Base Gamma rose in the distance like a mountain, Odysseus’s ship against the wine-dark sea. Looking out the window, T felt like a thief or a vagabond, making a perilous ocean journey under the cover of night. Out here, floating on top of the stormy waves, he could see the stars; Errai, the Northern pole, seemed to stare down at him like the eye of God.

“It’s a nice night,” he murmured, more to himself than anybody. Cassandra wouldn’t be paying attention to the sea or the stars above, and Ace was far too distracted by the planetary witch-hunt for him to notice the beauty of the midnight sky. Nevertheless, it was a nice night, and T would be damned if he let it go to waste. He was rarely ever planetside to begin with, and he’d appreciate the few glimpses of nature he could get in a place so emotionless and cold.

“It’s beautiful,” Lyra, the Cantator, whispered. T startled slightly. He hadn’t realized she was still awake—he half-expected the blood loss to have exhausted her, if nothing else. But here she was, standing here behind him and looking thoroughly unconcerned about her numerous injuries.

“You should rest,” T said.

“How can anyone sleep when the sky is so clear? Look. Not a single cloud.” She turned her face skyward, breathing in the salty air and gazing up at the heavens, enraptured. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“It’s a pretty uncommon sight to see. Normally the forcefields cover everything, and even when they’re out of commission the smog is just... omnipresent.”

“It’s definitely like that in the Underground. I didn’t know it was the same everywhere else.”

“They try to cover it up, but you can still see past the façade,” T said. “The stars are different. You can tell where the sky is real and where they’ve erected force fields, because all of the force fields are outdated by about two thousand years. They make it look like the North Star is still Polaris.”

“It’s not anymore?”

T shook his head. “It’s a phenomenon called precessional wobbling. Polaris was the North Star when the Luminosae walked the Earth, and Errai is the North Star now. It’ll be Vega, I think, in another few thousand years, but we’ll all be long dead by then.”

“That’s fascinating.” Lyra looked straight up again, and T didn’t bother to tell her that she wouldn’t be able to see Errai that way. “Where did you learn so much about the stars?”

“I took astronomy classes in school. We had to pick a science, you know? Acidalia used to make fun of me because I didn’t choose biology. She always said it’d be more useful to me. It seems to serve her pretty well.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Regret what?”

“Not choosing biology.”

T shrugged. “Not really. I guess I’ve always been more concerned about what’s up there than what’s down here. Everything here is so corrupt and rotted from the inside, and biology and chemistry are treated like weapons. I think I just wanted to study something lofty and celestial. It was the one class I took where nothing was violent or dangerous—we talked about the Mira, of course, and how to get by them, but we didn’t sit there and discuss how to burn them alive from the inside or melt down their cells with lethal pathogens.”

Lyra nodded, not looking down from the sky. “I get it.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.”

A moment of silence passed without fanfare, and the hovercraft moved closer to the spire jutting out of the sea. For a few minutes, the only sounds were the soft white noise of the motor and a sleeping Cassandra’s quiet breathing. Then Lyra looked at T, her big brown eyes glassy and vitreous in a way that almost reminded him of Acidalia, and asked, “what are they like?”

“Who?”

“The Mira.”

T thought about it for a moment. “I’ve never seen one in person,” he said, “but I’ve seen pictures, heard stories. They look sort of like people, but sort of not—like robots, maybe, or like Alestra. Not like her, but you know that weird thing that happens where certain people look human enough for your brain to think they’re a person, but just different enough that it creeps you out a little?”

“You mean the uncanny valley.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Sometimes they look like old Star Trek aliens—like people in body paint and costumes. But then sometimes they look so different from humans that it’s hard to remember they’re even sentient. And then, on occasion, they just sort of fall in the middle, and your mind register them as weird humans, sick humans, so you get this urge to run from them. But they’re not really scary like horror movie creatures or anything. Most of the time they look like us.”

