Wen has the conscience to look guilty when she sees me, though only half of her face can pull off contrition. Her wrists are furiously red from where she was zip-tied, and she shoots a foul sneer at the back of the officer who escorted her out of the cellblock.
“I was trying to help,” she mutters as I grab her by the elbow and pull her down the hall. “That Needle was on the verge of collapse when they stuffed it in the hangar last night. The pilot didn’t notice. I thought I could put it right—then at least I’d be doing something useful around here.”
As we burst out into the heat of the early afternoon, I realize I’m too angry to put things into words. Instead, I drop her arm and storm along the path to the hangars. After a moment’s hesitation, Wen follows in silence.
I track the familiar scream of engines until I reach the edge of an open drill field. A runway sprawls on the far side of it, where a unit of light fighter craft are doing touch-and-go landings. The summer heat makes the distant pavement of the runway shimmer, and the ground beneath my boots is parched.
Wen barely bats an eye when I turn on her. “I thought I told you I was working on something,” I snap. “I told you to be patient.”
She shrugs, and the rage inside me flares hot. “I’m not gonna sit around and wait to be told where to go and what to do.” Though she speaks with an easy cadence, her tone is measured like she’s toeing a line.
I’m crossing one. “You don’t understand what’s at stake here, Wen!” I shout, throwing up my hands. “This is a military operation. You can’t just—”
“You’re right!” she yells so suddenly that I nearly stagger a step backward. “I don’t know what’s going on here. I’m trapped in this place on a promise that I can get off-world, and I barely know what the Archon Empire was, much less what it means to you. I…” Her voice goes soft, and the fierceness in her eyes drops abruptly, leaving only the hollowed-out look of a girl with no roots. “I thought it was my best option. I thought you were my best option.”
It hits me all at once—this isn’t the fight I’m spoiling for. I sink down on my haunches, the grass crackling beneath me as I sit with my boots pointed toward the distant runway.
Wen joins me a second later. She wraps her arms around her knees and tucks her chin between them. “I’m sorry. I know I jeopardized your position. Gal was probably right to try and send me back.”
It takes me a moment to process what she’s said.
Wen catches my wide-eyed look and gives me a bitter grin. “Thanks for fighting to keep me here, even if it wasn’t worth it.”
“Gal wanted…I mean…”
“It’s okay, Ettian.” She stares up at the distant tail of a fighter craft as it screams along a nearly vertical vector. “I wouldn’t have kept myself around either. Like I said, not much for me to do around here, and I have no idea what’s going on.”
I grimace. “I could give you a recap, but I can’t promise an unbiased one.”
Wen’s eyebrows rise. Go on, she gestures.
So I do. Starting at the very beginning, when the ancient generation fleets were roving down the galactic arm. On Lucia, settlers found a rich world with vast swaths of arable land, and the Umber Empire grew from that abundance. On Rana, they found hard ground and thin air—and the Archon Empire rose to that challenge. It took centuries for terraforming to spread through systems, for powers to condense into the empires we know, and for an actual border to form between the two entities. And, while they had their differences, they managed to coexist peacefully despite them.
And then Iva emp-Umber came to power drenched in her sister’s blood. In the decade after her ascension, the system governors beneath her jockeyed to prove to her that they were just as vicious. To keep them in line, Iva needed more dreadnoughts than the Umber Empire’s mined-out belts could provide and an excuse to unite them against a common enemy.
She looked to her Archon neighbors and saw the solution to both problems.
When I pull back and explain it like this—a game of resources and power, an inevitable consequence of ruling philosophies—it makes the war logical. Inevitable, even, the way history tends to be. I’m halfway to spitting the old propaganda about freeing Archon’s starving people from their imperials’ mismanagement and justifying it completely. But then I remember Umber warbirds razing the skyline of Trost during the final month of fighting. The way the walls of the bunker would shudder around us. The helpless noises it wrenched from my throat.
“You know about the suited knights, right?” I ask, wincing at how sudden the change of vector feels.
Wen shrugs. “Bits and pieces. They were like…vigilantes?”
“What? No!” I laugh. “They were at the service of the Archon imperials themselves. They were heroes. Sure, they had barely any jurisdiction, but they operated under a strict code of honor passed down for centuries.”
“I think the technical term for that is vigilante. Vigilante with fancy sponsorship.”
“Okay, well, these ‘vigilantes’ were total badasses. Arceley Vitto once took a C-27 cannon burst to the chest, got up, and kept fighting. Lamar plan-Rana tore the engines off a skipship and rode it through an atmospheric burn. I even heard a rumor that one time Ala Rutger split a fighter clear down the middle with her vibrosword.”
Wen lets out a sharp giggle. “There’s no way that’s true.”
I grin. “That was the point of the suited knights. Yeah, they were ordinary people. Some of them had bloodrights, others didn’t—but they were all united by the drive to serve their empire and the wild bravery it’d take to wear one of those suits. They could do anything.” And then I picture Rafe’s empty powersuit, and the grin falters as I remember where this line of conversation is supposed to go. “So Iva emp-Umber coordinated thirty simultaneous strikes across the Archon Empire to kill them all and launch her war.”
There isn’t much more left to say after that. With the story wrung out of my head, I stare at the runway, watching another featherlight fighter dip down, skim it with its landing gear, and then go howling back into the summer sky.
“Gal doesn’t understand it, does he?” Wen asks after the jet’s faded to a shimmering speck.
“Understand what?” I don’t try to hide the wary edge in my tone. Increasingly, I’m finding it difficult to hide anything from this girl.
“What it took out of you. He doesn’t see you with a before and after. He just sees what’s left.”
I think about her own before and after. Before, when she was destined for glory. After, a place filled with dirt and burns and uncertainty. I flop back, folding my hands behind my head, and a second later, Wen joins me.