As I led Navan back into the palace, I realized that an opportunity lay before us. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t come to me sooner. Then again, all we’d been thinking about was getting the information out of Yorrek. Getting the information to Orion had been the next step, a bridge to cross, when we came to it. But now, it seemed the ideal moment had arisen.

“We need to go to the control room,” I whispered to Navan, who was still making a show of being drunk.

He frowned, his face turning serious for a moment. “Now?”

“Not many guards should be there. At the very least, it’ll be a reduced team, considering everyone is at the party,” I explained hurriedly. I was still thinking about the notebook Yorrek had mentioned, which was in the queen’s possession, but that would have to wait. I mean, we didn’t want to feed Orion everything at once. If we did, what further use would we be?

Navan smiled. “I love your mind,” he murmured, kissing me passionately on the lips. For a moment, I wondered if he might actually be drunk.

“We can do this later,” I whispered, pulling away from him.

Navan released me and took my hand with a sigh. “If I didn’t already despise Orion, I’d hate him for his uncanny ability to ruin a romantic moment, even from the other side of the universe.”

We hurried down the network of palace corridors, seeking out a doorway that would lead us down to the queen’s underground control bunker. The secret entrance on the top floor, where Pandora had exerted her impressive might upon the emergency exit, had already been closed back up again. If we busted it open, someone would undoubtedly find it and let the queen know, which was something we couldn’t risk—not after the close call we’d just had. Pandora might not have reported anything suspicious so far, but I doubted she’d be able to ignore a gaping hole in the wall of a palace corridor. No, we were already walking on a knife edge where Brisha was concerned; we needed to tread carefully.

An idea came to me. The wing of the palace that held the ancient galleria, and all the artifacts of the former royals, was abandoned. Nobody went there. Even if we had to kick down a door, we could always cover it up and nobody would notice. A guard doing a routine check would hardly bother to look too closely.

“The old part, with the galleria,” I whispered. “We should check for bunker entrances there.”

“Good idea,” Navan replied as we turned a corner into the main hallway of the palace. Guards were standing around, but they paid us no heed as we passed, evidently expecting us to go up in the elevator to our chambers. By now, our faces were well known in the palace, giving us the freedom to walk around relatively unhindered.

We darted down one of the side corridors, out of sight of the guards. A short while later, we entered the dusty halls of the abandoned wing. It seemed a shame that all of this had fallen into ruin, when it must have been spectacular once, but I could see how it might trouble the queen. On the walls, the old images were of united royal families, not two sisters tearing a nation apart.

“There,” Navan said, pointing to a blank wall at the end of the long hallway. There was something strange about the way it had been painted, making it look almost false.

I crept forward, following Navan toward the peculiar, bare patch of wall. My eye was drawn to the galleria a short distance away, the shrouded statues and covered paintings just visible through a gap in the door. A creeping sensation shivered up my spine at the sight of the ghostly figures. I found myself half expecting one to swoop out and attack us.

Reaching the patch of wall, Navan tapped it lightly. The sound was oddly hollow, confirming our suspicions: something was hidden behind the façade. Casting a nervous glance backward, Navan turned and smashed his leg through the wall. An enormous hole crumbled inward, revealing a door beyond. With his muscles bulging, Navan tore the rest of the stone and plaster away, before kicking the door open. It swung wide, with a spiral set of stairs leading down into the dark unknown.

“Let’s hope this leads to the right place,” Navan said.

“Where else could it possibly lead?” I reached for a golden tassel that held back a flowing velvet curtain, dyed blood red. The curtain swung across the hole Navan had created. Whether it was a remnant from when the doorway hadn’t been shrouded by plaster, I wasn’t sure, but it had clearly been custom-made to cover this section of wall.

Ducking behind the curtain, we made our way down the steep spiral staircase, our path lit by the dim glow of emergency lighting. The metal was shaky, each step rustier than the last, crumbs of stone falling away with every move we made.

“How exactly are we going to send the intel to Orion?” I whispered, wanting to break the silence of our steady descent.

