Selene did wake up, and she almost wished she'd stayed asleep.

She could feel the crazy, all soaking her bones and saturating her blood. It made her feel unhinged. Teetering constantly on the edge of instability. She expected a breakdown at every moment she lay with her eyes open, but the breakdown never came. She awoke, and a chair screeched, and then settled again. She looked up, and Jacin was there, standing at attention. Jacin the palace guard. "Your Majesty," he said, with the perfectly emotionless voice and unwavering bioelectrical wavelength that all the Lunar guards had mastered.

She exhaled deeply and sat up in her bed, grabbing the mattress to support herself and feeling the sheets shift across her legs. "How are you feeling?"

"No injury came to me, your Majesty."

She glanced over at him, her hair beginning to fall into her face. "Is that the truth?"

"I couldn't lie to you, your Majesty."

She knew he was telling the truth, of course. She could feel every change of emotion and electricity. And then she realised she was looking for the change, rooting around in his head, and she shifted her eyes to the window, feeling very guilty suddenly and withdrawing her mental presence.

"You don't need to talk to me like that. You can't tell me I'm looking very queenly right now, am I? The formality is jarring." She sighed and turned back to him. "Can you sit down, please?"

Jacin sat obediently, and the silence was uncomfortable. Awkwardness filled the air between them. Selene didn't know what to say or what to do— she knew they both remembered, all those times when they were kids. With Winter between them. Selene hardly remembered those days, just as she had only felt grasps of the events the Winter in her dream had told her of, but she remembered enough to remind herself of random glimpses of Jacin around the palace, bewildered and solitary. She had torn him from his only friend.

But she was sure he remembered, far better than her. He was three years older. With another strike across her conscience, she knew that she had hardly thought of him since they were kids, and she wondered how much better she would have known the loneliness that already plagued her, had Winter not been there.

Selene opened her mouth to say something, and then judged her words and fastened her mouth shut again, and then blurted out, "I'm sorry."

Jacin stared blankly at her. She retreated from his gaze, even though she knew exactly how hard he must be trying to keep his emotions in check to stay so impassive. "Excuse me, your Majesty?"

"I-I-" She searched for the words. "I'm sorry for dragging you into this. Whatever this is. It- It's a treason plot, that's what it is, back home. I've been forced and battered out and I dragged you with me. And— you could have died, so easily. I know they were shooting at us out there. And I know we could have come down. Just like my last ship did. And you would be dead, just like the last pilot was—"

Selene cut herself off and glanced back at Jacin, who seemed to be studying the floor awkwardly.

"What I'm trying to say is that I should never have brought you into this. I'm just so sorry."

Jacin's chair creaked, and he seemed to have gained his composure a little bit. He smiled slightly. Nearly imperceptibly. Selene didn't think she saw it right, but by the time she looked again it was gone.

"You Majesty, it's nothing but an honour to help in any way I can. It's my duty to put my life on the line for my queen, and I would never shirk that duty for as long as I live." He paused for a moment. "I'm not worthy of an apology from your Majesty, even less so in these regards."

Selene looked back toward the window. Evening was beginning with a pink sky, the glittering lights of New Beijing beginning to shine out against the darkening outside world. She didn't know whether or not to believe him. He was a palace guard and she was the queen— he could never accept an apology. He could never acknowledge that he needed one. And she wasn't supposed to question putting his life in danger. He was supposed to be disposable in a moment's notice for her. She felt like burying herself away in remorse, but she was silent and still, and Jacin said, "Permission to speak out of turn, your Majesty?"

She turned to him, nodding affirmation, and he said, "I'm insignificant, compared to the more pressing matters at hand. The treason plots at hand on Luna, and the reason we've come to Earth for asylum in the first place. What happened on Luna?"

Selene studied the sheet she held in her grip carefully, and thought for a long time. Getting her facts straight, and getting her priorities in order. She thought about what had happened that evening, and tried to separate delirium, hallucination from reality.

"I— don't know," she answered honestly, shaking her head and letting her hair scratch her face and neck distractedly. "It was Thaumaturge Charlotte Bement. She— gave me something. Injected it straight into me. She really knew her veins. I-"

Selene shook her head again, harder this time. "It must have been drugs. A hallucinogen. I don't know. But if it were a drug, it would have worked itself out of my system. And I—" She raised her hands in front of her face. Even her steel hand trembled as she stared, the nerve connections so fine as they were, and her lip matched the tremor that shook through her body. "I can still feel it, like it's—"

Her voice trailed off into a hoarse whisper, and Selene dropped her hands limply to the bedsheet, feeling the cool linen against her flesh and the cool of the steel all the way through the sheet onto her leg. A thought distracted her, pricking the back of her skull. "It's almost like— like—"

"Lunar sickness?" Jacin finished her sentence for her, and she didn't bother responding. She could hear the chair creak as Jacin shifted forward. "But how? They found a cure. It's gone. And you haven't stopped—" Jacin didn't know how to finish his sentence and seemed to judge his words, leaning back in his chair again and restoring stoicism. But he had got the gears turning. Selene was thinking and thinking, and it dawned on her the observations of months.

"I'm so stupid," Selene interrupted her own thoughts, looking up from her bedsheets. "All those months. They'd been planning this since I got back. All these palace researchers, going into offices and meeting rooms and Bement's chambers in the plain clothes of civilians, at inopportune moments of the morning and evening." She shifted in her bed and stared at Jacin with a morose sparkle in her eye, holding up a single finger on each hand. "You think it could be done? You think they could reverse-engineer the Lunar sickness vaccine, into a stimulating agent that reactivates the dormant gene that causes it in the first place?" She brought her fingers together. "There would be a period of total sense overload to the brain. The dormant Lunar sickness gene would be stimulated so suddenly, the brain-melting effects would come like waves over the nervous system. It would be the most risky thing in the world; if it's what they did, they couldn't have known the effects of injecting the counter-cure straight into the bloodstream. It could have exploded my brain, for all they had known. But they had been lucky, and all it had done was driven me mad, and driven me away from Luna."

Jacin's brow was furrowed in thought, and Selene awaited any response. After a few seconds, he responded hesitantly with a faint, "I suppose," and then a hasty, "But only with the very best of facilities. It would be such a delicate process, the fabrication of such a solution. But, then again, Luna—"

"—does have such facilities." Selene finished. She lowered her fingers and formed fists in her lap. "You know, Levana tried to kill me in the elevator. It wasn't enough just to drug me and drive me from Luna, but she had to attack me with a knife as well."

She tried to quell a hard-pressing panic attack in her chest, her hands beginning to tremble again. "I want to leave immediately. I need clothes, and I need to talk to K- the emperor and his government. There are people up there in danger. Especially—"

She didn't want to finish her sentence. She didn't think she could restrain the sobs drumming against her chest, waiting for freedom, for much longer. "Get the doctor, please," she told Jacin in a perfectly level voice. "I need updates on my condition."

As much as she would have hated to admit it, Selene was still selfish. She only worried about one person. Just a single person on Luna made her so worried she could hardly breathe. Someone whose life was in imminent danger, and someone Levana wouldn't hesitate to use as a chip to push around in her sick little game of chess.

A game of chess, Selene thought, that I'd just been playing a few months ago.

Jacin obeyed without hesitation, holding a button beside the door and speaking into a small speaker in a low murmur.

Selene's body shook in tiny tremors, so small they could be shivers. Familial relationships weren't so loving in Luna's royal family. Winter would be Levana's hostage soon, and her life would be in danger.