RHEE had replayed at least a dozen times the hologram of the Eliedio exploding. Even more souls lost. Another explosion she’d escaped. She should’ve been among them . . .
“Don’t you get tired of watching the same thing?” asked the Fontisian. She’d recently learned his name was Dahlen, and that he was insufferable.
“No,” Rhee said. She pulled the handheld back, just out of his grasp, and the projected image distorted across the pod’s ceiling. “Not even close.”
Only a few passengers had managed to escape, Tai Reyanna among them. Rhee was relieved to hear of her Tai’s survival—her caretaker, who’d lived with her family even before the accident, and her only remaining tie to that life in the palace. Even now, Tai Reyanna was organizing a public vigil at the base of the sacred crystals in Tinoppa—a tiny asteroid currently equidistant from Kalu and Nau Fruma. It was famous for its ancient monument of crystals, impossibly large and arranged in a half circle. It was thought to be a sacred site, and it was there the galaxy would mourn Rhee’s passing.
Would Julian go? Could his mother afford it, now that Veyron was gone?
Rhee pushed the thought aside. Her skin felt itchy. The wool Fontisian-style tunic she’d been given to wear aggravated her skin, though anything was better than the red embroidered coronation dress.
Dahlen shook his head and placed a red pill on the console in front of her. After they’d jettisoned Veyron’s body in the Eliedio escape pod, she’d boarded the Fontisian’s craft; it was made of some kind of organic matter that must have belonged to his native planet. It smelled strongly of oak and cloves, and it looked like it was carved from the inside of a tree. It was bursting with plants, like a rain forest in the sky, and the green foliage seemed to angle toward Dahlen wherever he went. The console itself was a stump, with rings that Rhee could trace with a finger.
“You’re out of options,” he said. “Take this.” He couldn’t have been older than eighteen, but he acted like all adults did: bossy, distracted, annoyed to have to repeat himself.
“I told you already,” she said. “I won’t take it.” She picked it up to examine it.
The pill was the size of her pinky nail, and filled with a gel-like substance. It was a scrambler—it would rearrange her DNA so that the scans wouldn’t detect any trace of Rhee. Not in her eyes, her fingerprints, her blood, or her saliva. If she took the red pill, Rhiannon Ta’an, the last empress of the Ta’an dynasty, would be gone.
Only for a time, he’d claimed. But how could she trust him? If he was lying, twelve generations of Ta’an would end with her.
“I can’t tell if you enjoy being this difficult, or if you’ve not been raised properly.” Dahlen had high cheekbones and thin lips that made his expression hard to read. Disinterested, like the sleek, wild desert cats that wandered the sands of Nau Fruma.
But cats pounced. She had to remember this. She cleared her throat. “My apologies,” she said, with deep sarcasm. “Was this supposed to be an easy kidnapping?”
“I’m not kidnapping you. If it weren’t for me, you’d be dead.”
“And yet you haven’t told me why the order sent you,” she said. Her hair fell in front of her face, and she tucked it back behind both her ears. It was short now—too short. She’d been growing her hair out for the royal braid since she was in diapers.
He claimed his mission was on behalf of a Fontisian order, the Order of the Light. Rhee had heard of them in passing—children ordained as religious warriors to defend their mountaintop monasteries. Half priests, half military elite, the Order of the Light had been established during the Great War. Rhee had always known them as a cult of sorts, elaborately tattooed to let the world know of their commitment to Vodhan. She’d heard of even stranger practices too. Animal sacrifices. Plant elixirs with psychotropic properties . . .
Dahlen didn’t seem like a religious fanatic, though. He wasn’t savage or intense so much as deeply composed—a calculated coolness that in some ways scared her even more.
In the hours since leaving Nau Fruma, they’d almost been caught by a UniForce ship and had nearly burned up while breaking into Fontis’s atmosphere. Dahlen had fired commands at her: Be quiet, stay down, stop asking questions.
“Is it not obvious?” he asked. “Our planet benefits from a Ta’an on the throne.” The Urnew Treaty dictated as much, if there was to be lasting peace between Kalu and Fontis.
Rhee refused to back down. “You say so, but what isn’t obvious is how you knew of the assassination attempt before it happened. How you infiltrated a Kalusian network and knew of a secret plan ordered by the Crown Regent himself.”
“You seem smart enough, and yet you speak like a child.”