”Narika.” Prince Grantyde folds his arms. “Hey. Been a second.”
“Yes, it has.” Narika sits back at her vast blackwood desk, framing herself between fastidiously organized filing cabinets and metallic-gold curtains that billow in her cabin’s artificial breeze. “Pardon my lack of communication. How goes life as a father?”
“It’s great,” he says. “It’s very nearly everything I hoped for. I want to know what you’re doing here, Narika.”
She bats her carefully blacked-out eyelids toward her camera. “Doing where, exactly? I’m aboard the Banner.”
“Lywa Three-Monsoon just turned up at Black Pike’s Maekyon system station,” he says. “Requesting a full Extrasector Persona clearance tier report.”
“And was this provided?” she asks, as if she hadn’t already read it.
“Everything that we are legally obligated to send, we did. But you know that already.”
“And you know, I hope, that she also offered aid from the Glory Banner sector,” Narika says. “In whatever capacity I can reasonably provide.”
He nods. His lips are thin. “Reasonable, huh?”
“Lywa’s offer of assistance was genuine, Grantyde,” Narika says. “I am invested in your success. It’s why I’ve focused my efforts on places besides your wife’s doorstep. And it’s why now that Maekyon is finally in the crosshairs…” She holds a sheaf of typeset papers up to the camera. She’s had them spiral-bound, of course. “I’ve gotten my hands on this report. It’s quite incomplete, and I’m sure your people have much they’ve withheld. But my analysis concerns me. Deeply. I want to help.”
“Help how?”
“We could present some united front,” Narika says. “An alternate annexation strategy, like the one you employed on Eqtora. Last time you slipped it under the Raptors’ doors before they could pounce on it. This time I have no doubt they’ll be watching. I could muster my coterie to speak in support of you. A whole additional sector’s worth of voices. Or perhaps other resources. Or connections, or…”
She pauses. She’s never hesitated like this before in front of him.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what you’re planning, where you are on this. But if you wanted to deal me in, I could help. I want to help.”
“Last time I trusted you, you nearly shivved my wife,” Grant says.
“But I didn’t.”
“But you were about to. And then you jetted off after we let you hold our kid, and I haven’t heard from you since. And I’m glad to see you. Sincerely. But I had to call you, Narika. And it’s not a social call.”
“Was that such a burden?”
“I meant to keep in touch,” he says. “I did. But my life has intertwined with three new ones, and the braid has bound me up so tightly that the time slipped through my fingers.” He exhales. “Shit, listen to me. I sound like a Princess.”
“You sound like a Prince.”
“I just feel like we were close to getting somewhere,” he says. “Like you wanted to be let in.”
“I have been truant, too,” Narika says. “But I’ve been doing a great deal of pondering. A great deal. I’ve been attempting to come up with some sort of… olive branch is the Maekyonite term, yes?”
“That’s right. You’re studying up, huh?”
“I don’t want to be at a disadvantage,” she says. “By the time my nieces and nephews are speaking, you’ll all be bilingual. Can’t fall behind.”
“I really, really, really, really want to believe you,” he says. “But I can’t just let you in now, when you suddenly decide that it’s time to be a real sister during the greatest crisis Sykora and I have faced.”
“That is the exact reason I have decided, Grantyde,” she says. “The division is no longer some aesthetic pastime. These consequences go beyond petty Princess games.”
“I have told you over and over that I want to know you,” Grant says. “But I still don’t. And I want to trust you on this, but I still can’t.” He shrugs resignedly. “I’m sorry, Narika.”
She recoils from the word. He sees, but doesn’t retract it.
“How do I earn it, then?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Last time I was in this position, I hit someone with Compound Seventy and felt fucking rotten about it for a few cycles. And I don’t suppose you’d be willing to go that route.”
She shakes her head. “I will not put myself at you and your wife’s mercy in that way.”
“All right,” he says.
They stare impassively at one another for a few moments, as if waiting for the other to speak.
“All right,” she echoes, finally. “I’ve simply missed the window. I can accept that.”
“You haven’t missed it,” he says. “You’ve come at a time it’s boarded up for a storm. On the other side of this, Narika. I promise. I can call you every tenday and bombard you with baby pictures, if that’s what it takes.”
“So what now, then?”
“Now I guess I keep an eye on you,” Grant says. “And hope that one of us comes up with a way to fix it.”
“Ask your people for something called a collateral infortunity report,” she says. “They’ll tell you it isn’t ready. Insist.”
His expression darkens. “You want me afraid.”
“I want you informed.” She steeples her fingers. “I want you to know what annexing Maekyon means.”
“You think I don’t?” The lines of his frown sharpen. “You think I haven’t thought about this constantly already and that it hasn’t kept me up at night? I’m taking Maekyon because if I don’t, then what? Then some other Void Princess does. Maybe Dantia, maybe you. Maybe that’s what you want.”
“Do what you have to,” she says. “But the Grantyde I first met—the Grantyde I admire—I wonder, if you went back in time and presented this future to him, whether he’d recognize himself within it.”
“That guy was way out of his depth,” Grant says. “That guy wasn’t a father, and he wasn’t a Prince. Put him here and he’d drown. I’ve learned how to swim.”
“Perhaps you have.” She leans forward into the camera. “Or perhaps you’ve simply forgotten how to breathe, and your lungs haven’t started burning yet.”
He looks past her—at whatever camera he’s using, presumably. “Bye, Narika,” he says.
The screen goes blank.
Narika sits back from her console and sighs. She places her face in her hands.
