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Prudently and still somewhat shaken, she booked passage back to Dunia the next day.
Later, back home, Selene watched a holo news interview featuring Rhesian authorities who claimed they found the cause of the vicious fire that had consumed Prince Occaro’s study. According to witnesses, the royal had gone to retrieve a new laser gun he’d wanted to show off to his friends and fans at the party.
The weapon itself was reported to be a rare, handcrafted piece that retailed for hundreds of thousands of schills. It’d been shipped from Iccythria by a dear friend of the Prince as a birthday gift.
The experts said the gun must have misfired due to the Prince’s mishandling. Its energy cartridge had exploded, causing the blaze.
However, a contradictory top-secret report crossed her desk a few weeks later. One she’d requested from the Dunian Security Intelligence Office after debating with herself about coming clean about the events of that fateful night.
The brief outlined how Prince Occaro’s pleasant public facade had hidden a violent temper. Interviews with anonymous sources uncovered rumours that he’d assaulted more than one noblewoman. And got another pregnant. Intelligence operatives suggested it’d been Lady Sarita, the wayward daughter of Duke Faustian, one of King Auban’s close friends.
Worse still, credible evidence found that Occaro had secretly been behind a plan to assassinate Prince Naveen, the King’s first son, and his nephew. The plan hatched a few years ago was a bid to thrust himself closer to the throne’s ascension line.
The plot - an attack on a spaceliner the young Prince had purportedly been travelling on - had failed. It turned out the King’s son had not been on board. Nonetheless, faceless perpetrators had rigged it with explosives. As a result, it blew up, killing thousands.
Fathers, mothers, children. Many had been refugees from various parts of Pegasi, relocating to the moon station Eden II in the skies above Dunia.
It seemed someone had wanted Prince Occaro to pay for some or all of his sins. With his life, no less.
She read the report with great outrage.
If the intel was indeed true, the flaming vigilante had delivered the best possible justice,Selene angrily thought.
She made a few conclusions of her own. And quite a few conjectures. Which led to a single hypothesis - that this affair, while deeply disturbing, was simply none of her business.
So she locked the report in her office safe and promptly forgot it there.
For her home planet, Dunia, had enough problems of its own.
I
Don’t set sail on someone else’s star.
1
A Landslide Of The Heart
Selene, seven months later
She ached.
Even the bones of her little finger cried out for relief.
She was shattered.
Wiped.
Done.
‘Fokk!’ she cursed under her breath.
She pulled her booted foot from an unexpected hole in the ground filled with icy water.
There was no time to stop and empty the soaked brogues. So she gritted her teeth and squelched on.
The river she and her three companions were walking along was a mass of surging, boiling water and rocks, the result of a rain-spawned tempest of planetary magnitude.
The storm surge had resulted from a devastation in the skies above. It had hammered the vertical slopes of the dark mountain slopes that ringed the valley they were trudging through.
