“Callum! What are you doing here?” I whispered to him in the empty hallway. He turned and looked at me with shock.

“Percy! What are you doing here? How - what - why…” He spluttered.

“I followed you in. Do you know where the princesses are?”

“I think so.”

“Down this hall,” I say, and he follows me to their room. It used to be the largest conference room; now three cots line the far wall.

I knock on the door, and Tegan opens it. She looks at me, then Callum, confused. “We’re here to rescue you,” Callum says. “Let’s go, quickly. Grab the others.”

“Has the mission failed?” Tegan asked.

I can’t let them leave. “No, but new circumstances have been made clear. Your task is no longer safe to be completed.”

Tegan accepted it. “I’ll get Flora and Chantelle.” She left the door open slightly, and we could hear her speak to the other princesses. “Girls, it’s time to leave, it’s not safe here anymore.”

The three of them came to the door. Each of them wore normal dresses, without much decoration, and carried their own knapsacks. “How can we escape?” Flora asks.

“There’s a way out if we follow this hallway,” I told them. “You’ll have to squeeze through. Is that okay?”

“We’ll make it,” Chantelle says confidently.

“Let’s go. We need to be fast.”

We trooped down the hall. No one else walked by. At the end of the corridor, I opened an unlocked door. The dark tunnel behind it was narrow. “It’s going to be dark,” I told them. “The floor is smooth. We have to crawl towards the end, but it brings us to the edge of Syntyque Forest, just outside the city walls. Callum and I will go first.”

I crouched and walked as far as I could into the tunnel, and Callum followed. Flora shut the door and we all continued in the darkness. I hit my head on the rough rock. “Time to start crawling,” I said. I wiped my forehead and my hand came back wet. We crawled for a while. My knees started to hurt. Finally, my head bumped into a wall. I slowly stood up. “Here’s the ladder,” I told the others.

“Oh!” Flora exclaimed as she bumped into Tegan's legs.

“Sorry,” Tegan said.

I slowly stood up and started to climb up the metal ladder. When I reached the top, I fumbled with the trapdoor above my head. The rusty deadbolt opened and the door lifted. I propped it open with the attached metal rod, like the engine of a steam carriage.

The quiet forest shone in a cacophony of greenness. A wispy fog hung just above the trees. I slithered out, and moved away so the others would have enough room. First Callum, then Tegan, Flora, and Chantelle followed. Our clothes, dirty from the knees down, marked us. “What are we going to do?” Chantelle asked.

“Percy and I will go back to the cave and end the Triumdemic, once and for all. You three, well, maybe you should go back to the palace. Or travel back to your home countries; but that’s not very safe.” Callum told them.

“Regardless of it being safe or not, it would break our contracts.” Flora replied.

“Okay. Just do what you want, as long as it’s safe.” I said.

Tegan crossed her arms. “Why do we have to be safe when you two get to go back to the belly of the beast and do the exciting stuff?”

“Because you three are worth something,” I said. "Not that Callum and I aren’t, but I mean that you have a life beyond the war, beyond the Triumdemic. We don’t, not really.”

“You guys hurry back to the cave,” Chantelle tells us. “We”ll take care of ourselves.”

We all said goodbye. Callum and I climbed back down to the tunnel and crawled our way back in.

“This is crazy,” Callum said at one point. “Returning to the enemy’s headquarters. We had the opportunity to escape, but we didn’t. I guess there’s nowhere to go, anyway.”

“It’ll be alright,” I said. I tried to sound convincing, but I didn’t even reassure myself.

We eventually stepped into the hall and quietly shut the door behind us. We watched as a guard left the princesses’ room and ran to The Cave. “We have to move quickly now,” I said.

“And do what?”

I handed him a few matches. “Burn down the crates. That’s something. I’ll sneak into an office and try to find some incriminating papers.”

“Why don’t we stick together? We could watch each other’s backs.”

“You can be the distraction.”

Callum sighed. “Really? A distraction?”

“The papers are the most important. The king needs proof.”

“Where should we meet?”

“In the alley hide-out. There’s lots of ways out of here, I think. Just keep running, and don’t look back.”

“Okay. See you on the other side.”

“You, too.”

He slipped into the shadows and I watched him walk down the hall. I stepped into my father’s secondary office, closed the door, and tried to open the first file cabinet. Locked. O-kay. I pulled two pins from the inner cuff of my shirt, and picked the lock. After a couple tries, it opened. I rifled through the folders full of papers: receipts, contracts, business plans. I don’t have time to go through it all; I shove the important-looking ones under the waistband of my pants and cover them with my shirt.

