“When can I—” Discordia pressed her lips together. She hadn’t meant to ask aloud, to betray how vulnerable she was.
“Sleep?” Mistress Heraia finished. Her eyes narrowed and she pressed her fingers to the desk. “There will be no rest in war, Discordia. Every soldier will depend on you to keep your mind sharp when you’re most exhausted. So, you will run until I tell you to stop. And when your breath threatens to choke you, you will recite chapter five for me again. Then, once I’m satisfied, I’ll consider letting you sleep.”
Discordia ran until the suns reached their zenith in the Myndalian sky. They shone through the windows of the gymnasium and the trees planted to create the illusion of an outside.
Not once did Discordia fall. Not once did she pause and give Mistress Heraia the opportunity to thrash her for her failure. Not like her siblings; all of them had, at some point during their training, allowed their prefects to beat them into unconsciousness. Just for sleep.
Every sibling except for Damocles.
After Discordia recited the chapter through her hard, heavy breathing, she looked up at the raised observation deck. She knew Damocles would be there. Every child of the Archon was encouraged to watch each other train in the small amount of free time they were given. First, to find each other’s weaknesses. Then, eventually, to exploit them. Though they were not permitted to kill each other at the academy, it was where the royal cohort began viewing one another as competition.
And as potential victims.
Their eyes met. Damocles nodded once and held up one finger, then another. A message passed down from the Archon to all of his potentials.
Damocles wanted to form an alliance.
He came to Discordia’s room later, after another grueling day of training. Mistress Heraia had finally allowed her to eat and then sleep.
Discordia opened the door shortly after dinner. She froze when she saw him. Though still a fourteen-year-old growing into his gangly limbs, he towered over her. His gaze was penetrating, a beam sharper than any Mors laser. He constantly measured the people around him. Whether they were a danger, or—more likely—how quickly he could kill them.
She scanned the hallway and ushered him inside. “Hurry.”
“You were awake for five days,” he said as she closed the door. He sounded almost accusatory. “How did you do that?”
Discordia kept her voice cool. “Sheer force of will.”
Damocles scanned her room—clean, white, and sterile as a prison cell. The only personal object she kept in her room was the round zatrikion board on the desk, still in the same positions that she and Mistress Heraia had left them. The prefect always played the King, and Discordia the Queen. It was a game of strategy, of careful calculation meant to reproduce the moves one might make in war. She had another twelve hours to make her decision. If she won, she ate again. If she didn’t, she starved. This was how they played, and Mistress Heraia was a master at it.
“Do you play?” Discordia asked, noting how he studied each piece.
“Not often.” Accusatory again. “It seems my prefect is useless.”
Every prefect was a former member of the royal guard, all trained to be the best soldiers in the Empire. Each one had picked their trainee among the royal cohort—and those who had first pick always went with the male children. A woman had never been Archon. A woman had never made it through training without dying.
But soldiers all had vulnerabilities and strengths. Some prefects emphasized battle. Some emphasized strategy. Mistress Heraia was determined to teach Discordia everything—and if she ended up dying, then she wasn’t strong enough to begin with.
“You indicated you wanted to form an alliance,” Discordia said, impatient. “Did you mean it?”
“Would I be here if I didn’t?”
“Then who would be the Heir?” Her unasked question was just as important: Who would be the Spare? The other was lucky enough to live, but they would never be as valued, never as vital, never as recognized.
Damocles shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. Didn’t fool her. “Whoever was better.”
He kept staring at the zatrikion board, never at her. Finally, she grew impatient. “Do you want to play?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
They sat there afternoon after afternoon between their own training—often exhausted—strategizing and figuring out each other’s weaknesses.
She learned that Damocles didn’t like losing. She learned that he considered it a weakness. She learned that he grew impatient easily, and that when he sensed he wouldn’t win, he made stupid mistakes.
And she learned that he hated hearing her say the same words when she won every game.
Regina regem necat. Queen kills King.
7.
CLO
Present Day
As Clo and Eris trudged to their destination, they kept to the muddy path, their boots splashing in the shallow water. The trail grew so narrow in some places, they had to go single file. One wrong step might cause a stumble into the swamp, where bogs could be three times as deep as a person. The hidden currents dragged people down in the undertow, to tangle in weeds and never be seen again. Monsters or the thick sludge of water would kill anyone just the same.
The hangar was on the outskirts of the slums. Technically, the city was called Kersh, but everyone in that cesspit called it the Snarl. The outskirts were solely for the transport centers where commercial and private spacecraft came, to either refuel or drop off the rich to go up to the silver and gold floating palaces. High above the clouds, they never heard the constant roar of engines as the ships landed or took off.
The poor had no such luxury. Clo’s childhood had been punctuated in three-minute intervals. The ships landed and took off with perfect precision. Eventually, the roars had faded into the background like the stench of lead, garbage, sulfur, and fuel. When she’d first left Myndalia, she’d found the relative silence and the huge open spaces on Nova terrifying. She’d downloaded engine rumbles to her newly fitted Pathos to help lull her to sleep.
Eris must have looked down on the Snarl, through breaks in the clouds, and thanked her stars she’d never had to live among the scum like Clo. Clo had told Eris where she’d grown up, late on those booze-soaked nights. It wasn’t until much later that Clo realized Eris had barely shared anything in return. That she’d said just enough about training and military to fool Clo into thinking she’d been a soldier.
A spacecraft flew low over their heads, the sound drowning out all thought. From above, they wouldn’t be seen. They would time their entrance with a big Tholosian carrier crawling with hundreds, thousands of soldiers and passengers.
Clo’s Pathos read the details of the spaceship—an Empusa V-900, nice—and fed it into their forged paperwork. The resistance had updated the Pathos since her last mission. Whoever designed their tech was brilliant. A Publican and a mechanic could now pretend to be on the passenger list.