It was a daze. One moment I was screaming at the screens, and in the next, my hand was pounding against Uncle Hassan's door.

The train was off into the night, flying across the tracks, only held down by the magnets that made sure it wouldn't run off the rails. We were minutes from Andhra Pradesh, minutes from the tunnels.

I couldn't see the sky. I couldn't see the trees or the houses. All I could see was the impending darkness, coming at me from all sides.

When he opened the door, the sleep from his eyes left the instant they laid sights on me. I must have been as disheveled as I felt. "What do you need?"

"How much cash do you have?"

He opened the door. "Should I ask?"

"No." I said. If he knew it was Ly, he would have told me or killed him.

He would never forgive me for what I was about to do.

Uncle Hassan's training lurched into his mind, the blood of warriors and spies passed down by generations of kings taking over, as he pushed the mattress off his bed with strength, he didn't look like he had. He, so thoughtlessly, was ready to help me.

The whole bed frame was cash. He was sleeping nightly on a rainbow of a billion denari. "What currency?"

"You're just as ready to run as I am, aren't you?" I snorted, trying to keep the emotions out of my voice, my face.

"You can't run."

I know. I thought. But he can.

I grabbed fistfuls of newly minted money from every country in every cardinal direction and piled them into the duffel bag I grabbed from my closet. Zabdi was waiting for me there, speechless. Our next move was supposed to be a crossroads, but he was taking his time. He should have left like Theo.

As my hand grew sore of stuffing the bills in the bag, I saw a glimmer of blue pass across my vision. The ring. Just as I'd predicted, soon, I would ruin Tino. I cursed myself, flipping the ring over, just in case I got caught, at least no one would know it was from him. He would be safe.

I would have to break his heart; take that sun and eclipse it. He would leave if he knew what was good for him.

All the thirty would, if we got caught.

"What do I need to know?" Uncle Hassan asked over my shoulder, guarding his plausible deniability.

I turned to him and looked him in the eye. I poured every bit of sincerity I had into my words. Knowing I wouldn't be able to live with myself if he thought I killed his father. "No matter what happens, know that I didn't lie to you. I am innocent."

His eyes were so much like my father's, I almost broke.

"Who's guilty?" His brows furrowed at the confusion he felt. How could a man love and hate someone that much at the same time? I hoped he loved me more.

I turned my back to him, asking for forgiveness in my head, possessing too much of cowardice and pride to beg on my knees. "You'll know."

And when I closed his door, I knew he already did.

×+×

I sat on my bed, my breathing fast, as I let the adrenaline seep into my veins. This was good. I was focused. But my hands were shaking uncontrollably, clutching my very last silver piece, the necklace.

When my fingers figured to leave it alone, I swore I felt every atom in the air, jittering at my presence.

Shaking my head against the nerves, the quick vibrations left.

"What should we do?" Zabdi asked, pacing. "What happens now?"

"I don't know." I shook my head. Of course, I knew, but the anxiety was eating the best of my focus.

He gave an exhausted sigh. "What's the plan?"

"We get him to the tunnels." I said. "I'll direct him to the food storage, the rooms. He has enough money here to get anywhere in the world."

"He'll be the most wanted man in the world."

I swallowed. "He'll disappear." I hoped.

Silence fell when he stopped knowing what to say, and I stopped knowing what to think. He paced the floor, patting Jazzy's head when he got to her corner of the room. Jazzy and I had been in the train station of the Andhra Pradesh before, and she knew where to go, but that was a contingency.

Zabdi simply muttered the directions to himself; he did this until it was obvious that he couldn't take it anymore. "What I said in the elevator-"

"I know." I sighed.

"You told me not to say sorry, but I am."

"Nothing's changed." I stared at him, knowing that everything has. "You leave after he does."

Zabdi have a heavy sigh, resigning himself to the fact. "Theo knew, that's why he left?"

I nodded.

"He didn't cause a ruckus." Zabdi said, all the pretense of tension and anger he had at the elevator disappearing in his readiness to fight... For me.

"He needed me more than I needed him." I said. Antarctica was in debt to the Islanders; his mother's regime was ending soon. War was coming, and I felt it in my bones. "The public thinks I favored him because that's what he wanted them to think. He thought I would help him climb, so he latched. But now if I go down, he'll go down with me. I'm sure he told no one."

"But who told him?"

I couldn't answer. Our eyes snapped to the door when we heard the footsteps approaching. In milliseconds, Zabdi's hands were on fire, but I told him to stand down.

"Go to the bathroom."

He shot me a look.

I already knew who was coming. From the steps, the beat he walked in, the scent wafting from behind the door; the scent of the killer I loved.

"I need to do this alone."

×+×

I remember those memories as if they were my present. It would be a mistake to say they haunted the back of my mind, because the truth was that they haunted me right behind my eyelids.

I remember the elevator going down, with the bunker unguarded as always. I went inside and the vents released the same relaxant I grew to hate. They found me in the afternoon, I think, but I didn't know how much time had passed. I didn't realize but I was in a slight coma after overdosing on the gas. It was made for much older people, not a skinny thirteen-year-old princess.

