I didn’t sleep much last night.
“Nassun,” the instructor repeats, and I straighten in my chair. “We were discussing the failure of the joint effort by the Corinthian Empire and the Archon general Maxo Iral in their gambit for the Utar System. Specifically, the personal decisions made by Iral which led to—”
My mouth goes dry, a tickle of nausea climbing my throat. “The Utar campaign failed due to a fundamental lack of resources,” I mutter. “The joint forces expected to be able to mine the system’s moons for fuel, but they didn’t establish the supply lines necessary to sustain that operation. With superior reserves, the Umber forces easily overwhelmed them.”
Too late I realize it’s the kind of answer Gal would have given—one that completely undermines the point of the question. This is a leadership seminar, and we’re supposed to be deconstructing the faults and failures of Maxo Iral, not unpacking the mechanics of intersystem warfare. The subtle point I’m supposed to be making, the one the instructor wants to hear, is how Archon leadership was inherently unfit, making Umber intervention not just necessary but downright humane in comparison. But I’m not keen on thinking about the ways the general failed.
After Knightfall, he was the next hero the Archon people hung their hopes on—myself included. We realized that we couldn’t rely on one person in a powersuit to come swooping in and save us. We needed people like Iral, people who could command hearts and minds, who could convince you to be your own goddamn hero.
Five years after they slaughtered the suited knights, the Umber imperials hung Maxo Iral on an electrified crucifix.
So much for heroes.
The instructor raises a brow. “Do try to be present the next time you show up for class,” she says, and moves her imperious gaze to the next cadet.
I scowl. None of this makes any goddamn sense. Gal is a prince, we nearly got killed yesterday, twenty kids died, and somehow I’m back in class. Somehow the academy is carrying on like the galaxy hasn’t suddenly reversed its spin. No time to catch my breath. Not even time to catch some decent sleep.
I let my eyes slide shut.
* * *
—
We were fifteen when we met. Both of us wide-eyed, clutching duffels, dressed in the simple grays of first-year cadets. His nose was too big for his face in the same way my ears were. We’d been assigned to the same bunk after the ceremony that marked our induction into the Umber Imperial Academy. I didn’t know what I was getting into when he shook my hand and introduced himself as Gal Veres. I smiled and told him my name was Ettian Nassun and he could have the top bunk if he wanted. Maybe I should have noticed the imperialism in his blood when he took it immediately.
At first, we were only friends in the way proximity demanded. Neither of us knew anyone else—me because I’d been spat out by the postwar reconstruction and him because he’d been shipped in from a distant world in the Umber interior, far removed from the lower schools where many of our classmates met.
In those early days, we’d eat together in the mess, wrapped in the bubble of the other cadets’ noise. I got the sense he was afraid of me then—I assumed because something about me screamed that I’d lived through the worst of the war, and no kid from the interior wanted to touch that. But after a week of quiet chewing, Gal started asking questions. Easy ones first—diplomatic, polite, the kind you ask when you’re getting to know anyone. Favorite food, favorite color, where I was born, what kind of movies I liked best. Then the harder ones—ones about the three years I spent being shuttled between foster homes before my acceptance to the academy.
He started asking questions about further back, too, but quickly stopped when he realized I wouldn’t—couldn’t—talk about anything that happened to me before I was twelve. The war and the two years that followed were a bleeding wound waiting to scar, and thinking about anything before that time shut me down. I was always afraid he’d guess what filled in those missing parts of my history, but apparently Gal was just as afraid I’d guess the missing parts of his. Looking back now, I’m certain he asked all of those questions to keep me from realizing he wasn’t answering any of mine.
But it didn’t matter. For the first time since the war ended, I felt known. I wasn’t part of the landscape, another faceless orphan shuffled into military service meant to replace the parents who fell with our homeworlds. I was someone. I had a story, and Gal was interested in hearing it.
And Gal was…Well, even then I could tell he was something glorious. He was magnetic, charming, and chaotic. His pranks were legendary, his clout with the upperclassmen uncanny, and it wasn’t long before he had most of our fellow cadets vying for a spot at our table.
But more than that, he had heart. Some friends pull you out of the trash when they find you facedown in it. Gal was the kind who lay down next to you until you were ready to get up on your own. He’d always throw himself right into the mess alongside me, and I didn’t fully grasp how important that was until the first time someone took a swing at me for my Archon origins and Gal swung back.
After he’d been released from a two-hour dressing-down and scheduled for three rotations of janitorial detention, he’d grinned at me, his black eye nearly swollen shut, and mouthed, “Worth it.”
I did my best to keep a straight face, but something went supernova in my mind the moment those words left his mouth. He doesn’t know what I am, what I’ve been through, part of me insisted. Worthy, the rest screamed so loudly that for once the other part barely seemed to matter. I weigh that moment against what I’m feeling now, and my gut boils with confusion, betrayal, guilt, and disgrace.
When I was ten, the Umber Empire stripped away everything I had and everything I was. When I was fifteen, the academy gave it back. Gal gave it back. I was proud to turn my nose up at Seely’s willful disobedience, proud to wear a uniform decorated with brass and obsidian, proud to take part in the machine that was putting the worlds back together stronger than before, bringing the wealth of the Umber Empire to the Archon people who so desperately needed it. Proud to have reassembled myself into something more than the twelve-year-old nobody who crawled out of the rubble of Trost.
And now I remember who destroyed those streets in the first place. What bloodline saw Archon as its rightful conquest, burned the empire to ash, stripped our worlds of their value, and rebuilt what was left into its image, from the cities themselves to the children funneled through its shining new academies. I remember Gal’s real name isn’t Veres. His bloodright demands that he be addressed with the breadth of his holdings attached by the imperial honorific, a tradition that dates back to the foundations of every empire. No higher bloodright exists that could overwrite it through marriage, and he has no other true name to adopt. For as long as he lives, no matter whether he takes his throne or not, his name is Gal emp-Umber.