parents’ memories, to what I owe myself after what I’ve endured in the seven years since the empire fell.
My lips go taut around a question I’m afraid to ask. Finally I spit it out. “When you take down Korsa, would you take his place?”
Wen sighs. Somewhere on the runway, another jet comes down, engines roaring, then rears back into the sky. “Mob rule is mob rule, Ettian,” she says. “The people under Korsa’s thumb wouldn’t be much different from the people under mine. I have to repay him for what he took from me, but I don’t have to take it back.”
“But if you burn him, what fills the hole he leaves?”
“In me or the city?” she asks, and it’s far too insightful for my liking.
“The latter,” I decide after a pause.
Wen groans. “I don’t want to be responsible for that. Someone worse could take his place, or someone better.”
“You could be someone better. Your mother’s blood must be strong in you.”
“You sound like an imperial,” she snorts. “Half the time, I don’t believe in this bloodright stuff. In this empire, a council of planetary representatives elects the emprex, but the idea’s impossible to root out of the criminal sector—they love the notion that the amount of power they hold in their bloodlines justifies their reign. I mean, my own mother…” She catches herself, her expression darkening suddenly. “Anyway, it always seems to be the choices that make a person, not the people who rutted to make ’em.”
“That’s one way of putting it.” I roll my head to the side, my eyes meeting hers.
“Whose side are you on, Ettian?” Wen asks, and I know I’m humped before the words have left her lips. I can’t look away without shattering her trust in the next thing that comes out of my mouth. Can’t take too long to say it, or else the lie is obvious. Can’t lie to her anyway.
“I’m still deciding,” I tell her, because it’s the closest thing to the truth that I can articulate. But the fact that my answer to that question used to be “Gal’s” without hesitation—used to be—is twisting something horrible in me.
I almost tell her, right then and there. Who Gal is and what it means. The full extent of the war that’s been waging inside me since the moment I realized he might not be everything I thought he was. Everything we’ve been through on the journey here, and how it feels to have the fate of two empires tethered to your every choice.
But that truth would lead to other truths, ones I’m not ready to put into words, and so instead I glance toward the hangars at the far end of the runway. “I asked Iral for permission to take you out on a test flight. He’s working on the clearances, and it might take longer after what you pulled this morning, but I swear I’m going to get us in the sky.”
Wen’s smile could give the brutal summer sun a run for its money, and something tells me it has everything to do with the word “us.”
CHAPTER 21
IT TAKES AN extra week to get clearance but only twenty minutes for Wen to drag me by my collar into the cockpit of the waiting Cygnet as soon as the verification comes through.
She’s somehow procured a flight suit. I’m not sure if it was a gift from the resistance or if she simply nicked it from the laundry. Wherever she got it, it’s a little too big for her, and she rolls the sleeves up as she settles amiably in the copilot’s seat. That alone curdles my suspicion—I’d have thought she’d be adamant about being the one to take us out.
Wen notices my hesitation and grins, something leering in the corner of her smile. “Let’s be honest, Ettian—you need this more than I do.”
I roll my eyes and climb past her, swatting her on the side of the head as I drop into the pilot’s seat. Wen cackles, wedging her helmet over the messy braid she’s snarled her hair into. The visor drops over her eyes, replacing them with a silvery