The Complete Madion War Trilogy

by S. Usher Evans

  I glanced at the clock again as another minute had ticked by.

  "This is ridiculous," I said to the secretary.

  "His Majesty is on his own schedule."

  I made sure he saw the gigantic eye roll.

  After an eternity, the doors opened, and my father and his cabinet members strolled out of the room, smelling of brandy and cigar smoke. I crossed my arms over my chest—this was more important than seeing his not-dead son?

  Then again, he hadn't given me much thought after my plane disappeared, so why was I expecting anything more?

  "Father." I announced my presence since the gaggle of old, bald men walked right by me.

  One by one, they turned around. It took them a moment—although my face was shorn of my beard, my hair was long and dangling around my ears.

  "My stars."

  "It's..."

  "He's alive!"

  "Yes, yes."

  My father, tall, imposing, his face devoid of my mother's worry and grief, pushed to the front of the crowd. Before he turned to face his advisors, he plastered a pained expression on his face and embraced me tightly. I stood stiffly, considering when the last time my father had ever embraced me.

  He stood back from me, a warning look in his eye, and he turned to face his cabinet.

  "We have been keeping it quiet, but my son has been found alive!"

  They exploded into applause and my father bowed slightly, as if he could take credit for my survival. I withheld a grimace when his arm looped around my shoulders.

  "We have been secretly searching for him for two months," he said. I was amazed at how easily he was able to lie. "His mother and I knew there was a chance that he'd survived, that he was still alive. But we dared not announce it, since the Ravens were so intent on killing him. I wouldn't be able to forgive myself if they'd found him before we did."

  I didn't bother to mask my disbelief.

  "Last night, we got a call from his personal bodyguard, who I'd tasked to search the northern islands in the Madion Sea." Another lie. "He said he had spotted wreckage from a plane on the beach, and this morning," my father squeezed me tightly against him, "this morning we found him!"

  More applause from the cabinet members, who savored this story as deliciously as fine wine.

  "With—" I started, but my father's voice overtook me.

  "I had my doubts about my son, as you all are aware. But to survive, alone, for two months!"

  My first thought was to ask him why he'd discussed me with his cabinet, but then I realized what he'd said. "I wasn't—"

  "He learned to hunt, he learned to fend for himself. I couldn't be prouder. But I've always said that with just a little push, he could be the sort of prince Kylae has always deserved."

  "Father," I hissed, ripping my arm out of his grasp.

  "My poor boy has been through a lot," he said. "If you'll give us a moment to catch up, father-to-son..."

  I didn't even wait for them to leave before turning on him. "What kind of bullshit is this? You know I wasn't alone—"

  "As far as this story goes, boy, you were." My father, dropping his smarmy veneer, was back to the same jackass I knew. "As far as your companion...I've solved that problem for you."

  My heart fell into my stomach. "What are you talking about?"

  "You will sit for interviews, talk to the media," he continued, ignoring my question completely. "We will use this story to bolster support for the war. My son, the survivor!"

  "I wasn't alone," I spat through gritted teeth. "What have you done?"

  "Galian!" I heard a voice calling me from down the hall and saw Dr. Maitland rushing toward me.

  My father patted me on the shoulder. "I told you, I took care of it." He paused to glance at my hair. "Tell your handler to schedule you a hair appointment. We can't have you walking around looking like that."

  "Galian," Dr. Maitland said breathlessly. A purple bruise was growing on his left temple, and my anger multiplied. "Your father's soldiers came, and they took her. There was nothing I could do, nothing I could say." His face shone with anguish. "Galian, I'm sorry...she's gone."

  "Where did they take her?" I asked, knowing and dreading the answer.

  Theo

  I was going to Mael.

  They didn't have to tell me. They didn't tell me. They barely even looked at me once the dirty uniform was back on my body. Something about the way they'd leered at me made me want to take a bath in molten lava.

  They covered my head and shoved me onto a metal bench, encircling my wrists and ankles with thick iron shackles. Then we rode. The bench was slippery, and more than once I slid into one of my captors when we went over a nasty bump. They shoved me off, spitting with anger that I'd dared touch them.

  I closed my eyes since I couldn't see anyway, and let all the self-hating thoughts consume me. I shouldn't have been surprised to be in this position. I knew when Galian spoke of me returning with him that it would never work. I knew when we crashed that it would've been smarter for me to kill myself than wait for Kylaen forces to take me to their death camp.

  I imagined the Raven slaves forced to endure the testing on the laboratory. I wondered how many of them killed themselves before the Kylaens killed them first.

  For a moment, I tried to get angry at Galian for bringing me to his country, for putting me in danger. But I couldn't. He'd truly thought I would be safe with Dr. Maitland. Truly thought we could make this work. His naive optimism was one of the reasons I loved him so much.

  But the shackles on my hands reminded me of the harsh reality.

  I felt the car slow and forced myself to think about Galian. If I were to remain strong, to keep myself from falling apart from fear, I needed to focus on something else. I let my mind wander to the mornings when I woke up to see him standing over the fire. I pictured the way the sunlight bounced off his pale skin, remembered how it felt when he whispered my name. When he kissed me. The sound of him telling me he loved me.

