Chapter 6

Saying It’s Sardius

It was a big surprise when Jenna was contacted by Sardius’ prison, which Jenna now knew was called The Xypher Zone Prison for Persons with Y Chromosomes. Even though the prison had experienced a full-scale massacre, it hadn’t been burnt to the ground and the clean-up crew informed her that Sardius was unaccounted for. The only people who had lived were prisoners who had been hiding in the walls before the chaos started. In the aftermath, there were large piles of body bits and the clean-up crew had tried to count the heads, but quite a lot of stuff was either burnt to ashes or jettisoned into outer space. They sent their condolences.

They told Jenna they had the marriage certificate ready. Sardius had authenticated it by contributing up a piece of his hair and then he signed it with his signature. At the wedding, the two of them were supposed to prick themselves and let their blood intermingle. The clean-up crew said they’d send her the certificate. Cloning techniques on Waltzer Prime were supposed to be top-notch, if she wanted to go that way. The wedding certificate would take a few months to send. Did she want it as a memento?

Of course, she wanted it.

“You know,” Crimp said in her slow grating voice. “If you didn’t even know what he looked like, that studio on Waltzer Prime can figure it out for you. If you want.”

“I can’t think about that now,” Jenna said, brushing off the topic. “I’ve been waiting to hear back from Vinia and she’s giving me the run-around.”

“Why don’t you just go see her?” Crimp suggested.

“Cause I’m terrified the AAMC will come after me, beat my head in, assassinate me… stuff like that,” Jenna admitted. “I’m starting to think they are behind all the diplomat deaths. The only way to change out diplomats is to kill the current ones. Yuck. I love reminding myself that my own army hates me.”

“There’s really no reason to fret about every little movement you make,” the bodyguard explained. “It’s not like they have instantaneous information about everything you do. This isn’t their system. Heaven knows how that reporter girl gets her broadcasts out for everyone to see in such a timely fashion. But it’s not like the AAMC can do anything about what happens around this star. Vinia is not on the other side of the universe. She’s on Spikay Two, which is next to the Octavia system. It’s a world that’s half Adamis and a quarter Octavian. It’s almost uninhabited. You could go there and be back before anyone at the AAMC even noticed.”

“Do we have an address for her?”

Crimp gave Jenna an IDK look before turning back to the tablet she was scrolling on.

Jenna rolled her eyes. It wasn’t Crimp’s job to do that sort of thing. She was in charge of security in the Stone Palace and not a PA. She didn’t have to look up anything.

Jenna went to the control panel and did a search much like a Google search back home, but way sketchier. She wished for the millionth time that Sardius was there to help her weed through the garbage. There was so much garbage. So many ads. So many people screaming for attention, like Twitter, Reddit, a Google search, and fifty other engines mashed up.

“Why don’t we have something like a voice-automated computer that does this sort of thing for us?” Jenna wondered aloud.

“Because the computers are too stupid,” Vash said, exiting Jenna’s bedroom and rubbing the crink in his neck.

“What?”

“Historically, we tried that, but it’s not as intuitive or as useful as a person. You can give voice commands to our control panel if you want to, but you’ll find out in under a minute that it sucks.”

“I can guess,” Jenna said hopelessly. “If it’s pulling information from the same places it’s displaying then we’re all screwed.”

Vash pursed his lips together. “We received a parcel today.”

“Have we ever received a parcel before?”

“We get them all the time. I just don’t talk to you about them because they’re addressed to Smoothie because they’re our food deliveries. Or they’re addressed to Misha because they’re your new clothes. I decided to open it on your behalf because it looked so suspicious.”

“What was inside?”

“It was two tickets to a boxing match on Spikay Two… from Sardius.”

***

Jenna took in a sharp intake of breath. “From Sardius, you say?”

Vash flipped over the package and showed her the shipping label. “It being from him makes no sense, but it came with a note saying that he’d prepared a new earpiece for you and he had someone who would deliver it to you for him at that boxing match.”

“Show it to me.”

Vash brought out the envelope. It was black with two holographic tickets inside with a printed note included.”

