“I’ll check it out,” Sale said. “Craik, Losan, with me. Ean, watch us in case it’s a setup.”
They left at a fast walk.
Ean sang to lines eight and five, and asked them to track Sale through the station. He put it onto the closest screen. “Where’s she going?”
“Station manager’s office,” Bhaksir said. “Apparently, the station manager has had a heart attack.”
The station manager was the equivalent of a ship captain. If he’d had a heart attack, wouldn’t the lines have registered something? A little distress, maybe. If Captain Helmo had a heart attack, the lines on the Lancastrian Princess would go crazy. If someone had attacked the station manager—which was why Sale was checking it out—wouldn’t the lines have reacted?
Ean sang up the station manager’s office on another screen. The room was filled with paramedics, along with an older, tired-looking man who was speaking to one of them, and a distressed younger man.
“Station staff,” Bhaksir said. “The older man works directly for Patten.”
Patten was the station manager.
“The younger one is new. Also works for Patten. Nothing untoward.” Bhaksir called up Sale. “Looks clear so far.”
Rossi snickered. “Nothing untoward. You people take your job so seriously.”
Maybe one day, a heart attack could simply be a heart attack instead of paranoia. Until then? Ean watched as Sale, Craik, and Losan entered the already overcrowded office.
Why hadn’t the lines become distressed?
CHAPTER TWO: DOMINIQUE RADKO
The Radko estate looked the same as Radko remembered it. Kilometers of vineyards, deepening now into purple as the leaves darkened for autumn. She hadn’t told Ean that most of the wine he drank on the Lancastrian Princess came from her family winery.
Golden Lake, named for its color, sat like a massive gem in the heart of the estate. Hectares of trees and gardens set around smaller lakes made a gracious panorama as the car flew in. The morning sun caught the rose quartz and mica in the granite of the stone blocks of the house, making it sparkle and glow.
It had been afternoon when she’d left Confluence Station. Radko sighed. On top of everything else, it was going to be a long day.
She received three messages from her mother in the time it took to walk from the parking station to her apartment, and another one as she dropped her kit onto a shelf in the nearly empty wardrobe room. This time, Hua Radko leaned on the signal until her daughter answered.
“Mother.”
“You’re late.”
She wasn’t. She was seventeen minutes earlier than she’d told them she’d be, but there was no point saying that. “When you’re traveling with Michelle, you travel on Michelle’s time.”
“I suppose you can’t argue that. Although you’d think she’d try to be on time for her own father.”
“Are we going to hold this whole conversation through the comms?” Radko asked. Her mother was perfectly capable of doing that though her apartment was just down the corridor from Radko’s. “Why don’t I come and talk face-to-face?”
She dropped her comms back into her pocket and moved swiftly down the corridor to her mother’s claustrophobic quarters. Hua Radko had collected jeweled eggs all her life. The heavy black timber cupboards that were de rigueur for displaying them lined the walls. That, combined with the individual display lights to show off each egg, always made Radko think of a cave alight with phosphorescent growth.
Her mother hadn’t changed. A tall, elderly woman who held herself as straight as a soldier on parade, Hua must have spent time in the military; for how else could she hold that posture so long? Radko had never asked, for her mother didn’t encourage personal questions. They’d never been close.
The long entertaining room was crowded with people. That was normal. Hua entertained as much as her sister Jai—the Emperor’s mother—did.
There were new faces. After years serving under Abram Galenos, checking out potential threats to the Crown Princess of Lancia, Radko recognized many of them.
Prominent among them was Tiana Chen, a minor functionary in the Emperor’s outer circle. She didn’t have much influence with the Emperor himself, but she had a knack of ferreting out secrets from those who did and using those secrets to control them. She had no reason to associate herself with an out-of-favor branch of the Yu family like the Radkos. Nor did Ethan Saylor, the slender youth sitting beside her, whose family were part of the Emperor’s inner circle.
Saylor leaned his head close to Chen’s, curled his lip, and said in an undertone meant to be heard. “Look what just walked in.”
Chen rapped his fingers with her comms and said something too low to hear. Given Chen’s lower standing in court, an action like that should have been social suicide. Instead, Saylor scowled at Radko, as if she were to blame for the reprimand.
Radko moved around to get close enough to hear them.
Both of them fell silent.
Her time in the fleet had made her suspicious of everyone. She had to remember that people behaved strangely without ulterior motives.
Hua saw her then. “Surely you could have changed out of that dreadful outfit before you came to me.” If her mother had been given to histrionics, she would have put her hand to her forehead in an overt display of the hopelessness of the task.
Out of the corner of her eye, Radko saw Saylor nod. Chen rapped his fingers again.
Hua beckoned two of the guests toward her with an imperious snap. “Messire Zheng, Messire Tse. Do what you can.”
Tse and Zheng circled Radko.
“At least she has the family looks,” Tse murmured.
“But her hair,” Zheng said. “What a disaster.”
Hua beckoned again. “Messire Coles.”
Pieter Coles had been doing the hair for the Radko family ever since Radko could remember. He’d been the first and only person to cut her hair until she’d left to join the fleet. He’d been simply “Pieter” back then. Messire was an old term, once used for a master of a craft but now mostly fallen out of favor. Maybe it was coming back into fashion, for Ean’s voice coach insisted on the title “Messire” Gospetto, as well.
It wasn’t hard to tell what the other two were, with their striking outfits and their comms extended to full slate mode. Clothes designers.
Radko stood patiently while the designers made their sketches. She’d done this often enough as a child to know they would have come in with their designs mostly complete. After all, what designer threw something together in half an hour when it would be worn to an audience with the Emperor of Lancia? This part of the designing was for show.
“So excited to be a guest of honor at tonight’s party,” Hua said. “And Michelle will be there. I haven’t seen her in… oh, I forget how long.”
Radko could have told her mother that Hua had last seen her grandniece 287 days prior, at a function held the day before Michelle had left to supposedly investigate the confluence. She didn’t. Instead, she stood silent and thought about her own upcoming meeting.
Emperor Yu had a habit of springing nasty surprises when he called a member of his family in for a royal audience, and Radko’s invitation had come separate from Michelle’s, which meant the Emperor had plans for both of them.
She didn’t know which was worse. Worrying about what the Emperor wanted or worrying about what might happen to Ean while she wasn’t there to protect him.
“Dress her to show how important her family is,” Hua said to the designers. “After all, she is the Emperor’s cousin.”