I ate well the first time I figured out this way in. Probably too well—the hole I left in the pantry’s stock wasn’t subtle. Fortunately the trick panel, tucked behind a boiler and shadowed even when the lights are on, was more difficult to notice. I’d squirm in and squirm out whenever I thought I could get away with it. The stakes were higher, but the day-to-day risk was far more preferable to swiping what I could from convenience stores or digging through trash. This used to be my secret.
Now it’s one more little truth I’ve shared with Wen. She presses close against my back as I feel my way past the boiler machinery and into the dusty shelves. This part of the palace wasn’t destroyed in the bombing of Trost—it’s been hewn out of the rock the building was founded on. The stone walls reflect the sound of our careful footsteps, our rustling clothes, our breaths. But no other sounds join the mix. The estate’s new occupants haven’t made their way down here yet.
Even so, we make our way in silence. First through the building’s dimly lit sublevels, the paths I dared to explore six years ago when I was sure no one else was down here. Then into a narrow servant’s stair that winds into the palace’s main floor. The bedrock falls away, replaced with new concrete and steel. My knowledge of our position ends.
We switch places. Wen was in the palace briefly, and she got a good look at the layout during her mad dash for the exit. She leads the way through the narrow service corridors that run parallel to the ostentatious halls.
I catch glimpses of soldiers through the spyholes, clearly Archon by the platinum-and-emerald uniforms they wear proudly. They stand guard in the main halls, still new enough to their surroundings that their eyes keep getting caught on the decorations. Berr sys-Tosa dressed his palace to Umber tastes, and I can see the brass-and-obsidian trappings gnawing away at the soldiers forced to look at them for hours on end.
We peer around a corner into the hall that leads to the court’s doors. Wen catches my eye with a quick hand motion, pointing to an immense urn tucked into an antechamber across the hall. There, she signals, then, I’ll cover you.
I squeeze her shoulder once to let her know I understood and pass her the blaster. Steeling myself, I pull my datapad out of my pocket, bring up the contacts, and dial.
From a nearby cranny within the hall, her datapad chimes in answer. At full volume, it blasts a bombastic choral rendition of the Archon Anthem, backed by a battery of imperial skin drums, and my heart swells. In the main hall, confused voices murmur back and forth. From our hiding place, we have eyes on the pair of soldiers guarding the gates to the court.
They glance at each other, unsure. One of their comrades playing a practical joke? An obvious distraction? As the song moves from the first verse to the chorus, one of them takes a hesitant step forward. Then another. His hands are tense on his gun.
Cautiously, he moves past our hiding place. We listen to his footsteps, and then the steps of his comrade as she follows him. When they’ve both passed us, I give Wen a nod.
Time for some real knight shit.
She whips around the corner and fires two quick bolts into their backs. The noise is deafening. The chorus roars. The drums rumble in a triumph rhythm. As she sprints for the cover of the urn, I take off running for the gate, skidding to a halt in front of the brass handles. With a monumental heave, I pull the doors open and step into the court, the music blasting at my back. I resist the urge to turn around and check on Wen. The boltfire she lays down as cover tells me enough.
Head held high, I march into the court like it’s my right.
This is how I come back to my people.
The room is massive, the vaulted ceiling decorated with inlaid obsidian that glitters in the evening light streaming through the great windows. Hundreds of eyes turn toward me as the noise in the room fades to whispers, and I find myself facing down Archon officials, resistance officers, and soldiers who point their guns and wait for an order. I hold up my empty hands as an offering to the dais at the head of the room, where Maxo Iral looks up from his datapad and shoves through the knot of officers gathered around him.
My eyes glance off him and find Gal farther along the dais, still wearing the brass cuffs, with two soldiers standing guard over him. I can’t bear the look in his eyes, the equal measures of hope and fear and love. I look away.
The beady lenses of six cameras swing around, and their presence, along with all of the officials in the room, emboldens me. With all eyes watching, they can’t gun me down. I straighten my spine and stride forward, lifting my chin.
“Ettian Nassun,” General Iral says coolly. “I was wondering when we’d see you next.”
I turn my right hand around, flashing the sparkle of emeralds, the pale glint of platinum, the signet ring in all its glory, freed from its velvet prison. The anthem’s last notes fade.
“Not Nassun. Ettian emp-Archon. And you will address me by my bloodright, or not at all.”
CHAPTER 31
NO ONE KNOWS what to make of me. I don’t know what to make of me. The silence grows deafening. The fire in the hall outside goes quiet, and a moment later I hear Wen’s familiar footsteps stop short a few feet behind my back.
So I just stand there and let the truth sink in. It isn’t difficult to see. I have my father’s large brow and my mother’s full lips. If you’re looking for one, you’d miss it. If you’re looking for both, you could never. But no one’s ever scrutinized me, not since the fall of Archon. I’m a street kid, raised from nothing, one of a thousand scrappy young things who shook off the rubble of Trost.
Only, that’s not quite how it happened.
What I said on the Ruttin’ Hell was a partial truth. There was an airstrike. It had been too risky to sneak me off-world this far into the war, and so I stayed deep in the palace’s recesses, in the stone-hewn rooms that raised and sheltered me. But we weren’t deep enough when the bombs hit. My world came raining down around me. My caretaker crushed. Every exit blocked by rubble. And somehow I still lived.
I still lived, but I couldn’t survive for long down there. Not until a world-shattering rumble sent tremors through the ground that freed an opening in the wreckage I had spent days scrabbling at, trying to dig a way out. Not until I found the panel behind the boiler and walked a mile in the dark of the mine-cut tunnel, my feet bleeding, my fingers scraped raw, my royal garb tattered beyond repair and recognition.
By that time, the war was over—the Warning Shot fired, my parents captured, our armies crushed, and Iral’s crusade of revenge only beginning. My useless bloodright hung on a platinum chain around my neck, the signet ring too large to fit on my ten-year-old fingers. In the parking garage, I wrapped it in one of my torn sleeves. I didn’t get the velvet bag until much, much later.
Now I hold the ring high for the whole court to see. Every camera and every pair of eyes fixes on the metal and stone, the pale platinum stark against my darker skin. They all know what it is. They all know what it means.