  "C'mon!" Hands roughly pulled me off of the bench and into the open. Through the hood still on my head, the noxious gas filled my nose. I remembered reading the laboratory file: two hundred times the ingested amount before it was fatal.

  I tried hard not to breathe, but I couldn't help it.

  The hood was ripped off, along with some of my hair, and I looked around at the building I had only seen in pictures. Large smokestacks billowed white smoke into the sky. Grimy windows lined the rusty old building. The fences were high and covered in barbed wire.

  "Move it!"

  They shoved me forward, and I stumbled, my still-broken leg protesting the extra weight. I walked normally on it as best I could, even though it screamed in pain.

  Five other prisoners stood in line. Most of them had the pale Kylaen skin, but I spotted one man darker in color. I tried to catch his eyes, but they stared blankly ahead, as if already dead.

  We stood in a courtyard for what felt like eons, and my leg began to hurt so badly it made me sick. Or perhaps the smell was starting to get to me. I tried to take shorter breaths, hoping I might inhale less of the poison.

  Next to me, one of the lighter-skinned prisoners was muttering to himself. I saw him counting on his fingers in antsy anticipation.

  I wanted to say something to him, wanted to tell him my trusty phrase about not making it this far just to die, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. This was truly the end for everyone who set foot in there. There was no way out.

  "We're going to die," the man to my right whispered.

  "Stay calm," I whispered back.

  "We're going to die." He began to shuffle forward, his eyes wild and crazed.

  A crack echoed in the courtyard, and I turned away so I wouldn't see him lying there on the ground. How much longer would I last before I lost my mind from fear?

  A very real, palpable fear washed over me, one that I hadn't felt since my very first battle. My stomach was in my throat, but I swallowed hard. I refused to appear weak in front of
these monsters.

  Closing my eyes, I forced myself to remember how it felt when Galian kissed my hand in the tree. The look on his face when he said he loved me. I vowed I would keep his memory in the forefront of my mind until my dying breath.

  "Well, well, look what we have here, a full-blooded Raven girl." His hand grabbed my face and forced me to face him. I couldn't see his face through a thick gas mask, but his eyes glittered.

  I forced myself to think of the island, of cold nights in front of the fire. Watching Galian sleep, or pretend to sleep until he gave up and talked with me through the night.

  "It's been a while since we've had a full Raven. They usually last a lot longer than the others here. Must be that slave blood in their system."

  I imagined Galian's laughter, how it had felt when he'd come back into the camp after being away for a few hours.

  "Send her into the pit with the rest of the dogs."

  "Amichai," I whispered to myself as they pulled me forward, my foot kicking the body of the man at my feet.

  Galian

  I spotted Kader standing next to my car. I didn't remember walking up to him, but I sure remembered the feeling when my fist connected with his jaw.

  "You son of a bitch!" I screamed.

  "I was just doing what I was instructed," Kader said, rubbing his jaw.

  My punch didn't even lay him out, so, furiously, I reared back to hit him again, but he grabbed my arm and spun me around, pinning my arm behind my back.

  "Calm down, Galian," he said, sounding too normal for what he'd just done.

  "You sentenced her to death," I spat out. "You... Why did you tell him?"

  "Because it was the right thing to do," Kader said in my ear. "Are you going to try to hit me again?"

  "I'm going to tear your fucking head off!"

  Kader's grip tightened on my arm. "You aren't thinking clearly. Otherwise, why would you think bringing a Raven girl back with you was a smart idea?"

  "Because I love her!" I bellowed.

  "You may think that—"

  That was too much. I kicked Kader in the shin, and he released me. I heaved for a moment, anger and exertion taking their toll.

  "I am completely in control of my own emotions," I growled. "Do you think I'm an idiot? Do you think I don't know that we've been at war with them? She shot me down!"

  "Then how can you expect me to believe that you fell in love with her?" Kader said. "She was the only pussy on the island, I get it, but—"

  "Don't you ever talk about her that way again. That girl, she saved my life more times than I can even count. I would be dead if it weren't for her! And you expect me to just send her off to her death because my father thought it was a better story to say that I survived all by myself?"

  Kader said nothing.

  "She is a human being," I said, amazed that I even had to say that. "She's not just a Raven any more than I'm just a Kylaen. She...she deserves more than this. She took care of me. And now she's going to die." My eyes narrowed. "I should've told you to leave us there."

  "We couldn't do that," Kader said, rubbing his jaw. "You're too thin as it is. You wouldn't have survived—"

  "I survived for two months with her," I said defiantly. "Fuck you for thinking otherwise."

  Again, Kader said nothing and I stared north again. Where those bastards had taken my Theo.

  "I'm going after her."

  "That's ridiculous," Kader said. "You can't—"

  "I'm the prince. I can do whatever I want." I gritted my teeth and brushed past him. "And I'm going to get my Theo back."

  I slid into the front seat of Kader's car and searched for the keys. I hadn't driven a car since I was sixteen, swerving around a deserted airfield with my guard at the time, but I could probably remember the gist of it. I'd figured out how to skin a rabbit, I could figure this out.

