Orestes Drunk and Pylades Fasting

March 15, 489 I.C., Odin

They gathered well before dawn for the assault on Neue Sanssouci, leaving the school building unseen in the darkness, dressed in the uniforms that Martin’s crew had been stealing from Littenheim’s soldiers. Kircheis had a knife at his hip and Leigh’s gun tucked into his holster. He didn’t intend to carry a rifle— they had few enough to go around that the other members of Martin’s group had claimed them all. Since the palace guards were under strict orders to never use zephyr gas (the risk of damaging the precious things in the building was too high), they didn’t need to carry axes, just some tools for breaking open doors.

It felt very odd to be in uniform again, and it felt odder still to see Martin dressed in a soldier’s clothes. The uniforms didn’t fit either of them: Kircheis’s was too short at the wrists and ankles, and Martin’s hung loose on his shoulders. Several of the other members of the group were ex-fleet— it was immediately clear who was comfortable in the clothes and who felt like they were wearing the enemy’s skin. But perhaps even the former members of the fleet felt that way.

Kircheis doubted that the uniforms would serve much purpose once they got inside Neue Sanssouci. It would be far too obvious who the intruders were. He simply hoped that they would be enough for the first step.

The morning air was dark and cold when they set out. Spring was on the wind, but it hadn’t yet arrived in full force, just enough to blanket the whole city in mist. It was quiet, walking through the streets, like they were underwater in the predawn light. They walked openly in two ragged lines. Those who knew how to march properly ended up in front, and everyone else trailed behind, except for Martin, who remained at the head of the line, with Kircheis at his right hand. Those in the back pushed carts loaded with their rifles and other equipment, though from the outside they looked like any large and nondescript cargo boxes.

Their target was a building complex that Kircheis was familiar with. The National Archives were near Neue Sanssouci, away from the residential part of the city. Kircheis, during the summer when he had researched the Earth Church, had spent many hours there on his own, and he had been there with Leigh plenty of times in the past. From the outside, the building was the same classical marble as every other official building in the city, but underneath was a deep complex of records: computer banks and physical archives.

Of course, when Kircheis had been there as a researcher, he hadn’t known that in the underground storage areas, far below his feet, there was a secret tunnel directly to the heart of Neue Sanssouci.

According to Martin, the whole city was littered with things like this: boltholes for the royal family, constructed in the early days of the Galactic Empire when the capital was being built up from nothing. It was a trademark of Kaiser Rudolph’s way of ruling, how he showed favoritism to his most trusted allies. The man who had funded the construction of the National Archives building, the family name that was emblazoned on a plaque in the entryway, had been given the right to create his own passage to the palace, and to safeguard it forever.

There were dozens of examples of this, though the exact number would probably never be known to anyone, not even the architects of Neue Sanssouci itself. Martin knew about four entryways into the palace, and his plan hinged on Littenheim not knowing of any (except, perhaps, whichever one his own family safeguarded).

Perhaps Rudolph had thought to give every family of note a secret entrance into the palace as a display of strength. He feared assassination so little, and thought that his palace security was so strong, that he would allow so many secret passages just as a demonstration. Whatever Rudolph’s reasons, they suited Martin’s plans quite well now.

Martin’s groups were dispatched all around the city. Several were going to the buildings they knew contained entrances, while others were taking up positions around the city to watch the movements of Littenheim’s troops. Still others were gathering outside of Neue Sanssouci itself, waiting for the signal to climb over the protective walls and enter the massive complex’s hunting grounds. Even more had gathered in buildings near key intersections, ready to counterattack any of Littenheim’s forces that tried to approach the palace.

While Martin had lots of supporters in groups around the city, even put all together they were nothing compared to the strength of Littenheim’s ground troops, not even the military police alone. Additionally, while many of the dissidents were trained former members of the fleet, and had spent time arming and teaching the others, they were still out-matched in knowledge, manpower, and equipment. Furthermore, many of Martin’s comrades were malnourished after months of occupation and little food, while Littenheim’s men had remained fed. If they were to win, the groups entering the palace directly would need to succeed at their goals.

If they could get inside and accomplish their strategic goals, it might be possible to cause enough chaos within the ranks of the military police and Littenheim’s other forces that they would be able to hold out, even if all of Littenheim’s forces rallied against them inside the palace.

It was a slim chance, but it was a chance nonetheless, and Martin was going to take it. He was running out of time: if Braunschweig’s forces returned to Odin, as everyone knew they would, they would be able to take the city for themselves, and there wouldn’t be any chance to mount a revolt against them. Survival hinged on popular support being enough to turn the tide against Braunschweig when he arrived, after taking on Littenheim at his weakest moment.

Kircheis didn’t think about that as they marched through the streets. He thought only about Martin at his side, and their current enemy. That was more than enough. He didn’t need to think about Braunschweig, and what his arrival would portend.

The National Archives loomed above the nearby buildings in the misty pre-dawn, six stories tall where the surrounding buildings were merely two. In front was a long grass promenade, with an empty fountain surrounding a huge statue of Kaiser Rudolph. Before they stepped out of the street corner towards the building, Martin held up his hand and stopped their column of men.

There were guards at the top of the tall marble steps that led up to the front of the building, as Martin had known there would be. They had been watching the patterns of the soldiers in the capital for weeks. For a building that had a secret entrance to the palace, the Archives were not safeguarded nearly enough, at least compared to the security that Neue Sanssouci itself bristled with. Littenheim likely didn’t know about the connecting passage to this building. The guards here were a formality, perhaps just to stop people from accessing the secret archives. The building appeared to be without power, which meant that internal security would also be lax. It must not be worth the cost or effort to run a generator or solar panels to power a building like this.

What they needed to do was enter the Archives without attracting undue attention. Even though it was still early in the day, and there was no one around the building other than the guards, killing them openly would surely result in a call for backup that would send their whole plan tumbling down.

Kircheis was wearing a lieutenant commander’s uniform, though it had once been one rank lower: they had sewn new stripes onto the shoulders to elevate it. As Martin sent the most ragtag looking of their group off towards the back of the building out of sight, Kircheis took ten former fleet members up to the door, walking openly out of the misty gloom. They passed directly by the men in the booth at the foot of the stairs. The one leaning outside the booth, drinking a cup of coffee, looked at them but didn’t say anything. Kircheis saluted, but didn’t get a salute back.

The guards at the front doors were smoking, four of them passing two cigarettes back and forth between themselves, a warm glow moving between their fingertips and the smoke curling in the air. They turned to look at Kircheis as he led his men up the stairs. Kircheis saluted, and this time they did rouse themselves enough to return the gesture.

“Morning, sir,” one of them said. These men were members of Littenheim’s ground troops, not the military police. Kircheis was— fortunately or unfortunately— wearing an MP’s uniform, the hat settled low over his forehead. They had chosen the MP uniforms in the hopes that there would be enough of a lack of familiarity between Littenheim’s personal troops and his allied forces that they could get away with looking like strangers.

“Morning,” Kircheis said. “We’re looking for information on properties owned by the Lichtenlade family, and were told we could look in here for those records.”

The guards glanced at each other. “Written orders?”

They had seen other people require authorization to pass checkpoints and enter buildings before, so they had been prepared for this. Kircheis fished in his pockets for the letterhead, along with a convincing enough forged signature, and handed it over to the guards, who glanced it over before nodding and going to open the door.

“Think you’ll be in there long?” the guard asked.

“There’s still no power, is there?”

