But it didn’t work out that way.

I woke alone in the night, wondering what the awful beeping sound was. Some annoying medical monitor? But there weren’t any nurses rushing to check my condition. In fact, there wasn’t even a light coming from the desk outside my room. Pitch-blackness, and nothing but that continuing beep-beep-beep.

The sound came from my wrist. Some navy someone was signaling a Mayday. It might have been anybody from the diplomatic mission, but I knew in my heart it was Sam.

Without thinking, I rolled out of bed and stumbled toward the door. After being sick so long, I was nowhere near my physical peak, but Innocence and the muscle-working machines had kept me from going to seed. I could walk just fine and even run a bit if worse came to worst.

And maybe it had. There were no lights anywhere, not even on the medical sensors that were supposed to watch me night and day — someone must have cut the power, and even the emergency generators. That meant big trouble. I didn’t know much about what’d happened in the year gone by, just that things had gone down hill. A long way down hill. Maybe so bad that one of the outlaw queens had decided to attack Unshummin palace.

Outside my room, the doctors and nurses were gone. In their place, five palace guards wearing gas masks had ranged themselves around the room, all with souped-up stun-pistols aimed at the far door… like they expected an enemy to come smashing through any second.

"What’s going on?" I whispered.

They whirled on me, and for a heartbeat I thought they were going to shoot; but one of them, a sergeant, snapped, "Hold your fire," and nobody pulled the trigger. "Go back to bed, consort," the sergeant told me. "There’s been a mutiny. It’s not safe in the halls."

"Is the queen all right?" I asked. "And my sister?"

"Don’t know." He glanced at the others, then turned back to me. "Our assignment is to keep you safe."

"Me? Who cares about me?" I held up my wrist; it was still beeping. "You and your men are going to help me save someone who’s in trouble. Do you hear me?"

For a second he didn’t answer: his antennas bent just a bit, as if he was smiling. Then he snapped a salute. "Yes, sir. We’ll follow you."

The six of us raced through dark halls, tracking the Mayday. Once or twice, we passed close to fighting; we’d hear the whir of stunners somewhere down a corridor, then running feet and voices shouting orders. But none of the action ever came our way. We saw plenty of bodies, unconscious and dead, but nobody stopped us as we raced straight from the infirmary to Queen Verity’s chambers… the source of the Mayday.

Outside the door, the queen’s personal guards had been butchered. Inside, so had the queen — decapitated by some assassin who’d crept unseen through the palace during all the ruckus. Verity’s head had been laid on a big serving plate in the middle of her own dining table.

A few steps away sprawled my sister’s body, apparently stabbed through the heart while trying to defend the queen. Sam had triggered the Mayday… and even as I stared at the blood spilling from her chest, the beeping signal stopped. I knew what that meant — not enough bioelectric energy left in her body to power the transmitter.

A navy quartermaster once told me those transmitters could keep drawing power from your tissues at least five minutes after you were dead.

I took one step toward my sister’s body. Then hands grabbed me from behind: bright red hands, the sergeant on my right, one of his men on my left. They were only using their Cheejreth arms, but at that moment, they were strong enough to hold me.

"Nothing we can do here," the sergeant said. His voice was muffled by his gas mask. "No one to save."

"Wrong," I told him. "There’s still someone unaccounted for."

Innocence. My sort-of daughter. The new high queen.

She had a secret room in the palace, but not secret enough. When we got there, the door had been blown off its hinges by explosives. There was no sign of a struggle, no blood, no little yellow corpse; it looked like Innocence hadn’t been home when the assassin showed up.

Where else might she go? Would she run and hide like a seven-year-old girl, or throw herself into action like a queen? My first thought was she might run for my sickroom, to rescue her beloved Daddy Edward; but she hadn’t shown up, had she? The guards would have seen her the second she came charging through the door…

They’d had their stunners out, ready to fire. A single stun-shot wouldn’t take down a queen, not even a young one like Innocence. But five shots simultaneously would. And they were all wearing gas masks, so it wouldn’t matter if Innocence surrounded herself with a cloud of her own royal pheromone.

Now the same guards were waiting for me to tell them where Innocence might hide. They wanted me to lead them straight to her.

The sergeant had told me, "There’s been a mutiny." He hadn’t mentioned which side he was on.

Now the sergeant asked, "Where should we go, sir? You said there was someone you wanted us to protect?"

Yes — the sergeant definitely knew about Innocence. He shouldn’t have known, but he did. And he also knew I was so stupid, I wasn’t likely to see through their trick.

"This way," I said. "I know where she’s gone."

Unshummin palace is shaped like a Mandasar queen. Really. A long central body with eight legs sticking out at the sides — the legs are actually separate wings of the building, three stories tall — and up at the head, the queen’s "claws" are four more building wings stretched out on diagonals. The claw parts even end in crescent-shaped rotundas, so from the air they look like pincers.

Much farther back, where the palace’s "tail" meets the wider part of the body, there are two big glass domes to represent venom sacs. The domes are actually huge greenhouse roofs; beneath them lies the Royal Conservatory, with tropical-zone plants under the right-hand dome and temperate-zone plants under the left.

The right-hand part is the closest thing to a jungle you’ll find within a thousand kilometers of Unshummin. That’s where I led the five guards.

"There’s this little girl," I whispered to them. "And she has this secret place where she goes when she’s really scared."

They nodded and even smiled, like they understood. What I said wasn’t true — Innocence could never have gone from the infirmary to the conservatory without being seen by dozens of people — but the guards were willing to believe me. They didn’t suspect I suspected… till I led them into the middle of the dark trees and vines, then suddenly dashed away through a grove of Koshavese fire oaks.

The trees grew too close together for the warriors to follow me; and I moved fast enough that I was out of sight before they could bring their stunners to bear. The guns whirred anyway, but I didn’t feel a tingle — what with the dark and the tree cover and the gas masks on the guards’ faces, I guess they weren’t aiming very well.

Nice thing about those gas masks: the guards couldn’t sniff me out. A Mandasar warrior depends so much on his nose, he’s at a numb disadvantage when his smelling’s sealed off. Mandasar eyes are just as good as human, and their ears are sharp enough to hear a big guy like me blundering his way through the bush… but without their noses, they lose their edge: a fraction slower on everything they do. That was good — after a year of being sick, I was a fraction slower too, and I don’t mean a tiny fraction like one over a thousand.

My plan was just to lose the soldiers in the conservatory, then duck out a door to find Innocence. Just one problem: there were three doors — one toward the head of the palace, one toward the tail, and one that led through a bunch of potting rooms to the other half of the conservatory. While I was still dodging through the undergrowth, the sergeant sent three of his men racing to cover those exits. That left two of them to search for one of me… and they had all the guns.