Questions ricocheted around the Revelation at the speed of light, but Lyra’s head spun too fast for her to even really register any of them. It felt like her weirdness-detecting meter was broken—so much had happened in the past few days that her mind had just stopped noticing these bizarre situations. It all still felt like a fever dream, and she half-expected to be woken up at any minute by some drunken draft dodger or homeless streetwalker screaming at her to get out of their territory. That was it, it had to be. Any second now, the distant hum of the spacecraft’s life-support systems would fade into the buzz of neon lights, the lingering scent of lavender would transform into the odor of cheap perfume, and Imperial white would turn to Cantator black.

Lyra closed her eyes tight and opened them again, only to see the glittering, ascetic luxury of the Revelation once more. She was still the picture of upper-crust perfection—she was clothed in a gown the Imperatrix had personally gifted her, wearing jewelry expensive enough to support her forever if she dared to run away and pawn it, and sitting amongst people from a range of castes she never thought she’d meet. Acidalia sat in front of her, talking to David about some complicated war Lyra had only ever heard snippets of from T, while the others interrupted the conversation occasionally to add bits and pieces of information and insight. Lyra herself stayed silent, mostly because she had no idea what she could possibly offer this conversation.

“This is dangerous territory,” Acidalia said wearily, rubbing her forehead like she had a migraine. “You’d think after all this time, people would learn that forming never-ending, complicated webs of alliances is a recipe for disaster, especially combined with that imperialistic, militaristic attitude Cadé claims the Alliance has.”

David scoffed. “People never learn from their ancestors’ mistakes. If they did, nobody would be in the mess every one of us is trapped in right now.” Alongside him, his daughter nodded, but she clearly wasn't paying attention. She looked bored and annoyed, unimpressed.

“Well, we’re not really in a mess, are we?” Athena, one of the Scientias, asked. She’d already somehow managed to get her lipstick smeared all the way down her chin and on her bright white teeth, though she hadn’t eaten anything or touched her face. It looked absolutely ridiculous, but Lyra assumed she had a high enough status that the others didn’t want to mention it. “I mean,” Athena clarified, “outside of our own war, that is. What can they do, make us listen to them?”

Acidalia sighed. “Well, yes.”

“Bullshit,” Athena said. “You’re the Imperatrix Ceasarina—or, at least, an Imperatrix Ceasarina—of Eleutheria. They have to listen to what you say.”

“That isn’t how diplomacy works.” Acidalia frowned. “I have no way of knowing if Cadé is telling the truth or if this is all entirely made up. Keep in mind that, according to him, the governing body behind their delegation has no idea that they’re even here. There’s a very real possibility that he could just be utterly mad, or that he’s a radical politician with no real, substantial support simply making absurd claims to invoke pathos.”

“So you can just say no to him,” Athena said patronizingly.

“No, not exactly. Because if he was telling the truth, Eleutheria could be facing a military unlike any other we’ve ever dealt with, and then either they crush us, or we waste countless resources getting them off of our planet. Perhaps I’d have taken the risk of denying him if we were in peacetime, but the great Eleutherian army is already divided in two, the government is a barely functioning mess, and half the citizens hate the other half with a passion I’ve never seen before. If we declined their ‘offer’ of an alliance and we were attacked by this hypothetical enemy…” Her voice trailed off, and though it never wavered, she didn’t look exactly the same as before. She wasn’t shaken, really, but perhaps slightly less confident, and that worried Lyra supremely.

“Well, I, for one, am not going to be bullied by these interstellar assholes,” Praetor Andromeda declared, as if it was that easy. Her one glowing iris made a click-click-click noise like metal on metal when she rolled her eyes. “They may claim to have fancy technology, but they’re definitely bluffing. If they don’t have Eleutheria’s biotech, how can they have weaponized black holes? Those aren’t even possible.”

“That is true,” Acidalia ceded, “but they’ve always been far more advanced than us in regards to physics. They do seem to lag behind in biology, but that’s not what’s important right now.”

“And, um,” the other Scientia—Carina?—said, “weaponizing black holes is kind of technically possible.”

Andromeda’s eyes widened, casting a fluorescent blue glow on the floor. “What do you mean by that?”

