Eva and the Psychopomp

March 489 I.C., Odin

When Eva woke up, she was in a room by herself in the creaking old farmhouse that the Earth Church was using as a safehouse. Waking up out of a sedative’s trance was a jarring experience— there was no gradual stirring as with after a natural sleep, just one moment of nothingness, and a full alertness. Her arm hurt— she touched it with two fingers and found a plasticky bandage, which she pulled back to reveal a neat set of stitches. She stuck the square bandage pad back down on her arm and laid back on the bed, the dull spring sunlight filtering past clouds and lacy curtains.

It would have been peaceful, if she wasn’t in a stranger’s house, with nowhere to go and the feeling that she had lost her whole life behind her. It took her many minutes to regain her will to get up. Images flitted in and out of her mind, but she felt helpless, like she could do nothing about their contents, and it made her want to lay on the narrow guest bed with its granny-square blanket forever. Nevertheless, she did get up.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror dangling on the inside of the door. Someone had bathed her and braided her hair while she was unconscious. She undid the braid, ran her hand through her clean hair, and tried not to think about it.

The door to the bedroom was unlocked; she exited.

The house was silent as the tomb, but not empty. She passed the living room where two members of the Earth Church— one of the men who had accompanied her to the Lichtenlade house, and a woman that she had never seen before— knelt silently in front of a makeshift shrine: one of their white banners laid across the coffee table, and a tiny cairn of rocks stacked atop of it. They prayed, moving their lips but making no sound, and Eva slipped past them to the kitchen.

She found Landsberg sitting at the scratched wooden table. He had a pad of paper in front of him, and he was tapping a pen on the edge of the table in a semblance of a rhythm, and mouthing silent words like the Earth Church acolytes in the other room, but she could see that rather than poetry, the page in front of him was covered in a heavy handed black scribble. There was a cup of coffee cooling at his elbow, and he looked up at her and pointed at the half-full carafe on the counter, to indicate where it had come from. She poured herself a mug, realizing that although she had been asleep for seemingly well more than a night, amd most of the morning, she was exhausted. The drugged sleep was not restful. She slid into the chair across from him, breaking the silence of the house when she scraped it across the peeling yellow linoleum of the floor.

“Where’s Erwin Josef?” she asked.

“Upstairs, asleep,” he said. “I think they’re going to keep him out.”

She looked down into her coffee, seeing her reflection quiver as she lifted the cup, unable to still the slight tremor in her hands. She should have protested. “For how long?”

Landsberg just shrugged. “They let him wake up for breakfast. So maybe just until he stops trying to escape.”

“Can you blame him for that?”

“Where does he think he’s going to go?”

“I don’t know.”

“They said that there’s a ship coming from Phezzan that they have a scheduled meeting with. It’ll be here in a few days. They’ll put us on that.”

“Okay.” She couldn’t muster any feeling in her voice— but neither could Landsberg, so it was fair turnabout. Neither of them asked how the other was doing; what was there to say?

“Did you see the woman in the other room?”

“Yeah.”

“She’ll come with us,” Landsberg said. “She did the stitches on your arm— she’s a nurse, or something. But she’ll babysit us.”

“Babysit Erwin.”

Landsberg let out a noise that might have been a laugh, if he had been capable of it. “No— he’ll be asleep. You don’t need to babysit that.”

“Can I see him?”

“Ask her.”

“Do I need permission?”

Landsberg spread his hands. Eva got up from the table, walked past the living room, and headed back upstairs. The floorboards creaked on the stairs, though she wasn’t exactly trying to be secretive.

She remembered which door had been Erwin Josef’s room— but it would have been easy to figure out anyway: it was the only room that locked from the outside. Someone had screwed a deadbolt onto the outer door, a clumsy and quick retrofit. As she reached up to undo it, she heard footsteps behind her on the staircase, and she turned around to find the Earth Church woman.

She was slender, and maybe a handsbreadth taller than Eva. She couldn’t have been more than twenty two, twenty three years old. She had heavy-lidded brown eyes that gave her a tired and dull expression, and plain brown hair that fell in lank layers around her face. She spoke in a monotone: “You can go in, but he’s asleep. Don’t try to wake him up— he won’t.”

Eva pretended like she didn’t need the woman’s permission, and she undid the lock and stepped inside. Erwin Josef was tucked into the covers, laying flat on his back, looking more like a corpse than anything else. But his chest rose and fell, and the little stone necklace that he wore was prominently laying over top of his nightshirt, placed there very deliberately.

“When will he wake up?”

The woman checked her watch. “Five hours. We’ll give him dinner.”

“Can I give it to him?”

“You can watch him eat.” She pointed to a camera in the corner of the room, a wire that Eva hadn’t noticed taped around the ceiling trim of the room, until it left through the door and went into one of the other rooms, presumably where a computer setup was. “There’s no reason to rile him up. He can eat by himself.”

She should have protested. But she didn’t.

“Okay,” she said.

“You haven’t eaten,” the woman said. “There’s food in the cupboards downstairs.” And then she pulled the door to Erwin Josef’s room shut, and that was the end of that.

Later, and for the few days that they stayed in the safehouse, she did watch him eat. He would come to on the bed, look around at his surroundings— she had to imagine that he was confused and frightened— try the door, look out the window, knock furniture around, pull the blankets off the bed for no reason that she could understand, and then finally notice the food that had been left for him on the desk. The first two days, he threw the plate on the floor. After that, he was hungry enough to eat. The food was drugged; when he was done eating, he fell asleep quickly, often still in the middle of trying to pry open the window of the room, though it was far too heavy and stiff for him to lift. He would run out of strength, and his head would slump against the glass, leaving a little foggy outline where it rested, and Eva would come in and pick him up and tuck him back into bed.

Eva felt horrid about it— the treatment of the boy, and the fact that she went along with it without any protest. They let her change his clothes and wash him, which she tried to do delicately before placing him back into bed to sleep. It was a stolen intimacy, and she tried to think of it clinically, as the woman (Ellie, Eva learned her name was) had stitched her arm and washed her while she was asleep. But she cherished the time with the boy nonetheless, and felt worse for it.

It would be better, she reasoned, to let him wake up when they were in a more stable situation, where he couldn’t try to run and vanish into the countryside. Perhaps once they were en route to Phezzan, or when they had made it to their ultimate destination. She would try to argue for him then.

When it eventually was the day to leave for Phezzan, they loaded into one of the white vans. They drove in the opposite direction of the capital city, heading past the mountains and far out into the grassy plains beyond, where farmland lay still fallow this early in the spring.

The ship had settled down onto a patch of grazing-land in the middle of nowhere. They pulled off the highway and onto a dirt road to get to it, but it was visible from miles away, settled squatly onto the low, dry grass. Around it were clustered other vehicles: passenger cars and shipping trucks alike. The ship was grey and square-cornered, a merchant freighter, and it was unloading crates of wares to waiting trucks: forklifts emerging from the vessel’s ramp carrying wooden boxes, then zooming back up empty handed in a practiced dance. Nothing was being loaded back onto the ship except passengers, a whole gaggle of them arriving just as Eva had. They looked at each other warily, stepping out from their cars and clutching their suitcases full of belongings to their chests, as though this would protect them from theft or violence. Some of the drivers of the cars— family servants, most likely— scanned the horizon and sky with binoculars, trying to catch out any potential approaching ambushes.