Navan kept his eyes dead ahead as he replied. “I have some of the hypnosis serum and some Elysium left. So we should be able to convince one of the intelligence officers to get a message to Orion, on a remote wavelength. You remember that black box I had, back at my cabin?”

“Yeah, but it didn’t work, did it?”

“The disc didn’t work. The transmitter would have worked. Anyway, they should have something like that down here that can send a message, separate from any main systems,” he went on. “The queen probably uses them to get messages to her spies in the South. We just need an officer to use one of them, to bounce the message off a deep-space satellite and reach Orion.”

“Why off a satellite?” I frowned, puzzled by everything he was saying.

“If we send it straight to Earth, then the transmitter will know where the message has been sent. If we send it via a satellite, the transmitter will think the message has gone to whichever satellite we’ve sent it to,” he explained. “So, even if an anomaly is discovered in the system, they won’t be able to trace where the message went.”

“Will they be able to read what the message says?” I pressed, feeling more anxious by the minute.

He shook his head. “I’ll get the officer to delete it as soon as it’s been sent and we’ve received the reply we need.”

“If you send it like that, how can we get confirmation that my parents won’t be hurt?” I asked. It already pained me to know there was nothing I could do for the humans that the rebels would continue to kill in Siberia for their blood. But I could do something about the rest.

“We’ll set up a connection via the satellite, and we’ll ask him to confirm his end of the bargain. If we’re satisfied with the answer, then we’ll give him the intel in a separate message. If we don’t like what he has to say, then we’ll come up with something else,” he said, though there was a hint of worry in his voice.

As we reached the bottom of the stairwell, he put a hand out and lifted a finger to his lips, bringing me to a silent halt. Beyond the door, the control room looked fairly empty. A few guards were wandering around, but they didn’t seem to be paying much attention to what they were doing. Two stood talking in front of the doorway.

“We need their clothes,” I whispered, gesturing at my ballgown and Navan’s suit. They weren’t exactly inconspicuous.

“I have a better idea. Wait here,” Navan said, before slipping out the door. Peering through the gap, I watched as he crept up behind the two guards. He tensed his hands, then sliced them down hard on the sides of the guards’ necks. Their heads jolted, and, instantly, their eyes went blank, their knees giving way as they crumpled to the floor. I had never seen that particular Aksavdo move before, but it was certainly impressive. Casting a quick look around, Navan tilted their heads back and poured serum into their mouths, using his thumb and forefinger against their throats to coax it down without choking them. Which serum, I wasn’t sure.

Their bodies were already limp, but their eyes took on an extra layer of fogginess as the serum took hold. Navan hauled each one backward and leaned them up against the door, making it look like they were merely slacking. Then he hurried across the control room toward the huts at the back of the bunker. He reappeared five minutes later. A guard stopped him on the way back, but whatever he said to her, she believed him, and he continued on his way a moment later.

Moving the guards to one side, Navan reentered the small space where I stood, pulling black fatigues out of his suit jacket and handing me a set.

“What did you say to that chick?” I asked as I shimmied out of my ballgown and pulled on the military clothes.

Navan smirked. “I told her my friend had forgotten something, and those guards told me I could come and fetch it,” he said, zipping up the flak jacket and pulling the metal peak of the cap down over his face. I did the same, wanting to look as close to the real thing as possible.

Once we were ready, we snuck through the door and headed over to the workstations. A few officers were on duty, but Navan made a beeline for the back of the room, where a solitary worker was at his position, his station almost hidden from the rest. He looked up in surprise as we approached.

“Can I help you?” he asked uncertainly, his brow furrowed.

Before he could say anything else, Navan had poured the hypnosis serum into the officer’s mouth and clamped his hand across his lips. The officer had two options: swallow or choke. Fortunately for us, the officer chose to swallow the serum, the gulp echoing outward. Even so, Navan didn’t release the man’s mouth until the serum kicked in. We couldn’t risk him shouting out. As his eyes glazed over and his shoulders slackened, his face taking on a dopey expression, we both took seats beside the poor coldblood, making it look like we were hard at work surveying the monitors for any signs of Gianne. The hypnosis serum was working its magic, leaving him open to suggestions.

