an open drill field. A runway sprawls on the far side of it, where a unit of light fighter craft are doing touch-and-go landings. The summer heat makes the distant pavement of the runway shimmer, and the ground beneath my boots is parched.
Wen barely bats an eye when I turn on her. “I thought I told you I was working on something,” I snap. “I told you to be patient.”
She shrugs, and the rage inside me flares hot. “I’m not gonna sit around and wait to be told where to go and what to do.” Though she speaks with an easy cadence, her tone is measured like she’s toeing a line.
I’m crossing one. “You don’t understand what’s at stake here, Wen!” I shout, throwing up my hands. “This is a military operation. You can’t just—”
“You’re right!” she yells so suddenly that I nearly stagger a step backward. “I don’t know what’s going on here. I’m trapped in this place on a promise that I can get off-world, and I barely know what the Archon Empire was, much less what it means to you. I…” Her voice goes soft, and the fierceness in her eyes drops abruptly, leaving only the hollowed-out look of a girl with no roots. “I thought it was my best option. I thought you were my best option.”
It hits me all at once—this isn’t the fight I’m spoiling for. I sink down on my haunches, the grass crackling beneath me as I sit with my boots pointed toward the distant runway.
Wen joins me a second later. She wraps her arms around her knees and tucks her chin between them. “I’m sorry. I know I jeopardized your position. Gal was probably right to try and send me back.”
It takes me a moment to process what she’s said.
Wen catches my wide-eyed look and gives me a bitter grin. “Thanks for fighting to keep me here, even if it wasn’t worth it.”
“Gal wanted…I mean…”
“It’s okay, Ettian.” She stares up at the distant tail of a fighter craft as it screams along a nearly vertical vector. “I wouldn’t have kept myself around either. Like I said, not much for me to do around here, and I have no idea what’s going on.”
I grimace. “I could give you a recap, but I can’t promise an unbiased one.”
Wen’s eyebrows rise. Go on, she gestures.
So I do. Starting at the very beginning, when the ancient generation fleets were roving down the galactic arm. On Lucia, settlers found a rich world with vast swaths of arable land, and the Umber Empire grew from that abundance. On Rana, they found hard ground and thin air—and the Archon Empire rose to that challenge. It took centuries for terraforming to spread through systems, for powers to condense into the empires we know, and for an actual border to form between the two entities. And, while they had their differences, they managed to coexist peacefully despite them.
And then Iva emp-Umber came to power drenched in her sister’s blood. In the decade after her ascension, the system governors beneath her jockeyed to prove to her that they were just as vicious. To keep them in line, Iva needed more dreadnoughts than the Umber Empire’s mined-out belts could provide and an excuse to unite them against a common enemy.
She looked to her Archon neighbors and saw the solution to both problems.
When I pull back and explain it like this—a game of resources and power, an inevitable consequence of ruling philosophies—it makes the war logical. Inevitable, even, the way history tends to be. I’m halfway to spitting the old propaganda about freeing Archon’s starving people from their imperials’ mismanagement and justifying it completely. But then I remember Umber warbirds razing the skyline of Trost during the final month of fighting. The way the walls of the bunker would shudder around us. The helpless noises it wrenched from my throat.
“You know about the suited knights, right?” I ask, wincing at how sudden the change of vector feels.
Wen shrugs. “Bits and pieces. They were like…vigilantes?”
“What? No!” I laugh. “They were at the service of the Archon imperials themselves. They