Passage on this ship was a dear thing indeed. The Earth Church had only booked passage for Eva, Count Landsberg, Erwin Josef, the nurse Ellie. She would be responsible for getting them in contact with the Earth Church on Phezzan, and making sure that they would be then safely delivered to the rebel territories.

There were no fond goodbyes with the rest of the Earth Church acolytes who had accompanied them to the ship. They merely paid the man at the bottom of the ship’s ramp his fee, and watched Eva and Count Landsberg head up inside, the unconscious and drooling Erwin Josef being pushed in a large stroller by Ellie. The other passengers looked at them with derision, in a way that Eva couldn’t help but notice. At least if they were judging her for caring for what they imagined was a broken child, they didn’t notice that he was royalty. They had put Erwin Josef in a rather androgynous set of soft sleeping clothes, with a bib and a thick pair of glasses that looped all the way around his sleeping head to hold them in place— he was quite unrecognizable. Eva just bit her lip and ignored the ugly looks so that they could get settled into their cabin.

It was a small set of rooms, two bedrooms with two beds apiece, connected by a bathroom. This was a merchant freighter, not a luxe passenger liner, and they were in bunks meant for low-ranking crew members, but even these had cost a fortune. Ellie and Eva took one room, Count Landsberg had the honor of the top bunk over the unconscious Erwin Josef. It was a bit of a compromise, unspoken as it was. Eva didn’t want to leave Erwin Josef alone with the Earth Church nurse for a long time, but Ellie looked at her with a suspicious glance when she tried to claim the bunk above him. Ellie clearly did think of the count as an idiot, since she allowed him to take the bunk.

Eva wasn’t sure what either she or the other woman was suspicious of. What could they do in this tiny room, trapped in this spaceship? Yet suspicious they both were, and the doors that connected the two rooms to the bathroom remained shimmed open most of the time, Eva sticking a pair of shoes in the panel where the doors slid sideways into the wall to stop them from closing.

The journey to Phezzan was not short— it would take more than two weeks of careful travel before they would dock at the top of the space elevator. Eva tried to talk herself into appreciating the novelty of the experience— she had never been in space before. But the fear lingered in a prickling on the back of her neck, and a nausea when she ate, regardless of how safe they were on board the ship. It was the feeling of having nowhere else to go. The ship was too utilitarian to have a viewing lounge. When she asked one of the crew members if she could see the stars, they told her that maybe when they were far enough away from the planet that they were just safely cruising, she could be let onto the bridge to look through the cameras, and she dropped her question after that and just tried to ignore the feeling of the walls closing in around her.

She wanted to find a chance to talk to Count Landsberg about their situation, and she kept trying to pull him aside, but there seemed to be no time that the two of them were able to be truly alone. In their rooms, Ellie was always there when both of them were, and there was never any privacy in the other areas of the ship— the tiny crew mess hall where all the passengers were assigned a time to show up for meals, and the other few common rooms. Speaking in the hallways was out of the question, as they were far too exposed.

Perhaps she could have found some way to drag Landsberg into a corner to talk, but she didn’t even know what she would say to him, exactly. She didn’t have any power to do anything, and she admitted to herself that she was being paranoid. If the Earth Church had wanted to be rid of her, they could have killed her as soon as they had Erwin Josef in their hands. It wouldn’t have been difficult for them at all. But she was alive, and on her way to Phezzan, with just one woman who was likely far more suspicious of her. All they could do was trust each other— a difficult proposition.

The most dangerous part of the journey was getting away from Odin, during which the ship had to sneak as slowly and quietly as possible away from the planet. There was the possibility of military ships and pirates in the area, the narrow spacelane that kept the planet safe. Eva wasn’t privy to what went on on the bridge, but she saw the tension in the faces of the ship’s crew. For days, there was a tension on board, and she heard them talking about detecting convoys of military ships. Whose ships they were, Eva didn’t know, and she didn’t want to think about it. Even if one of those ships contained her husband— right now, he was her enemy, if only by painful circumstance.

She listened to what the crew said about the war, but didn’t ask questions of her own, fearing whatever answer she got. It would have been a non-answer. The crew was all Phezzani, and they had no news of what was happening on Odin other than what their passengers brought with them, and no news of what was happening in the galaxy other than rumors of areas of space that they should avoid. She heard them making bets about other ships who had ventured into the Empire’s territory— those not headed for Odin but for outlying planets, to pick up long overdue shipments of grain and metal or to deliver tranches of weapons— and they had a running list of bets of which ships would make it past the Imperial Fleets, the ones nominally loyal to Litchtenlade, who were attacking any ships headed for Braunschweig’s lands, and possibly the lands themselves. The crew laughed at other people’s doom as a way of pushing off their own.

But after a few days, they made it clear of the most dangerous areas. The crew relaxed, as much as they could, and Eva tried to relax as well.

The crew and passengers rubbed shoulders on the trip more than Eva might have expected, forced to share the small mess hall and the other common areas. The other passengers, all truly noble, or at least very rich, turned up their noses at the brash, working class Phezzani crew, but Eva didn’t mind them at all. After the first few days on board, she spent a lot of time outside their rooms, leaving Landsberg there to watch Erwin Josef and work on his poetry while she wandered the ship.

Her favorite place was the lounge, which was rarely full. The ship was operating on a skeleton crew, in order to provide berths for the passengers, and so there was rarely enough time for the men off duty to relax. It was empty now when Eva went in, which suited her just fine.

It was a comfortable room, with bookshelves along one wall, and well-worn couches in front of a TV set. In the corner was a fridge full of snacks. Although Eva was wary of the strange Phezzani branding (taste seemed to be lacking on that planet) the presence of ice cream in the freezer made her willing to risk the unusual novelty flavors. While the Kummel house had not lacked in food over the winter, nothing so delicate as ice cream was available anywhere on Odin after all the supply chains had collapsed.

Eva got a popsicle from the freezer and ate it as she stood near the bookshelf to look at the titles. The popsicle was sherbert, some kind of exotic fruit flavor, red with tiny seeds stuck into it. She ran her free hand over the spines of the books. Most of them were written in the Phezzani dialect, which she could only understand about half of, and she had no interest in trying to read a book in. A few titles on the bottom shelf were written in Imperial, though, and Eva crouched down to read the spines.

There, tucked into the corner, was a fairly battered copy of a book that she recognized. Every Point Forms the Line — Hank’s book about the early history of the Goldenbaum dynasty. Feeling a miserable wave of homesickness, Eva pulled the book out from the shelf and flipped to the back where the acknowledgements were.

Seeing her name— her real name— listed there alongside Wolf’s, and Maggie’s, and a whole slew of other friends, near Hank’s gently smiling picture, made her want to cry, a painful lump rising in her throat. She stared at it for so long without moving that her popsicle began to melt in her hand, dripping down her fingers. She might have kept staring at it if one of the ship’s crew hadn’t come in, whistling a jaunty tune. Eva hastily licked up the melted ice cream before the man could see the mess she was making, and turned around to say hello.

