I blink, and the man is gone. The reflection in the mirror is just me.
The elevator comes to a halt and the doors open, casting all thoughts of familiar men in mirrors out of my head. I run down the bright, metallic hallways of the base ship, peering through the glass doors of different rooms until I find exactly what I need.
The tablet is propped on a table, in a small, white empty room, and its screen blinks with a string of empty boxes. Waiting for me, for the string of numbers clutched in my clammy hand.
I enter the room, letting the doors slide shut behind me. I lock them, just to be safe.
And not a moment too soon: something slams against the glass doors. I turn back and see Kirrin outside, his expression frantic, his fists pounding on the glass.
“Titania, don’t do this! Don’t listen to him!”
Him? Who is he talking about?
He’s the god of tricks, says the voice, cold and angry. He lies.
I tilt my head, intrigued by the fact that Kirrin hasn’t just materialized inside the room. This room must be shielded, the same way King Cassel’s cottage and Esmae’s broom cupboard were shielded, to prevent any interference from powerful celestial creatures.
“Remember what we saw?” Kirrin is shouting. “The ruins and the ash? Everyone dead? This is how it happens, Titania! That future is what will happen if you put that code in!”
The ashy red ponytail under the rubble. The shattered mullioned window. Max telling Esmae to close her eyes.
I pull my hand away from the tablet. What if Kirrin’s right?
He wants Alexi to win, the voice in my head hisses. He wants Esmae to die. If you trust him now, you might as well kill her yourself.
There’s too much truth there to deny. Kirrin has constructed so many tricks to get Alexi a victory, including my own creation, and Esmae has almost died half a dozen times because of those tricks. Even Amba and Max don’t trust him anymore. How can I?
So I turn away, ignoring his pleas, and, with the greatest care, I put the code in.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Radha
I have no idea what happened, but the battle is over. I must have missed some sign that someone has called an end to it, but I don’t care as long as it is over. I don’t even know who won, if you can call the bloodshed in front of me any sort of victory, but I’m not sure I care about who won or lost either, as long as I find the people I love alive and safe.
As I run across the courtyard to the palace gates, passing the noisy, busy medical clinic, I can see the battlefield down the hill. There are soldiers backing away from each other, generals calling orders, ships retracting their weapons and lowering their engines to a hum. People are rushing to put out the fires of wreckages.
At the gates, I walk past Kirrin, who stands out not just because of his blue skin, but because of how clean he is. No blood, no ash, no sweat. He is ancient, untouched, eternal. He’s not looking at the battlefield, but at something over my shoulder instead.
“The palace is still standing,” he says quietly, more to himself than to anyone else.
I have no idea why that, of all things, is what he’s decided to observe right now, but I have never pretended to understand the way the gods think.
I keep going, making my way down the hill to where the smell of blood and burned flesh is almost unbearable. I make myself look at each corpse I pass, to make sure it’s not someone I love and also to make sure I remember each wound, each face. How monstrous we are, to be able to do this to each other.
Then, just when I think I might have to resort to screaming out the names of everyone I need to find, I catch a glimpse of something near the thorn forest. A gloriously red ponytail.
I run, almost tripping over my own feet, blundering down the grassy knoll to the opening of the forest, where the ground is stained an ugly, sticky red and soldiers tend to the wounded. There’s Max, staggering to his feet, carefully pulling his sword out of the heart of Leila Saka, who is bloody and filthy and angry even in death. I allow myself a moment to be glad that he’s okay and then I stumble past him.
Sybilla turns right before I reach her, and her face lights up with dazzling, perfect joy. She takes a step and then I’m there, tangled in her arms, and we hold each other so tightly that I’m no longer sure where I end and she begins.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Esmae
Alex comes up beside me, torn fabric from his sleeve clutched in his hands. “Let me see your shoulder,” he says.
“No,” I protest, trying and failing to step past him. “I have to find the others.”
“You won’t find anyone if you bleed to death.”
