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Chapter Twenty Four

S ami and Romaissa flatly refused to re-stage the signing at the top of the Atlas Mountains.

“The Green Futures Summit has been taking place on the island,” Romaissa said firmly. “We finish it there. All the delegates are there anyway. Maximum exposure, secure proximity. We’re not risking you again.”

Zynara gave her a look and the woman didn’t even flutter her eyelids.

She was probably losing her touch. She’d probably surrendered it to Lottie Finch, the grifter who worked for the Queen of England and who likely had been lying so long and so hard in her life she probably no longer knew she was doing it.

Zynara hated probabilities . She preferred cold, hard facts, scientifically demonstrable and repeatable. Solutions nailed down after rigorous testing. Not whispered promises sealed with a dubious kiss.

At least her father had been pleased. Hell, he’d been so relieved and had hugged her so tightly when she told him, it made her realise just how much he’d been carrying on her behalf. She’d been selfish. She’d denied him his rest as his illness had progressed.

It crystalised a few things.

She hadn’t seen Lottie since that morning, but the signing with Petrov was going ahead on the Azure islands. She’d flown over in a brand new flier with two regular members of her detail at her side. It made her realise how comfortable she’d become with Lottie’s protection instead.

If you could call that gorgeous little psychopath’s care protection, she thought, smothering a smile.

She still wanted her, even if she wasn’t sure she could trust her.

Antonin Petrov hadn’t been scared off. In fact, the attempted kidnapping at the top of the Atlas Mountains had only solidified his resolve.

“I don’t believe we were in any danger, Highness,” he told her respectfully.

“The leaders of today’s authoritarian governments devote full-time attention to the crippling of their opposition without annihilating it.

They flout the rule of law all while maintaining a plausible veneer of order, legitimacy and prosperity.

Trust me. I live under Putin. This I know. But you cannot trust your brother.”

There wasn’t anyone Zynara could trust.

So there they were, facing the summit on the Azure islands again, the eyes of the world watching Ain Zargiers and Russia’s bravest gas mogul sign a ten-year deal to make the planet a safer place.

Zynara had hoped to do it with Lottie’s cheeky smile waiting for her off stage, but she couldn’t see her anywhere.

Two insanely expensive fountain pens scratched on excruciatingly detailed contracts—and the deal was done.

Cameras flashed. The polite applause was optimistic. She and Antonin shook hands. Champagne popped—and nothing happened.

The press conference went without a hitch and they mingled for canapes. And still the world hadn’t ended.

Where was Malik? He would know by now, she thought. Perhaps that was why he wasn’t there. He was throwing his toys out of the pram up at the palace. Smashing his cars.

And then the lights flickered—

—and she knew.

The screen behind the summit dais glitched once, twice, then cut to black.

She felt it before it happened—a shift in the air, the collective intake of breath from a crowd unsure if what they were seeing was an error or a spectacle.

From the corner of her eye she saw the high-res LED banners swirl.

The Green Futures: Powering the Next Century logo dissolved into a single line of text.

‘Can’t keep the lights on, sister?’

And then everything went dead.

Romaissa was at her shoulder in an instant. She handed her a tablet and leaned in close.

“The connector to Spain,” she murmured. “It was cut five minutes ago. All high voltage cables from the offshore wind farms are down. Local power is out in five provinces. This” —she waved a hand at the room— “is the least of it.”

Zynara stared at the screen. For a moment, nothing moved in her chest.

This is what it was to rule, she thought. This is what lay in front of her.

Then she snapped into action. “Get Sami. Now.”

She pivoted, calm as glass, and strode from the room. It barely even mattered that back-up battery-supplied power clicked on mere milliseconds later.

In a conference suite, the news struck harder.

“We think it was mechanical failure,” Romaissa repeated, as if trying to believe it herself. “But— there’s no seismic activity. No maintenance in any of those sections. No explanation.”

Zynara flicked through the feeds, her fingers trembling despite herself.

Three major transmission lines from three of Ain Zargiers’ largest solar fields were offline.

The dual deep-sea high-voltage direct current connectors that carried massive amounts of critical renewable energy to Spain, France and onwards to the UK were dead.

Europe’s southern grid had been severely destabilised.

Whole sections of the network blacked out before her eyes.

They all relied on Ain Zargieri transmission of renewables.

Her entire green energy infrastructure had been made a joke in front of every energy minister on the planet.

“This isn’t failure,” she said, her voice low. “This is sabotage.”

She turned sharply as the door banged open.

Sami stood there, rumpled and furious. He threw down a tablet with a satellite image. Black shapes, clustered near the intercontinental connector route.

“Thank god for your batteries, Niz. The whole city went offline for a moment before commercial backup kicked in.” He grunted at the image.

“Submersibles. Heat signatures. Likely foreign-manufacture. Someone severed both lines with highly focussed, deliberately placed undersea explosions. Anyone want to guess who?”

Zynara barely looked at the satellite pics. Her spine straightened. “Where is Malik?”

“Standing in front of a camera on Twitter offering emergency oil support to Europe.” He held out his phone.

Malik was dressed in traditional robes. The desert stretched out behind him, brilliant in the sunshine.

The pipes of an oil refinery crunched in the sands, the Ain Zargieri flag flying from its heights.

A gas fired power station hunkered at its side.

There it was. The knife twist. Her brother turning her country into a punchline, her father's dream into a laughing stock.

“Of course,” she murmured. Of course he was.

There was another commotion at the door as Lottie barged past her security detail.

“Give me one good reason not to fly out there and torch every single one of his oil wells,” she demanded.

Zynara didn’t look at her.

“Because he wants you to,” she said. “He wants us to look like extremists.” Her voice cracked.

Europe would be running with the story now.

Markets would be crashing. Investors would start asking questions.

Power grids would be straining. People would be stuck in darkened subway tunnels, children would be trapped in elevators.

Life support machines in hospitals would be triaged as generators struggled to supply optimum power.

It wasn’t the game Malik thought it was. It was life and death, and Zynara had an obligation.

Heavy the head that wore the crown, she thought bitterly.

“Where have you been?” she whispered.

But bloody Lottie Finch didn’t give up so easily.

“So, you can fix this, right?” she blurted. “I mean, you flew in those batteries last week when he took out your desal plant. You can do the same again. Can’t you?”

“I can fix all the local outages, of course.” Zynara lifted her chin.

Rage, heartbreak and calculation were all wired into her next breath.

“But I can’t fly batteries to Spain and France.

I can’t fix the subsea cables inside a month.

We need his fossil fuels—oil and gas. We have supply agreements with Europe.

He knows that too. We need his fucking oil. ”

“Then that’s where he’ll be!” Lottie cried. “Bili and I have been trying to find him all morning. And I really, really hate to tell you this, princess, but I think he’s got your father.”