The Green King and the Silver Flame Attunement

> “You’ve been travelling a long, long time. Like the birds in the winter you’ve been gone. But when the sun does rise, I can see them in the skies, and like the birds in the springtime you’ll come home. Home to me, home to me, like the birds in the sky you’ll come home to me. My lover and my friend, my darling to the end, with the birds in the spring you’ll come home.”

>

> -“Wintertime Traveller”, Emerri folk song

yan banner [https://66.media.tumblr.com/3a8e1d12d80117e6afc9f5f48ca78e87/tumblr_pdxwrhUDP41xnm75po1_1280.png]

Yan had a few strategies. She hadn't stopped trying to escape, and she was doing everything she could, even if that wasn't much. Underneath her bed, she was creating something disgusting. She had a few bites of chewed up food that she piled up on the floor, waiting for them to grow mold. Maybe if she ate it and got sick enough, someone would have to come and take her out, and then she might have an opportunity to escape.

She tried every day to smash her chain apart. Over and over, she placed the chain underneath one of the legs of the bed, and threw herself on top of it as hard as possible. Usually, the chain just skittered out of the way, undamaged.

She hoisted her chair over her head and used it to batter at the door. Nothing ever came in that, but it was something to do.

Even the light, which she had sworn she wouldn't try to smash, she went at it, hammering it with the chair leg. Unfortunately, like the chain, it was extremely resistant to breaking.

Yan was also developing a certain language of pain. It was the only thing that she could reliably feel, so she almost welcomed it whenever she strained her arms from lifting, or hopped over her chain wrong while pacing. It always snapped her back into her own body, her own head, from wherever she had been drifting in her thoughts. She seized on that and tried to use it to her advantage.

The chip in her head blocked her use of the power by overloading her nerves with pain until she passed out. That was what it felt like, anyway. It didn't actually stop the power from existing, or her ability to access it, like drugs did. It just punished her whenever she even thought about it, and ramped up in intensity whenever she built up the focus required to use the power. There was a constant tingle in her brain. It wasn't painful, exactly, it was just a static feeling that reminded her that the chip was present. It grew louder when she meditated, and quieter when she abandoned her physical body and floated in her imagination.

If she could stay conscious through that pain, Yan knew that she could use the power. And if she could use the power, she could escape. So, along with all of her other daily tasks- eating, working out, smashing the chain and door, cultivating her poisonous mess underneath her bed, sleeping, pacing relentlessly, singing, imagining she was elsewhere- Yan added practicing her pain tolerance to that list.

She knew she already had a pretty high one. After all, she had sliced open her own neck not… How long had it been? There was no way to tell. It didn't matter. In her desperation to escape, she had carved herself into pieces. That took a lot. Yan knew what she was capable of, in that respect, at least.

Deliberately testing the bounds of what she could manage before she passed out was difficult, though. She had to take a moment to psych herself up before each attempt, and she would stiffen her whole body in anticipation of the searing pain. It was like nothing else, and it felt different, and newly horrible, every time.

Maybe her brain was just saving her the agony of remembering the pain, but it didn't make developing a tolerance to it any easier, if she couldn't tell how much further she had to push herself. She hoped that there was some sort of maximum threshold, above which the pain could not increase, and she would be free to focus on maintaining focus, using the power.

There was one other thing she kept trying. In between her focused sessions where she lay on her mattress and focused until she passed out, she would pace, tossing one of her folded up pieces of cardboard from hand to hand. She remembered that at least part of the use of the power was instinctual. When Sid had been punished by the Emperor, he had abruptly become much clumsier. With things like catching objects, there was an unconscious use of the power to nudge the flying thing into the hand. Or, if something was teetering on the edge of the table, one could subconsciously use the power to stabilize it for the fraction of a second it took to reach out and grab it. All those processes that happened without her thinking about them, maybe they wouldn't be attacked by whatever chip was in Yan's head. So she paced, stared straight ahead with her stiff neck, and tossed things from hand to hand, trying to seize on that instinct that let her catch things she couldn't see.

She wasn't making that much progress with it. Every time she thought she felt something, the pain would come back. And she couldn't tell if she was just getting better at catching things naturally, or if she was using the power. And even if she did manage to harness that subconscious feeling, it wasn't as though she could subconsciously break her chains or open the door.

