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His body sagged.

I caught him too late—my arm slid past his shoulder and he dropped anyway, chin first, his head hitting my collarbone hard enough that I felt his teeth click through my shirt.

His weight came down all at once, loose and heavy, one hand still half-raised toward the guards as if he’d been in the middle of a sentence he meant to finish. The silver light under his skin guttered like a lamp running out of fuel and went dimmer than I’d ever seen it.

His breath came out in one long uneven push against my neck and then stopped taking shape entirely, just ragged little pulls that didn’t go anywhere. His pulse fluttered under my thumb where my hand had landed against his throat—fast, thin, wrong—and I pressed harder like that would fix it.

It didn’t fix it. Nothing fixed it.

He was gone somewhere I couldn’t follow and I was shouting his name into the blue light of the royal intake bay while three armed guards stood frozen in the doorway with their rifles half-raised, watching a dead man die again in front of them.

The royal guards moved.

Rifles came down. Not all the way—the barrels still angled toward the deck, fingers still on the triggers—but down.

Boots on the grated floor behind them. Medical personnel, two of them, carrying a litter between them, already talking to each other in clipped Zunatorian half-sentences I couldn’t follow.

I kept one hand against his chest.

Silver-white ŭre still flickered beneath my palm. A faint pulse of it, irregular, dimming each time it came around like a light on a failing battery.

Weak.

But there.

The lead guard looked down at him. His mouth opened. He looked at me. Then back at Veyr’s face, longer this time, and his grip shifted on the rifle—not tightening, loosening, like he’d forgotten he was holding it.

“St-strike C-commander Veyr? That name is impossible.”

I tightened my grip on Veyr.

“Then you should probably find the Crown Prince. Now.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Veyr

Pain returned before consciousness did.

Not sharp. Heavy. Deep enough that my body seemed built around it.

I became aware of pressure across my chest, a pulling sensation along my side, and the steady pulse of silver-white beneath my skin.

My ŭre.

Working.

Slowly.

I opened my eyes to a white ceiling and medical lighting.

Royal construction.

I knew the difference before I saw the insignia. The walls were too clean for an ordinary military facility and too heavily reinforced for civilian medicine. A narrow royal crest had been worked into the metal above the door instead of displayed openly.

Secure royal medical wing.

She did it.