On the dais, Aleskynn luxuriated in the opulent, alabaster brilliance of uptown Appalachia City, drinking fruit punch out of a wine glass and trying not to think about the smell of decomposing corpses that even her expensive perfume couldn’t cover up. Just outside the door, men were rotting in the heat, strung up on the walls like carrion on meat hooks just to demonstrate the lengths Alestra would go to destroy anyone who opposed her. Underneath Aleskynn’s platform stilettos, the floor was slick with the blood of exsanguinated men, and in the distance, the city burned. This was not the glory Aleskynn had envisioned or the type of attention she had wanted; it felt like she’d asked a genie for a wish only for him to deceive her with clever wordplay, giving her what she’d asked for but only on a technicality. Eleutheria’s crown finally sat on the head of the legitimate dauphine, but everything else was wrong. For the first time in her life, Aleskynn was scared—not didn’t-study-for-a-test or fighting-with-your-best-friend scared, but genuinely afraid, fearful for life and limb.

This wasn’t how wars were supposed to happen. Wars were supposed to be fought by soldiers and generals and brave strong warriors who would happily die for the sake of their empire, not shady creeps who used thirteen-year-old princesses as bait to catch revolutionaries. Aleskynn never should have been forced onto a battlefield—her blood was too precious to be spilled. She shouldn’t have had to see the terrified look on Acidalia’s face when she thought, briefly, that her friend had been shot, or the alien gore of bizarrely bloodless yet eviscerating laser wounds, or the last moments of a man who shrieked and flew across the room like a rag doll when he stepped in a puddle bisected by a wire none of them had even noticed. The men had cursed Acidalia for that, dragged her name through the mud while their comrade lay smoldering, but Aleskynn found no comfort in calling her sister a bastard bitch—not when the damage was already done and the corpses were already cooling.

Before yesterday, she’d never even seen a body, and now she’d watched dozens of people meet horrible ends—and, not only that, but she was forced to confront the fact that she might someday be among them. She wasn’t dead yet, but if one of those laser bolts had gotten a little closer to her head, or if she was the one who stepped in that puddle… who would ever think that a puddle of innocent water might kill them? And if water was dangerous, what else was lethal? Men were already dropping dead of diseases Aleskynn had never heard of before, and maybe that meant there were invisible pathogens in the palace already, circling around her head and waiting to melt her body into virus soup and tear her DNA to shreds. That’s what Acidalia wanted—to tear people’s DNA to shreds. And there were a lot of ways to do that, a lot of ways to kill a lot of people really fast, and Acidalia was smart, smart enough to make these plans and put them into action. It was fighting dirty, but then Alestra was fighting dirty, too.

This shouldn’t even be my job, Aleskynn thought. Princesses didn’t have jurisdiction over war. Princesses had jurisdiction over things like yelling at servants and posing for paparazzi and looking pretty on camera—not things like brutally murdering other people and hanging their corpses up like Saturnalia lights. Acidalia and Alestra were supposed to the leaders here—evenly-matched Imperatrices, the empress and the dauphine, the components of Eleutheria’s Rule of Two. Aleskynn was the spare to the throne, not an actual politician with real responsibilities—

Except she wasn’t just the spare anymore.

Oh, God. Acidalia was a traitor. Whatever claim she ever had to the throne had evaporated the minute Cassiopeia tried to shoot that crown off of her head. So Aleskynn was not only a princess, but a future empress, and…

Well, maybe war was her jurisdiction now.

Shit.

At that realization, Aleskynn swelled with a mixture of pride and fear. One half of her brain was excited, almost weeping with joy—she’d just jumped up in standing from a regular Principissa to the honest-to-God Dauphine, and in seven years, the throne was all but hers. She would celebrate her twentieth birthday by taking control of the empire, and she’d rule over a glorious nation controlled by the best and brightest. Her country would be beautiful, perfect—Alestra would make it so that her precious daughter inherited the greatest possible version of Eleutheria. Aleskynn couldn’t have possibly asked for more.