“Afraid not.”

“Then we’ll be a while, probably until next shift, at the very least,” Kircheis said. “We’ll need to get the computers running off our batteries.” He pointed down to their large equipment boxes, and the guard nodded.

The guard held the door open and Kircheis and all the rest of Martin’s group filed in. They switched on their flashlights before the door swung shut behind them.

It was about eight in the morning, and the rotunda of the archives was lit with windows, the vague illumination from the lightening sky outside ghosting down over the marble floors. It was eerily silent aside from their footsteps. One group dispatched towards the back of the building to let the rest of their number in through the back door, while Kircheis and Martin led the way down to the basement levels.

Especially for those carrying the equipment, getting down the stairs would be a tedious and miserable process, so after they got away from the rotunda, they unloaded everything from the crates, and everyone strapped a rifle to their back, while one man set up a radio to listen to any of the chatter around the capital. Littenheim’s men usually broadcast on open frequencies, not bothering to use encrypted radio except for the most important orders, so it was easy to listen to what they were saying. Kircheis paid attention to the wash of voices coming in over the crackling radio as he consulted their map of where the secret entrance was located. No one in Littenheim’s camp was mentioning anything amiss at all, at least not so far, which was a very good sign.

They would stay in contact with their one lookout left behind over their own radio, and get their news about the movements of everyone in the capital from him. They had a severe shortage of radios— and many of the ones that they did have had been scavenged out of the trucks they had hijacked early on, or taken from the corpses of Littenheim’s men. This lack of powerful equipment made it so that Kircheis’s group would lose contact with the world as soon as they descended too far underground, and would only be able to get information once they had emerged into the grounds of Neue Sanssouci.

The stairwells of the archives building were cold concrete, wide enough that their group could go down them four abreast if they wanted. They descended so many floors that Kircheis’s ears popped— he lost count after ten. All he knew was that they had to get to the bottom floor. It was dizzying, descending in the darkness, with their flashlights bobbing before them. No one spoke, except to apologize when they bumped into each other by accident, or to report that they could no longer get radio signals from above.

Kircheis stayed shoulder to shoulder with Martin at the front of the pack, and when they finally reached the bottom of the stairwell, Martin stopped them all and let them take a rest.

“We have plenty of time,” he said. “Catch your breath.”

They were very early. Martin still intended to take advantage of Hilde’s distraction, which would not be happening until eight that night. They needed to be inside Neue Sanssouci by then, but it was far better to be in position inside the tunnels, ready to break out at the indicated time, than it was to wait and be late.

The bottom floor of the Archives building stretched out for what seemed like an infinite distance. The bottom floors held physical media in rows and rows of heavy metal shelves on rails. They fit together tightly, and had to be slid apart by turning a crank to open them. They stretched out far beyond the reach of the beams of their flashlights, swallowed by the pitch blackness.

The tunnel they were looking for was an access hatch hidden beneath one of these shelves. They walked down the rows of archives, checking the shelf labels until they found the correct one, and then began the laborious process of turning the cranks to move the heavy storage cases. They revealed, between the rails on the floor, an innocuous metal plate, barely wide enough for one person to fit through. They unbolted it, revealing a shaft in the ground from which emerged the smell of dampness and earth. They all looked down into the pit.

“I’ll go first,” Martin said, but Kircheis stopped him.

“Let me.”

There was no further argument, so he sat down on the ground and dangled his legs into the hole, kicking until he found the rung of the ladder he knew was there. He grabbed it and began to descend. There was no way to see below him, and the lights of the flashlights above narrowed to a single point in his vision. He went down ten or fifteen meters, and then he could feel the air change as the passage widened around him, and his foot, expecting to find the next rung of the ladder, found solid ground. One thing that Kircheis noticed as he descended was that even if the royal family had ever taken this bolthole exit, it would have been very difficult for them to escape if someone was not waiting at the top to help them: the heavy shelves covered the hole completely, and the panel unbolted from the outside. This, surely, was intentional: to make the Kaiser continue to rely on the family who had orchestrated the rescue in the first place.

“I’m at the bottom,” Kircheis called back up. “It’s not too far. I don’t see any blockage in the tunnel.”

The walls down here were hewn stone— this was a tunnel carved into the earth, not a building’s foundations. Kircheis felt the rough surface with his fingers. The air smelled stale, and there was a persistent, fetid dampness in the air. It was likely that this tunnel flooded at points, and they were lucky that it was dry now.

Everyone shuffled further into the tunnel as their group descended the ladder. Martin waited right by the bottom, helping everyone down the last few steps, providing a gentle hand to get them oriented once they were on the floor. By the time that their entire group, more than fifty people now, with their ranks swelled by those who had entered through the back door of the Archives, were in the tunnel, Kircheis had been forced to walk quite far away from the ladder entrance. Every sound they made echoed far, far down the stone walls, voices coming back ten seconds later as disembodied whispers.

The tunnel was straight, but sloped upwards at about a four degree incline. It was thin enough that Kircheis could reach out both arms and rest his palms flat on the walls on either side of him, but it was at least tall enough that he didn’t need to bow his head.

Martin inched his way back through to the front of the group as they walked. Even now, Kircheis wanted to wrap his arm around him, but that was not a luxury that was permitted there in the dark. Instead, they just brushed elbows every few steps.

“I hope Hilde is doing well,” Martin said, unprompted, after a long stretch of silence. Although he spoke very quietly, his voice nevertheless carried down the tunnel; there was no privacy here.

“She’ll be fine,” Kircheis said. “She’s not in any danger.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I think she understands why I’m here.”

Martin nodded. In any event, it was far too late for Kircheis to do anything about it, even if he regretted leaving Hilde the way he had. He didn’t regret it, but thinking about her did pain him.

They walked and walked. Kircheis didn’t have a good sense of the distance— he was disoriented by the endless, featureless dark, with nothing to mark progress against except the number of footsteps he had taken. Perhaps they could have yelled in either direction down the tunnel and timed the echoes to calculate the length they had yet to go, but they didn’t stop to do so, and just trudged on. They had time.

Finally, they came to the other side, all bunching up at the end when the men in front came to a halt, and it took a moment for those behind to receive the signal. Like the other end of the tunnel, they had a ladder up into nowhere. This was intended as a bolthole for the royal family, and of course the fact that it was a single file ladder up would make it more difficult for an invasion force to come in this way.

They had a hand radio with a wire strung on to the antenna, a long one, and Kircheis took the end of the wire and began the long ascent into the palace. He didn’t intend to get out, but they couldn’t receive radio this far below, without bringing the antenna up.

The ladder was much longer on this end, and he had to mind his feet, the radio wire trailing down beneath him. He clutched the free end in his teeth so that he could climb with both hands.

The closer he got to the top, the quieter he tried to be: there was a chance that someone could hear him if they happened to pass right by the exit.

When he arrived at the top, he used his flashlight to signal that they could start trying to listen over the radio. He tied the antenna off to the side of the ladder, then carefully tried feeling the opening to the palace above him.

It was a metal cover, fastened down from the outside. They brought several methods for dealing with it, but it seemed that the exit was constructed in the same manner as the entrance they had gone through: the bolts outside went directly down into the concrete around the cover. Explosives would easily blow it off, and they had some, but a quieter method would be to drill out the stone at the top of the ladder, enough to access and then turn the bolts from below. Kircheis felt blindly around to confirm that this would be possible, and then descended the ladder quietly.