“Good evening, Miss Kleiner.” It was Boris Konev— one of the ship’s pilots. He was a tall and broad shouldered man with a curl of blonde hair, usually smiling. He addressed her in the Phezzani argot, too, but for a simple conversation it wasn’t likely to matter. If there was a word she didn’t know, she would make a confused expression and he would search his memory and repeat it in Imperial. They had spoken several times before, in the lounge or while eating dinner. He usually asked after her kid, with a sympathetic smile.

“Good evening,” she said. She sat down on the couch as he got out a soda from the fridge.

He ended up sitting across from her, kicking his legs up onto the coffee table. He looked over at the book open on her lap. “What’re you reading?”

She held up the book so that he could see the cover. For some reason, this made Konev laugh. “Hey, good choice!”

“I’ve already read it,” Eva admitted. “But you don’t have a lot of Imperial books.”

Konev leaned forward on his elbows. “Oh, great— what did you think about it? I’ve been dying to ask other people about this one.”

“I liked it— why do you ask?”

He laughed again. “It’s a really funny story. I’m afraid I’m not educated enough to know if the author did a good job— I need to ask around to find out if other people think he did. Get a second opinion, and all.”

“I think so,” Eva said. Faintly, she added, “But I’m a little biased.”

“How so?”

“I met the author,” she said.

“Really! How?” This seemed to thrill Konev, and he stared at her intently. “You have to tell me, Miss Kleiner.”

“Oh— he works for Duke Braunschweig— I met him at a party…” she lied.

Konev grinned and leaned back in his seat. “It seems like Odin is an even smaller planet than Phezzan, sometimes.”

“Maybe.”

“You know he’s a duke now, right?”

“Count,” Eva corrected. “Count von Leigh.”

“Right. Man— it’s a fucking weird world out there. Pardon my language.” He laughed. “Still not really used to carrying passengers such as yourself.”

“Why do you say that?”

“About the passengers?”

“No, about it being a weird world.”

“Oh. I know the author too,” Konev said with a funny smile. “That’s why I read the thing in the first place— I don’t care about history at all.”

“You know Hank?” Eva asked.

“Hank— yeah, I know him. His father used to captain a merchant ship off Phezzan, just like mine did. We were friends as kids.”

“Oh, wow.”

“The whole thing about him ending up in the Empire— after his dad died, he owed a lot of money, and— ah, it was some real trouble. I love Phezzan, but she eats her young.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, he had to get out of here.” Konev looked at Eva. “You don’t think he’d mind me telling you— do you? I mean, he’s successful now. Seems like he’s made it, he can’t really get in trouble for it at this point.”

“No, I don’t think he’d mind,” Eva said. Even as she did, she felt guilty— Hank rarely talked about his childhood, and she had assumed it was for good reason. But she put a smile on her face and asked anyway. “What was he like as a kid?”

“Smart as hell,” Konev said. “Smarter than me by a lightyear, anyway. But you could talk him into doing anything, if you didn’t mind him complaining about it.”

Eva laughed. “Yeah— that’s Hank.”

“Well— that’s not his real name, you know,” Konev said. “I made that one up for him as part of a dumb scheme that didn’t work out.”

“I didn’t know that,” Eva said. “That’s all anyone’s ever called him.”

“I guess the fake one really stuck. But yeah, no, his real name is Yang Wen-li. Family name first— it’s an old Earth thing. Got revived in the Alliance, you know how it is.”

“Oh,” Eva said. “Yang Wen-li…” She looked down at his smiling author photo in the back of the book. She had taken that photo of him, one warm day in Magdalena’s garden. She could mentally expand the image to encompass Wolf and Maggie just out of frame, sitting on lawn chairs and antagonizing Hank as he tried to get his hair to settle nicely for the photo.

As she stared down at it, the long-neglected popsicle in her hand melted enough that a chunk of it fell off its wooden stick, landing on the book in her lap and splattering the photo bright red.

“Hey!” Konev said. “I only have the one copy!”

Eva hastily wiped it up, trying to do as little damage to the book as possible. She could feel tears rising to her eyes, and a red flush of misery taking its place on her cheeks. Seeing her distress, Konev reached over and took the book from her hands. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and cleaned it the rest of the way, as much as he was able, and then tossed the book on the table dismissively.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Not worth crying over. Come on.” It was kind of him to try to comfort her, despite the fact that he was a Phezzani— the few she had met before through her old job had always seemed distant people. Aside from cool calculation, cheerful braggadocio seemed to be the only emotion they were allowed to express, perhaps out of fear that expressing doubt would sour whatever business venture they were conducting. Konev kept trying to smile, even though he awkwardly perched on the edge of the sofa, not sure what to do with himself.

“Sorry,” Eva said. She passed her hand over her eyes for a moment, trying to cool her face with her hand, and clear the lump in her throat.

Konev waited for her to regain her composure. “Is your kid alright, Ms. Kleiner?”

“Alright…” Eva bit back a horrible laugh— one that felt like an alien creature crawling its way out of her mouth. The sound she made instead was strangled. “No.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shook her head.

“Do you mind me asking…?”

“Brain tumor,” she said, repeating the agreed-upon story. The unhappy stuttering that she couldn’t get rid of lent the words an unpleasant ring of truth, and Konev looked at her sympathetically. “He was getting treated on Odin before the war— and he was getting better— but then—”

“I’m so sorry.”

“The medicine we give him for the pain just makes him sleep all the time. But maybe that’s for the best. He doesn’t even recognize me when he’s awake.”

“I hope there’s something on Phezzan that can be done for him.”

“Is there?”

“I don’t know. I’m a sailor, not a doctor.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, Ms. Kleiner— not your fault I’m a nobody.”

“No— anyway, I feel bad dropping all this on you,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “You don’t deserve to be dragged into my problems.” She wiped her hands on her skirt. “I shouldn’t trouble you with it.”

“It’s no trouble.” But he looked at her, and saw something uncomfortably sincere in her expression— the danger that he might be in, ferrying her disguised passenger— and his expression changed. He nodded, half to himself, and then stood. “I’d better get back to the bridge. Have a nice night.”

Eva decided she could no longer tolerate watching Erwin Josef waste away on his bed. After they had closed the bedroom doors for the night, leaving Landsberg and the boy on the other side of the bathroom, with Eva and Ellie changing into their pajamas in their tiny room, bumping elbows as they did, Eva finally brought up the subject with the quiet Earth Church nurse. Ellie had said so little over the journey that Eva had begun to wonder if she was half-mute.

“Tomorrow, when it’s time for Erwin to have his meal— let me talk to him,” Eva said.

“Why?” It was a question, but her tone was dark and flat, more of a bark.

“Are you planning to keep him asleep for the rest of his life?”

“No, but he’ll be easier to manage once we’re in the rebel territories,” she said. “If he manages to escape the room, or tell anyone who he is, we’ll be in danger. And so will he.”

Ellie was right about that— their fellow passengers, and the crew of the ship, even the affable Boris Konev, could not be trusted. Erwin Josef was far too valuable. But even still, Eva said, “He can’t get out of the room. And you can put him to sleep again when we’re leaving the ship. But— it’s not humane— not human — to keep him like this. He’s just a kid.”

“No.”

“Why not?” She knew the reason why not. Ellie didn’t trust her, either. Didn’t trust her not to take Erwin Josef and run the instant they landed in Phezzan, something that would be far easier to do if the boy was willing to go with her, and could walk under his own power.

