I stayed in the hall for a few seconds, wondering which level the crypts were on, when padded feet came trotting towards me. Jazzy.

Being in that hall again was disorienting.

I've run away multiple times as a child; once with my brother for three days before they found us in the deserts of our ancestors, the Sauds. Then they found me a few months after my brother died staying somewhere below the border where I met Ly. Once when I tried to smuggle Ly out of the country to avoid conscription, but we were eventually caught in one of my safe houses in España. And then now, right after the attempt that almost succeeded.

It was unreal. I was still here when I thought I could go. There was no hope of escaping now.

I sighed and Jazzy rubbed her head on my shoulder. She looked cleaner, her maw no longer covered in blood and meaty bits. She had a violet collar on which I immediately hated. When she laid down on the wood-paneled floor I installed myself, I found the latch and took it off of her. "You look better without it, Jazzy. Tigers aren't pets, they're buddies."

She didn't care.

The hall that led to my quarters were lined with high-level Guard, all of which were wearing the regal, now mournful, violet. I needed to get over my disgust of the color... was it even disgust?

More likely it was fear that kept me away from it, remembering the sting of a hand across my face when I was caught wearing my mother's old coat. I just wanted her scent, but Upapa told me I didn't even deserve to wear the color.

A wave of nostalgia came over me as I scanned the bedroom of the suite. It was ten times the size of the cabin at the Peak, painted in a softer white compared to the marble exterior. The floor was of gray-tone wood, covered here and there by blue and cream rugs. Vases full of wilted green carnations... My bed was still white sheets and cream pillows without a comforter, my windows were still screens showing me what was outside without actually making me vulnerable with glass.

On my shelves were the books with real paper which I've collected over years of diving into antique shops... and right next to my window were my art supplies, still not arranged from the day I hastily left. And on my walls were pictures of me and Ly on vacations next to printed flight maps.

How could everything here still be the same after everything else has changed? It felt like I was creeping into the life I left in a time capsule.

I found myself straying to the faux window with the easel- on my palette there were still two colors wet from my last painting- blood red and cyan.

One was the only color I was allowed to wear in public. Most people just thought I liked red. But to the people who actually knew what it meant, I was that girl; always separate, always an outsider.

Then cyan... the color of the sea I loved to bathe in, the sky I learned to fly in. It was different now. Once it was the color of the freedom, I always wanted for myself, once it was the color of new friendship and comrades at arms. Now it was the color of the sky my grandfather died in.

They melted together down the finger hole of the palette and mixed on my floor. Violet. Regal, imposing... my new identity, I guess.

Jazzy looked at me lazily licking her paws on my bed. She filled up the entire thing, so I just dived on her. She put one heavy leg on me as if to hug me and I hugged her back. "We should have stayed on the peak."

She squinted her agreement. Jazzy was the largest of her kind. She was only about five years old, a gift from the Russians to my grandfather, who, after seeing her resemblance to me, gifted her probably hoping she would grow big enough to swallow me whole.

"You would have liked the Pacifics... they have skinny trees that grow seeds as big as our heads! Fish of every color swim through their waters, and birds fill their skies. They have the paradise..."

"YOUR IMPERIAL HIGHNESS, EMPRESS LESYA!"

I groaned. "Go away!"

Ly's dark-haired head peaked through. "I have a package, your imperial highness."

"Will you stop?"

He sauntered in without the usual pomp of the Guard. Ly looked almost like a prince in his uniform, the deep violet coat, the white pants, the white shoes... only ruined by his tousled hair. He was supposed to keep it short, but as his sovereign, I didn't mind.

"Well, no." He walked to my bed with the plain white box which I knew contained the only lock of hair left from my grandfather. "You were the one who said you didn't want to be queen, but I didn't take that as you wanting to be an empress-"

The pillow barely missed his head.

I felt Jazzy shift and put her head over my tummy, grumbling at Ly. "I did it for show, you know that. Bald guy got on my nerves, prime minister what's-her-name doesn't like me, and eastern girl had good ideas but didn't talk."

"So what? Confidence boost for Ms. Miller, threat to Mr. Young and what... Prime Minister Crawford still doesn't like you."

"But now she knows I don't like her either."

He sat on my bed and patted my leg as I tried kicking him off. "Wanna cry? I won't judge." Ly leaned on Jazzy's belly and kept on patting my leg. This was a good moment, a happy moment in the midst of my world going to hell.

