“Make sure your men keep their heads down on the approach. I mean low,” said Roskvir. “It’ll be real flat for a good while, and their pickets will be close now. Don’t silhouette yourselves.”

  “Mark, two hours since dawn,” announced his platoon sergeant, reading his pocketwatch.

  “Mark. Count down from three hundred, then it's over the top. There’ll be no other signal to start the advance.”

  Roskvir surveyed the terrain ahead one last time, as his section leaders hurried out to their units. The next few low-rolling knolls where they would take up positions were five hundred yards out. About five hundred more from the outcropping that hid the supposed stronghold, and its semi-natural outworks.

  Once they were established at the crest of those inclines, their presence would implicitly threaten a second advance to occupy the high ground of the outcropping itself, around and behind the stronghold’s entrance. Thus, the enemy would be forced aboveground to occupy the heights themselves, to preempt that maneuver.

  But rather than fighting for the heights, Roskvir’s force just would hold its position, harrying the enemy as they emerged. Only drawing the garrison out so that the vizeadmiral’s stealthier group of elites could come from the approaches behind the heights, and catch the enemy between them.

  He wondered if there was anything he’d overlooked.

  They’d made no plan for retreat, in case things did not go to plan. But that wasn’t an oversight. For means of rapid transportation, they had but the one swift he’d rode from the Tanngnjostr, moored back at their base camp. It was a tiny vessel, only able to carry a handful of soldiers at a time. And they were all very deep beyond the front line, there. Attempts at retreat in such conditions just weren’t feasible.

  And neither were they honorable. If the day turned against them, fighting until destruction would be the Albian way.

  So he hadn’t forgotten anything, he tried to tell himself.

  * * *

  When Aurelia awoke, she could feel that she’d slept for a long time.

  Crying hadn’t been therapeutic. It had exhausted her, at least, such that she’d managed to fall asleep even under those circumstances. But awake again, she faced the only the same horrors, while dehydrated to boot.

  She was the Empress of Setet, she thought.

  Once, she’d felt a responsibility to refuse even a single word to her captors, nor to accept any of their gestures of goodwill. Above all, to frustrate the aims of that tall, robed man. And after what he’d shown her through his strange window, she felt the weight of that same responsibility dozens of times heavier.

  But after hearing his threats, she couldn’t help but grapple with a new conception of what she might owe others, then. What she might owe her people.

  Before, she’d assumed her value was as leverage. A hostage, held as a bargaining chip. She could no longer hope for a role so peripheral and indirect.

  Instead, the lives of her subjects were in her hands. Not in those of her grandfather, or her mother. But her own.

  She might have the power to end any coming war, insofar as her people would obey her as their sovereign. Or she might have the power to remain silent, and so allow them to decide themselves between resistance and surrender. In that way, tacitly encouraging them to fight.

  To fight and die. Perhaps, when all was counted, to die for nothing.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  So many would suffer either way, she knew, as she estimated, calculated, and despaired. Sick to her stomach, she writhed onto one side on the too-plush mattress.

  Something about her chamber was different from the way she’d left it. Dozens of untouched offerings still littered its landscape as before, but with her perfect memory, she could tell at once that there was something new.

  She climbed out of the bed, at first wary of her nausea, before considering how little she’d eaten those last days.

  It was a book, she saw. Left atop the low table where she and Roskvir played their games.

  It was the fantasy she’d been reading in the great library, the day she’d been abducted.

  A note in passable Setetic was folded into the front cover.

  I think this belongs to you.

  I will be gone for some time, so please use it to avoid boredom while I am away.

  And I’m sorry, Aurelia.

  She stared at the paper, taking it into both hands. It crumpled between her fingers.

  She’d told him not to use her people’s language, she thought. Her indignation rang hollow.

  The note fluttered to the floor as she lifted the whole book, heavy as it was for her. She embraced it, burying her face into its leather cover. Its scent was the closest like home to anything she smelled in a long time.

  She thought of how she wished her mother were there beside her. Or her father, or Captain Tanhkmet. Or one of her siblings or cousins, even the ones that had been less than kind to her, during their life in the palaces.

  But she knew they were all dead.

  * * *

  Kera trotted Horus through what had been once a major thoroughfare, then a desolate valley between two heaps of rubble on either side.

  What surprised her most was just how gray it all was. In her memory the city had been colorful, if nothing else. But everywhere she looked, the half-forms of broken buildings, scattered rocks, and particulate debris were all the exact same burnt, ash gray.

  Her exploration of those ruins up close wasn’t an experience half as painful as she’d expected, for some reason. But neither was it cathartic. As Horus carried her onward, she found it ever stranger that it was all so unprovoking.

  There was no sense of violence. No evidence of panic or desperate struggle before the disaster. Tragedy, but not suffering.

  In the ruins of a city where a million people had lived and died, Kera realized, there were no dead bodies.

  She’d prepared to confront the sight of corpses, mutilated, burned or crushed. But there was nothing of the sort to be found.

  It almost fell short of devastating, up close. It was almost just confusing.

  Kera stopped Horus before a row of former townhouses, recognizable even in ruin. As gray powder had caked her fatigues and the sun lowered in the sky, gaining her bearings had become unavoidable, and so even with every landmark so disfigured, she’d no doubt that she stood then in her mother’s old neighborhood.

  Her mother had died right there. If not in her office or laboratory, then there.

  Tile shards of the townhome’s foyer crunched underfoot, as she swung a leg over Horus’ saddle.

  But neither was there a corpse to be found within that ruin, as she ventured within. The skeleton of a bookshelf and the brittle shell of a cast-iron stove, instead, were buried under bricks and charred rafters.

  Where would she have been, then, at the moment of the catastrophe? In her laboratory?

  Where was anyone?

  Kera hadn’t wanted to find her mothers remains, of course. But if indeed she had perished, she’d at least wanted the closure of seeing some evidence of that, and knowing for certain. She’d wanted to have no choice but to say goodbye, facing proof she was gone.

  She hadn’t even come to her graduation from the academy, Kera thought. Tears welled in her eyes at last. Her mother had missed so many opportunities to have that last goodbye.

  Sparks showered down over her shoulders.

  Though she hadn’t willed manifest her vis, the dim fire of her crown flared alive above her forehead, while her compass-needle blade tried to form in her hand. Muted dusk-blue flame cast shadows across the rubble, and the remnants of the walls.

  As the ruin was cast in a new light, a metallic sheen caught her eye. Something of iron or steel buried under the collapsed roof, its whole surface rusted and char-blackened but for a handful of tiny lustrous speckles that glinted in her crown’s glow.

  She tried at first to banish her vis, but it felt as though resistant.

  The length of iron seemed to beckon, as if magnetic. She squatted before it, clearing away the debris.

  Her vis at last disappeared, again on its own, as she unearthed an iron lockbox from the rubble.

  The metal exterior was blackened like the inside walls of a furnace. She jammed her saber under the lid, and its brittle, heat-fused hinges snapped off with ease.

  "What's in the box!?"

  Se7en