As an Imperatrix, Acidalia should not have been afraid to go to any part of her own planet. She was their servant of state, their protector, their liberator—there was no justification for being scared to go near those she was fighting for.

As an ordinary human being, Acidalia was terrified.

It probably said something about Eleutheria that she was more confident waltzing into an alien starship and telling them that fine, sure, she’d help them, but she had to settle her own little war first, than she was wandering the Underground. Her own planet and its people were scarier than the Mira, and that unsettled her.

And Lyra… Lyra couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old. Acidalia had gotten involved with the Revolution earlier than that, but she also knew much more about what she was doing. The Eleutherian court was filled with contempt and lies and secret plots, and she knew well how to navigate the tangled web that was politics. She didn’t doubt Lyra’s intelligence, but she knew that Lyra didn’t have any of the experience she had, nor did any of the other girls. Athena, Carina, Cressida… they had no idea what they were doing. They’d never seen how ugly war could get. If they knew more about the Revolution, Acidalia doubted they would all be so eager to join.

Then again, what would happen to them if they didn’t? The planet had quickly descended into open war. They’d be dead if they didn’t pick a side.

Still, it felt wrong, somehow, to have people so young in a conflict so big.

Acidalia knew she was only a few years older than the girl she called young, but she didn’t quite feel young anymore. She certainly didn’t look like a teenage girl. Without the makeup and the regalia, she looked like a woman who’d been through too much. Her left wrist kept swelling and, from the pain, she could tell it was either sprained or broken. Those goddamn shards of glass were still biting into her foot, though the pain had gotten duller—or maybe she’d just stopped feeling it so badly. Everything hurt and she knew she should see a medic, but that was impossible right now. There was no time to stop, to take one breath, no time to do anything but keep soldiering on, because so many couldn’t. Because T couldn’t.

She was so close to the place where he died. His corpse was so near, and she wanted to recover it so badly, even though every last vestige of sanity in her body was screaming at her that this was a very bad idea. The soldiers had their traditions—they spaced bodies, so they could be among the stars, return to the elements they were created from. It could give Ace some closure—Ace, who broke Acidalia’s heart every time she thought of him. What had happened? Were his last memories of his best friend T running off with a quick goodbye, hoping he’d be back soon and knowing he probably wouldn’t? What was he thinking? He’d lost a brother just like she’d lost hers; he couldn’t have been remotely okay. She wasn’t okay, either, but she’d had years of political training to hide it.

And that’s what scared her most about the Underground—that political training wouldn’t help her even slightly.

Everything about that place was so foreign to someone like her. Even the colors were unfamiliar. It took her over an hour to hunt down the only black thing she owned—the military uniform she was supposed to wear when she wanted to be be addressed as the commander in chief—and take all the colorful parts off, and even then it didn’t look right. With a helmet and a visor on, and her hair pulled back into a ponytail, Acidalia hoped she’d look enough like an ordinary person to pass for any other fleeing footman, but she’d never been able to take off the Imperial crown before—at least, in a metaphorical sense. How did normal people even talk to each other? Acidalia couldn’t come off as normal if she tried.

Maybe if she ran quickly enough and brandished her gun a lot, nobody would ask her any questions. One could hope.

Wincing because the boots pressed right against the glass, Acidalia stood and opened the door. Andromeda and Lyra stood against the wall, the former looking bored, the latter anxious. They’d swapped clothes—Lyra wore Andromeda’s black dress, but she’d hiked up the front with very visible safety pins, so it looked much shorter and much cheaper. She’d also slathered herself with the most unflattering makeup Acidalia owned: orange bronzer that didn’t match her pale skin at all, blocky neon eyeshadow so bright it almost felt sacrilegious somehow, and dewey highlighter applied in all the wrong places, making her look like a sweaty mess. Acidalia had no idea if that type of style was truly commonplace in the Underground, but she figured Lyra would know better than her, so she didn’t say anything.

Andromeda finished something on her metadit, then looked up at Acidalia. “No,” she said immediately.

“No what?” Acidalia asked.