"I wanted to... before Uncle Hassan accused me of killing the old bastard." I still felt Uncle Hassan's hand on my shoulder.

"You didn't kill him." He said through gritted teeth. I hit a nerve with him. Ly knew Upapa.

Once, when Upapa realized how much Ly meant to me, he elevated him to King's Guard status, but it was not out of kindness or regard for Ly's skills. Ly became King's Guard so my grandfather could call upon him each time I made a mistake. The whips changed hands and Ly was forced to make me bleed. It was his punishment for being my friend.

"I wanted to kill him." I admitted. He never told me why, but he was always cruel, and I never understood why I couldn't be the same to him. "I wanted to slit his throat."

"There's a difference between intent and action, Lesya. You can't kill anyone unless they're heading for you with a finger on a trigger. And even then, you make it fast."

The pats on my leg stopped as I was sure he saw the flashbacks of my blood on his hands. Upapa commanded him to hurt me. That first night it happened, I saw Ly cut himself with his standard issue knife. He could barely look at me, he told me he wanted to kill himself.

I hugged him as the cuts on my back split open, and together, both wanting to die, we kept breathing.

"Speaking of death, are you Muslim, Ly?"

"Nope. Vishnu all the way, remember?" The pats resumed, followed by Jazzy tucking her head under Ly's arm to make him pet her. Yes. Ly was the Hindu Egyptian immigrant who threw pink powder at me at the Holi Festival. He turned his face away from me, the shift in his energy immediately affecting me.

"So, you don't know what I should wear..."

"Your mom's Muslim and she was wearing a white abaya in the lobby, so I think a white dress?"

I bolted upright; I must have heard wrong. "Are you sure it was Ayda, Princess of Russia?"

He merely raised both his eyebrows in confirmation.

I kicked Jazzy off and stood pacing to the foot of my bed, got on my knees and crawled through the slight parting of the wooden frame and the floor. This space used to be bigger. "White hair, weird eyes, about five feet and a half?"

"Leans on her right leg while standing, has a thick Arabian accent, likes silver jewelry and is incredibly stunning? Yes... pretty sure that was your mother."

My hands reached the dusty box, and I took the third photograph from the top of the stack. Then I shimmied down back out from under my bed, hitting my head twice before clearing the damn mahogany. "This woman? Are you sure?" I threw him the photo took on her wedding day, rubbing the sore spot on my head.

He regarded the picture and nodded. "That's her. By the way, why is she princess of Russia if she's from the southwest territory?"

"It's just a title, Ly. Stop distracting me." Maybe I sat on the floor for a minute, maybe it was an hour, but Ly had managed to go to my closet and his rummaging consisted of bangs and whipping fabric.

I didn't know why I was terrified of seeing her again. But there was safety in silence. I would just shut my mouth and ignore my mother.

A big piece of fabric made contact with my face as it was thrown from my closet. "That's the only white thing here! Everything is in every shade of red."

It was a bed sheet.

"I'll just wear this over my clothes."

He walks over to me and places the whole thing over my head like a cheap ghost costume. "You look a hundred times better!"

"You too." I say, blinded by the cloth.

For the short moment I was beyond the world and under the white, I tried remembering my mother. There was nothing worth noting except the stories she told me and my brother before we went to sleep. They were a crime.

The stories ended when I was thirteen.

That was probably the worst year of my life.

For a while I thought my mother had died as well. But she was perfectly alive, banned from the House, never reached out despite me even running to her door thousands of miles away from the capital.

Now she was here. I didn't know what to feel about her. How were you supposed to feel about the last person you had, but didn't have? I had Uncle Hassan and Ly but they didn't give birth to me, nor have they ever abandoned me.

She was here, and when she left, she handed me a certain kind of pain that I, for better or worse, grew accustomed to. The pain started out as yearning, but years aged it into hate, and maturity forged it into indifference.

Her return should have mattered to me as much as I mattered to her when she walked away.

But that's not the case.

"Are you going to stay in there or should I poke holes?" The fabric slid off me and was wrapped around my shoulders with caramel-skinned hands. Ly worshipped fashion and knew how to manipulate it more than me. The bed sheet was his way of making a joke, I guess. "You're sure you don't want me to go with you?"

"I don't want to see her." I muttered, voicing out my pain.

He stopped knotting the cloth all of a sudden. "Well, you should have just told me not to move the bed sheet. The whole covered-up thing does wonders for you."

"I'm serious, Ly... and the crypts are sacred. You're not allowed there. You're not family."

