Page 33 of Last of Her Name

I sit by the tensor, which seems to surprise him. He raises his head a little but doesn’t look at me. I can feel his desperation like a fever’s heat. This cool, polite exterior he projects is a thin shell; I wonder how close he is to splitting open. What happens when a tensor loses control? Again, the darker stories I’ve heard bubble in the back of my mind, but I shake them away.

In these skies, everyone’s trying to save someone.

“When did he take her?” I ask softly.

His reply is flat. “It’s been one hundred and eighty-three days.”

I swallow. “And you’ve been looking for her all that time?”

“Every minute of it. Even in my sleep, I …” He releases a shaky breath, his eyes boring into the open palms of his hands. “It’s no use. The Union is too strong, too well defended. Even if I knew where she was being held, I couldn’t get to her. And now I know I’m too weak to playtheirgames.”

Meaning he won’t trade us for Natalya, I suppose. But it’s hard to feel relief when I know what he’s experienced, the pain of seeing your loved ones ripped away and knowing you’re powerless to help them. The grief and anger I’m feeling now, he’s been living with for more than six months.

He’s a tensor. I’ve seen his incredible power. Ifhecan’t rescue a prisoner from the Union, what hope doIhave?

I push back against the despair snaking around my lungs. “Maybe the Loyalists can help us both.” I have to grind out the words, the taste of them bitter on my tongue. “I don’t trust them. But they have to be better than the Union, right?”

Pol is watching us now, from across the deck, but thank the stars he’s keeping quiet.

“I met a Loyalist spy once,” says Riyan. “We were both trying to infiltrate a gulag on Emerault. She was looking for someone too, and I told her if I saw her man, I’d find a way to help him. All I wanted was for her to agree to the same, to help Natalya if she could.”

He sits up, and though he doesn’t look at Pol, I can feel the air simmering between them. His words are directed at the aeyla more than me. While I don’t think he’ll try attacking Pol again, I still can’t help but tense.

“She told me to crawl back to whatever black hole had spawned me,” Riyan says through his teeth. “She said if the Union had my sister, then they were welcome to her. She said she hoped they’d already shot her and rid the galaxy of one more freak.Thatis what the Loyalists think of my people.”

A painful silence seizes the deck. I glance at Pol, and see him gazing at Riyan with a queasy expression.

“Look, mate,” he says, his voice rough. “I’m sorry for the wholewitchthing. I should know better. I …doknow better.”

I know he’s thinking of the vityazes in Afka, and the vile slurs they hurled.

“But we’re not all like that spy you met,” he adds.

“No?” Riyan’s gaze turns dangerously cool. He rises to his feet, and I rise with him, electrified with alarm. But he doesn’t attack Pol. Instead, he presses a series of buttons on the arm of the sofa, and a hologram activates, a wide cone of light beaming down from a projector in the ceiling. It fills the empty floor between him and the aeyla. The threads of light twist and coalesce into a shape that makes my heart twinge.

Emerault’s moon.

The moon the Leonov emperor destroyed, sparking the war that split the galaxy apart.

I let out a long, thin breath, knowing this won’t end well. And judging by Pol’s expression, he knows it too. He’s already shaking his head, preparing a defense, but Riyan doesn’t give him time to speak.

“Forty-eight of my people died the day Emperor Pyotr Leonov destroyed this moon. I knew the name and face of each one. They were there to attend a mathematics conference. Half of them were schoolchildren.” His tone is clad in ice. “One of them was my mother. Then, when the war began, the Empire had the audacity to ask us for aid. When we did not come, they branded us traitors and oathbreakers. Is this the cause to which you’ve sworn yourself? Is this your good to the Union’s evil?”

Pol looks at me, perhaps expecting me to step in and defend the empire he thinks I should inherit. But I can’t.

I can only watch him and wait to hear his answer, because Riyan has found the words for the question I’ve been too afraid to voice: Is Pol’s faith in the Loyalists as blind as I fear it is? Has he given himself wholly to their cause?

Who is Appollo Androsthenes? A Loyalist soldier, or my friend?

But he doesn’t give an answer. He just stares at the shining hologram moon, his face pale but impassive.

Riyan shuts down the hologram. “I can’t trust your people, but I won’t keep you from them. As soon as we reach your base, let’s agree to part ways and forget we ever met.”

Pol nods once, ashen. He looks like he’s had the wind knocked from his lungs.

Riyan leaves the deck, disappearing into one of the cabins in the rear of the ship. Left alone with Pol, I sink onto the sofa and feel his eyes on me. A long moment of silence passes between us. If Clio were here, she’d try to lighten the mood by noting how the blue lighting inside theValentinamakes Pol’s horns look sexy, or something stupid like that. Stars, I miss her so much I can hardly breathe. Everything in me is out of balance without her by my side. I’m careening out of control, faster and faster, all thruster and no brakes.

“You think he’s right,” Pol says at last.