Aside from her routines, the one thing that kept her sane was her nightly visits from the girl who brought her food. She didn't come every time Yan slept. They had started delivering her food in larger quantities, apparently satisfied that she could ration it herself. It made the passage of time even less connected to reality, since the food came once in a while while she slept, and sometimes she was very hungry before she got a new delivery of it. Maybe they didn't want the girl interacting with her.

But Yan still lay awake every time, hoping to catch a glimpse of her through half lidded eyes. Whenever the door clicked open and Yan heard the soft shuffling footsteps, it was hard to resist jumping up and yelling. Her heartbeat sped up so much it was a wonder the girl didn't hear it.

The girl had the same routine every time. She would set the food on the table, line up Yan's cardboard figures (there was quite a collection of them now), clean up the garbage, and then… There was always a moment where the girl paused indecisively and looked around the room, glancing up into the corners and the light. Then she would say something in a language Yan didn't recognize or understand, and it was barely more than a whisper anyway. And then Yan had to hold her breath, because the girl would come over and crouch down in front of the bed. Yan peered out at her, eyes almost closed, looking out at her from behind her eyelashes.

The girl had dark eyes, and the side of her face that wasn't drooping from old injury always had a pensive look on it. She came close enough that Yan could hear her breathing, and occasionally she would reach out her finger and almost touch Yan's face. It was almost too much to bear, feeling the warmth of it hovering just millimeters away. But she always lost her courage before she ever touched Yan, and she would shiver all over, stand up, and walk away. Yan always tried not to cry when the door closed again, but she didn't always succeed.

----------------------------------------

How long had it been?

"Tell me how you make the stardrive work, Halen?" Yan asked.

"I don't know. I'm not a computer," Halen said. "I don't even know enough math for it." He stared at it, in the back of the shuttle, all the wires and ties holding it down. It was brighter than any of the stars outside the window.

"But you made it work."

"Not yet."

"You will."

"Will I?"

"Yes."

"Then you need to tell me," Halen said. "Because I don't know."

"You're not even real." Yan turned away, frustrated, and floated back to the front of the shuttle. "Nothing here matters."

"That's not true."

"Watch me," Yan grunted through gritted teeth. She slid herself into the pilot's chair and strapped in, grabbing the yoke. "Watch me."

The shuttle responded to her instructions, and warning lights flashed on the console as she sent it into a dangerous spin. The blood rushed out of her head towards her feet. Halen slammed up against the side of the shuttle behind her, vainly reaching toward her to make her stop. Yan laughed maniacally, holding the yoke to stay spinning. The stars swung crazily around outside the window. The stardrive in the back rattled and its light flickered, casting wild illuminations over everything.

It hurt to hold that spin. The blood rushed out of her brain. The air was trapped thick as soup in her lungs. She couldn't breathe. Yan passed out.

When she came to, the room was pitch dark. Yan was on the floor, her chain wrapped around her ankle. She stretched out her hand on the cold stone floor, and felt a sudden pain. Carefully, cradling her hand, Yan sat up. She couldn't see anything, but she poked at her right palm with her left hand and felt a shard of glass embedded in it.

Somehow, she had broken the light.

Her head and hand hurt, one throbbing with the residual pain of using the power against the will of the chip, the other stinging from the shard of glass stuck in it. She yanked out the shard, and felt her hot blood pool in her palm. She couldn't see it, but as she raised her hand up to her eyes, the blood trickled down her arm. Yan laughed and laughed and laughed.

Unfortunately, her moment of triumph and her long stretch of solitude ended at the same time. The watching camera must have been hidden in the light, and the sudden darkness in her room brought attention to her cell. The guards came quickly, and opened the door, letting light stream in. Yan held her glass shard as they approached her.

It was two men, and neither of them looked like the Green King. She couldn't see their faces, and they spoke to her in a language she didn't know. The intent was clear from the tone. Don't move. Put down the glass.

Yan could only imagine what she herself looked like, crouched on the floor, one hand covered in blood, the other holding a shard of glass up like a weapon in the dim light, grinning like a maniac.

The two men glanced at each other, and one of them stepped toward her. Strangely, he stepped past her, and bent down. Something glinted at his waist. A gun?

Yan lunged for it, using her wounded hand to grab for it. Her fingers closed around it the same instant that the second guard tackled her hard, pinning her body and wrenching her back. She turned as much as she could and scratched wildly at him with her nails and the glass shard, digging it into his face. He grunted in pain and wrestled her arms flat onto the ground. The other guard helped, abandoning whatever he had been doing behind Yan.

