AMAIA

  THE SOUND HIT WITHOUT A WARNING. It exploded into her ears, sharp and piercing, like glass shattering inside her skull. She’d heard it before, just yesterday, in her room. Only back then it had been distant. Now it was everywhere. Louder. Hungrier. Sending shivers down her spine.

  The woman questioning her shot up from behind the desk and bolted from the room.

  Hope sparked for a second. Then the heavy click of the lock smothered it again. Amaia didn’t need to check. She knew that sound too well by now.

  But this one, the one still echoing, she wasn’t used to yet. She pressed her palms against her ears, but it made no difference. The sound crawled through her skin. It was as if the walls, the floor, the very air were screaming.

  She realised it was an alarm. A warning bell. Like the tower gongs back home, when the watch spotted something on the horizon.

  Maybe they were under attack. Maybe her father was storming this place.

  She shoved that thought away. Her father had left her once already. Left her and Ademund on that farm. Just turned and walked away like there was something more important to him than his own children.

  She stood up slowly and took a few steps around the room. Rolled her shoulders. Bent at the waist, touched her toes. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Ademund used to do it the moment he woke up, though his routine was longer, more elaborate. Squats, push-ups, weird swings of his arms and legs he insisted were essential.

  He said more and more Faithful were arriving in the city. Said most of them didn’t think much of women. That their thought to treat them worse than animals. Ademund told her that while their father was away, it was up to him to protect her. It was his duty as her brother.

  While father was away...

  That night proved he was never away. He’d had a hidden room the whole time. A secret space beneath the dried-up well, where he sat and schemed while they waited for him. Rayla had called it his “private war room”, filled with papers and plans and gods knew what else. He buried it all the night they came.

  The night he ran and left them at the mercy of that monster of a woman.

  The lock clicked again.

  Amaia blinked. The alarm had stopped, and she hadn’t even noticed when.

  The woman walked in, perfectly composed, save for the strand of hair that had slipped from her immaculate bun and the faint smudge of ash across her cheek. She smoothed her sleeves, adjusted her gloves, and sat down like they were continuing a pleasant conversation.

  “A small incident,” she said with a smile. “Nothing important.”

  But the way she moved, the way her gloves trembled, just slightly, betrayed her. Something had happened. Something big enough to rattle even her. It was something more than a small incident.

  “We’re going to have to accelerate things,” she said, and cleared her throat. Her voice came out warped, raw and rasping, like something had clawed its way through her windpipe.

  “Sorry. Damn smoke. Doesn’t matter.”

  She leaned forward slightly, hands folded.

  “Tell me,” she said. “What’s the last thing you remember? From the Earth. I mean, before we… Before you ended up here.”

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  Something had gone wrong. Amaia could feel it now. Whatever had happened during that alarm, it mattered more than they wanted her to know.

  Amaia knew now, knew with the kind of certainty that hit deep in the gut, not the brain, that whatever that alarm had been, it mattered. It had shaken the woman who’d been questioning her. It had shaken them all. The ones who pulled her strings and puppeteered these interrogations.

  Until now, none of them had ever let their masks slip. They asked the same questions, in the same rehearsed voices, without reacting to anything Amaia said. As if they were puppets at a market play, mouthing lines carved into them by someone else.

  But this woman was different since she returned. No longer in full control. She moved like she was shaken. Brittle. Like someone had tugged too hard on her strings and snapped them loose.

  And still, her voice reached across the desk with sharp insistence.

  “Well? Speak, girl.”

  It was almost the same voice as before. Almost.

  Amaia swallowed.

  “Yanick wasn’t moving,” she said. “He was just lying there. Bleeding. His arm looked wrong, bent in a way it shouldn’t have been.”

  The woman nodded slowly, fingers still twitching on the edge of the desk.

  “You described your brother the same way. When he died.”

  Amaia’s jaw clenched, but she didn’t argue.

  “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

  She remembered Big Mike telling her the story about him and Yanick’s father.

  The woman’s expression shifted to an almost-smile, too sharp at the corners.

  “This Yanick,” she said, dragging out his name like a curse, “you still feel something for him, don’t you? Even after what he did.”

  Amaia looked down at her lap.

  “Yes,” she admitted. Both to the woman and to herself. She could feel it right now, like a stone lodged just beneath her ribs.

  Because it wasn’t just betrayal. It was more complicated. More real than that.

  He had stood up for her, shielded her, even when it put him in danger. He had believed she was worth more than her bloodline, more than what Rayla wanted to trade her for. And even if she’d used him, even if she’d twisted his trust and used his kindness to make her escape — her breath still caught when she thought of him lying broken in the dirt.

  The woman studied her like she was dissecting a wound.

  “Then you’ll be pleased to hear,” she said, tone suddenly lighter, “that we brought him here. To our station.”

  Amaia’s heart thudded.

  “He’s here?” she whispered. Her breath shortened, heat rushing to her cheeks. Her stomach twisted with something like hope, but sharper, more painful.

  The woman didn’t miss it.

  “That alarm, just moments ago,” she said, adjusting the cuffs of her gloves, “it was because of him. He escaped.”

  Amaia stared. Her fingers curled against her palms, nails biting skin. The silence between them stretched tight like a drawn bowstring.

  “With help,” the woman resumed after the pause. “One of ours. A traitor. We’d been holding him in confinement. Seems he and your Yanick made a rather bold exit.”

  He ran away, just like father did.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Amaia asked, her voice sharper than she intended.

  “Because we want your help.”

  “Help?” She let out a dry cough that threatened to turn into a laugh. “Me? You want my help?”

  The woman didn’t flinch.

  “Do you know who your father is?” she asked.

  Amaia stiffened. She’d heard the rumours. The stories whispered by travellers, shouted by rebels, spat by loyalists. Myths and curses, tangled so tightly with lies it had always been easy not to believe them.

  Until that night. The night he ran away and left her and Ademund to Rayla’s mercy.

  ‘The traitor,” the woman continued, “the one who escaped with Yanick. He was the reason your father started the Great War under the banner of the Black Moon. I was for him, your father slaughtered millions of people. Southerners, easterners. Everyone whose skin was darker than that of his pale kin.”

  She’s lying. Don’t listen to her.

  But the words crawled under Amaia’s skin all the same.

  The woman leaned forward slightly.

  “Your skin tone, girl, leads me to believe your father regretted what he did. Maybe it was your mother who made him see it. Or maybe it was you. You and your brother, born under a different sky.”

  Amaia clenched her fists.

  “What do you know about my mother?”

  The woman smiled then. It wasn’t cruel. It was worse. It was calculated. She became the puppeteer right this moment.

  “Let’s make a trade,” she said smoothly. “You help us, and we help you.”

  Her voice was sugar, but the room still felt cold.

  “Is she here too?” Amaia asked. “My mother. Do you keep her here too?”

  The woman said nothing for a beat too long. She stared at Amaia weighing the words in her head.

  “Decide, girl.”

  Amaia didn’t move. But her heartbeat was no longer steady. And in that moment she realised they knew exactly which strings to pull to make her dance like their obedient little puppet.