And yet, there was still something absurd about Aleskynn being the Imperatrix. She’d never been trained for this—she hadn’t spent so much as five minutes thinking about her future before. When she was younger, everything had seemed so set in stone: Acidalia was the eldest and the heir, and Aleskynn was just a princess. Her only role was being Acidalia’s confidant, and her only power came from her status as Acidalia’s sister. Everything hinged on Acidalia and the power vested in her by virtue of primogenitum. With her gone, it all fell apart, and suddenly a future that had seemed constant and immobile was fluid and unsure. Aleskynn would be the empress, but could she really rule the world the way her mother and sister could? She couldn’t fix petty fights between her friends, or even really keep track of them. How was she supposed to take control of the whole planet when she could barely remember which of her ladies-in-waiting were still alive?

Stop it, she told herself. Mom will be right there with you, and she’s brilliant. But did that make anything any better? Aleskynn didn’t particularly want to be babysat for the rest of her life, and Alestra had a tendency to take up arms against anyone she didn’t like. Aleskynn would never be able to contradict her, lest she lose her mind and murder some innocent person for corrupting her beautiful daughter. She’d already killed so many of Aleskynn’s handmaids that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind regarding the lengths she’d go to keep her family ideologically pure. And yeah, those murders were justified, and those girls had been spreading dangerous ideas… but that didn’t mean Aleskynn had to take pleasure in their deaths. It was just like the soldiers hanging on the walls outside—they deserved their fate, undoubtedly so, but their desecrated corpses weren’t pretty. They were grim reminders of what happened to dissidents, and they served that purpose well, but Aleskynn still didn’t like seeing them.

I’m going to have to get a stronger stomach for this type of thing, aren’t I? she thought. Weakness was for princesses, princesses who were only good at being attractive and dumb. And as much obfuscating stupidity Aleskynn liked to put on, she wasn’t that dumb—inexperienced, maybe, but not dumb. She was Alestra’s daughter, after all, and that kind of put a cap on how stupid she could be. Her IQ was in the 140’s and she was playing with quaternions when the other girls were playing with dolls; she was much brighter than anyone thought she was (in theory, at least.) The trouble came with applying that brightness to things that mattered. Outside of shitty mobile strategy games, it wasn’t often that Aleskynn had to put her brain to the test—she’d stopped going to school years ago, and they’d just let her quit, because they never anticipated her needing any of the skills they taught. She never engaged in anything hard, because difficult things were scary. And, most importantly, she’d never had any real competition—nobody wanted to be the poor unfortunate soul to beat Aleskynn at something and incur Alestra’s wrath in the process. So Aleskynn was smart, but not wise—she had potential energy that she hadn’t gotten the chance to release yet. Maybe becoming an empress would be good for her, she reasoned. It’d give her an opportunity to actually use her brain for once.

On the other hand, though, did she really want that stimulation? Yeah, she was wasting her awesome mind, but did that really matter if she was having fun doing it? She wasn’t going to be a nerdy show-off like Acidalia and speed-cube until her fingers bled. She had no interest in politics or war games. Even if she had all the smarts in the whole wide world, she’d much rather play on her phone than slaughter rebels. Taking command felt like playing dressup in her mother and her sister’s clothes.

Isn’t this ironic? she thought. I wanted so badly for Acidalia to disappear, and now she may as well be dead, but I’m still not happy. What would make her happy at this point? She didn’t want Acidalia on the throne any more than she wanted Alestra to lose the war, but she didn’t exactly desire a position of command, either.

Maybe she could just be a puppet queen and have someone else rule from the shadows. It’d be easy to find a trustworthy person and hand them the key to the city, right? Then Aleskynn could reap the rewards of the crown, but she wouldn’t need to do any heavy lifting. All of the real responsibility would fall to the puppetmaster. And if something went wrong, Aleskynn could always pull back the curtain and reveal that she was just a marionette all along, shifting the blame onto someone else for the people to massacre.

