Lyra had been everywhere from uptown Appalachia to rural Mars, but she kept coming back to this dilapidated slum. Maybe that was meaningful, somehow—Alicaria always said that these city streets had ways of pulling their displaced diaspora back home. Or maybe it was just Stockholm syndrome, keeping her feet firmly rooted in the place that once imprisoned her. Either way, here she was again, skipping through the all-too-familiar refuse and rubble, just another wanderer in the wasteland.

“Isn’t it weird,” she asked Acidalia, “that the Imperial district is right above us?” Logically, Lyra had always known that her Appalachia and Alestra’s Appalachia were one and the same, but it never felt real until this moment, until she was traversing the war-torn streets with the contested Imperatrix Ceasarina.

Acidalia was silent for a moment. Then she said, simply, “quite.” Quite. It was such a ridiculous, posh thing to say. If she tried to speak to anyone down here, she’d be recognized in an instant. She already walked too confidently, like she was looking for a fight—she wasn’t wearing heels, but she might as well have been. To Lyra, she seemed like she was seven feet tall. The actual height difference between them was small—a few centimetrons, at most—but that didn’t matter. Acidalia transcended height. No matter what she did, she always gave off the impression that she was looking down on the people around her—not to demean them, but to let them know that she was different, that she was on another level. She probably wasn’t doing it intentionally, but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing one could just switch off. It was in the blood. Even the way she limped on her injured ankle was delicate, pretty.

“You walk like you’ve practiced it a whole lot,” Lyra said, feeling bold.

Acidalia laughed. “Have you ever heard of the Alexandra limp?”

“The what?”

“In 1863, Alexandra of Dania married the Princips of Cambria, and subsequently became a fashion icon. She was a bit of a role model at the time; people copied everything she did. And when she fell ill with rheumatic fever, they copied her resulting limp, too. So I suppose you could say many noblewomen did indeed practice limping ‘a whole lot.’”

Acidalia looked mildly amused by the anecdote, so Lyra laughed at it too, but she was too busy thinking to really process the humor of it. Dania, she thought. Where was Dania? It was probably an Eleutherian territory now—most of the world was either completely destroyed, or under Eleutheria’s thumb—but it was weird to imagine a time when that wasn’t true, when thousands of little provinces and nations dotted the globe.

“You know,” she said, “I’ve really never thought about royalty before the Ciphers.”

“There’s my mother’s propaganda at work.” Acidalia shook her head. “Centuries upon centuries of monarchs have risen and fell before us. We aren’t as special as people seem to think. But of course, when you live under her rule, she may as well be the one and only empress to ever grace Terra with her presence. Did you know that she wasn’t even supposed to inherit the throne, initially?”

That took Lyra by surprise. “Quod?” As far as she knew, Alestra’s reign was written in the stars; there were rumors about sisters and sororicide, but those were just rumors.

“Alestra was the second sister,” Acidalia said, “in a family of three. The eldest and the heir was Avina, and the youngest and the favorite was Celestia. Supposedly, Avina murdered Celestia in a fit of rage and jealousy, then slit her wrists and bled out in the Roman baths, leaving my mother to inherit the throne—but I think we both know who really did the killing.”

“How?” Lyra asked, incredulous. With the forensic techniques available to Eleutherian magistratum, she found it hard to believe that Alestra could get away with multiple homicides; the genetic evidence alone would be enough to damn her.

“By being smart about it,” Acidalia said. “By finding her allies and surrounding herself with them, then using that united front to murder everyone outside the clique until there was no one left to remember the truth. At one point, I believe house Generalis publicly opposed her agenda, so she slaughtered them all one by one until Cassiopeia Anatolia—a baby at the time—was the only survivor. Then she had Cassiopeia raised with her own ideals, so she could reshape the dead house in her image. But I doubt her supporters needed much convincing to come to her side in the first place; Avina was unpopular, as was my grandmother Harmonia, and remember, a dictator is nothing without their key.”

“Keys?”

“Keys are the influential and wealthy people who surround the head of state. Military officials, other nobles, courtiers—men and women who can drastically influence the state of the nation, should they choose to do so. A ruler has to keep the keys happy, or the keys will rebel, and the force of all of those important people acting as one is more than enough to push a monarch off the throne. Alestra is not infallible. Like all other rulers, she needs her keys.”

“Right.” Lyra realized something suddenly. “Andromeda,” she said out loud. “Andromeda is one of your keys.”

Acidalia paused. “Yes,” she said, “she is. A very important and valuable key.”

“Damn right,” Andromeda barked from the headset. Her metallic voice was every bit as grating as it had been in person. Initially, Lyra didn’t understand why Acidalia would want to keep someone so brash and obnoxious in her inner circle, but now she knew: Andromeda, for all her faults, was good at her job, and if she became angry enough to oppose Acidalia, she could do a lot of damage.

After that, there wasn’t much more to say, and silence fell over them again. Lyra walked silently, listening to her wet footsteps against the paved-over tunnel floors. She and Acidalia walked side-by-side at first, but, slowly, Acidalia began to fall behind; she tried to keep up, but her foot kept slowing her down. “Can we stop?” Lyra asked, “just for a second?” She wasn’t really tired, but she could tell somehow that if she outright told Acidalia to take a break, Acidalia would not take it well.