I grimace, but stay put, mostly because I don’t think I can get past him. I grumble a little as he puts a painful amount of pressure on my shoulder, right over the wound his sword left there, so that he can bind it tightly and stop the bleeding until I can get hold of a laser.
“Bear should be here with us,” he says quietly, tying a knot.
The way he says us sends a needle right through my heart. “I know.”
“All he wanted was for us to be on the same side.”
“Well,” I say, “We can do that for him.”
He finishes binding my wound and takes a step back. “I have to check on my people,” he tells me, a little awkwardly. He isn’t quite sure how to tread through this new, uncertain future of ours, but neither am I. “I’ll find you after.”
I nod, and we part ways. I turn back up the hill, quickening my steps as I make my way back to the other edge of the thorn forest, where I left Max with Leila Saka. I see him almost at once, watching me get closer, a crooked smile on his face.
“There you are,” he says.
I’m less than two paces from him when he crumples. Just like that, like his legs forgot how to hold up him.
“Max!” I drop to my knees beside him, more confused than worried, and help him sit up a little against the fallen trunk of a tree. “Hey. What’s the matter?”
He looks at me for a long moment and then, reluctantly, moves the hand that had been pressed to his thigh. Horror floods my body, turning it icy cold, as I see the wound. The artery that must be cut. The blood.
“No,” I whisper, clamping my hands down over his thigh, pressing firmly down on the pulse beating wildly there. “No, no, no, no. Max, please. You can’t. It’s okay. I can fix this.”
“What happened?” Sybilla’s spiky, urgent voice is the most welcome sound in the world.
“Get the queen,” I tell her. “She can save him. Now, Sybilla! Get Guinne!”
I take deep breaths, in and out, in and out, refusing to let myself slip into a panic. Max’s eyes flutter, but they stay open. He’s going to be fine. Because if there ever, ever, was a time for Guinne to use her boon, this is it. This is what she saved it for. She will come and she will reverse what happened to him and he’ll be fine.
Everything’s going to be fine.
And then she’s here, the bottom half of her face pale as death beneath her blindfold, clutching Sybilla’s arm tightly as Sybilla guides her to us. They stumble over the uneven ground in their haste. Amba is right behind them, limping, her face pale and set.
“You can save him, can’t you?” The words tumble out of me as the panic I tried to quash rises up anyway. “You can reverse this?”
“Yes,” Guinne says at once, so confidently that I feel instantly better. “Yes, it hasn’t been more than a few minutes since it happened. I can do it. I just have to take my blindfold off.”
But before she can, before she can even touch it, an unexpected sound makes us all go quiet.
It’s a klaxon, but not like the one that triggered when the inner shield came down. This isn’t loud and shrill. This is muted and whiny, just one long beep after another.
Like something is counting down.
Amba’s face loses what little color it had.
“That sound,” Guinne says, her lips almost bloodless. “We are neve
r supposed to hear that sound.”
Then silence. Absolute, total silence. I look around, bewildered. Did the klaxon stop?
No, everything has stopped.
As I stare, stunned right out of my panic, I see that everything around me is frozen into utter stillness. There is no sound and no movement. Even the wind has died. Max’s hand is halfway to my cheek, Sybilla’s ponytail is mid-swing, and everyone else around us, all the way up and down the hill, they’re all frozen, too. Like a tableau of sculptures, painstakingly placed in a grotesque, macabre theatre.
Then someone crouches down beside Max, and I look up into the grim, austere face of a god.
“Ah, nephew,” Ash says quietly, one hand on Max’s shoulder. “How many times must I watch you die?”
“He’s not going to die!”
He looks at me then, with those impossibly dark, bleak eyes. “You do not understand, do you?”
“I understand that, somehow, you’ve stopped time.”
“Suspended it,” he corrects, “and only for a moment, so that I might speak with you. That klaxon is the sound of the base ship shutting down.”