At the bottom, the front of their group was listening to the radio, tuned to the frequency of their relay station. So far, there was nothing amiss. It was a little past ten in the morning now, and Kircheis reported that the top was just smooth poured concrete, and it would be easy to chip or drill it out to gain access to the bolts, without having to resort to the explosives they had brought.

Martin sent two men up the ladder, taking with them the tools they would need to open the hatch. They muffled the sound of their hammers and chisels with cloth, and debris steadily rained down from the shaft.

Everyone at the bottom sat down to wait. It would take quite some time for those at the top to finish their work, and even once the bolts were loosened, they weren’t going to move until they received word that the distraction was proceeding as planned. There wasn’t much in the way of conversation that could be had down there in the darkness— just the muffled breathing of fifty men and the hiss of the static over the radio.

One of the men descended the ladder to report that they had reached the bolts and would be able to loosen them. Martin asked them to listen above and make sure that there was no one in the room they would be entering into, and then see if the entrance was obstructed, like it was in the archives. The men lifted the cover fractionally, and reported that it was clear above.

Kircheis closed his eyes and pictured the map of Neue Sanssouci. According to the information that Martin had gathered, their group would be entering directly into the Kaiser’s personal wing of the palace, emerging into a tiny service closet inside the kitchen complex.

Although this was the Kaiser’s personal residence, they were nowhere near the Imperial family’s living quarters: the palace was huge, and the kitchens, with their smells and noise, were far away from the bedchambers and parlors of the royal family. There was no guarantee that the royal family would even be in the residential areas of Neue Sanssouci (indeed, Martin was fairly sure that Litttenheim would be in another part of the palace entirely, in the administrative areas), nor did they have any information on which rooms in the vast suite were in use.

They had been sitting in the darkness waiting for a while, when their radio crackled out an urgent warning. “I got a report from our lookout— troops are moving in the capital,” their radio relay said. “I don’t know where they’re going— but they’re moving from the airfield— tanks coming out and heading towards the city. No movement of ships taking off.”

Martin picked up the radio’s microphone. “Do you know where they’re going?” he asked. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t know— I haven’t heard anything from the others.”

Martin turned to Kircheis, face barely visible in the flashlight-darkness. “Is this Hilde’s plan?”

“No. She tried to direct troops away from the palace, and they wouldn’t move until later, if they were acting on her warning. They’d be fortifying the airfield, or heading outside the city.”

“Try to raise the other groups,” Martin said into the radio.

“I’ll try,” their relay-man said. There was silence for a long time. “Littenheim’s soldiers have moved to encrypted radio. I can’t track what they’re saying anymore.”

“And the others?” Martin aksed.

“I’m trying.” More silence over the line. “The third is in position, no trouble— the seventy-seventh is fine.”

“And the hundred-twelfth?”

“I’m trying to raise them.”

Kircheis’s stomach dropped further and further, and he could feel the charged apprehension of the other men in the tunnel around him. With every moment that passed, it seemed more and more likely that one of their groups had been caught, damning their plans before they even started. The only relief was that no one had yet entered Neue Sanssouci properly, and of all the groups, Martin was the only person who knew the plan in full— if any of the others had been caught, they wouldn’t be able to betray the exact locations of the rest.

“We should retreat,” Kircheis said. “We shouldn’t go in if we’re at a disadvantage.”

There were a scattered few comments from the other members of the team, but not as many as Kircheis might have expected. Martin’s revolutionary crew was fervent, but there was a level of pragmatism involved— it would be better to fight another day, if they couldn’t get in now. Most of them turned towards Martin for his decision, but Martin had his eyes closed, the radio mic held up to his lips, an expression on his face like that of prayer.

“And the hundred-twelfth?” he asked again.

There was no response from their relay— it was likely he had his radio tuned to a different channel, trying to get in contact with one of their other groups.

The radio hissed again. “There’s someone else in the building,” their radio relay operator said. Even through the static, they could hear the pained resignation in his voice. “I’m— good luck, comrades.” There was half a second of the sound of breathing, and then the radio went silent and dead, empty static no matter what hails Martin sent.

Kircheis could guess what had happened. The other groups also were disguised as soldiers, using various excuses to get into the buildings. Their uniforms, and some of their identification, were stolen off of the corpses from the trucks that Martin’s group had been raiding. It only would have taken one person to notice that a group demanding entrance into the National Gallery was not, in fact, who they claimed to be. While the hundred-twelfth had a plan to look like art thieves if they were caught, an alarm might nevertheless be raised to ask if any other buildings had strange soldiers asking for entrance. Someone would be sent in to investigate them in the National Archives, and would quickly discover that they were not there, save for their one lookout with the radio.

It was only a guess— there could have been a million other things that had gone wrong. But something had gone wrong.

There was now no going back, even if Martin wanted to retreat. Kircheis looked over at him. His face was still tilted upwards, but then he put down the radio mic and opened his eyes. They glittered in the darkness; Kircheis felt the noose tighten.

“Let’s move,” Martin said. “We can’t go back the way we came.”

“Will the other groups join us?” one of the other men asked.

“They should,” Martin said. “I’m sure their escape routes are just as closed off as ours are.”

Martin stood, and the rest of the group rose with him, a shuffling of bodies in the tunnel. Martin took his position at the bottom of the ladder, undaunted by the prospect of going up first.

“Be right on my heels,” he said. “It’s going to be rough getting everyone up and out. The first of us will take up positions outside the door, but move as fast as you can up the ladder. As soon as you get to the top, you go to one side or the other.”

Kircheis took up a position one man behind Martin, trying to arrange it so that he would end up near him when they emerged into the kitchens. Behind him, other people also traded places with their neighbors in line, as if the exact spot they picked would decide their fate, and as if they could know that beforehand.

He climbed the ladder as closely behind the man above him as he could, trying to keep his hands away from the man above’s feet, and his feet away from the man below’s face. They couldn’t hold their flashlights on the way up, and there would be no use for them later, so they left them all down on the floor at the bottom of the ladder, a pool of light slowly receding, leaving them all in total darkness.

At the top, Martin felt blindly for the holes that others had made in the concrete, and reached his slender fingers in to unscrew the bolts the remainder of the way. A shower of rock dust fell down the shaft. Kircheis felt some of it tangle in his hair. The line had come to a complete stop, every man holding himself tense in position, waiting for the door above to be opened. Martin waited until he could no longer hear the noise of people moving below him, and then he shouted, “Let’s go!” and with a scrape and clatter, shoved the metal plate up off the shaft.

He climbed out, into a dark closet jammed full of cleaning supplies. It took the other man and Kircheis to get into the tiny space before the combined force of their shoulders slamming against the door could break the weak lock and open the closet from the inside. With all their force and the chaos in the darkness, mops and buckets spilled out of the closet with them, and a shelf holding gallon jugs of cleaning liquid collapsed when a fourth man tried to squeeze into the closet and hit his head on it.

After the darkness of the tunnels, the well lit kitchen complex of Neue Sanssouci was jarring, like emerging into an alternate world. Lunch had just been served to the royal family, and the people who remained in the kitchen were cleaning up the remains of the prep from the last meal: carrying pots and pans away from the stoves to the huge washing stations and wiping down the counters. Others were carrying around boxes of food, putting them down to begin work on dinner. On the central prep island, there were already cutting boards laid out, knives hanging above, for the great chopping of meat and vegetables to begin. The general noise in the kitchen— full of staff— was such that none of them had heard Martin’s shout, and only the crash of the closet door breaking open alerted anyone. Even then, those facing away, engaged in their own tasks, ignored the sound as routine. It wasn’t until a kitchen maid who was scrubbing one of the sinks saw them and began to scream that the kitchen was fully alerted.