“The math does check out.” Carina shrugged. “I—well, I’d hardly know, I’m a student, really. But they’re definitely not too outlandish. And, theoretically, if they existed, they’d be too powerful to face up against. All of Terra would be torn to shreds, and most of Mars, too, at the very least.”

“Is there any way for us to get weaponized black holes?” Andromeda asked. “Hypothetically.”

“No,” Acidalia said quickly, “and even if there was, I would never green light that. If these massive forces of destruction are real, the galaxy most certainly doesn’t need another one.”

“It’s war. Creating massive forces of destruction comes with the territory.”

“We do not need to go from leveling cities to leveling solar systems,” David argued. “As if nuclear bombs and the like aren’t already bad enough. Have you ever seen Star Wars: A New Hope? Look at what happened to Princess Leia’s planet! Acidalia’s right—nobody needs more of that.”

“Maybe Acidalia should keep her mouth shut about what’s ethical and what isn’t, seeing as she let her brother kill himself to save her own skin,” Ace snapped suddenly, glaring at Acidalia with a gaze sharp enough to cut steel.

Lyra was sure her eyes almost bulged out of her head, but the Imperatrix herself seemed to take it in stride. “We can debate the ethics of war and self-sacrifice another time,” she said, smoothly transitioning to another subject. Ace looked like he wanted to say something, but Lyra shot him a look, and he closed his mouth. It wasn’t that she didn’t want Acidalia to be held accountable for her actions and the role she had in T’s death, but it seemed unwise to bring that up now, and insulting royalty was never a good idea. Ace was lucky nobody straight-up arrested him on the spot.

With Acidalia’s statement, the rest of the room quieted somewhat, though Ace continued to stare angrily into space. Andromeda kicked at something on the floor, clearly irritated, and an awkward silence fell over the leaders.

“So what are we gonna do?” Athena asked eventually, breaking the unsteady quietude.

“Right now, I think our priority should be shutting down the madness happening in Appalachia at the moment,” Acidalia replied. “Once we secure the capital, we’ll have more resources to allocate to dealing with the massive war the rest of the Via Lactea may or may not have gotten itself into. I’m going have to address the potential alliance at some point, but I can’t do much while we’re actively fighting a battle.”

“You make it sound much simpler than it is,” Andromeda cautioned, gesturing at the window. “Imperatrix Ceasarina though you may be, you’re still no Praetor.”

“I’m actually the Commander in Chief of the entire Eleutherian military, technically speaking, but that’s irrelevant. I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job, but I maintain that it needs to be done. We have to get Appalachia and we have to do it quickly, and if there’s anyone alive who can do that, it’s you.” The compliment tacked on at the end was clearly an attempt to pacify Andromeda, but it seemed to work, and she relaxed slightly, placated.

“All right, but you’re going to have to be lenient on me,” Andromeda said. “If I have to use unorthodox methods—“

“Andy, don’t,” David interrupted, and he and Acidalia both stiffened. Lyra glanced at Cressida, Ace, and the Scientias, who seemed just as tense as the others. For a brief instant it seemed like Acidalia and Andromeda were about to start arguing again, then the atmosphere shifted, and Acidalia’s eyes went wide like she’d had a sudden realization.

“What is it?” Andromeda asked—well, more like demanded, really.

“I just had an idea.”

“Yeah, no shit. What’s the idea?”

Acidalia bit her lip. “It’s absolutely mad.”

“Great.”

“It’s almost certainly a war crime.”

“Even better.”

David shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t like where this is going. I will not have my daughter be the child of a convicted war criminal.”

“You can’t get convicted of war crimes if you don’t lose the war,” Andromeda shrugged. “What is it?”

“Before I say anything—“ Acidalia began.

“Will you stop running your mouth and spit it out? You’re going to give me a goddamn heart attack from the anticipation. I swear to God, you are the worst,” Andromeda interrupted. She held something in her hands—an elastic hair tie, or maybe a rubber band—and twisted it around her fingers, fidgeting, like she simply couldn’t wait to hear what horrible plan Acidalia had concocted in the past five minutes.