"Yet." Ilyaas sighed, joking again. I already asked him to marry me hundreds of times before and I always got a 'maybe later' or a sarcastic 'no'... never a 'yes', because God forbid, he actually meant it as much as I did.

He didn't know her, so he didn't know what to miss and what to detest. But in those amber eyes I saw understanding, he saw in me the mild repulsion I'd cultivated against my own mother. "Well, she has access to the crypts, it's the floor below the bunker, no guards or scans since it's sacred." He rolled his eyes. "No one gets in there without your bloodline anyway, so I guess no guards are needed? You have to drop some blood at the gate, but it's just a prick, you'll be fine. Then you will be with her, but you don't owe her even a single glance, much less a greeting."

"Then why am I scared? Why do I feel like I need to prove something?"

"Because you are a great daughter to an absentee mother, but she does not get to harvest what she didn't sow. She left when you needed her the most, Lesya. If it were up to me, I'd send her packing." Ly walked over to the bed and handed me the box. "Nobody has consent over your happiness, Lesya, except you. You owe her the respect of letting her bury someone she used to call a father, nothing more. I'll escort her out, myself, and you won't need to see her again."

There it was again. The protectiveness, the kindness that only he had for me. I reached out to grab his hand, squeezing a little. "Thank you."

×+×

The bed sheet was indeed a bad idea, and the trip down through the elevators only led me as far down as the bunker. Then I had to follow directions to get to the stairs and the iron gate that had a single needle poking out. The hygiene was uncertain. I inhaled with the prick.

As I arrived at the foot of the stairwell that led down to the crypts, I saw Uncle Hassan's eyes widen in incredulity. But his eyes were a small distraction compared to the gorgeous woman standing in front of a boy's painting.

The abaya was soft silk, her whole body covered in it. My blood seemed to sing for her, but my mouth was mute.

"Why are you wearing beddings?" Uncle Hassan asked and his voice went through one ear and out the other.

She turned. I bowed my head so as to avoid her glance, but I saw...

She curtsied, and I nodded my head without looking at her.

"Where do I put him?" I raised the small box.

The crypts were simple like a long hall extending to the abyss on either side. One direction led to marble sealed floors with hand-painted portraits hanging above them, the other led to open rectangular crevices with lids standing like doors above them. Only direct descendants lay here, and the last sealed panel of the floor contained Kazimir, my brother.

"There, right next to Kaz." Her voice was poisoned honey.

I walked over the dusty marble, trying to hold my breath to avoid coughing. The opened hole on the floor was only two feet deep and big enough for a body. I found myself descending into it, feeling for a small nook on the right side. I placed the box facing southwest to Mecca.

Before she could give me a hand to exit the tomb, I pushed myself up and away from her.

Uncle Hassan helped me seal the tomb by folding the lid over it. It was made of marble cut less than a centimeter thick, I thought we almost broke it. Then I stepped away, behind her and Uncle Hassan. This would be the time to pay respects, but I had none for the dead king.

I heard Uncle Hassan whisper to Jesus to ask for forgiveness for the father who never was a father, and I heard my mother sing under her breath.

A breath in with a mouthful of dust, and a breath out into the dry and dark room. Then it was over.

Uncle Hassan came over and kissed me on the forehead and left me with my mother. I cursed him over it.

"Ayda, I'll keep the gen elevator open for you, so hurry." I forgot they were technically not royal. They used the one the ministers took, the one the other people always took.

Right as I was going to follow him to my own elevator, she spoke.

"Wanika."

I faced her. She was just as beautiful as the day she let them rip me from her arms. She had dark skin, darker than Ly's. Her eyes were like orange-red balls of magma floating over white space, and the hair under her hijab was the same ivory as mine. "You've grown."

I snorted. "It's what we tend to do in six years."

With a shuffle of feet, my back was to her, and I was striding for the elevator doors. "I have something for you."

"I want nothing from you." I snapped.

"It's from your grandfather."

They kept in contact? She couldn't even talk to me but she could speak to the man who banished her? Mother walked towards me as I turned towards her, like a ghost, like a goddess.

There was a small piece of metal in her hands that I recognized from years ago. It was the key to the silver jewelry strewn over my whole body; bracelets, anklets, necklace. "He wanted me to give you this when you became queen. Empress."

My hand closed around the small stick of silver metal, making sure my skin didn't touch hers, and my mother started to walk away. This meant almost nothing.