Ellie said nothing, and just pulled her nightshirt down over her head.

“You can listen at the door,” Eva pleaded. “I won’t…”

“Won’t do what?”

Eva just spread her hands helplessly. “Didn’t I give him to you already?” she asked. “What more can I do—”

Ellie stared at her, long and hard. “Then what would you have to say to him?”

“I want to tell him that he’s safe,” she said. “That he can trust us— that we’re not going to hurt him— that we’re bringing him to his mother.” She thought that tack might work on the Earth Church believer, even though it pained a part of her to say it.

“He’s not stupid.”

She was right that it would be difficult to convince the boy that they meant him no harm: he had watched his guardians get killed, and he had been kidnapped and drugged for weeks. But she nevertheless had to try. “I know,” she said. “But he’s also only seven.”

“I don’t want you to lose a finger or an eye from him biting them off.”

“I won’t,” Eva said.

So, the next day, when it was time for Erwin Josef to wake up and eat his dinner, Ellie locked Eva in his room, providing her with a sandwich on a plate, along with some chocolate, and a glass of milk to give him. Count Landsberg was eating his own dinner with the crew, and Ellie was in the adjoining bathroom, listening at the door.

She could tell when Erwin Josef woke up. He had been twitching with restless dreams, his little legs kicking at the thin blanket, but the minute he regained some sense of himself, his body stilled and tensed. He was facing away from her, laying on his side, but she knew that he knew she was there— he could probably hear her breathing, quiet though it was. She wondered what he was thinking about as he lay there. Was he considering the best way to leap out of bed and attack her? Even if he was, she tried to tell herself, the reason he would do such a thing was because he was just a scared little boy, one who had no control over his life and circumstances except what he could exert with his tiny fists. That was not much power for a person to have.

Although her heart was beating strangely, she nevertheless spoke up. “Are you awake, Erwin?”

He didn’t move or say anything, and the painful stillness stretching on for so long made her fear that he was sick, or that there was something else wrong with him. She knelt down on the grey-tiled floor next to his bottom bunk and reached out to gently touch his shoulder.

The instant that she did, he squirmed away from her, pressing himself against the wall, trying to escape or protect himself. He didn’t turn his face towards her, and he curled up, shielding his head with his arms.

It would have been better if he had flown at her in a rage. She felt her heart drop in her chest, like all her worst fears for the boy had come true. These weeks of keeping him drugged and barely conscious, and completely solitary when he was awake, had served their intended purpose— they had broken his spirit.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Eva said. She touched his back, laying just the tips of her fingers against his striped flannel pajamas.

“Don’t touch me!” he tried to yell, but his voice was raw and cracked from thirst and weeks of disuse. He thrashed to get away from her, but he couldn’t go very far in the bunk bed, and his limbs were weak. Eva didn’t chase him, and he squirmed through the metal frame at the foot end of the bed and fell out onto the floor, landing with a wet-sounding flop on the linoleum. He got up and tried the door, first to the bathroom, then the hallway, and found both were locked. He whipped his head back behind himself at Eva every few seconds, afraid and angry, his face glowing a painful red, and his lips curled up around his teeth in frustration. When he realized that both the doors were locked, and that there was nowhere for him to go to get away from her, he pressed himself into the corner next to the bathroom door, looking at her warily.

Very slowly, holding her hands up in a conciliatory gesture, Eva got off the ground where she was kneeling and sat on the bed. “I brought you some dinner,” she said, and nodded at the plate on the desk.

Erwin Josef didn’t move, nor did he look her in the eye. He stood as still as a statue. Perhaps all of the fight hadn’t gone out of him: his hands were balled into fists. But it was good that he wasn’t attacking her. Just beyond the bathroom door stood Ellie, with a needle full of sedative in her hands. If Erwin Josef was likely to become violent, she would tell Ellie to open the door, and simply leave before there could be trouble. But that would maintain the status quo: Erwin Josef would remain locked in the room asleep.

“I promise I’m not going to hurt you,” Eva said. “I’m trying to help you. If you’ll just talk to me—”

“Where am I?” His voice, still dusty with thirst, had taken on a falsely haughty tone, a confidence he was trying to drag up from inside himself. He was trying to exercise the shallow power over servants and his own life he had once held, acting on a kind of superstition that such power could be summoned by saying the right things.

“You’re on a spaceship,” Eva said. She kept her tone very even and calm. “We’re on our way to Phezzan. Have you ever been to Phezzan before?”

Erwin Josef licked his chapped lips and said nothing.

“You’ll be safe there,” Eva said. “We’re taking you to see your mother.”

“I don’t have one,” he said, like he was accusing her of lying.

“You know, my own mother, she died when I was young,” she said. “I grew up without one, too. But yours isn’t dead— she was just sent very far away when you were very small.”

Erwin Josef shook his head.

“I promise, I’m telling you the truth. You’ll get to meet her.”

“Don’t want to,” he said. He tried the door again, and still found it locked. He crinkled his nose in frustration, and perhaps would have been on the edge of tears if he wasn’t so dehydrated.

“I’m sorry,” Eva said. “But you will be happy when we get there.”

Erwin Josef opened his mouth, perhaps to yell, but then scrunched his eyes closed and pawed at something beneath his shirt— the stone amulet that had been given to him. Even though she was not the one wearing it, Eva wanted to believe in its comforting and protective power. She watched the motion of his hand, waiting to see if he would open his eyes and speak to her again. He didn’t.

“Do you want your dinner?” Eva asked. “It’s good— the food on this ship. I can go get you some ice cream, if you want it. I didn’t, just in case it melted before you woke up, but I could get some. Do you want some?”

She hated the way that she was rambling, and she hated the way that Erwin Josef remained pressed into the corner of the room, not moving, not looking at her.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“It makes me sleep,” he said. “I know it does. I don’t want—” And he turned and tried the door again, as if anything had changed between his last attempt and this one. He leaned his whole weight on the knob, bracing his bare foot against the doorframe, trying to haul it open through sheer force. But he couldn’t have weighed more than thirty kilograms, and his fingers, slick with sweat, slipped off the doorknob. He managed to catch himself before he fell to the ground, and he grabbed the doorknob again. “Let me out. Let me out!”

“There’s nowhere to go,” Eva said. “We’re on a spaceship.”

He bared his teeth, and in a final desperate, frustrated attempt, shook the door with as much strength as he could muster. It didn’t even rattle in its frame, not least because it was a sliding door, and he was trying to pull it open like a hinged one. When he failed again, he made a noise somewhere between a growl and a whine, and pressed his face, hot with frustration, to the cool fiberglass of the wall panels.

“Won’t you eat something?” she said. “I promise that this food won’t put you to sleep. If you behave” — and she felt awful saying it like that, but what other way was there to deliver the threat that every parent delivered to their children? If the child did not comply, then force would be exerted from above. — “you don’t have to sleep as much. We just didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”

He turned his face halfway towards her, looking at her out of the corner of his red eyes. He didn’t believe her.

“I promise,” she said. She reached towards the plate of food on the desk, the sandwich with its drooping piece of lettuce hanging out the side, and took a bite, chewing it with her dry mouth. “See— it’s fine. It won’t hurt you. Here. Aren’t you hungry?”

