I roll my eyes, even though the compliment puts me at ease. I can still look the part when I need to. Back on the Vagabond Quick, I’d engaged in a prolonged wardrobe-audition montage, and Hell Monkey had picked out the winner for me. Dark gray and tough, epaulets and gold trim, double-breasted with rows of embellished buttons going down the chest.
Hell Monkey stayed behind on the Vagabond, to hold her in orbit and keep the engines warm. I want to be ready to hit a hyperlight lane as soon as everything down here is tied up. It’s weird to not have him with me, though. Makes the space feel a little too big. Or maybe I feel too small in it.
Charlie’s liftship rumbles as it passes through the upper atmosphere of Apex. The subatmosphere wings unfold with a whir, and then we burst through the cloud line and it’s nothing but ocean below. The blue-black Eastern Sea. From this altitude I can just make out breakers large enough to smash a fuel tanker to bits.
Anything looks harmless and pretty if you’re far enough away.
I’m struck by a memory that I’m not primed to deal with. Me, barely out of diapers. Uncle Atar, grinning and regal. He holds me up as we look out one of the kingship’s towering windows down at the roiling sea. My eyes go wide as I take it all in.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Uncle Atar had asked me back then. “Imagine what’s hiding beneath those waves. Would you like to see that, Alyssa?”
Is that when it started? Did the wanderlust creep in right then and there?
It isn’t long before the kingship appears on the horizon. It’s something to see, and that’s coming from someone who’s seen a lot. A giant geodesic sphere floats above the ocean, like it’s made of air instead of glass, steel, and gold. And trapped inside it is an honest-to-gods fairy-tale castle. The whole thing. I don’t know how old it is exactly, but it’s ancient. The castle used to be on the ground millennia ago, but no one remembers where. Big sections of the stone facade are still the same as when the castle was built, back when the quadrant was just a bunch of dots on some astronomer’s hand-drawn map. They’ve had to reinforce the structure with new materials here and there. (It’s not like there were docking bays for airships on a lot of ancient castle schematics.) And the castle’s guts have changed too—state-of-the-art technology, always being upgraded, power of a sun harnessed inside, etc., etc. Hell Monkey is nuts for the kingship. He’s got a collection of old blueprints stored on his personal hard drive. Dork.
Charlie’s liftship dives for the underbelly of the sphere, and soon we’re swinging around one of the three great cables that anchor it to Apex’s surface. The kingship can travel interstellar, but Uncle Atar’s always preferred to dock on Apex. The anchor cables double as power cords, drawing energy from Apex’s enormous waves.
I grew up on the kingship. It was home once, until my uncles gifted me the Vagabond Quick. I haven’t been back since.
Did they know I’d take off and never visit? Just keep following that starsong from planet to planet? They had to, right?
The eastern hangar hails us in, and we follow the track of landing drones through the bay doors.
“Welcome home,” Charlie says after we’ve touched down.
I grimace. “Not really my home anymore, Charlie.”
He sighs. “Are you ready?”
I want to come back with something clever and cavalier, but I’ve got nothing. So I shoot him a pair of finger guns. Charlie blinks.
Smooth, Farshot.
There’s a squad of otari crownsguards waiting at the bottom of the gangplank. Shoot these guys finger guns and they’ll probably take it as a threat and vaporize you. Some of the strongest and fastest humanoids in the quadrant. Their wounds heal into craggy scars with the texture and hardness of rocks and minerals found on their planet. Most otari—and the crownsguard in particular—purposely scar their fists and feet, all the better to bash in a head.
Standing out in front of them in bright yellow-and-orange robes, his fingers steepled piously together, is Enkindler Ilysium Wythe. He showed up on the kingship when I was about ten years old, an official ambassador for the Solari religion. I don’t know the details, just that the only thing they love more than worshipping their sun, Solarus, is trying to convince everyone else to worship their sun too. Whatever they’re doing must be working—Solari temples have been popping up all over the empire the past few years. Wythe here is an enkindler, one of the religion’s leadership caste, and we never got along particularly well. I wasn’t a big fan of him trying to convert me, and he wasn’t a fan of me in general. Too mouthy. Too wild. Not at all useful to him in achieving his political goals.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I blurt out, and Charlie hisses with disapproval just behind me.
Wythe bows, although the guy is like two and a half meters tall so I can still see right up all three of his nostrils. “I’m here to greet you as a representative for the Imperial Council. A pleasure to see you again, Ms. Faroshti.”
“Captain Farshot,” I correct him. “Since when are you on the council?”
“Since last year,” Charlie cuts in smoothly. “There was a push to add someone who might provide a voice for the people outside the prime families, and Enkindler Wythe’s name was put forward. All the heads of the prime families voted on it.”
I look back at Charlie, and he must see all the questions his explanation definitely didn’t answer on my face because he very subtly wraps a hand around my elbow and squeezes. Not hard. Not like I’m in trouble. More of a “we’ll talk about it later, Alyssa.”
Fine, then. I swing back around to Wythe and smack him on the arm. “Hey, belated congrats, Wythe. Small-town boy really coming up in the world lately, huh?”
He barely manages to turn his sneer into a smile and bows again. “You are as unchanged as ever, Ms. Faroshti. Follow me, please.”
What an ass.
We’re led across the hangar to a multiperson transport that will whisk us up through the body of the kingship to the emperor’s private quarters. Charlie and I sit on one plush bench, facing Enkindler Wythe. He and Charlie stare out the windows as we glide along corridors and up glass-encased lift tubes, climbing toward the upper levels.
“Nice ride,” I say, and they look at me.
What? I hate awkward silences.
“You all upgraded since I left. This the Class X model?”
Nothing.
I nod like someone’s actually answered. “Expensive. You get good mileage on these—?”
“Alyssa,” Charlie mumbles.
I shut up.
I want to go. I want to run. Not just away from this but to something. I want to see more of the quadrant. I want to see all of it. I am not like Charlie, polished and respectable. And I’m not like Enkindler Wythe, happily needling his way deeper and deeper into politics. I flew out of here once, trying to shake the weight of the kingship and the throne and everything that came with it.
But I didn’t fly far enough.
I sigh and lean back in my seat.
“So,” I say after a beat. “Either of you guys ever ridden a flame tsunami?”
Four
IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE I’VE BEEN IN MY uncle’s imperial chambers. Back when I lived on the kingship, he’d had family quarters set aside for him and me and Charlie—smaller, less ostentatious. So we could play at being normal, I guess. The few times I wound up in his imperial rooms, I remember them being stupidly beautiful, with vaulted ceilings and jeweled chandeliers and that delicate, gilded type of furniture you never felt you could sit on. The views from the floor-to-ceiling windows were spectacular, all sunlight and sea.