But who would be meek enough to assume such a role without growing too powerful? All of Aleskynn’s friends were haughty noblewomen, and none of them were particularly intelligent. She was half-sure Sirena didn’t even know how to read. If she gave any of them any more power than was absolutely necessary, they’d either go mad and hunger for more, or ruin Eleutheria’s progress by abandoning their posts and spending the tax credits on clothes and jewelry. Neither situation was optimal. Aleskynn needed someone who was smart and reasonable, but also a total pushover—someone who could rule fairly, but also take the blame if her decisions didn’t work out. Someone like—

Carina.

Oh, stars, Carina would be perfect. She had to be decently intelligent—she was a Scientia, and all Scientia-castes were geniuses. That meant she’d be good at making all of the decisions Aleskynn was too apathetic or stupid to make by herself. But Carina wasn’t exactly a dictator-in-training, and she probably wouldn’t want any more power than the authority Aleskynn bestowed upon her. She’d probably consider herself lucky to get a sliver off of the Cipher’s table—there was no way she’d ask for more after being given essentially a whole meal. She was practically as smart as Katherine herself, but as much of a doormat as Anna Luminosa had been. It was the best combination Aleskynn could possibly ask for.

Where was Carina, anyway? If Aleskynn was going to make her into a shadow-empress making choices for a puppet-queen, it was probably best to tell her now so she could brush up on her politics first. Scientias usually weren’t given the best educations outside of science and math, and she’d want to learn about history at the very least before she dove headfirst into ruling a country for her best friend. To be entirely honest, Aleskynn didn’t know too much about history, either, but then again, she wouldn’t be the one actually making the decisions.

With a newfound confidence in mind, Aleskynn shoved her empty wineglass of fruit punch into the arms of a waiting Ministratora-caste and set off down the hallway to find her mother. Carina never answered her phone when she was at work, and she was always at work—such was the fate of the middle-class. Normally Aleskynn didn’t want to mess with the caste order and pull people out of their assigned roles—the whole system had been designed by her ancestors, who were probably more versed in psychology and political theory than she was—but this situation was kind of different, and the world needed a stable leader (or at least the appearance of one) more than it needed yet another astrophysicist. What did astrophysicists even do, anyway? Math? Science? Some weird combination of both? Nothing that was really vital to society. So Aleskynn didn’t feel much guilt about pulling Carina away from the caste she was born into—it wasn’t like the planet would collapse without her.

“Mom?” she called down the hallway, trying not to look at the corpses. Then, turning to a nearby guard, she asked, “where’s my mother?”

“Her majesty the Imperatrix Ceasarina—"

“Cut the crap and tell me already.” Normally Aleskynn liked pompous titles and bossing people around, but only when it was convenient.

“She’s in a meeting in the East Wing,” the guard replied, without a shred of professionalism slipping off his facade. Aleskynn liked the guards—they all did their jobs so well, and they never asked questions. She mumbled a thanks—unnecessary, but she felt like saying it—and set off down the corridor, not wanting to be around these corpses for any longer than she had to be. Part of her wondered why Alestra would let this mess sit for so long, but the other part of her already knew—she wanted to send a message. That was part of the art of being an Imperatrix—reenforcing ideas without saying anything and crushing rebellions before thoughts of them even began. It made Aleskynn uncomfortable, but it wasn’t like she could show that; if she was going to be the heir and (pretend to) rule someday, she couldn’t let anyone think of her as squeamish. So she walked and didn’t run, looking ahead very deliberately and trying not to let her eyes wander. The soldiers didn’t look much like people, anyway; they were all the same, with thick black armor and helmet-covered heads. It wasn’t so bad if she ignored the metallic tinge of blood in the air and the seeping scent of decay underneath that.

