Behind the Throne

by K. B. Wagers

  I shook away the encroaching memories as my computer uploaded the file. Something about Emmory’s warning made it obvious that it wasn’t safe for anyone else to see this. I played the video internally, closing my eyes to shut out distractions.

  Cire appeared. The pretty sister I remembered had grown into a stunningly royal princess. Her blue-black curls were pinned up and away from her doll-like face. A face that was exhausted, the gunrunner part of me noted critically.

  “Hail,” she said, smiling sadly. Her perfect, soft voice washed over me. “Unfortunately, if you’re watching this, it means I won’t get to say anything to you in person. Emmory has orders to deliver this to you in the event of my death.” A tear slid down her round cheek, and Cire brushed it away with impatient fingers.

  “Damn it. I’m sorry for that. Sorry you’ll get that news on top of everything else I’m about to tell you, and sorry I’ll never get to see you again. I’d always hoped I would someday. I’ve missed you so much, you have no idea. Pace is dead—”

  Cire straightened her shoulders, the grief sliding off her face like water off glass. She looked every bit the empress she would never be, and my heart writhed in pain.

  “Someone killed her, Haili, and it wasn’t the Upja rebels no matter what Mother might claim. Knowing you, you don’t trust anyone. I need you to come home for Ami. If I’m gone, there’s no one to protect her and Mother is sick.

  “There are dark, dangerous things at work, Haili. People are trying to destroy the empire from within. I’ve attached what information I can, and you can get the rest of it from Emmory.

  “I know you don’t think it, but the empire needs you. I needed you, but I’m afraid I waited too long to admit it, and since you’re listening to this, it’s too late for me.” Cire stopped, muttering a curse that had me raising my eyebrows. Then she fixed her eyes back on the camera with a forced smile. “It’s damned hard to see into the future, Haili. I don’t know what things will be like here by the time you get this message. I only know you need to trust in Portis—he’s been watching after you since you left.”

  Those words sliced through me and stole my breath. Emmory’s announcement I could dismiss as lies, but my sister would never have lied to me. The doubt coalesced around my heart, threatening to crush it to dust. Had I mistaken Portis’s intentions? Had I killed him when he was really just trying to protect me? Why couldn’t I remember what had happened?

  Cire continued, “Also trust Zin and Emmory, Haili.” She laughed softly. “Emmory is unconventional and extremely improper at times. You will probably butt heads quite a bit, but he has your best interests at heart. Keep him close to you even after you get into the palace. They’ll be able to help you find out who is responsible for all this.”

  Cire glanced off-camera, frowning at whatever noise she heard. “I’m sorry to drag you home, but I know you can help. You always sold yourself short where these things were concerned. Ami will need your wisdom and your strength, and hey, it’s not like you’ll have to be empress.”

  She looked directly at me, her dark eyes filled with ten thousand things left unsaid between us. “You are the only one left who can help my daughter save the empire. I love you, Hail. Please come home.”

  The message ended, and I lay on the bed with tears leaking from behind my closed lids. They tracked down the sides of my head to hide in my hair.

  “Gods damn it,” I muttered at the ceiling. “You deserved better.” I wasn’t entirely sure if I meant the words for Cire or for myself.

  Ami had been alive when Cire made the message. Hell, Cire had been alive when she recorded the message. She’d been alive when she sent Emmory after me. Now they were all gone.

  Trust Emmory, Haili.

  I hadn’t trusted anyone except for Portis for a long time. Even if he hadn’t tried to kill me, he’d lied to me, and his betrayal had shattered that trust. I didn’t know if I could recover enough from it to trust a total stranger, no matter what my sister said. But Cire had always had a knack for the truth, for knowing who to trust. If I couldn’t take her word for it, where did that leave me?

  Walking into the snake pit without so much as a sharp stick. I snorted on bitter laughter.

  The fact that Emmory hadn’t tried to kill me straight off was a step in the right direction, though. Only I wasn’t sure if it was onto solid ground, or onto a burning transport ship.