How can she blame him? Of course, he’s right. She’s erred. As a Princess and as a sister. She should have been checking in. She should have been present. The tactical thing to do would have been swallowing her pride and setting foot on the Pike, enough times to turn her ridiculous sister’s incredulity into smugness—back again, Narika?—and from there into…
Into what, exactly? Does she really believe Grant’s vision? The man’s such an idealist. Or he was, anyway. And yet somehow these iron edifices bent for him. She supposes that’s what happens when you have a deep voice and a pretty smile.
And now, instead of bending the bars, he’s become one. Well done, Sykora, she thinks, bitterly.
But it wasn’t just Sykora, was it? Now that the screen has darkened back into a portal to the firmament, she sees her own dim reflection. She stands and moves closer to it, until it fades to a featureless silhouette.
“You get the cold shoulder from the hot Prince?”
Narika turns sharply. A pair of glinting anticomps emerge from behind her cabin’s curtain. They are attached to a short, smirking woman in a black cloak over her alabaster uniform.
“Told you,” Axyna says. “The one noble more of a goody-goody than you are. It smells like sanctimony in here. Oughta light a candle.”
“Do be quiet, Specialist-Gefreiter.”
“You wanna make me again?”
Narika scowls. She sits back at her desk and swivels her high-backed seat around. “Come here,” she says.
Axyna steps past the curtain—she took her boots off at the door this time, Narika notes, so she’s not a hopeless case—and stands before the Princess, hip cocked.
“Sit,” Narika says.
Axyna looks around for a seat. The closest one is at the kitchenette.
“Not there. No hardwood edges on my carpet.” Narika points her manicured toe at the floor. “Sit.”
Axyna looks up Narika’s foot, to her leg, to where it disappears into her black-and-gold tunic. She rises further, to eye contact, grins wickedly, and sits cross-legged on the floor.
“Remove your anticompel glasses,” Narika says.
“Why?”
“Remove them,” she repeats. “Or you are dismissed, Specialist-Gefreiter.”
Axyna snorts. “Some progressive.”
“I am not threatening you,” Narika says. “You are free to depart. I have told you time and again, in fact, that I want you gone—”
“And I’ve told you that your Empress insists I go where I please,” Axyna says. “She wants me near the Pike brats, and Sykora wants me far. So here I am, hanging next door with the up yours to the Pike squadron. Let’s make shirts.”
“If you insist on haunting my vessel like some poltergeist, you will obey my rules,” Narika says. “And I’ll make you useful.”
“Use me, huh?” Axyna’s feet flex against Narika’s lavish carpets. “And here I thought you were on Kabira’s Wort.”
“You can caper and leer for the shuttle pilot, Axyna. Or you can remove your anticomps and give me what I want.”
“What would that be?”
“I will find out what you know about Zithra XIX’s designs upon Maekyon,” Narika says. “I will learn what you have kept from my sister and I. And then I will flash the memory of it from your mind.”
“That’s all? How do I know what else you’ll do to me and erase?” Axyna’s laugh has a shake to it. “Or what you’ve already done, maybe?”
“Leave, then. Tell on me to your would-be mother, if you like. Or stay, and be obedient.”
“If you want to be my mistress, you really ought to get your sex drive back first.”
“I want to save Maekyon,” Narika says. “And you do, too.”
“What I want—”
“You do, Axyna,” Narika hisses. “You can pretend to be an amoral gremlin with your Empress. But she doesn’t know what you are.”
Axyna curls her knees up to her chest. “And I suppose you’re eager to tell me.”
“You are a desperate, cornered creature.” Narika’s leather seat squeaks as she stoops forward. “Desperate and frightened. You make yourself reprehensible, to give the hateful confusion toward you a reason beyond your condition. To make it make sense. You shove the firmament away from yourself. You prove your own wretchedness to yourself. You pretend that you welcome the disdain.”
She’s out of her seat now, crouching before her seated interloper.
“But inside yourself, you vibrate. You are the progenitor. The new Taiikari. The breaking of the strictures.” Her nose is nearly touching Axyna’s. “Foolish girl. You think I haven’t guessed what you’re making with your mad Maekyonite tinkering?”
Axyna’s smirk is still on, but her voice has grown strained. Hoarse. “Did you make me tell you?”
“I didn’t need to,” Narika says. “You are obvious. Of course you want to break the compulsion binary over your knee. It made you a sad little outcast. It doomed you to the demimonde from your birth. Just as I was doomed.”
Axyna licks her lips.
“The fact that the Empress wants what you want, for now, is useful coincidence,” Narika says. “And when your paths diverge, when she reminds you of her control and your place. When she lets Maekyon break apart, and keeps the miracle you grew locked away, the same as the first time. And she discards you. What then?”
Axyna’s still smirking. But she’s shut up, and she never shuts up.
“Then you will be an outcast again, if she lets you live.” Narika eases back into her chair and crosses her legs. “Do you ever wonder if she’ll let you live?”
“I don’t need to live,” Axyna says. “What I have created will outlast me. Can you say the same?”
“Exactly.” Narika snaps her fingers. “Exactly, Specialist-Gefreiter. You are the mother of what is to come, and you are watching the future dying in its cradle. You want to save it.” She reaches her hand out. “And you know I’m the only woman who can.”
Axyna is very still as Narika’s fingers brush past her ear.
“So you will do exactly what I tell you to do. And I will use you. I’ll use you how you ought to be used.” She wraps a hand around Axyna’s anticomps. “Or you’ll leave, and I will find some other way.”
A hoarse chuckle passes through Axyna’s gritted fangs. “You’ll try,” she whispers. “And fail. Big swinging fucking tail. You’re the desperate one.”
Narika’s finger hooks under the anticomp strap. “Last chance.”
Axyna is as still and leering as a gargoyle.
Narika sees her reflection again, clear and crisp in the amber lenses, as she lifts them from Axyna’s face.