It seemed that she could fill the entire space of the room, imbue every air molecule with her words that were as sincere as they were terrible. She tried to let the silence stretch on, to let Erwin Josef come to her willingly. He stood, pressed into the corner, for as long as a child could endure silence— about three minutes. And then he said, “Give it to me,” and reached for the plate of food.

Eva stood up to give it to him, and in his desire to take the plate and get as far away from each other as possible, they traded places: Eva by the door and Erwin by the bed.

“Get out,” he said. His mouth was crammed full of sandwich already, dry and stuffing up his cheeks like a chipmunk, but he still tried to be haughty. “Get out!” And he hoisted the plate to throw at her.

She knocked on the door, rapping smartly to let Ellie know she wanted to get out, and the door slid open to let her through. It was a good thing that Erwin Josef wasn’t fast enough to dodge through her legs— if he had been, Ellie would have sedated him. Instead, he pounded his fists on the other side of the door and howled.

Because Ellie allowed them to keep Erwin Josef awake, this meant that Count Landsberg was banished from the room he had shared with the sleeping prince. Eva offered to share a level of the slim bunk bed with either her false husband or Ellie, but Landsberg gamely offered to take the floor, so Eva had to avoid stepping on him in the mornings when she got out of bed. One morning, as she did so, he grabbed her ankle, which almost made her shriek aloud and wake Ellie up. But she controlled herself when she saw that he was sitting up and holding his finger to his lips, trying to get her to be quiet. She followed him into the bathroom, where they had a modicum of privacy, though they still had to whisper.

“Good job on getting him to trust you,” Landsberg whispered, jerking his thumb towards the closed door leading to Erwin Josef’s room. “That’ll make this a lot easier.”

“Make what easier?”

“We’ll need to run as soon as we get to Phezzan.”

“What? Why would we do that?”

“Do you really trust these people? After everything?”

“They haven’t killed us— they could have at any time. If they weren’t honest about wanting to work with us, they would have gotten rid of us.”

“I’m not talking about that,” Landsberg said, though he was too quick to deny it, so much so that it made Eva suspect he was doing his best to rationalize away his fears. “I’m talking about the future of the galaxy. We have a crown prince in our hands. I don’t really want to let them turn Odin into some kind of—” He waved his hands. “Or the rebels. Giving them a puppet monarch? Do you really want that to happen?”

Eva hadn’t thought much about it. “I don’t care.”

Count Landsberg’s face went through several changes: startled, bemused, annoyed, and then settled on a patronizing quirk of his lips. “I suppose the governance of the country has never really been something you needed to concern yourself with before. But that shouldn’t matter— I know what we’re going to do.”

“And what is that?”

“I have some money and friends on Phezzan,” Landsberg said. “I’ll find a way to let them know where we are and what we have— we can find a way out.”

This did not sound like much of a plan, but she also recognized that there was no way for her to dissuade Landsberg from whatever he was set on. She looked him in the eyes there in the dim bathroom, the light not even on, and then glanced at the closed door to Erwin Josef’s room, like her eyes were x-rays and could see right through to where he curled on his blanket, alone and fragile. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said. “Don’t do anything that will get us all killed.”

And she slipped back into the dark room where Ellie was still asleep, or pretending to be asleep, on the bottom bunk.

When the ship docked at the top of Phezzan’s space elevator, despite the chaotic rush all throughout the top of the gaudily decorated structure (vendors hawking their wares in the Alliance language, announcements on the overhead speakers calling out comings and goings of ships, passengers and cargo moving in great streams from the elevator cars to the docks, the movement of ships and the flicker of starlight outside), there was a deeply jarring sense of normality about the place. Although almost all of the travelers coming and going were from the Alliance, and this must have been less than half of the normal flow of traffic through Phezzan, it still seemed like, when she stepped off the ship, she had entered another world where there was no civil war, where nothing had gone wrong.

She would have felt out of place on Phezzan regardless, not speaking the language, not dressed in their loose clothing, not walking with the brisk self-confidence that every Phezzani seemed to possess, but she felt like she was dragging an invisible cloud of horror along behind her— one that hadn’t touched this planet, and never would. There was no war here, not even the war between the two halves of the galaxy. There was only Phezzan, content to think of itself as the still center of the universe, around which everything else revolved.

Eva walked side by side with Landsberg, who smiled as they pushed their way through the spaceport. Ellie was a few steps ahead of them, pushing Erwin Josef in the stroller. Landsberg had been here before, if only as a tourist, and he walked with the swagger of someone showing around guests, pointing out restaurants they walked past that he claimed were good venues.

Every step of the journey coiled her tighter, expecting at every moment that soldiers would leap out of the walls to grab Erwin Josef, or someone would ask for her ID and discover that she was operating under a false name, or would run a facial scan on Erwin Josef and realize what precious cargo was passing through Phezzan’s doors. But none of that happened, and they made it down the tense elevator ride without difficulty, stepping out into the sweltering heat of the Phezzani equator.

It was night when they reached the ground, and so they went immediately to book a hotel. Count Landsberg insisted on making the choice, and although Ellie pinched her lips at letting Landsberg choose something that strained their stock of Phezzani currency, she didn’t protest too much. The hotel they ended up in was styled in the Imperial fashion, with heavy wooden doors and red velvet curtains on all the windows. It didn’t do much to disguise the Phezzani love of tall buildings and giant overlooks, things uncommon in the Empire. They were on the thirtieth floor, and looking out the window made Eva dizzy, all the lights of Phezzan twinkling below her, like an ocean reflecting the stars.

Ellie had put Erwin Josef to sleep just to get him down from the ship, but now that they were in the hotel room, she allowed him to wake back up, and Eva tried to explain to him what the new situation was. He seemed calmer, now that they were on Phezzan. Perhaps it was the surroundings of their hotel room— no longer the bare and cramped ship’s quarters, or an unfamiliar house, but silk bedsheets and heavy furniture in wide and dark rooms that were much like those of Neue Sanssouci, or the Litchentlade house. Or, perhaps he had learned that Eva, at least, wasn’t going to hurt him. He ate the food that she gave him, and only took a few steps back when she tried to come close to him.

If the hotel room made Count Landsberg and Erwin Josef comfortable, it made Eva uncomfortable. She found herself tossing and turning in the slick sheets in the huge, empty bed, and couldn’t sleep at all. She eventually got up, and made her way out into the central sitting room of their hotel suite. Count Landsberg was snoring on the couch, and the door to Erwin Josef’s room was closed tightly. In the small dining area, the light was on, and Eva found Ellie sitting at the marble-topped island, looking across the room, out the window, at the sun beginning its pink rise over the horizon. She glanced up at Eva when she came in, and offered her a mug of coffee from a freshly brewed pot. Eva accepted it, though they had no cream, and so scalded her mouth and winced at the bitterness.

After a long moment of silence, in a low voice, Ellie said, “I’m going to get in contact with the bishop here today.”

“Does he know we’ve arrived?”

“No one knew we were coming. No way to get messages off of Odin.” That made sense, of course, and Eva felt a little chagrined to have asked. Involuntarily, she glanced over at the sleeping Landsberg.

“Ah.”

“I won’t make you drag the boy with me,” Ellie said. “Keep an eye on him here while I go out.”

