A Treason of Truths

by Ada Harper

  Perhaps something of that thought slipped out, a warning around her eyes. The senate chamber bubbled with those quiet whispers again. The younger senator spoke up, this time with the slight unease of a misplay. He was from a minor House, one that allowed no room for a fatal error in the senate’s eternal games.

  “Forgive me, Your Highness. We had not been briefed.”

  “For obvious practicalities.” Sabine inclined her head, a sign of gracious forbearance. “Those who needed to know were informed. Sadly, since we have had to labor the point here, The Liar’s use as a counter-agent is diminished. However, she is still my most senior intelligence advisor. She holds valuable knowledge about the Empire and must be retrieved.”

  “Or eliminated.” It was a half-voiced mutter, somewhere suspiciously near the older senator she’d tangled with earlier. Sabine’s smile turned languid as she focused on him.

  “Of course. As Empress I will not hesitate to eliminate any threat to the Empire.” Sabine spoke precisely. Devoid of frost, full of barbs. “No matter their standing in this senate.”

  And by degrees, the senator’s face turned a shade of gray only slightly lighter than his hair.

  Good.

  “With the senate’s support, I will protect our lands. Blessings on your Houses.” Sabine rose and barely waited for the senate to rise and bow before striding out. If she’d wanted to make it a true power play, she could have stayed. Stayed through the tedious motion and vote. The tedious accounting. The tedious senate approval for an action she was fully in her rights to do anyway. She could have forced them to make their obsequious promises of loyalty, one by one, at her throne before they were dismissed. It would have cemented every gray hair and twitchy youth’s place, made it easier the next time around.

  But she needed Lyre. She’d already wasted too much time.

  So much lost time.

  “Any word?” The privacy of her quarters had been sacrificed in the name of expediency. Galen had turned her coffee table into a map projection, the focus of which Sabine couldn’t see for the cluster of soldiers around it.

  Maris popped her head between uniformed shoulders. “You wrangled the senate? They voted to sanction action?”

  “They will,” Sabine said with cold certainty. “Now, update.”

  “The Vault is still closed-lipped about the crash. They’re still citing ‘terrorist activity’ which will call for a full investigation—”

  “I meant Lyre,” Sabine snapped.

  “I know what you meant, girl.” Maris’s lip curled around her cigar. She shrugged. “She’s not on the evacuee list, and the Vault ain’t releasing any news about survivors yet.”

  “The Syndicate?”

  “Prime Minister Cian was on the feed this morning, reassuring the markets. So they obviously picked him up somewhere. Looked like hell, though.”

  Relief pieced through Sabine’s tension like a dissipating mist. Cian had survived. He deserved to survive, a thought Sabine never imagined she’d have about a Syndicate politician. It opened up many possibilities, but she was only focused on one.

  “If they picked up the PM they could have Lyre too.” Olivia had a bag open and a collection of its wicked-looking matte-black contents spread across the floor. She was crouched over it with a young Howl beside her. “No, charger in other end. Lady’s tits, you’re gonna blow your fingers off, kid.”

  “Are you quite certain you should be playing with explosives in the empress’s suite?” Alais asked mildly.

  “Sabine wants scouts and Howls ready. And seeing how somehow I ended up mother hen to both today... This is me getting ready.”

  “You? A mother? How charmingly terrifying.”

  “I want everyone ready,” Sabine cut in. “If the Syndicate meddles in this—”

  “Actually—” Maris interrupted and waved a slate in her direction “—we got a weird kind of memo from them this morning.”

  “A memo?” Sabine grabbed the slate and raised her brows as she absorbed it. She passed it to Galen. He made a rumble of disbelief.

  “A diplomatic envoy? The Syn want to visit after this disaster?”

  “Not the Syn, Prime Minister Cian.” An invitation. Sabine rolled the concept around like a flavor on her tongue. There was no love lost between the Syndicate and the Empire, but Sabine had learned some things about the strange little man after surviving hell with him. Cian did not do niceties. He did not do impulsive things. And he did not do diplomatic invitations for no reason.

