"She's kinda cute." Ace said. "The girl, I mean."

Lyra stood in the middle of the spaceport, gazing through the skylight. Her black clothes stood out like a sore thumb in the utilitarian gray of the place, and passing Ministratora castes gave her a wide berth, but she didn't seem to care much. She just looked up through the glass with a rapturous expression, like she was staring at heaven itself instead of the thick, polluted clouds that obscured the sun.

"I guess," T shrugged. "Not really my type.” He wasn’t lying—Lyra was not his type—but she seemed to have an intoxicating quality about her anyway, something T didn’t want to share with Ace.

"Her hair is pretty,” Ace said.

"You say that about every girl you meet.”

"Says the guy who like the green chick from the new Ultores movie," Ace countered.

"Because she's a badass," TB-2215 said. "Besides, she's not even from Ultores, she's from Custodes de Galaxia-"

"And the princess from Stella Bella-"

"She's a badass, too. And talk about pretty hair-"

"Talk about out of your league. And you tell me Acidalia is too classy for me."

"See," T said, "the main difference between crushing on fictional characters and crushing on the Imperatrix is that the fictional characters don't exist."

"'Fictional characters don't exist' isn't what you said when you were crying at Infinitum Bellum," Ace said.

"I did not cry." (Admittedly, he had cried. But everyone in the spaceport did not need to be made aware of this, and besides, it didn't really matter.)

"I was there. You can't hide from me," he replied. "I think you're the only person who could shoot down six people, and then start hysterically sobbing because they killed off-"

"Hey, what's Lyra doing?" he asked loudly, interrupting Ace. "Go talk to her if you think she's so cute. Go on, leave me alone."

"I would, but..." he said slowly, "I mean, they're already looking at her enough. Aren't we supposed to be being inconspicuous?"

"Just go." T lightly nudged him. "Don't be obnoxious. She's supposed to be your pregnant girlfriend, isn't she? Go."

"You're all business lately," he said. "What's up with you?"

T eyed him. "You know exactly what's up. I'm not talking about this further. Not here."

"Right, right," Ace sighed. In a quieter tone, he added, "She'll be okay, you know."

"No, I don't," T retorted. "It's not a guarantee."

"I've seen that woman with a blaster. She shot down twelve people in about five seconds while wearing a tiara of flowers. If there's one person on the planet who can stay alive, it's-"

"Keep your voice down. And not even the most skilled marksman could survive a twenty-person ambush with no backup."

"Andromeda will send backup," Ace said.

T sighed. "But how long will it take? Cassandra’s useless.”

"I don't know. I wouldn't stress about it," he replied. "Things like this have happened before. Remember last week?"

"Yeah," T said, "but Cassiopeia is different. She's an idiot. I think her IQ is the same as the kitten we snuck onto the ship when we were, what, 10? Her plans aren't so much 'incoherent' as 'nonexistent.' You saw what she did— just grabbed-"

He bit his tongue suddenly. Talking about this here was a bad idea. He didn't mention his sisters' names. Cassiopeia on its own was common enough that he could have been referring to any girl, but if he brought up the Imperials, they'd all know exactly who he was talking about—and it was never a good idea to clue in everyone else to private matters.

¨My point is,"he said softly, "my mother is a lot smarter, and a lot more powerful, than Cassiopeia ever was."

At that moment, he heard his sister's name, broadcast in a cool, feminine voice, and he jumped six inches.

"Relax," Ace said. "They're talking about Mars."

He was right: they were just announcing the 1815 flights to Acidalia, Utopia, and Arcadia Planitia—the place she was named after, not the Imperatrix. He checked their tickets—1830. They were scheduled to board in fifteen minutes.

"We better get going," he said. He wondered, briefly, what David Seren himself had thought when he left the planet sixteen years ago—except he actually had a baby with him. Had he expected that he wouldn't return to his home for the next decade and a half? Had he been nervous?

T decided not to think about it too much. He had been reluctant about this whole ridiculous thing in the first place, and anxious about what it would mean to leave Eleutheria unsure of when he was coming back. How long would it take for his squadron to notice he was missing? What if they went searching for him? What if they thought something bad had happened to them both?

He had grown up with these men. They were more brothers than anything else. They'd spent their whole childhood play-fighting, having movie nights, and talking about girls in between school and battle. They were the lucky ones—the sons of the elite, the TB strategists and the AX tech specialists, both immunes, neither concerned whatsoever about death. Maybe they should have been.

