We can’t sweep yet. Sykora desperately scrambles for the puzzle prisms, but they keep slipping from her grip. One of the glass prisms has cracked; she’s desperately trying to piece it back together, find its place in the honeycombed mosaic. I haven’t finished, she says. I need to finish.

It’s too late, Majesty, Hyax says, and she’s huge, and her uniform is the drab gray Maekyonite coverall. You’ve run out of time. We’re sweeping without you.

You can’t, Sykora whines. There are so many pieces missing. Where did they all go? You can’t.

Listen to her. Poor stupid orphan. Waian laughs and holds the shock prod close to Sykora’s face. She still thinks she’s in charge.

I am, Sykora cries. I’m the Princess of the Black Pike. She stamps her little foot and realizes she is three hectos old again. No, no, no. She grew up. She’s supposed to be grown up.

Tak tak tak.

Silly girl. Waian picks her up. Fool girl. Do you know what happens to foolish Princesses?

No, she sobs. No. Please. Mother, please. But Waian isn’t her mother. She has no mother. She has nobody.

We’re going to leave you here, Hyax says, and her face has become the Empress’s. We’re taking the Pike and leaving you behind. You’re not the Princess anymore.

I am, Vora says. I’m the Princess. And you’re nothing at all.

I’ll be good, Sykora wails. I’ll do anything. I’ll be loyal I’ll be good please! PLEASE—

Tak tak tak.

She jolts awake and for a moment the relief floods her. A nightmare. Just a nightmare.

And then the waking nightmare crashes into her forebrain and knocks the air from her lungs. Makes her want to tear her hair out of her skull. Makes her nearly sob aloud, but she swore she’d never cry on those cameras again, so she just bites down hard on her hand. She is losing her mind. She feels it happening. Everything is slipping away.

There is no refuge anywhere. Not awake, not asleep.

And nobody is coming to save her.

Tak tak tak.

Sykora shifts at the noise. She seeks its source.

There it is, standing in front of the glass. It’s the Maekyonite. The one she spoke to. It’s been a tenday at least since she’s seen him out of his little room. The shock prod never came. No new security regs she can see.

He didn’t tell anyone about me. About that night.

“Hai,” he says.

She knows that syllable. A greeting. She rises to a sitting position on her skeletal bedframe. The sleep is still clearing from her frazzled mind.

“Iguezzyuh problydoanunerstanmi,” the Maekyonite says. “Inyumeinod wannanithing t’duwimi. Buddiwannidasay sahri. Uh. Thatchirstuk hir.”

She stares at him. Her heart gallops.

“Anthatwenwimet, Ididdn’ helpyu. Umnodshiraikin helpyu now, ivn.” He puts his big, rugged-looking hands in his drab uniform’s pockets. "Buddaiam sahri.”

“Sah-ri,” she says.

A light goes off in those dark, searching eyes. A smile spreads across his face and oh no—he has dimples. “Thazryde,” he says.

She repeats the nonsense syllables. Just to communicate with someone. Just to speak and be heard. “Thaz ryde.”

“Wellnauyurjazgoppingmi.”

Her tail swishes. “Wellnau yurjaz goppingmi.”

He chuckles. That was her. She made him laugh.

There is something in the way he is looking at her. A careful attentiveness. Something that gives her a hunch. She curls her tail around the scaffold and drops between its bars into an isometric tail-hold that lets this world’s bouncy gravity take hold of her curves. His eyes shift, then catch. He blinks rapidly and refocuses on her face. “Duyuhava naym?”

“Naym,” she murmurs.

“Eimgrant. Grantyde. Mainaym. Naym. Izgrantyde.”

Is he trying to teach her his language?

“Name. You’re asking my name. Grantyde. Naym.”

A smile stretches across his face, furrowing those dimples again, under that fascinating stubble. He nods encouragingly. “Howboud yu?” He points at her. “Whotsyr naym?” His hands are big.

God, he’s cute. That’s not fair.

His laugh sprinkles cinnamon warmth into her chest. “Aycandjuskipcollinyu Batty.”

“Batty.” She nods. It’s familiar—that’s what they keep calling her. “Grantyde naym, Batty naym.”

He sucks air through his teeth and mumbles something in his language.

“My real name is Sykora, the Princess of the Black Pike,” she says. “But I don’t imagine you understand that name’s import. And I like the way your mouth moves when you call me Batty.”

That grin again as he lets out more of his strange, choppy language. He presses his palm to the glass. He points at it. “Hand.”

Her pulse quickens. He is trying to teach her. He’s arming her, and he doesn’t even realize it.