“Do they act like us?” Lyra asked, raising her voice as waves lapped against the side of the hovercraft. “I know they’re the enemy, but…”

“Yeah, mostly. They’re violent, though,” T said, “and you’d think they’d look all swole, like gladiators, but most of them seem to have pretty normal builds, actually. But they’ll go at each other’s throats over almost anything. And they drink a lot, but not for pleasure—they chug pure ethanol, like laboratory grade stuff.”

Lyra giggled. “So they’re like us, but weirdos?”

“Pretty much.” T racked his brain for any sort of information he could give that might interest Lyra, though he didn’t know exactly why he was trying so hard to keep her attention. “Oh,” he added, “they’re blue. Sometimes purple-ish, sometimes green-ish, but always blue, or some shade of it. Their blood has hemocyanin instead of hemoglobin, and it’s the color of pewter when it’s oxygenated. And sometimes they get weird markings around their faces, and their hair grows super long—they always have long hair, but every spring they start styling it and it turns different colors. Or at least, the males do—nobody’s ever seen a female Mira.”

“Nobody ever?”

“Not in person, at least. I wouldn’t know—I’m only seventeen, they don’t exactly tell me these things. But they don’t have women in their military, and all of their doctors and technicians are men. We don’t know if it’s because of sexism or because their women are radically different somehow, but yeah.”

“Don’t they carry around pictures of their kids or partners?” Lyra looked almost concerned, like she was worried about enemy soldiers having failing marriages. It was oddly sweet, even if it was misguided.

“Honestly,” T said, “these are a group of people who will literally fight to the death over the most minor insult. They act like death doesn’t even matter to them—they all kill each other or themselves before we can take them prisoner. I doubt they really want emotional connections to anyone.”

“So they’re like Eleutherians, then?” Lyra laughed.

“I guess so. They probably see us as barbarians as much as we see them as savages,” T said. “Really, it is unfair to act like they’re all hyper-violent beasts—I mean, they are a whole species, and they probably have a myriad of different cultures nobody on Terra cares to find out about. And they’re smart—really smart. Some of their technology is insane. We’ve been fighting a war of attrition against them for centuries because we’re so evenly matched. They’ll stop attacking us if we stay behind Neptune, but every time we try to inch past Pluto they start their assault again, and then nobody wins anything.”

“So why don’t you just stay inside the Solar System?” Lyra asked. “What’s out there that you want to find so badly?”

“Nothing, really. But it sucks to be stuck in this little corner of space when there’s so much more out there. And I guess that brings us back to the stars again, doesn’t it?” T looked back up at the sky, gazing at Errai. “Look at all that. So many stars have solar systems, and so many planets have biospheres, and there’s so much out there that we want to be able to see. I don’t know why the Mira are so dead-set on keeping us stuck here, but I understand why Eleutheria wants to fight its way out of this quarantine.”

“I do, too.” Lyra looked at T with a strange sort of half-smile. She had the crooked teeth of a girl who’d never been able to afford braces, but it seemed almost endearing instead of ugly, and her features were soft and rounded in cute way. She wasn’t beautiful like Alestra or Acidalia were beautiful, but she had a type of girl-next-door quality about her that made her enchanting, and a surge of affection for this lost Cantator bubbled up in T’s chest. They looked at each other for a little while, two pairs of brown eyes staring into one another, until the hovercraft chimed softly and broke the quietude.

Ace bumbled out of the door, yawning. He still had bits and pieces of Acidalia’s torn coronation gown clinging to his mussed hair, looking very visible against his dark brown curls. “We’re here,” he announced, as if T was incapable of seeing the massive building jutting out of the ocean like something from the city of R’lyeh.

“I see that.” For some reason, T was disappointed at the sudden end to their brief ocean journey. He had to remind himself for the first time that there were more pressing matters at hand than Lyra’s bubblegum-pink hair and big doe eyes. Nevertheless, he spared another glance at her as they both jumped out of the hovercraft and headed towards the base.

“Thank stars you’re here,” one of the guards said to a bleary-eyed Cassandra. “Your daughter has been waiting for you for the past hour. She says it’s an emergency.”