He remembered staying up late and listening to stories about distant worlds with the older boys who seemed like they knew the whole galaxy; they'd tell tales of planets with temperatures so low liquid tetraoxygen sloshed around in the seas and burned all the living things it touched, places so rich in carbon and so high in pressure it snowed solid diamonds, the gas giant that moved so fast it rained molten glass sideways. His favorite was the tidally locked planet, with one side trapped in eternal night, and the other so blisteringly hot it was an ocean of lava where the clouds were made of rubies and sapphires. He was always so jealous of the men who actually got to see these strange, alien worlds, and the creatures—or the people, even—who lived on them.

More than once, one of the lower ranking men, someone who actually got to experience the rest of the galaxy, would go missing. They might return a few days later, wide-eyed and skittish; other times they'd simply vanish. Those stories were more fables to be told around the faux-campfires of lights the blasters made when they were charging—tales of ancient alien ruins, of beautiful women with green skin, of life beyond the two known sentient species in the galaxy. Life beyond the Mira.

T didn't think he'd ever really laid eyes on the people who called themselves the Mira, but the tales told about them ranged from hideous monsters to almost fae-like creatures. They were sparkly purple people, and then they were hideous, psychotic animals with no humanity left in their strange, gelatinous minds.

It was probably a little of both.

The propaganda portrayed them as savages, but propaganda always did that. The older men recalled tales of nights with beautiful alien women, but T couldn't help but doubt that, too (especially since every eyewitness had described them as "cold," "wet," and "icy to the touch" regardless of their perspective.) The Mira were an enigma.

He always thought they were interesting. The researchers—the xenolinguists, the biological weapons research squad, the historians—were always more appealing to him than the fighters he was supposed to idolize. His specialty—his purpose—was always strategy, military logic. If we put those soldiers there, how many people could die? If we launched the pox now, how many would it infect? He played games of war like they played games of chess—the TB units were the grandmasters, the rest of the army the pawns, Eleutheria the king they protected. But T always found chess boring.

One could only talk so often about endless death and destruction before it got to their head. He may have been a lucky one when it came to his chances of death and dismemberment—virtually nonexistent—but the subject matter of his education was depressing. Playing with people's lives, deciding whether it was worth it to save the people you loved, weighing probabilities, taking the other path because one less soldier might die, putting other people through hell for a benefit so small it was hardy noticed—it wasn't worth the reduced chance of a terrible fate. Especially not when the hypothetical king was an unstable, broken mess of a country who couldn't move one square because every shift required intense thought and argument and the tension was building so thick that the piece would shatter into shards of broken porcelain regardless of what the rest of the board did.

Even here, at the spaceport, people were whispering. It was Lyra—a Cantator in the middle of a nice spaceport?—but something else, too. It was odd, venturing out into regular, civilian life—this talk would not have been tolerated in the barracks. Yet here everyone was, muttering. This planet was as tense as it could get. They were on a dangerous precipice, hovering over the edge of the void, about to fall.

"Hey, T," someone said, breaking him out of his reverie. "Time to go."

"Right," he said thickly. "Yeah."

"This is amazing," Lyra sighed. "I mean, stars, look at this!" She pulled a piece of her bubblegum-pink hair out of the neat braid she'd been trying to wrestle it into, seemingly forgetting about tidiness entirely. "Eleutheria's so big. And it's pretty. I guess that sounds stupid—that sounds stupid, doesn't it?—but when you only ever see the very bottom of the heap you don't have the full picture. The only parts I've ever seen of this world are the little tiny alleys in downtown Appalachia, and I never thought once about leaving, but..." Her voice trailed off. She continued to excitedly fidget, ignoring the stares she was receiving.

"At least someone's excited," T muttered.

"Maybe it'll be a learning experience?" Ace suggested tentatively.

T glared at him and handed him a ticket. Lyra took her own, holding it so tight it crinkled and cracked slightly. A voice announced the presence of the 1830 Acidalian flight and she practically jumped.

They boarded slowly, cramming into the cheap seats while the foreign dignitaries in creamy off-while stepped delicately to the windowed deck. T already hated this. It smelled like spent fuel and stale sweat, and the outside seemed infinitely better. Mars, the little red dot in the distant sky, was very far away.

His meta vibrated in his pocket. Annoyed, he picked it up and glared at the little glowing name: Diana. His codename for Artemis. He scrambled to answer it, dropping his own visor on the way; two Suffragium giggled at him. Momentarily, he thought, If you knew who I was....