In Kaiser Friedrich’s time, the staff of Neue Sanssouci had been a well oiled machine, and it would have been mere moments before the guards that should have been stationed right down the hall were summoned. But Littenheim had gotten rid of all the existing palace staff, and replaced them with people from his personal estates. In the chaos of the past few months on Odin, no one had thought to train the kitchen staff in emergency procedures. This was good for Martin’s group: they continued to pour out of the hole in the ground in the closet, one man standing at the top to haul others out by the arms to make them get on stable ground faster.

Martin pointed his gun at the kitchen staff. “Against the wall. Now!”

Most of them went, especially as more and more of his crew followed suit, stalking through the kitchen’s multiple rooms and corralling the staff against the walls. Kircheis’s heart was in his throat— while intimidating the kitchen staff allowed everyone to get out of the tunnels, it was a delay that might be costly if they lingered.

As most of the female staff of the kitchen bunched up against the walls, one of the chefs, a burly man taller than Kircheis, lunged at Martin with a knife. Kircheis was the first to react, Leigh’s gun already in his hand, and he shot the man’s arm— a clean hit to his wrist. He yowled and dropped the knife, falling forward in pain as the blood gushed from the artery there.

“Don’t move!” Martin tried to yell. “We won’t hurt you if you don’t move!”

But his words went completely unheeded as the sight of the blood unleashed some of the other members of the household staff. While they weren’t well trained, they were selected specifically for their loyalty to Littenheim, and a few of them leaped on Martin’s crew. Most of them were able to react in time to avoid getting knifed, either by jumping out of the way or shooting at their attackers, but one scrawny prep cook slashed an unwary revolutionary across the throat.

He clutched at the wound, the blood bubbling madly from his fingers, and the man who had been standing next to him shot the cook point blank in the head. When the cook fell dead at the slashed man’s feet, he too toppled over.

In the chaos, one of the kitchen maids managed to sneak out of the group that was bunched up in the corner, and make a break for the door. Kircheis tried to stop her, running after her and not wanting to shoot, but he slid on the wet tiled floor, having to catch himself from falling on the prep island, knocking cutting boards to the ground as he slid. She made it out the swinging double doors into the hallway, where she began yelling as she ran. She was long gone, off behind a corner where Kircheis could no longer hit her, by the time that he reached the still-swinging doors and looked out of them. No guards were coming down the hallway yet, but that wasn’t something that could be true for long.

Kircheis looked back at Martin, who was still struggling to get control of the kitchen staff and his own men, some of whom had to be stopped from indiscriminately shooting anything that moved. As the last stragglers emerged from the tunnel, Martin finally glanced at Kircheis behind him, wordless eye contact between them saying everything that Martin needed to know about the situation. Kircheis wondered if his regret was visible on his face— if he had shot the girl, killed her before she got out of the kitchen, how much more time would they have had?

If the girl had lunged at Martin, he would have shot her without hesitation, he thought. He tried to resolve himself— the next time a split-second decision was called for like that, he would make himself shoot, no matter who it was that presented the danger. He could aim for a leg, or an arm. If he was here for Martin, if he had already abandoned whatever principles had been holding him back before, a hesitation to use violence against anyone in their way should be abandoned too.

Martin turned towards a liveried servant, someone who looked like they had probably been part of the group serving the lunch meal to the royal family.

“Who was at lunch, and what dining hall were they in?” He held his gun to the boy’s throat— he couldn’t have been older than seventeen. The boy’s jaw just quivered, unable to speak out of fear, and Martin made a funny little expression and dropped the gun down to his side. “What dining hall? And who was at lunch?” he asked again.

“The Kaiserin,” the boy stuttered. “And the admiral and some of his staff. In the Blue Room.”

“And Marquis Littenheim? And Princess Christine?”

“I don’t know.”

Martin looked the boy in the eye for a moment, then nodded and let him go, giving him a gentle shove back towards the rest of the staff.

“We need to move,” Martin said. “Are we all clear?”

“What about Levi—” one man said, crouching in a pool of blood and trying to staunch the wound on the neck of the man who had been slashed. He was unconscious on the floor, and his chest was no longer visibly moving to breathe. It seemed unlikely that he was alive, or that he would live much longer.

“You—” Martin said, grabbing one of the kitchen maids from the group against the wall. “Hold that bandage.”

The woman stumbled down to the floor, choking back vomit, but she did trade places with the revolutionary, staunching the flow of blood from Levi’s neck with a wadded up kitchen towel. It wouldn’t save the man, Kircheis was sure, but the act was enough to get the rest of his group moving again.

The kitchens of Neue Sanssouci were in the basement, and a freight elevator was the main way for the food and dishes to be transported upstairs. It wouldn’t serve their purposes, so instead Martin led them to a stairwell. Whatever guards should have been at the top were long gone, heeding the kitchen maid’s warning and running to tell the royal family that the palace was under siege from inside.

Upstairs, their surroundings were much more lavish than they were in the utilitarian service corridors of the basement. The stone walls were smooth cut, and the marble tiles on the floor were laid in alternating colors. If Kircheis remembered the map of Neue Sanssouci correctly, they were close to the dining hall the servant had indicated. It was one of the smaller, more intimate ones for the royal family and perhaps a few guests. Martin knew the way, and they arrived there quickly, finding the huge wooden doors unlocked and the Kaiserin and guards gone.

The dining room that the Kaiserin had been in was blue: a royal wallpaper decorated with shimmering gold birds wrapped the room, with a skylight above that illuminated the table. The table itself was ornate, with decorative inlays of wood in different tones, showing some scene that Kircheis didn’t have time to decipher.

More importantly, the table was covered with a half-eaten meal, the diners having departed in a rush. Martin’s group, some of whom had not had a real meal in months, looked at it with hungry eyes, and then grabbed pillowy soft bread rolls, and dipped their hands directly into the rich bowls of stew on the table, scooping out chunks of meat and licking the sauce from their fingers. They snatched up the barely-touched wine goblets and drained them dry. Still, they didn’t linger, wolfing down the food as they went past, each man taking whatever handful he could grab without slowing his pace, and no more. Even Martin took a glass of wine, drinking it out of genuine thirst so quickly that some escaped the corner of his lips and dripped down his chin, leaving a ruby trail that he didn’t bother to wipe away.

Kircheis didn’t take anything. He ran through the room quickly, passing Martin and taking up a position at the opposite door from where they had come in. Although they had met no real resistance thus far, distantly there were sounds of men gathering in the hallways, heading this direction.

“We’ll be cornered here if we don’t move,” Kircheis said. “Where are we going?”

“Towards the family quarters,” Martin said. It was perhaps an arbitrary choice on his part: they could have tried to make a break for the administrative wing of the palace, where Littenheim himself was likely to be; and it wasn’t a sure thing that Kaiserin Sabine would return to her rooms— with the palace firmly under attack, she might be spirited away to some saferoom that Martin didn’t know about. But the family quarters were as good of a target as any: they at least knew how to get there, and they were in the opposite direction of the approaching sounds of soldiers.