“Just for a few minutes,” Acidalia said, but she looked grateful. They sat on the ground together, and eventually, she pulled off one of her combat boots to get a better look at her foot. Lyra saw it and winced. She thought the glass shards were the main problem—and they were still there, clearly sticking out of her bloodied sock—but she’d clearly also broken multiple bones. Her ankle was bent in a completely abnormal direction, and bruises blossomed like yellow-black flowers all the way up to her knee.

“Hmmm,” Acidalia said. “This is not ideal.”

“Not ideal?” That looks so broken.” Lyra looked at it again, then turned away, almost incredulous. How Acidalia had managed to walk for this long, she had no idea.

Acidalia sighed. “Funnily enough, I can assure you that it’s not broken—perhaps my ankle is, but not my foot.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I have no bones from the ankle down.” Looking distracted, she opened her jacket and fished around in the front pocket for a couple of seconds. Eventually, she found what she was looking for—a long, metal syringe wrapped in a sterile sheath. “When I was young,” she said, “seven or eight, I tripped and fell at court. So Alestra had me take ballet classes—she said walking would be simple, compared to dancing en pointe. They had me learning pointe technique before my bones even ossified completely, and I gave myself so many stress fractures the surgeons eventually decided that fixing them was no longer cost efficient. So they gave me metal bones, and I did ballet for five more years.” As she spoke, she pulled the syringe out of the wrapper with eerie calmness, then jammed it into her foot so hard Lyra was afraid the tip would break off. “This is just a numbing agent,” Acidalia said, too casually.

Lyra stared. “You have metal bones because she made you dance until your feet broke?”

“Well, she did ballet, and her sisters did ballet, and now Aleskynn does ballet,” Acidalia shrugged. “Most noblewomen had hobbies like that. I learned how to ride sidesaddle, how to play polo, how to compose music, how to play the violin and the flute and and the pianoforte. I’d be lying if I claimed to remember half of it, though.” Smoothly, she pulled the needle out of her syringe, capped it, and put it back in her pocket. “In any case, I only danced until I was twelve or thirteen. Then they made me stop.”

“What, did they decide that looking pretty in a tutu wasn’t worth breaking your bones for?”

Acidalia laughed, then sobered quickly. “No. I hit puberty, and suddenly I didn’t have the body for it.”

“You?” Maybe it was the corsetry, but Acidalia’s waist was incredibly small, almost to the point of being visibly disconcerting.

She nodded. “My hips are too wide, my legs are too muscular, my shoulders are too broad, my legs aren’t long enough, I have too many curves, I’m too busty, I’m too Martian.” She rattled off the list like it’d been drilled into her mind a thousand times, but it caught Lyra off-guard, because it was familiar.

“You know,” she replied, as Acidalia cleaned the injection site, “they always said I could never be a dancer, either?”

“Really? If my old ballet coach saw you, they’d have called you perfect.”

Lyra blushed at the compliment. “See,” she said, “my Magister would have called you perfect, and said that my hips are too small, my legs are too thin, my shoulders are too skinny, I need more curves, and I’m not busty enough.”

Acidalia smiled sadly. “I suppose horrible parenting is a phenomenon that transcends social class, unfortunately.”

“Unfortunately,” Lyra echoed.

Talking to Acidalia was a lot easier after that. Lyra was surprised by how much they seemed to have in common; experiences she thought unique to the Underground were evidently commonplace elsewhere, too, and the Imperatrix Ceasarina had dealt with many of them as a Principissa. Lyra’s friends used to disappear off the streets and vanish into the ether, never to be seen again, and Acidalia’s friends would likewise blink out of existence at random times—both Cantatores and rival noblewomen faced the same punishments for aggravating Alestra. And Lyra’s discontent about not knowing about her own parents was not dissimilar to Acidalia’s lack of knowledge about her father. “I considered looking into it, once,” she said, “but I decided against it, because I’ve heard that he was just as bad as my mother, and if that’s the truth, I don’t want to know any more.” That hit Lyra hard, because it was the same way with her—not that she ever had access to Acidalia’s resources, but she’d never even investigated the fate of her mother, because maybe she truly was an ignorant deadbeat, and if that was the case, Lyra didn’t want to learn about her. They spoke, quietly, for almost twenty minutes. Then Lyra was hit suddenly with the unmistakable smell of rot, and all conversation stopped.

“Where are we?” Acidalia asked into her headset, putting her helmet back up. Lyra switched her own visor to thermal mode, and saw hundreds of humanoid shapes, slowly fading from red to blue. It took her a minute to process that she was probably right under a pile of corpses.

“Quadratum Temporis,” Andromeda said. “A very old district surrounded by decaying buildings, and the Caedis and Rubrum-Quadrigis are always fighting over the surface, so it was a hellhole even before the war started—stay underground.”

“Got it,” Lyra said, but they walked only a few more paces before the sounds of screaming filtered into her ears. The shrieks were only growing in intensity, and she came to a terrifying realization: there were other people in the tunnels, rushing towards her and Acidalia. “We’ve got to move,” she said, suddenly breathless. “Someone else is down here—“

“Where do we go?” Acidalia looked back the way they came, but there were no alternate paths to take; all they could do was run before whatever enemy that was tailing them came out of the shadows.

“I don’t know, just—“ Then Lyra felt a presence behind her, and she froze.

They were trapped.