As she traversed the hallways, the bodies grew more numerous, and she started to think that all of this gore and viscera might be a little excessive. Alestra didn’t seem to mind violence, but weaker castes didn’t have a very high tolerance for it, and there was no way the staff could do their jobs without losing their minds when they were trapped in this hell. Even now, the Ministratora girls that stood at every doorway looked unnerved. They were just decorations, really, barely even servants; the doors opened on their own, and the royal family didn’t need anyone to hold them open for them. Aleskynn had half a mind to dismiss the women entirely, tell them to go home and rest, but she had the feeling that her mother wouldn’t like that very much, and then those girls would be jobless or dead by morning. Alestra didn’t think very highly of her staff—bread and circuses was her philosophy when it came to the servants. She gave them the bare minimum of food to keep them standing and entertainment to keep them distracted, and if that failed, she just killed them like they killed the vermin that nested in the palace walls. It was a surefire way of preventing an insurgency, but Aleskynn didn’t really like that, either. She afforded them a small smile as she strode past, but they averted their eyes; they knew better than to look at any of their betters, let alone a Cipher.

Aleskynn could hear her mother’s voice long before she could see her. She was angry, yelling at some poor staff member about something involving a dead boy, and Aleskynn was surprised at the fact that this was even still shocking to her. She knew plenty of people who had met unfortunate ends; dealing with this shouldn’t have been any different. In fact, it probably should have been easier, if anything—nearly all of the dead were traitors. But Aleskynn felt uncomfortable anyway, and she couldn’t quite muster enough apathy to put all the thoughts of sympathy out of her mind.

Well, at least Alestra was angry about something, Aleskynn thought. That was good. Alestra snapped at the slightest little things, especially things concerning Acidalia, and that was always good for Aleskynn because that meant she’d allow her to do whatever she wanted. Normally Alestra was a doting parent to the one child she actually gave a shit about, but when she was lost in one of her blind fits of rage, nothing could tear her attention away—not even her own daughter.

Aleskynn followed the sounds of yelling and raving to a small room in a hallway she’d only ever been to when she was playing hide-and-seek with her sister—the corridor just outside of the morgue, which led down into the crypts. Acidalia used to hide here all the time because it was the one place Aleskynn had always been too afraid to look in–she shouldn’t have been scared of something as harmless as the inert bodies of her own ancestors, but it was creepy nonetheless, and there were some things little girls were not meant to see. Acidalia always had a much stronger stomach for that type of stuff. She could kill people and run away and not regret anything—she’d created electrified death traps with no forethought or effort, and she didn’t even turn to watch as her victim’s charred skin melted away from his body. She didn’t even care. Aleskynn was both awestruck and horrified of the power Acidalia had over both herself and the people around her—in that respect, Alestra and her bastard daughter were one and the same.

Woe be to the person who told either of them that, though.

Aleskynn bypassed the entrance to the crypts and waited for the guards to open the morgue’s doors for her. She hated morgues even more than she hated mausoleums—at least in mausoleums, the dead people were long-gone. In morgues, the bodies were usually still warm, figuratively speaking, and they hadn’t decayed enough for anyone to recognize them as really gone. In the absence of blood and gore, they all looked asleep, and post-mortem muscular movements and the occasional escape of gases could make the dead look alive again. But if Alestra could be around recently dead people, Aleskynn could, too. The only way to get a stronger stomach is through constant exposure to your fears, she thought.

Alestra and stood around a stretcher, yelling at collective of professionals. Medica Caecelia, the royal physician, was there, as were a few other women Aleskynn only vaguely recognized as one of her mother’s hairstylists and the old house Generalis’s desairologist. They hovered around the body on the stretcher like a swarm of flies, brushing at its face with makeup and entangling their hands in its hair. Next to them stood TB-0125—Kryptos, now, was his name—and another TB-class soldier, who looked like he was in some kind of position of authority. Then, finally, in the corner of the room, A7-IO12 cowered from a furious Alestra, looking like he’d rather be the corpse on the table than the object of the Imperatrix’s wrath.

“Your highness,” said Dr. Caecelia, nodding respectfully. Aleskynn mumbled some sort of half-greeting before turning to face the others, curious as to what this was about. She went to greet her mother, but then she saw the makeup the desairologist was putting on the body’s face.

It was Acidalia’s makeup. Not just her favorite brand or her skin color—it was hers.