“What?” I just stare at him, incredulous. “That’s not possible. No one would do that!”
With something like pity on his face, Ash waves a hand. Beside us, translucent, moving holographic images appear, much like the recording Titania made me when I was trying to find out how my father died.
I watch as Titania, in human form, approaches a sleeping man shrouded in a strange, otherworldly glow. Curious, she reaches for him. A holographic version of Ash interrupts her, but not before her fingers make contact with that peculiar glowing energy.
“That’s Ness,” I say. “Isn’t it? Amba’s father? Max told me he’s been sleeping in the Temple of Ashma for centuries.”
“When Titania touched the energy around him, she woke him,” says Ash. “Not completely, not his body, but just enough for his mind to form a connection with her. It was useless to him when she went back to being a ship, but when she became human, that connection reactivated. She did not understand what was happening to her, and I did not see it until it was too late.”
“Wait,” I say, shaking my head, my stomach clenching around itself. “You’re not saying Titania triggered the shutdown?”
“I am saying that Ness did,” says Ash, “through Titania. He manipulated her, preyed on her fears that she is no longer useful, used her love for you. He convinced her that she would be helping you by destroying Kali. He let her believe that there would be time to evacuate the kingdom.”
“But there isn’t, is there?” I ask in growing horror. “Because the emergency shutdown isn’t supposed to be triggered until after the kingdom has already been evacuated. That’s why the klaxon sounds like it’s counting down. It’s supposed to be just enough time for one person to put the code into the system, get in a ship, and fly to safety.”
Ash nods. “Kirrin had a vision of Kali’s destruction. He thought Sorsha might have torn the kingdom apart in battle, but he did not take into account the snow. There was snow in his vision.”
“It doesn’t snow on Kali,” I say quietly. “But it does on Winter.”
“What he saw was all that was left of Kali after the kingdom, having lost its atmosphere and gravity, crashed into Winter.”
“Why?” I ask, my voice somewhere between grief and fury. “Why would Ness want to kill half a million people?”
“He does not care one way or another about killing half a million people,” says Ash. He turns his head, looking at Amba, standing frozen just a few feet away. “He did this to kill her.”
I shouldn’t be surprised. Stories have an unsettling way of coming full circle, and with lives and stories as tangled as ours are, why does it surprise me that the god who swallowed his children, and who was slain by his daughter, has found a way to punish her one last time?
“I imagine he could have manipulated Titania into killing Amba herself,” Ash says quietly. “But he saw too much in Titania’s memories. He saw that Amba sacrificed her god-hood for you. And he knew that there could be no better way to destroy her than to have her die powerless, knowing as she did that the person she loved most was going to die, too.”
I want to scream in fury. By shutting down the base ship, Ness will kill not just Amba and me, but also Max, who is his son reborn, and Alex, who one of his other sons loves. In one cruel blow, Ness is going to strike down two of his children and devastate the others. Kirrin, for one, will never recover from losing Amba, Max, and Alex.
And for the sake of his vendetta, Ness will wipe out hundreds of thousands of innocent people, too. It’s monstrous.
“Is there any way to stop it?” I ask. “You must have come to speak to me for a reason.”
“You already know the answer to that,” Ash says. “You just don’t want to know. The shutdown cannot be stopped, but, with a powerful boon, it can be reversed.”
Reversed.
My heart breaks apart. “No!”
But he’s gone, time is no longer suspended, and I am in pieces.
As the chaos around me continues as if there were no pause, I can’t bring myself to speak. I just look at Max, memorizing every detail of his face.
“You must use your boon to reverse the shutdown,” I hear Amba say to a horrified Guinne. Ash must have spoken to her, too. “That is the only way to thwart my father and save hundreds of thousands of lives.”
“No.” I say the word again because I feel like I have to, like saying it enough times might actually make a difference. A sob slips out of my throat. “No.”
“It’s okay,” Max says quietly, his breathing ragged and shallow. “I’ve died before. I’ll find a way back to you.”