“You won’t just use the phone?”

“Not secure.”

Eva tilted her head at the other woman, who wasn’t looking anywhere in particular. “Alright. I will.” She was surprised that Ellie trusted her so much— which she shouldn’t have done. If Count Landsberg tried to grab Erwin Josef and run, Eva would likely follow him.

“The bishop will probably prepare a safer place for us than here. And a ship to get us to the rebel territories. We won’t stay here for long.”

Eva just nodded.

It only took a few more minutes for the sun to crest the buildings of the city, and begin shining directly into Count Landsberg’s sleeping face. He rolled over on the couch and tried to shield his eyes with his arm, but failed, and woke up. That ended whatever moment Ellie and Eva had been having, and Ellie placed a call to order room service to get them all breakfast.

When she left, not long after eating, Count Landsberg immediately picked up the room phone, and began placing calls to his friends on Phezzan, getting their contact information from the desk of some social club he frequented. He didn’t say anything incriminating to them, mostly just asking if they had time to meet, and letting them know that he was on the planet.

While he was on the phone, Eva watched Erwin Josef out of the corner of her eye, the door to his bedroom cracked open so that she could see him. During their brief time in the spaceport, Eva had gotten him some coloring books from a market stall, and he was quietly occupied with them, crushing his red crayon down into a stump across all the pictures of horses and riders. He was very neat, methodically and precisely filling in the lines, but only ever using one color, and with such a heavy hand that the crayon snapped in half and dangled from its paper sheath. He said nothing, and pointedly ignored both Eva and Landsberg, though when he thought she wasn’t looking, he would glance up at her.

Landsberg was in the middle of one of his phone calls when Ellie returned. She knocked on the door before opening it with the keycard, using the same knock that she had used when on board the merchant freighter. Landsberg hastily hung up the phone and stepped away from it, hands behind his back, when the door swung open.

Ellie wasn’t alone, though. Four members of what Eva assumed was the Earth Church had arrived behind her. These were much more intimidating than the quiet nurse— men in their twenties and thirties, dressed in workmen’s outfits.from the way they carried themselves, it seemed clear that they had weapons hidden in holsters beneath their baggy grey duck-cloth jackets.

“What’s going on?” Eva asked, stepping between the men who came in and Erwin Josef.

“We need to move,” Ellie said. She seemed flustered— more than Eva had seen her in their long journey together. She glanced behind herself to make sure that the door was closed, and then she said. “We need to get you to a safehouse.”

“Why so quickly?” It wasn’t surprising that they were going to be given an escort to a new location, but Ellie’s stress was unexpected, completely contrary to her normal professionalism.

“We can discuss it in the car,” one of the men said. “Please pack up your things.” The words were delivered in an unfriendly tone, hard and with a heavy Phezzani accent, though the man spoke Imperial for her sake.

The man was looking over Eva’s shoulder at Erwin Josef, sitting on the floor of his hotel bedroom, listening to the conversation. He had a slight smile on his face, though he was anxiously twisting his fingers through the chain of his necklace. Perhaps he was enjoying the schadenfreude of his captors being put on the back foot, though he understood his own position as precarious.

There wasn’t much to pack— she was already living out of a suitcase, and Erwin Josef had even less. Eva nevertheless lingered over the task, kneeling to pick up every one of Erwin’s crayons one by one, trying to catch Ellie’s eye as she did. Ellie didn’t quite meet her gaze, as she folded Erwin’s pajamas and forced him to put on the glasses that made him look like a different person. Erwin, for once, didn’t do much complaining aloud, though he squirmed when she tried to put them on his head. Ellie, look at me , Eva kept thinking— but Ellie didn’t.

The game had changed, clearly. Some kind of line had been drawn between them. To the Earth Church on Odin, which was a tiny sect with resources but not great numbers, Eva had been a co-conspirator, a countryman, a useful tool and source of information, and, most importantly, a known quantity— valuable for her loyalty to Erwin Josef above everything else. To the Earth Church on Phezzan, she was a liability at best, and a burden at worst. A stranger and not one of their number.

None of them had realized, though perhaps they should have, that whatever reassurances and letters and instructions Ellie carried from Odin and her bishop there meant nothing, or little, to the Earth Church on Phezzan, who had been operating on their own. They had been cut off from Odin (or Odin had been cut off from them) for months.

Eva could feel the clock hovering over her head, ticking down moments until she was disposed of.

The only saving grace was that when one of the men tried to pick up Erwin Josef, he screamed and clawed so much that Ellie said, “Let her take him,” and the man passed Erwin Josef to Eva, in whose arms his heavy body merely stiffened so much that he was impossible to hold (he was seven— not easy to carry at the best of times), and so she put him down on the ground and just took his small and sweaty hand. Erwin’s sharp nails dug into her skin, but he didn’t fight her.

“He can walk,” Eva said. “It’s fine.”

And so they walked out of the hotel, Eva’s suitcase thumping against her left leg as she held Erwin Josef’s hand with her right, surrounded like a wall by the Earth Church acolytes.

They loaded into a car, with Erwin Josef sitting in the middle bench seat between Landsberg and Eva. She gave him his coloring book, which he threw on the floor. The ride was dead silent for some time, until they got through the worst of the traffic near the hotel, and then Landsberg managed to ask, “So, what’s the rush?”

Ellie, riding shotgun, said, “The rebel fleet is about to invade this planet.”

“What— how—” Eva tried. She couldn’t quite string the words together, nor even her thoughts. Of all the things that she had expected Ellie to say, that was not one of them. It was unimaginable that Phezzan was about to be invaded. Although it made no sense, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had brought the war with her, picking up bad luck and carrying it in her arms like the boy. “How do you know?”

“The Church helped plan it,” she said in a faint voice. Ellie glanced at the driver, and her pale face and wide eyes made it clear to Eva that she hadn’t, until this moment, realized that the Earth Church’s actions could have an effect on her homeland other than a positive one. Ellie was born and raised in the Empire. That much Eva knew, regardless of how little personal information she had been able to pry out of the woman. She spoke with the particular Southwestern Odin annunciation of Rs, giving them what felt like an extra syllable all of their own— she couldn’t have been from anywhere else.

“Before they knew about us and Erwin?” Eva asked. But, of course— if they had Erwin Josef’s mother, and wanted to put him on the throne, as Eva knew that they did, they would need to plan to invade the country before either Braunschweig or Littenheim managed to kill the boy— they would need to extract official peace terms, or whatever it was they were looking for, from Litchtenlade, as Erwin Josef’s regent, and they could then install his mother as their puppet regent instead. They didn’t have to know where Erwin Josef actually was. It was perhaps even a stumbling block for them that Litchtenlade was dead (Eva thought there was no way he could have escaped Reuenthal’s burning house alive), and no one was at home upholding Erwin Josef’s claim to the throne.

“Yes,” Ellie said. “The landing will be—” She glanced at the driver again, silently asking him to supply that information.

“Two days.”

“Well,” Landsberg stuttered, “the plan was to give ourselves up to the rebels, wasn’t it? Has that changed?”

“The Alliance has no idea you’re here, and Church leadership will want to decide what to do,” one of the men said. There was an unspoken “with him” tacked onto the end of the sentence, and he looked in the rearview mirror at the boy at Eva’s side.