I asked where Abbu was, where Mama was, where the heck Kaz was. I should have known from the faces of the maids that they were gone.

General Hori came to me and asked what I wanted to do. I remembered that my Abbu told me that she was a fine pilot, so I asked her to let me swim in the Americas. I should have known from the redness in her eyes that she was mourning her victim.

Soon enough, I was in Montauk, braving the waves.

After that, we went to the Islands. After that, she let me be a pilot. After that they told me my father and brother had died in a runner crash. After that, Upapa banished my mother. After that, Upapa remarried, and remarried, and remarried until he realized he could no longer have children... And I was now his only heir.

This all happened in four months. Four months of me wondering why Kaz and Abbu were in the same runner. Heirs never drove in the same car, in the same jet... It was protocol. I convinced myself that they at least died in each other's arms.

Then they started taking down the paintings of my family, erasing my mother from the walls. I took the pictures they'd yet to shred and gathered them in a box I hid under my bed.

When Upapa found out, he ordered one of his guards to slap me across the face.

It only escalated from there.

I was only short of crucifixion. Yet somehow, it always all healed, leaving no scars, erasing all phantom memories of pain. I should have known I was Onus, but I was too dumb and depressed to come to that conclusion.

One time, after getting a grade lower than A in history, I was whipped. I saw the weapon exchange hands. It was string with metal balls on it. It dug into my back. It was probably the first time I truly felt pain, and the wounds didn't heal on their own. The agony pushed me into sleep and woke me just the same.

I asked them to kill me. I asked Upapa to kill me.

He should have said yes. There was a thing we called the Request. Heirs of the throne could ask for anything except the throne for once in their heir-hood and the sovereign would have to comply. My father asked for my mother, Uncle Hassan asked to abdicate. I asked for death.

But he didn't see me as his heir and so he let me bleed. He made me live.

I ran to my mother's house in Norway, but the doors were locked. I could hear her on the inside, but she wouldn't open even an inch of her window. I ran to Uncle Hassan and found solace for two days before they raided us. I hid in England with my cousins and Queen Aridni, but Upapa found me and sliced a bit of my toe out. It healed, leaving no evidence of torture.

I simply thought it was the nanites. As a Hail Mary, I flew to my cousin, Mohammad bin Nayef, and he cried for me. I hid there for almost a week before he came in the middle of the night to give me the code to his runner and... I ran.

I remembered him kissing my forehead and telling me to save myself. The next time I saw him, he no longer had a bisht, he no longer had a head.

I didn't know where I was going until I saw the anti-aircraft runners around me. North Africa was caught in a Civil War against the Ravens, and I'd flew right into it. I didn't know how to work the radio. I screamed I wasn't a Raven.

Nevertheless, they shot me down.

The next thing I knew, an angel was looking down on me, his amber eyes full of wonder and concern, holding the small black box communicator he fished out of the wreckage with me.

"I am Ilyaas. What is your name?" His accent was as thick as his lashes.

His family was the kindest I'd ever met. He had two brothers who were much younger than him. His mother was a widow who made ends meet with the help of her eldest, my Ilyaas, who tended to the animals they kept near the dunes. If he wasn't there watching the livestock that night, I would have burned to death.

Ilyaas was the only one who spoke the Eurasian common tongue, and so he quickly became my only friend. He told me how they used to live in the city with buildings of glass reaching up to the sky. He told me he was the only one of his siblings to remember a life of beautiful parks, fast food chains, and school.

The war had been going on for decades before, but it was then that it reached his home. They had to flee.

They found a handful of people at the edge of the desert living in crumbling ruins and made a new home among a few cattle and goats.

When the army came to recruit, his father went with them. Ilyaas cried when he left and, cried when he returned. His body came back in a wooden box.

I helped in the small farm in the mornings and taught the children how to read in the afternoons. There weren't regular baths or chef-made dinners but for the first time since I was born, I felt the richest.

They didn't stare at me, I didn't hear whispers of "abomination" or "mutt", and I was valued beyond my status and family. I was valued because I was me.

"Do you miss your home?" Ly asked as we took inventory of the grain remaining in the basement of the house.

"I like this home." I said. "But I miss my brother." The ache in my chest was so fresh.

"You should go back?"

I shrugged. "This home is perfect." I whispered to myself.

But that ended soon enough.

I was in the common bedroom when it happened. I hid the black box under some burlap on my makeshift bed, but I knew it was listening. I knew it was collecting data on me, my voice, the location, my state.

I tried breaking it, but it could survive a crash, thus it could survive a knife. The light blinked in and out over the weeks I was there, until a voice started emanating from it.

"Your highness, Princess Lizaveta of the Continent of Eurasia, this is the King's Guard, can you hear me?"

Static.

"Your highness, we know your location."

Static.

That was when Ilyaas came into the room, seeing me stand near the furthest wall from the black box.

"Your highness, please press the call button once if you are safe for extraction, please press the call button twice if you are in immediate danger. We will pick you up within the hour."