  My face hurt.

  Getting up from the bed, I leaned against the sink and poked experimentally at the shiner swelling my right eye. Gone was the eighteen-year-old princess, erased by twenty years and a haywire body mod. The sharp-faced woman in the mirror flinched.

  These injuries were child’s play in comparison to the ones I’d gotten in the fight on Sophie. My shoulder had been—I paused and frowned at my reflection. I’d hit Sophie’s deck hard—first my shoulder and then my head snapping back against the metal floor. It had only added to my fucking addled brain.

  Why was my memory in pieces?

  Thanks to my BodyGuards, I’d had some training before I met Portis, but Portis had been the one to really teach me how to fight, and I couldn’t see him falling for the kick I’d lashed out with after I fell, but I remembered the grunt of pain in the darkness. My shot had struck home.

  I fisted my hands around the lip of the sink and rolled my shoulders. Things that seemed just coincidence at the time were starting to fall into place with alarming speed.

  All the self-defense lessons Portis had forced on me. Teaching me how to shoot, teaching me how to fly. What had been the purpose of it all? I’d thought it was because that was the only way to survive as a gunrunner, and maybe that was true. But an ITS-trained guard standing in as my BodyGuard would have seen it as one more tool in a survival kit.

  I’d run into Portis just weeks after I left home. I was an inexperienced eighteen-year-old hiding on the streets of Delhi, only four planets away from home and in way over my head as I tried to track the man I was certain was responsible for my father’s death.

  He’d saved my ass from a gang of street punks, and even after I’d nearly taken his head off with a two-by-four, he had still been calm enough to get me out of that alley and back to the boardinghouse before the cops showed up.

  “We’ll stick together. Watch each other’s backs,” he’d said after I’d fed him a story about being an orphan trying to get off-planet to see the stars.

  I’d taken him up on it, and somewhere along the way, I’d fallen in love with the bastard. Now I was faced with one of two choices—either he’d betrayed me from the very beginning, or at the very end.

  He was dead, and I’d never know for sure. Hell and fire, I might have been the one to kill him.

  Check your smati, stupid. The voice in my head now sounded a lot like Hao, my former mentor and the man who’d sponsored my way into Po-Sin’s gang. He had the habit of taunting me with that when we argued—even though more often than not, my recording of our conversation proved him wrong.

  Smatis had a recording feature. They only looped on a seventy-two-hour cycle to save data space. Mine was a little longer, by dint of my royal hardware, but even the standard was enough to show me what had happened on the ship.

  Provided that whatever was keeping me from remembering in the first place hadn’t also impacted my system. I tightened my hands on the lip of the sink again as I queued up the footage. Heart pounding and my breath clogging my throat, the image of all of us at dinner overlaid itself on my vision. We’d just done a hell of a deal. I’d hijacked a new shipment of handguns and a few heavier pieces destined for the Solarian Conglomerate’s police force. Turned around and sold them to the Cheng for a profit that meant we could take a few years off if we wanted to. Not that I’d particularly wanted to do that.

  We’d been headed to the outer territories to drop off some cargo that had been taking up space in the bay for a while, but Portis kept trying to get me to take a job in Hortsmith. I’d been so pissed at him for pushing it when he kn
ew I wanted those damn rugs off my ship.

  I sped through the recording until it went black as I passed out and for what seemed like an eternity nothing happened.

  “Baby, wake up.” Portis’s voice filtered through the black, but my eyes didn’t open immediately. “Fuck,” he muttered and rolled me over. “Breathe in for me, baby, and wake up.”

  “What’s going on?” My voice was slurred and I reached a hand out but missed his face by several inches.

  “Someone drugged you, we need to go.”

  It was a surreal experience to watch through my drugged-up eyes as Portis got me dressed, armed, and out the door in a matter of moments. Now I could see the things I’d missed in my haze. The fear tightening his mouth and making his hands shake. We stumbled down the hallway to the cargo bay.

