Hunted

But it didn’t work out that way.

I woke alone in the night, wondering what the awful beeping sound was. Some a

The sound came from my wrist. Some navy someone was signaling a Mayday. It might have been anybody from the diplomatic mission, but I knew in my heart it was Sam.

Without thinking, I rolled out of bed and stumbled toward the door. After being sick so long, I was nowhere near my physical peak, but I

And maybe it had. There were no lights anywhere, not even on the medical sensors that were supposed to watch me night and day — someone must have cut the power, and even the emergency generators. That meant big trouble. I didn’t know much about what’d happened in the year gone by, just that things had gone down hill. A long way down hill. Maybe so bad that one of the outlaw queens had decided to attack Unshummin palace.

Outside my room, the doctors and nurses were gone. In their place, five palace guards wearing gas masks had ranged themselves around the room, all with souped-up stun-pistols aimed at the far door… like they expected an enemy to come smashing through any second.

"What’s going on?" I whispered.

They whirled on me, and for a heartbeat I thought they were going to shoot; but one of them, a sergeant, snapped, "Hold your fire," and nobody pulled the trigger. "Go back to bed, consort," the sergeant told me. "There’s been a mutiny. It’s not safe in the halls."

"Is the queen all right?" I asked. "And my sister?"

"Don’t know." He glanced at the others, then turned back to me. "Our assignment is to keep you safe."

"Me? Who cares about me?" I held up my wrist; it was still beeping. "You and your men are going to help me save someone who’s in trouble. Do you hear me?"

For a second he didn’t answer: his ante

The six of us raced through dark halls, tracking the Mayday. Once or twice, we passed close to fighting; we’d hear the whir of stu

Outside the door, the queen’s personal guards had been butchered. Inside, so had the queen — decapitated by some assassin who’d crept unseen through the palace during all the ruckus. Verity’s head had been laid on a big serving plate in the middle of her own dining table.

A few steps away sprawled my sister’s body, apparently stabbed through the heart while trying to defend the queen. Sam had triggered the Mayday… and even as I stared at the blood spilling from her chest, the beeping signal stopped. I knew what that meant — not enough bioelectric energy left in her body to power the transmitter.

A navy quartermaster once told me those transmitters could keep drawing power from your tissues at least five minutes after you were dead.

I took one step toward my sister’s body. Then hands grabbed me from behind: bright red hands, the sergeant on my right, one of his men on my left. They were only using their Cheejreth arms, but at that moment, they were strong enough to hold me.

"Nothing we can do here," the sergeant said. His voice was muffled by his gas mask. "No one to save."

"Wrong," I told him. "There’s still someone unaccounted for."

I

She had a secret room in the palace, but not secret enough. When we got there, the door had been blown off its hinges by explosives. There was no sign of a struggle, no blood, no little yellow corpse; it looked like I

Where else might she go? Would she run and hide like a seven-year-old girl, or throw herself into action like a queen? My first thought was she might run for my sickroom, to rescue her beloved Daddy Edward; but she hadn’t shown up, had she? The guards would have seen her the second she came charging through the door…

They’d had their stu

Now the same guards were waiting for me to tell them where I

The sergeant had told me, "There’s been a mutiny." He hadn’t mentioned which side he was on.

Now the sergeant asked, "Where should we go, sir? You said there was someone you wanted us to protect?"

Yes — the sergeant definitely knew about I

"This way," I said. "I know where she’s gone."

Unshummin palace is shaped like a Mandasar queen. Really. A long central body with eight legs sticking out at the sides — the legs are actually separate wings of the building, three stories tall — and up at the head, the queen’s "claws" are four more building wings stretched out on diagonals. The claw parts even end in crescent-shaped rotundas, so from the air they look like pincers.

Much farther back, where the palace’s "tail" meets the wider part of the body, there are two big glass domes to represent venom sacs. The domes are actually huge greenhouse roofs; beneath them lies the Royal Conservatory, with tropical-zone plants under the right-hand dome and temperate-zone plants under the left.

The right-hand part is the closest thing to a jungle you’ll find within a thousand kilometers of Unshummin. That’s where I led the five guards.

"There’s this little girl," I whispered to them. "And she has this secret place where she goes when she’s really scared."

They nodded and even smiled, like they understood. What I said wasn’t true — I

The trees grew too close together for the warriors to follow me; and I moved fast enough that I was out of sight before they could bring their stu

Nice thing about those gas masks: the guards couldn’t sniff me out. A Mandasar warrior depends so much on his nose, he’s at a numb disadvantage when his smelling’s sealed off. Mandasar eyes are just as good as human, and their ears are sharp enough to hear a big guy like me blundering his way through the bush… but without their noses, they lose their edge: a fraction slower on everything they do. That was good — after a year of being sick, I was a fraction slower too, and I don’t mean a tiny fraction like one over a thousand.

My plan was just to lose the soldiers in the conservatory, then duck out a door to find I