Page 38 of Alien Devil’s Crown

“New terms. The defector dies first, as policy, you understand. Nothing personal in it, Strategist; you were excellent, and the excellence is precisely the problem, and people must understand what happens to defectors.” The chairman’s smile came back on, hospitable to the end.

“And then we revisit the cases.”

Four muzzles. Two meters of open marble between my position and hers. A column base stood just behind her left heel.

The plan said hold position and keep his focus. Talon was inbound; Zarek and Bronwen were already ghosting the column line. Let the formation commit to a hostage play, then take it apart from three sides. The plan was good. It gave her the best survival odds we could make.

I knew all that. I could see where those four muzzles pointed.

I crossed the two meters before I could stop myself. Her breath hit my back, quick and furious. I’d blocked her firing line and disrupted three of our own contingencies. She knew it as well as I did.

The words came up out of some floor of me I’d sealed off after the coup, at a volume this building had never heard from me, a roar off the marble and the gold and the forty-foot banners.

“NOT HER.”

My left hand dropped behind my thigh and cut the two-finger breach signal before command thought fully caught up with instinct.

The formation flinched. Trained men, the best the Conclave owned, and the front rank’s muzzles dipped. Over the comm the whole net went silent, every station, my people hearing a sound out of their commander that none of them knew he kept. Then Zarek, quietly: “There he is.”

In the ringing quiet I found my ordinary voice again.

“Take your shot at me if you want it. Here I am; the object of your hunting, delivered. But understand this first.” I let them see me look at Aarvyd and only at Aarvyd.

“If she dies, there is no version of the next ten minutes in which anyone in this room outlives her. You will be last, and it will not be quick, and no story you tell about this room will ever be managed again. If you fire, that’s what happens. Try me.”

Nobody fired.

Aarvyd studied me across the marble. His official warmth gave way to a delighted smile. He thought he had finally found something he could use against me.

“So,” Aarvyd said softly. “The Architect has a weakness.”

Behind me, almost inaudible, in the register she saves for corrections at my table: “He really doesn’t understand what he’s looking at.”

Aarvyd’s smile widened. “The cases were valuable when I thought they were the only leverage in the room. They aren’t.”

LIKA

“Kill her. Take him alive,” Aarvyd said, and ruined every plan I might have made by aiming the whole formation through the male in front of me.

I had three responses ready in that half-second. I was not helpless behind him. I knew where Zarek was moving, where the rifle in my hands could fire past Rylos’s right side, and I was certain Aarvyd would keep talking before he committed. I’d read every transcript the man produced.

I was wrong.

Our contingency moved on his order. Flinx hit the Regent’s targeting net with a white-noise spike. Anhara’s first round knocked one rifle off line. Bronwen’s concussive charge went under the front rank and broke their stance.

Rylos still did not dive aside, did not drop, did not do one thing a man saving himself does. He turned into me, pulled me against him, and put his back to the rifles. The broken volley meant for a defector’s execution came apart around him. Most went high or wide through blinded optics and moving bodies.

One guard fired clean.

The blast took him in the left shoulder and I felt it arrive through his body into mine, a shock that drove through both of us. Scorched fabric and worse, and Rylos buckled sideways onto the marble with his arms still around me, his full Vinduthi weight taking us both down.

He turned the fall too. Even hit, even burning, he turned us so the stone took his side and not my skull. We came down together behind the base of a column in a tangle of blood and trade clothes.

The case’s strap caught beneath him and tore from its mount as we fell. Soren’s records case hit the marble beside us and slid against the column base. My rifle tore out of my grip and skittered into the open. I shoved the case farther behind the stone with my heel before my hands went to Rylos.

For half a second, under him, in the stink of scorched skin, I was fifteen again reading a resolution letter. The oldest fear I knew came back at once. Everyone I loved died. Then somebody rewrote what they had been.

Then his heart worked against my shoulder, slow, alien, insufferably steady, one beat, two. The fear loosened enough for me to move, and I got my hands moving.