Andromeda groaned. “No. Just… no. No one dresses like that, ever. You look like you belong on a propaganda poster. That makeup and that uniform? You’ll stand out like a sore thumb.”

Lyra bit her lip. “She’s right.”

“Explain to me what I’m supposed to look like, then,” Acidalia said, feeling very out-of-place.

“Shorter hair-“ Andromeda began.

“Not happening, next point,” Acidalia interrupted.

“I mean, it really depends on whether you’re trying to be a Labora or a Cantator. Because the uniform says Labora, but the hair says Cantator. Either way, you need shittier clothes, worse makeup—like you didn’t try, or didn’t have the time to. And you look way too confident. Walk around like that, and people are gonna pick fights with you. And can you maybe look a little less Martian—?”

“We don’t have time for this,” Acidalia interrupted. “I don’t have any other clothes, and we need to get going.” Look a “little less Martian.” That was easy for Andromeda, who was 100% Terran, to say.

“At least take off the corset,” Andromeda argued.

“How can you even tell I’m wearing a corset?”

“Because you always wear corsets? Seriously, you look nowhere near what a normal Cantator looks like. You look like an escort, not a hooker.”

“I wasn’t exactly aiming for either of those things,” Acidalia replied. “Why do I look like an escort?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Lyra interrupted.

“She does look like an escort, right?” Andromeda asked.

Lyra looked at Andromeda in that way people did when they weren’t sure what to say, confirming in Acidalia’s mind that she did indeed look like an escort. Fantastic, she thought.

“We should get going,” Lyra said quickly, obviously not wanting to offend anyone.

“Yes, we should.” Acidalia tightened her top around her waist, now mildly self-conscious about the fact that she had inadvertently dressed herself like a semi-classy prostitute. Then she was annoyed at herself for even caring about how she looked when they were facing interstellar war.

“I’ll have the smaller ships trail you,” Andromeda said, “but not far up enough to make it obvious. We can’t let people know who you are.”

“Got it,” Lyra replied. “It shouldn’t be that bad. This is where I grew up; I know these streets like the back of my hand. Just as long as the Imperatrix can get into the Terminal-“

“They scan for DNA, irisis, fingerprints, et cetera,” Acidalia said. “My mother couldn’t lock me out if she tried—the system knows I’m a Cipher. There should be no problem with me getting in, the issue lies in getting there in the first place. Every second we stand here is a second we waste. We should leave.”

“All right,” Lyra said, swallowing. “Let’s… leave, I guess.”

“Let’s leave, indeed,” Acidalia replied, as Andromeda called “no normal person says ‘indeed!’”

Acidalia hadn’t prepared herself for this blinding panic.

She felt as if she’d been dropped in the middle of a battlefield—which, to an extent, she had been. The very instant her feet touched the ground, she was surrounded by total chaos. Screaming people climbed over each other in tidal waves, running from something miles away. They were cursing, yelling in vulgar Latin, begging those around them to move! and get down! before they fell victim to the fires. Smoke rose to the sky in plumes of gray, pale and ghostlike against black buildings.

Lyra seemed barely surprised.

“It’s messier than usual down here,” she yelled over the din of the crowd.

“Do you think?” Acidalia asked.

“I can’t hear you!” Lyra shouted.

“Never mind—“ Something erupted in front of them, and white smoke rained down from above. Acidalia’s throat stung and her vision turned blurry. She pulled the visor and mask of her helmet down, then stood up tall as the gas began to settle towards the ground in a thick, smoggy blanket. It had to be a type of mild irritant, she surmised, blinking to clear it from her eyes. Tear gas, perhaps? But Alestra didn’t seem like the type to settle for typical tear gas.

“You good?” Lyra called through the helmet’s mic, only visible as a shadowy, black silhouette. “This stuff looks dangerous.”

“I’m fine, you?” Someone pushed her to the ground in a blind panic. She rubbed her head and fought her way back up again.

“I’m okay, but we need to get out of here,” Lyra shouted. “Go left.”

