Kai barely resisted the urge to collapse back on the sofa. He had another meeting in thirty minutes, and there were still plans to review and reports to read and comms to respond to and—

“Your Majesty.”

He started. “Yes, Nainsi?”

“There was one additional report that I thought might be best to discuss with you in private.”

He blinked. There were very few subjects that he didn’t discuss with Torin. “What is it?”

“An association was recently discovered by my intelligence-synapses. It involves Linh Cinder.”

His stomach dropped. It would be that topic—that one topic that he couldn’t talk to even his most trusted adviser about. Every time he heard her name, he was filled with barely constrained panic, certain that Cinder had been found. She had been taken into custody. She had already been killed. Even though he should have been glad that his country’s most-wanted fugitive had been captured, the thought made him ill.

“What about her?” he said, tossing the washcloth back onto the tray and perching on the arm of the sofa.

“I may have deduced the reason that she was in Rieux, France.”

The tirade of worried thoughts evaporated as quickly as they had come. Sensing a headache, Kai massaged the spot above his nose, relieved that one more hour had come and gone and Cinder was still missing. Which meant she was still safe.

“Rieux, France,” he said, reorienting himself. Everyone had known that the ship Cinder was on would need to return to Earth eventually, for fuel and possible maintenance. Her choice of a small town—any small town—had never struck him as suspicious. “Go on.”

“When Linh Cinder removed the D-COMM chip that had temporarily shut down my programming, I transmitted information to her about Michelle Benoit.”

“The pilot?” Kai had practically memorized the information Nainsi had gathered regarding everyone who had even the most tenuous connection to the missing Princess Selene. Michelle Benoit had been one of their top suspects for someone who had possibly helped to hide the princess.

“Yes, Your Majesty. Linh Cinder would have known her name and her previous affiliation with the European military.”

“So?”

“After retiring, Michelle Benoit purchased a farm. That farm is located near Rieux, France, and it was on that property where the stolen ship first landed.”

“So Cinder went there because … do you think she was looking for Princess Selene?”

“That is my assumption, Your Majesty.”

He jumped to his feet and began pacing. “Has anyone spoken to Michelle Benoit? Has she been questioned? Did she see Cinder, talk to her?”

“I am sorry, Your Majesty, but Michelle Benoit disappeared over four weeks ago.”

He stalled. “Disappeared?”

“Her granddaughter, Scarlet Benoit, has gone missing as well. We know only that she boarded a maglev train in Toulouse, France, en route for Paris.”

“Can’t we track them?”

“Michelle Benoit’s ID chip was found in her home the day she went missing. Scarlet Benoit’s ID chip, it appears, has been destroyed.”

Kai slumped. Another dead-end.

“But why would Cinder go there? Why would she care about finding Princess…” He hesitated. “Unless she’s trying to help me.”

“I cannot follow your reasoning, Your Majesty.”

He faced Nainsi again. “Maybe she’s trying to help me. Cinder knows that if she finds the princess, it could be the end of Levana’s rule. I wouldn’t have to marry her. She would probably be executed for treason. Cinder risked her life going to that farm, and she did it … she may have done it for me.”

He could hear Nainsi’s fan whirring, before she said, “I might suggest the alternate explanation that Linh Cinder’s motives stem from Queen Levana’s desire to have her found and executed, Your Majesty.”

Face flushing, he dropped his gaze to the hand-woven rug beneath his feet. “Right. Or that.”

But he couldn’t shake the feeling that Cinder’s new objective was about more than self-preservation. After all, she’d come to the ball to warn him against marrying Queen Levana, and that decision had nearly gotten her killed.

“Do you think she found anything? About the princess?”

“I have no way of discerning that information.”

He paced around his desk, staring thoughtfully at the vast city beyond his office window, glass and steel glinting in the afternoon sunlight. “Find out everything you can about this Michelle Benoit. Maybe Cinder is onto something. Maybe Princess Selene is still out there.”

Hope fluttered again, brightening with every moment. His search for the princess had been abandoned weeks ago, when his life had become too tumultuous to focus on anything other than keeping war at bay. Pacifying Queen Levana and her temper. Preparing himself for a life at her side, as her husband … and that, only if he was lucky enough not to be murdered before their first anniversary.

He’d been so distracted that he’d forgotten the reason he’d been searching for Princess Selene in the first place.

If she was alive, she would be the rightful heir to the Lunar throne. She could end Levana’s reign.

She could save them all.

Seven

Dr. Dmitri Erland perched on the edge of his hotel bed, with the worn cotton quilt pooling around his ankles. All his attention was on the battered netscreen on the wall, the one where the sound cut out randomly and the picture liked to tremble and flicker at inopportune moments. Unlike the last time a Lunar representative had come to Earth, this time the arrival was being internationally broadcast. This time, there was no hiding the purpose of the visit.

Her Majesty, the Queen, had gotten what she wanted. She was going to become empress.

Though Queen Levana herself would not be arriving until closer to the ceremony date, Thaumaturge Aimery Park, as one of her closest lackeys—er, advisers—was coming early as a show of “goodwill” to the people of the Commonwealth and planet Earth. That, and to ensure all wedding arrangements were being made to suit Her Majesty’s preferences, no doubt.

The shimmering white spaceship with its decorative runes had landed on the launchpad of New Beijing Palace fifteen minutes ago, and still showed no sign of opening. A journalist from the African Union was droning on and on in the background about trivial wedding and coronation details—how many diamonds were in the empress’s crown, the length of the aisle, the number of expected guests, and of course, yet another mention that Prime Minister Kamin herself had been selected as the ceremony’s officiant.

He was glad for one thing to result from this engagement, at least. All this ballyhoo had taken the media’s attention off Miss Cinder. He’d hoped that she would have had the sense to take this serendipitous distraction and come find him, quickly, but that had not yet happened. He was growing impatient and more than a little worried for the girl, but there was nothing he could do but wait patiently in this forsaken desert and continue with his research and plan for the day when all his hard work would finally come to fruition.

Growing bored of the broadcast, Dr. Erland removed his spectacles and spent a moment huffing on them and rubbing them down with his shirt.

It seemed that Earthens were quick to forget their prejudices when a royal wedding was involved, or perhaps they were simply terrified to speak openly about the Lunars and their tyranny, especially with the memory of the wolf-hybrid attacks so fresh in the collective memory. Plus, since the announcement of the royal engagement, at least two members of the worldwide media who had declared the alliance a royal mistake—a netgroup administrator from Bucharest-on-the-Sea and a newsfeed editor from Buenos Aires—had committed suicide.

Which Dr. Erland suspected was a diplomatic way of saying “murdered by Lunars, but who can prove it?”