“There’s not…much left,” I admit to the broadness of the sky. “I don’t understand how there’s so much of you left.”
I expect her to fire off some sort of snappy quip, and I’m surprised when she doesn’t. Wen stares up contemplatively at the distant contrails left by transports far above us. “I lost my mother,” she says at last. “You lost an entire empire.”
“I lost my mother too,” I whisper, and my heart seizes in my chest. It’s a truth that’s always been wrapped up in the larger tragedy. A truth so obvious that I’ve never said it out loud like this.
If I said it to Gal, he’d follow with a question, or with sympathy that would only double the sensation of a weight crushing my ribs. But Wen just nods and says, “I had to fight for what I kept. I had to keep thinking about it, keep the hurt fresh. And…I don’t think I like what it’s done to me. Part of me wants to know what I’d be without this revenge quest eating up my spare time.”
And I want to know what I’d be if I kept my fire the way she has.
“I don’t know,” she says and sighs, twisting her heels against the dirt. “It’s so much to live up to. But for you, it’s good to be here, right? To find out that you lost less than you thought? To know so many are fighting to restore it?”
I can’t bring myself to lie to Wen directly, and so it startles me when I admit, “Yeah, a little. More than a little.” After a moment, I add, “But we’re just trying to get back home.”
“To Gal’s home.”
I nod, my jaw tightening. “I go where Gal goes.”
“Even if the resistance retakes Rana?”
“I go where Gal goes,” I repeat.
“Fair enough,” Wen says, but nothing in her sounds convinced. Which is fair, because what I said wasn’t exactly convincing. I haven’t allowed myself to consider what I’d do if our plan falls through and Archon actually regains territory. My thoughts flick to my velvet bag, to what I owe my parents’ memories, to what I owe myself after what I’ve endured in the seven years since the empire fell.
My lips go taut around a question I’m afraid to ask. Finally I spit it out. “When you take down Korsa, would you take his place?”
Wen sighs. Somewhere on the runway, another jet comes down, engines roaring, then rears back into the sky. “Mob rule is mob rule, Ettian,” she says. “The people under Korsa’s thumb wouldn’t be much different from the people under mine. I have to repay him for what he took from me, but I don’t have to take it back.”
“But if you burn him, what fills the hole he leaves?”
“In me or the city?” she asks, and it’s far too insightful for my liking.
“The latter,” I decide after a pause.
Wen groans. “I don’t want to be responsible for that. Someone worse could take his place, or someone better.”
“You could be someone better. Your mother’s blood must be strong in you.”
“You sound like an imperial,” she snorts. “Half the time, I don’t believe in this bloodright stuff. In this empire, a council of planetary representatives elects the emprex, but the idea’s impossible to root out of the criminal sector—they love the notion that the amount of power they hold in their bloodlines justifies their reign. I mean, my own mother…” She catches herself, her expression darkening suddenly. “Anyway, it always seems to be the choices that make a person, not the people who rutted to make ’em.”
“That’s one way of putting it.” I roll my head to the side, my eyes meeting hers.
“Whose side are you on, Ettian?” Wen asks, and I know I’m humped before the words have left her lips. I can’t look away without shattering her trust in the next thing that comes out of my mouth. Can’t take too long to say it, or else the lie is obvious. Can’t lie to her anyway.
“I’m still deciding,” I tell her, because it’s the closest thing to the truth that I can articulate. But the fact that my answer to that question used to be “Gal’s” without hesitation—used to be—is twisting something horrible in me.
I almost tell her, right then and there. Who Gal is and what it means. The full extent of the war that’s been waging inside me since the moment I realized he might not be everything I thought he was. Everything we’ve been through on the journey here, and how it feels to have the fate of two empires tethered to your every choice.
But that truth would lead to other truths, ones I’m not ready to put into words, and so instead I glance toward the hangars at the far end of the runway. “I asked Iral for permission to take you out on a test flight. He’s working on the clearances, and it might take longer after what you pulled this morning, but I swear I’m going to get us in the sky.”
Wen’s smile could give the brutal summer sun a run for its money, and something tells me it has everything to do with the word “us.”
CHAPTER 21
IT TAKES AN extra week to get clearance but only twenty minutes for Wen to drag me by my collar into the cockpit of the waiting Cygnet as soon as the verification comes through.
She’s somehow procured a flight suit. I’m not sure if it was a gift from the resistance or if she simply nicked it from the laundry. Wherever she got it, it’s a little too big for her, and she rolls the sleeves up as she settles amiably in the copilot’s seat. That alone curdles my suspicion—I’d have thought she’d be adamant about being the one to take us out.
Wen notices my hesitation and grins, something leering in the corner of her smile. “Let’s be honest, Ettian—you need this more than I do.”
I roll my eyes and climb past her, swatting her on the side of the head as I drop into the pilot’s seat. Wen cackles, wedging her helmet over the messy braid she’s snarled her hair into. The visor drops over her eyes, replacing them with a silvery mirror.
I settle into the gel-seat, hands gliding over the dashboard as I spin up the ship’s preflight checks. The set of the controls is familiar, but this ship—Corinthian-made, with a little more emphasis on form than function—still feels a little alien to the touch. Outside, the hangar bustles with activity. I track a group of soldiers as they wheel crates of artillery toward one of the larger cargo ships for transport to orbit. Slowly but surely, the assault is coming together. With every passing second, my heart creeps higher and higher up my throat.
And it’s not helping that ever since the mission was green-lit, Gal’s been pulling away from me. With the constant threat of discovery hanging over his head, he’s been getting more and more withdrawn, and even the tiniest of irregularities causes him to lock up in panic. It’s been days since the last conversation I had with him that didn’t involve our subterfuge, and even longer since the last time we managed to speak without fighting.