“Gentlemen, please.” Pavel stretched out two claw attachments and tugged at their pant sleeves, trying to wrestle them back into their seats. They both kicked out of his grip, and Pavel gave off an engine whirl that sounded like a sigh.
“Why did they frame you?” Vin’s voice had dropped. “I’m the spy. I’m the one who sent out the hail.”
Something thick and sticky was working its way through Aly’s brain. The silence stretched out around them as if it, too, were free of gravity, and diffusing through the ship.
“Because I’m Wraetan,” he said finally. It would always come back to his nation, his second-citizen status. He remembered what Vin had said earlier. If you weren’t always trying to get people to like you . . . Was that true? Probably. He was mostly just trying to get people to like Wraetans. To show everyone that Wraetans were more than the rabid guerrilla fighters they’d seen on the holos during the Great War. But he was trying to show the Wraetans, too, what they could be, what he wanted them to be. “It was easy for the public to swallow. They want to get back at us for allying with Fontis . . .”
“Yeah, all of that.” Vin looked at him. “You were convenient. You were the perfect spur-of-the-moment scapegoat to stoke the flames of war. But you were a diversion. The question is: What were they trying to hide?” The fire had seemed to drain out of him. He gripped his way to the dash and looked out into the darkness. “They needed to distract the public from rumors that the Princess is still alive.”
“You know?” Aly asked. He hadn’t told him about the braid he found in the escape pod.
“We suspected as much.” He leaned back like he was trying to get a better look at Aly, trying to take him all in. “How long have you known?”
“Since I found the dead Nau Fruman in the royal escape pod . . .”
“Wait.” Vin stared at him. “What escape pod?”
Aly told him, finally, about catching up to the royal escape pod, and the dead man with a braid coiled on his chest.
Vin just stared. “You’re talking about Princess Rhiannon?”
“No, the other assassinated princess,” Aly said, but when he saw Vin’s face, he knew to drop the sarcasm.
“Holy taejis. Do you know what this means?” Vin asked. “You knew this whole time, and you didn’t say anything?”
“Don’t try to lecture me about keeping secrets,” Aly said. Vin made a face. “And anyway, who the hell are you talking about?”
Vin hesitated. “Princess Josselyn,” he said, after a pause. Aly nearly laughed—would have laughed, if Vin didn’t look so serious. Sure, there were always rumors that she’d survived the crash—conspiracy theories, that kind of thing. You could find anything if you went deep enough on the holos. “I’ve been tracking her. When I was back in Sibu—”
Aly could barely process what he was saying. “When were you in Sibu?”
“During leave a few months back . . .”
The last time they were all on leave, Alyosha went to Jethezar’s house. Vincent had said he was going to the coast to meet up with a fan. Aly figured he was off doing who knows what, with one of the thousands of girls who proposed to him on the holos or cried when he came on screen. For some reason this lie hit him harder than the others.
“Can I believe anything you tell me?” Aly hated how he sounded, like a desperate younger brother shut out of a game.
“You can believe this,” Vin said softly. “I think she’s alive. The United Planets thinks she’s alive. It’s even more important now that we find her.” Aly could see him chewing the inside of his mouth, like he did sometimes when he was thinking. “Listen, we have to risk taking the direct route to Portiis, even if there are patrols. We need to get there as fast as—”
Just then a loud pop made the whole hull shudder. The craft tilted noticeably, and the metal shell around them groaned.
“What the—?” But Aly knew right away what it was. Someone had locked on to the craft.
“A grav beam?” Vin swam back down into his seat, kicking off the walls and strapping in. Aly did the same and unlocked the nav system from his screen.
“It’s not a grav beam,” Aly said. The velocity was too slight. “It feels almost . . . magnetic.” As he said the last word he swung to the window. He had a visual on a body thirty astro units in the distance. What quadrant were they in again? Bazorl. Bazorl Quadrant. He scanned the nav stats and his blood went cold.
“Choirtoi,” he swore. “We’re being pulled into Naidoz.”
“Naidoz,” Vin repeated. He said it like a death sentence. He frantically began pressing buttons and pulling at the console. But Aly knew it was too late.
Naidoz was another dwarf planet, with an enormous valley of magnetic lava that had cooled and hardened centuries ago. Equipment failed constantly and crashes were common because everyone was pulled into its magnetic field. Every pilot knew to avoid it. But they’d drifted—they’d stopped paying attention all because of a stupid fight that Aly had started.
The pull got stronger, and they picked up speed as they were drawn helplessly toward the planet. It felt like the pod was made of glass, like it might shatter.