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The words of her father came to her—words spoken a few months before he’d died of the green plague. “If you ever need help, and there is no one you can trust in the palace, go to Drake in the lower city.”
Over all these intervening years, that memory had sat waiting for her to recall it.
Drake was a mauleon—the one other species trapped here in large numbers by the Quarantine one hundred and ninety years ago. Mauleons were humanlike but clawed and heavy of body—supreme predators by ancestry. Nothing on their home planet could best them one-on-one. Here, they’d sunk to the bottom of the pile.
Drake was rumored to be a criminal lord, with a claw in every rotten plot, heist, or murder. There was even darker gossip of women made slaves to the mauleons, forced to whore or be impregnated, so others could claim the babies as theirs.
Why would her father think it safe to go to him?
She stood and wandered to her balcony area, her stomach a hard, aching lump.
She often dined on the balcony. Sassi, her childhood robot, followed her out. He was an antique, with a squarish head and rectangular body, more scratches than gray paint, and was probably the last functioning bot in the kingdom of Dywin. The palace engineers knew Sassi’s maintenance was a priority.
Vass would likely countermand every priority of hers, if she let him take power.
She clutched the railing and stared out over the city. Drake. What else? Who else? She had no alternatives. Why plan for dire emergencies and being queen when she’d had a future of zero importance?
Stay in her rooms? Pfft.
“Get my armored suit, Sassi, and weapons. I’ll take Father’s pistols as well as two stilettos. The pistols are in his old study. I’m going into the lower city, the bad sectors.”
“I know where the pistols are located. Expanding, flechette, poison, and explosive ammo should be sufficient. I’ll add a small backpack for extras. I should come with you, Princess.”
“No. You’d mark me as royal. We’ve had this conversation before.”
While a teenager she’d visited the city—slipping out and going to the scenic places as well as the streets of the poor, the streets of the middle-class rich, the interesting places like the hospital baby ward. Infertility was such a common thing and baby watching was a sport, almost. Those cute chubby hands, waving about...
Her father had caught her sneaking out, once. After a severe reprimand about safety and security, he’d allowed her to go again, providing she told him beforehand.
She had friends in the city who knew her only as Calli.
She’d never ventured into the darker, seedier areas where Drake was known to rule, where the mauleons held sway. Only bad humans went there.
Her grip on the railing tightened.
If bad meant wanting to kill a certain general by wrapping him around a tree in a forest for the meat-eaters to feast upon, she qualified.
Her father had trusted Drake enough to suggest him for her last resort; she’d have to trust him too. Sadly, there was no one else. Her palace guards might be traitors. The army was either in the general’s pockets or suckling at his teats.
Drake. That day...
Goggle-eyed, eighteen years old, and astounded her father had any connection to such a pillar of evil, she’d nodded at her father’s advice but tucked it away in her what-the-fuck mental file.
Her father had inclined his head at a murmur of sound and a shadow had blocked the door of the study. She’d swiveled and seen a hulking brute slip from the doorway. The scent of oil and gunpowder had made her at first think he was a guard.
No palace guard was that large or exuded such threat.
The glimpse of claws had made her understand that this brute was likely the man her father recommended.
Massiveness, danger, masculinity... all these she’d detected in his wake. Then he was gone, leaving only a shiver of excitement in her middle.
* * *
The mauleon sector was only a part of the lower city. She’d have to ask for directions once deeper in. Unfortunately, there was no map that had a spot on it labelled, Drake lives here.
Calliope stepped over the rusty piston casing sticking up from the footpath and headed down the steep curve of road. Her hands were sweating.
The streets were a muddle of fractured concrete, mangled metal, and craters. After two centuries of no off-world trade or travel, infrastructure and tech had decayed.