Cassandra rolled her eyes with a mixture of fondness and disdain. “That girl gets too lost in her own imagination. If I had a dollar for every one of the spy-novel plots she comes up with—“

“Mom!” A young girl with shockingly blue hair and painted-on, star-shaped freckles came barreling down the corridor at the speed of sound, trailed by two other women T had never seen before in his life. “Mom, you gotta listen to me. It’s important this time, I swear.”

“Important how, Kalyn?” Cassandra asked, nonplussed.

“It involves Acidalia and Cassiopeia and the whole royal court, actually, kind of, and—okay, well, so it started with Carina—you know, maybe it’s best if I just let her explain it. But I promise it’s legitimate this time.” Kalyn sounded out of breath, half-wheezing, as she shoved one of the girls in front of her. “Tell her what you heard.”

The girl looked anxious, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. T immediately pegged her as a Scientia—she had that scrawny, skinny look about her, borne not from malnutrition but from a lack of muscle mass. Her clothing was simple and neat—a gray blouse tucked into gray pants, and gray boots worn with gray socks. She could have easily blended into any crowd, except—

“I’ve seen you before,” Ace said. “You were at the coronation, weren’t you?”

“Um,” she stammered, “yeah. My name is Carina. I’m friends with Principissa Aleskynn… sort of. It’s complicated.”

“She’s Aleskynn’s emotional support Scientia,” the other girl said, deadpan.

Carina blushed. “Pretty much. But it’s not important. There’s this think Aleskynn told me, and… well, can we talk about this somewhere else, maybe? It’s not the type of thing I really want to discuss in public.” She bit her lip hard enough to draw blood, and T glanced at Ace.

“Yeah,” Ace said. “Yeah, let’s go someplace else. I kind of have a vested interest in assassination attempts against Acidalia now, too.”

Cassandra led the meandering group through the winding hallways of Gamma Base, with Kalyn and the Scientias trailing them like little ducklings. The whole building was paid for and inspired by Acidalia—it was the first major ocean base the Revolution had ever been able to afford—and it showed. It was a lesson in luxury and excess, from the polished marble floors to the high cathedral ceilings, and it could easily have passed for a wing of the palace if it weren’t for the soldiers in black standing about and ruining the aesthetic. It was so very Acidalian that T felt almost as if he was back in Appalachia with his sister. You wish, he chided himself.

The group found an empty conference room without much effort, probably because most of the Revolution’s usual leaders were someplace off base. If Acidalia were here, she’d have meetings every hour—she was organized like that, and she was used to leading committees. But Acidalia was conspicuously absent, and the others were off scattered throughout the planet and the other bases, fending off the occasional Nova attack and desperately trying to evade detection. Because there were no more important people present to take charge, T settled himself in one of the nice chairs at the front of the room and turned it around so he was facing the Scientias.

Carina looked at the door with shifty eyes. Cassandra waved a hand at it and it slammed shut. At the same time, the windows turned from transparent to opaque, obscuring any view of the outside world.

“All right,” Cassandra said, picking at her nail polish very apathetically. “Spill the beans.”

Carina spared her friends one last glance and hesitated slightly. Then, with the air of someone vomiting out words, she exclaimed very forcefully, “everyone’s with the Nova.”

T and Ace looked at each other.

“What do you mean?” Ace asked. “This is a secure location, you can say whatever you need to say. There’s no reason to act all shady about it.”

She took a deep and shaky breath. “I… should probably start at the beginning. Leski—Aleskynn—and I are sorta close—I mean, we’re not, like, best friends, obviously, but we know each other well enough that she wants to talk to me sometimes. I think she sees me as a sort of, well—like a curiosity, I guess. It’s not really that important. Anyway, I was at work the other day, and I got this call—more of a summons, really—from Aleskynn, basically just asking me to hang out. And so I went, because she’s a princess—“

“Cut to the chase or I’ll say it myself,” the other Scientia interrupted.

“I’m getting there, Athena,” Carina said, sounding stressed. “So I went, because you can’t really say no to a Cipher when she asks you to do something. And she starts doing all the normal whiny princess shit—stuff, I mean, sorry—“

Kalyn giggled, but the look Athena shot her said there was nothing funny about it.