"You should be more careful," Yan huffed, trapped underneath the guard. "I'm dangerous." She wasn't feeling particularly stressed out. Some of her euphoria about managing to use the power (however accidentally it had been) and her relief about seeing and touching someone, anyone, was greater than her fear towards these people. After all, her captors hadn't actually hurt her yet. Well. It depended on how she looked at things. They hadn't physically tortured her while she was conscious yet. That was maybe the most she could say.

The two men said something to each other very quickly. It was weird, she couldn't place it at all, and they didn't seem to understand anything that she said. They didn't react to it, anyway. Had she said it in Old Imperial?

"Get off me," Yan said, this time in Old Imperial for sure. That was the language that the Green King had used, and it was fairly standard throughout the Empire. She kicked her legs for emphasis, but it didn't do anything.They didn't respond. The one kept her pinned down while the other performed his duty. He seemed to be checking her chain. It rattled against the floor as he picked up and inspected every link of it. Yan would have laughed if she could have breathed enough to do so. If her chain was broken, wouldn't she be trying much harder to escape?

At least the fact that they were checking her chain gave her hope that the chain was breakable, even if only by the power. It was a little sad to think that no one had ever bothered to inspect the chain after all the hours she had spent trying to smash it to pieces with the leg of her bed. That had given her something to fill the time with at least.

When the man on top of her breathed, she could feel it in her own chest. "Sorry I sliced you with the glass," Yan said. They both ignored her. Once the man was finished looking over her chain, he came over to her and pried the glass out of her hand. She couldn't be allowed to keep a weapon like that, of course. He tossed it out into the hallway; she heard it skitter across the floor. Then he kicked the rest of the broken glass shards out as well.

It wasn't as though Yan was going to hurt herself with them. They needn't have worried about that. Maybe a few hours ago she would have, but she was feeling beastly and strange, with a wild energy and confidence coursing through her. Even her current predicament, pinned down as she was, didn't bother her as much as it should have. It really should have bothered her. She knew that. Maybe she was really going crazy. Maybe she hadn't used the power to break the light. Maybe she had just used the chair. She couldn't see the chair from her position on the ground, not with her stuck neck and being pinned.

It took a surprisingly long time for the man to find all the glass shards and kick them out into the hallway. Yan didn't bother moving or resisting. There was no way she was going to be able to get out of this full body hold. Though she probably had at least a few centimeters on the man in terms of height, he weighed a lot more than she did. The men, too, grew more relaxed as she just lay there limply. They didn't talk to her, but they spoke to each other in their own language. The man dealing with the glass even laughed at one point, a halfhearted chuckle, sure, but it was something.

She gave them both names. The one she had scratched with the glass shard (who was pinning her down) she would call Scarface. The other could be… Kicker.

"What do you even want me for, if you're not even going to do anything with me?" Yan asked Scarface. "Nobody's even taken pictures of me for ransom. It's like you just want me rotting for no reason."

Kicker finished with the glass and said something to Scarface. He began to let her go, standing up slowly. Kicker kept his foot heavily on her chain, so she couldn't have gotten up even if she wanted to. They left, and Yan was left in the dark.

Abruptly, the fear that had been absent while the two men were with her came back full force. She stood up, cradling her cut hand to her chest. Yan shivered violently. The silence and darkness of the room wrapped around her. It had been better to be with people than alone, even if those people were her captors. Her back hurt from being tackled. She knew her way around the room backwards and forwards, since she paced so much with her eyes closed, so it wasn't much of an obstacle to be in the dark. She rinsed her hand off in the sink, cleaning the cut, and she wadded and wrapped some toilet paper over it.

Why hadn't she been worried while they were there? She didn't even think that she could use the power again (if it had been the power she used). Now that she knew that she could access it from her daydream about Halen, it would probably be harder to get back to that state. Going into it was completely involuntary, and only happened sometimes when her mind wandered. It was nothing like the structure of prayer or singing or meditating. It was completely unformed, and half crazy. She was more than half crazy.

She was exhausted and lay down to sleep. Her dreams were turbulent.

Yan woke some unknown amount of time later. The door creaked open, and her familiar night visitor came in. Yan knew it was her by her odd, shuffling steps. She was carrying a flashlight, and the beam of it made firelike shadows on the walls where it touched. After the girl finished her normal routine, she turned the flashlight's beam on Yan. Her eyes had been open all the way; because it was dark there was no reason for her to disguise that. The sudden direct light momentarily blinded her, and she clamped her eyes shut. The girl didn't seem to notice, and her shuffling footsteps approached. The beam of the flashlight made red spots behind Yan's eyelids, it was that bright.