"Hello?" he asked, his voice breaking awkwardly.

"T?" she asked. “What’s up with Acidalia?”

He choked on his own saliva. "What?"

“She’s not picking up her meta.”

A chill ran down T’s spine. Acidalia always answered her metadit.

"I'm in the KC Interplanetary spaceport," he said. "That's close to the palace."

"Have you taken off yet?"

"I think we're about to. I'm getting off."

Ace and Lyra looked at each other, confused. "What?" Lyra asked. "Are you okay? Spacesick already? I mean, I heard that could happen-"

He shook his head. "Ace, get her off-planet. I have to go."

"What's she saying?" Ace asked. Now everyone in the section was staring at them—as if two soldiers and a Cantator weren't suspicious enough already.

"Not here," T muttered. "Talk to you later." He stood abruptly, putting his visor back on and pushing past the people in front of him. A Scientia glared at him for a second before he whipped out his stunner pistol and waved it in front of his face.

"TB sector soldier here. I'm on military business. Get out of the way."

She jumped aside, and suddenly the aisle was clear. The girls who had been laughing at him before looked at each other and shrunk back, smoothing their hair and settling down where he couldn't see them. He jumped over someone's turned-over backpack and raced past the upper decks.

"I know you!" said a girl in silver-white. She was young, maybe twelve or thirteen.

"Really?" he asked, not listening much. He scouted around a corner, drawing his gun. If someone caught on to where he was going—someone with the Nova—it would be less than ideal.

"I saw you at the coronation," she said, like it was obvious. "You were the one who talked with the Imperatrix." Then, in a deep whisper, she added, "do you like her? Aleskynn says you like her."

"Aleskynn doesn't know what she's on about," he replied. "That's not true." He pulled his mask down. One person had already recognized him; there were sure to be more.

"I think it would have been romantic," she sighed. "Forbidden love, and all..."

T cringed, wanting more than anything to mention their genetic relationship. "No thanks. Hey, kid, where's your mother?"

"Don't call me kid," she demanded, standing up to a height of a full 140 centimetrons. "I'm the daughter of a Negotia. You're just a standard soldier."

"You're going to get yourself killed," he snapped. "Get back up on deck and hide, you hear me? Now."

"What?" Her bright pink eyes turned a deep, dark purple. It was the latest trend—color-changing eyes. It looked just as fake and stupid on this girl as it did on Aleskynn when she went through her rebellious phase; T had a picture of her with bright orange hair and sea-foam green eyes in his wallet.

"You heard me."

She backed away slightly before scampering up the pretty marble steps—so far apart from the standard gray steel the rest of the planet had to use—and glanced back at him.

"Go," he called. "Get out."

She vanished behind a featureless pillar of stone.

He darted around the corner, sticking close to the wall before bursting out of the ship's doors. Three Raedae in identical uniforms jumped backwards at the sight of him.

"Which one of you is in charge?" he demanded. Two of them glanced at their comrade nervously.

"Me," she said softly. "Hi."

"Hi," he replied, far louder. "Get this ship off the ground immediately. Don't ask questions, just go." He flashed his visor at her, identifying himself as a high-ranking soldier. The Raeda didn't respond, signaling something to her comrades. All together, their steps strangely in line with one another, they surrounded the ship and signaled it for takeoff. He knew better than to stick around.

At least Ace and the Cantator would be safe for now. They couldn't exactly track them down once they were thousands of miles away on Mars, could they? Well, they probably could—it just wouldn't be worth the effort.

T sprinted off the runway and out of the spaceport, to the astonished looks of everyone around him. People fell out of his path once they realized who he was. They'd surely be talking about it later, but that didn't matter now.

The planet outside was a glowing array of dazzling blue-on-black lights. It was a pretty urban area, covered in countless art projects he could all recognize by name; the capitol city of Eleutheria was all beautiful neoclassicism mixed with neon. It seemed like it would never work, but it was stunning—everything from the ultraviolet lights to the bioluminescent flowers. Acidalia's touch was everywhere.

Pictures of his sister ran through his mind at the speed of sound, tripping over one another so quickly they came in flashes and vanished into thin air again. Braiding her dark hair on her balcony at night when they weren't supposed to be there, gossiping about the upper-class idiots she paraded around with, telling extravagant and exaggerated stories of places neither of them had any business being.

What would they do to her?