  Kader slid into the passenger seat next to me, as if he were going out for a leisurely drive. "Are you serious about going after her?"

  "Give me the keys," I said. "I'm going to take down the front gate. I'll order them—"

  "I might remind you that your father left you for dead for two months."

  "So?"

  "So if you went to his death camp, demanding that your girlfriend be released, he might have a problem with that," Kader said, putting his hands behind his head. "And you might find yourself in that prison with her."

  "Then I'll just sneak her out."

  Kader snorted. "You're as stealthy as a fighter jet."

  I growled in frustration.

  "Do you even have a plan to get her?" Kader asked lazily.

  "I... what?" I blinked, expecting him to argue with me more.

  "A plan, Sire," he asked, looking quite annoyed. "To rescue your Raven girl." He paused as I opened my mouth. "Your...Theo."

  I closed my mouth, too shocked to respond.

  "Are you truly serious about putting your life on the line? To put someone else before yourself and your own safety? Even if it means that you'll be known as a traitor to your country?" He looked at me, and I shrank from the intensity of his glare. "Because that's what'll happen if you set this girl free. You'll have to give up your princely life and your fancy parties and all the special treatment you receive."

  "In case you forgot, I had none of that for two months," I retorted, but it lacked some of my previous fire.

  "But now you have a chance to have it back, and then some. You could have any girl in Kylae that you wanted. Dr. Maitland would welcome you back at the hospital. Life could return to normal. All you have to do is hand over the keys and go back to the palace and forget all about your girlfriend."

  In response, I stuffed the keys into the ignition and turned the car on. "Fuck off. I'm getting my girl out of there."

  "Fine," Kader said, reaching over to turn off the car. "But if we do this, we do it my way."

  I whipped my head around. "I thought you said—"

  "If your father finds out that I let you waltz into Mael, I'll be the one behind bars," Kader said, as if discussing the weather. "So if you're really going to do this—"

  "I am."

  "Then I guess I have to make sure you don't fuck it up. For my sake."

  I stared at him as if I'd never seen him before. Kader had been gruff, but he'd never spoken so...plainly to me before. Perhaps my own newfound freedom had rubbed off on him.

  "What do we do first?" I asked.

  Theo

  I was deposited in the center of the iron building, my shackles attached to a line of sickly looking prisoners. I tried my best to ignore the woman to my left, or the tumor growing out of her cheek. Her eyes were heavy-lidded as she shoveled the black material from one pile to another.

  "Shovel, bitch." The voice behind me was on my neck, and I picked up the shovel in front of me.

  I was to move the black stones from the mountain next to me into my neighbor's pile, and then she to hers, and so on until it reached the burning fire pit in the center. I realized this was the source of the poison. I couldn't remember the name Galian had used—

  Galian.

  I forced myself to remember what he looked like, what he smelled like. The sound of his voice. I wanted to keep it in the forefront of my mind, just in case I dropped dead. I wanted him to be my last thought.

  "Shovel faster!"

  I sneered at a guard who was screaming at a boy as he cowered in fear. If my hands hadn't been shackled to the ground, I would've run over and snapped the guard's neck.

  There were more than a few children in this wretched place. They were old enough to have been pilots, but rarely did I hear of a Raven pilot who'd been taken prisoner. They didn't look fully Raven either, with some having Kylaen blue eyes and lighter hair. But they shared the same, scared look that my young lieutenants did before we'd left for a mission.

  I shifted my weight for a second onto my bad leg and then back onto my good one, which was aching from standing on it for so long. Galian used to get on me for using i
t too much.

  I paused for a moment, reaffirming his presence in my mind.

  "Don't stop." The breath was behind me again, and I continued working, my lungs burning with the disgusting gas that would eventually kill me.

  NINETEEN

  Galian

  I remembered the first time I'd been to Mael. I was hungover as shit, but that didn't matter to my mom. She wanted me to see what my father was doing. We walked right in the front gates, tabloid photographers in tow. The place was brutal then, but it was nothing compared to what I saw sitting on the hill, spying on the compound with Kader.

  Without my mother's watchful eye, four prisoners were dragged out for beating then shoved back in. Guards kicked and spat on an old man who'd fallen. A cart of bodies was wheeled out and disappeared. I wasn't quite sure I wanted to know where or for what purpose.

  But worst of all were the little bodies amongst the prisoners.

  "Why are there children down here?" I asked Kader.

  "It's a quiet program one of your father's ministers instigated," Kader said, binoculars poised on his eyes. "Mixed children who get in trouble are sent here."

  "Mixed children?"

  "Raven and Kylaen parents," Kader said. To my perplexed look, he added, "It happens a lot more often in the slums of Norose. There are more Ravens here than you'd think."

  "Define get in trouble."

  "Stealing, shoplifting," Kader said.

  "Are all kids from the slums sent here when they're caught? Not to a regular jail or a rehabilitation or even a school?"

  Kader didn't respond. If I'd thought I couldn't hate my father any more...

  "The next shift change is in half an hour," Kader said, looking at his watch. "I will go down there and get uniforms and bring them back. It's a good thing they mandate the use of masks."