Acidalia swallowed, looking like she was reconsidering even mentioning whatever she was about to say. A moment passed, then two. Then, with a pained voice, she announced simply, “I am a Cipher.”

Lyra had no idea what that was supposed to mean, but evidently Andromeda and David understood, because they looked at each other, wide-eyed.

“That’s genius,” Andromeda said, her features lighting up like a Saturnalia tree.

“That’s horrible,” David countered, looking shocked that Acidalia even dared to suggest it.

Everyone else just kind of stared at each other, and Lyra was relieved to see that she wasn’t the only one in the dark. Even the Scientias looked bemused, which wasn’t a feeling she often associated with the caste of knowledge. Cressida tugged at her father’s arm, asking a question in rapid Martian Anglian, but he didn’t answer her. Eventually Acidalia seemed to sense that they needed an explanation, and she rose from her place in her white chair, which suddenly looked much more like a throne than it had before.

“To cipher is to encode,” she said, but she didn’t look at them. Her big brown eyes focused on something outside the window, a distant speck of light a million parsecs away, and Lyra got the feeling Acidalia was trying to avoid her gaze. She wondered why. It didn’t seem like the Imperatrix should have to worry about anyone’s judgement—especially not a Cantator’s.

Athena just stared. “Your point?”

“What I’m about to say may be somewhat shocking,” Acidalia said, though her tone never wavered, and she didn’t look at all like she was about to drop a bombshell. Still, Ace tensed, and Lyra couldn’t blame him. If she were in his position… well, she might not be very enthusiastic to hear any more life-changing statements by Acidalia, either.

“With all due respect, we just met space aliens. I doubt there’s anything that could shock me any more than that,” Athena dismissed with a wave of her hand. “Now you’ve just made me curious.”

“Well, if you insist.” Acidalia sighed. “The Ciphers are rulers, first and foremost, but we are scientists, too. Eleutheria is much more of a technocracy than you may have anticipated, and the strength of the Imperial family comes not only from wealth, but from scientific skill. More specifically, people like my mother and I are both Imperatrices and geneticists, and that’s why we’ve been able to rule over Eleutheria for as long as we have. If you genetically modify each and every citizen from birth, you’re quelling rebellions before they even begin. Everyone in this room bears the marks of a society so focused on futurism that they’ve given up on ethics, myself included.”

For a minute, nobody said anything. Lyra only half-knew what Acidalia was talking about—she’d heard, vaguely, of biology and genetics, but she hardly knew what a cell was, let alone the intricacies of the human genome. Then Athena said, quite loudly, “so that means we’re mutants?”

“In a sense,” Acidalia said, “though I’m afraid that it’s probably not half as cool as what you’re thinking of. Let me give you an example: you’re a caste Scientia, correct?”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Yeah,” Athena said, “so?”

“So…” Acidalia trailed off, and Lyra could almost see gears turning in her head. “So you have a very high IQ. Some would argue extraordinarily high, higher than human nature is supposed to permit. High enough that the negative effects—anxiety, depression, mood disorders, psychosis, and schizophrenia—almost cancel out any benefit it ever may have had. How many of your elders suffered from incurable mental illnesses?”

Athena went silent, her easygoing façade disappearing like a mask falling off her face. “Oh, god. My mother. I never met her, but while she was alive, she was supposedly out of her mind. I always wondered if that was why I was so bad at numbers—my family was just stupid. But you think it’s because she had an artificially inflated IQ or something?”

“I know four people with psychotic disorders,” Carina offered. “I always thought that seemed kind of like too many people for such a small sample size, but I never put the pieces together. Why would Eleutheria want to drive their scientists crazy?”

“They don’t. It’s an unprecedented side effect of an experiment that was done one time on one small group, and then extrapolated to everyone forever. You’re researchers, too, even if you’re not in biomed, and you know how disastrous improperly applied science is. But the Eleutherian perspective on science and society extends far beyond just the intelligence and resultant mental illness of the Scientia caste—it permeates every aspect of our civilization from the top down, and the Ciphers are—supposedly—the ones in charge of it all.”

“So they built us to fit in the boxes they made,” Athena said, sounding half-enraptured. “You’re saying that they intentionally modified everyone just to fit into a caste?”

