear.
Fear of...moths? The floating orbs grew closer. Tissue tatter wings, barely as big as a thumbnail, only had to beat once a minute to keep the creatures in the air. A flight of five of them drifted down the tunnel like ghosts.
The lead flutter pulled short of their hiding place. It hovered, lingering over the puddle that Goji had been sniffing, close enough to create a glowing reflection in the water. It was almost pretty. Sabine was about to say so—Lyre was being ridiculous, after all—when the moth’s blue light brightened. And stretched.
A fine spray of light passed over the puddle, then, as if dissatisfied, the moth turned it toward the walls and ceiling. It was a clinical movement, at odds with its delicate wings. Confused, Sabine squinted and focused. Silver nanite signals between the moths, communicating in a rapid, invisible starburst. They were communicating. They were...scanning.
The lead moth was on the move again. Lyre’s hand tightened around Sabine. The scan swept over their wall but Goji’s chest heaved, blocking the line of light. When the moth swayed in for a closer look, Goji gave a sleepy rumble and snapped lazily at the air. The moth gave a muffled, uninsect-like beep. Slowly, the swarm drifted off.
They all waited until blue glow had entirely faded from the hallway before relaxing. Lyre’s hold loosened, and Sabine stifled a stab of disappointment as she leaned back, creating a little space between their pressed faces. Goji lurched to her feet and shoved her long face in Sabine’s, snuffling her thoroughly.
“I’m fine,” she murmured, digging her fingers behind the wolf’s ears before meeting Lyre’s gaze. “What was that?”
“Sentries.” Lyre’s lips were a fine line in the dark. Her face was downturned and freckles were lost in the shadows. “They look delicate, but if they’re down here, they’re communicating with something much bigger and meaner on the hunt.”
“The butterflies upstairs were harmless.”
“Nothing made on the Vault is harmless. I keep trying to tell you that, Your Grace.” Lyre only ever used Your Grace when she was annoyed. “The butterflies upstairs were the public excuse to create the tech that also creates things like the moths down here.”
The old unease flickered in Sabine’s chest. “You sound certain.”
“I am.” Lyre unclenched her fists and walked to the corner of the tunnel to check their path.
“Lyre.” Sabine felt an unease rise from the depths and take shape. It brought her to her feet. Her voice was low and uneven. She didn’t want to ask. But she did. “Why do you know so much about the Vault?”
Lyre didn’t react. She never did. But she had a tell all the same. The one only Sabine could read. The pull in her chest, a string yanked tight with distress that made her heart hurt. On the outside, Lyre only laughed, flicking a sanguine look over her shoulder. “Isn’t that what you pay—sorry, paid—me for, Your Highness?”
It was wrong, the smile. Perfect, but wrong. The way a freckle on Lyre’s cheek disappeared into a dimple, the way the glow from the moss tangled and caught in the coils of Lyre’s hair like a halo. Like a moment she wasn’t going to get back.
“That would explain everything topside. Even navigation of the underworks, if a stretch. But you knew everything about the creeper vines, and you reacted to those moths coming as quickly as Goji did—and she lives here. Lyre, have you been to the Vault before?”
Lyre met her eyes and opened her mouth, and she was going to say what Sabine wanted to hear. She knew it. Sabine jolted forward, startling Goji at her side. Lyre’s mouth clicked shut as Sabine approached, suddenly wary.
“You’ve never lied to me,” Sabine said, soft and threatening. “I always loved—I always appreciated that. You are the Liar, but never to me. Don’t...don’t start now.”
And don’t break my heart.
Icy water had soaked through her formal slippers. Sabine’s head ached. Her stomach was empty. The chill, earthy smell of the underworks was invading her pores but the smothering feeling in her chest was none of these things. It was the part of air between Lyre’s lips as she paused long enough for something in her eyes to shatter. “I grew up here.”
Oh, oh. And Sabine felt herself breaking too. “What?”
“I didn’t grow up in the Empire. I grew up here. On the Cloud Vault. Crawling around gods forsaken places like these.” A grimace twitched at the edge of Lyre’s mouth. “Though even I was smart enough not to go this deep.”
“But when I met you, the diner—”
“Auntie Nori and Auntie Laure. Aunties, but not the kind you think of.” For a moment, Lyre broke eye contact. Tugging at her hair as she stared at the ceiling as if there would be a better escape there. “It’s what the Vault calls handlers of junior agents in the field. I’d only been there a year before meeting you. Everyone reports to Mother—”
“Agents.” The knot of foreboding had grown in Sabine’s chest. It was hard to breathe. “You were trained to be a spy by the Vault.”
“Not just trained. Was.” Lyre looked at her, then added, almost with pity. “The Vault had an interest in the stability of the Imperial throne. I was just supposed to listen—”
“You were spying on the Empire.”