Come to think of it, the dead man on the stretcher looked a lot like Acidalia, period. Uncannily like her, in fact. He had her onyx-black hair and her jasper eyes, but it wasn’t just that—he had her same skin tone, her same wavy hair, her same Grecian nose and high cheekbones. Aleskynn never would have noticed it if she wasn’t looking for it—they had different haircuts and different jawlines—but once she saw it, their near-identical appearance was impossible to ignore. If someone had told her that this man was Acidalia’s brother—or her own brother, even—she probably would have believed them.

The desairologist seemed to have picked up on her shock (god dammit, Aleskynn thought, I need a better poker face.) She put her brush down—Acidalia’s brush, really, it was the same gold-handled brush with the dent on the end that Acidalia used to use all the time—and smiled a winning cheerleader smile. “Do you like it?” she asked.

“Did—did you do this?” Aleskynn stammered. The boy could have been alive, for all the detail she’d managed to put into his face.

The desairologist laughed. “Partially. He was already a dead-ringer for her—all I really did was stave off the decay a while longer. Freshen up the face a bit, suture up his mouth. The works. It was pretty easy, actually; he died of a gunshot wound to the head, but it was a laser, not a bullet. And once I had someone bring Acidalia’s cosmetics in, well, I just went from there.” She dabbed a bit of highlighter on his cheek. “It does get kind of hard, because we want to make him look like your half-sister, but we don’t want to make him look like he’s actually wearing makeup. Other than that, though…” She trailed off, lost in thought, as she brushed some more bronzer on near his face.

“But… why?” Aleskynn couldn’t think of any legitimate reason to single out a corpse like this and give it special treatment when all of the other soldiers’ bodies had been desecrated. Perhaps he was a Nova supporter who had died for a rightful cause, but even then, Alestra could never be persuaded to afford an ordinary soldier this much dignity. Unless he was someone really spectacular, he would have had a no-frills cremation like all of his brethren, a sendoff befitting his status. Maybe he was a war hero or a savior of some kind, but surely someone would have mentioned it by now.

“Propaganda reasons, initially,” the desairologist said. “We’re not sure whose side he was on—he’s just a regular Eleutherian TB-class—but he looks a lot like Acidalia, and that’s all that really matters. So I was going to fix him up all nice, exaggerate their resemblances a little, and then dirty him up in a way that’s more obvious than a laser wound—big bloody gashes, lots of seeping wounds, that sort of thing. Then we could put him on posters and be like, this is what happens to people like Acidalia. You know? Easy peasy, and the message is clear. But Her Majesty your mother… well, she wasn’t exactly partial to the idea. And it was a stupid idea, in hindsight,” she added hurriedly. She needn’t have been concerned, though; Alestra was far too busy screaming about something involving phrases like desecrated bodies, traitorous bitch, filia nullius, and other political buzzwords with no meaning to notice what the makeup artist was saying.

“So what are you going to do now?” Aleskynn asked.

“Same thing,” the desairologist replied, “only we’re just going to target Acidalia directly instead of the planet as a whole. Shake her up a bit. It was Kryptos’s idea.” She pointed to the soldier behind her, who stared coldly at the distance in a very imposing way. Aleskynn shuddered.

“And then…?”

“Stuff him into storage. Her Imperial Majesty asked.”

Aleskynn turned to her mother. Why on Earth would Alestra want to keep the dead body of some guy who happened to look like Acidalia? The resemblance was kind of weird, but soldier boys were all engineered to look the same, anyway, and the odds of this man being related to the Ciphers in any way were impossibly low. Besides, even if he did somehow bear Cipher genes, did it matter? He didn’t have any of the Cipher traits that set them apart—sure, some of his facial features were kind of Alestra-y, but he lacked the distinctive blue eyes and white-blonde hair that were so characteristic of nobility.

“Is there something I should know here?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. Alestra didn’t so much as breathe in her direction, which was unusual even for her—she rarely ever outright ignored Aleskynn. “Mom,” she said again, but Alestra didn’t respond that time, either. She just kept yelling, red-faced and irate, at the poor soldier in the corner.