I didn't know what came over me. But with my back still to her I said. "I sent for you a thousand and ninety-five times. I called you every day for four years. I sent you encrypted messages only you could crack forty thousand, four hundred and eighty-seven times. I traveled to your door every birthday I had since I was thirteen, and I knew you were inside. It never opened." I wanted to see her face when I said it, but I couldn't bring myself to turn. "So, if you could do me a favor... please, don't come back until I'm dead."

She said nothing. All I heard was the soft hush of feet on marble and doors sealing closed. It didn't matter to her. I didn't matter to her.

A sigh escaped me. I knew that was not necessary, but after seeing her, I realized that the feelings I had for my mother were ultimately and grossly still... hate. Keeping her away from me would have been beneficial for the both of us. If I ever saw her again, I would have wrung her neck.

And there I was, wrapped in a linen bed sheet, at the center of an infinite tunnel stretching to God knows where, filled with the corpses and dust of the monarchs that used to own the earth. Right there... it came to me that I was the most powerful being in the world. And yet... I was still going to end up here. No taj mahal, no monument, nothing to give flowers to, or light incense for. Ultimately forgotten.

My descendants would erase everything I worked hard for, parliament would call upon democracy to keep my memory at bay, and at the end of everything, I would be... nothing.

What purpose was there to doing all these things if in the end, it was all for nothing?

The painting of my brother caught my glance. He was always a bit tan, with eyes the light shade of heather, and his hair was every bit of white as mine, though straight where mine almost was an afro. I stepped closer to it, noticing every detail and smoky brush stroke, until my foot reached the lid. There was a small cracking sound and I had to step back. The lid was probably as thin as the other one.

"I know you liked mom, but... I think you understand." Why was I speaking to a painting?

The key grew cold in my hand. Somehow, I felt like confessing to my brother.

It's been a while since I saw his face. Just as I remembered him, with his slightly upturned eyes, thin and delicately pointed nose, and lips a bit too full for a boy. He would have grown to be beautiful.

"I killed three thousand people today. I bombed their safe houses and dropped bioweapons on each armory. Civilians are safe, though. They'll die while the civilians won't notice." I saw the glimmer on my wrists reflecting the dim light, from under the bed sheet, and picked at the lock with my nail. "I didn't do it for Upapa, I did it for the king of the empire. No one harms this country. You used to say you would die for Eurasia... today I killed for her."

A mass murderer. I could almost hear the judgment through the great tunnel.

But then I remembered how all these people killed far more than I did. They killed more for less. There should be a higher standard for my conscience... if I were to base my life on the lives of the dead bodies in the crypts, I could set the whole country on fire, and laugh at the ashes.

The metal against my skin turned cold. The desire to rid my body of any taint left by my grandfather grew stronger as I stared at the bracelets. At least in death he wanted to set me free.

I mentally noted that I had to bring one of my grandfather's paintings down here. Seeing the image of my father in all his regalia next to my brother's picture just made the loss seem more permanent.

They were gone, yes, but I never saw them leave. Sometimes I silently pretended that they just went for a long vacation, off to some other country or planet.

But their bodies were down here, and someday mine will be right beside them.

I looked down.

The key was of the same metal as the jewelry but with distinct grooves at the top and sides. It was slim- barely more than a needle. It was light as I pushed it through the keyhole. With slight pressure, I heard a small click on my wrist, and the hinge on the other end of my bracelet folded into itself.

Then...

I think it fell. There was an echo that repeated itself over and over down through every direction, and a haze fell over my mind. The whole thing landed on my brother's lid and made a seemingly deafening crack in the silent hall.

And with its fall came a searing pain that ran through the vein from my wrist right through my heart. My chest was on fire.

Acid, flaming acid, that was what my blood felt like. The breath was knocked out of me, but for some reason I felt the eager need to take the other one off. Maybe if I took it off, the pain would stop. I was getting dizzy, and the faces of the dead hanging on the gray walls seemed to beacon to me.

Take it off. I saw their eyes say.

So, I did.

I pushed the needle into my left bracelet's keyhole, and with another crack, it fell on my brother's tomb. The pain from my wrist left a fiery path towards my heart, towards every inch of my body...

Maybe I screamed, but all I heard was the echo of metal against marble. Maybe I was hallucinating. But I felt my body keel over, towards the marble lid already cracked in two places. The impact was barely felt.

My eyes closed, the darkness swept in, and with the kiss of unconsciousness, I felt the heat leave me, and with its departure came ice.

Maybe the day I joined the dead would be today.