Aly had taken zeppelins sometimes on leave, always in one of the high-numbered capsules. They were cheap and slow and not even a little bit fancy. He’d park his butt in one of the worn seats while a rusty droid rammed his elbow with the drink cart. The air was always stale and it took forever to get anywhere, but he’d still give his right arm to be one of these folks. He’d take a lumpy chair so long as it reclined, and a packet of calories delivered right to his hand.
There was no cruising now, no kicking back in one of the poky seats. They double-timed it down the aisle, without moving so fast they’d be suspicious. Kara’s stolen badge did the trick again and again.
By some miracle they hadn’t run into any guards, but he remembered Nero had boarded the zeppelin at Navrum City. Probably the entire security team was guarding Nero’s next fart. Aly never thought he’d thank god to be anywhere near a politician—but it was working in their favor now.
Or it was—until Kara swiped a door and they barreled through into a room packed with reporters. They were all facing a podium with none other than Nero standing behind it. And he looked pretty steamed. Everyone turned in their direction.
Alyosha was paralyzed. He was the most wanted criminal in the universe, and only a few flimsy pieces of fabric separated him from a room full of people who wanted his head. Literally.
“Oops,” Kara whispered under her breath. Aly felt the weight of at least one hundred sets of eyes on him—one hundred sets of eyes attached to one hundred souls who believed he’d murdered the last princess of the Ta’an dynasty. He tensed up, ready to run. But his eyes landed on a girl, Fontisian by the look of her clothes, whose face was half-covered by an oversized hood. He could see her mouth, though, and the quicksilver flash of relief as she sighed.
An aide near the podium charged their way, and the girl lowered her hood and vanished into the crowd. The aide—public relations, you could somehow always tell—pushed them back out into the hallway. A big-ass Tasinn followed at her heels.
“What in the hell are you doing? Who let you in? This is a private event.” Her voice had gotten so high she was practically screeching.
“We were looking for the medical wing,” Kara said quickly. She’d shifted her accent seamlessly—now she sounded like she’d come straight from a high-society Kalusian country club. “The layout of this zeppelin is simply impossible to navigate! My apologies!”
“Zuilie.” The girl’s yellow reptilian eyes flickered as she looked them up and down. “The patients are to be kept strictly quarantined,” she said, flinging a hand in Aly’s direction. Kara was right; the girl didn’t want to look at him. When their eyes met for a split second, her blue skin flushed.
“Understood,” Kara said evenly. “It won’t happen again. They just needed to get his circulation going,” she said. Aly did his best not to move, react.
“You’re not even close to the medwing,” the Tasinn said behind them. His eyes were narrow with suspicion.
Kara hesitated a beat too long, but Pavel piped in just in time. “That is entirely my fault,” he said. “I led them out of the medwing. But my software must be outdated, and I lost the layout during the blackout.”
Aly tried hard not to express surprise. Look at my little man, learning how to lie. He guessed there’d never been a reason to before.
“Unbelievable.” The woman brought her hand to her face, her long fingers curling halfway around her head. “Okay, okay, what’s done is done.” She took a deep breath in and a long exhale out. Her eyes went cloudy as she checked her cube. “Take this hallway down until you hit a spiral set of stairs, up one flight and then two immediate lefts. There’ll be signs from there, and it looks like the patient bay is up top, lab on the bottom. You got that?”
Pavel’s eyelights flashed blue.
“Should I escort them, Fiona?” the Tasinn asked, and Aly’s heart stopped.
“No, you idiot,” the girl said, in a tone of deep condescension. “Your mandate is to protect Nero, not play escort. And you”—she pointed to Pavel—“tell those choirtois to update your software.”
That was that: They were free to go. Alyosha nearly lost it. He wanted to roll around on the floor laughing until it hurt, until his sides split and he cried. But he was still shaking.
The woman and the guard both glared at them before turning and retreating into the conference room. They’d escaped an execution, practically, and gotten step-by-step directions to the place they wanted to go.
They moved in silence. He knew they were all too scared to speak—like they might break a spell and everything would shatter. Finally, they got to a door that was made of a thick, shiny metal that looked different from all the others. Kara swiped her security card, and they pushed their way inside.
They faced a long hallway lined with a row of shelves filled with scrubs neatly stacked and a wardrobe full of hanging lab coats. In the cabinets were boxes of latex gloves and hair caps. Kara ran her palm absently over them, as if she were petting an animal.