The safe house they were brought to took several hours to get to. It nevertheless was still in view of the space elevator, a marker of the center of the city’s sprawl. Like a mountain, it was visible on the horizon for hundreds of kilometers around. Since the Phezzan capital was so large, it felt to Eva that they had barely even left the city grounds, regardless of how far they actually traveled. The buildings were lower here, but it was still dense, and they drove past train tracks carrying high speed trains that whizzed in every direction.

The house they were put in was brick, three stories, and narrow. It was a split building, two properties sharing one lot and a firewall between them, divided up and down rather than each owner having a floor. This meant that the bedrooms were split between the second and third floors, with a narrow stairway separating them. When they showed Erwin Josef into a bedroom, Eva deposited her own suitcase on the bed, and sat down on the bamboo and rattan desk chair, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for her to share a room with the boy. The Earth Church members began to insist that she go upstairs with Landsberg, but Eva looked to Ellie for help, and Ellie said, “Let her stay— what harm does it do?”

And they left her in the room and closed the door. When she tried it, she found that it was locked from the outside. She shook it until it rattled, but stopped after that, not wanting to make too much noise and make the Earth Church think she was more of a nuisance than she was.

A bit of hysterical laughter welled up in her chest, and she looked over at Erwin Josef, who was ignoring her, his elbows propped on the windowsill and looking out at the city, or the seagulls that wheeled overhead. Erwin Josef ordinarily would have been jamming his fingers into the cracks into the window to try to get out, but he had already realized how impossible this was. Like most Phezzani buildings, the whirring of the HVAC was an omnipresent hum in the background to cope with the equatorial heat, and the windows weren’t designed to be opened at all.

“It’s just you and me, kid,” Eva said. Erwin Josef ignored her completely. He pulled a broken crayon piece from his pants pockets and began scrawling on the window, the red wax skipping and sliding across the glass like a cartoon spray of blood.

They kept Eva and Erwin in the room for two days. There was an adjoining bathroom, which made it much more tolerable, but gave them no excuses to leave the room. Eva ate the food they brought before allowing Erwin to have any, as if she could do anything were it poisoned. It was all styrofoam containers of hot Phezzani takeout, noodles too salty and spicy for her to properly enjoy, but none of it was drugged, and it didn’t send her to sleep. For some reason, she found it funny that none of her captors bothered to buy a loaf of bread to make cheap sandwiches with— they were probably just giving her and Erwin Josef whatever it was they themselves ordered for lunch.

She wondered often what had become of Count Landsberg, after they had ushered him up the stairs. The walls in this house were thin enough that she could hear people moving through the hallways, but she couldn’t make out conversations clearly between floors. She had never heard screams or the sound of laser fire, or Count Landsberg’s wheedling voice going back downstairs, so perhaps he was still up above her. She sometimes thought about standing on the rattan chair to knock on the ceiling, but didn’t.

People came and left the house often, a few arriving or going every few hours. She could see cars pull up outside and people get out of them, but lost sight of them as they actually approached the house. Some of them were clearly members of the Earth Church— one of them had even left his car wearing the white lettered stole— but some of them might have just been the next door neighbors. Occasionally, downstairs, a TV played. She could hear the trumpet-noise of news segments starting and ending, but couldn’t make out distinct words of what the rapid-fire Phezzani broadcaster was saying.

Erwin Josef said very little to her the whole time, and she tried her best to leave him be, merely cajoling him at the end of the day to brush his teeth and take a shower and get into bed at a reasonable time. He was clearly a child used to boredom— the Litchtenlade house probably had very little for him to do. The bedroom they were kept in had a wicker basket full of magazines in it, and Erwin flipped through them slowly, looking at the photos of articles and advertisements alike. He ripped out the pictures he liked and put them in one pile, and ripped out the pictures he didn’t like, and shredded them into tiny bits, leaving a mess on the floor which Eva swept up with her hands after he was done and went to look out the window. She slept in the plush armchair near the window, letting him have the bed to himself.

On the morning of the third day, the house was full of people stomping around the bottom floor. She could hear them over the news segments playing nonstop. They forgot to deliver her and Erwin Josef breakfast, and he started to complain and pound on the door around eleven. Eva didn’t even bother to try to stop him.

Ellie eventually opened the door in the afternoon, bearing coffee and some wilted looking donuts. It was unusual that she was the one to bring them food, and she lingered in the door for a moment.

“What’s going on?” Eva asked.

“The invasion’s started,” Ellie replied. She glanced down the stairs as she said this, but no one else seemed to be coming up.

“Where’s Count Landsberg?”

“Upstairs. In the room right above you.” Ellie held up another small paper bag, presumably containing more donuts. “He’s fine.”

“Do you know—” But then there were footsteps on the stairs, and Ellie hastily shut the door in Eva’s face, though there was no characteristic click of the lock’s bolt turning. Eva tested the door subtly, felt the knob turn, and tried not to let Erwin Josef know what she was doing and what dangerous freedom they suddenly had— if he knew the door was open, he would run out of it immediately, and that would be the end of her. She gave the food to Erwin Josef and looked out the window, trying to see what was happening.

She hadn’t seen any evidence of ships descending en masse through the atmosphere (what was it that Wolf had told her? Alliance ships weren’t built for that?), and this far from the city center there had been no soldiers on the streets anyway. But as the day crawled on, the voices downstairs became increasingly agitated. People who had been in the house left, trickling out to go do other things, vanishing. No one brought them dinner. She gave Erwin Josef her donut from breakfast, which she had saved for just this reason, and he ate it without complaint.

Although people were leaving, with the TV blaring downstairs, there were still too many people in the house to effect an escape, especially if she couldn’t think of a way to talk to Landsberg. She put Erwin Josef to bed, and she sat in the armchair, looking out the window, looking up at the sky. Erwin didn’t sleep much— he knew something was going on just as much as she did, and in the streetlights coming in through the window, she often saw the glittering whites of his eyes in the dark.

As the night dragged on, Eva saw the spire of the space elevator begin to illuminate, like it was burning. She thought it was catching the rising of the sun, but it didn’t look like it had the previous mornings. After staring at it for some time, she realized that it was burning, the whole thing one line of fire stretching from the ground to heaven. She watched it in horror. Erwin Josef, a light sleeper, if he even was asleep, heard the change in her breathing and sat up in bed.

Pieces of the elevator that were lower to the ground cleaved off in huge glittering chunks, betraying their lightness as the wind picked them up and fluttered them through the air. She couldn’t tell if they landed elsewhere still burning, or if they disintegrated into the black chemical ash that seemed to be blotting out the sky around the elevator, covering the stars. It was a haze so thick that the wind couldn’t take it away.

Downstairs, the television, which had been blaring news reports near constantly, cut out into garbled digital noise, and then a drawn-out ‘no signal’ whine, and then was switched off, leaving the whole house in terrible silence. The few people downstairs spoke in loud, unhappy voices, and then one of them left, slamming the door on his way out. Eva watched his car headlights recede down the road.

She had been keeping a mental tally of the number of people in the house: this was the fewest it had ever been. The door of her bedroom was unlocked, and she suspected the door of Landsberg’s was, too. If they were going to run— they should do it before someone came in to give them breakfast, before anyone returned to the house.