And then there was a gentle touch. She peeled back Yan's fingers to see the clumsy toilet paper bandage on her palm. Yan was limp, not wanting to disturb the girl as she prodded at it. It hurt, but it wasn't malicious. Then the girl curled Yan's fingers back up and took a step back, leaving Yan alone and in the dark once more.

It was strange how her life was completely ruled and punctuated by these visits. These things were the only things that broke up the monotony, and it was a long time before the monotony was broken again.

Yan struggled to return to her daydream state, but as she had suspected, the more she tried, the less it worked. She couldn't even summon the ghosts she usually talked to- friends and family that she casually chatted with and imagined sitting around as she paced through her tiny cell. Yan had never considered herself a particularly imaginative person before. Sure, she enjoyed meditating, but that was clearing her mind, not intentionally cluttering up reality with ghosts. Discovering her penchant for it under extreme circumstances, then immediately losing the skill as soon as it became relevant was extremely annoying to her.

It was lonely and boring without her ghosts. She went back to praying, talking to God as though God was one of them. That didn't bring her much comfort, and it felt almost sacrilegious, even though she was angry at God anyway. She just needed someone to talk to other than herself. And she continued her experiments with withstanding pain and with her subconscious use of the power.

If someone had asked her beforehand if it would be easier to slide away into her daydreams with the light on or off, she would have said off, but now, in the dark, it was harder. The people keeping her operated under the flag of taking away anything that she tried to hurt herself with. So just as the trashcan had vanished forever, so had the lightbulb. As an experiment one day, Yan shredded the plastic wrapper that held her granola bars, and ate it. She was thoroughly indigested and scraped out her insides with the plastic, but her suspicions were confirmed when, from then on, all of her foods came to her unwrapped.

And then, some unknown time later, but after perhaps ten or fifteen visits from the girl who brought her food, the Green King returned.

He brought a flashlight. It looked like the same one the girl who came at night had. Yan imagined for a moment it hanging on a hook outside her door, ready for anyone who came into her dark prison to have. The light burned her eyes. She had been in the dark for too long, and he was pointing it directly at her face.

This was the first time they had met where she began the conversation with some semblance of control over herself, and she wanted to keep it that way. She was neither drugged nor immediately being held down by the power. It was pathetic how even that tiny amount of control over the boundaries of her own body was something to relish, when she remained trapped and chained.

"What do you want?" Yan asked in Old Imperial, sitting on her bed with her legs crossed. She knew there was no point in going after him. His power, even if she had been able to use hers, was strong enough to keep her trapped.

"Information." The Green King took the greatly battered chair and scooted it so that its back was facing Yan's bed. He sat on it backwards, leaning over the back of it and holding the flashlight so that it pointed at her. The flashlight illuminated bloodstains on her clothes from when she cut her hand that she hadn't been able to get out. She washed her clothes in the sink regularly, but in the dark she couldn't ever tell if they were really clean. Her eyes hurt in the glare, and from straining to look down at her own body in the rare opportunities that she got to see herself. Her neck still was frozen in place, so her peripheral vision did all the heavy lifting. It was always a bit disconcerting to see again after so long in darkness.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"Why didn't you ask me before?"

The Green King smiled, a sight made more ghoulish by the light of the flashlight bobbing around in his hand. "It's been hard to figure out what exactly we wanted to do with you. You haven't been making people very happy, you know."

"What do you want to do with me?"

The Green King continued as though he hadn't heard her question. "You weren't our original target, obviously, but by time our operation was set up, it was too late to change our plans."

"Then why are you keeping me?"

He sighed dramatically, leaning forward on the chair and tilting the flashlight up underneath his own chin. "We're hoping to have some use out of you anyway."

"Who is 'we'?" Yan asked.

"Do you really think I would tell you that?"

"It's not like I have much hope of escaping," Yan said. Her fingers itched to reach out and grab the flashlight, to hit the King over the head with it, to search his body for keys that would release her from her chains and room. There probably was no such key, though. Her chains probably required the power to break, or at least some judicious use of power tools.

"You seem to think you have hope," the Green King said.

"Then do you really think that I'll give you the information you're looking for?"

"I haven't even asked my questions yet."

Yan didn't say anything in response, just stared at him.

"You really messed up one of my men," the Green King said. "That glass did a number on his cheek. Had to get stitches."