“Which left? I can’t see anything.” Acidalia could make out the tiny, holographic numbers displayed inside her visor, and some brief flashes of neon light, but nothing substantial. Switching it to heat mode only showed the bright red bodies of people, crawling and stumbling over each other in pale blue-green clouds of gas.

“Hold tight. I’ll come get you.” Lyra’s voice sounded distant again, almost overshadowed by the screaming and coughing. Acidalia tugged her helmet down again, making sure that it was fastened tightly. Behind her, people started to collapse one right after another, falling like dominos. She’d been right; Alestra had not settled for a “mild irritant.” Then a tiny, black-gloved hand gripped her shoulder.

“Lyra?” she asked int the crowd.

“Yeah, come with me.” She pulled Acidalia’s shoulder, seemingly confident in her ability to lead. Acidalia followed her, still trying to make out anything over the smoke. How did Lyra know exactly where she was going, navigating the piled-up people and the dilapidated chrome buildings like she’d been here a thousand times before? While Acidalia stumbled, trying to figure out where she was going, Lyra glided over everything effortlessly. Not being the one in charge for once felt strange.

The roads got less crowded suddenly, and living people were quickly replaced with corpses. The streets ran red with blood, literally—it poured from the mouths and eyes of the dead, coating the concrete in slick, half-clotted fluid. Coagulated reddish-brown sludge clung to Acidalia’s boots. She couldn’t smell anything with her visor on, but she didn’t need to—the scent of death was in her mind anyway.

“In here,” Lyra said, entirely unaffected. She pulled Acidalia under the awning of a dilapidated building and pressed herself up against the wall, effectively fading into the background. “We’re the only two people standing up right now,” she said breathlessly. “We can’t just be running around—we’re going to get shot.”

“Right.” Acidalia leant against the wall, but it crumbled away partially when she put her weight on it. “Is this place stable?”

Lyra shrugged. “No idea. It’s pretty old, I wouldn’t go up any higher.”

Acidalia surveyed the building quickly. It was all broken stone—stone that hadn’t been used as building material for eons. The top had long since fallen apart, and the rest of it looked like it was about to. This place was beyond dilapidated—it was a ruin, easily thousands of years old. Judging from the amounts of faded preservative on the stone, she could assume it had been restored a few times, and then built over and forgotten as the centuries passed. The sound of a bomb burst echoed from blocks away, and the whole structure trembled, like it was about to fall.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Acidalia decided. “This is about to crumble to pieces.”

“Good luck finding anywhere else to go,” Lyra replied. “This whole section of Appalachia is like this. Skyscrapers built over by starscrapers, I mean.”

“Haven’t any of these buildings ever fallen and killed someone?” Acidalia asked.

“Sometimes. That’s why you’re supposed to steer clear of the ruins and stay underground, but a lot of people don’t do that. It’s probably fine-“

The building swayed again. A giant golden letter, maybe a T or a broken X, fell from the sky and landed a few hundred feet from their heads.

“I stand corrected, let’s get a move on,” Lyra said, wide-eyed.

They started moving again, less quickly than before, trying not to upset the delicate architecture—though Acidalia supposed two people wouldn’t make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, considering all of the bombs that were going off around them. Any misstep could result in a fiery death, but she decided to pretend that wasn’t true for the time being. Drawing a straight line is easier if you focus on the endpoint instead of the pen, she reasoned. Missions are like that. Think about the future, not the now. And hopefully, if death came crashing down from the heavens, it would happen too quickly for her to notice or care.

Lyra led the way, her tiny black boots dancing across the bloodstained streets. She was lighter than Acidalia, significantly so—she was younger and smaller, and she had no cybernetic implants or metal bones to weigh her down—and her footsteps didn’t cause as many tremors. The two walked on, the Imperatrix and the Cantator, for a mile or so, until Andromeda’s crackling, mechanical voice sounded in Acidalia’s headset. “Turn back. You’re heading straight into a massacre.”

“Wonderful,” Acidalia sighed.

“We’re what?” Lyra asked. “I know this place, there’s nothing that would fall right there-“

“No, a bunch of people just got shot. Those outfits don’t protect you from laser blasts, you know.”