A shout from The Cave fills the room. Something like, “Hey!” I freeze. They caught Callum! I stuff more papers in my trousers and then step out the door. To my left is the dim hallway, with an escape at the end. To my right is The Cave, now a little smoky. Should I go, and deliver the papers to the king right away? Could I leave Callum behind like that? No. I turn to the right and run into the chaos. Armed guards race to the fiery stored goods, and I follow them. I stop short - I’m too late. Callum is in handcuffs, a black eye already formed. Spots of blood darken his sleeve, and yet they drag him to a cell.

I meet his eyes as a guard reports to me. I try to stand tall, to hide the papers that bulk the front of my shirt. “Intruder found and captured, sir,” the guard says breathlessly.

“Very good, sir,” I say quickly. “Dismissed. I will report to Optio Baker.”

I walk away, without another glance at Callum. After Father admits me into his office, I report to him the news: “Father, Target Bloomfield has been captured. He is being placed into Cell Four as we speak.”

“Excellent. And the princesses?”

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How much does he know? “Still unaccounted for, sir.”

“A search party will be dispatched as soon as Target Bloomfield’s confinement is confirmed. You will lead it.”

I start to sweat a little. “Yes, sir.”

“Confirm that Target Bloomfield is in custody, then report back as soon as you can.”

“Right away, sir.”

I left the room, still conscious of the rustling papers. The cells, made of stone brick, stood in the very middle of The Cave. A huge stalactite hangs from the ceiling and tapers to a point right above Cell One. No one else occupied any of the other cells except Callum in Cell Four.

More men rushed by with buckets of water. The smell of smoke hung in the air. Two guards, one with a welt on his cheek like someone slapped him, stood by the metal door to Callum’s cell. They each greeted me with a nod. The door had a small hinged flap on the bottom to slide food in, and a sliding part at eye level to look through.

“Dismissed, men. But stay close by,” I told them. They walked about a dozen feet away and waited.

I slid the eye-hole open and peeked in. Callum sat in the corner and stared at the floor. His hands, still cuffed together, rested crumpled in his lap, like two birds dead in the street of cold. When he heard me at the door, he looked up at me with hate in his eyes. “You!”

“Callum, Callum, it’s not what it looks like,” I said quickly, trying to calm him. I hope the guards can’t hear us. “We don’t have much time. I need to tell you some things. Listen to me.”

“That’s the last time I listen to you! ‘You’re the distraction, Callum’. The distraction for what? For you to tell the leaders about me! You’re the reason I’m here, in this cell!”

“Callum, I want to help you escape. I promise. Just give me a few minutes. Trust me, please.”

“No. Go away.”

“Hey-”

“Go away!”

I closed the slider and told the guards to resume their posts. The papers in my waistband started to slip as I returned to my father’s office. I told him that everything is fine, Target Bloomfield is secure, all that. My father took in the information without any expression, and dismissed me for my sleep shift.

My room is still above the bakery. At least I didn’t lie about that.

LATER THAT NIGHT

I brought a candle and the whisper of a promise with me down to The Cave. Everyone seemed to be asleep, including the guards by Callum’s cell, who should have been alert. I knocked both of them out with one solid blow to the back of the head each.

I took the cell’s key from the higher-ranking guard and unlocked the metal door. The noise of its opening echoed from the cave’s tall ceiling - I hope that no one recognized it. There are very few guards down here. Rather, they are stationed along the tunnels that lead to the surface.

“Callum,” I whispered. “It’s time to go.”

Just outside the candle’s circle of light, I heard him get up. He stepped into the yellow light. His black, swollen eye looked so grotesque. He held out his arms for me to unlock his cuffs, which I did promptly. He rubbed his wrists as we stepped out of the cell and into The Cave. Three decorative swords hung from the wall a few feet down the path.

“I thought I could trust you,” he said suddenly, forcefully. He sped up. “I thought you were my friend.” He grabbed a decorative sword from the wall and contemplated its blade, which wasn’t especially sharp - but not dull, either. He pointed the tip at me.

I set the candleholder down and edged my way toward the other swords.

“I overlooked the small, creeping doubts. You always knew too much about the Triumdemic. You defended them. You turned white whenever Shaphan and I talked about them. You’re not a very good spy, you know.”

I grabbed a sword off the rack and held it at the ready.

“Then you said you ‘had a friend’ who was a spy for the Triumdemic. Well, then. Sure. I shrugged it off. You commiserated with me about the fleabag hotel. Then you ruined it all. You did whatever you did with Chantelle. But later you saved me from the fox. So I didn’t know what to think. You abandoned me, but you always came back.” He slowly waved his sword at me. “You saved me from the crowd at the princesses’ funeral. You hid me. And then you betray me into the hands of my enemy. Our enemy. And here we are.” He clumsily swung the blade at me, and I blocked it with an unpracticed arm. He jabbed again, and I dodged.

