Page 49 of Omega’s Fealty

I don’t know why that makes me so angry. He’s been doing this his whole life. He told me so. He was simply reading what he’s given, same as he always has.

I turn it off.

I sit there in the sleeping bag for a while with the dead screen in my hand.

He’s alive. That’s what I keep coming back to. He’s alive and he’s walking and he’s talking. They saw the mark and they didn’t drag him off somewhere and do to him what their law says they can do.

They can’t. Not now. Not with the whole world watching them be grateful. Not on American soil.

But they know.

I put my hand over the dressing on my arm and press until it hurts. It clears my head.

Exiles, he said. Students. Activists. Somebody with a lawyer.

I’m not political, but I’m not completely clueless and I just had a crash course in Monteverran politics. If there are people willing to stand in a square and be shot at, then there are people abroad who speak for them. There always are.

I pick the phone back up.

I search for “Monteverra” and “activist groups.”

I find footage first. I don’t watch all of it. There’s a square and a lot of people in it and then there’s smoke, and I scroll past that to the words underneath.

Names of groups. Names of people who’ve talked to newspapers. A man in Vienna. A woman in Toronto with a law degree who is quoted in three different places saying the same thing about the omega property statutes.

Finally I find a website with a black banner that says in English and in something else FREE MONTEVERRA. There is a contact form at the bottom.

I don’t know which of them are real. I don’t know which of them are watched. I don’t know which of them, if I walked up and said “I’m the man they say is in the river and I’ve got your prince’s teeth marks in my shoulder,” would call the FBI before I’d finished the sentence.

I’m going to find out.

I pull the sleeping bag tighter and I start reading.

13. Aurelio

After the third pre-recorded statement there are no more, and there have never been interviews. The line is that “the prince is recovering from his ordeal.”

In reality, they are panicking that I am pregnant. I hope I am. They won’t execute me if I am pregnant. At least I hope they won’t.

But even more than that, I will still have Roan with me or part of him.

“Your Highness.”

The younger of my two doctors holds out the cup. He is holding it at arm’s length, with a paper towel folded under it.

The stick is in a kidney dish on the desk behind him, still in its wrapper. Beside it, there is a second wrapper, folded flat, from tonight’s. They bring both up at once now and leave the evening one on the desk so that I can look at it all day.

I take the cup and go into the bathroom and shut the door.

This is the only door in the suite that I am permitted to close. I don’t know if there is a camera in here. I hope not. There probably is.

I do what is required. I’ve done it twice a day for weeks.

When I first understood how often they wanted it, I thought it was a joke. I don’t need to be tested twice a day, but they don’t want to wait.

Reinhardt wants to know the hour that it turns, if it turns, so that he can begin whatever he is going to begin.

The tour has moved on without me. I have been left here with a security team and a bevy of doctors whose sole job is to dip a pregnancy stick in my urine twice a day.