"Sorry," Yan said. She didn't feel that sorry.

"How have you liked living in the dark?"

"It's about the same as the light. The buzzing annoyed me." Yan didn't want to give him any satisfaction from the way they were treating her.

"Sorry," he said, but he clearly wasn't sorry either. They stared at each other for a moment.

"Are you planning to kill me?" Yan asked after a while. She felt detached from the question, but it was something that she needed to ask, that she had been wanting to know for a long time.

"I'm not planning to do anything except what I'm told," the Green King said. "I'm the hired help, you know."

"Then why are you in here instead of someone important?"

"Oh, because you're not a danger to me." He shrugged, and the light flared in Yan's eyes.

"I'm hardly a danger to anyone," Yan said.

"That's not going to convince me to let you out. Specifically since it isn't true. You know, if you insist on trying to use the power, we'll have to drug you again, and that will be no fun."

"What's the point of you keeping me alone in here?"

"Temporary holding, like I said, until people figure out what to do with you. Breaking your spirit would be a nice secondary accomplishment."

"Is it working?"

"Is it?" he asked.He studied her. Yan kept her arms at her sides, resisting the urge to lash out at him. She wanted to keep her body her own. She didn't want to give him new reason to touch her with his power. "I don't think so. Well, there's plenty of time yet."

They fell into silence again.

"Aren't you overstaying your welcome?"

"No, I have as long as I like with you today." He scooted his chair back slightly, making a horrible grinding sound on the floor.

"Could you tell me how long I've been in here?" Yan asked.

"No, I don't think so." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a phone. He ignored her and swiped through it idly. It was such a mundane action, and so out of contrast to her surroundings, that Yan almost laughed. The cool glow of it illuminated his features, and he stood the flashlight up on the floor between them, pointing up to the stone ceiling. The phone was just outside of grabbing range, and that was probably why he had scooted back so far.

"Texting somebody?" Yan asked. He ignored her.

"So. Ms. BarCarran. I'd like you to answer these questions for me as completely and honestly as you can."

"No."

"I haven't even asked the question yet!" The Green King sounded slightly amused. He wasn't looking at her, he was just staring down at his phone screen. His attention on it was making Yan a little nervous. "Let's start off with something easy. Why did Aymon Sandreas pick you to be his apprentice?"

"Why do you care?"

"I'm mostly just curious. Indulge me, will you?"

"I don't know. He liked my project."

"Project?"

"You don't know about that? Did you not go to the Academy?" Yan had been thinking that the Green King was a rogue Academy graduate. She didn't know how common such people were, but she had heard all about the nasty business on Jenjin, so they weren't exactly unheard of. So either the Green King was playing dumb, or she had made several fundamental mistakes about her situation.

"Just tell me what the project is."

"I made a fake fish. I wanted to be a xenobiologist. Probably would have been better for me in the long run."

"I agree. And why did Aymon Sandreas like that project so much?"

"He said that God told him to pick me. I don't know. This is dumb." Yan couldn't believe that the first real conversation she was having in who knows how long was with her captor, and all he wanted to ask was inane questions about the beginning of her apprenticeship. It didn't feel relevant to her. Maybe he was just softening her up for later questions that would be more difficult for her to answer. Or maybe he was trying to get down to the core personality of Sandreas, but that didn't make sense either. As far as Yan could tell, there wasn't any external rhyme or reason to the projects that he had picked. Other peoples were more impressive, or more politically tailored, and there was almost nothing in common even between the projects of the three apprentices. Sid and Kino had both made statues, but that was it. She clenched her fists, though she kept her arms to her sides, careful not to look aggressive.

"Dumb or not, I need you to answer the questions."

"I did answer your question."

"The other two apprentices, Kino Mejia and Sid Welslak, why did he pick them?"

"I'm not going to answer that." As much as she thought the question was harmless, there was no reason for her to give these people any information that could hurt Kino and Sid.

"I do need you to answer the question."

"I don't know the answer, and even if I did, I'm not going to tell you anything about my friends."

"That's nice of you, but I'm just asking why Aymon Sandreas chose them to be his apprentices."

"God told him," Yan huffed. "That's the only thing I know."

"And you believe that?"

"Are we going to have a theological discussion here? Because I've had a whole lot of time to sit in the dark and think about fucking theology. You have me bugged. You've heard me praying, and everything else, too."

"Luckily for me, I am not the person who has to comb through your ramblings for any useful information," the Green King said, his voice dry.