“Got it,” Lyra said, like she wasn’t even surprised. “How’s the deep underground?”

“You’re thinking about going down there?” Andromeda asked. “Christ, I haven’t been in those tunnels in decades. I have no idea.”

“We have to,” Lyra replied. “The buildings up here are too shaky for us to get any higher, and the ground is a battlefield—did you see that gas they just released?”

“Fine. But be careful,” Andromeda warned, sounding like she didn’t actually care whether they were careful at all.

“What is she talking about?” Acidalia asked, shouting just to be heard. “How do we get to the ‘deeper underground?’” In hindsight, she should have thought of the tunnels earlier; they were filled with factories and water treatment plants, the sorts of places whose only purpose was to supply the people who lived above them, and there wouldn’t be as many soldiers down there, just dangerous machinery. But she had no idea how one would even go about getting down there, and the tunnels were like catacombs—an inexperienced person could easily get lost, and stay unrecovered for decades.

“We find a transit station,” Lyra said. “There’s one a bit east of here, just a few blocks away. It might be flooded—sometimes the walls that hold the rivers back collapse—but it’s our best shot.”

“Flooded? Can you swim?” Acidalia asked. Lyra didn’t answer the question

Another blast rang out.

“Doesn’t matter,” Lyra said, almost defensively. “Time to go.” She grabbed Acidalia’s hand again and started to run, kicking up shiny glass dust from all the broken windows.

The “transit station” was a hole in the ground, a few feet in diameter, covered by a metal top that looked like a sewer grate. Inside was a broken ladder attached to the wall by only one side and swinging precariously. It looked like death and smelled even worse, and it appeared to be designed so that very few people could enter or exit the darkness beneath. It was exactly the type of thing Alestra’s extensive taxes should have fixed, if they hadn’t gone towards buying another mansion in the South Seas.

“Are you sure going down here is a good idea?” Acidalia asked. “Can this ladder support our weight?”

“It’s our only option.” Lyra grabbed onto the ladder and started to descend, eventually giving up and just sliding down on the exposed metal side like a child on a playground pole. Acidalia tried to do the same thing, landing with considerably more grace than her partner before immediately collapsing as something sharp dug into her foot.

“You okay?” Lyra asked.

Acidalia cursed under her breath. “I’m fine,” she added, “it’s just the glass.”

“Glass?”

“Long story.” Acidalia stumbled to her feet and adjusted her shoes. Her socks felt hot and sticky with blood.

Unlike the surface, the deep underground was quiet and empty. The sides of the main room were covered in grime-speckled, once-white gray tiles and signs reading the names of neighborhoods that didn’t exist outside of history books. A framed, stylized map on the wall showed a spiderweb of multicolored lines connecting dots and numbers, like a graveyard of forgotten places and long-dead civilizations. Maybe, a thousand years ago, this had been a train station, and maybe, two thousand years before that, a subway. There was no sign of a struggle anywhere, no strange gas or fluid on the ground—just memories of antiquity. It wasn’t that the place was clean—far from it—but the lack of hysterical, wounded men and women made it look like heaven in comparison to the nightmare world above.

As they progressed ever-onward, walking on paved-over tracks, the walls turned to durametal, the floors to steel. Some of the small lights above were broken, shrouding the entire hall in a sort of dusky twilight. It was slightly claustrophobic down here, and very dark.

Lyra looked around for a few seconds before deciding on a direction. She pointed down a hallway and took off, dodging obstacles—tiny sets of cleaning equipment, tiny tool kits. She threw open a door with a loud clatter, and rows of tiny people dropped their tiny hammers, startled.

Five hundred pairs of pretty brown eyes belonging to five hundred sickly-looking little girls stared at the two of them. Their hair was cut short and their skin was a lackluster pale. None of them said anything. Like small robots, they went immediately back to what they were doing—mostly hitting the same spot with the same hammer over and over again before the conveyor belt moved, and they hit a different spot on the next metal sheet.

“Labora kids,” Lyra said.

