Jainan shoved the door aside and burst into the hallway, now crowded with dinner guests. People were looking at them. They were in the way of the exit; Jainan had to stop for an instant, trapped. He turned his head.
“I … I understand,” Kiem said. The tight lines at the corners of his eyes were back. “I’m, I’m sorry. I’ll leave you alone.”
And then he was gone.
It happened so fast that Jainan didn’t even realize Kiem had really gone until the murmur of chatter started up again. People’s sidelong glances were turning into outright stares. Kiem had pushed through the crowd, not toward their guest suite, but deep into the station in the opposite direction.
Jainan looked at the floor, reflexively straightened his shirt, and walked through the crowd without meeting anyone’s eyes. The next thing he knew, he was back in their rooms. Their silent, white, empty rooms, with just the ringing memory of what he had done. He crumpled into a chair.
Who would Kiem tell? With Taam there had always been the safety of knowing that both of them would rather crawl over broken glass than shame themselves in public. Kiem didn’t care about his reputation. Would he talk to the press? Jainan couldn’t stop him. He could not go back to Thea. He pressed his hand over his face and tried not to think about the fact there was no way out.
He would have to talk to Kiem later and attempt to salvage something. They still had to try to find some way of fixing the treaty—though it seemed more and more unlikely with every hour. Jainan felt the weight of the station atmosphere on his shoulders as if it had substance and mass, pressing down. Was his marriage dissolved? How likely was it that Kiem would keep up the charade after a scene like that?
The door chimed. Jainan looked up, adrenaline surging through him until he realized that the door would have just opened for Kiem without announcement. He sank back. He was not going to receive company on Kiem’s behalf, not now.
The chime sounded again. It cut off halfway through, with a harsh beep, and the door opened of its own accord. An arm slammed against it as it drew fully aside and someone slapped a manual lock on the frame to keep it open.
Jainan was only halfway to his feet by the time the visitors entered. There were five of them: a corporal strode into the middle of the room, and his four soldiers fanned out into a loose semicircle. Their incapacitator guns were out. They weren’t pointed, but everyone’s attention was on Jainan.
Jainan stopped his instinctive scramble to stand and rose the rest of the way slowly. He was in a place beyond emotion. “Ah. Good evening.”
“Count Jainan.” The corporal didn’t even incline his head. “I would be obliged if you refrained from sudden movements.”
“To what do I owe this visit?”
“You are under arrest for the murder of Prince Taam,” the corporal said, “and the attempted murder of Prince Kiem.”
Jainan breathed in slowly. Everything was suddenly very simple: the smallest of movements, like the wavering mouth of the capper nearest him, had a sharp, almost otherworldly clarity. A direct hit on the skull would be fatal; anywhere else would knock him out. “I see,” he said. “If this is legitimate, then you will not mind if I inform my partner.”
He slammed his hand down toward his wristband to trigger an emergency command. Before he could finish the sequence, the mouth of the capper blazed with a shimmer of force. It hit Jainan’s chest; he fell back, his conscious thoughts ripping like wet tissue. He had failed in so many ways. It was almost a relief to black out.
* * *
The line between consciousness and sleep was very thin, and Jainan was still unsure he’d crossed it when he opened his eyes. His vision was hazy. He felt some sort of restraints around his wrists and padding under his back. He was lying down.
What was terrifying was that the dizziness didn’t clear any further as he woke. The slightest movement of his head left him drained and sick. He forced himself to try and look around.
At first he thought he was back on one of his student manufacturing placements. The space felt enormous, like a warehouse, though most of it was dark. The gravity was still weak. The only illumination came from a single, jury-rigged floodlight that formed a pool of brightness around a figure perched on the side of a crate, working from a wrist-screen.
Aren.
“Oh hell, already?” Aren said. He idly wiped away the screen. “I’m still waiting for the technician. You’ve got the constitution of a fucking elephant, anyone ever tell you that?”
Jainan was battling his nausea too hard to answer immediately. The bed he was lying on felt like a hospital bed, with removable guardrails on each side and clips at the foot to hold machinery. He couldn’t tell if it was normal to feel this way; he had never been on the wrong end of an incapacitator gun before. He took a deep breath against the rising dizziness and concentrated hard. “We didn’t even suspect you,” he said. “Why move now?”
Aren pulled his legs up and sat cross-legged on the crate, somehow balancing on the very edge. “Okay, well, here’s the thing,” he said. “When you send a meeting request to the Emperor’s aides and mention the fucking army, the first thing they do is get in touch with the supreme commander to find out what’s going on. And the first thing the supreme commander does is come down on me like a ton of fucking bricks for not maintaining a minimum level of operational secrecy around Kingfisher. So, thanks for that! Really made my day.”
Jainan turned around the phrase operational secrecy in his head, where it felt jagged and painful. Kingfisher—not just Taam, but his whole operation—had something to hide, and the supreme commander knew about it. “General Fenrik knew what Taam was doing.”
“Yes, well done, congratulations on catching up with the rest of us. All those years with Taam really did fry your brain, didn’t they? Mind you, I always felt my IQ dropping when I sat down to dinner with him—a boor in the grand tradition of all royal boors.” Aren moved again, dangling his legs off the crate. “No wonder Fenrik was so fond of him. Like to like.”
Jainan tried to sit up. That was when he realized the cuffs and the guardrails were totally unnecessary; he could barely manage to make his muscles acknowledge him, let alone obey him. There were odd-shaped spikes around the bed, which Jainan would guess projected some sort of field, but they didn’t seem to be turned on. He let himself lie back, slowly cataloging his bruises. “Who killed him?”
Aren raised an eyebrow. “Wasn’t it you?”
Jainan stayed silent. He finally identified a pinching sensation in his arm as an intravenous patch, which presumably had something to do with the dizziness. If he could roll onto the floor he might yank it out, but with his hands tied, that was a plan with a short shelf life.
Aren broke the silence by laughing abruptly. “No. Our esteemed General Fenrik still doesn’t know who killed Taam. He gave me the authority to run a confidential investigation, isn’t that ironic? I’ve given him some perfect suspects. It doesn’t look like he’s going to buy Audel, though, and neither will Internal Security, so you’ll have to do instead.”
Jainan tasted copper in his mouth. “Why?”
“Why you? Well, you’ve reached the status of royal fucking pain.” That wasn’t what Jainan had meant, but he didn’t interrupt. Aren’s heels beat against the crate with a jagged, suppressed energy. “I didn’t even realize how much you’d pulled out of those files we released to the College. Taam redacted the shit out of them before he let them go, but apparently not well enough. That got Internal Security sniffing around and Internal Security is hard for even General Fenrik to squash. Then just when I had the perfect plan for you to take the fall for all of it, you got in the fucking flybug and ended up in the crash with Prince Kiem. It’s like you’re out to get me. I don’t get how you can be such a miserable bundle of wet atmosphere and still get in my way all the time. Holy fuck, it feels good to stop acting,” Aren added. “I always envied that in Taam, you know. He could just say what he thought to your face. I have to bite my tongue and smile because I’m not an Imperial bloody Prince and the rules aren’t the same.”