  “Help’s coming. If we can just get to the shuttle.” We were on the stairs. Portis swore and shoved me. I fell down the stairs into the cargo bay, crashed to the floor, jamming my leg on the way down. It was dark in the bay, but it lit up when someone fired in my direction. I fired back and heard a body fall.

  “Get down!” Portis tackled me and we slid across the cargo bay floor.

  “Captain, get away from him! He’s trying to kill you!” Memz’s sharp voice echoed through the darkness.

  “Haili, baby, please stay down.”

  Awful terror lanced through me, as sharp as a tempered blade. “What did you call me?” I blinked at Portis as the emergency lighting flicked on, coating the cargo hold in a wash of red.

  Guilt flooded his face and Portis held a hand out to me. “Baby, don’t do this now. Please. You have to trust me. I’m trying to get you out of here.”

  “What. Did. You. Call. Me?”

  “Hailimi Mercedes Jaya Bristol,” Portis whispered. “I know who you are. I’ve always known. You let me handle this, get to the shuttle.” Portis’s voice was breathy with pain.

  I caught him as he fell to his knees, blood smearing across the front of my white shirt and staining my arms where he grabbed me.

  “Baby, I’m sorry. You’ve got to get out of here.”

  “I don’t understand. How did you know?” I dragged him backward until we were reasonably safe from the gunfire peppering our position.

  “I’ve always known. It doesn’t matter.” He pressed his gun into my hand. “You get to the shuttle and get the hell off this ship. Emmory’s coming for you, I sent coordinates. Trust him. He’ll keep you safe.”

  “Who’s Emmory?”

  Portis coughed, splattering me with blood. “Just trust him, Haili. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for lying to you. I’m sorry it turned out like this and you have to go the rest of the way alone. But all that matters is you staying alive. You have to go. Now.”

  He shoved me away from him, pulling another gun free as he staggered to his feet and rushed out into the center of the cargo bay.

  I gasped, wanting to look away, but instead I watched the rest of the scene play itself out with painful clarity. Memz shot Portis again as he rushed her, but she missed me, barreling right after him, and I tackled her with the precision of an Austro footballer. Our fight was brutal and I finally tore myself away from the replay when the crack of her neck shot through my brain.

  “Your Highness, are you all right?”

  Blinking dry eyes back to the present, I realized I was on my knees a meter away from the sink. Both Trackers were in the room, but at a cautious distance. Zin was holding my boots. Emmory had his arms crossed. I’d thought his eyes were black, but in this light I could see the earthy brown layered over the silver of his augmentations. Portis’s green eyes—bright sunlight through leaves—flashed into my vision and I felt another tear slip down my wet cheeks.

  Rocking back on my heels, I rose in a smooth motion and held my hand out. “My smati remembered what I couldn’t, Tracker. Would you like to see?”

  “Highness, you swore an oath.”

  “I keep my oaths. This isn’t an elaborate ruse to try and escape again. My recording shows what happened on Sophie.” I wiggled my fingers. “Zin’s welcome to take his gun out if it will make you feel better.”

  Emmory gave me a look and took my hand. Our smatis synced and I queued up the file once more. Emmory didn’t get that glazed look people sometimes had when they viewed things on their smatis; instead he looked right at me the whole time. Like water washing away a sand castle, his anger melted. It was replaced with grief and I pulled my hand away, turning my head in respect.

  “Why didn’t you make it to the shuttle?” There wasn’t any accusation in the question, but I flinched anyway. Now that I’d seen it, the memories rushed back in like a wave, shredding my composure in its path.

  “I couldn’t leave him.” My confession echoed loudly in the silence. “I couldn’t leave him to die alone like I’d left my father. After everything we’d been through, I didn’t want—” I choked the words back down, not wanting to admit that to anyone.

  I could remember it now, as clearly as the surface of a quiet pond. When the realization that I was going to lose Portis hit me, I hadn’t wanted to survive either.

  “Zin, are we clear?”

  “Have been since we came in. They’ll probably get suspicious, but I can keep the surveillance scrambled for as long as we want. Someone might come knocking, though.”

