“Get her to the ship!” I yelled at Eton.
He spun to snatch Qole up off the ground as though she weighed nothing. “Where’s Arjan?” he yelled back at me. “Basra searched all night!”
Please forgive me, Qole.
“I don’t know. I’m going to figure it out, but you need to get out of here before the Air Guard arrives!”
Eton was no doubt fond of Arjan, but if there was anything I could trust, it was that he would protect Qole at any cost. Even if Arjan was the cost. I didn’t stop to watch if he’d take my advice. I turned back to the guards still on their feet after Eton’s assault. Four. Too many.
“Stand down,” I ordered. “It’s not worth it. You can tell my father you didn’t want to hit my royal face,” I added bitterly.
I recognized one of the guards I had sent away earlier in the hallways, a kid barely old enough to wear the uniform.
“I’m sorry, my prince, but your father is the king, not you,” he replied, and three others dove for me, batons in hand.
We met in a staccato burst of swords-upon-sticks. Electricity arced between us as the batons died after engaging with my blades. I worked in a furious defensive pattern, parrying the batons again and again, until I trapped one between my swords. I kicked one guard in the face, sending him staggering into another, and then with a twist of my wrists I wrenched the baton into the third guard. It flickered just as he tried to knock it away, and he dropped to the ground, twitching.
Three down. But the kid was no longer in sight.
I whipped around. Qole was lying on the Kaitan’s ramp, where Eton was grappling with the young guard. The kid fell back, pulling out his blaster and leveling it with trembling hands. Eton shrugged and, faster than the eye could follow, pulled out a subcompact and blew his head off.
I froze in midsprint, staring as his body crumpled and rolled, falling onto the Atrium floor. I didn’t have any emotion outside of horror—simple, irreversible horror.
I wasn’t given any time to process it. “Where’s Arjan?” Basra yelled, appearing at the top of the ramp and sounding nearly frantic, while Eton scooped up Qole again. “We can’t leave him!”
I looked over my shoulder. “I don’t know!” More guards were pouring in to reinforce the last few. I shook my head, then reached for my comm as I closed the remaining distance between us. “Telu, you have to take off now, now, now. Head north!” I sheathed my blades the second before I shoved Eton, sending him farther up the ramp with Qole in his arms.
I was only planning to make sure they were safely aboard before going back to find Arjan and face the consequences with my father, try to convince him and Rubion to return to reason and decency, but one of Eton’s hands closed around my wrist. At first I thought it might have been his military training to leave no one behind, but then I saw his face.
“What are you doing?” I yelled at him.
He gave me a grim smile and shouted over the roar of the engines. “Making sure you don’t get away with this. They have Arjan, we have you.”
The next moment, we were a hundred feet over the citadel, then a thousand, and then we were skimming over mountaintops, heading far away from my home.
Collecting my wits felt like gathering fallen snow back into clouds. And in fact, by the time I succeeded in fully returning to my own mind, snow was billowing outside the main viewport of the Kaitan, backed by a heavy sky that turned the daylight gray.
For a disorienting moment, I thought we were back on Alaxak. But the harsh details of my surroundings made me realize I wasn’t hallucinating, wherever we were. I lay on a cold bench on the bridge with fur blankets piled over me and the remnants of the Shadow-inspired gown still stuck to my chest and shoulders. I gazed at mountains outside that were defined, sharp, and unrecognizable. Not home.
Then I saw Nev and Telu both in front of the control console, Telu in the captain’s chair and Nev bent next to her, like they’d piloted through a team effort, which struck me as indefinably surreal. Why were they piloting? Snippets of the previous evening came back to me in blasts, as if from a photon rifle. I was pretty sure that I’d seen more than a few of those firing last night, and that the shots had been aimed at me. I’d been captured, but I’d somehow gotten out, and Nev and Telu had helped me.
The others were nowhere to be seen. If I’d had to guess, I would have put Eton up in the mass-driver turret, Basra down at his station monitoring comms, and Arjan…Arjan should have been piloting in my place, not Telu.
“Arjan!” I sat bolt upright, knocking the furs away. Every part of my body ached, but that didn’t stop me.
Telu spun, and Nev was kneeling at my side in an instant. He grabbed my hand and ran his thumb over the back of it.
“It’s okay, you’re safe…-ish.” He cast a glance toward the viewport.
“Where?”
He knew me well enough to be specific and began rattling off coordinates, which I admittedly didn’t understand. “We’re in the northernmost quadrant of Luvos, just off the pole,” he added. “You’ve been out for hours. The terrain is inhospitable and scrambled by drone interference, and we flew in low enough that Telu could hide our signal. We’ve escaped the reach of the Air Guard. The drones shouldn’t bother us, though some of them are moving more than they should be, deactivated though they supposedly are.”
I didn’t care about drones. “Where’s Arjan?”
A grimace like I’d stabbed him flashed across his face. “I don’t know, we had to leave him—Qole!”
I was up before he could stop me. My muscles cried out in protest, but my memories of Arjan came back to me with far more agony.
“You left him?”
But it hadn’t just been him. I’d left him too. We all had.
“I’m so sorry,” Nev said. “I was going to go back to find him, but—”
His apologies and explanations faded to the background as the image of my brother’s eye socket sprang to the front of my mind. We left him, we left him….The pain was so strong that I could barely gasp for breath. My head felt light, and I couldn’t get enough air. We left him. A high buzzing rang in my ears as I tried to suck more air in. We left him.
“You’re hyperventilating, Qole.”
But we left him. Arjan had been tortured, then abandoned. For so long I’d tried to protect him from his fears, but now I’d left him in the worst of nightmares. Arjan, Arjan, forgive me, we left you, please forgive me. And then, when I finally caught a breath, the pressure in my chest, neck, face, released in a wrenching sob. It ripped through me. I felt shredded. Like I’d never be whole again.
Nev seized my arm, trying to pull me back down to the bench.
And with that, I snapped back into myself. I looked at his hand, then at him. “Let me go.”