“The tunnels won’t work, Visha, because it traps us all. If we get caught during the landslides, we won’t be able to escape. And not just us, but also the Sesharians working the mines. We can’t just leave them.”
Visha rubbed the back of her neck. She stared at the map, her eyebrows knitting together.
“Wait,” she said suddenly. “What if—”
She was interrupted by a loud bang at the front of the hall. They sprang up at once. Samson pulled out his urumi as Chandi shouted for the men in the armory to guard the doors. But it was only Akiri. The twin weapons master called them to come out, quick, look, look!
Samson was already midway down the stairs when he heard it. The roar of engines. His heart stuttered and dropped. Had the Jantari launched a counterattack? Was Farin finally making his move?
But Akiri pointed north, to the Agnee mountains, and in the fading dusk, Samson saw the shape of a tanker lift into the air.
“What?” he began.
“Did the Cyleoni fucking abandon us?” Visha said.
“They’re gone,” Chandi said, looking at her holopod. “Both of them.”
“Sir!” A soldier jogged up the steps, saluted, and handed him three things:herurumi and anklets.
“General,” Visha said.
Samson took them with shaking fingers. A message was crudely etched on the urumi, and he raised the blade to read it.
The Yumi never liked urumis. I’m leaving it with you.
“General.”
She knew about the trackers in the anklets. She knew, and she had left him.She had fucking abandoned him.Samson searched the sky, but the tanker was already fading into the distance. The urumi and anklets hung limply in his hands.
“General!”
He turned, a snarl on his lips, when Visha pointed behind them and into the hall. On the table beside the holopanel, the metal lotus began to glow a deep incarnadine. Then it began to vibrate.
Suddenly, alarms blared. Samson whipped around to see pulse fire coming from the walls as the tiny shapes of his soldiers ran up and down the ramparts.
“The Arohassin are here.”
CHAPTER 24
ELENA
Every great man must know how to betray.
—a Sesharian proverb
The Ahi Sea glimmered beneath her like a liquid sheet of black glass, trapping starlight within its dark and unknowable depths. It was as if she were staring into a void. A deep, unsettling feeling limned the bottom of her chest, and Elena looked away. The sea always frightened her. She had only traveled across it once, on a state visit to Nbru with her father back when he still took trips to the first continent. Then, and even now, she had retreated.
“Nervous?” Kirri asked.
“Is it that obvious?”
Before Kirri could answer, the panel chimed, and a holo of Syla appeared before them.
“Elena,” he cried, “you are either mad or a genius for a maneuver like this.”
“Some say there’s a fine line between the two,” she said.
“Spoken like your father,” he grumbled, though a smile tugged at his mouth. “When Kirri first told me of your plan, I had half a mind to call back my men. But he was right. We can cut two stalks with one sword. I just hope that at least one of you succeeds.”