I couldn't believe my eyes when Ilyaas ran to it, his hand reaching for the button. I didn't realize how fast he was. I tackled him there and screamed "I DON'T WANT TO GO BACK!" I struggled against him, pulling it away, but I heard the click.

He'd pressed it.

"How many?" I asked as blood drained from my face.

He put up two fingers.

"You missed your brother-" He said as something blared in the distance. I knew the sound too well.

Runner jet bombers.

I looked outside and saw his mother across the street, and I knew then I couldn't save her. I pulled on Ly's hand and ran for the basement. We got there just in time for the first bomb to drop. I covered his body with mine as the buildings surrounding the house collapsed in on us.

Of course, they wouldn't bomb me directly, Upapa wouldn't know how to explain that. But if I died accidentally during a tiff to save me, that would be just a tragedy - it wouldn't be premeditated murder.

I whispered to him in the dust, my arms around his whole body. "My brother is dead."

And I felt his broken arms wrap themselves around me. "So are mine."

The tears made cement with the dust on our cheeks as we waited for sweet death under the rubble. It never came.

When they finally got us out, they put him on a cot as he reached for my hand. In his eyes was an amalgamation of gratitude and guilt and incredulity.

I never thought that six years after that I would look at him in the exact same way.

The look on my face must have given it away, as his eyes fell, and moisture started to collect on his lashes.

"It was you." I said, not accusing, simply certain.

He couldn't speak.

We stood there for a few seconds, waiting for his courage.

"He wanted me to kill you." The words sounded painful in his mouth. I wasn't shocked. I asked Upapa too many times for death already, it was high time he gave it to me.

"So, you killed him with the drone meant for me." The heaviness, I thought would escape with the words, but it stayed in my chest. He didn't even deny it; for once I preferred his lies over his honesty.

"I-"

"I should have known." I said. I took one step towards him forcing him to look me in the eye. I was in such pain-

Was he a Raven? Was he paid? Was he an imbecile?

"Why?" I croaked.

His beautiful amber eyes slowly moved from the floor and locked on to mine, in a silent confession. The intensity of his lack of regret hit me like a boulder. He didn't say it, but I knew.

For all the times he broke my heart, he was breaking his.

"Such poor choices you make." The pain evident in my eyes, mirroring his own.

Before I could lose myself in wrath or in thanks, I handed him the duffle bag. Its top revealed its contents, and I could see his spirit fall. "I'm leaving?" He said it more as a declaration than an inquiry, but I could feel his disbelief.

I knew he thought I would sentence him to death for giving me a throne I expressly said remained unwanted, but I wanted him more than my pride, my anger... my life.

"They'll kill you." I said.

"They'll kill you."

I shook my head. "If they can't get the serum in you, they'll have nothing on me." They would; they would find a way to get rid of me, they had every reason to.

Ilyaas's eyes looked at me as if memorizing each feature, and it was then that I realized these were our last seconds together.

I sniffed in the incoming sobs, denying them any entry into the precious moments. I looked at him the same, unsure of whether any of us would make it through the night.

"You don't hate me?" He asked, so achingly innocent for a man who killed twice for me.

"How could you think that?" I said, a twinge of pain blooming in my chest simultaneously and in equal measure as longing.

I was bracing myself for the impact his and my actions had set forth; the explosion of wrong choices awaiting, the wrong choice I was making, yet unwilling to acknowledge.

Despite knowing he wanted to look away from the fruit of his crimes, he kept his gaze at me.

He looked at me like he looked at the sun; like I hurt his eyes. But sunset was coming soon, and he wasn't sure of dawn.

"You sentenced yourself to death... for me." I raised my hand to his cheek, memorizing the smoothness, the softness, the edge of his jaw.

"I'm alive because of you."

"That was six years ago-"

He snorted and shook his head ruefully. "How do you believe me when I act like I don't love you?" Ly's eyes were brimming with tears, his whole body seeming to collapse, yet holding on to that one strand of strength. "Was I that convincing? Did I convince you that I lived for any other reason-?"

Don't. Don't. Don't.

"But you didn't want to-"

"Marry you?" He smiled against his tears. "What would they do to you if they knew?"

"A miscalculation on your part." I said as I leaned my head against his chin. "You underestimated me" I wrapped my arms around his neck, his arms wrapping around my waist, in our last embrace. "If I knew earlier, I would have taken you to whatever island didn't know us. I would have forsaken the throne, the empire, I would have ran away with you-"

"Would have." He whispered, knowing he was leaving alone.

'Would have' was such a hunting phrase; a fate that could have been but wasn't. A destiny that should have been but isn't.

He pressed his lips against my forehead and recorded I it like a video, the tenderness, his scent, the texture of his palm against my nape.

When Abbu and Kaz were taken from me, I didn't know grief. I wasn't allowed to feel it.

How was it possible to grieve the living? When you already know, they're gone.

I let one tear slide down my cheek and raised my lips to his, right as the train stopped for the station... right as the alarm blared.