“—you know, like I want the throne, Mom won’t give me what I want, someone give me attention, et cetera,” Carina continued. “And I was kind of half-listening—I do that a lot; mostly I think she just sees me as a well for all of her feelings—until she said very casually that Acidalia will be dead by the end of the week.”

“Huh,” Cassandra said conversationally. “Well, we can investigate that, but these sort of threats happen like all the ti–“

“That’s not all of it,” Carina interjected, breathless. “It wasn’t an idle threat or anything. They had a plan, and everyone was in on it, every house on Terra and maybe even more. I forget which one, but someone was going to stab her or—or something. Vulgaris, maybe? Or Generalis? I just know that there were a bunch of people who normally hate each other banding together to kill Acidalia Cipher, which… well. That’s not good,” she finished lamely. “And Aleskynn was so sure of it. I mean, she was even planning out who her royal advisors would be. That’s why she told me to begin with—she wanted to make me one of her advisors.”

Ace raised an eyebrow. “What caste are you in, again?”

“Scientia. She offered to lie about it to her mother. She said she’d protect me.”

A surge of ice-cold fear shot through T’s chest. If Aleskynn was offering to keep this random Scientia friend of hers safe, the Nova had to be planning something bad. Alestra already disliked the Logos castes; they were the ones who posed the most direct threat to her regime, and they were by far some of the smartest people in Eleutheria. She had gone out of her way to kill them off before—she could easily be planning the same thing now. Genocide, with extra steps and a thin justification.

Then, suddenly, T realized that the hypothetical genocide of Scientias wasn’t even the problem. The whole court was in on Alestra’s plan. Everyone was in bed with the Nova, including, apparently, Vulgaris and houses like it. Even the dissidents and troublemakers had banded together for the sake of murdering his sister.

“We have to do something, now,” he demanded, standing up. “We can’t let Acidalia die. We can’t. Don’t look at me like that—I am not being selfish here. Imagine how bad things will be if Alestra is on the throne, alone, and our biggest source of money is dead in a ditch someplace. Without Acidalia, we have nothing. We have no funding, no supplies, less intel—and that’s without even considering the bio program, the medical—“ He felt as if his throat was closing up, swollen from panic and fear.

“Woah,” Ace said. “Dude, calm down. You’re shaking.”

“Don’t,” T snapped. “I’m right. You know it. Cassandra knows it. Don’t give me that bullshit. What’s the plan?”

“Well,” Cassandra said, “I can tell you right now that ‘the plan’ is not going to involve you. You are way too close to this emotionally. We already know Ace has to get out of here, and you should probably go with him. If they have security footage of Ace, they have security footage of you, too.”

“Are you insane? You want me to just abandon my sister to die at the hands of—“

“We are not abandoning Acidalia, we’re trying to get you and Ace to safety.”

“I don’t give a shit about being safe. I want my sister to live past the age of twenty.” How could Cassandra be so blasé? Acidalia was the cornerstone of the entire movement. Even disregarding the fact that she was his sister, even disregarding the fact that she was a human being with a life and dreams and a personality, she was a living weapon with a skillset so rare it would be impossible to replicate. Ciphers were unique, and without Acidalia, the Nova would have a dramatic edge on the Revolution.

“Relax about Acidalia,” Cassandra said. “I’ll call Andy and get her on it. Then the whole damn court will be regretting their involvement in any of this.”

T groaned internally. Andy—Andromeda—was a fantastic battle strategist and one of the strongest warriors he’d ever met in his life. She was the type of woman who could probably punt him across the room with barely any effort whatsoever (and she’d be happy to do it, too.) But she was absolutely not the person he wanted dealing with this sort of plot. Andromeda excelled in areas where she could use her fists or firearms, but she barely knew the meaning of the word subtlety, and T had a difficult time seeing her navigating the Byzantine scheming of the Eleutherian court.

