Elvera hadn’t worked her limbs so furiously in years. She was fit, but three minutes of sprinting and she was already regretting her sedentary life. Not much point in it—she wouldn’t be able to catch up even if she tried. The best she could do was hope her entourage could catch a glimpse through the Aether, let alone apprehend them.

  What irked her most was how they’d stared at her and only her. It was a challenge; an invitation to a battle of wits they knew they were already winning.

  She’d burst out into the reality beyond the darkened council chambers, shoving past secretaries and clerks shunting documentation in and out of the central room. Afternoon sun streamed through the lobby doors, shaded by a sandstone arcade; its many grand pillars casting imposing lines of shadow across the red carpet below her feet.

  The shadows were harsh, but far from opaque. The closer darkness got to pitch black, the less room there was in the shadow for a Beak to fill. A shadow darker than its surroundings was the classic tell; she stood on the precipice of a thin, snaking lobby that stretched the entire circumference of a building like a sports stadium—too much ground to cover with such a small party.

  No credible threat. No immediate danger. Hell, locking down the entire building wouldn’t help, anyway.

  She tried, scanning her surroundings for an unnaturally turgid shadow, but it wasn’t obvious at a glance. Her nails dug into her palm out of frustration, and by the time she was forced to admit defeat, it had truly dawned on her how valuable an asset Crestana would be one day, as much as she hated that train of thought.

  If it weren’t such a public place, her urge to kick and scream like an infant might’ve taken over her. But now was, unfortunately, again the time to catch up. Check-in logs, security, eyewitnesses. Shadow magic or not, the innermost parliamentary chambers were barricaded with magic older than the city itself. Whoever they were, that very identity gave them access, and it was perhaps the biggest clue she’d gotten as yet.

  She calmed her nerves, breathing through her mouth again before she straightened the collar of her suit and called off the search into the small radio collar hanging around her neck.

  “Copy that,” her security lead said. She could spot him a minute’s walk to her left; but a small, suited blip in a sea of moving bodies. “Got a communication from the Whale.”

  “Pass it along,” Elvera said.

  “You ordered Intelligence to look into the Emergency Constitutional Committee?”

  “For any New Modernist connections, yes,” Elvera said. At least in her own corps, she could act on her hunch however she pleased.

  “They’ve come back. Preliminary investigation doesn’t suggest a connection—”

  If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

  “God’s sake—”

  “There’s more, ma’am,” he said, and Elvera bit her tongue and straightened herself.

  “All right.”

  “Local rumour mill suggests roughly twelve of the sixteen members recently invested enormous sums into the same handful of companies. Russel Docks, Tiranima, Altitude…”

  “Shipping companies?”

  “Close ties to the Traders and Unions Party, and the only ones that operate lanes to and from Vesmos.”

  It stank of insider trading. Premeditated investments based on the Queen’s death were as good as branding ‘guilty’ into their putrid flesh. It wasn’t impossible to imagine that a well-connected politician could guess who would form a constitutional committee, even if it was unprecedented. Pounce on them with an offer, and provided they take it, privy to the consequences or not, that was unprecedented sway on the final decision.

  Then and there, it finally dawned on her the horrid reality that killing the monarchy wasn’t even their end goal. Sowing discord and sweeping in with violence sounded more down Vesmos’s alley, but something had made them cautious…cunning.

  Regime change without setting foot outside their borders. Kill Geverde’s queen and replace the monarchy with a constitution riddled with loopholes for Vesmos to exploit.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Sorry,” she said, the seconds flying past her. “Tell them we need those numbers. Find those accounts. They’re politicians; we might find those gaps in public record.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And I need a team to follow up here. Investigate everybody who checked into this council session.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Elvera finally let go of the transmission button on her radio and wriggled the stiffness out of her finger. It was a lead, but a lead based on a hunch based on the accounts of a child. Nothing substantial enough to inspire direct action, but more than enough to put torturous ideas into her head. The unshakeable feeling that she was right, that she could prove herself right if she just took the initiative and acted on her instinct.

  Cuff the Federal Police. Every last one, and she knew instinctually that it would all be over.

  That power didn’t lie with her, but it lay in Al, the same monarch now taking refuge in the bowels of her own ship. They understood her theories, agreed with her assessment, especially of the Federal Police. The only problem was their instatement as King; the ritual they, for good reason, refused to undertake.

  But as the hours dragged on, and Elvera’s mind set like clay in a kiln on the perpetrators, she found it harder to justify. The ceremonies were one thing, but laws had developed independently. Declare Al as King in legal-terms only, and they could give the decree as they liked. Special Operations could crack the case wide open with a well-planned raid the morning of the coronation, lock the cell and throw away the key before the crown ever touched Al’s head.

  Queen’s guard.

  Queen’s right hand.

  Those words, the blemish on their name in New Modernist handwriting, bubbled to the surface, stopping both her and her thoughts in their tracks.

  Destroy a government entity on mere suspicion. They were the acts of a foreign dictatorship ruling a country collapsing under their hefty golden throne, not Geverde.

  Stable. Uncontroversial. The lines Special Operations had skirted and circumvented since its inception were buffered and padded—no matter what they did, they were always colouring within the lines to a certain extent.

  But this. This line of thought, this idea of power, this action in a state of emergency, twisted by bad actors or, at worst, in the event it failed, carried the risk of reminding the public what it meant to live in a monarchy.

  Geverde’s people only knew the fruits of a benevolent one, while people like her, people like Evalyn and Iris, knew the price that came with maintaining it.

  Ride her hunch to success, and unrest would quell. The nation would strengthen. Fail, and even Al’s rise to King might not stop the public outcry for a Vesmos-backed constitution.