“Okay, now do it again, but this time, look cooler.”

“Look cooler? What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, just cooler. Maybe stick your hip out a little bit, and put your hand out—yeah, like that, like you’re about to grab someone. Give me I-will-yank-your-still-beating-heart-right-out-of-your-chest vibes.”

Lyra did what the photographer said, feeling somewhere in between ridiculous and powerful. She was one half art subject and one half political statement, like a fusion of a dictator and their concubine, and she had no idea what she was supposed to feel about that, if she was supposed to feel anything at all. Was she a living prop, or a soldier? A politician, or a statue? Half of the people she spoke to treated her like some pretty background object to holoshop onto a propaganda poster, and the other half were practically reverent. Neither of those perceptions of her seemed accurate.

Adjusting to this was going to be difficult, Lyra realized suddenly. When Ace and T had first approached her and asked her to join them, she’d been hopeful, but she never would have dreamed that she’d wind up fighting alongside Acidalia Cipher and saving the day while she was at it. All she’d ever wanted was a safe place to sleep and easy access to food, and maybe money and some friends if she was lucky, but even that felt like a stretch. This absurd future where she was posing for propaganda so the Revolution could brag about the Cantator who fought with the Imperatrix was so far removed from her reality that it wasn’t even a pipe dream—it wasn’t a dream at all. Winning the lottery seemed more likely, even though everyone knew it was rigged. And yet, here was Lyra, literally standing up on a pedestal, brandishing a gun she couldn’t shoot and pretending to be a soldier, profiting off of a reputation she didn’t know if she really deserved.

The mission to the Terminal had been dangerous—she’d give herself that—and perhaps some level of recognition was warranted there, but Lyra’s role in its success was so minuscule that she questioned whether this type of attention was faithfully earned. She understood hazard pay and, to a degree, respect—just being in Appalachia was enough to get someone killed now. But the Revolution dressing her up in combat gear and putting her against a backdrop of a rich person’s vision of what the Underground might be like, then editing photos of her into equally awkward images of the Imperatrix Ceasarina just to make them both seem like better role models, felt a little too over-the-top. At the end of the day, Lyra was a tour guide, really; she hadn’t done anything a million other Cantatores couldn’t do. Her only skill was being in the right place at the right time, and that didn’t seem particularly noteworthy to her.

But who was she to ask these people to stop? They liked her—or, at least, they liked the idea of her. They liked how she looked when she was standing beside a digitalized Acidalia Cipher and staring cooly off into the distance like an action-movie hero walking away from an explosion. And if that meant they were willing to make her a rich woman—well, she couldn’t exactly object to that, and she didn’t know if she wanted to.

That didn’t make it feel any less immoral, though. There were soldiers out there, real people who were fighting for their lives, and Lyra being paid more because she looked better in pictures felt wrong, just like Aleskynn Cipher having more money than God felt wrong when she was the epitome of the idle rich and Laborum were suffering on borderline-slavery salaries deep in the Underground. Even Acidalia probably deserved her wealth more than Lyra did—at least she was doing things. Lyra was just standing around and looking pretty, just like the rich women she used to resent and envy so much.

“Lyra?” the photographer asked. “Hey, Lyra.”

“What?” She’d gotten so lost in her own head that she’d half-forgotten she was being used as a propaganda prop. “Sorry, I’m really tired.” Blearily, she rubbed her eyes before remembering that she was wearing approximately ten tons of makeup. Then she noticed with surprise that nothing had even rubbed off—fancy stage eyeshadow was more robust than the crap she was used to wearing.

“You’ll be able to sleep right after this, I promise,” the photographer said. “You actually look better with those bloodshot eyes and dark circles. It makes you look like you just stormed out of a fight or something—which you sort of have.”

“Sort of,” Lyra said, laughing listlessly. She’d certainly been in the heat of battle—she’d just done very little actual fighting.

If the photographer noticed the exhausted apathy in her voice, he didn’t seem to care very much. One of his assistants tossed Lyra a bag of something cold and wet, saying briskly “Hold this.”

“What is it?” It looked like a bag of blood, like the kind a Medica-caste would hang on an IV pole, but the liquid inside was a dark blackish-brown color that couldn’t possibly support a living human. Maybe it was some other kind of IV medication, Lyra reasoned, but the labelling on the bag didn’t seem to support that—she couldn’t read very well, but she recognized the big, bold O- emblazoned on the front.