Jenna agreed with Vash. “This looks so suspicious. Would it have looked less suspicious if the note was handwritten?”

“No. It’s all suspicious. We don’t know Sardius’ handwriting from a hole in the wall.”

Jenna laughed. “His handwriting probably was a hole in the wall.”

“Is Sardius dead?” Vash asked in a hushed tone.

The butler had not been told the details of Sardius’ contract or situation. All he knew was that he had been Jenna’s personal assistant, but now he was gone and Jenna had a new personal assistant who… she’d completely forgotten about when she went to look for Vinia’s address.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Jenna didn’t answer Vash, and instead, she clicked on her earpiece. “Ixy, I need you to find a current address for Arvantis’ third wife, Vinia.”

“One second,” Ixy called. “I was in the shower. Can I call you back in a few?”

“Yup.” Jenna refused to be annoyed with Ixy and she switched off her earpiece. Then she turned back to Vash. “Wanna come with me to hear what Crimp has to say about the suspicion level of those tickets?”

“Yes.” He followed her to the Stone Palace.

Jenna presented them to their only bodyguard as she lounged on the deck. “What do you think of this?”

Crimp sat up straighter in her deck chair and looked at the tickets with interest. “I’d go with you to see this.”

“You would?” Jenna asked incredulously.

“Yeah. The fight is an ogre bare-knuckle boxing a boneman. Yeah, I’d pay to see that, except it looks like these tickets are already paid for by this dude, Sardius. And if you want to go, you need a bodyguard, so… are we going?”

“You think it’s safe to just accept random tickets? How can we verify that they came from who they say they come from?”

“Well, we can’t, but we can do a few other things,” she said, getting up from her chair and pacing the length of the deck. “Who is Sardius?”

“He just… was my personal assistant… sort of… we were very close,” Jenna admitted bashfully. “But we haven’t been in contact for months and everyone thinks he’s dead.”

“Ohhhh…” Crimp started laughing. “That’s awesome. I thought only Princess Celestina had a soap opera life. If everyone thinks he’s dead, then just coming to see you is probably completely out of the question. He has to initiate contact in this sideways manner. So, he’s offering you an earpiece to get back in touch with him.” The poison girl smacked her lips before approaching the problem from another angle. “Okay, let’s pretend for a minute that the tickets have come from someone who is not Sardius, but someone who is trying to lure you into a trap. Let’s look at the bait. Is the boxing match bait for you? Do you love watching guys beat the snot out of each other, Jenna?”

“Not really. I’m more of a kitten-in-an-oversized-goblet kind of girl.”

“Then that’s bad bait. What about the earpiece he’s offering? Do you want that?”

“So bad my mouth fills with saliva thinking of it,” she confessed without thinking of how it sounded.

Vash took a step away from Jenna.

“Okay… that’s dangerous because it’s good bait,” Crimp continued. “Did everyone know you and Sardius were involved, close, extra close, whatever? I mean, I’ve been following your moves on Interstellar TV and I’ve never heard of you having a love interest aside from Armen and Favel. Did anyone even know about it?”

“The members of the Octavian Council would have known I had designs on him. We had a conversation about it.”

“I thought he was just your PA,” Vash laughed with a snort.

“Aside from that, Misha and Smoothie might have guessed. Apparently, Vash had no idea. I guess it was a pretty big secret,” Jenna said, flicking him in the bicep.

At that moment, Ixy came back online and gave Jenna Vinia’s address, reminding them that Vinia lived on Spikay Two.

“Okay,” Crimp said with enthusiasm. “The boxing match is on the same moon I was going to take you to meet Vinia anyway. Let’s double up the activities. We can go to the boxing match and then go find Vinia.”

“Wait. I don’t think we’ve plugged all the holes. Someone else may have known about Sardius. If we go, you’re not concerned that this whole setup is a trap and someone will try to kill me?”

“Someone may try to kill you,” Crimp agreed, “but if they do, poison isn’t the only thing I do. You’ll be quite safe with me.”