Acidalia nodded. “That’s why I don’t even have to look at you and Carina to know that you probably have all sorts of inconvenient diseases that would make it difficult for you to do much of anything physical. Asthma and allergies, chronic fatigue, weak muscles and soft bones, immune systems that will lose their metaphorical minds over a grain of pollen or cat dander but will turn the other cheek when faced with influenza. Scientias weren’t built for fighting, and I mean that quite literally. After all, if the smartest members of the population are also the strongest, you’re setting yourself up for a revolution. That’s too risky.”

“I was always sick as a child,” Carina said softly. “Is that why?”

Acidalia nodded. “Almost certainly. It’s like that with every other caste, too—Labora are incredibly strong, but also prone to deafness, blindness, and other conditions that make communication much more difficult in the absence of sign language and Braille, because you can’t form rebellions—or even unions—if you can’t speak to one another. And the only group of people who are exempt from this are the people who were born to rule society itself. Have you ever seen a noblewoman who’s anything less than brilliant and beautiful?”

“Long story short, the propaganda isn’t lying when it says power is in the Ciphers’ DNA,” Andromeda said, looking far less concerned about all this than Lyra was. Despite being a Cantator, a child whose existence wasn’t approved of by the government, she almost felt that something was crawling underneath her skin, like her body wasn’t exactly her own.

Maybe it wasn’t. She’d never met anyone else whose hair grew in a natural fluorescent pink. That couldn’t be normal, could it? She’d inherited it from one of her parents, and where did they get it from? Pre-Eleutherian humans didn’t have hair that looked like liquid fruit-gum amoxicillin. Even Lyra, who had an abandonment certificate instead of a birth certificate, was affected by the Ciphers and their encoding of genes. And if they’d managed to make her hair the same color as strawberry-flavored antibiotics, what had they managed to put into her head?

“So how can we weaponize this?” Athena asked, having apparently already gotten over the revelation that the government had been poisoning her to keep her scrawny and weak her entire life.

“I can edit the genome of anything,” Acidalia said, “including microorganisms. I’m a walking source of made-to-order bioweapons. It’s not a complicated science—in fact, any standard Biologica could probably do it—but what makes me different is the fact that I have training and education and an expensive lab, while any Biologica who looked too deep into genetics would probably find herself dead before her research even made it to publication.”

“Yes, so let’s stop talking and do it already,” Andromeda snapped, clearly bored. She’d probably heard this discussion a thousand times, to the point where she was sick and tired of even hearing people talk about it. “What do you think would work best? I’m partial to something as infectious as the common cold and as lethal as rabies, myself.”

“Rabies would never work, it’s too slow-acting,” Acidalia dismissed. “Besides, I am in no way agreeing to dropping virus bombs out of planes, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“Why not?”

“Because that would start a cascade I have no way of shutting down. At least with nuclear attacks, radiation disperses over time. Infectious diseases only amplify, becoming worse and worse with every new case. Innocent people would almost certainly die.”

“Well, the needs of the many—“

“Don’t you dare. I’m not murdering civilians for the sake of winning a war. They didn’t sign up for this, and it’s not their conflict to fight. They don’t deserve to die.”

“By that logic, neither do half the soldiers we’ve killed.”

“Soldiers know what they’re doing when they join. The two aren’t comparable. Even disregarding the ethics of targeting civilians, though, the effects of such a drastic attack would be felt for miles around. It could kill millions. It could bring about the end of days. Eleutheria was born from the ashes of a world killed by a pandemic, and I won’t let that happen again. No more world-destroying, civilization-ending smallpox missiles.”

“Then what are you proposing?” Andromeda’s voice was as cold as the gaze from her electric iris, and Lyra was suddenly more afraid of her than she’d ever been before. She sounded so icy, so inhuman, that it was hard not to flinch away from her uncanny-valley eyes.

“There are ways to localize plagues. It uses ridiculously outdated technology and it’d be a very risky mission, but it’s far better than killing innocents.”

“Not if it kills you.”

“I’m one person. I’d much rather risk my own skin than doom millions of others unfairly.” Acidalia didn’t say unlike you, but the way she looked at Andromeda made it abundantly clear.