As Navan explained to the intelligence officer what he wanted him to do, I thought about the rebels and everyone’s obsession with the immortality elixir. It made me furious to know we’d have to give up our intel to Orion, after everything he had done to us. I still had the scars from the device he’d put in my neck, and Galo’s death still haunted me, though I’d forced myself to repress my grief for him as best I could, knowing it would only serve to stop me from functioning.

“I wish we could sabotage the rebels’ attempts to create the elixir somehow,” I murmured sourly. “I mean, there must be a way we could do that, and get rid of their hold on us. I hate that they have so much power over our every move.”

Navan sighed. “I know. It’s been playing on my mind a lot lately, too.”

I watched the hypnotized intelligence officer at work, his hands moving across the translucent screen below him, working to connect us to a secret frequency. There was only one saving grace in all of this: with the two queens occupied with trying to outdo one another, neither of them knew about Earth. I wasn’t sure I could deal with three factions in all-out war with one another. Not yet, anyway. Not while we were still in the middle of it all, and my species hung in the balance.

“Maybe we could figure out a way to bring the rebels back to Vysanthe,” I said, my mind clawing for ideas. “If we could bring them back here without giving away their base on Earth, then we could let them fight it out among themselves. We could make sure Gianne and Brisha are prepared for the rebels’ arrival, while convincing Orion that his attack will be a surprise. Then, maybe, they’ll all just… destroy each other?”

“The rebels won’t come back here until they have the immortality elixir,” Navan said sullenly.

“What if we told them that the elixir can only be made here? That there’s a certain ingredient or something that can only be taken from Vysanthean soil?” I said, though I knew it was a longshot.

Navan shook his head. “They’d get us to box it up and bring it back to them one way or another. Until they have a working elixir, they aren’t coming back to Vysanthe. I guarantee it,” he replied, making it clear he’d already thought through most scenarios. But then, something glittered in his slate eyes, and he sat up taller in his chair. “Unless… If we could find a way to reverse the effects of the elixir, once the rebels arrive on Vysanthe, then we could destroy them that way.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, frowning.

A moment later, his face fell once more, and he exhaled. “Actually, it doesn’t matter. Because without knowing how a successful immortality elixir works, we can’t hope to come up with a counteracting agent,” he muttered, throwing his head back in annoyance. “We’d need to take a live specimen and figure out an anti-elixir from that…”

A gruff voice spoke from behind us.

“How did you get clearance to be here?” a guard asked, curling back his lips to reveal sharp fangs. My heart leapt to my throat. I glanced at Navan, but he made a subtle gesture toward his pockets, revealing that he was out of any useful serums, aside from the Elysium we’d need to knock out the intelligence officer.

“We have permission,” Navan replied firmly.

Panic coursed through my veins as the guard drew closer. Unless this guy backed down, if we wanted to leave the control room unnoticed, we were going to have to kill him. But, in doing so, I knew we’d only end up drawing more attention to ourselves, the way we had with Queen Gianne and Kalvin. Someone would inevitably find his body or sound an alarm that he was missing, and then we’d be in serious trouble.

“Who gave you permission?” the guard pressed, his face stern.

“I did,” a voice called from across the room, making us all whip around in surprise.

Pandora made her way through the stations, her boots thudding on the hard ground, her eyes cold and focused. “They are here under my jurisdiction, Bartok. I should have sent word earlier, but I had some misdemeanors to attend to at the party. My apologies.”

The guard bowed anxiously, suddenly nervous in Pandora’s presence. “No need to apologize, ma’am. I should have known better than to question guests of yours,” he mumbled, before backing away, hurrying as far from her as possible.

I looked at her suspiciously as she waited for Bartok to fully disappear, her shoulders tensed, her eyes homing in on him like a predator watching prey. What was she doing here? And, more importantly, why was she helping us? Surely, she knew we were up to something, if we were down here in stolen clothes, while everyone else was up at the party.

“So,” Pandora said, turning slowly back around with a knowing smile on her lips. “How’s Chief Orion?”