“We all tried to talk to her, your highness,” the hairstylist said, sighing and putting down her curlers. The body had naturally spiky, uneven hair, like he’d been cutting it himself, but she’d managed to curl it into coal-colored waves that framed his face scarily perfectly. “I suggest you return at a later time,” she finished.

“Yeah, I can kinda see that,” Aleskynn replied, cringing. It probably was best for her to get out of here—if she stayed any longer, there would be two bodies in this room.

Find Carina. Find Carina. Find Carina. Aleskynn repeated the thought to herself like a mantra as she paced back and forth in her bedroom. Domina Velia Communia kept texting her about some inconsequential bullshit that wasn’t important to either of them and Contissa Sirena Vulgaris wouldn’t shut up about some TV show she’d just finished, and Aleskynn’s metadit was just ringing and ringing and ringing, but none of the messages actually mattered. The one person she wanted to find just would not answer her goddamn phone.

Please don’t be dead, Aleskynn thought. Please don’t be dead. She didn’t think Carina would be gone already—after all, the fight had only just begun—but Appalachia City was a war zone, and Acidalia herself had last been seen on a murderous rampage inside of a biology lab, so it was entirely possible. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, per se, but it would be a huge waste, and Aleskynn would have one fewer friend.

You know what, screw this, she thought, looking down at yet another text message from Velia—mostly just nonsensical cooing over some boy she thought was attractive. I’m a Cipher. I can just triangulate her signal and see where she is. Royalty had a right to know what their people were doing and where they were going, after all, and it was unbelievably easy to track every single citizen of Eleutheria—way too time-consuming to be practical for the whole planet at once, but relatively simple for finding a single person. If the signal was coming from a more dangerous area, Aleskynn would assume Carina had been killed, and if it was coming from a safe place, she’d assume she was just busy. Feeling relieved somehow, she pulled up the location software and typed Carina’s citizen ID into it, then settled back to watch the progress bar fill up as the program loaded. Within thirty seconds, she had a result: somewhere in the Continental Center.

What?

Aleskynn went to zoom in, but before she could see any further, the little blue dot jumped halfway across the world to the District Canadensis. By the time she caught up to that one, it was someplace in Iaponia, then in the Philippinae, then Sinae. Then, in a little burst of light, it disappeared off of the Earth’s surface and popped up again on Mars, darting around Arabia Terra for a few seconds before vanishing again and appearing on the Lunar Colonies. Every time Aleskynn got closer to it, it moved away again, only to show up a moment later in an increasingly bizarre place, like it was taunting her. Carina, either willingly or unwillingly (probably the latter), was under the influence of a location randomizer.

Fine. Want to play these games? I’ll look you up myself. Aleskynn slammed the button of the computer, and the hologram shattered into a thousand shards of light. Then, breathing in deeply, she opened the computer again, let it scan her iris, and clicked on the camera program. Carina’s file said she worked in the Trinity Lab complex on the 678th floor—smack-dab in the middle of Appalachia City and only a few steps away from the Terminal. Aleskynn clicked on the building, then clicked the up arrow until the floor she wanted came into view. The lower floors were a disaster—there was one entire story that seemed dedicated to giant, mostly broken containers of swirling artificial blood, and there were dead people all over the place in the center of it—but the closer she got to the astrophysics lab, the nicer the facilities got, until every single one of them looked completely normal. Then, finally, she was on 678.

It looked like a boring place, honestly—it was obvious that not much had happened here. The only people present were dozens of women and the occasional male military scientist, all sitting at desks and playing with computers. There were secretaries and researchers and guards and janitors, but not a single soldier or even a cop in sight, and everything seemed shockingly, bizarrely normal. So Carina was probably fine.

Aleskynn still kind of wanted to make sure, though.

She clicked through onto the next room, and then into the next. Nearly every single desk was full, every slot taken, in the A and B rows. She finally got down to C—C for Carina Nebula—and scanned the nameplates. Cabalina, Caecelia, Cadenza… Carina.

Her desk was empty.

Maybe she was in the lab, Aleskynn thought in a panic, but none of her belongings were there. She had no idea what people usually brought to work, but surely a Scientia would have, like, a bag, or her lunch, or something. But her spot looked like it hadn’t been occupied in days, and Carina never missed work unless she really had to. Something must have happened to her.