"Oh, fuck you."

"Language."

Yan said something foul in Terlin, cheerfully repeating a long string of swears she had once heard her aunt use when cussing out a late delivery. The vivid image of her aunt screaming at the navigators of another ship after they had been trapped waiting in port for several days was indelibly etched into Yan's mind. Her lips twitched up at the corners when she recalled it.

"I'll assume that was nothing polite," the Green King said.

"Why do none of you speak New Imperial, anyway?"

"I'm asking the questions here," the Green King said.

"You're lucky we used Old Imperial on the ship, sometimes, or I'd hardly be able to talk to you all."

"How well would you say that you know your fellow apprentices?" the Green King asked, going back to his questions.

"Not going to tell you anything about them." It was so strange that he was focusing so much on Kino and Sid, when they were, in the grand scheme of the Empire's politics, fairly irrelevant. Until one of them stepped up to take Sandreas's place, it wasn't as though they had that much power aside from what Sandreas chose to give them.

"Do I need to encourage you to speak up?"

Yan did not like the sound of that, but she also wasn't going to betray her friends with just the suggestion of torture. She didn't say anything.

"Sid Welslak. Has he ever done anything that you thought was strange?"

Although Yan desperately wanted to ask him what he meant by that, she stayed silent. It was her new tactic. Of course Sid had done strange things. All three of them were deeply strange, messed up people.

On that thought, Yan wondered just how messed up she would be when she got out of here. She was going to get out of here.

"Alright, a simpler question, maybe. How much time did you spend with Sid on a daily basis?"

Yan bit her lip. She had become quite chatty (with herself) during her confinement, so it was difficult to resist just saying things. Luckily, she had practice during all the nights she had pretended to be asleep so she could catch a glimpse of the girl who came to visit her. Words popped out of her mouth, seemingly without her volition.

"Who is the girl who brings my food?"

"I'll tell you her name if you tell me about Sid Welslak," the Green King said. Yan frowned and silenced herself again. Although she did want to know, that was definitely not worth giving up anything on Si. She didn't even know what they could possibly use this information for, but it wasn't worth the risk. After all, these people had managed to kidnap her, and were presumably aiming for Sandreas, so they must be at least a little bit competent.

"Are you really not going to tell me about Sid? We're not going to hurt him, we just need to know a little bit about him."

Yan looked steadily into the Green King's face. The room was dark, and he was illuminated only on the sharp parts of his face, yellow from the flashlight, blue from the screen of his phone. She didn't believe a word he said.

"Alright, I'll try a different question. We'll go back to Sid in a minute. Who is the Emperor?"

"I don't know, I've never met him," Yan said.

"How can you be the apprentice to the Voice of the Empire and not have met the Emperor?" The Green King's face proclaimed just how little he believed what she was saying. Unfortunately, it was true.

"Sandreas never took me to him, and no one ever wants to talk about him. It's true."

"But Aymon Sandreas himself goes to see the Emperor?" Oh, that might have been a mistake for Yan to say. She shut up again. Maybe all this time alone really had broken her.

"I'm really not good at this, am I?" The Green King ran his hand through his hair. "Maybe yes or no questions would be easier. Did Aymon Sandreas go see the Emperor?"

Yan didn't say anything, didn't move.

"I do need you to answer the question."

She bit her lip and closed her eyes.

"Did Aymon Sandreas consult with the Emperor, yes or no?"

She stayed silent.

"You have ten seconds to think about my question." Oh, so there was the threat again. "Ten. Nine. Eight…" The Green King was shockingly bad at counting backwards in Old Imperial; he had to stop and think about each number before he said it. "Three. Two. One."

Nothing happened for a second, and Yan was about to laugh at his empty bluff, but then he tapped his phone, and a searing wave of pain shot through Yan's brain. The chip. It was the same pain that assaulted her whenever she tried to use the power, but it was a lesser version of it, and she was able to stay conscious. It wouldn't make sense for them to make her pass out when they were trying to get information out of her.

"Did Aymon Sandreas ever indicate to you that he was going to talk to the Emperor?"

Yan stayed silent, and the pain came again, just a tiny bit more. It was all in her head, and that was one saving grace of it. It might have felt like her body was on fire, but she could open her eyes and see that nothing was wrong with her. There wasn't anything… At least they weren't touching her. She looked at her hands, and they trembled on her lap as she rode the wave of pain for a few moments. The other thing that saved her was that she knew she could withstand more. She had been practicing every day, over and over, resisting this pain so that she could break through and use the power. She knew exactly what her threshold was.