“I can explain,” I said slowly. “I know I haven’t done many good things. But there’s a good reason for all the bad things.”

“So you’re saying that it’s okay to do bad things for the right reasons? Like serve the Triumdemic… for what?” His sword dove for my torso, forcing me away from the light.

I jumped away. “It’s a family business. It’s true that we run a bakery. Not that it’s the cover for an underground criminal organization or anything, though.”

“So you wanted your daddy’s approval? And he never gave it to you, no matter how hard you tried? So you decided to stop trying, and join the other side instead? Huh? Is that what happened? Be honest, now; God knows you haven’t done much of that lately.” He casually leaned against a stalagmite and crossed his arms, still mindful of the sword in his hand.

I began to speak, but he interrupted. “To circle back to a previous thought, is it better to do the right things for the wrong reasons? Like become friends with the enemy, so that I could fit in better with you? Or try to be good, so that the guilt didn’t eat me up as I tried to sleep? What would my mother, my brother, say if they saw me participate in a war that claimed the lives of puppets?”

“I-”

“And I’m sure a lot of the people we met were in on it, right? And there’s Callum, so innocent. So naive. Jack Weller? Carrington? Any number of the palace guards, or fellow soldiers that we ran into? How many of them were involved?

“Well, definitely not Carrington. He’s a few slices short of a loaf, like you said. But Jack Weller, that’s another story.”

“Don’t you mean Jackie?” A husky voice came from behind Callum. I peered into the shadows. Jackie’s here? How did that happen? Did she get recalled from the front? “C’mon, you aren’t going to run to me like you did last time? Gosh, Percy, you should have seen your face when we ran into each other in the hotel room!”

“Jack Weller?” Callum asked, and turned around. We watched as Jackie took the last sword from the wall and spit-polished its blade.

“Nope, it’s Jackie. Remember me? I didn’t lie about being a Freylandian, you know. I really did live above the cooper with my sisters. Three girls, they used to say. So unfortunate that Paul didn’t have a son to take over the business one day. The only reason I’m not in a skirt right now is because I’m spying for the Triumdemic. Three square meals a day, pays well, and practically none of the beaks know that I can kick their butts and bat my eyes at them.”

I felt my face turn white again. Jackie and I, our poor relationship went back a few years. And for her to show up here, of all places, and now, at this crucial time? Not a good combination. I knew she could handle a sword just fine. Better than myself, actually.

All of Callum’s anger had faded since she showed up. Only disbelief rang over his face. “You’re… a girl?”

“Pretty sure,” she replied cheekily. “At least, I was last time I checked.” She stepped into the circle of candlelight. Her hair was short, as befitted an Egronite soldier. She looked better when it was long. Her upturned eyes gazed at me. “So, Percy, how’ve you been? Don’t let this bad hat get to you.” She confidently walked to me and kissed my mouth. I pulled away as quickly as I could, sensing Callum’s look of horror. Jackie and I haven’t been together for a while now, but I’m pretty sure she wants us to reunite. “You know what needs to be done,” she said. “So do it. Let’s whack this guy. He knows too much.”

“Woah, woah, woah. Isn’t this jumping to conclusions a bit early? What if I just needed to release my angst, and now I love the Triumdemic and want to join right away?” Callum backpedaled.

“Dude, I’ve listened this whole time. You certainly don’t sound like you love the Triumdemic. Also, Percy, who’s this Chantelle that our lovely friend Callum mentioned? She’s one of the princesses, isn’t she? How did you two meet?” She said ‘Chantelle’ like someone would say ‘rats’.

“We are only acquaintances,” I said numbly. “The incident that Callum was referring to was a complete misunderstanding. I was actually merely convincing her of the princesses’ dire need to join the Triumdemic.”

Callum laughed. “Oddly enough, I’m a little relieved, now that you said that. All this time I thought you two were making out, but really you were just convincing her to join a criminal black market. Oh boy.”

“He’s stalling,” Jackie said quickly. “C’mon, Percy, let’s bag this cracker.” She moved toward Callum, her sword at her side.

She swiftly brought the blade up to his neck, but Callum blocked it. He jabbed at her, but she easily dodged. Realizing her talent, Callum doubled down. Some people in his situation would have fought to escape. I saw in his risky moves, his gutsy ideas… that he fought to die. He swiped left and right furiously, but it didn’t deter Jackie at all. She expertly jabbed her sword whenever she found an opportunity. Callum’s sleeves and pant legs, ripped by Jackie’s blade, swung as he moved. Small, shallow cuts on his skin stained his rags. Jackie toyed with him.

She knew that she would win, yet she fought like she couldn’t.

He knew that he would lose, yet he fought like he wouldn’t.