“Are you kidding? Don’t put Andromeda in charge of this,” Ace said, voicing exactly what T was thinking. “She’s like a bull in a china shop.”

“Then I’ll get Atlas on the case, or Artemis, or whatever,” Cassandra replied flippantly. “Besides, have you seen Acidalia shoot before? The woman’s a crack shot.”

“Yes, but that won’t matter if she’s been stabbed or poisoned or ambushed. Even the best sharpshooter in the world couldn’t defend themselves against an army of dozens, let alone hundreds—“

“Anyway,” Cassandra interrupted very loudly, “I was thinking that you and Ace could fulfill a job for me while the dust from this settles. You both need to get off-planet, and we need a man to deliver some data to an informant on Mars.”

“Make Ace do it,” T said quickly.

“Not so fast. Ace is a very Terran looking soldier boy, and him leaving the planet on his own would raise all sorts of red flags.”

“Then send Lyra with him. Plenty of people leave the planet because they’ve accidentally gotten pregnant or impregnated someone else. Nobody would be looking for the man who ‘attacked’ Acidalia next to a teenage Cantator.” It would be disappointing, he realized, to have Ace and Lyra both a planet away, but it would be safer for them both. And Lyra, for her part, looked shocked and overjoyed. She would love to leave this miserable empire behind, and T couldn’t blame her.

“But it would look more convincing if you went with them,” Cassandra replied. “Look at it this way: you’re Martian. Very, very, very clearly Martian. Your skin looks like you spent ten hours in a tanning bed. But here’s the other thing—you and Ace look decently similar, too. You’re both seventeen-year-old males with black hair and brown eyes, and you could easily pass for cousins or half-brothers.”

Ace looked at her suspiciously. “Where are you going with this?”

“I’m just saying that it will look more legit if T seems like a person who might have an actual, legal reason to go to Mars. They might question Ace or Lyra, but if they’re accompanied by T, they’d probably get off easier. And if you have a meeting with, say, a decently important politician, that will look even better.” She pulled a sticky note out of her belt, which seemed too small and thin to fit office supplies, and took a pen out from behind her ear. In glittery pink ink, she wrote David Seren, followed by an address someplace in the Mare Acidalium quadrangle. “This guy is the Secretary of Agriculture,” she said. “You remember David.”

T vaguely recalled the name, but not the man himself. “How could the Secretary of Agriculture possibly help us? That man is something like number five thousand in line to the presidency.”

“Number nine, actually.”

“Still incredibly unlikely to come into power.”

“Doesn’t matter. He associates with the President on a frequent basis, and his daughter is dating the vice president’s son. I think.” Of course Cassandra would know about who the Martian Secretary of Agriculture’s daughter was dating, T thought.

He bit his lip. He couldn’t stand leaving Acidalia alone here on a planet full of people who hated her. The thought of what Alestra would do to her if she found out about the revolution was beyond nightmarish. But if David Seren could help the Revolution secure an alliance with Mars, someone had to go talk to him, and Ace and Lyra would be scrutinized heavily on their own.

“All right,” he said, after some consideration. “I will go with Ace and Lyra, and I will speak to David Seren. But you have to do something for me first.”

“What?”

“You have to call Andromeda, and Artemis, and Atlas, and everyone else on the war council,” T commanded. “Get them on this immediately. I don’t want you to wait.” Technically, Cassandra was in charge of him, and she had no reason to do what he said. Still, T hoped his pleading might help her see how severe a situation this was, for him and Acidalia both.

Cassandra looked entirely nonplussed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It’ll have to be.” She turned away from T to face the Scientias and then they began to talk, their voices fading into an endless sea of jabbering and complaints. T looked at Ace, who looked away from him. Aggravation swelled in his chest, and he was reminded of the time he’d burst a blood vessel and it had all spilled out into bruises under his skin; this anger was that same type of pressure building up, about to burst.

He took a deep, steadying breath and tried to calm himself. This type of resentment wouldn’t help him, and it certainly wouldn’t help Acidalia. If Cassandra was dead-set on letting Acidalia be killed, T would just have to take manners into his own hands.