"Any sign of the Explorers?" Dade asked.

Tobit fiddled with dials and peered at the Bumbler’s screen. "No… no… wait. Back there in the shadows," he said, pointing at the far rear of the roof. "I think it’s an Explorer’s backpack."

Dade immediately started forward, but Festina grabbed his arm. "You and Tobit stay here. In case the roof isn’t as solid as we think."

"And in case it’s a trap," Tobit muttered.

"Why would it be a trap?" Dade asked.

"Because anything could be a trap!" Tobit growled "We don’t know dick about what’s going on. Someone may have lured us here with a fake signal so they could blow us to smithereens. And don’t say that doesn’t make sense, junior — stuff that doesn’t make sense can still make you Go Oh Shit."

Festina was already heading toward the knapsack. Since nobody stopped me, I jogged a few paces and caught up with her. Side by side, we walked toward the building’s rear… and the farther we went, the less I cared about the pack and the more I worried about something else.

The smell of buttered toast trickled through the air.

Like I said, the back of the Fasskister embassy faced the palace — just a stone’s throw from the diamondwood palisade surrounding the palace grounds. Shining from inside that wall came the glow I’d thought was cookflres. A dull red glow.

The queen-shaped palace had its tail toward us, but not quite straight on. There was enough of an angle that we could see along its body, past the glass conservatory domes, up the torso, all the way to the head and its outstretched claws.

Moss. Balrog moss. Covering every square millimeter of the building from the venom sacs forward. In the dark, it glimmered a very self-satisfied crimson.

"Holy shit," Festina whispered.

I just nodded. The buttered-toast smell was making me dizzy.

"That queen," Festina said. "The one who dumped those spores on the Fasskisters. She must have left some here too — to make the place uninhabitable for the Black Army."

"Kind of hard on her own guards," I said. It gave me a crawly feeling, thinking about that. I could understand a queen setting up a nasty parting gift for her enemies, but not when it would also hurt her own subjects. Protecting your citizens should always be your number one concern, shouldn’t it? A king who didn’t put his people’s safety ahead of his own hunger for revenge…

A queen. I meant a queen who didn’t put her people’s safety ahead of her hunger for revenge…

Never mind.

Festina growled under her breath. "That fucking Kaisho. She had to know about this."

"Why?" I asked.

"She took that damned satellite photo," Festina said. "The whole front half of the palace should have been glowing, for Christ’s sake. But there wasn’t any shine in the shot she showed us. She must have deliberately told the computer to filter out the red." The admiral made a disgusted sound in her throat. "And I never double-checked. I checked the landing site, and the spot where the signal came from, but I never bothered to look at the palace. Sloppy, Ramos — really sloppy."

"You didn’t know," I said.

"I knew enough," she snapped. "Kaisho has jerked us around time and again. I kept letting her do it, in the hope she’d go too far and we could justifiably whack her. But enough is enough." She tapped a button on her wrist, changing the channel on her radio. "Tobit, Dade: full paranoia mode."

Dade’s voice sounded in my ear, even though he was standing back at the stairwell. "I thought we already were in full paranoia mode."

Festina sighed and rolled her eyes. "What can you do with a kid like that?"

"Um," I said, "if you want I can keep an eye on—"

That’s when the cannons started firing.

A real soldier probably wouldn’t call them long-distance guns — they were shooting from the top of the palace toward that kill zone beyond Prosperity Water. Only about a kilometer; in artillery terms, that was practically point-blank range. But from where we were standing, the shells looked like they were zooming past us and heading way off in the distance before they blew up.

Of course, we didn’t stay standing too long.

I dropped flat to the roof. Festina did a dive, then rolled to her feet again, fists up… like it was some pure reflex to hit the dirt and come out fighting. A second later, she threw herself onto the roof again, cursing in a language I didn’t understand. Spanish, I guess. Considering how comfortable she was swearing in English, she must have been really mad this time.

Another boom of a cannon. While its thunder still echoed from nearby buildings, Dade’s voice came over my earphone. "It’s all right," he babbled excitedly, "they’re firing over our heads. Shelling the enemy."

"And what happens," Tobit growled, "when the enemy starts shelling back? If the guns are a few degrees too low, we’re bang in the line of fire. How do you think this building got wrecked in the first place?"

Good point. The front of the embassy could have got hit by a barrage intended for the palace — just a few hundred meters short, that’s all. How long ago would that have been? When the Black Army first surrounded Queen Temperance? Or back earlier in some other battle… maybe when Temperance herself grabbed the palace from whoever held it before her.

"What do we do?" Dade called over the radio. "Leave?"

"No," Tobit and Festina snapped in unison.

"We’re here to pick up fellow Explorers," Festina said a moment later. "We stay until we absolutely have to go."

"Yeah," Tobit put in. "We aren’t going to get another chance down here."

He was right. If the palace was firing, the Black Army must be attacking out on the defense perimeter — going for their final offensive. The moment they saw our Sperm-tail, someone must have called the attack.

Someone. Maybe Sam. Whose time of waiting was over.

In a few hours now, the war would end… right where it started, inside the high queen’s palace. There’d be fighting in the halls, just like the night Verity died — loyal palace guards without a queen, just trying to survive till the dawn. It made me feel guilty, realizing I was soon going to run off on them again. We’d pick up the other Explorers, or we’d decide they weren’t coming and hightail it back to Jacaranda. Either way, I was abandoning a lot of warriors, when I should be there with them, helping them, leading them…

Wait a minute — what the heck was going through my head? I was no leader.

The cannons fired again. I covered my ears and tried not to think.

Festina began to crawl on her belly back to Tobit and Dade. It didn’t look very graceful, her in that big fat tightsuit… but she moved surprisingly fast, and if you took your eyes off her the tiniest split second, she disappeared. That camo was good. I started to crawl too, then stopped. The Explorer’s backpack was still lying on the roof behind me; Festina hadn’t had a chance to look at it. I turned around, and slithered up to it, sniffing furiously.

It smelled of the same stuff as the tightsuit, plus the odor of a male human. No trace of female scent. Maybe Plebon had been here an hour ago to send the contact beep, but Olympia Mell hadn’t been with him.

Was that a bad sign? I couldn’t tell.

I sniffed at the knapsack again, not sure what I was looking for. Even if the pack was booby-trapped with some kind of bomb, I wouldn’t know what explosives smelled like. Anyway, there were a whole lot of odors jumbled together: Explorer stuff, like a radio transmitter, and food rations, and a Sperm anchor…

My fingers twitched. I didn’t make them do that. Uh-oh… getting possessed again.