Lyre took a staggering breath, a wheeze of pain clenched between her teeth. And nodded.
Sabine’s thoughts were fragments, and all with a jagged edge. “But you stopped. You had to have stopped. The accident happened. I was the new heir. You helped—you stopped.” Sabine wasn’t good at asking questions. It seemed if she could just say it with enough authority, enough certainty, she could make it true.
Lyre said nothing.
“You stopped,” Sabine repeated.
Lyre said n
othing. A well of undefinable feelings clawed up her chest, threatened to drown her. No, this was wrong, this had to be wrong.
“How long? How long did you report on—spy on me?” Sabine’s voice didn’t waver. An empress’s voice never wavered. It was a trick of tunnel acoustics. “When father was in the senate?”
Lyre said nothing.
“When—when my mother died? When the old emperor died? The assassination attempt?”
Lyre said nothing.
“During—” Sabine had to stop, take a breath, start again. “During the coronation? Beyond that?”
Lyre said nothing. And the nothing was loud, so loud. The complete stillness of her shoulders shouted. The emotionless line of her lips shrieked. It was loud, so loud, and Sabine wanted to close her ears to it. She closed her eyes instead, but the echo was ripping something bloody in her chest.
“How long?” Sabine’s voice cracked. “Or were you always spying, reporting my every failing back to the Vault? Are you theirs even now, was all this—”
“No.” It was a single syllable, but it sounded like breaking. And Lyre, finally, reacted. Her face crumpled before slowly reconstructing itself. “I would never—I couldn’t. I sent reports, sure. But they were just reports, and after the coronation night, after we...”
Lyre trailed off, so halting and unsure. No longer her Liar. No longer her Lyre. Sabine wondered what that made either of them. It seemed an unbreathable distance between here and the night of her coronation. Sabine held on to memories of parting silk, sweaty skin, then let it fall away. Let her pride take its place. Pride hurt less.
“You sent reports,” Sabine repeated. “The first day we snuck away from minders and ate pop candy at the back of the holo house, you sent a report. The night my mother died, and you helped me find where Galen had run away to cry, you sent a report. The morning the Imperial shuttle landed, because I’d become the next in succession and life as I knew it was over. The day I threw away my paints.” Sabine’s voice wobbled. “Everything. You wrote a report.”
“Sabs—” Lyre whispered. Miserable, eyes wet. Lyre never cried. Sabine wasn’t about to let her cry now. That was her right.
“The first day you held my hand. The first day you kissed me on the cheek. Sixteen years old. Just for luck, you said. And then you. Sent. A report.” Sabine’s cheeks felt hot, wet. She refused to wipe them because it would mean admitting how much it hurt. “None of it was real.”
“No. Don’t say that. You don’t get to say that.” Something firmer crept along Lyre’s jaw. “I never lied to you, Sabs. Not about...the things that matter.”
“This matters. You just stood there, beside me, for years. Listening to my childish fear, reporting it all back—” Sabine swallowed the ugly feeling that threatened to choke her throat. No. No good being human now. “I trusted you to protect the throne.”
“That wasn’t my job. I did that on my own. It was never the throne I was protecting.” Lyre’s gaze was hot, angry, like a dare.
Sabine opened her mouth, then closed it. She’d been charging ahead and suddenly found herself tripping over things not said.
Lyre took pity on her and studied her feet. “I never cared a bloody wit about what cold metal seat you wanted to park your ass on. Just that you were safe...happy.”
Sabine tried to accept that. It was a sign of caring—if in a glancing sort of way—that she’d been looking for from Lyre all the time. It should have felt better. But it came now. Now, when everything hurt. No matter how she tried to use it like a balm, it didn’t quite reach.
Lyre was her everything. Had been her everything, since they were teenagers. First her friend, then her guide, then her trusted ally, then her protector, then her first romantic crush, and then...
But Sabine had been a job. No matter what Lyre said, she’d started as a job. All the memories Sabine had held on to, to remind herself she was allowed to be a human being, a blood and flesh thing outside of the weight of the crown...all of that was altered now. Lyre had taken that from her. She hadn’t even known there was anything to take.
Her cheeks felt hot. She felt like a victim, and then felt like a fool, and then resolved to feel nothing at all. Pride was easier than vulnerability. Sabine had learned that lesson years ago. No halfhearted confession could make up for that injury.
“This is why you were retiring?”
Lyre nodded miserably, shoulders hunched. “I wanted to stay. But I’d stayed too long already. And you were going to the Vault—going here. If any of the senate found out about my...origins, I knew they’d use it against you. You’re settled now. You have Galen and Liv. After the Syn incident, no one’s going to try to take your throne. It was past time, but I thought I could still save it. I thought if I stepped away—if you’d just let me go—then no one would ever care.”
