Sergeant Qiva mek-Hvok is lying on the flatbed of a troop transport, in the center of a rapidly reinforcing perimeter of marines and metal. Her right arm is cocooned in gauze; its end is strapped into a heavy black cylinder with a thicket of tubes spilling from its end.

  She gives Grant a woozy smile as he approaches. “Hey, Majesty. I’d salute, but.” She wiggles the arm in the contraption. “Y’need a hand for that.”

  “You’re a hero, Qiva,” Grant says. “Let everyone salute you for a change.” He climbs into the flatbed. “How are you feeling, if that’s not a stupid question?”

  “Ah, fine,” she says. “I mean it hurt like a bitch. But now I am pretty fucking faded on this Taiikari painkiller goop.” She looks past Grant’s shoulder and whistles. “Corp. C’mere.”

  Talem looks up from the huddle he’s in with the other marine section officers. His face is unreadable beneath his marine facemask but Grant’s gotten good at reading the body language of the soldiers under his command—first a desperate magnetic need to get to Qiva and then a squeal of his mental brakes as he sees Grant and remembers his duty.

  Grant beckons impatiently. “Get over here, Corporal.”

  Talem scrambles onto the flatbed. “You dipshit,” he says. “Jumping on a grenade. Fuck you, Sarge. Never scare me like that again.”

  Qiva giggles weakly. “Hi to you too, little Imp.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Gimme a kiss,” she says. “And get me some xhurr.”

  Talem flips his visor up out of his helmet and kisses Qiva’s clammy forehead. “You’re torn up, Sarge.”

  “I’ll be good,” Qiva croaks. “Little organ damage never killed anyone.”

  “That is incredibly untrue,” Talem says.

  “And they’ll get me some kinda sick Imp robot hand, right?” Qiva indicates the contraption where her forearm used to be.

  “We can get you a normal one,” Talem says. “A synthvat grow-and-sew. Good as new.”

  “Oh.” Qiva sounds vaguely disappointed. “Do I have to?”

  “Yes,” Talem says. “I know you, sarge. You’ll think a robot arm is fucking awesome for a couple of cycles and then you’d realize how hard it is to maintain it and we’d need to do the whole surgery to take the node back off the stump and I don’t want to have to hold your fuckin’ hand through that. Especially if it’s silicon.”

  She hacks a laugh. “No fun.”

  “And you wouldn’t be able to tattoo it.”

  “All right, all right, fine. Where’s the xhurr at?”

  Talem clicks his tongue. “They’re not gonna let you chew xhurr, dude.”

  “His Majesty’s right here.” Qiva’s thick tail thumps pathetically on the flatbed. “Hey, Majesty. I shot the guy. Hook a girl up.”

  “Let’s not do anything that could interact with the pain meds,” Grant says. “Okay?”

  Qiva scoffs. “Fine. Dad.”

  Talem makes a pained noise in his throat. “Qiva.”

  “Can he stay with me, at least?” Qiva mumbles. Her unsteady touch grazes Talem’s thigh. “I know he’s got a job to do. Can he stay?”

  “They need me, sarge.” Talem rest his hand on Qiva’s. “I’ll be back, but—”

  “I love you.”

  The rest of whatever Talem was going to say compresses into a wispy “What?”

  “Don’t leave,” she rasps. “I love you.”

  The marine whose commlink was raising the Pike is gesturing urgently across the square for Grant. He holds up a one-second finger and looks back to the wounded warrior and her… whatever Talem is. “Stay with her,” Grant says. “That’s an order, Lance Corporal.”

  The order from his Prince snaps Talem out of his stunned fugue long enough to deliver a salute. Grant returns it and hops from the transport. He moves through a crowd of anxious, terrified Eqtorans. Black Pike marines guard every exit, kettling in the shifting crowd and shoving back anyone who tries to leave. HAK-suited soldiers move through the crowd, searching people, raising voices. The baby Grant passed on his way in wails in her father’s heavy arms. He picks up the pace to a jog.

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  The impromptu HQ has set itself up in the vacated temple's shadow. Ipqen chats with the medtech who’s replacing the gauze on her arm, peppering the guy with questions about the medical gel he’s using. Ruaq stands to one side, her communicator to her ear. “We’re both fine,” she says. “We’re coming back with the Prince. I—”

  She pauses to listen to whoever is on the other end.

  “I know you are,” she says, turning away from the square and lowering her voice. “I am, too. It’s okay. Ipqen’s okay. It’s just a scratch for a big hunky bitch like her. Are you—no. No, I know. Look, we should have this conversation in person, maybe. The three of us.”

  The communication specialist is standing with Lieutenant Numia and a grave-looking Eqtoran woman with a nose ring, who Grant recalls is Qiva’s second-in-command. Shaneq-mek-Hvok, he remembers. She salutes. “Majesty.”

  “Talem would be proud of that one,” Grant says. Shaneq gives that a wry huff.

  Sykora’s voice is emerging from the comm link in strident speakerphone.