  “You don’t trust these people?”

  Emmory gave a short shake of his head. “There wasn’t time to vet the whole ship. Gill’s people are crewing the surveillance for your room, but others could be listening in…” He raised a hand and wiggled it. “At this point, it’s best not to tip anyone off.”

  “That’s why no one knows who I am.” I tapped one hand against the boots before I tossed them on the bed. “My sister said to trust you. I was right. She’s the one who sent you, not my mother.”

  “We are not the enemy here, Highness. I swear.” Emmory held my gaze, his eyes filled with concern and frustration. There was no trace of his previous anger; I wondered if he was just hiding it or if it was gone for good.

  Wiping my face with the heels of my hands, I exhaled, letting the ice settle around my heart and across my face. There wasn’t time to grieve for everything I’d lost. I was headed into a situation more dangerous than anything I’d faced outside the empire. No friends, no weapons, and far too little intel. If I didn’t keep it together, I was going to end up dead. “Who is?”

  Emmory looked away, his jaw flexing, and I was pretty sure he was trying to think up a nonoffensive reply. Cire was probably right about us butting heads. Trackers were a different breed. With so much exposure to the outside worlds, they had trouble acting like proper Indranan men: no biting of their tongues as was expected in conventional society.

  Of course, I wasn’t much good at that either. There was a good chance Emmory and I would get along just fine.

  3

  We don’t know, Highness,” he said finally.

  “Memz was on my crew for years. Someone offered her something worth killing me for.” I let a brief smile flicker through even though I’d never wanted a drink so badly as in that moment. “Or trying to kill me. Am I correct in assuming whoever it was, they’re responsible for the deaths of my sisters?”

  “It’s likely, Highness.”

  “You can understand my hesitation, then, Tracker, to just throw myself at your mercy.”

  “I am loyal to Indrana, Highness. I swore an oath to Princess Cire to bring you home and keep you safe,” Emmory whispered, and gods damn but he looked hurt. He took a step toward me, his gloved hands held out in supplication.

  “Bugger me, I don’t know you!” The furious reply slipped out, and I wasn’t in the mood to lie to him so I went with it. I swallowed, glared at him, and continued, “Either of you. I’ll trust you both as far as I can, but you drugged me, kidnapped me—”

  “I retrieved you. As I was ordered to do.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “As your sister ordered me to do.”

  “Ordered! D
on’t talk to me about orders. Portis was ordered to lie to me and babysit me. It’s all sophistry,” I snarled, advancing on him. I jabbed a finger into his chest and then pointed it at Zin.

  I thought I’d been free. I’d thought that my life was my own. The one thing I really wanted, the thing I’d given up every piece of my life at home for, had turned out to be a lie. I choked on the sudden tears and spun away before they spilled free.

  “Highness—”

  “Fine, you were doing your job. Give me one reason I should trust you.” I looked up at the ceiling, blinking the tears away before I faced him.

  “You don’t have anyone else,” he said. Brutal honesty cut right to the heart of things. “And you need us.”

  He was right. I didn’t want to set foot on Pashati without someone I could trust. I scrubbed my hands over my face and muttered a curse that had Emmory raising an eyebrow. “When did Cire die?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. We were already off-planet. She’d wanted to make sure your empress-mother couldn’t stop us.”

  “Why did she send you after me? What is going on?”

  “She needed you, Highness. I don’t know how much you’ve been paying attention, but things are bad.”

  I hadn’t been paying attention at all lately and it was about to bite me in the ass. “Dump the title, Emmory. We don’t have time for it.”

  A smile fluttered to life on his face, vanishing as quickly as a flame in space, and I got the feeling he was going to ignore my order.

  “The empire is in chaos. Things are falling apart even more rapidly than your sister feared. Read the files she sent you, and I’ll catch you up when I can. We’ve been off the grid for too long already.”

  “Who’s responsible? Who blew up Cire? And Pace—” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. “What in the Mother Destroyer’s name is my mother doing about it?”