There was a long beat of stunned silence as the surprise of the two words ground through them.

  But then Junius had the man by the collar of his dirtied white uniform, and thrust him back down to the dry earth.

  “You fucking rat,” he hissed, driving a knee into his abdomen. The captive grunted in pain, while Junius wrung him back and forth. “A spy, then? Is that what brought you all the way out here?”

  “Setetic…” Lycera said to herself, bewildered. “So they — the leaflets…” She paced away, retreating into her own thoughts.

  Tanhkmet at last shook off his own surprise, and stepped forward to pull Junius off the white-coated soldier. Descending to one knee, he put himself at eye-level with the man.

  “What did you say, just then?” Tanhkmet asked him quietly.

  The man looked up at him. His features were dust-caked and wooden.

  “Sorry… please, slowly,” he said with a strange and heavy accent. “Say slowly.”

  “What was it… that you said?”

  “…Aurelia,” said the man. “The prinzess… of you. I assumed… the color of uniforms…”

  Tanhkmet watched the captive, monitoring his blinking and the subtle changes of his pupils for all the classic tells of deceit. But he could find none. Spies were trained liars, of course, but he’d once thought himself adept at perceiving those signs.

  “You say… she’s alive?” he asked.

  The man’s face lit up, and he nodded vigorously.

  “Yes, yes! Alive.”

  Junius had to be right. He had to be some sort of spy.

  But hearing Aurelia’s name did give Tanhkmet pause. Might this man have been briefed on the whole royal family? How much did their strange enemy know?

  Everyone else was watching them, rapt, he realized with a glance over his shoulder. Iumatar was still unafraid to stare him down, as if she’d forgotten her disabling shyness under the sheer weight of indignant fury.

  “Why would you be telling us this?” he asked the captive.

  The man shifted in discomfort, hesitating to answer. He seemed to react in the fashion of a guilty suspect who’d been pressed to explain a hole in their alibi: someone who didn’t themselves know what the truth was supposed to be, attempting to conjure whichever explanation would sound most plausible.

  “Your… uniforms…” the man said at last. “The color… You were her… guardians?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “It was assigned to me… to be her guardian, too.”

  Tanhkmet scowled at the pretension that the man might’ve held any sort of role even remotely similar to his own. But he stayed his tongue, listening.

  “That was my… duty, for a time,” the man continued. “My superior asked it of me. So I guarded her… I saw her learn my language. So quick. Though I can-not say I taught her… she… she–”

  That certainly sounded like Aurelia, at least, Tanhkmet thought.

  The man didn’t finish his explanation, shaking his head, as if he felt foolish for trying.

  “It is greatly… not good… for my people soldiers surrender, instead die, in battles,” he said, looking back up at Tanhkmet. “But we were surrender to-day. And after, you think… to destroy of us. Kill my soldiers. I wish… bargain. For saving my soldiers' lives. I give information, so you have mercy.”

  Tanhkmet found that explanation far less convincing, even though the man had seemed strangely honest before. He raised an eyebrow at Junius, and saw it was clear they both recognized the same falseness.

  “What type of information do you think would interest me?” he asked.

  “Information like… of Aurelia, the princess… alive, being. And information like… well, I think… that she, princess, not want you to do. Surrender. My superior said, you will want surrender. Many times my superior… asked her to tell her people, you, that you to surrender. So can win war… easy. He desires her to do, greatly. But many times… she refused of him. Even when… it has become difficult… for her to do. So I tell, so you know she is being alive, and what she want of… so you can see not must you to surrender. I tell you of this, and more… so you give mercy of me, and my soldiers.”

  It was all deceit, some desperate ploy, Tanhkmet reminded himself. The man was a spy.

  But however false the story, the image it conjured still tugged at his heart.

  Tanhkmet’s careful stoic balance splintered and crumbled as he just imagined little Aurelia taken hostage, and yet still struggling to fight for them all those weeks against the pressures of some alien statesman. And at even just the idea that she was still alive, in the first place.

  He stood, crossing his arms, as if that would conceal the threat to his otherwise rocksteady neutrality.

  Because for a moment he could think only of his desperate desire for a world where the man at his feet was telling the truth. A world where he was free to do as that imaginary Aurelia wished — a world where he could fight to defy those strange invaders as long as he lived.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Hope did not return to him. But in that moment, Tanhkmet remembered what it was like to have once had it.

  He did not let that spark of hope take flame, in the shadow of such overwhelming cause for doubt. But a spark indeed flit across the emptiness of his soul, a spark of something too foolish to rekindle. And so as soon as it came, he smothered it, and suffocated it away, until he was again anchored firm against that absurd fantasy.

  They were all as if still knee-deep in the grave of Atum-Ra. That was reality. It couldn’t be ignored or forgotten, looming over them there.

  “What do you know about… what it is, that happened? About… that weapon?” Tanhkmet asked the captive.

  “What? — Oh — oh...”

  The man couldn’t meet Tanhkmet’s eyes, then.

  “…No… No, I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “Just… that my superior… wanted of it. Ordered it.”

  “Not anything else? Whether or not he would, or could do it again?”

  But the man only shook his head.