  Unless...

  “Lyre sent him,” Sabine said.

  Galen frowned, looking much like an angry puppy. “So she’s with the Syn?”

  “No.” Sabine thought that through. “She wouldn’t call attention to it by involving a diplomatic envoy. There’s no gain for that, that I can see.” She slid her glance to the side and Olivia nodded. “And if they were holding Lyre hostage, Cian certainly wouldn’t send his terms in person. Lyre sent him.”

  “But if she’s not in the Syn, where else could she be but...” Olivia pursed her lips. Her sister-in-law was getting better about emotions, but every reservation read on her face. “Sabine...”

  “Lyre is alive.” Doubt left her. Lyre was alive. Sabine knew it like few certainties in her life. The warmth of the sun. The pulse in her veins. The pull of their bond. Lyre in her life. If any of those stopped existing, she couldn’t possibly not know it. Lyre was alive, because the world continued. “Lyre is alive. The Vault still has her.”

  “Negotiating for a hostage they won’t admit they have is going to be a hell of a thing.” Maris’s lips soured around the cigar and she removed it, tapping the ash into a nearby tray with a telling kind of carefulness. When she looked at Sabine again, her wrinkled face was all doctor. “We’ve all seen the drone holos of the wreckage. The thing was carrying eight ancient reactors and it dropped like a rock from forty clicks up. If you want my professional opinion, the likely—”

  “I don’t.” Sabine turned to Olivia again. “One team. Today.”

  “A military strike—even a small one—into a sovereign nation would not be what Lyre wanted,” Galen said quietly.

  Bitter anger sparked up Sabine’s throat. What Lyre wanted. What Lyre wanted. How could anyone say that now? No one knew Lyre. No one cared what Lyre had wanted before. Not Galen, who’d grown up with her as much as Sabine had. Not her fellow advisors. Not her reports. Or her Vault handlers. Not even...

  Not even Sabine.

  Lyre had left, and Sabine had made it about how she felt abandoned. Lyre told her the truth, and Sabine had made it about how she felt betrayed. Lyre had comforted her, and Sabine had made it about her own desire. She’d even taken the bond for granted. Wielded it to get another confession out of Lyre because of course Lyre wanted her. But Sabine hadn’t thought to ask. It’d never been about what Lyre wanted, what Lyre needed. Dear gods.

  “What Lyre wants...” Sabine felt the words stick in her throat.

  “I’ll turn down the Syn’s invitation then,” Maris muttered.

  Sabine grabbed on to that like an anchor. Her eyes fell to the map glimmering on the surface of the table, and it was the next thought that steadied her. “No.”

  “No?” Olivia squinted up at her. “Listen, if we’re tangling with the Vault we don’t need the Syn smelling blood in the water and—”

  “The Syndicate is going to help us. Accept the invitation, Maris. Make the arrangements. Urgently,” Sabine said with a dizzy kind of certainty. She traced a finger along the bramble of black that matched the site of the crash. It was just to the side of a red, contested line.

  Maris’s clucked tongue was the first sign of understanding, followed by a simultaneous displeased groan from Galen and Alais.

  Olivia was last, grunting as she swiped Maris’s cigar to take a contemplative puff, to Galen’s disapproval. The ember lit her
eyes, a kind of electricity in her brother’s mate that Sabine knew preceded something exceedingly risky and troublesome. Olivia tapped a spot a few centimeters away from Sabine’s hands. “This mean I can bring the new toys?”

  “Bring whatever it takes. We’re bringing her home.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Lyre woke up to an irritating puzzle. She breathed, she lived, and it made no damn sense. She remembered the screech of metal, a split-second roar, not even getting enough time to build up a crescendo before the screech had seemed to coalesce in the air and punch her skull into the permasteel wall. It was too loud to hear a sick crunching sound anywhere but inside her head as everything flared and went black.

  But she was senselessly awake and whole. The walls were gray and the air tasted like iron and she was whole.

