It wouldn’t—shouldn’t—matter. I’m here now.
“The refugees organized with assistance from the Corinthian Empire. Our imperials have a vested interest in keeping Umber from overreaching again, after all, but an even more vested interest in appearing uninterested in conflict with the Umber Empire. They built camps for the Archon folks at first, spreading them across the borderworlds where we had the space and the resources. But after a few years, there was a shift in their priorities. Those who wanted to integrate peacefully into Corinthian society did just that. But those who wanted revenge—they have our emprex’s support. So much so that for the past five years, they’ve been operating a resistance movement out of a base right here on Delos. I don’t know exactly what they do over there, but if you’re deserters from a former Archon territory, they might welcome you. And me along with you. And maybe they could get all three of us where we need to go.”
Gal looks ashen. He grips his knees, staring at his knuckles, and his breaths are so measured that I know he must be counting. One, two, three, in. One, two, three, out.
A different sort of counting echoes in my heart, a steady rhythm I’ve known all my life. The beat Tatsun Seely tapped into my shoulder finds resonance in my bones. I push myself to my feet, trying not to look off-balance even as my mind reels. “Wen, could you give me and my, uh, boyfriend a second?”
I reach down and help Gal up. He shrugs out of his pack, and I loop an arm around his shoulders, shepherding him toward the edge of the roof. When I glance back at Wen, she’s sprawled on her back, her hands folded behind her head as she stares up at the late afternoon sky.
Gal’s tense under my touch, his eyes downcast. I glance at the city street beneath us, half expecting to see Cutters racing up on bikes, but instead I see the reason Wen knew for sure we’d be safe on top of this particular building.
“A police precinct,” Gal mutters. “Rut me sideways.”
“She’s…” I don’t know how that sentence ends. Part of me wants to call it cleverness. Part of me wants to call it luck. Most of me wants to get as far away from her as we can. And all of me knows that’s impossible now.
“She’s something,” Gal agrees.
I heave in a deep breath, staring out at Isla’s distant downtown. It shimmers and glitters in the haze, the sky above woven with the vectors of ship traffic. My old wounds ache, my old loyalties prickling at the back of my neck. The ghosts of drums thunder in my ears.
I feel like I’m being torn in half, like the person I’ve been pretending to be for the past seven years is being ripped away, leaving that fragile, bitter, vengeful ten-year-old in his place. I fight the sensation. I trained at the academy. I’m a loyal soldier of Umber, trying to get its prince home. I have no loyalty to the shattered remains of the Archon Empire, the empire that abandoned me to the rubble of Trost.
It’s dead. It’s gone. I can’t carry it with me.
But apparently it’s not dead. Not gone all the way. And I’ve carried enough through the years that the idea of a resistance movement out there, still fighting after all this time, is lighting a small fire in my heart.
I don’t want to join them. But I have to know what made it through those blockades.
Gal’s arm snakes around my waist, and I stiffen. The simple fact—the inescapable fact—is that going to the Archon resistance would be handing ourselves over to the enemy. If they find out who Gal is, we could be giving them all they need to take back their empire. They might already know. They could have been in contact with the academy officer who organized the attack that outed Gal as the Umber heir—the assassination attempt that would have succeeded if it hadn’t been for me.
“She might not be telling the truth,” Gal mutters, sneaking a glance back over our shoulders to make sure Wen’s a safe distance away. “What’s your read on her?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him honestly. “She kicked things off by trying to sell me a ship with no engines. But she helped me escape the Cutters. Helped us escape the Cutters, even though she was the one who brought them down on us in the first place.”
“She’s trouble.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“A junker girl.”
“A waypoint.”
“A distraction.”
“Chaos incarnate, more like.” I pause. “But she’s smart. Terrifyingly, brilliantly smart one second, and then the next she’s blowing up a ship. And somehow that was smart too.”
“So you think what she’s suggesting is smart?”
My breath hitches, and I know he can feel it. I duck my chin against a sudden swell of confusing emotions. “No,” I try to say with confidence. I fail utterly. “Yeah,” I admit, but that doesn’t sound wholly true either. “Look, if there’s an Archon resistance out there, sponsored by the Corinthians, we can’t sit by and do nothing. You can’t sit by—not after you ran.”
The dig at the insecurity he confessed last night is a cheap tactic, but I feel it work—Gal’s spine goes a notch stiffer under my arm. “There could be an…opportunity, I guess,” he suggests carefully.
There’s a note in his tone that reminds me of the way he dismantled the Cutter woman—imperial, sharp-edged, and utterly ruthless. An ache blooms in my chest. I don’t know the boy I have my arm around. Not the way I thought I did. Today I saw what Gal is capable of. What his mother’s blood makes him capable of. Does it matter that he spent his entire academy career theorizing about dismantling the violence of his legacy if in the moment he defaults to the vicious impulses that define his line?
At least it seems to be eating him up inside. There’s a cosmic storm in Gal’s expression as he stares out over this unfamiliar city. The summer wind tugs at his unruly hair, the late-afternoon sun deepening the shadows carved by the purse of his lips. He looks severe and regal, and my heart aches, urging me to pull him closer.
I wish I’d tried to keep him here, to enact that whim I had before this all went sideways. Keep him from his blood’s potential and the way he cut that woman until the fight drained out of her. Keep him harmless. I wish I’d realized he was never harmless to start.
What I saw today could be just the beginning, but the more he flexes that merciless edge, the easier it’ll be for him to use it. I know what it’s like to walk down that path, feeling as if you have no other route. I know how hard it is to pull yourself back from it once that instinct is ingrained. And I know how easy it is to give in to it when you tell yourself it’s the only way to survive. I suppress a flinch at the thought of how viciously I fought today—how much I want to forget where that came from. I wasn’t raised to feel the give of a skull under my fists, but I have, knowing all the while how disappointed my parents would have been to see me reduced to such violence.