“I know.” Acidalia knew exactly who they were, but something about seeing all of these children living like prisoners for no reason other than the crime of being born Labora made it a hundred times worse. There was no time for contemplation, though. Her feet moved more quickly than she did, and she found herself in the next room—five hundred barebones bunks and five hundred storage compartments filled with five hundred tiny, tiny uniforms. God, they were so small, so young.

A very small sniffle ran out through the room, echoing around the metal walls. One child, little enough to barely reach Acidalia’s waist, wiped her nose and pushed a broom. She looked dizzy, like she was about to collapse.

Acidalia was about to ignore her and leave—she felt horrible about it, but there was no time for any of this, and the girl was safer here than she was up there—but Lyra reached a pale hand out to the girl. “Are you okay?”

The child didn’t answer, looking fearfully at them both.

“It’s all good,” Lyra said. “I’m like you. In black, see?”

The girl relaxed slightly. Acidalia didn’t move, not wanting to be recognized.

“What are you doing?” Andromeda’s voice hissed in her ear.

“Lyra met a child,” Acidalia whispered.

“Listen, I know it sucks down there, but you can’t be doing this. Literally everything about this is a bad idea.

“I know,” Acidalia said. “I have a feeling it wouldn’t go over well if you told her that, though.”

Lyra reached for the fastener of her helmet and pulled it off slowly, not wanting to startle the little girl. Evidently she’d frightened her anyway, because the child leapt backwards the minute she saw Lyra’s face, backing up against the wall.

“I’m not dangerous,” Lyra said. “I’m not going to hurt you-“

“Get away from me!” the girl shrieked in a voice not befitting one that small. “Leave me alone, meretrix!”

“We’re not-“

“I’m going to call the magistratum if you don’t get out! People like you aren’t supposed to be down here!”

“Lyra, let it go.” Acidalia put a hand on her partner’s shoulder.

“She’s sick,” Lyra said.

“Go!” the girl screamed. “Go! Get out! Even I won’t talk to a lupa like a cantrix!”

“All right, all right.” Lyra stumbled back nervously, like she was afraid of this tiny, sickly child. “We were just trying to help-“

“We don’t want the help of you people,” the girl snapped, and glared at the two. Acidalia pulled Lyra’s arm and dragged her towards what she assumed to be the exit.

The entire underground was a labyrinth of walls and long rooms, staffed by people as young as six years old and as old as around fifty. Acidalia was fully aware that none of these women could afford anti-aging genetic mods, and she didn’t want to think about why not a single person seemed over half a century old. Lyra, meanwhile, had seemingly lost her concentration. Andromeda was lecturing her in the headpiece, and Acidalia wasn’t paying much attention to her spiel, trying to focus on her objective. Get to the Terminal, send out the virus, get back to safety. It sounded so much simpler, listed out in her head like that. Three steps. Three things. It should be easy.

The stark black linoleum tiles creaked beneath her feet. Blood sloshed in her shoes, red-hot, weakly metallic and sickly-sweet. The factory machines whirred and whistled, emitting LED-lit smoke that rose up in the chambers like a ghost. Broken lights cast shadows on every piece of dust. Acidalia’s mouth and eyes still stung slightly from the gas, and she wondered again what type of poison it was and who had unleashed it. Every bone in her body hurt. It was sensory overload and sensory deprivation at the same time—there was almost nothing around, nothing to see or touch, but she noticed everything so clearly it was borderline overwhelming. Her breath picked up, even though she wasn’t sprinting or doing anything really strenuous, and the world felt hot, even though the deep earth was cold for the sake of keeping the machines functioning.

She recognized the sensation of panic immediately, and slowed her breathing, taking long, deep breaths. I can’t afford to panic right now. Her mind jumped back to her childhood, the way she’d have nervous breakdowns before every speech, the way she’d bottled everything up for the sake of being the perfect princess the world expected her to be.

Except this was much more dangerous than making a speech in front of a crowd of thousands. Now the risk wasn’t of embarrassing herself in front of a planet of trillions and disappointing her entire family—it was of getting killed and destroying everything her own movement had worked for. She couldn’t just be a perfect princess anymore. She had to be the perfect empress.