Page 39 of Alien Devil’s Crown

The throne level of the Capital Spire came apart.

Zarek and Bronwen hit the formation from behind the column line where they’d been drifting, unremarked, since the first sentence of Aarvyd’s speech.

Kallum, who had peeled off while Aarvyd talked, dropped into their rear from the upper gallery; I never saw when he left us, only that a Regent’s Own guard went down and Kallum was suddenly behind the formation.

Brevan and Carys took the left flank, Flinx blinding optics. Varrick sealed the level’s far doors on their own reinforcements. Anhara fired from the colonnade, one careful shot at a time.

Four bonded pairs, and us. Five fighting units, one column, and the only competent formation in the building lasted eleven seconds. Even flat on the marble with a wounded Vinduthi over me, I could see our people covering one another through the smoke.

One of the great sunburst banners took a plasma bolt at its top mounting and let go of the wall, forty feet of the Conclave’s face falling in slow majesty through the smoke. It fell across three of their own dead. Nobody had aimed at it.

I had Rylos’s blood on my hands and his weight against me. He was conscious, breathing through his teeth, the shoulder a ruin of char and gray skin and bright shocking red.

My hands were already working, field dressing out of his own kit, pressure where pressure could go, and they were steady. The shaking would come later. It always did.

“Serious,” he gritted, self-report, commander’s habit. “Not fatal. Vinduthi. It’s already slowing.” His right hand caught my wrist over the dressing, held it there, made me meet his eyes. “Lika. Look at the room.”

I looked at the room. Bronwen dropped beside us and levered Rylos upright with his good arm across her shoulders; then her hand replaced mine over the dressing, firm and competent. He got his feet under him against the column.

Through the smoke along the colonnade, walking backward off his own battlefield, one hand keying and rekeying at his collar, went the silver-haired reason for all of it. Calling for reinforcements that Varrick’s sealed doors would strand two levels down. Calling for air cover that was currently discovering the Penumbra. Calling, at the end of everything, for staff.

Bronwen kept pressure on the dressing. “I’ll stay here with him and the case.”

“Go,” Rylos said.

Aarvyd was retreating toward the smaller old door in the room’s eastern face. Toward the east access. He was moving over the same stretch of marble Soren had defended, and everything in me narrowed to that fact.

I took a fallen guard’s rifle. I checked its cell the way Derev taught me, on the move, and I walked.

I let him see me coming, past columns I’d crossed without lifting my head. For years I’d planned to hurt the Conclave with evidence in a courtroom. Every version of the plan had ended in documents. Testimony. Soren’s name read into a record.

I’d never once, in all those years of wanting, planned for this: the author of it all, alone, in reach, on the floor his order had bloodied, with nothing between us but ten meters of marble and everything he’d taught me to be.

Aarvyd saw me coming and understood. He tried command first.

“Strategist Darven, stand down.” Command. I kept walking.

“Name a figure. Any figure. You’ve seen the vault; I can triple it.” I kept walking.

“I have grandchildren.” The first honest sentence I’d ever heard him speak, and it arrived a lifetime too late at a woman who’d been six once, in a camp, in a fever year. I kept walking.

He turned to run in earnest.

I shot him through the right knee.

He went down against the east-access door, screaming now, silk gone, just an old man’s raw voice, and he clawed himself half-upright against the door frame. I stopped four meters out, aimed, and took the left knee too. He had called worse things policy.

He slid down the doorway my brother held and sat at the foot of it, hands finding the marble. For the first time I had ever seen, Regent Aarvyd had nothing to say.

I stood over him with a dead guard’s rifle, and the noise of the room fell away until there was only his breathing and mine. Up close he was simply an old man. Silver hair disarranged, chairman’s coat scorched at the hem, an old man against an old door.

I asked myself once whether Soren would have wanted mercy. Maybe he would have. I could not find any for the man who had ordered the coup and helped erase the people who died resisting it.

“My name is Lika Vashri.”

“Look at me.” He looked.

“My brother’s name was Soren Vashri. Guard Second Class, Sovereign’s Household. He was twenty-one years old, and when your men came through this level, he held this door. This one. The one you’re bleeding on. Nineteen minutes, alone, wounded, against everything you sent, and when he was dead you flagged his file TRAITOR and erased him by breakfast, and his sister was fifteen, and she read your resolution letter forty times looking for his name and it was not there.”