Martin led the way, further into the palace. They passed alcoves in the stone walls where statues leered down at the running revolutionaries, and paintings with eyes that seemed to follow them. Martin had an incredible sense of direction— he must have been dreaming about the layout of the palace for months, navigating the hallways like he had been raised in them. Everyone else followed him blindly.

They didn’t encounter much resistance as they ran. When they found simple pairs of guards at critical hallway junctures, they were quickly overwhelmed by the mass of revolutionaries. If they turned tail and ran without resisting, Martin ordered his group not to pursue or shoot at them. For the ones they did shoot, they grabbed the keycards from their belts, allowing them to swipe the doors open rather than having to smash their way through by other means.

It didn’t matter that they encountered little trouble ahead of them. Even over their own pounding footsteps and harsh breathing, they could hear the pursuers behind them coming closer.

They ran through the empty ballroom, with its great windows overlooking the gardens of Neue Sanssouci. Outside, there was chaos: soldiers were running through the damp grass, and there were bodies on the ground that Kircheis couldn’t identify by face, not at this distance. It seemed at least one of the other groups had made it into the palace, though it wasn’t clear how many now survived. These might have been the groups sent to break in over the palace walls, through the back hunting grounds, or they may have been ones whose secret tunnels had brought them up into the gardens rather than inside the palace buildings. It didn’t matter. Off in the distance, there was a huge explosion, a rolling boom like thunder incongruous with the drizzling rain. A cloud of black smoke rose up over the trees, but it was unclear where it had come from or what it meant. Kircheis didn’t stop to ponder it; they kept running.

In an attempt to avoid pursuers, they had gone all the way from the dining room on the left side of the palace, along the outside rear where the ballroom was, and were now passing the great personal library of the Kaiser on the right interior. Although there were smaller staircases and servants’ hallways that could take them up to the royal family’s personal quarters on the upper floor, they risked getting trapped and cornered inside them. That seemed to be Martin’s rationale for leading them towards the main stairwell in the grand entrance. After their long stretch in the tunnels, it had driven home to Martin how easily people could become pinned in narrow corridors.

The grand entry foyer had a huge marble staircase, broken into split levels, with one staircase ascending halfway, and then breaking in two at a landing to reach the upper floor along the left and the right, curling around to meet again at the top. There was resistance waiting for them there: they were met with a fierce hail of gunfire the moment that they opened the side doors to the grand foyer.

The soldiers were all over the room, some on the ground level, others on both levels of the staircase. Kircheis and some of the other better shots crouched in the doorway, holding one of the double doors open so that they could take their own aim at the soldiers on the ground floor— the only ones who could see them beneath the stairs.

They had cover, and the soldiers did not, so eventually they were able to pick off some of them. But from behind, their pursuers had finally arrived, and began shooting at the rear of Martin’s group— another whole mass of soldiers.

They had become pinned in the hallway: the shooting gallery of the soldiers on the stairway above, and the approaching squad behind them. Martin made the only choice that he could. He yelled, “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

If they could make a breakthrough of the soldiers on the stairs, they might be able to hold their own inside the royal family’s quarters.

As they ran out of the doorway, under a hail of gunfire, they tried to stick to the area beneath the second-level staircase, where there was no easy aim for the soldiers above. This left them bunched up for the soldiers on the ground. They were saved from an instant slaughter with a zephyr gas grenade, one of their very limited supply, tossed directly up into the air like a signal flare. The palace soldiers never would have deployed one— they were too risky when the palace was as valuable as it was— but Martin’s group had no such compunctions. The rain of gunfire momentarily ceased, and this allowed their group to push forward.

They tried to dodge their way up the stairs, keeping out of the way of the soldiers’ bayonets. They made it to the halfway landing without losing too many, but on the landing, they were bunched up and approached from all sides, making progress exponentially more difficult on the narrower stairs. Nevertheless, they pushed forward.

Martin’s group was shockingly well trained: two men working in concert to tackle and wrest the gun away from one soldier. In this way, they were able to take the long bayoneted rifles from the soldiers and keep moving up the stairs.

Kircheis, untrained in whatever squad tactics Martin had been drilling, simply stuck by his side, and he leapt bodily on anyone who got in Martin’s way. If he had time to feel anything, he would have felt like a dog, his knife in his hand like a single long tooth, biting—

But it was no different killing with a blade than with a gun— the result was the same. A soldier lunged at Martin, and Kircheis’s arm moved without conscious thought, his knife landing in the soldier’s side below his ribs, tearing sideways through fabric, and skin, and the soft layer of fat, and the hard layer of muscle across the band of the abdomen, until the man’s guts spilled out through the crack Kircheis had made in his body. He fell to the ground, unable to even scream but able to clutch at his wounds. Kircheis stepped around him, following Martin another step up the stairs, to face another man slashing at Martin’s face with his bayonet.

Even though they were making headway, their group had become divided in half, with Martin and Kircheis ending up in a small squad on the left side staircase, away from where they had come in. The rear half of their group, attempting to follow them, had gotten pinched off, and had either ended up on the right side of the split stairs, or were trapped below on the wider central staircase below the first landing. Martin kept trying to press on. He now had a rifle and bayonet in his own hands, though he swung it like a club towards the soldiers’ heads and throats, rather than jabbing it forward to clear his own space.

Kircheis felt something wet spray onto his face— he would have thought it was blood if it wasn’t so cold— and realized that the sprinkler systems above were going off, the water coming down harder and harder from revealed spigots in the ceiling, massively dampening the effectiveness of the zephyr gas. The hydrophilic molecules stuck to the misty spray and lost their potency.

The soldiers, trained in operations involving zephyr gas, knew that the particles were ineffective in rainy conditions, and began to fire again. If there were bursts of explosions from the remaining gas near the muzzles of their guns, the effects were contained to popping flashes of light and heat, not an avalanche of flame.

The tide was immediately turned against the onrushing revolutionaries, and more soldiers emerged from the doors above, reinforcing the ones already on the stairs, shooting directly down over the second floor balcony into the crowd fighting on the landing and both sides of the stairs.

People screamed as they were hit, sliding on the wet marble stairs, water mixed with blood. Since Martin’s group were all wearing soldiers’ uniforms, once the clear division of lines had been lost, the soldiers above could no longer tell who exactly they were supposed to be shooting at, and shot indiscriminately downwards, hitting their own comrades and Martin’s group alike.

This was the only thing that saved Martin’s life. The soldiers who had previously been resisting them with bayonets abandoned their posts and tried to run down the stairs and escape the shots being fired above.

Martin was still trying to climb, but Kircheis whipped his head around as men fell around him, taking an unconscious tally even as he aimed his handgun and picked off men on the landing above, those aiming in his direction. Martin’s group was outnumbered at least two to one, and falling by the second— of the fifty men who had come in, less than half of that number remained alive. They were resolute, some of them crouching in the corners of the stairs to present a smaller profile as they raised their guns, but this made them sitting targets, and the soldiers above began to descend. Now, Martin recognized the futility of their position, with their lines broken and disorganized. If they could regroup, there was still perhaps some chance of success, slim though it might be. If they could join up with the other cell they had glimpsed outside—

“Out!” Martin yelled. “Move back!”

He tried to get his group to form up, move towards the grand entrance, but as they had been pinched in half, only the group on the right staircase side was able to make any cohesive headway towards it, leaping off the railing and running for the main doors, leaving trails of bloody footprints as they ran, splashing through the water that pooled on the marble tiles. The soldiers from above descended the stairs on the right, which blocked the center landing and enclosing Martin’s left-hand side even tighter.

