What I need is manpower, but she’s already me shot down. I say this as an invitation for her to get out of the reactive headspace she’s clearly in, and start thinking proactively.
“We already have an information pipeline set up.” Luza leans against a rock, tapping her lip, impervious to the sun beating down. I’m feeling the burn from baking during the trek to get here. My neck and back are red despite the coverage from my shirt, and my face incurred damage that will surely haunt me when I’m middle-aged. If I make it that far.
Lorcan once joked, grimly, that living to age twenty-five seemed ambitious. When I left him at death’s doorstep, he was twenty-one.
I hate it when he’s right about bad things.
“We have a network of children running messages between Oceanside and the camps. Some as young as five.” Luza interrupts my freighted thoughts.
I close my eyes. Five-year-olds should be learning to read at their grandparents’ knee, not running messages in a war.
“What do you know?”
“Everything I’ve told you, plus details about what they’re moving, how much of it, and when. Where they’re storing it.”
“Useful.”
Luza smiles grimly. “The pirates have some of the village women cooking and cleaning for them.” By force, undoubtedly. Auralians of all tribes are proud to a fault. The only way anyone would serve the pirates is under duress. “It won’t be easy to contact them, but if we can find a way to pass messages through the children, I’m sure we can leverage that for intelligence. If we’re careful.”
The thought of children being hurt for their participation in trying to save our country makes me sick.
We return to camp to discuss it with Ephram, but he’s barely lucid from the pain and all the morphine I’m putting in him. In short order, Luza and I made a plan. A reckless plan. One few wanted to attempt, and wouldn’t have, without my influence. I wasn’ttheirprincess, but I was a known quantity, and in Zosia’s absence, they trusted me to fill the gap.
Now, I could only hope our plan didn’t fail.
July
Chapter 6
My walkie-talkie squawks unintelligibly in my pocket. The cheap thing barely works, but we don’t have anything better to use. One of our new spies stole fresh batteries from the pirates’ stores. We have to hope it will be enough to get us through the next hour or so, which is beginning to feel like one of the worst ideas I’ve ever had in my life.
Worse than the time I let my own curiosity and Zosia’s rebellious streak get the best of me and agreed to go clubbing, alone, in a foreign city. Beijing. Just to compound my terrible judgment that evening, I invited Lorcan along without telling her, hoping she’d go off and dance by herself and let me and Lorcan be alone together.
Ha.
Even when she couldn’t stand him, he was completely fixated on her. Lorcan took one look at the crowd and started herding her outside, saying it wasn’t safe for us to be there—which was the appeal, of course.
Sure enough, the club got bombed minutes after we left. Lorcan’s instincts are preternaturally keen. Or were. I hope they still are when he wakes up.
Zosia resented him for months afterward.
He claimed it was a crank, and maybe it was. Skía would’ve been more likely to slit her throat and leave Zosia bleeding out on the dance floor. But I’ve always wondered.
Back then, I tried to stay out of war planning. There was a sense that it wouldn’t actually happen, that the Skía would never be quite that bold. It all felt a bit theoretical until it was terrifyingly real.
Now, almost everyone I know from that era is missing or dead. Despite the years of preparing for this invasion—unsuccessfully, as it turns out—I never thought I’d have to get through a war almost completely on my own.
I’d have done several things differently if I’d known this was how things would turn out.
“Red team, come in team red.” The lump in my pocket pipes up again, this time with a message I can understand.
“10-1, Red team receiving poorly.”
I don’t know how much of my message got through, so I repeat it. I’m hidden inside a rocky overhang which doesn’t help transmission. Outside, in the distance, the long low line of the Grasslands Bridge hovers like a mirage over the marshlands. Beside me, my horse stomps its hoof and flicks its tail against the biting flies. We’re not even in the marshes yet.
“What I wouldn’t give for some of Tovian’s insect deterrent,” I mutter, patting the mare’s neck.
“10-9, Red team, 10-9. Repeat message.”