“It’s prop blood,” the assistant explained. “We want to really drive home the fact that the blood supply is like, super contaminated and corrupt, because then we can say Alestra and her robber baron friends are making ‘literal blood money.’ It’s a pun, see?”

“But why is it so thick and brown?”

“Real blood doesn’t holograph well.”

“But won’t people be able to tell it’s fake?”

The photographer laughed. “Have you ever seen a video of an actual fire? It always looks fake, even if you don’t edit it at all. You basically have to use CGI fire effects, because the real thing looks so made up. Blood is like that in holograms. It’ll look fine so long as you don’t slosh it around too much—the prop stuff is like chocolate syrup. It’s just a little too viscous.”

“Okay,” Lyra said, holding the bag out hesitantly. Even though she knew it wasn’t real, it felt a little too thick and clinical for comfort—there was something about the cold sterility of blood bags and IV poles that made her heart beat faster. She tried to look angry, but it was nigh-impossible to force her features into anything even approximating wrath; the exhaustion was buried somewhere deep inside of her, sucking out all of her energy like a vampire. The photographer frowned at his pictures and motioned to his makeup artist, who hurried out to Lyra with a tiny brush and some dark pink powder.

“For your eyebrows,” she said, rubbing it onto Lyra’s face with the most delicate brush she’d ever seen. “They have to be bigger and meaner. You’re too cute and innocent.”

“I thought you were using me for this because I am cute and innocent,” she said.

“Yes, but we need you to be cute and innocent and murderous at the same time.” The makeup artist dipped her brush into a vial of something red and painted it onto the corner of Lyra’s mouth. It tasted of artificial cherries, the same kind that were in cough syrup and sweets. “This is just lip gloss, but it’s supposed to look like blood.”

“What, like I bit my cheek?”

“Or something like that.” She finished off the look with a dab of concealer over a bruise on Lyra’s hairline, which she thought was funny—why would they want her to look bloody around the mouth, but otherwise perfect? Why not just leave the scars as they were? But she already knew the answer—natural wounds didn’t look as good in holographs.

They snapped another series of photos, despite the fact that Lyra definitely looked like an inelegant disaster. Her eyelids felt heavy enough to pull her whole face down, and her feet burned from the pain of standing for so long. Judging from the photographer’s expression, the makeup wasn’t helping very much, and it was only a few minutes before he dismissed her hurriedly and muttered to his assistants about fixing it in post. Lyra could only imagine how badly they’d holoshop her—with the combination of fancy fatigues, fake-bloody badass makeup, and the flawless skin and perfect hair hat digital software could give anyone, she’d probably look exactly like Acidalia. A scrawnier, paler, more Terran version of Acidalia, at least. She wasn’t sure if she liked that, but it wasn’t exactly her decision to make, and she wasn’t about to argue with the people who were giving her food and shelter. Being a propaganda model was annoying, but safe—safer than anything she’d ever experienced before. If that minor annoyance meant she got room and board and they paid her for it, she would gladly put up with it every day forever.

She walked from the propaganda set—which looked much nicer than the set of a clandestine revolution really ought to—to the room they’d assigned her, which was stamped on a digital key that she assumed would open the door. They’d offered to implant the chip under the skin on her wrist so she’d never have to actually carry a card with her, but she’d declined it; despite her knowledge that the Revolution was probably much more sanitary and trustworthy than back-alley doctors and organ thieves, she’d never met a cyborg without serious health issues, and it was hard to reconcile that with the fact that this implant was supposed to be helpful. So instead, she’d taken the key and synched the lock to her DNA—that way, only she would be able to open the room, and she wouldn’t have to keep a piece of metal right on top of her pulse at all times.