"They didn't even give me a good list of questions to ask, you know. They're all wrapped up in their own paranoid conspiracies that they've given me a list of nonsense, and you aren't even cooperating! It's bullshit." The Green King then went on to mumble something in a language that Yan didn't understand. At least when he was doing that, he wasn't keeping his finger on the pain button. "You know what? Fuck it, I'll ask about military strategy if I want to. Ms. BarCarran, what's the next planet the Fleet is going to target?"

There was probably a reason why whoever the Green King's boss was hadn't wanted him to ask about military information. That reason was that now Yan knew more about her captors. Nobody in the Empire should know anything about the Fleet, and certainly not that there was a list of planets out there waiting to be captured and colonized.

Several things clicked into place during the long moment of silence where Yan refused to answer. She had been captured by actual enemies of the Empire. Those enemies were somehow also working with pirates to capture her, which had horrifying implications. And those pirates had been able to get themselves in the good graces of some crew members on a Guild ship. The Empire had a horrible, horrible information leak on its hands. If pirates were freely associating with the enemy… It was a miracle that, through the normal flow of information along channels of drug trafficking and money laundering and human transportation, everyone in the Empire hadn't learned about the war.

"My name is Yan, you know."

"I know. Please answer the question."

"I don't know why you think I will," Yan said. She clenched her hands again in anticipation of the oncoming pain.

"Next Fleet target planet. Come on, you should know this."

Yan stayed silent. She had an idea, and it was going to be a bad one, but she had to test her hypothesis. She was sure that the chip in her head wasn't just a chip. After all, when she had removed it before, the pain remained when she used the power. It probably wasn't hooked directly onto her nerves. There must be something residual in her brain that the chip then controlled. And if it was just acting as a relay, she needed to know if it could perform two commands at once. After all, if the Green King was frying her brain at a relatively low setting, maybe she would be able to use the power without it "noticing". She would have to try to do something small first, just as a test.

Her range of vision was limited, both by her inability to turn her neck and the darkness of the room. She needed to manipulate something that she could recognize, but that the Green King wouldn't. As he counted down from ten, Yan began to concentrate on the fabric of her skirt that was bunched up on her knee. She wouldn't have to move it too much, just a tiny bit. Enough to know… The concentration, the readying herself, that caused a tingle to grow in her brain. A warning signal.

"Three. Two. One." The Green King pressed the button, and Yan felt like she was on fire again. As always, it was difficult to think through the pain, but she had practice. The Green King wouldn't hold the button down for more than a few seconds, so she had to be quick as she used the power. It came sluggishly toward her, feeling like a thick sap oozing out of a wound on a plant in the greenhouse. In the long time she had been trapped and unable to use the power without fear, her usual skill with it had degraded. The thought of that was almost more painful than the searing of her nerves. She hadn't realized just how much her skill with the power had been a part of her identity, part of her perception of herself.

She focused, and the fabric of her skirt shifted imperceptibly in the dim light. She felt it move across her knees, and she let out a rush of breath that could have been a whimper. The pain stopped, and her ears rang.

"Are you ready to answer my questions now?"

Yan was careful to keep any sign of her triumph off her face. Though she could do nothing but stare straight ahead, she didn't let her mouth move, or the corners of her eyes crinkle up. She took a few deep, ragged breaths and looked squarely at the Green King.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"None of your business, I'm afraid." She hadn't expected anything different. "What is the next military target the Empire has chosen? There has to be one, since–" He coughed slightly, his face twisted in the flashlight beam.

"None of your business, I'm afraid," Yan said. Now she did need to egg him on. A plan was forming. Break the chain first, quietly, then take the flashlight, hit the Green King with it until he passed out. Or maybe not the flashlight. Maybe the table would be better. Heavier.

It was a shame that Halen hadn't ever gotten a chance to teach them how to actually freeze another person's body. She probably wouldn't have had the strength and dexterity of power for it even if he had, but it would have been one more tool in her arsenal. Even now, she was going to be working against great odds, with very little in the way of supplies or preparation. But she had to do it. She wasn't going to allow herself to languish here without trying.

She had no idea what the consequences for failure would be. The bad thing about knowing that she had been taken by the enemies of the Empire was that she knew, now, that she probably wouldn't be rescued. Unless she was on Tyx III, which seemed highly unlikely, there would be no search party combing the surface of a hostile planet. She needed to free herself, and she was going to try to do so for as long as it took, or die trying.