“There has to be another way!”
“Esmae,” Amba says, only the slightest tremor in her voice. “You know there is nothing else we can do. Even if Max is saved, he will die when Kali falls. You know that’s not what he wants. You cannot dishonor him by allowing thousands to die just to give him a few more minutes.”
“I won’t let thousands die!” I say fiercely. “I’ll find another way! I won’t let Kali fall. I won’t let a bitter, cruel god take everything from us. I’ll find a way.”
“There is no time,” she replies.
Max’s tired, half-glazed eyes move to his mother. “Mother, reverse what Ness did.”
And I know this is what has to happen, I know that, and yet every part of me wants to scream childishly that this isn’t fair, that we shouldn’t have to lose him to save everybody else.
“Mother,” Max says again, his breathing shallower than ever.
Guinne’s mouth trembles, but she nods. “Of course.” She runs a shaky hand over his hair. “Goodbye, my boy.”
Then she stands, the picture of quiet dignity, and turns her back to us. Her hands reach up behind her head as she unties and peels the blindfold from her eyes. Her shoulders shake.
A tear slides down Amba’s cheek as she places a hand over Max’s heart. “The stars will be lucky to have you, brother,” she says softly. “Go in peace.”
Don’t go in peace, I want to shout. Don’t you dare. Stay. Stay. Stay.
Instead, I just hold Max tighter. My tears drip all over his bloody shirt, but he doesn’t seem to care. “I found you once,” I whisper in his ear. “I got my fingerprints all over you. I’ll find you again.”
He smiles, that special small, crooked smile that he only ever lets me see, and his eyes crinkle at the corners. “I know,” he whispers back.
Behind us, there’s a clap of thunder. It rattles my teeth, sends electricity skittering across my skin.
Then, quiet.
The whine of the klaxon is gone. The sun lamps blaze back to life, like dawn after a dark night. The kingdom is saved.
And Max stops breathing.
CHAPTER FORTY
Esmae
At some point, when the wounded have been tended and the dead returned to their families, wh
en the city is quiet with grief and relief, someone thinks to ask how the battle ended. And who won.
I open my mouth to tell them about my surrender, but Alex gets there first. “No one,” he says, his eyes meeting mine. “No one won.”
But what of the crown, someone asks.
My uncle, brother, and I all have a claim to it, but none of us wants it anymore. It is, after all, a crown soaked in blood. It cost us Rama and Sorsha and Bear, Laika and Leila and far, far too many others.
It cost us Max.
And even if all of that weren’t true, well, I know that I, at least, am nowhere near ready to rule a kingdom. I may never be ready. I don’t know how to be fair and wise with that kind of power.
It’s not a big leap from there to question whether any one person should have that kind of power.
I’m the one who suggests that it may be time for the House of Rey to come to an end. It’ll take years to make such a transition, to lay out all the ways in which the kingdom must grow and become better. But I’m not the only one who likes the idea of a future in which Kali is ruled by a government of its people and not by a king, queen, or war council.
Elvar, tired and grieving, is not opposed to it, but he’s afraid. “What will we be,” he asks, “without our House?”
“We’ll be a family,” I tell him.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Titania
For the first time since I became human, I am whole.
Ash severed the connection between Ness and me, so I can see now how he slipped into the cracks between my memories, how insidiously he distorted me. The peculiar, ugly outbursts of anger and resentment are gone. The cruel thoughts are gone. I am myself again.
It is agony. I will not see anyone, will not speak to anyone. I cannot bear to see what I might find in their eyes. Instead, I take to haunting the south tower like a ghost, hiding among the turrets where no one will think to find me, the closest place I can get to the stars.
There is no happiness in food or in touch anymore. I don’t deserve happiness. I wish I had never become human. All it has done is cause intolerable grief. If I had remained Titania, the indestructible, unbeatable ship, the arrow in the hands of better archers, there would have been no invasion. Ness would have had no hold over me.
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