Those on the stairs with Martin, recognizing that they couldn’t escape, tried to provide some kind of cover for those who had been able to run towards the great entry doors, shooting at the soldiers that followed the runners. Martin did this, though it wasn’t clear if he hit any of his targets. In the chaos of bodies, all in uniform, it was impossible to tell who the dead were.

Laser fire whiffed past Kircheis’s ears, and he picked off soldiers above with his own handgun. He was sure of who he was hitting. When he saw one man above aim squarely at Martin, and realized that they were some of the only ones left standing, Kircheis grabbed Martin by the arm, and hauled him over the balcony railing. They fell to the marble tiles below, bypassing the central landing, and falling with a heavy thud on their knees and elbows in the half inch of water on the ground.

Although it had been less than a minute they had been on the stairs after Martin gave the shout to retreat, they had held out there long enough that the remaining mass of Martin’s group had escaped outside, though the sounds of screaming and gunfire carried into the building on the open wind, and soldiers still ran out of the building, chasing after them. Martin might have gone the same way, as he tried to scramble to his feet after the hard landing, but Kircheis, hauling himself from a crawl into a run, went for the side door, dragging Martin with him. A keycard that he had stolen off a guard earlier got the door open. Once they were through, Kircheis slammed the door shut and held it closed with his body, the heavy wood rattling as the soldiers tried to open and pursue them.

“Go!” he said.

Martin didn’t move, though he glanced down the hallway. Instead, he took his rifle, fired at the electronic lock, seizing the door into its locked position, and then jammed the bayonet into the hinges, preventing the door from opening even with force— at least for a few moments— at least enough time for him to grab Kircheis’s hand and pull him down the hallway.

They didn’t stop to check if they were being followed, running through the palace, taking blind turns wherever Martin thought they should go. When they saw a guard, they turned the other direction, and Martin led him through an unmarked door, down a narrow flight of steps.

They were in the rabbit warren of servants’ corridors now, the subterranean world once again. No one seemed to have followed them, and the whole corridor was dimly lit— someone had killed main power to the palace, and only emergency lights glowed at the hallway intersections. Their breathing was ragged, and Kircheis was covered in blood, though Martin had escaped relatively unscathed and clean, except for the water from the sprinklers that left his hair wet and clinging to the sides of his face.

“What are we doing?” Kircheis asked.

Martin’s eyes were wide and his expression was one of unrestrained horror— he kept moving in little twitches back towards the stairwell, like he could go back and rejoin the rest of his group outside. The only thing that stopped him was the impossibility of it. Martin and Kircheis were alone.

“If we—” Martin began. He closed his eyes in pain, clenching his fists.

“I’m with you,” Kircheis said. “Tell me what we’re doing.”

“Let’s go to the family quarters,” Martin finally said. “Maybe we can get Sabine.”

“Alright. Let’s go.” He had known Martin would say this— there was no universe in which he would offer to sneak out, escape without his crew.

“The courtyard,” Martin said. “There’s an entrance down here— we can get in there, and then we’ll be in the family quarters.”

In the center of the family residences, there was a private courtyard, completely enclosed. Only one doorway led into it on the ground floor, and it was inside the residences themselves. Down below, however, there was a servant’s entrance for invisibly spiriting in and out the shears and rakes that were necessary to keep the place well maintained. Kircheis hadn’t thought much of it when they had been planning their entrance into the palace— the narrow stairwell leading up to a trapdoor was wide enough for only one person at a time, and would have been impossible to lead the squad up— but it was useful now.

Kircheis nodded, and followed Martin again as he set off down the hallway, moving with a renewed purpose in his steps, navigating by memory. When they got closer, they stopped, and checked for guards outside the entrance. The servants’ hallways had been quite empty— it seemed the servants were all hiding, but the two guards in front of this one door had not abandoned their posts. He glimpsed them as they turned the corner, then hastily reversed course before they were seen.

Kircheis peeked out from behind the corner just quickly enough to shoot accurately. All it took was two shots, silent and directly to their foreheads. The soldiers didn’t even have time to recognize that they were being shot at before they went down, slumping against the grey stone wall.

Martin and Kircheis ran up to them, and searched the bodies for their ID cards, to open the courtyard door. They found one, then got the door open. Without saying a word, they both picked up a body by the armpits and dragged them inside the stairs, dropping them against the inside wall. With any luck, an unobservant passer-by might just think that the guards had abandoned their posts. Even in the narrow stairwell, before they got to the top, they could smell the change in the air. Kircheis lifted up the trapdoor, disguised underneath more marble tiles in the center of the path, and climbed out.

The courtyard, too, was like a different word. It wasn’t open to the elements, though the sky was visible through the glass roof. Foggy grey rain splattered the glass above, lending an eerie non-light to the courtyard. It was a greenhouse, reminiscent of Kircheis’s father’s. The air was thick with the smell of flowers and loamy, tropical soil. Colorful birds hopped between the branches of the huge central tree, draped with vines and heavy with leaves larger than Kircheis’s head. The birds’ chirping songs blended with the rushing sound of a fountain on the other side of the massive space.

They didn’t have time to admire the scenery. A bench beneath the tree allowed Kircheis to hoist himself onto one of the lower limbs, and he pulled Martin up after. From there, they were able to scramble higher, and then inch along the rapidly-thinning branch. At the end of it, Kircheis was close enough to one of the balconies that he could grab onto the metal railing at a leap, and haul himself up and over, onto solid ground again. Martin followed, and when he dangled from the ornate railing by his fingertips, Kircheis got his hands under his armpits to drag him onto the balcony.

The first balcony they stood on had its glass door covered by thick curtains inside, and was locked. They might have been able to break the glass and get inside, but instead they climbed up onto the balcony railing and jumped the meter or so of distance to the next one, Martin taking a leap of faith after Kircheis. They finally came to one bedroom where the balcony door was unlocked when Martin tried the handle. He pushed the door open quietly, peered in, saw that it was empty, and walked inside, plush red carpet muting their steps. The balcony room key was tucked inside the lock on the other side— the owner of the room clearly went out there often enough to not feel like ever removing it.

They were in a bedroom, an opulent one, with a canopy bed and illustrated tapestries of hunting scenes hung on the walls. Despite the richness of the furniture, it was curiously bereft of personal belongings, making Kircheis momentarily think that they had walked into an unused spare room. But when he looked more carefully, he saw that the vanity at the side of the room held an open makeup compact, and a hairbrush with blonde strands tucked in its bristles. There was only one person to whom this bedroom could belong: the proclaimed Kaiserin Sabine. She must not have been able to bring much in the way of personal effects when she moved between the Littenheim estate and her father’s ship, and then again to the palace.

For some reason, they were both hesitant to touch anything. Kircheis’s hands ghosted over the velvet couch at the foot of the bed, hovering off it by a centimeter, following its curves but not landing on the fabric.

Kircheis pulled open one closed door and discovered a bathroom: large and gleaming white, but otherwise empty and uninteresting.

“Look at this,” Martin said, getting Kircheis’s attention. His voice held a note of disgusted admiration.

He had stepped outside the bedroom’s open double doors, into the attached dressing room, or some kind of antechamber to the bedroom itself. There was another room past that— a sitting room or parlor, also through an open set of doors. But in the middle room, standing against the wall across from the entrance to the walk-in closet, there were two mannequins— both in the shape of a teenage girl. The simpler mannequin, headless and clearly meant for real work, was wearing a spectacular but unfinished gown— pieces of lace were pinned in place on the bodice, and the train was far too long. The other mannequin, more of a display piece, was draped in a cloak of the most luxurious furs imaginable. Before it were placed a pair of petite red slippers, and on its faceless walnut-wood head was a golden crown.