The room they’d given her was astonishingly nice, really—it wasn’t half as extravagant as Acidalia’s starship, but it was much better than the crowded backrooms where Lyra used to have to fight for space to lay down. She’d seen a movie once about a Martian girl in college, and the Revolution’s housing looked kind of like her dorm: there was a single bed wide enough for a woman Lyra's size to sleep comfortably, a desk equipped with a sheath of paper and some shiny metal pens, a bookshelf for books she didn’t know how to read, a storage locker for property she didn’t own, and a plush chair. Someone had decorated it for her already, not to an excessive degree but just enough to make it almost homey—there were sheets on the bed and a white rug on the tiled floor, and the closet’s door was slightly ajar in an inviting sort of way. Lyra pulled it open completely to change out of the fatigues they’d photographed her in, and she saw with surprise that it was already filled with clothes. Her dress from before, the one she’d worn to Mars, was sitting on the first hanger.

Why would anyone want to keep this? she thought, taking it out with the intention of throwing it away. It had been ripped in dozens of places and stained in even more, and even barring that, it was made of the world’s cheapest, easiest-to-tear fabric. But then she noticed that the torn parts had been repaired, meticulously stitched back together until the thread was barely visible, and the stains had been washed out completely.

Huh.

Confused, but happy, she quickly took off the fake-bloodied uniform and put the dress back on. It felt strangely good to wear something normal, and she quite enjoyed the feeling of not wearing pants—combat and propaganda photoshoots did not call for skirts, and Lyra hated the feeling of scratchy fabric on her legs. With that done, she sat on the chair and pulled one of her books off her bookshelf—she wasn’t fantastic at reading, but she could at least practice. The one she’d selected looked like a children’s fantasy novel, which couldn’t be that hard to comprehend. Afraid of denting the spine and ruining the pristine leather bounding—leather and paper in a book seemed so luxurious—she opened the cover gently and stared at the first sentence.

In foramine terrae habitabat hobbitus…

***

Several hours later, Lyra woke up suddenly to a knock at the door. She’d fallen asleep with the book on her chest before she had even struggled past the first chapter—perhaps fantasy was a bad genre to start in, with all of its made-up names and places. Real words were difficult enough without names like “Bilbo” thrown into the mix.

Rubbing sleep out of her eyes, she padded towards the door and unlocked it blearily. In the doorway stood Ace, looking even more haggard than she did, somehow; his shirt was untucked, one of his shoes was missing, and his hair was mussed like someone had been running their fingers through it. He ambled through the entrance and stood next to Lyra for a moment, then he seemed to pounce on her, drawing her close to his chest and holding her tight. He smelled like shitty cologne and cheap beer, a mixture of angst and anger.

“What—what’s this about?” Lyra asked nervously. Years of living in the Underground had taught her to never let herself be alone with a stranger, and especially not a strange man. “If you’re dumb enough to let one of those soldiers back you into a corner, whatever happens to you is your own damn fault”—the message had been drilled into her head over and over again, so much so that just standing here was making her anxious. It wasn’t that she was actually afraid of something happening, Ace would never… but would he? She’d known him for less than a week, and at the end of the day, he was an immune and she was a Cantator—a Cantator-turned-domina-turned-propaganda-supermodel, but a Cantator nonetheless. He could do whatever he wanted, and it’d be a case of he said she said, where the odds were stacked against her a million to one.

He didn’t say anything in response. Instead of talking, he just clung to Lyra tighter, so tight she thought his fingers might leave bruises. Part of her wanted to kick him off and run for it—the door was so close—but what if that was overzealous? What if he had wholesome intentions? He wasn’t doing anything bad, yet. But surely he’d understand what a drunk soldier stumbling into the bedroom of a teenage cantrix would look like, what she might be scared of, what people would say.

Except he wouldn’t. He’d never been in a situation like this. And how could a Cantator girl ever explain to a soldier boy what she was thinking of without sounding bitchy and accusatory and a thousand other things she didn’t intend to come across as?

God, all of this was complicated.

Ace stayed like that, clutching at her, for a few more frightening seconds. Then, after what seemed like an eternity, he pulled back and held Lyra at arms’ length. He surveyed her face like a portrait artist, then said, softly, “you look uncomfortable.”

“I—I’m not—I just—this is…unexpected,” Lyra said awkwardly. There’s a huge power imbalance here and it’s scaring me would have been more apt, but not as acceptable, and Ace didn’t look like he was really ready to hear any judgement at the moment. The bags under his eyes were so dark they looked painted on with kohl, and his skin was an ashen, dehydrated gray. Nothing about him seemed healthy or right, and Lyra’s anxiety became a strange, swirling mixture of fear and sympathy that she had no idea how to respond to.