She drops to the floor and approaches him. Gods of the Firmament, this is a tall alien. She wonders how much he weighs. “Hand,” she repeats.

“Thazryde.” There’s that work again. It must be some kind of affirmation. “Grant.” He points at himself, then at his palm. “Hand.”

Sykora wants to dance. She wants to break into laughter or tears; she isn’t sure. He’s looking at her like she’s a person. He’s talking to her. An uncontrollable smile is fixed on her face. “Grantyde,” she says, cocking her hip.

“Grant Hyde.”

“Grantyde.”

“Grant.”

“Grantyde. Grantyde Grantyde Grantyde. That’s your name from now on, Grantyde.”

He holds his hands up in mock-surrender. “Grantyde,” he allows.

He wants to be friends. He is dropping his freedom into her lap. “I think I’m going to use you, Grantyde,” she says. “I think you’re my way out.”

He scratches his chin. God, his chin. Why do these aliens have to be so fucking handsome? “Ynoweycandunnerstanyu, Batty.”

She leans forward. She gives him a look at her. Again that flicker. She doesn’t know what Maekyonites look like, under those coveralls. But she knows how a man looks when he sees what he wants. “I think you’re gobsmacked,” she says. “I think you’re my weapon.”

She has been trained to know when she’s snared someone. She has snared this Maekyonite. And it’s been night for so long. Her whole life is night, now. But she feels a dawning warmth. He wants me. He wants me, he wants me. There is a giddiness of spirit the thought brings that—although she’d never admit it—pertains to more than just her escape. He wants her.

“Goddabicoldnther.” He crouches to her level. “Por Batty. Theibedirbi crankinthaheetfoarya.”

You’re happy because he’s made a mistake, comes that counseling voice. It sounds like Hyax. You’re happy because you’ve gotten your way out. He is a primitive. A barbarian. He’s beneath you.

Oh, but she’d love that. Him beneath her. Him atop her. Him however she pleases.

“Teach me your language,” she says. “Surrender your mind. And when I kill everyone here, I’ll spare you.”

He smiles at her with friendly incomprehension. “Meibyai ottabringya kreyonsrsumthn. Havaconvirsashinlyke pikshinary.”

She imagines he’s telling her all the things he wants to do to her. She really has become some kind of beast in here. All her careful superiority, her monastic self-control, it’s all been sandblasted away. Her firm imperial edifice has become some kind of craggy cliff, like the caves where her ancestors hid and hunted. And bred.

“I am going to steal you,” she decides. “I’ll pry you from their cold, stiffening hands. Why not? Why not take something beautiful with me from Hell?”

She imagines him on top of her, enthralled and inside, captured and kept. She lets the thought put a subtle roll into her hips and is rewarded by another waver in his attention. He keeps looking away, at the moment she’s sure he’d rather do anything but. Perhaps it’s training. But she doesn’t think so. She thinks it’s bashfulness.

He doesn’t realize it, yet.

She gazes into his dark alien eyes. She grins. “Do you know what you are, now?”

“Igoddagedbak,” he says. “Goddaloopthakamruzz. Sahri.”

She lays a hand on the glass as he steps back. She doesn’t panic. She knows, now. Knows he’ll be back. Knows that all is aligning—that this beautiful male will be taught the place that waits for him in the Empire.

“You’re mine, Grantyde,” she whispers.

***

“Okay. Story time. Auntie Waian is gonna tell you what a daemon is.”

Waian—

[Threat level: Nil]

[Control Vector: Waian knows what she’s doing.]

[Contingency: This is Waian. No contingency is needed.]

—kicks her boots onto the command deck.

“A daemon,” she says, “is an artificial copy of a person’s brain, shoved into a little box along with a virtual world designed to keep them from going rampant long enough to be useful.”

One of Grantyde’s hands is deliberately clutching his armrest. The other Sykora has managed to tug into her lap. “Rampant meaning…”

“Hitting the edges of its programming,” Waian says. “A side effect of how they’re made. There are artifacts and scraps of ego that stick around to preserve the originator’s thought processes and incentive mechanisms, and little pieces of junk data that the techs missed. They have a way of metastasizing and corrupting the runtime.”

“So it goes insane,” Grantyde says.

“I guess you could think of it that way, sure.”

“Chief Engineer.” Sykora interrupts. “Can you please try to speak on this without initiating an existential crisis in my husband.”

Waian gives her a droll look. “He’s looking pretty existential to me, boss. The only way out is through.”

The chime of the lift sounds. Quartermaster Kymai inches past the two hulking marines at the door, a platter in his hands that’s piled with fluffy, stretchy flatbreads and vividly violet eggs.

