I’ve just finished brushing out my hair and changing into the heavy soldier uniform Belinda left for me when there’s a knock on my door.
“Coming!” I call.
I open the door to find two female soldiers standing there—Julia and Dominique were the names they gave me when we were introduced. One is carrying a pile of bedding, and the other has a food tray.
“Come in, come in,” I tell them, ushering them inside. “Thank you so much for everything.”
“Where would you like me to put your breakfast?” Dominique asks. She’s tall and thin, with friendly eyes, brown skin, and the short-cropped hair of all soldiers in the Empire’s military units.
“The counter is fine,” I tell her, gesturing to the small kitchen area.
“May I make your bed, Your Highness?” Julia asks, holding up the bedding in her hands.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that! I can make my bed myself.”
They both recoil, and I’m not sure if it’s from shock or horror. Either way, I mentally kick myself. How could I forget that princesses don’t make their own beds? Rain had to show me the first day on the Starlight, but since then it’s become habit.
One I apparently have to unlearn if I’m going back to my mother’s palace. “Yes, you can make it for me.”
Julia nods, and her friendly look is back in place.
“How long have you been stationed here?” I ask Dominique as Julia moves toward the bed in the corner and begins making it up.
“Two years, Your Highness,” she answers, shuffling her feet a little like she’s nervous. “Julia and I came together, right out of training.”
“Do you like it?”
They exchange a look that tells me everything I want to know. But all Dominique says is, “It’s a quiet post, Your Highness. You’re definitely the most exciting thing to happen on Espia in the two years I’ve been here.”
“To be fair, having the princess show up out of nowhere would be exciting for anyone, not just us,” Julia adds.
“You’re right,” Dominique agrees. “We’ll definitely have something to brag about at our next post.”
“Dom!” Julia hisses, and the other soldier flushes as she just realizes what she said.
I laugh, though, because they remind me that there are nice people in the world who work for the Empire—something it was easy to forget on the Starlight, when nearly all of my traveling companions had been treated so badly by them.
I start to ask them more questions, but before I can think of anything, there’s another knock on my door.
Dominique rushes to open it, and Lieutenant Belinda is standing there. She salutes when I come to the door, touching her finger to her forehead. “I wanted to let you know that we’ve contacted the palace, Your Highness. We’ve been told that there are several shuttles already deployed nearby, as they’ve been looking for you. The closest one has already set course for Espia and will be here before lunch tomorrow.”
Relief sweeps through me at the news. I thank the lieutenant, who offers to show me around the base. I want to say no—I’m emotionally drained and miserable, and the cold weather reminds me of walking through the docks of Rodos with Ian—but I’m not sure sitting in this room on my own will do me any good, either.
So in the end I agree. How long could a tour of Espia take, anyway?
The answer is way more hours than I anticipated, because there is a lot more out here than there looked to be when I first landed. Yes, the base is small, but I didn’t realize that there was so much beyond the mountains.
We drive through a tunnel cut into the base of the mountain, with Lieutenant Belinda explaining to me how the tunnel was made to streamline access to the facilities on the other side.
She adds that Espia was settled a long time ago, when the Corporation had wanted to explore Tybris and Nabroch, the two dead planets in the system.
They’re at the edge of the system, right before the Wilds. Almost none of Serai’s warmth makes it out here—one of the reasons the planets died so long ago. But when we found nothing usable, exploration halted, and nothing’s been out here since.
Or so I was taught.
Now, however, I think that’s not quite the case. Otherwise, why would the Reformer have brought Milla all the way out here, into the Wilds? And why would Ian know how horrible it was and that no one ever comes back?
Something is out there, obviously. Maybe a prison filled with people like Milla and Beckett, who are set to be experimented on? A child camp like the kind Ian grew up in? Something even worse?
It turns out that Espia has none of those things. Just an industrial park much bigger than the base, filled with identical-looking buildings—all painted Corporation black.
My suspicions grow. Something doesn’t feel right about this. What is the Corporation doing with an active presence on Espia? But when I ask for a tour of the facilities, Lieutenant Belinda shakes her head.
“The military is discouraged from interrupting operations over here,” she tells me stiffly, and I can tell it’s a sore spot with her.
I start to ask her why she even brought me over here, and then I realize. It’s because she’s as suspicious of it as I am, and this is her way of letting her leadership know. That little laser gun incident this morning notwithstanding, Lieutenant Belinda is growing on me.
I will be checking up on this after I get home. And if I need to take another shuttle out here in a few months, then that’s what I’ll do. My mother and the Corporation aren’t going to control me anymore.
We’re almost back to the tunnel when I spot someone coming down the side of the mountain. The lieutenant must spot him, too, because she slows our pod down to a crawl.
It’s a large man—taller even than Merrick, I think—and he’s wearing some kind of mechanical device on his right leg, probably to help him climb the mountain. It doesn’t seem so unusual, though, and definitely not the smoking gun I was hoping for. The Corporation is in charge of technology for the entire system, and they’re always researching and developing something new.
Tech to help people negotiate rough terrain seems like a really great project, actually, considering what some of the planets are starting to look like as the sun dies.
Eventually, he disappears from sight and we speed up again. Once we get back to the base, I excuse myself to my room and spend the rest of the day doing exactly what I told myself I wouldn’t do. I wallow in my own misery. On the plus side, the base has a fairly extensive digital library, and after I have dinner with the soldiers, I stop and check out a tablet.
I read until I fall asleep in the middle of the night, and when I wake up, it’s almost time to go. I dress in the uniform they gave me yesterday, then pack my dirty jumpsuit into my backpack. I know I should just get rid of it—I’ve been wearing it so long that I’m sure it’s unsalvageable—but I can’t bring myself to do it. So I just shove it to the bottom of my bag and tell myself I’ll deal with it when I get home.
After having lunch with the soldiers, I walk around and thank each of them individually for their service. Dominique gets overly excited and nearly throws her arms around me—which horrifies her lieutenant but makes me really happy. When I get home, I’m abolishing the no-touching rule anyway.