Ace looked surprised for a minute, then he collapsed into the chair bonelessly, covering his head with his hands. “God, I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m bothering you. I guess—I guess I just thought—“

“Thought what?”

“I don’t know. I just—it’s not fair, you know?” Something inside of him seemed to shift, and his expression turned from sadness to bitterness. “Out of all the people in the world, it had to be him,” he said. “He was seventeen, Lyra. Seventeen.”

“I know,” Lyra replied softly, not knowing what else to say. What could she possibly do to comfort a man whose best friend had just been murdered? Nothing short of resurrecting T could make things better again, and even Eleutherian technology couldn’t bring back the dead.

“There were so many things he never got to do,” Ace continued, his voice strained and hoarse. “He’ll never get to grow up or get that promotion or go to space and see the stars or live through our victory or do anything ever again. He was so excited for the finale of the Ultores series and now he’ll never live to see it, and I’ll never watch it either because every time I see one of those shitty photoshopped posters it reminds me of him and I want to throw up. So many things are ruined now. Everything’s all sorts of fucked, and I want to be angry at him for acting like a hotheaded idiot, but I can’t, because he’s dead.”

“You’re allowed to have feelings about what he did,” Lyra said. “He might be de—uh, gone—but that doesn’t mean you have to act like his decision was the right one.” It’s not like he’s here to see your reaction to his demise, anyway, she added silently. Years of losing friends to the stupidest, most preventable tragedies she could dream of had taught Lyra to treat death with pragmatism; it was an inevitability that simply came sooner for some than others, whether they were Imperial soldiers shot dead by psychotic dissidents or teenaged girls succumbing to strep when cheap street antibiotics weren’t strong enough. It was sad and horrible and depressing, but it was a fact of life—she’d grown up with death just as much as she’d grown up with neon lights and city streets and the faint scent of acrid pollution lingering in every breath of air.

That didn’t make T’s sacrifice any less important, though.

“The thing is,” Ace said, “I can’t, because then I feel guilty, and that’s so much worse.” He kicked at something, a tiny cardboard box next to Lyra’s wastebasket. It spiraled through the air for a few seconds before hitting the wall with an underwhelming thwack. “It’s not my fault,” he added, growing visibly incensed. “It’s not my fault.”

“You’re right. It isn’t.” Lyra took care not to place the blame on someone else, but she knew who Ace was thinking of, and she didn’t know if she could really fault him for it. Acidalia hadn’t killed her brother any more than she’d hurt all of the other people Alestra had murdered, but T had died for her, and that surely counted for something. Lyra couldn’t begrudge Ace the opportunity to rant about Acidalia, not now when T was dead. And she’d only known Acidalia for a few days at best, anyway—Ace was her little brother’s best friend. It was possible that he knew more about the Imperatrix than Lyra ever could.

“I know,” Ace said, sounding choked up. “I know. I just—“ Whatever he was trying to say wouldn’t come out of his mouth, so he just sighed in a stilted way, breathing raggedly.

“He’d be happy to know that we won this battle,” Lyra offered, unsure if it would actually do anything to help, but willing at least to try. “He’d be proud of you, Ace.”

“Proud of me for what?” Ace snapped. “I haven’t done jack fucking shit for the past week.”

“You met aliens,” Lyra said. “He always liked space—or, at least, that’s what he told me. He would have been so happy that you were one of the first people to interact with them peacefully.”

“Really? You really think T would have been happy because I stood there crying while his sister committed a war crime to help save an empire of aliens we’ve been at war with for five centuries?” Ace half-laughed in a sick, angry way and whirled around to face the wall. “If that’s what you think would have made him happy, then I’m glad that at least you will feel better. But you didn’t know him like I did. Nobody knew T like I did. And I know that this is not what he would have wanted.”

“Oh.” Lyra didn’t know how she was expected to respond to that. Maybe Ace wanted to be alone, she realized, but it didn’t seem wise to just leave him here when he was drenched in alcohol and yelling loudly enough to wake half the planet. People did stupid things in the throes of grief, especially when they were eager for someone to blame. Part of her wanted to just walk away from this, but the larger part of her was worried that Ace would seriously hurt either himself or someone else—even if only because he was kicking things without any concern about where they were flying. They were cardboard boxes, sure, but cardboard boxes could escalate.