Andromeda narrowed her eyes. “If you want to kill yourself, that’s fine with me. But I’m going to need to know what to put in the obituary.”

“You don’t need to write an obituary, because the planet thinks I’m dead anyway. Remember, Alestra 'killed' me. I have nothing to lose. If we win, we win, and if I die, nothing happens. It’d be wonderful if I could come back from the dead proclaiming the news of a Revolutionary victory, but if I’m killed for real, people will be none the wiser.” Acidalia sounded incredibly blasé about her potential imminent death, and Lyra had to wonder if it was all due to T’s untimely demise. The Underground was a sick, twisted, violent place, and she’d lost enough childhood friends to know how the Imperatrix felt. When a loved one died, it was so easy to slip into a toxic, self-sacrificial mentality borne out of survivors’ guilt and the first stages of grief. Even monarchs weren’t immune to the challenges and feelings that came with being human.

Equally empathetic and disturbed by the sudden realization that the Imperatrix Ceasarina was, in fact, as human as any other, Lyra sat back and tried to focus again on the task at hand. Localizing a plague seemed impossible. Diseases—well, they replicated. It was their nature. She’d seen it a thousand times. One person would fall ill, and maybe they’d get better, or maybe they’d slowly decline until their body just crashed and they died. And sometimes that was it—one body, one burial, one half-empty bottle of ineffective antibacterial pills. But there were other times where one sick person turned into ten turned into a hundred, and symptoms swept through crowds of people like wildfire. Lyra had been a victim of such an event, once; her throat had swollen up, almost but not quite enough to suffocate her. She made it through. Many had not.

It didn’t discriminate, the sickness. It killed the slavers and slaves, the criminals and police, the powerful and anyone who dared to oppose them. It was a silent, lethal force that lurked in every dark corner and every abandoned medical base. She couldn’t imagine how dangerous it would be if it was weaponized. How do you fight against an enemy you can’t even see?

“How would you make sure it would only hurt the people it’s supposed to?” Lyra asked, feeling nervous. Addressing the Imperatrix so casually still felt wrong.

Acidalia still looked uncomfortable, but she answered anyway, sounding as proper and elegant as ever. “Several centuries ago, when Eleutheria was far smaller and the populace more easily controlled, there existed a laboratory of sorts called the Terminal. It was built for the sole purpose of providing medical care to the city-state, but technology progressed and my ancestors gained more power, and, like many scientific endeavors, it lost its original mission after years of experiments of dubious ethicality. After several wars and a near-uprising, the Terminal’s purpose shifted from noble scientific research to citizen control, and you can now use it as a method to dispatch deadly pandemics or lifesaving cures to whichever portions of the city you’d like.”

“How?” Athena asked, looking suspicious. As if Acidalia had a reason to lie to them, Lyra thought.

“It’s built into Eleutheria itself. The city’s grown around the Terminal for the past few hundred years. Or, to put it metaphorically, it’s like mycelium; the actual structure is the flowering fungus, but it has an invisible network of hyphae that reach under the surface,” Acidalia said, somewhat unhelpfully.

Athena looked completely bemused, which made Lyra feel slightly better about not knowing what mycelium was. Acidalia didn’t seem to sense that they hadn’t gotten the metaphor, because she didn’t explain.

“So what you’re proposing,” Athena said, “is getting into the Terminal and creating some nightmare plague that would only affect Nova bases?”

Acidalia nodded. “Well, more specifically, adolescent and adult men in those Nova bases, as that demographic composes the majority of their army. It’s not perfect—rare as they are, female soldiers exist, and there are doubtlessly many women in non-combat roles that nevertheless have great impact—but it’s the same philosophy about cutting specimens, isn’t it? It’s far better to cut carefully and with patience, even if you wind up removing less than what you wanted, because you can always go back and cut away more. But you should never try to cut more than you need, because once it’s off, there’s no way of getting it back on again.”