The thoughts rushed through her. She felt like time was slowing down.

"You little–" the Green King tipped his chair forward towards her, reaching out, but Yan scurried backward onto her bed, just out of reach. He either didn't think to use the power or only wanted to intimidate her, but he couldn't physically touch her from his position now. He smiled at her grimly. "Kino Mejia. How closely does she work with Aymon Sandreas?"

"I'm not going to tell you anything," Yan said. "You might as well not even ask."

This time, there wasn't even a countdown before he unleashed the pain. Yan yelped, but remembered her plan through the haze. Once again, the power crawled toward her, and she had just enough time to seek out one of the chain links resting on the floor and break it. She cleaved a line straight through it, and the two halves separated cleanly on the floor, just out of sight. The pain abated, and she took a few choked breaths. She was very careful not to move her leg, not to let him know that the chain was broken.

The Green King didn't make any sign that he saw what was going on. Yan was sweating; her whole forehead was beaded in it, and her palms were slimy. She opened and closed her fists a few times, feeling the ache in her hands from clenching them too hard.

"Did you know Kino Mejia when you both attended the Academy?"

If she stayed silent, maybe she could provoke him more. She anticipated the stinging pain. She wanted it to come. The thought of freedom was sending shivers down her spine, and she clamped all her muscles as firmly as she could to stop herself from wiggling. It was so close. She could do it. She could at least get out of here, even if not off whatever planet she was trapped on.

"Is there anyone who Kino Mejia is in regular contact with?"

Yan didn't know why he was so focused on Sid and Kino. It didn't make any sense to her. He wasn't even asking questions about Sandreas, and theoretically he had been the one they were after when Yan had been kidnapped.

Wait.

If he wasn't asking about Sandreas, and he was focused on Kino and Sid… They couldn't have gotten Sandreas, could they have? Sandreas couldn't be dead. That wasn't… But if he only wanted to know about Kino and Sid, maybe one of them had been forced to take over. Maybe she was overthinking things.

Halen would have protected Sandreas. There was no way that he would allow anything to happen.

"What's been going on since you put me in here?" Yan asked, in as calm of a voice as she could make.

"That's none of your business."

Maybe they were just trying to decide which one of the apprentices they'd prefer to have eventually become Voice. Maybe they were trying to stake out future plans. That was even more reason for her to not say anything about Kino and Sid. None of this was making any sense. She shivered, tense and miserable.

She needed to provoke him again, in order for him to zap her with the chip. She didn't want to, though. All of a sudden, she wanted to know what was happening outside in the real world. She had just been assuming that life had proceeded as normal without her, but the realization that more bad things could have happened had struck her like a brick, far harder than the pain of the Green King's zapping chip.

"Are Sid and Kino alright?"

"I wouldn't have any information on that," the Green King said with a halfhearted shrug. "I didn't even know who they were until I got this list of questions."

That had to be a lie. "Is Sandreas still the Voice?"

The Green King raised an eyebrow at her. "I just told you I wouldn't be giving you any news. Maybe I'll change my mind if you answer my questions."

"I won't."

"Let me ask one again. Did Kino Mejia have any contact with people outside the Empire?"

"I don't fucking know," Yan said. "Tell me if Sandreas is still alive!"

"You have ten seconds to answer my question. And I won't be so gentle with my punishment this time."

Yan braced herself. She would grab the flashlight with the power and hit him with it. That's what she would do. The pain hit her again, and it was worse than before. The Green King hadn't lied about that, at least. Her whole body twitched involuntarily, and through the haze, Yan reached for the power. It was slow and weak, but she wrapped it around the flashlight, and yanked it up into the air as violently and quickly as she could. It knocked the underside of the Green King's chin, and his head snapped backward.

He dropped his phone, and immediately the pain stopped. With the pain gone, the power left Yan's grasp as well and the flashlight clattered to the ground. She lunged for the phone, but the Green King recovered his senses before she could reach it, and she felt the hard grasp of his power on her body. She froze and toppled over, face planted on her mattress, arms reaching out and grasping at nothing.

"Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not." The Green King picked up his phone, and spit onto the floor. His voice sounded thick, as though he had bit his tongue when she hit him with the flashlight.

"Now, let's take it from the top, and if you don't answer me, I'll just break your fingers… I see that I've been treating you a little too kindly."