“I can handle them myself in the morning, if you’d like,” she offered. “You don’t have to be burdened with it. Your silence will be heavy enough.”
“No need, Commander.”
“Good man,” she said finally and moved toward the exit past Wall, silent in his cage for once.
“Commander?” Mr. Caphree called.
“What?” she snapped.
He shook his head as if she were in a pitiable position. “You see it, don’t you? The need for change.”
“I can’t be recruited.” She stalked up the stairs.
“That wasn’t a no,” he called after her.
She marched back out into the open air, nearly rounding the corner to catch up with Yemi before she paused and decided she wasn’t actually keen on seeing her just now. Instead, she turned in the opposite direction toward the tiered gardens.
What is there to even say?She huffed. Night lights of the barracks over the cloud bridge twinkled nearby.The deed is done. But the man can’t possibly stand a public trial without a tongue and no explanation for it…
Maybe he had to die. She tried not to think about it.
Out in the dark, someone whistled. It wasn’t unusual, but still, she stopped. Shadowed figures moved about the near edge of the cloud bridge.
“And what are we up to this evening?” she called, her voice casual, though something felt off as no one moved to respond.
She whistled herself and edged closer. “Who’s there?”
Two people. One of them wore a dark cloth mask over their face as they turned toward her. Behind their hunched bodies, a spark, a sizzle,and smoke. Two more black-clad figures raced across the bridge and up toward the palace, calling for these two to join them.
“Wait,” Nova said, mostly to herself. The sizzle and smoke registered as a fuse. Her hackles raised too late. “Stop!” she yelled and ran after them, but she got no closer than the bridge’s edge before it exploded, hurling her backward into the bushes and stone wall of the palace.
Her ears rang and eyes burned with dust and gunpowder as she got to her feet and emerged from the bushes. The ground rumbled as the marble of the bridge undoubtedly crashed into the temple below. She could make out figures darting among the palace foregrounds, but not whether they were friend or foe. She coughed, desperate for air that didn’t singe her lungs.
I failed,she screamed in her head.I didn’t get all of them.
But they weren’t trying to free their friends. The dungeons were behind her. Foreign-sounding pops resounded off walls, terrifyingly close. Guns. They had guns.
Yemi.
Nova heaved and blew dust-caked snot from her nose so she could breathe. A garden fountain allowed her to rinse her eyes quickly before she ducked into a tunnel behind it, one of the secret spaces beneath the Rock created for emergencies that had truthfully never come. She was grateful for them now.
This one let out in the west wing near the kitchens and library. The pops continued, echoing along with shouts and the sounds of chases in marble hallways. She found herself behind a ventilation grate on the back wall of the kitchen. The etched iron was slick with grease as she maneuvered the panel downward and climbed out over one of the stoves. The room was empty but not yet clean. Dishes still waited in the sink. An unfinished plate of food sat abandoned on a prep table near an overturned stool. The staff had likely fled.
She wiped her hands on a discarded rice sack and armed herself with a kitchen blade as she approached the doorway leading out into the hall.
“Butwhywould she do that?” Cerro whispered aggressively on the other side of the wall. He was accompanied by another set of frantic footsteps, but there was no second voice. “There arepriestsdown there!Icould have been down there! And she drops a bridge on them?”
Nova braced for Cerro to turn the corner so she could put a kitchen blade in his throat, but they scurried past toward some other destination. She crept out behind them, following for as long as she could to get a sense of where they were going. It appeared to be the throne room. Cavernous. A ridiculous place to hide.
An ideal central location for a rendezvous, however.
A skirmish tumbled out of the library doors ahead. She identified Brother Lain, his white robe stained a dark red, wrestling with an assailant who seemed to be brandishing a letter opener. Nova rushed over and signaled to Lain to back off so she could take over. She kicked the blade from the masked man’s hand and flicked an iron fan open near enough that the blade grazed his throat. She held it there and he froze as she crouched over him.
“You know who I am?” she asked. He nodded slightly.
“You wrecked the bridge?”
He nodded again.
