Aimee Carter - Queen

Guilt twisted in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t tell Benjy the truth about why I wanted to stay with Knox, not without revealing Celia’s call, but I owed him some kind of explanation. “I need to talk to him about everything going on with Lila,” I said as steadily as I could. “If we don’t come up with a counterattack soon, we’ll lose any ground we gained this morning.”

Benjy eyed me, and I could sense his uncertainty. I gave him a questioning look.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said, and he finished preparing our plates. “If you finish early, come find me.”

“I will,” I promised, and taking the plates, I forced a smile before heading back to the office, feeling worse with each step I took. I hated keeping secrets from him, but the more time I spent as Lila, the more of a habit it became.

As I walked away, able to feel his gaze burning into the back of my skull, I made myself a promise, too. After this war was over, there would be no more secrets between me and Benjy. Even if it meant telling the whole ugly truth, at least we would be honest with one another.

Knox and I settled in on the sofa, him sitting rigidly while I propped my feet up on a footstool. Every screen in his office displayed a different news channel, and together we watched as the anchors droned on and on about acts of terrorism that hadn’t happened and shortages that didn’t exist. Whatever Daxton’s game was, it involved feeding the public lie after lie about our campaign. With communication between cities nearly nonexistent, few had any way of disproving the news channels’ claims. Or any reason not to believe them.

“How can you stand watching this?” I said as I ate the last bite of hard biscuit. “It’s all lies. Everything they say is just a bunch of propaganda for Daxton and the Ministers.”

“I remind myself that out of all the crimes the government commits, lying to the public is pretty low on the list. Every government does it, no matter how good their intentions are or how much they care about their people.” He glanced at me. “We’re doing it right now, to our little part of the world.”

I scowled. “That’s not what I—”

“I know what you meant, Kitty. And I gave you my answer.” He leaned back, his posture still stiff. “Once you accept that everything that comes out of a news anchor’s mouth is propaganda, it gets easier to read between the lines. And that’s what I’m listening for. The things they aren’t telling us.”

I fell silent for several minutes, listening to a man drone on about how the Hart family was holding together during this difficult time, in the midst of such terrible and hurtful accusations from someone they had treated like family. It was easy to sniff out the real story when I already knew it, and I waited for another to come on.

“How did you get started with the Blackcoats, anyway?” I said. “I know you knew Celia through Lila, but—what, did the three of you have dinner one day and decide to start a revolution? How did that happen?”

“Something like that,” he muttered. “Celia’s never been particularly subtle about her political ideology. I sought her out, and the rest fell into place.”

“Wait—was your relationship with Lila an arrangement, then?” I said as a piece of the puzzle clicked into place. It made sense—Lila and Knox had never seemed to get along. “Was it a way to spend time together without being discovered?”

“Yes,” said Knox, his tone growing shorter. “If it’s all the same to you, I’m not in the mood for conversation right now.”

It wasn’t all the same to me. I still had a million questions to ask, ones I’d gathered every minute of every day we’d been forced to play pretend. But tensions were high enough right now, and I didn’t want to give him any reason to try to kick me out.

So for the rest of the night, as the hours dragged by, I kept quiet. Sometimes Knox would make a comment about a story, and I would chime in with a response, but he never elaborated further than that. Those occasional remarks grew less and less frequent as midnight came and went, and sometime around one in the morning, I said hopefully, “Maybe Sampson talked her out of it.”

Knox’s jaw tightened. I set my hand over his clenched fist, and only then did he relax marginally. “If we haven’t heard anything by dawn, I’ll believe it.”

Sometime around two, I fell asleep. I didn’t mean to—I’d promised I’d stay up with Knox, and I wanted to. But my ribs ached, the couch was warm, and the lull of voices was too much to resist. I rested my head against the armrest, promising myself I’d only close my eyes. Within seconds, I was fast asleep.

The sound of sirens jolted me awake, and I sat up, my head spinning. “What—?”

Beside me, Knox’s expression was impassive, but his fingers were digging into his thighs. The sirens weren’t coming from Elsewhere. They were coming from the televisions.

Every news network had a different view of the same scene: an image of the front gate of Somerset. Lights from emergency vehicles flashed across the brick wall, and a camera zoomed in on a team of Shields climbing over onto the property.

My heart sank. “They raided Somerset after all. Is Daxton...?”

“I don’t know,” said Knox. “If Celia had the chance, she took it. I guarantee you.”

Wide-awake now, I leaned forward and watched the images unfolding on the screens. It was the middle of the night in D.C., too, but light flooded Somerset like it was midday. Gunshots sounded in the distance, and I briefly closed my eyes, trying not to imagine where those bullets might wind up. I may not have known the other Blackcoats well, but we were still on the same side.

Someone knocked on the door, and I jumped. Strand poked his head inside, first glancing at Knox and me, then the televisions. “You’re watching this?”

Knox nodded. “Call a meeting for dawn. However this turns out, we should know by then.”

Thirty seconds after Strand left, one of the feeds cut to a reporter whose face was mostly obscured by a thick scarf. She didn’t seem to care, however, as she excitedly rambled into the microphone. “We are receiving reports now that Prime Minister Daxton Hart’s body has been spotted near the front of the Hart family home. Do we have visu—”

Suddenly an image of Somerset appeared. Normally it was a beautiful sight, and no matter how many times I’d been down the drive heading toward it, I’d always been captivated by the high windows into the atrium, the opulent balconies, the shining white exterior that reflected a shimmer of rainbow in the sunlight. But this time, I had to swallow a gag.

Daxton’s body hung from the front door, held up by a chain wrapped around his neck. A hunting knife was buried to the hilt above his heart, and a big red X glistened across his chest. I doubted it was paint.

“Oh my God,” I whispered, clasping my hand over my mouth. Beside me, Knox remained silent, but out of the corner of my eye, I watched his expression go from painfully neutral to barely suppressed rage.

“That’s it,” he said tightly. “It’s over. We’ve lost the war.”

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