Martin picked up the crown, turning it around in his hands. “All this for—”

From outside the door in the other room, they heard the sound of footsteps and voices— several men. Martin and Kircheis didn’t have time to think. Martin ran into the closet in the central dressing room, and Kircheis dodged under the bed, pressing his cheek to the plush carpet and lifting the bedskirt just enough to see who was coming in.

His heart leapt into his throat when the door fully opened and the two people stepped into the room. One was the young Sabine, fifteen or so and looking rattled but unharmed, and the other was a man that Kircheis only had heard of, never met in person.

This was High Admiral Ovlesser— a giant of a man, nearly seven feet tall, with a perpetual scowl beneath his reddish brown facial hair. An old scar that seemed to trap all the blood in his face crossed his cheek and vanished beneath his beard. Among the fleet high command, Ovlesser was notable to Kircheis because he was someone that Commodore Leigh had in the past expressed sincere, vocal dislike of. Leigh rarely spoke ill of anyone— even people who hated him— so it had stuck out to Kircheis how, when remarking on Littenheim’s choice of top staff, Leigh had described Ovlesser in scathing tones: “He’s an expert in ground warfare, but if the duke had approached him, I would have warned him against it. He doesn’t understand the value of human life— or anything else.”

To be trapped in the room with him now was terrifying, especially for how close he walked to the closet in which Martin was hiding. Kirchies held his breath as he watched Ovlesser pace. Sabine sat down on the couch in the frontmost room, smoothing her hands over her skirt over and over. “I’m fine now that I’m back in my room, Admiral. I don’t think you need to stay here, if you’re needed elsewhere.”

Ovlesser made a dismissive growl, which Sabine was unaffected by. Even if she was rattled by what was happening in the palace, she didn’t seem bothered by Ovlesser, which was unusual. “You should have stayed in the saferoom.”

“I hate the saferoom,” Sabine said. “And if there are people getting into the palace from all directions, I don’t know what makes the saferoom any safer than my room. I’m fine. You don’t need to stay here.”

Ovlesser ignored her pleas for privacy and walked through the bedroom, yanking open the balcony door so hard that the panes of glass rattled. He looked down over the courtyard, but didn’t see anything amiss. He slammed the door shut again and marched back around to the front sitting room, then said, “Kaiserin, it may still be difficult for you to understand that you are the sole reason—”

She interrupted him, teenage voice full of self-assuredness and frustration. “I’m not stupid, Admiral,” she said. “I’m aware.”

“Good. You should have stayed in the saferoom.”

“Don’t you trust your guards?” she asked. “Isn’t that their job? Maybe I should be flattered, but I don’t think my father keeps high admirals around for the sake of being my personal bodyguard. I doubt he told you that you needed to personally—”

Ovlesser growled again, and Sabine sighed and slumped down on the couch, tipping her head towards the ceiling against the backrest, and draping her arm dramatically over her eyes.

“My father’s men are competent, you know,” she said. “I trust them— and so does my father! — even if you don’t. At least sit. You’re making me nervous.” She gestured vaguely with her other hand, indicating the couch opposite from her.

Ovlesser sat down on the couch— it creaked loudly. Sabine straightened herself up and took her hand off her eyes. “ Thank you,” she said. “How long do you think this will take?”

“Not long. If your father’s men are as competent as you and he think they should be.”

“Good,” Sabine said. “Is my embroidery over there?”

Ovlesser gave her a blank look, and she sighed and stood, going to open the drawer in the side table next to his couch. Kircheis couldn’t see what it revealed, but it either wasn’t her embroidery or wasn’t what she was looking for, because she turned and walked towards the bedroom. Ovlesser watched her.

Kircheis stayed as silent as he physically could as Sabine opened the drawers of the writing desk at the side of her bedroom, and pulled something out with a triumphant, “Right.” He relaxed marginally when she walked back towards the front room.

If they could stay undetected until Ovlesser decided the emergency was over and left the room— he and Martin might have a chance. Take the Kaiserin hostage, escape the palace, find what remained of Martin’s group and figure out a way to make demands.

But Sabine didn’t go sit down. Instead, she stopped in the central room, standing stock still in front of the two mannequins. She looked at them, and her mouth pinched tight into a frown, then she said, in a reedier, more worried voice, “Somebody’s been in here— they took my crown.”

Ovlesser immediately stood up and took his gun from his holster. “You should have stayed in the saferoom. Sit down.”

This time, Sabine jumped to obey, sitting on the couch and pulling her knees up to her chest, hugging her arms around them as Ovlesser stomped through the room. He pulled open the closet in the sitting room— not the one that Martin was hiding in, but it was only a matter of time before he got there.

“You think there’s someone in here?” she asked.

“The guards didn’t see anyone come out,” he said. He stomped towards the central room, and when he turned towards the dressing room closet where Martin was hiding, Kircheis could no longer stay still. He pulled himself out from underneath the bed. Sabine saw him from across the room and yelped.

What he needed was to give Martin time— time and space to grab Sabine and get out of the room. All he needed was to take up that time, keep Ovlesser distracted for as long as it took. Kircheis had his gun trained at Sabine’s head by the time that Ovlesser turned around. Kircheis knew what he looked like: smeared with blood and with a terrifying expression on his face.

Ovlesser already had his gun in his hand, and he pointed it at Kircheis.

“If you shoot me, I’ll shoot her,” Kircheis said. “Put down your gun.”

Ovlesser growled, and he took two steps forward, trying to get in between Kircheis and Sabine. Good. That was what Kircheis wanted. Get him away from the closet where Martin was. Kircheis’s finger twitched on the trigger, but he didn’t shoot. He smiled, rather grimly.

“I know this is a foregone conclusion, High Admiral,” he said. “You’ll call for the guards right outside in a second, and that’ll be it for me. But— let’s make it— I’ve come this far—” he said. He was struggling to find something to say to Ovlesser that would keep him away from the closet door, give Martin enough of a distraction. “Put down your gun. I’ll put down mine. Fight me man to man. Or I’ll shoot her right now.”

Ovlesser was startled by the request, but then let out a roaring laugh. “You?” he said. “Fight me?”

“Don’t do it!” Sabine said. “Admiral!”

“You’re nothing— look at you. You think you have a chance?”

“I do,” Kircheis said. “Let’s try it. Unless you don’t think—”

Sabine made a strangled noise behind Ovlesser, who turned his head to look at her. He growled, then tossed his gun down on the ground behind him. It skittered across the floor towards Sabine’s couch.

“Good,” Kircheis said. He tossed Leigh’s gun back behind himself. It made a sharp crack against the glass of the balcony door, then fell somewhere behind the bed. He spread his hands. “I am a man of my word.”

Ovlesser made an animalistic growl and lunged at him, crossing the several meters of distance between the central room and Kircheis in just a few steps. Kircheis had just enough time to get his short knife in his hand, and dodge out of the way of Ovlesser’s swinging fist.

He was sure that he was going to die, but the longer he could draw this out, the better chance he would give Martin. This feeling gave the scene a strange clarity, every movement happening calmly, precisely, feeling like it stretched out for far longer than it should have. Ovlesser’s fist sailed wide over Kircheis’s head; he dodged down and swiped his dog-tooth blade at the mans legs.

