“Thank you,” I say, and then I lunge for the insurgent before she can scream.
Zalel doesn’t deign to announce his arrival in my chambers. He’s still a young boy, otherwise easy to miss, but his own mutations are far from tame, his breath pluming as bright blue flame before him. I see the flicker beneath my closed door before he speaks at all. It’s neither his only nor his most notable gift—that would be his healing abilities—but it’s certainly the most distinctive.
I clear my throat. “What does she know, Zalel?”
“Maybe nothing,” he says from the threshold. “Maybe more than anyone should. She hasn’t broken yet.”
The insurgent from the previous battle, the one who dared to send a freezeshot blast between my eyes, has been in our custody since. She’s a bold one, fire-struck, bursting with the planet’s power that she denies. The kind of person her lot would trust. The kind with secrets that could end their rebellion.
I rise from my bed, sleep now far out of reach, wings uncurling from my aching body. “I don’t want her broken. I want her lucid so she can tell us everything she knows—not tortured fragments between pleas for her life.” A thought niggles at the back of my mind. “Who has been interrogating her?”
Suddenly, Zalel is barely audible, but I can feel the tremble in his voice, even from behind a closed door. “Thaane, my liege.”
A growl rises in my throat. Thaane may be my friend and among my greatest soldiers, but he’s doing what he does best: leaping to the next stage of a plan he never bothered explaining to anyone else. He could’ve pinged my comms tablet. He could’ve sent a live messenger, if typing a message himself was too much work. Even before I took over leading my late parents’ army, Thaane was known for his little insubordinations. Breaking a door in the process of opening it. Injuring a combatant in a friendly sparring match. Pointed criticisms of his legion commander under his breath, despite the elder soldier’s established seniority.
“Open the damned door, Zalel.”
He does. Zalel’s skin has gone sickly pale with worry, so white it nearly blots out the bluish undertones of all nightfolk flesh; stress lines his forehead, indents the angles of his face. The Shadow Court judged me in need of a personal attendant since my parricide, and I was in no state to resist. He’s been flitting around the edges of my awareness for countless sleep cycles now, feeding my dog, sweeping up the shatteredglass in my chambers, delivering meals I have no desire to eat. By now, I expected he’d have adjusted to my temper. But it seems not. Fair enough.
Sometimes the stubborn, wriggling rage in my chest catches even me by surprise. I don’t remember a time before it crouched there, like a dragon in its lair, always in wait.
“Thaane,” I say, before Zalel can interrupt me, “was not assigned to the task.”
Zalel swallows the lump in his throat. “He volunteered, my liege.”
Another curse slips, unbidden, from my mouth. I want to throw something, and I’m at once both grateful and furious with past Adria for breaking nearly everything in sight and having Zalel remove the fragile remainder from my sleeping quarters. “This will not stand.”
“I will file a report with his legion commander. He will be swiftly—”
“Take me to them.”
Zalel nods stiffly. I follow him into the hall. Still terribly young, he has to think harder than most about the fortress’s layout, visibly second-guessing each turn the instant before he takes it, but I leash my frustration. Better to save it for Thaane. God help him if he’s broken my best lead on the rebellion beyond repair.
By the time we enter the interrogation chamber, I’ve assembled a short list of things to possibly expect. The prisoner, battered by Thaane’s own claws or torn to shreds by his four wings. Burned, perhaps, by a blast of demanding radioactive power. Having her own life threatened, or even hearing a bluff regarding the lives of those she loves. But what I see is none of those things.
The rebel cowers, like a lost child, in the chamber’s center. The table and restraints for questioning are empty, abandoned, but she remains caked with dirt, dust, and gravel. Blood has dried along the arch of her throat, which I threatened with my teeth before taking her prisoner last night. But otherwise, she shows no signs of injury. Not by weapons. Not by energy. Not even by Thaane’s own three-fingered clawed hands.
She rattles like ice beginning to splinter, teeth chattering. Outside of her obstinate armor, her own mutations are now visible. A sweep of scales along her spine. Spikes tearing through her skin all over, clearly designed to protect, but they’ve all been bent back, many broken, by the force of wearing armor over them.
I wonder why she seems to cringe into the floor, rather than away from me. Then I realize she’s covered her eyes with her hands, nails digging into the skin of her own face.
Thaane looms behind and above her, not one of his four arms raised, but jagged teeth glinting in a bestial smile.
“What in the hell—?” I start.
Thaane raises a singular claw and points up.
The breath whooshes out of my lungs. Thaane’s gift from the Diakópsei is displayed in glittering, horrible glory before me. Thaane’s energy manipulation turns stone into glass. Something he can bend. Something he can shatter.
The entire domed ceiling has become a hectic clash of mirrors, all angled toward the captured rebel. Even the walls are glass now. As I step over the threshold and into the room, I realize the floor, too, is now reflective. Bile rises in my throat; I swallow it down. “What’s the meaning of this?”
“She thinks she’s better than us,” Thaane says, smirking. “She thinks she can bury what she is, what we all are, under some cheap armor and platitudes.” He gestures broadly to the spiked, scaled, shuddering woman at his feet. “Before she leaves this place to whatever punishment you decree, little princess, I’ll ensure she knows herself to be wrong.”
My tongue feels too swollen for my mouth. “This isn’t what I ordered,” I breathe, glancing sidelong at Zalel. “This isn’t procedure for interrogations. What have we evenlearned—?”
“You’re asking the wrong question. Think whatshehas learned.” Thaane drops to one knee, tilting the prisoner’s chin up with a freshly sharpened claw. “Look at me, girl,” he says, his stormy-gray eyes holdinghers fast. “Are we so different, you and I? Is it worth all this trouble, to dethrone a leader who acknowledges what we are?”
My voice spears from my throat, so fierce I half expect a blast of energy to involuntarily follow it. “I’m nothing like you.We’renothing like you. What are you accomplishing here? What has been gained but your own sick pleasure at watching someone elsesuffer—?”
