Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18

While a slow rain creeps into the southern provinces that next morning, San-Er receives less than a drizzle, which trickles down the cramped building exteriors at such slow speed that the rivulets have practically dissipated by the time they reach ground level.

Yilas doesn’t like it when it rains. Before she scrimped together enough money to get corrective surgery on her eyes, the world was always blurry. Perhaps she could have worn her glasses more often, but the cities were too damp, and if she clamped on a mask during the colder, plague-ridden months, her glasses would fog up constantly. It felt easier to walk around squinting, her brow furrowed in a permanent frown. Other attendants working the palace thought she was so rude. She never smiled at familiar faces when they passed each other in the hallways. Chami had once offered a solution by suggesting that Yilas smile at everyone she passed, and Yilas decided she preferred it if they thought her unbearable.

Her world is usually crystal clear these days. When it rains, though, it brings back some of those old feelings, that weight in her chest. The water on the windows smudges the lights into amorphous blots. Mist congeals the neon signs, forms a muggy veil over the city.

“Good morning.” Chami descends from the apartment above the diner, walks over, and drops a kiss on Yilas’s bare shoulder. They’ve got a few minutes before opening. “You’re up early.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Yilas says. She cups her mug of tea closer to her chest. Sadly, it has gone cold since she made it. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

Chami shakes her head, and a lock of her hair drops into her pink eyes. Instinctively, Yilas reaches to tug the lock, which makes Chami smile. She’s always reminded Yilas of the godlings in their storybooks, the deities that haven’t grown power-hungry enough to claim a title of their own but still flit about the world prettier than anything a mortal mind can comprehend.

“You can always wake me.” Chami leans forward, her eyes closing again for a momentary rest when her cheek meets Yilas’s arm. Yilas is still dressed in her pajamas, the worn fabric fraying at the left shoulder strap. Chami must notice the detail too, because she loops her finger through it and tugs once.

“Didn’t I buy you new pajamas last month?”

“These are perfectly fine, I’ll have you know.”

“Yes, but”—Chami shifts, only to bite on Yilas’s shoulder, taking a solid chomp—“you can also buy new clothes for the sake of it. The city isn’t going to strike you down for that.”

The logical part of Yilas knows that. The frightened part still lives in that palace, counting forward the months that her savings could last if she finally ditched the job. She could have it worse, she knows. She could have been born outside the wall. She could have been born without two parents who spent every day of her childhood making sure she had food. Still, working in the palace opened her eyes to how some of them were allowed to live, and perhaps she didn’t have it that bad, but it would only take a small hole opening in her beat-up safety net to land her there.

“I’ll wear the new ones tonight,” Yilas promises.

“Great,” Chami says. “I can’t wait to take them off.”

“ You— ”

A loud thud on the diner’s doors cuts off the rest of her teasing reproach. Immediately, she and Chami prepare for the worst, lunging for a spatula and a fork, respectively. When the doors thud again, Yilas hears “ It’s me! It’s meeeeee! ” and she rolls her eyes, setting the spatula down.

Chami blinks. “Is that Matiyu?”

“It sure is,” Yilas mutters. She goes to unlatch the glass door, then hurries her little brother into the diner. His face is entirely obscured under a mask and a low hat, but she’d know his voice anywhere, however muffled. “What are you doing here?”

“I can’t stay at the palace anymore.” With a huff, Matiyu starts yanking off his layers. He slaps the mask covering down onto the table. Chami winces and uses the fork still in her hand to scoop it up for the trash can.

“What happened?” Yilas asks. “It’s hardly dawn.”

“People are dying ! There are bodies showing up everywhere!”

“I heard that was Calla,” Chami calls from the kitchen, where she’s depositing Matiyu’s mask.

Matiyu plucks his wool hat off. “She only went after Leida Miliu. Calla’s not even in San-Er anymore—the delegation set off yesterday. They took lots of Weisannas with them too. Terrible idea, because the palace is clearly vulnerable and under attack.”

A small meowr! chirps from under his jacket.

Yilas blinks hard. “Did you kidnap Mao Mao from the palace?”

“ Kidnap? ” Matiyu yelps. He opens his jacket. Pliant as ever, Calla’s cat slowly pokes his face out from the crook of Matiyu’s arm, not the slightest bit stressed. “I rescued him. I was hoping you still had contact with Calla and could get a message to her.”

“About Mao Mao?”

“No!” Matiyu exclaims. He lets Mao Mao emerge from his jacket, leaping to the floor. The cat sniffs a sticky puddle by the booth. “The murders, Yilas! In the palace!”