  “I want the square locked down,” she says. “Nobody in or out. I want everyone questioned. I want Shoskia taken in and questioned. She knew today was happening.”

  Grant gestures to the comm.

  “I want that little serpent Ecclesiast Multraq muzzled and interned,” Sykora continues, as the comms officer hands her over. “If qe wants to spout all that hatred about my people and then pretend at innocence—”

  Grant turns the speaker off and raises the comm to his ear. “Hi, baby. You’re off the speaker.”

  “Grantyde?” Sykora goes high and squeaky. “Oh, dove. Thank the Gods of the Firmament you’re okay. Are you somewhere safe? You’re not outside, are you?”

  “Everything’s under control.” Grant hunkers away from the marines, who watch him warily. “Listen: I won’t openly countermand you again, but I need you to rescind those orders.”

  “What—but—they could have killed you,” she whispers furiously.

  “But they didn’t,” he says. “Because we had guards to keep me safe, and they did their jobs. The woman who killed the attacker and leapt on his grenade was an Eqtoran.”

  “Dove—”

  “I can see the faces down here. These people are freaking out from the attack and they’re terrified you’ll come down on them hard over it. Multraq is already a quarter of a way through coming up with some kind of bullshit public statement about the violence that the Taiikari import with them, I guarantee it. A little bit of restraint, a little bit of care, and we prove something to them. I believe that.”

  And you prove something to me, he thinks.

  A note of uncertainty in Sykora’s trim reply. “We need to know who he was working with, Grantyde. We need to keep as many of those people there as we can while we investigate.”

  “Maybe it was an agent provocateur from Shoskia.” Grant continues to pace away from the marines, who keep a nervous eye on him. He steps through a cordon to the site of the detonation. past the techs swabbing the residue and running imaging wands across the crater. “Or maybe it was the Penitent, or some other lurking enemy. Maybe he was hired or compelled. Or maybe it was one of the billions of people we conquered. Maybe there’s rage here, and it’s real.”

  He ignores all the living pairs of eyes that track his every move, and focuses on the graying, vacant gaze of the man his marines killed, half-zipped into an orange body bag. Sergeant Qiva’s rifle reduced the guy’s chest to shredded meat. The corpse looks focused, not enraged. But there’s only so much you can read into a dead face.

  “But we stopped them,” he says. “And we’re on high alert now. And I’m going to be honest with you—if we don’t get our answer today, I can live with that, if it means we’re not brutalizing or incarcerating these people. I get we need to understand what happened. But I can’t sit by and watch our people come down as heavy as you’ve instructed.”

  “You have children to raise, Grant.” Sykora goes whispery and pleading. “You have a family. They’re almost here. I need to—I’d burn that entire planet to keep you safe.”

  “I know you would. I know. And I love you for it.” He brings the communicator close. “But it scares me.”

  Her deep breath crackles the line.

  “I need to see this work without blood or bad will,” he says. “I need to see us enact a measured, careful, coolheaded response. I need all that because if we don’t, I think we’re playing into the hands of whoever did this. And because I’ve been kind of freaking out lately about what I said to you, about what we’re going to do to Maekyon. I was able to hand my planet to you because of what you and I did on Eqtora. And I can’t watch it fall apart. I need to prove to myself that it can work, that we can be kind and just and prudent even when our first response is righteous anger. So please, Batty. Please, please, please. I petition you as a subject, and I beg you as your husband. Please, mercy.”

  The Song of Resilience keeps its steady synthesized drumbeat going over Sykora’s silence, for a few slow seconds.

  “I love you,” she says.

  “I love you, too,” he says.

  “We need to take Multraq in, at least,” she says. “I’ll let the Eqtorans handle the security, but we need to keep that ecclesiast locked down awhile. For qer own safety as much as anything.”

  “Sure. As long as we don’t disappear qer entirely.”

  “And I won’t move against Shoskia openly, but privately, between us, I’m considering this an escalation on her part.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “I want you to be as excited as I am, Grantyde.” She sounds so small in contrast to how she was when she was giving orders. “For Maekyon, I mean. To think of you afraid—it would break my heart.”

  “I’m trying. I swear I am.”

  “Then I owe it to you to try, too.” Grant can visualize her straightening her spine; her voice gets its Princess poise back. “Give me back to the Lieutenant. We’ll clear the square and disperse the citizens. No arrests today. Not without a big, bald-faced reason.”

  “Thank you, Sykora.” He nearly kisses the comm and remembers it’s not his. “Thank you so fucking much. Really.”

  “Thank me by coming back to me, Grant,” she says. “As soon as you possibly can. Steal an interceptor if you have to.”

  He laughs. “That’s the thing about being a Prince, babe. I own all the interceptors.”

  He hears her smile. “I own all the interceptors, insufferable little Prince. No scratching the paint.”

  They keep their inane little patter up as Grant jogs the communicator back to the marines, and despite the blackened patch on the ground—and on the day—his stomach unknots itself with every step that brings him closer to the Princess of the Black Pike.