Where would they go? What would they do? She looked at Erwin Josef, who looked at her. If they remained with the Earth Church, she was reasonably certain that he, at least, would be safe. They had a vested interest in protecting him, if only to use him. If she took him and ran— what could she do to truly keep him sheltered? There were a bunch of Landsberg’s friends she could run to for help— but what would they do, especially if faced with Braunschweig’s desire to kill him?

She stood on the rattan chair and banged on the ceiling of her room. Landsberg, after a moment, answered by jumping up and down. It was communication, but meant nothing. Desperate, she clambered onto the bed, making Erwin Josef scramble out of it, and unscrewed the round light fixture. She pried apart the metal plate that contained the wires, breaking her fingernails as she pulled it from the ceiling. Above where it had been, squinting past the glowing bulb, she could see the slats of the floor above. A vague light shone through between the floorboards.

Erwin Josef sat on the edge of the armchair, kicking his legs, his hair stuck to his head with nighttime sweat.

“Can you hear me?” Eva asked, trying to speak up into the crack without yelling.

“Eva!” Landsberg said through the crack. “Yes!”

She was just as relieved to hear his voice as he was to hear hers. “Is your door unlocked?”

“Yes,” he said. “I was wondering—”

“Ellie’s giving us the chance to get out,” Eva said. “There’s not many people in the building right now. Did you see what’s happening outside? They’re all leaving—”

“Do you think we can run?”

She looked at Erwin Josef. When she had said those words, his own eyes had turned towards the door, and he was looking at it with an expression of calculation. “Can we?”

“I don’t think we have a choice. I assume they’ve been keeping me alive because I’m valuable as a hostage, maybe for ransom money,” — She doubted it. It seemed more likely that all the superiors had just been too busy to actually give the order to kill him. — “but I don’t know what they’ll do with you.”

“Do they still have a car outside?” Eva asked. “I can’t see the driveway from my window.”

There was a creaking noise as Landsberg got up and checked. “Yes.”

“Do you think we can steal it?” Eva’s heart was already pounding in her throat.

“Let’s try.”

She nodded to herself. “Okay. Okay. Come down to this flight— quietly. Don’t let anyone see you. We’ll have to grab the keys— I saw them on a hook in the kitchen wall when we were brought in— that’s the back of the house. The living room is in the front. They mostly stay in there— maybe we can just sneak through.”

Even as she said it, she didn’t believe it herself, but it was too late— saying the words had committed her to action. Erwin Josef was watching her carefully.

“Okay. I’m coming.”

Eva got down from the bed, knelt in front of Erwin Josef. “Are you ready to go?” she asked. While she had been talking to Landsberg, he had put on his shoes— smart boy— always ready to run. He nodded silently. “Will you take my hand?” she asked. “So you don’t get lost?”

He nodded again, and slipped his hand into hers, which steadied her momentarily. She pulled him to his feet, and they waited at the door until they heard Landsberg’s footsteps on the stairs outside. She opened the door a crack and saw him there, pressed against the wall, holding his finger to his mouth in a ‘quiet’ gesture.

With the door open, they could hear the sounds of people downstairs much more clearly. The sink was running, and glasses were clinking about. Someone was washing dishes, and having a chat in the Phezzani argot that passed too quickly for Eva to parse. A strangely domestic feeling sound for the situation. It was two men talking, no sound of Ellie. Very bad luck.

“Let’s go out the back door,” Eva whispered. “We’ll have to go on foot if we can’t grab the car keys.”

But even as they stood in the hallway, the tenor of the conversation downstairs changed, a sudden clatter of glass and turning off the faucet, and the men’s voices turning sharp and hard, and heavy footsteps on the squeaking kitchen linoleum, and the pulling back of curtains. Eva at first thought that she and Landsberg had been discovered, but then she saw, reflecting in on the walls of the house through the windows, a whole stream of headlights, which stopped and surrounded the building, the engines a roar and then a pur as they came to a stop. By the way that the men downstairs were acting, she could tell that this was not a scheduled interruption, nor were these members of the Earth Church. It was bad luck— carried in her arms again— that whatever this was came down just as she was trying to escape. She squeezed Erwin’s hand and took two steps down the stairs, trying to crane her neck and see past the bannister to what was happening. She couldn’t get a glimpse. There was shouting outside: someone on a bullhorn speaking unintelligible Phezzezani argot.

“The rebels?” she mouthed to Landsberg, trying not to let the men downstairs know that they were in the hallway.

It was too late for that, though. One of the men, rather than deal with what was happening outside, or perhaps in preparation for it, turned the corner to the stairs, gun in hand. He was monetarily very startled to see Eva and Landsberg and Erwin Josef there, his eyes widened, and he raised his gun.

It was Erwin who saved her life, though she didn’t think he had any intention to— it was just his instinct to run that made him rip his hand from hers and charge down the stairs, heedless of the Earth Church acolyte at the bottom. He slammed past the man’s waist. The man’s shot, already confused because he didn’t know if he should grab the boy or kill Eva and Landsberg, went wide above her head, scorching the ceiling. Erwin Josef vanished into the house, running for any door that would open for him.

Eva followed him blindly, shoving past the man at the bottom of the stairs, now trying to turn on his heel to chase Erwin. But Eva knocked him to the ground. The other man was in the living room, and he turned from his position at the window when he heard the commotion at the bottom of the stairs, but he was too slow, and Eva made it to the back door through the kitchen, where Erwin was frantically pulling at the lock.

The man from the stairs caught up to them. Landsberg was looking for the car keys, going first for the now-empty hook on the wall, and then the table. ( Why was he looking for the car keys! Eva thought as she fumbled with the door lock with stiff fingers, trying to push Erwin’s clawing hands out of the way so that she could undo it.)

But he was too late— the man from the stairs shot Landsberg in the head as he reached for the ring of keys laying on the counter near the stove. He fell to the floor, eyes wide, blood and liquefied brain matter oozing out of the quarter-sized hole in his skull.

Eva got the lock open. She grabbed Erwin Josef, picking him up with strength that she didn’t know she had, and ran out into the back garden, past the neat row of garbage cans, and into the street, illuminated by the headlights of the cars. Laser fire whizzed above her head.

She didn’t know if she was protecting Erwin Josef or using him as a human shield— that was a question that would haunt her for a long time. But she yelled out, in a raw voice, “Don’t shoot! I have him! Don’t shoot!”

And instead of being killed, she was tackled to the ground, trying to cradle Erwin Josef as she fell. Men in dark clothing tried to pry him out of her arms, but he screamed and refused to let go, and so they were shoved into the back of an armored car together, which sped away into the pre-dawn darkness.

It was only after they had left the scene that the divider between the front seat and the rear where Eva clutched Erwin Josef to her chest rolled down and Eva processed that she was in a kind of limousine rather than a police car— the difference hardly mattered. But the man sitting shotgun next to the driver turned around in his seat and smiled, if grimly. The streetlights reflected off his completely shaved head. She couldn’t place the man at first, though she knew he was familiar somehow, a face she had seen in the newspaper, maybe.

“I must be a very lucky man,” Adrian Rubinsky said, “to have the privilege of entertaining the future Kaiser as my guest. I’m leaving, but I’m glad I had the opportunity to say hello before I went. It really is my lucky day."