Her tone of voice suggested that everyone spent their spare time playing with “specimens” of some unknown nature, and Lyra wondered just how involved the Ciphers were in medicine and biology. She tried to picture Acidalia wearing a lab coat and blue latex gloves like the scientists she saw on the posters for disaster holos, but the image was too ridiculous for her to keep it in her mind’s eye for very long. It was hard to imagine the Imperatrix wearing anything other than elaborate white dresses and platinum jewelry.

“That’s suicidal,” David said simply, looking very put-off by the suggestion. “Ethics aside, you’re going to get yourself killed. The only entrances to the Terminal were built eons ago, back before the starscrapers were thousands of floors high, and they’re all located in places that are considered horrible areas even on the best of days. And today is definitely not the best of days.”

“I know,” Acidalia replied.

“Well, I’d volunteer to take you on a little tour of the worst places on all Terra,” Andromeda offered, “but it’s been years since I was last down there. And even when I was a kid, it’s not like I saw too much of the surface anyway. Besides, it’d be stupid to have us both go on a mission so risky.”

Lyra thought that sounded like a flimsy excuse to avoid having to go on a dangerous expedition, seeing as Acidalia and Andromeda were certainly not the only two important people in charge of the Revolution, but Acidalia seemed to agree with the Praetor. “I’ll have to go alone,” she not-quite-shrugged.

“No you don’t.” It took half a second for Lyra to realize that those words had just left her mouth, but she found that she couldn’t stop herself from talking. “I know those streets. I was raised there. I could show you the whole city if you wanted, and I can most definitely get you to the Terminal.”

Acidalia raised an eyebrow in surprise. “You know that place?”

“It’s where I stumbled across your brother. Or, more accurately, where he and Ace stumbled across me. You know—where Cassandra lives. I’ve worked there for my entire life. Up until a few days ago, I’d never even left the island. I tried, but I couldn’t get past the River Orientalis.” She cracked an awkward smile.

“I’m not saying no,” Acidalia said slowly, “but you’re… fifteen?”

“Sixteen,” Lyra corrected. In truth, she was probably not sixteen. She could count her age in summers, but everything before five or six years was fuzzy and nebulous, and she could just as easily have been fifteen or even younger. But that made her sound much more immature, and that was not how she wanted herself to come across.

Acidalia bit her lip. “You’re so young.”

“You’re barely twenty.” Lyra’s heart practically spasmed in her own chest, and she nearly flinched away from Acidalia’s steely brown eyes, half-surprised by her own boldness.

“You grow up quick in the Underground,” Andromeda shrugged. Lyra guessed that she was only agreeing to the plan so Lyra could take her place as the sacrificial lamb, but that wasn’t here nor there.

Acidalia shrugged, and something about her posture reminded Lyra of a surrendering dictator waving a white flag. She had an air about her that gave every expression and every action an uncanny amount of weight—all she had to do was breathe, and she captured the attention of everyone in the room.

“I suppose if it’s the only option,” Acidalia ceded, “but I will never be comfortable with dragging innocent people into a war that isn’t theirs.”

“I live on this planet, too,” Lyra reminded her.

“It isn’t the same. This is not your responsibility, and you don’t have to make this sacrifice. There is a high possibility we could both die from this mission.”

“I’m a Cantator. Death doesn’t scare me.”

“Then that’s one thing we have in common.” Acidalia offered Lyra hand, which she took. The Imperatrix’s skin was clammy and cold, and a thin crust of blood stuck around the edges of her perfectly manicured nails. Her fingertips were red and raw, like she’d been scrubbing at them until the skin started to peel, perhaps in an effort to get the clotted blood off. Lyra didn’t remark on it.

“A Cantator and a Cipher. I sure hope you survive, because the propaganda department will have a goddamn field day with this,” Andromeda laughed. “Good luck.”

Lyra almost wanted to snap at her. The Praetor wouldn’t be so jovial if she was the one about to go on a suicide mission. But that would have been wasted time, and this whole conversation had been long enough already. There were more important things to do than yell at Andromeda.

Like deliver a living biological weapon, who also happened to be Imperatrix Ceasarina Acidalia-Planitia Cipher, to an ancient laboratory buried in the middle of a war zone so she could program a plague to kill her own mother’s soldiers.

This is going to go just wonderfully, Lyra thought.