“Is there anything you want me to do to help?” she offered. “We could put together a memorial service, even if there’s no body—"

“What will that fix?”

“Maybe it would give you some closure?” I don’t know, I’m trying! Lyra thought.

“I don’t think I could stomach looking at his sister for another second,” Ace snapped.

Lyra cringed. “I mean, we can’t exactly ban Acidalia from attending her own brother’s funeral—“

“You can’t ban me from what?”

“Oh, speak of the fucking devil,” Ace groaned. “When will you get it in your head that nobody here wants to be around you? Is there a single person in this whole goddamn base whose life you haven’t ruined already?”

An uncanny silence fell over the room. Lyra felt like she could hear a pin drop. Then, Acidalia said softly, “I heard yelling. Is everything okay?”

“Everything is not okay, you—“

“It’s—I’m—fine,” Lyra interrupted loudly, not even waiting to hear what Ace was about to say. She felt like a civilian standing in between two scientists trying to disarm an atom bomb; she was right in the blast radius and she had no idea what she was doing or how to get out. Every cell in her body was screaming you shouldn’t be here, even though she was standing in her own assigned quarters. Maybe it was the fact that having a space of her own still felt absurd, or the fact that two very powerful people looked like they were on the verge of getting into a physical altercation. (Well, Ace looked like he was on the verge of starting a fight, but he was bigger than either woman and Acidalia would never seriously hurt him, so his attitude was really the only one that mattered.)

“Fine?!” Ace yelled. “Fine?!”

“I should leave,” Acidalia said quickly, and turned to the door.

“Don’t you dare,” Ace snarled. “Don’t you dare just walk away after you got my best friend—my brother—killed. This is all your fault.”

“I know,” Acidalia replied. Lyra searched for a trace of feeling on her face, a brief echo of emotion, but she saw only empty placidity. Acidalia didn’t look at all like she was mourning, or even thinking about Ace’s words. If they affected her, she didn’t show it. She wore her plain white dress and understated coronet like a shield, and every syllable seemed to bounce right off of her no matter what it was or who was saying it. Lyra didn’t know if that was good or bad—surely, anger would only have enraged Ace further, but this complete and total lack of sadness or grief or empathy or anything was even worse.

Ace stared at her for a few painful seconds, his expression cold and hard. Then he said sharply, “Stop acting like that.”

“What do you want me to do?” Acidalia asked, with all the emotion of a customer service representative trying to get an irritating consumer to leave without actually sounding mad about it.

“There are a lot of things I want to say to you,” Ace said bitterly, sinking into Lyra’s chair.

“Then say them.”

“Not like this.”

Another awkward moment went by, and time seemed to slow down to the speed of flowing molasses. Lyra had never realized that a minute could feel so long. She couldn’t have felt more out-of-place if she tried—even standing on the parapet of a balcony in Appalachia, dressed in white like a noblewoman and watching the Imperatrix speak to aliens, seemed more natural than this. Ace was so uncharacteristically angry and Acidalia was so inhumanly calm that the forces of nature felt thrown out of balance, and then there was Lyra, a stranger, watching a soldier and an empress argue over a dead man whom she was certain wouldn’t have wanted this to happen.

Ace just stared for a while, and Lyra expected Acidalia to either say something else or get up and leave, but she didn’t. Instead, she stared right back until they were just two sets of brown eyes looking into one another. Ace was upset, but Acidalia was clearly playing at some sort of psychological game, and Lyra didn’t know how to feel about that. She was sympathetic to both of them, certainly, but Ace was acting like an asshole, and she didn’t know what Acidalia’s deal was other than that it was supremely creepy.

Eventually, after a pause that seemed to last for a century or two, Acidalia said serenely, “I know what you’re looking for, and I’m not going to give it to you.”

“And what is that?” Ace asked, his voice low and furious.

“You want an emotional response from me. I’m not going to let you have it.” With a graceful, dignified motion accompanied by the rustle of expensive fabric and the clack of stilettos, Acidalia rose to her full height and looked down at Ace—he was taller than her, but she moved in a way that made it seem like his height didn’t matter. “I’m sorry about T, but he’s already gone, and talking to me like this isn’t going to bring him back.”