  That alone was no reason to panic. But it was a matter of habit for her to calculate that away. The air, the humidity, the dust that clung to her toes from the cold floor told her that she was somewhere underground. Somewhere in proximity to sand, from the grit beneath her nails. The walls were permacrete block, scoured but old: a renovated construction. The locked door had sealed hinges, encased in a cone of steel even she couldn’t get into. New. A recent addition, and by someone who knew what they were doing.

  The telltale spiderwebs on her skin told her that some major nanobot restoration had been required to put her together. The veins of silver disappeared up her sleeve. She’d been stripped of her filthy uniform, and the tank and drawstring pants had a worn quality against her skin. Not new or starchy, like they’d be in a medical facility. They gave off an astringent yet musty smell of confinement.

  All of which led her to the conclusion that she was being held by an unofficial force, somewhere impromptu, and not precisely for medical care.

  Which meant she was fucked.

  Granted, she was alive, which was more than she’d planned on. Being alive held options. But she was also a spy, several times over. That meant her treatment wasn’t likely to be pleasant, no matter who her hosts were. And she needed to figure that out first to have any chance in hell.

  The answer turned with the latch. The woman who stepped in was old, soft and plump, and with a shaved head that made her look like a fashionable cult leader. She wore clothes that were a nod at a uniform without giving away any precise rank or affiliation. Unnecessary, because Lyre would have known that wrinkled frown anywhere.

  “Mother,” Lyre breathed.

  “Scarab.”

  Seeing her old intelligence head made something fractured relax in her chest. She was so relieved to see a familiar face, she almost could forget. “Lady’s tits, you found me.”

  “We did. Wasn’t much to find when we pulled you out of the wreckage. You’re lucky we could even piece back together what we found.”

  “Thanks.” Lyre knew when manners were important. Being saved from a burning wreckage was one of those times. “You’ve got a hell of a mess to clean up.”

  “We do.” Mother sounded pleasant, calm. It was the first stir of long-buried unease at the back of Lyre’s mind. “I expect your help.”

  “Huh.” The unease fanned into a foreboding. She was a turncoat to her homeland. And Mother was the eyes of the Vault. “I got out of the game. You know that. Even S—the empress released me.”

  “I do.” Mother’s voice was level, grim. “The question is, what you got into.”

  It was old habit by now, the way that confusion stilled her face rather than shaped it. Lyre took two breaths as Mother stared her down. Advancing anything now would get her nowhere, not until she knew what Mother was thinking. Mother was always thinking something. So instead she calculated a safe question. “Where have you been, Mother?”

  “That is an interesting story.” Mother leaned against the door. There was a precise tilt to her shoulders. Poised, but not relaxed. The perception of a slouch, but none of the risk of real vulnerability. Lyre recognized it. Another small infection of habit learned from the Vault. “A peace summit was a big deal for all of us. So when the coordinator got word that the Quillian Imperial retinue had security concerns, council insisted senior intelligence oil it out. Reassure, in person. Imagine our dismay when we were turned away at the border for unauthorized entry.”

  Lyre entertained a flash of horror imagining what havoc Vault intelligence could have wreaked on the Imperial border. “Shit.”

  “We turned back, of course. I’m not a pink-cheeked idjit.” Mother flicked her hand. “So I was less surprised when our own flotilla failed to recognize our shuttle friend-or-foe indicator and tried to shoot us out of the sky.”

  “Hell.”

  Mother ignored her. “Spent a hell of a couple days trying to figure out who was trying to steal my city. Then damned thing started spewing evacuation shuttles, and we had an abundance of information about bloody-minded terrorists who were bringing down the Vault. Didn’t half believe it myself until it made a city-sized crater over the beach line.”

  “It wasn’t terrorists,” Lyre said.

  Mother snorted. “No shit. We know everything about everything that comes on or off the Vault. Everything. An ant coughs in the underworks, I hear about it. No undocumented terrorists slipped onto my city.”

  Lyre let out a breath. “Right. Then you know you have a delicate problem here.”

  “I do.”

  Mother didn’t move, but anyone who worked in intelligence had learned the fluent language of silences. Especially so if one worked under such a woman like Mother. Lyre knew this silence. The wait, the knowing. The resolution.