Who else was missing from the lab? Aleskynn pulled up their attendance log. Nobody was gone, really, except for serial absentees, the sorts of people who were already holding onto their jobs by a thread. She clicked through the rest of the names, unsure of what exactly she was looking for but determined to find something. There was really nothing interesting or informative about any of the Scientias—they were all boring nerds with generic backstories and no personality to speak of—but she had to get some information about Carina, even if that meant dragging every one of these women up to the palace and questioning them personally.

What was Carina’s mother’s name? Maybe that would help. It was unlikely—Scientias were never raised alongside their parents, lest that lead them to develop individualized ideals at odds with those of the state—but it was worth a try. Aleskynn clicked on Carina’s citizen file again and scanned her family tree. Her mother was called Julia Maxima, and she was a harsh-looking astrophysicist with very short hair and a stony gaze not unlike her daughter’s. Most of the notable facts about her were related to her research, which focused on some complicated physics thing involving quantum field theory. Carina’s father—sperm donor, really—was just a middle-ranking soldier who had died months before she was even conceived, so they must have harvested his DNA post-mortem. He hadn’t accomplished anything notable in his lifetime, either, and neither had any of his other children.

Neither profiles looked like they had anything useful to say, but Aleskynn still wanted to talk to Julia anyway, just in case. Just as she was about to pick up her metadit, though, she noticed something unusual—Carina had a yellow flag in the corner of her profile.

A yellow flag for Carina? That was new. Yellow flags denoted low-level risks to the nation, and Carina was possibly the least likely traitor Aleskynn had ever met. She was far too meek and subservient to rebel against anyone, let alone Eleutheria itself, and her quiet acceptance of her job and her station was the epitome of patriotism. And, honestly, she didn’t seem smart enough to be making clandestine plans behind everyone’s backs—she was intelligent, sure, but it wasn’t that type of intelligence. It was mostly just book-smartness.

For a second, interest in the yellow flag displaced Aleskynn’s worry for her friend, and she completely forgot her need to ensure Carina’s safety. Instead of asking for Julia Maxima to come to the palace for an interview session, she just clicked on the info box, curious.

Carina-Nebula Julia Maxima Scientia has been seen associating herself with known criminals, read the dialogue box. Internally, Aleskynn scoffed. What could Carina possibly have done, pirated a movie? Bought a knockoff watch? Oh, she could totally see Carina torrenting some shitty cartoon and trembling in fear of being caught the entire time. That’s totally something she’d do. God, Aleskynn would make fun of her so much for this later—if they ever saw each other again.

“So what are the charges?” she said to herself quietly. As she predicted, Carina hadn’t actually done anything—the only note on her file was that she’d been witnessed hanging out with a girl called Athena Stellara, probably the same Athena from the absent list. More out of curiosity than anything, Aleskynn clicked on Athena’s page, expecting to be greeted by a list of petty misdemeanors.

That… was not what happened.

Athena’s page was absolutely drenched in warnings and orange flags, as bright and as angry as neon fire. At the very top of the list read KNOWN REBEL OPERATIVE in all-caps and bold letters. For a second, Aleskynn wondered why the system hadn’t flagged her as a threat and notified the police before, but then she noticed the timestamp—it was incredibly recent. Her threat level had only been changed from yellow to orange a day ago, which probably had something to do with the current uprising. But that didn’t seem right—looking at her portrait, an image of a young girl with too-long hair and crooked teeth, Aleskynn had trouble believing she was dangerous. Her IQ was 134—lower than Aleskynn’s, but not by much, and not high enough for the empire to consider her problematic. All of the recordings that served as evidence for the accusations the system was throwing at her seemed relatively inconsequential—she was a conspiracy theorist, she had a long list of petty misdemeanors, she’d been in three fistfights, she refused to get a haircut, she got in trouble for smoking once. None of these were the marks of a terrorist.