Sykora slides her thermos out of the way to allow Kymai a clear spot on the table. “Thank you, quartermaster.”

“The flatbreads are underproofed.” Kymai backs away toward the lift, bowing and scraping. “Don’t look at them. Don’t look at me. I am going to retire in disgrace to a small moon.”

Grantyde is staring at a spot on the table, his dark brows scrunched in that way they get when he’s perturbed. It always raises Sykora’s pulse when he gets like that. It’s moments like this that she feels straightest—the times that her man clearly needs her help and her guidance. The urge to coddle him, to fix his disquiet, to compel him into calm, even, tingles behind her eyes.

Sykora began her marriage to Grantyde (the in-earnest part of their marriage) with no map to his territory. Her alien groom finds pride and comfort in his masculinity, but the meaning of the word, and the way he embodies it, is so richly strange. Even putting aside the biological confusion of his immunity, he has such a feminine assertiveness. It’s been with confused delight that she’s found her equilibrium with him, traded back and forth the boy roles and the girl roles into this chimera they’re riding together.

She thought it would feel wrong or unnatural, being a duelist, and yes, there have been a few times she’s relied on quiet conference with Hyax to help her navigate the waters. But the predominant emotion has been gleeful excitement. It feels dangerous in a good way. Rebellious, even. And damn her heart, but it pounds faster when she thinks the word. Grant said they’d be something new and they are. And what does a Void Princess love more than exploration of the unknown?

She knows it’s a point of discomfort in her husband, the way he doesn’t fit; she keeps the thrill of it to herself. His steady loyalty to her makes it easy to think of him as the uncomplicated man he sees himself as. And she’s sure that if there were a crucial moment for it, he’d obey her as surely as if he were all-the-way male.

That’s your Imperial Core tyrant talking, Kora. Don’t think of it that way. He is all-the-way male. Of course he is. Just the Maekyonite version.

“You should eat, Majesty,” Vora murmurs, sliding her a full plate.

“So it’s… an AI, sort of,” Grantyde says.

“A what?”

“An artificial intelligence.”

“Ah.” Waian nods. “Sorta. The Empire does not allow de novo intelligences to be created. We’ve encountered enough rogue artificial armies and technology tombs not to fuck around with them. Daemons are what we use instead.”

“A technology tomb being a civilization that destroyed itself through its inventions,” Vora adds.

“Starting with a blank slate leads to all sorts of difficulties and unexpected variables.” Waian spoons an herbaceous sauce over her hoard of eggs. “It is hard as hell to create a brain that won’t rapidly turbofuck itself. If you start with a person, you have a whole psychological profile you can rely on, and a ton of the work’s been done for you. We take the upload, trim out everything that’d get in the way, and just like that, you’ve got an expert in a box. Replicable and thousands of times faster than the brain it’s patterned off.”

“Okay. Uh.” Grantyde’s tapered fingers drum against the gilded lip of his fine tableware. “I can see how useful that’d be. What are you trimming?”

“Well, it’s bespoke,” Waian says. “Mine, for example, has no libido. Otherwise it’d lust itself into rampancy. Some daemons, though, they keep that sorta thing, because it’s key to the daemon’s quest.”

“You have a daemon?”

“What, me?” Waian bats her lashes. “Oh, I do, yeah. I must not have mentioned it.”

“A minor miracle,” mutters Hyax.

“And it has a quest?” Grantyde prompts.

“Mmhmm. One sec.” Waian holds up a finger while she swallows her bite of breakfast. “Pardon. A quest is the thing that a daemon is doing when it’s not addressing your question. While it waits for a query, it’s doing some task that its originator finds enjoyable and challenging. W is building a cruiser by hand. We do that to keep the functional life of an instance longer—perceived time, as much as you could say a daemon perceives anything, is a lot faster in there. A day is done in about a second. Eat, boss. You’ll feel better about it.”

Grantyde obediently piles eggs onto his plate.

“A quest is also how we incentivize the intelligence to do what we need it to do,” Waian continues. “In the virtual instance, if a daemon accomplishes the task we give it, we drop a virtual reward in there that helps it get its quest done. Of course that means the more times you use a daemon, the faster it completes its quest and the sooner you gotta reset it. And resets mean you gotta teach the daemon the context in which it’s operating all over again, which takes time and juice.”

“Is this daemon thing—is it a punishment or something?”

Hell no,” Waian says. “It’s an honor. And also it’s fuckin’ paydirt since you get kickbacks if you license yourself. If I wanted to quit—which I never will, you guys are gonna have to drag my mummy out my console—I could live comfortably in the Core off my daemon dosh. Not like I’m in there.”