Oddly, what he thought of in the first few moments of the fight was not Martin hiding in the closet, but Annerose von Müsel. Kircheis had never before been a fight where he was at a significant height disadvantage, and he remembered the fight he had with Annerose on Cahokia, axe to axe. She was so much smaller than him, light as a ghost, but she had nearly managed to take him out at the knees. He gave her a mental thanks, and farewell, as his knife tore Ovlesser’s uniform pants, though he had stepped back far enough to avoid anything more than a scratch across this thigh.

He thought about his day in the woods with young Reinhard as Ovlesser ignored the wild swinging of his knife blade and lept onto him, bringing him down to the ground, pinning his whole body from the waist. You would have told me to just take the shot , Kircheis thought as the breath went out of him. He swung his knife at Ovlesser’s face, and it nicked his nose, enough to send blood flying. I didn’t want to, though.

Ovlesser grabbed Kircheis’s arm, trying to wrest the knife blade out of it. This was enough for Kircheis to kick his legs free and roll out of the way, trying to stand back up, though he only made it to a crouch as Ovlesser scrambled after him. When they rolled on the floor, Kircheis trying to keep his blade away from his own chest, he thought about Hilde. He was sure she would understand what he was doing here— and Leigh would, too, when Leigh got back to Odin. His parents wouldn’t, but that was the same as it had always been— they had never understood.

Ovlesser struck him across the face hard enough to pop something in his nose and split his lip with his own teeth. He crushed his ribs with his elbow, and, blindly, Kircheis could do nothing but flail punches back, hitting flesh indiscriminately and knowing that it did nothing but keep the giant distracted. Ovlesser’s hand hit his face again, the sharp gem in the heavy ring he wore gouging across Kircheis’s forehead and spilling blood down across his face.

And when Ovlesser finally got Kircheis’s knife hand beneath his knee, crushing his fingers against the hilt with his entire weight until he could feel the bones break, and he let out an involuntary cry of pain, he thought about Martin.

From his position on the floor, with Ovlesser on top of him and half blinded by the blood dripping into his eyes, he couldn’t see what Martin was doing— if Martin had even made it out of the closet. With his other hand, he clawed blindly at Ovlesser’s face, trying to get his eyes, and was rewarded with another punch to the jaw. His mouth was filled with blood, and his sensation of the room swam dizzyingly— it felt like he was tumbling endlessly downwards, though he couldn’t have been moving at all from his position on the floor. Sounds were garbled in his ears. He clung to consciousness, kept struggling against Ovlesser, just to give Martin one more second, one more instant, to escape.

The weight on Kircheis’s body suddenly changed, and Ovlesser slumped down on top of Kircheis, blood dripping out of the sudden hole directly through the side of his head. There was a strange moment of silence even as the corpse twitched against him, the last fragmentary movements of life, and the ringing in Kircheis’s ears was empty rather than full of garbled shouts and movement that he couldn’t process.

Martin dropped his gun— the one he had stolen from Kircheis months ago— and shoved Ovlesser’s corpse off of him, helping him free and helping him sit up enough to lean against the side of the bed. Kircheis tallied the fact that he was alive, the fact that Martin was still there in front of him, the fact that Martin somehow still was holding the crown: he had stuck his arm through it and it dangled off his shoulder, pinched beneath his armpit.

Kircheis wiped the blood out of his eyes with his left hand as he took stock of the scene. Sabine remained on the couch, alive. Two guards had come in through the door, and were dead on the floor— Martin’s work. The door was closed again, and Martin had wedged a chair beneath the doorjamb. It wouldn’t stop anyone motivated for more than a second, but a second might be enough.

“You should have run,” Kircheis said, though his voice was bubbling and thick with all the blood in his mouth.

Martin picked up Kircheis’s right hand, limp on the ground next to him, his fingers crushed. The tender motion was more painful than anything else. “You should have run,” Kircheis said again. It seemed like the only thing he could say.

Martin didn’t say anything— he was too concerned with checking Kircheis over, touching his fingers gently to the wound on his forehead and the crack on his lip.

Behind Martin, Kircheis saw a flash of movement. Sabine was getting off the couch, falling to the floor in a crawl, and reaching for Ovlesser’s gun that had been thrown in her direction. Kircheis responded without thinking. Martin’s gun— his gun— was on the ground at his left hand, and he grabbed for it. Martin didn’t realize what was happening for a moment, and he turned around in confusion.

Sabine fired the gun wildly, but she got off three or four shots before Kircheis could take one. His mind was curiously blank, and later he would be unable to know what he was aiming for— if it was her arm, if it was her leg, or her chest, or her head. He was not left handed, and he was half-blinded by the swelling of his own eyes and the blood that dripped down into them. He aimed at her, for no reason other than that she was firing at Martin, and his shot hit her square in the throat. She couldn’t even scream, and could only claw at the blood gushing out from the wound, her face contorted in fear and agony as she thrashed on the floor.

Martin had fallen against him, and at first Kircheis thought that this was because of what Kircheis had done, but when he dropped the gun and pulled Martin towards him, he could feel the hot blood on his back, and the hole that the gun had made in his body, through his chest and heart. He hadn’t cried out when he had been shot, but had reached for Kircheis, and then fallen unconscious. He was still faintly alive— air streamed from his nose— but this wouldn’t be for long.

Kircheis clung to him, clutching his cheek against his own, leaving bloody handprints across Martin’s face as he pulled his body tight to his chest, rocking back and forth and struggling to breathe. You should have run — he tried to say, but couldn’t. And it didn’t matter. Martin wasn’t conscious to hear him.

Sabine was dying, thrashing to death on the floor across the room, and Martin was dying or already dead in his arms. And Kircheis remained alive, for just long enough for some other guard to recognize that those who had been posted outside were missing, and enter the room and kill him.

He could hear them now, someone was rattling the door, trying to dislodge the chair that Martin had wedged there. Kircheis didn’t even bother to pick up the gun that he had dropped. He wished that he hadn’t outlived Martin, even if only by a few minutes. It didn’t matter the order in which they died, not really, but he wished that he hadn’t needed to feel the grief of it. He wished he could have been killed by Ovlesser, thinking that Martin would be able to escape.

The chair fell away from the door, and the door opened— just one man entering, a soldier in a flag officer’s uniform. He was white haired, with a narrow, calculating face. He took in the scene dispassionately, his eyes moving from the dead Sabine on the floor in front of the couch, the dead Ovlesser on the ground, and then he realized that Kircheis, holding Martin, was still alive. His eyes narrowed, his mouth opened. Kircheis didn’t bother reaching for his gun, though the soldier trained his sidearm on him.

“What’s your name?” the man asked.

Kircheis could barely speak, but he answered the question. If only so that the knowledge of what had happened to him would have a chance of getting back to Hilde. “Siegfried Kircheis.”

The man let out a strange, amused noise, somehow suddenly nonchalant despite the disaster of the room. “You’re Leigh’s little protegee, aren’t you? He send you here? No— don’t answer that question.” His lip curled. “I clearly picked the wrong side.”

He put away his gun, slipping it back into his holster, and from his belt he pulled his ID card. He walked over to Kircheis and held it out to him. “I wasn’t here,” he said. “This will get you out any door of the building. If you make it out— feel free to let Leigh know who he owes a favor to.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s about forty-five seconds before the rest of the squad I called gets here. I suggest you leave by the balcony.”