“A week after his death and you’ve already moved on?” Ace snapped. “I don’t know why I expected anything else.”

“‘Moved on!’ Of course I haven’t ‘moved on,’ he was my brother! I’m just choosing to treat death with the gravitas it deserves instead of screaming at other people for things they can no longer change,” Acidalia said, the pitch of her voice escalating slightly, but noticeably. “You’ve known T for longer than I will ever have the privilege to and I don’t doubt that you’ve seen more of him than he ever let me see, but I think we can both agree that watching his best friend scream at his sister over a choice he made would never have made him happy.”

“How would you know what made him happy? How could you even claim to know him at all?”

“He was my brother, too. For six years, at least, he was my brother.”

“Well, he was my brother for seventeen years,” Ace spat, “but that doesn’t fucking matter anymore, because one afternoon with you and he’s dead!”

“I know,” Acidalia said. “I’m sorry.” For a second, she looked like she was going to say something else, but then something in her posture shifted, and she turned on her heel and walked out.

Lyra stood in stunned silence, then turned to Ace. He was still and quit like a toy soldier, then he followed Acidalia, barreling out of the room at the speed of sound. By the time Lyra even had the sense to follow him, he had cornered the Imperatrix by the storage closet at the end of the hallway and had her pinned up against the wall like a butterfly in a shadowbox.

“Oh my god,” Lyra said weakly. “Ace, stop, you’re going to hurt her—“

“I’m not letting this happen again,” Ace snarled while Acidalia hung limply underneath him. “I’m not going to watch another fucking Trinitarian create a mess like this and then walk away without cleaning it up. I’ve spent my whole damn life watching rich people send boys to their dooms and then disappear when it’s time to own up to it. I don’t give a shit if you meant for it to happen or not—the fact is that it did, and you don’t get to act like a victim because he died for you and that made you sad. Everything always has to be about you, doesn’t it? You’re always the victim in every story about you. But I’m done. I’m not going to let you be a high-and-mighty cold-hearted bitch this time. It’s time to put on your big girl pants and own the fuck up to what you did. You killed someone. You killed my best friend. You killed the only family you ever had or ever will have, and this time you’re going to have to deal with the ramifications of it instead of throwing T aside like one of the pawns in your stupid chess games that he only ever pretended to like to make you happy.” With that, he stepped back, and Acidalia fell to the ground in a limp bundle of limbs and fabric. Her coronet tumbled off of her head and clattered on the metal tiles of the floor, sending waves through the corridor like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Lyra went to help her up, but somehow she didn’t see Acidalia appreciating that.

Ace still didn’t look triumphant, and Acidalia didn’t look entirely done, either. Again, she drew herself up to her full height, this time sans crown and looking slightly more disheveled. “You think I don’t know it was my fault?” she asked. “You think I don’t spend every waking second regretting the fact that it wasn’t me instead?”

“If that’s true, then you certainly don’t act like it.” Ace seemed to almost lunge at her again, circling her like a tiger stalking its prey.

“I don’t have the luxury of wearing my heart on my sleeve,” Acidalia snapped. “If I lose it over one dead man, do you know what will happen? My army will be directionless, my underlings will be leaderless, and tomorrow there will be thousands of other sisters just like me mourning brothers just like him. I keep it together because I have to. I’m a living bioweapon and our only Cipher. If I fall, we all do."

“That’s the most self-centered thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s true. If I spiral, we don’t have anyone to conjure up plagues out of thin air, or make cures for all the plagues Alestra conjures up from thin air, or read all the millions of documents that can only be opened with DNA like mine. If I disappear, there’s nobody left to keep Andromeda’s temper under control or the nuclear warheads under lock and key. Believe me, if I was replaceable, I’d be dead already.”

“I wish you were.”

“Maybe I wish that, too.”

And with that, she stormed off, leaving Lyra standing limply in the crater of the explosive argument. She didn’t say anything; there was nothing to say. Awkwardly, she went back into the room, shut the door before Ace could follow her, and slumped against the bed, heart pounding. Leaving Ace and Acidalia alone right now felt like leaving nuclear warheads unattended, but what could she do?

What could anyone do?