Then, abruptly, Carina noticed the last video. It was set in the basement of the Trinity labs—the same blood pharm where Athena had gotten yelled at for smoking, and the same place where the security cameras had shown gore and dead bodies a few minutes ago. Unlike the other videos, though, this one showed Athena alongside a strange woman… and Carina.

What the hell?

Alarmed, Aleskynn zoomed in closer. Athena was holding a gun. And the woman next to her held a firearm so large it was hard to even see her face, plus she had a slew of cybernetics that couldn’t have been legal in any district. Aleskynn tried to pull up her page, but all it said was Andromeda Amalura—it didn’t even list a caste or show a portrait. Normally, that would be fine—the government usually assumed that caste-less women were Cantatores or Laborum who’d slipped through the gaps, and members of those castes were usually so dull that Alestra didn’t even want to bother with them—but Andromeda’s file had a red flag next to it. This was no Obscurus-caste. This was a high-level threat to the government. And, in her known associations box, there was only one name: Acidalia-Planitia Cipher.

Holy shit.

As she looked at the computer, Aleskynn’s heart practically stopped. Carina wasn’t just sick or absent—she was a Rebel hostage, by the looks of it. Aleskynn didn’t even want to imagine the circumstances that had led to her being captured, or think about what the Revolution had done to her. God, that was how they found out about the assassination attempt, wasn’t it? They’d probably interrogated Carina and she’d probably talked. Of course she’d talked. If Aleskynn was a prisoner of war, she’d talk, too—anything to keep herself safe. This explained everything. Carina’s absence, the location randomizer, Athena’s orange flag and Andromeda’s red one. Carina was a prisoner.

Aleskynn slammed the computer closed again and stood, feeling dizzied. I’m too young for this, she thought. Stars above, I’m too young for this. Her friend was a hostage, her sister was a traitor and a war criminal, her mother was a dictator, and they were all at war with each other and aliens and maybe Mars depending on what the President said, and the Revolution had Carina, they had Carina. What was she saying? What did she know? If the rebels went after Carina, would they come for Aleskynn too? What would they do to her? What had they done to her friend? What were they already planning? Aleskynn had wanted her life to be like a fairytale, but she was feeling less like a Cipher and more like a Romanov by the second, like she was waiting for her turn to get bayonetted to death in a basement and dumped into a shallow grave. Fear came coursing through her veins again, fear for her life and guilt that she was scared to begin with. She was Alestra’s daughter. She shouldn’t be feeling like this. She should be as brave and as strong as her mother, or at least as smart as Katherine, but she was alone and terrified and completely devoid of any qualities that might save her. She didn’t even have an education.

Jesus Christ, what have I done with my life? She should have gone to school. She should have paid more attention. She should have kept Carina closer. But—well—but she was thirteen. How was she supposed to know what would happen? Why was she in charge of anything? Cipher blood? What good was Cipher blood when Aleskynn was on the verge of being killed because of it?

What good was Cipher blood when Acidalia was a rebel?

Aleskynn turned wordlessly and stared out the window at the vast expanse of the cityscape. For the first time in her life, she felt like she lacked control. She couldn’t dictate what happened in those distant, starry buildings any more than she could dictate what happened to her own sister. She was a princess, but she was one princess, and there were millions of people out there who could easily kill her if they really truly wanted to. Being in the palace no longer made her feel comfortably secure in her role—it made her feel like these marble walls would swallow her up and eat her alive.

None of this would have happened if it weren’t for Alestra. Alestra slept with a Martian man and they had a bastard daughter and then everything went to shit. But Aleskynn wasn’t supposed to be thinking that.

Where did her loyalty lay? An hour ago, she would have said with her mother. But this gripping fear that clenched her heart and held it tight was making her rethink everything she’d ever known. She never thought she’d see the day where she wished she’d been born into a different caste, but now there were dead people in the hallways and murder outside her door and her family had fallen apart and she was supposed to be a dictator but she didn’t know how.

If Alestra could read Aleskynn’s mind, she’d be unfathomably angry—angry enough to kill someone. Aleskynn didn’t know if she cared. She didn’t know anything anymore.