“Ettian,” he whispers.
“I destroyed my whole life here for you, Gal. Everything I’ve built since the war, since your parents…” Horror swells in me as my eyes start to go damp. “Even knowing what you are, I knew I had to get you out of there at any cost. That’s what you’ve done to me. You knowingly let me get to the point where I would be willing to give up everything I worked for to save your ass. So yeah, I’m pissed, and I don’t think you can fault me for it.”
“I didn’t make you do anything,” Gal replies with a surprising amount of venom in his voice. He still won’t look at me. “You chose. You knew you were choosing. You keep choosing over and over. Don’t you dare blame me—”
“Don’t you dare act like you’re free of guilt.”
“Ettian!” he shouts, throwing his hands up. “What else was I supposed to do? Who else could I go to?”
“Anyone else. There was a whole academy full of cadets back there—Umber-born cadets. You were friendly with Ollins. With Rhodes. With a whole bunch of other people who easily could have done what I did.”
“ ‘Can’ and ‘will’ are very different words,” Gal says, his voice softening. “Ollins is good for a laugh or a wager, but Ollins didn’t strap his Viper to mine when twenty Archon sympathizers turned on me out of nowhere.”
I squeeze my eyes shut as the sour taste in my mouth gets keener. “Those drums…”
Gal lets out a soft sigh, barely audible over the hum of the Beamer’s instrumentation. “I don’t understand how any of this could happen. The academy head told me there was an entire resistance ring grown under their noses. All twenty of those kids who turned on me yesterday were from former Archon territories, and they were coordinated by an officer who’d pinpointed my identity through an affair with one of my sleepers. They…The head brought me to that officer, and they got her to confess everything. They made her do it in front of me…And then—” Gal’s voice chokes off, but I know the look in his eyes.
“They fried her,” I say, so he doesn’t have to. They electrocuted the traitor, and Gal had to watch.
Now isn’t the best time to bring up the historical precedent. I know he’s shaken. I know the wound is fresh. But I also know that Gal has seen executions before. Ones with far more spectacle and far more celebration involved. He would have been ten years old, same as me, on the day the Archon imperials fell.
They broadcasted it across the Umber Empire, across the freshly acquired Archon territories—hells, I’m sure even Corinth got the video. Everyone saw the triumph parade. Saw the brass-and-obsidian chariot moving through the Imperial Seat. Iva and Yltrast stood on top, cloaked in shining robes and crowned in their empire’s metal and stone.
And dragged along behind it—
The cameras weren’t close enough to capture the fear in their eyes. Marc and Henrietta, emperor and empress, former wearers of the Archon crown, stripped of their names and the worlds encompassed by them. The power of their blood yielded to Umber’s might. Instead of platinum, they were wrapped in brass chains. Instead of emerald, their necks were bound in an obsidian yoke. Trussed up in the metal and stone of their enemy. Their feet bare, bloodied from being dragged so far.
The imperials marched them up the steps of the citadel. Iva held the chains. Yltrast bore the ax. The cameras followed, greedy.
It was barbaric, but it was necessary. To let the fallen empire see the forfeit of its ruling blood. To see that blood spilled down the steps of the Umber capital.
They kept the skulls, after.
“Ettian?”
I unclench my fists, slumping back in the pilot’s seat and burying my face in my hands. “Sorry,” I croak, trying not to shake as the horror of the memory dissipates.
“No apologies,” he says. But he sounds worried. Maybe he’s remembering that Rana was my homeworld. That I lived at the heart of the Archon Empire before his parents tore it out. That there are years in my history that are still too painful to touch, all because of his bloodline’s conquest. “Are you okay? How are you holding up?” His voice is soft—too soft for the thoughts running wild in my head.
I shrug halfheartedly. It’s dead. It’s gone. I can’t carry it with me. “Still flying,” I tell him, trying to convince myself it’s true.
But the notion of an Archon insurgency continues to rattle me. The idea that there are people out there devoted to raising the empire from the ashes used to seem so impossible. And some of them were organized enough to make a serious attempt on the Umber heir’s life. Nothing’s come close to a victory for the Archon Empire since General Maxo Iral waged his fringe wars in the wake of the Umber conquest. Though he fell in the end, while he fought, there was hope that our defeat wasn’t final. That hope’s been buried for so long.
I haven’t had time to process it. The drums are thundering in my ears, in my heart, in the hollows of my chest.
“I know this is…complicated for you,” Gal says cautiously. “I know you suffered under my parents’ campaign.” I throw a sharp glance his way, and he holds up his hands, just like every other time he’s pried too closely at the gaping, Warning Shot–sized hole in my past. “You didn’t sign up for any of this, you’re not one of my sleepers—”
“Jana,” I say, no time between the formation of the thought and her name leaving my lips.
Gal flinches.
“I went to her room after I got your message. I saw…She put up a fight. I should have tried to find out what they did with her and the other sleepers. They could have helped—”
He gives his head the slightest shake, closing his eyes. “When she came by that morning before the drill, it was to warn me. The sleepers didn’t think it’d be safe to fly, but I thought it’d be too suspicious if I backed out at the last second. I should have listened to her—if I’d just listened to her, none of this would have happened. And now…” Gal scrubs the heel of his hand over one eye, inhaling sharply. “Their job was to protect me. It would have gone against every oath they swore to risk my safety for their sakes.”
I cling tight to the way those words tear out of his throat—reluctantly, like it’s ripping him in half to admit the necessity of leaving Jana behind. This is the Gal I’ve always known. The Gal who could never make his parents’ choices. The Gal who could change the galaxy for the better if he takes his mother’s throne.
For a little while, we stare out into the gray. Superluminal travel is disturbingly peaceful. It doesn’t feel like we’re snapping across systems faster than the speed of light. The ship is quiet but for the whine of the electronics and the distant hum of the drives. It’s like being on a raft, the lights turned out, the lake still, nothing but fog on all sides.