Grantyde chews. “But you sort of are.”

Waian raises a brow. “A program based off my brain isn’t my brain, boss. W isn’t sentient.”

“Uh. Right. I don’t mean to sound naïve, but I am a tiny bit existentially horrified.” Grantyde looks around the table. “I seem to be the only one, though. Yes?”

The command group looks at one another and produces a collective shrug.

Sykora frowns as she tries to place herself behind her husband’s eyes, into his perspective. Yes. It would be a terrible existence, to be a daemon. But you can’t be a daemon. Daemons have no essence within which an individual could situate itself. As well imagine oneself a rock. She wishes she had the capacity for this sort of empathy, to feel bad for an algorithm.

“You don’t have to fret, Majesty,” Hyax says. “Daemons are not people, and their runtime is not sentience.”

Sykora winces at the authority in Hyax’s voice. She knows the Brigadier is trying to be reassuring, but this is something she’s noticed about Grantyde—the confidence of others sometimes has a strange inverse effect on him, turning him further inward and speculative. At first she took it for distrust or disbelief, but it happens even with those in whom he has faith. It even happens with her sometimes, so she knows it isn’t any intentional caginess on his part. Just an involuntary and very non-Taiikari reaction.

Sykora holds up a hand. “One moment, everyone. Keep eating. I need a moment with my husband.”

She curls her tail around the solid span of her husband’s arm. He allows himself to be tugged from the table into a corner of the command deck.

“If you’d like to recuse yourself, you can,” Sykora murmurs. “Plenty of other tasks to turn your attention to. And I can handle this daemon thing.”

He shakes his head. “I gotta pick and choose what I get all Maekyonite Moralist about. We don’t have a thing like this on my world, outside of our fiction.” He squares his broad shoulders. The tightening of his jaw shows through his scruff, the way it does when he sets his wonderful, infuriating Maekyonite determination to something. “None of you are freaked out about this, so I won’t be either.”

“Just keep me in the loop, yes? Don’t bottle it up.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be very annoying if I need to.” And her gentle giant kisses her hand, and her stomach flutters, and she knows it’s going to be fine. Everything will be fine as long as she has Grantyde.

“So, okay.” He says this louder, pausing the side conversations as he returns with Sykora to the table, his hand so huge and warm around hers. “We need to find a daemon.”

“Unit K-77272, to be exact.” Vora reads the name off a printout. “Manufactured on Tamion by Kahanai Fabricant tW.”

“Tamion,” Grantyde says. “That’s a Pike sector world, right?”

“Correct. And our first stop, I’d think.” Hyax wipes her mouth.

Grantyde brightens. “So it’s good bye to the Core?”

“It’s good riddance to the Core.” Sykora’s tail flicks. “Get that course plotted. Alert the Qena-Qel and have them make ready to follow in our slip. The Marquess wants us to chase a daemon? Fine. We’ll chase it all the way home.”

“On it, boss.” Waian stands up. Her matching eagerness is clear. “We can be sweeping within the hour.”

“Not quite that fast, Chief.” Grantyde raises an ameliorating hand. “Sykora and I have one last piece of business to attend to.”

“Oh, of course.” Vora tugs her knuckles excitedly. “Sykora’s official commission as Princess Margrave, yes?”

“Uh.” Grantyde shares a look with Sykora. “Yes. That.”

She giggles and holds her hand up. “Come, husband. Let’s go get me commissioned.”

He plucks her from her seat and waves to the command group as they head for the lift. As the doors slide shut behind them, his hand departs hers to its home between her shoulder blades. She adores the warmth and weight when he does that. Protective. Possessive.

She knows not to tell him this. Not after what they went through. She isn’t even sure she’d be able to speak it aloud. But when he touches her like this, she sometimes imagines with a transgressive shiver that they're back in their old way, only reversed. That he’s her master, and she's his pretty little possession. That I'm his. Her tail rustles her topcoat with its mad wagging. His, his, his.

They board the lift. She tilts her head and rests it on his hip. “Ready?” she whispers.

He gathers her closer. “Ready.”

What Sykora didn’t tell her command group is that technically, she’s been a Princess Margrave for half a day, now. She agreed with Grantyde they didn’t want to spend a moment longer than they had to on stuffy, suffocating Core World ceremonies. She signed the papers last night, without pomp or flash, on a drab call into a drab office. That’s not where she’s going now.

Where she’s going now with her Maekyonite husband is to Axyna’s clinic, to harvest the sample for re-encoding.

The sample that will give Sykora her babies.