***

Before Jenna and Crimp boarded the pod to take them to Spikay Two, Favel came to introduce them to the pilot who would be flying them.

Favel came through the ocean entrance and dipped a tentacle back in the water to help the other Octavian out of the water. Jenna recognized him. He was blue like Favel, but he had large red rings on his tentacles. The new Octavian looked at Jenna and Crimp warily.

“This is my son, Temptic,” Favel announced proudly. “I want to introduce you to more members of my family.”

“Hello, Temptic.”

“You’re not my real mom,” he said sourly.

After a moment of complete silence, Jenna, Crimp, and Temptic laughed together. Favel looked on with a disapproving stare and then an eye roll.

“You’re cute,” Jenna declared. “I’ll try not to replace your real mom.”

“He has to be hilarious. He’s very poisonous,” Favel said grimly. “Fatal to humans.”

“Really?” Crimp said, coming closer and asking Temptic questions about how poisonous he was, how his poison worked, how long it took to kill someone and more.

The blue and red Octavian was very suspicious until Jenna clarified. “This is Crimp. She’s a bodyguard and she’s also, quite literally, poisonous.”

Temptic liked that and seated himself in a goblet where he talked to Crimp.

Once Jenna and Favel were more or less able to speak privately, Favel gave Jenna the details. “Temptic’s mother passed away many years ago. She was a red-ringed Octavian named Mytic. She was my favorite wife. I miss her dearly.”

“How did she die?” Jenna asked, trying to add a note of sympathy to her normally clipped tone.

“Her children ate her,” he explained quietly. “But not Temptic. Temptic was from her first clutch of eggs. I was her mate for it and I stayed with her and cared for her during her hatching and fed the infants when they were born. The babies parted and went their own ways, except for Temptic, who stayed with me. Mytic died when I was off-world. She was hatching the offspring of her second husband, who wasn’t able to take as much care as I was.”

“Aren’t you angry with him for not taking better care of her?”

“He was dead,” Favel explained. “I can’t be angry at a dead octopus. Life comes and goes so furiously when you’re an Octavian that there’s no one to blame even when things don’t go your way. Life has to keep happening one way or another. Occasionally, I’ll see a red-ringed octopus with yellow on the tips of their tentacles and I’ll wonder if that octopus is Mytic and Ruin’s child. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”

“Don’t you ever see a blue octopus with red rings and wonder if it’s your child with her?”

Favel’s eyes crinkled. “I tagged my babies when they were born. I know where each of them is.”

“Do you feel like that’s a violation of privacy?” Jenna asked, realizing that she was tagged herself because of her earpiece.

“No. In the ocean, we don’t have murder. We eat what we can eat and if something else dies then so be it. I have killed more things than I can count. A great many things died for me to keep Mytic and my babies alive during that clutch’s hatching. However, it’s completely legal to tag a baby if they’re poisonous. If an Octavian’s poison is being used inappropriately off-world, we need to know that. So all their poison is sampled, tagged, and stored. If an octopus has their poison taken from them, the government needs to know. That happens sometimes. You’ll learn more about it when you start working on the treaties.”

Jenna nodded.

“By the way,” Favel continued. “I wanted to tell you that I am very pleased about your second appointment. Do you know how Octavia Prime and all her moons worship you? They love Celestina. They’ve never had a media personality as famous as her involved with their cause. They think she is the most adorable thing in the world like you got a kitten to host the news.”

“That would be a huge hit on Earth,” Jenna conceded. “How outrageous was the reaction to our engagement? I’ve been so busy planning this trip off-world that I haven’t looked at any of the news feeds.”

Favel paused. “They love it… too much. I am under an incredible amount of pressure to marry you sooner rather than later. I’ve explained why I would like to wait, but my people are excited to the point of frenzy. Can we start a matchmaking process so we can get you a real man?”

“When so many people are trying to kill me or steal my crowns?” Jenna asked hesitantly. “It seems a little tough.”

Favel simply returned her gaze.

“If I’m still alive after this trip to Spikay Two, we’ll talk about it,” she relented.

“Good.”