Just let me go. Sabine caught her breath. It was a trapped feeling. She couldn’t imagine any world where she just let Lyre go, but she was cut too deep to hold her close, either. The only route left was to hurt as she stepped away. Goji let out a concerned noise as she pressed against her thigh. Sabine scritched her foliage absently.
“Sabs, I understand if you hate me—”
Whatever Lyre was about to entreat was lost in a sandpaper static that blasted their ears. Lyre cursed, and Sabine winced until it cut off, leaving a low hum that appeared to vibrate from the air itself.
“Of all the bloody timing—” And again, Lyre didn’t get to finish the thought. A voice curled through the tunnels that made Sabine’s blood run cold.
“A highly unorthodox way to conduct an international summit.” Sylvere’s voice was a sheathed blade. Contained, smooth, a hint of cut at the hilt.
Sabine’s breath caught in her throat. If Sylvere knew where they were, if he could transmit his voice, then he could transmit a signal. Her skin itched, her stomach curled. Every twitch of her nerves felt like a precursor to a phantom pain that could begin at any moment. If Sylvere—
A pinch shot up her arm, but not from nanite agents. Lyre’s fingernails dug into her wrists. She forced Sabine’s face to hers. Firm and insistent. “It’s a system echo. Just an echo, Sabine. He can’t hear us, he can’t see us. He’s using the tunnel acoustics but he can’t reach us down here, not yet.”
Sabine let go of her breath.
“—arrangements are available,” Sylvere was saying. Now that Sabine paid attention, she could feel the vibration in the air, the echoing note as the tunnel projected the transmission up and down the underworks. Sylvere must well and truly have control of the Vault if he didn’t care who else might hear his message. “My quarrel is not with you, my dear lady.”
He was talking to Sabine, in particular.
“I believed you came here with the same goal as me. The destruction of the Syndicate. Of course, I knew you would have to make the appearance of playing nice, a diplomatic gesture, but simply needed a single reason to confirm your country’s suspicions of the Syndicate threat. I merely provided it.”
Orric’s assassination. “Well that answers that,” Lyre muttered.
“We can still work together, my lady. I only require enough unrest to get my daughter out of the Syndicate caricae facilities. A war would have been most efficient, but I am a flexible man. A mysterious vacancy in the Ministry would do as well. If you would return to the surface and produce the Syndicate Prime Minister, I’m sure we can clear up this misunderstanding. I will await you.”
“He wants us to give him Cian,” Sabine mused, once it was clear the announcement was done. “Would that we could.”
The arch of Lyre’s brow had a weight to it, which carried over and landed squarely on Sabine’s head. She looked over and sighed, momentarily distracted with exasperation. “No, I’m not ordering you to bundle off and disappear the prime minister.”
“You wouldn’t need to order. Asking would be fine.”
“No,” Sabine repeated firmly.
Sylvere was evidently done. Water ticked into the quiet, a meter to the constant wind-wail. The silence quelled the vibration in the air, almost leaving it feeling too thin. Not enough to fill up the space between Sabine and the way Lyre’s dark, wounded eyes watched her.
Sabine closed her own eyes to shut it out. The memories she’d thrown back in Lyre’s face weren’t random. Those moments, each precious one, were like gems. Treasures she’d slipped in her pocket, souvenirs from a faraway land she knew she’d never see again. A childhood, a life before the crown. They were quiet, and they were sparkling and they were happy and they were hers. She’d kept them in a pocket of her mind, turning them over fondly when things had been ugly and uncertain. During the heir naming. During the coronation. During the endless political battles and sieges and the darkest parts of Sabine’s life. She’d thought of those memories as light.
But it was like slicing into an apple and finding a moldering heart. The very things she’d been treasuring, holding close, had rotted barbs and foul edges. Lies when the one thing Sabine had always believed in was Lyre, her Lyre. Liar. Gods, it’d been right there. How stupid could she have been? Her cheeks burned.
Lyre cleared her throat. “As I was saying, you should hate me, but—”
Hate. No. Sabine could hate. Was legendary for retribution against her grudges. Against the Syn. Against senators who thought she would be more pliable with one eye. Against anyone who wronged her, really. But she found herself unable to turn that against Lyre. No matter how real the betrayal.
She’d eat the rotted apple first.
So Sabine faced it. Lyre had been sent by the Cloud Vault. To infiltrate Sabine’s country. To insinuate herself to Sabine’s people. To suss the relative strength of Sabine’s throne. It didn’t matter if someone else had been sitting on it at the time. That Sabine hadn’t been Lyre’s initial target. It was her throne now. Her people. Her country, filled with familiar faces she couldn’t trust.