  “Then,” said Tanhkmet, “I’m afraid surrender remains but our only course.”

  * * *

  “Did you not hear what he just said?” Kera shouted at Tanhkmet, her voice breaking.

  “To whom do you speak, sergeant?” Junius spat.

  But she couldn’t care less about Junius’ threats, then. All the confused fury from the early morning had returned at once, worse as a reopened wound.

  “The family survived. How can’t that change things?” she cried. “An heir lived… and she wants that we not surrender. A princess of — no, the empress of Setet. And you intend to ignore her wishes?”

  Junius advanced further, fists balled. But without a word Theo stepped in front of her, placing herself between them. Even as she made no explicit promise, the gesture gave Junius pause. Regret competed with Kera’s rage, then, as she felt her debt to Theo grow once more.

  Tanhkmet at last turned back to her, his expression dark.

  “We have no choice,” he repeated.

  “But—”

  “We have access to critical information, Iumatar, that would almost certainly be kept from any member of the imperial family held captive by the enemy. Isn’t that obvious? Even if the princess were of ruling age, we would be wrong to treat her as a fully capable and independent actor,” he said.

  Frustration was bubbling up past Tanhkmet’s facade of control for the first time. But if nothing else, Kera took that as proof her words were reaching him in some way he refused to admit.

  “And to that last point,” he continued, “she is just a child. She would not yet rule in her own capacity. There would be a council of regency—“

  “No,“ said the white-coated soldier quietly.

  Tanhkmet glared at him, his scowl deepening.

  “No…” the man repeated. “Of course, yes, she is child. But you know of her, I believe, that you do. So then you know of that… there is more than just child. She is not… just as any child.”

  “But we don’t know what she knows,” said Tanhkmet, shaking his head. “And we surely can’t be certain that what this man says is half the truth—“

  “You seemed to believe him, for a moment, there,” Kera interjected. “And he sure seems to know a great deal for someone who’s just making things up—“

  “Be that as it may, lieutenant, all we know for certain is… is what we have, right in front of us. And what I have, right in front of me… is the city.”

  Tanhkmet paused, as if hoping some element of gravity in his point would convince her of something.

  The sight of the ruins certainly washed over her, once more. And it certainly convinced her of something.

  “Even if we assume this man is telling us anything worthwhile,” Tanhkmet went on, “even he can’t help us with that problem. We simply cannot risk provoking an enemy that is willing to use such a weapon. In light of that risk, nothing else matters.”

  “You have a duty to obey the emp—“

  “If she is alive, I have a duty to princess Aurelia to keep her safe,” Tanhkmet ground out. “And that is my chief duty but among many, many others. Listen to me, all of you. If there’s any chance to salvage some part of this wreck we’re in, then we must take it. If hostilities end as soon as possible, there is greater hope for mercy. At that point, if the princess has indeed survived, we can focus on negotiating for her.”

  “What could we possibly offer them after we surrender?” Kera shot back. “The princess will be a symbol of resistance as long as she lives, for all who do not follow your example and surrender in the way that you wish, who will be many. So she will most certainly not remain safe.”

  Lycera gave Tanhkmet a significant look, at that. He closed his eyes, his features pained.

  “If… that is the case, sergeant,” he said, “Then… perhaps she is already doomed. Giving us only more reason to cut our losses, to save who we still—”

  “No,” rasped the white-coated soldier.

  He tried to stand again, the effort a pitiful struggle in his bindings. But Tanhkmet was back on him in an instant, grabbing and shoving him hard back down to the stiff soil.

  “Do not think you have any more right to speak, devil, just because for a moment I was tricked into an ounce of sympathy,” Tanhkmet hissed, crushing the man’s shoulder in his gauntlet like a vice. “Think about it for just one second, all of you. If we resist, what use will they have for the princess after they defeat us conventionally? Or — gods know how we would, but — if we start to threaten victory? Then she would be doomed just like you say, but only more so. What I can hope for now, is mercy. And resistance truly is hopeless… are the ruins not right there? Am I living in some different world? If they can do something like that again, it is simply hopeless. Bringing who we have to them, and keeping things painless — that is what might save her. That’s what might save any of us.”

  Tanhkmet would’ve been making some good points, Kera thought, if their enemy really was willing to repeat what they’d done to Atum-Ra.

  But somehow, Kera simply knew they wouldn’t be.

  Some part of her just understood it.

  Even if they could, they wouldn’t want to. It contradicted all reason. What good was conquest if the spoils were but rubble and dust?

  “Please, listen,” rasped the white-coated soldier, desperate and hoarse. He winced, coughing out dust as Tanhkmet dug steel-gauntleted fingertips into his shoulder. “Please. Yes — I know I said… I didn’t know of… intentions… or ableness… of my superior. Of what could do with… city-weapons.”

  Tanhkmet hoisted him up with one arm, drawing back his other to beat him.

  “But…” wheezed the soldier. “I know… how to know.”

  "When all is said and done, it really is the commander's coup d'?il, his ability to see things simply, to identify the whole business of war completely with himself, that is the essence of good generalship. Only if the mind works in this comprehensive fashion can it achieve the freedom it needs to dominate events and not be dominated by them."

  Clausewitz, 'On War'