He pulls a disk out of his pocket. Chami waves Mao Mao over in the kitchen doorway, cooing about feeding him raw meat, and he patters to her on his fluffy paws. Matiyu tilts his head in that direction too, shaking the disk in his hand vigorously.

“I suppose you’d like to use the computer.” Yilas stands where she is. Maybe if she doesn’t offer, she’ll never have to see whatever it is on that disk, and Matiyu’s problems will simply dissolve into thin air.

“I didn’t smuggle surveillance footage out of the palace for fun and games, that’s for sure.”

Barely suppressing a sigh, Yilas nods and waves him to the back room, where their computer is. She has a feeling she’s not going to like this.

“You couldn’t tell your superiors about this?”

“Well, Yilas”—Matiyu puts the disk into the system unit slot—“my superior is a Weisanna who oversees the section of the south wing that I help keep watch over. When I clocked in this morning and ran a glimpse over my cameras…”

He navigates to a folder that pops up on the desktop. It takes some loading, but the file is local, so there’s no buffering when the computer system pulls it open on a video player. Matiyu thins his lips. He starts the footage.

The first notable observation is the dead guard lying in the middle of the room. His neck has turned at an unnatural angle. A vase has shattered beside him, fallen off a dining table. Yilas doesn’t recognize the room itself, but the Palace of Union was built similarly to the Palace of Heavens. The table is particularly long, so it is likely one of the main dining rooms that the nobles use to take meals. In an hour or so, the cooks will be bringing food into the room, and then this body will be discovered.

“Heavens,” Yilas breathes. “Matiyu, you have to report this to your superior.”

“Has it not occurred to you yet what the problem is?” Matiyu stabs a finger at the screen. “That is my superior!”

Oh. Oh, dear. “Okay,” Yilas says slowly. “Who is your superior’s superior?”

Matiyu shakes his head. “When the Weisannas rearranged security within the twin cities, the palace was affected too. They had to rid any chance there would be another treasonous captain of the guard, so most of the Weisannas stand equal now. They all report to the king.”

“Find an equal, then. Someone who knows what to do.”

“I’m scared ,” Matiyu hisses. “It’s only rumors, but I’ve been catching bits and pieces from the Weisannas these last few days about attacks around the palace. They’re never going to tell us the truth if there’s something wrong.”

Yilas laces her fingers in front of her. She stares at the image on the screen. It’s still playing, though nothing is happening. Matiyu has pasted over a few minutes. Perhaps by now the body has already been discovered.

“What do you want me to do?” Yilas asks. “Get the message to Calla, have her running back to protect the palace? She carries a cellular phone, but I don’t know if I’d reach her from inside San-Er.”

Chami pokes her head into the back room then. She’s frowning, concerned by the conversation. “Also, Calla said her traveling phone was for extreme emergencies.”

“This is an extreme emergency,” Matiyu insists. “Look.” He clicks on a second file he dragged onto the disk. The video player pulls open the infirmary. Yilas doesn’t know what she’s looking at. With the way Chami draws closer and scrunches her nose, she can’t tell either.

“At the back,” Matiyu prompts, “six beds have pulled the sheets over their occupants. Dead bodies.”

“To be fair,” Chami says, “two of the bodies are likely Leida Miliu.”

“Meowr,” Mao Mao agrees from her feet.

“When there are more people around and it’s safer, I’m going to go back into the palace and obtain footage that traces how they all died,” Matiyu says. “Because I’m willing to bet they’re guards, and something is happening to wipe them out.”

The screen is starting to hurt Yilas’s eyes. She shifts back. Extends her hands for Mao Mao and picks up the cat after he hurries over to her.

“I don’t understand—you want to warn Calla about guards dying in the palace?”

“It doesn’t really make sense, anyhow,” Chami adds. “The palace may have loosened its entry since August took power, but employees and approved visitors still need to input their identity number at the turnstiles. Every entrance remains watched. If guards are dying, then someone authorized to enter the palace is doing it.”

Matiyu goes quiet, thinking. Her brother doesn’t often follow beats of logic: he prefers to hit a conclusion first and then go back to connect the pieces. It’s great when it comes to solving problems at school and finishing his tests fast. Not so great when he’s claiming there’s a conspiracy unfolding at the heart of their capital.

“Look, I don’t know how it’s happening,” Matiyu decides, hitting eject for the disk. “But someone needs to know that there might be a coup coming. What else could this be leading toward? What happens when there are no guards left?”

Anyone who wants to enter the palace can march right in.

“Exactly,” Matiyu says to Yilas’s expression, though she has spoken nothing aloud. “Get word to Calla as quickly as you can. I’ll go get the rest of the footage, but I’m sleeping here from now on.”