  It was a silence for an interrogation, and for the first time in a long while, Lyre’s nerves lit up with fear. “You think I did this. That I crashed the Vault?”

  Mother said nothing.

  “Mother.” Lyre reached for calm. Recited algorithms in her head. Climbed exponential tables. Charted wind currents. Swam through chemical formulas. Breathed in a catalogue of facts. None of them would keep her alive if she lost her cool. “Be reasonable. That was Sylvere. Dr. Micha Sylvere. I’m not a terrorist. I am a spy, sure, but—”

  “Their. Their spy, Scarab. Not ours. You betrayed us, walked away and I just let you go. Always had a soft spot for you, didn’t think it’d do in the entire Vault.”

  “I didn’t betray you.” Maths. Reasons. Formulas. Don’t think about what happens to traitors that disappear into Vault intelligence. Don’t think about what happens if Mother walks out that door believing I’m guilty. Think. But don’t. Don’t think. “I never told the Empire anything about...about my time here.”

  “Really? Never? Is that why the empress is barraging our rescue center with inquiries about you? Declaring your immunity from turncoat charges as an Imperial asset?”

  Lyre closed her eyes. Gods damn, Sabs. You looked for me. You really didn’t give up. “What did you tell her?”

  “That you’re dead, of course.” Mother waved a hand. “And then the Empire demanded a body and we agreed and now some poor legitimate victim is going to go unmourned by their real family.”

  The image came unbidden. An unrecognizable corpse, lit up with all the best Vault tech to either mimic Lyre’s bio-profile or be mangled beyond analysis. And Sabine...

  Lyre opened her eyes. “She didn’t know anything. Not until we got here.”

  “When you executed a coup against your home country.”

  Lyre snorted. She shouldn’t. Shouldn’t laugh, but it was so... “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Ridiculous. That a former intelligence officer who went native shows up, on the Cloud Vault, and the very same day the senior members of Vault intelligence are nearly shot out of the sky. That, provided the witnesses I’ve spoken to are accurate, shortly after an Imperial noble conveniently dropped dead, throwing the summit into chaos.”

  “A noble I was there advising. Why in blue hell woul
d I—”

  “It appears your advice was poor,” Mother said, all snarl and suspicion before continuing, “Then, in the ensuing confusion, the dignitaries are abducted—”

  “You mean escaped unlawful detainment—” Lyre should stop talking. Talking when a suspect without a cover story was futile. She knew she should stop talking, but her heart was still rattled. Sabine will think I’m dead.

  “—and, not twelve hours later, a strategic attack against the cooling system of three of our prime engine reactors, which could have been conducted only by someone who knew both the underworks and the functions of the flotilla intimately. Are you saying that wasn’t you?”

  Lyre’s mouth fell closed. She could say it. It just wouldn’t be true. And Mother sniffed lies like a bloodhound. There’d be no way to admit to sabotaging the engines—the very safety of the Vault—without admitting to crimes Mother would shoot her on the spot for. No way to explain Sylvere, his single-focused desire to save his daughter at the cost of everything else. No way to explain Sabine or Cian’s sacrifice or the hundred little strings strangling her conscience that lead her to the engine core of a doomed city.

  It appeared she didn’t need to. Mother’s lips thinned. Something disappointed, almost sad, flickered across her face. Her voice was muted. “You’re here to give answers, Scarab.”

  Lyre gritted her teeth. “The one with the answers is Sylvere.”

  Mother was shaking her head. “You’ll have to try harder. Dr. Sylvere was not among the evacuation. He died in the crash.”

  Lyre considered. “Was Dr. Khait found?”

  “No.”

  “Then they’re definitely both still alive. You won’t find their bodies there.”

  “We’re not pulling anything from that wreckage but parts. The only reason you’re here is because we found you in the reactor shell. Why was that again?”

  To preserve the bits in my blood which could cure a nanite infection in the Quillian Empress. Which you could definitely take advantage of. Lyre shrugged. “Just visiting old stomping grounds.”