NOA

Noa gritted her teeth at the static shrieking coming from her comm piece. She ripped it out and threw it to the floor, cursing at the echo of shifting glass before she tore off her mask and tossed it to the side. The subterfuge portion of the evening was now over, and now the chaotic finale was about to begin.

“What the hell just happened?” came a voice from behind her. Gluttony.

“I don’t think we have time for that now,” the voice to her right responded. Greed.

He stood, pulled off his mask, and pushed back his hood—looking as calm and collected as ever while towering over the girl he’d shielded. Her wide, blue eyes looked between them, terrified and confused.

Welcome to the club, Noa thought just as her eyes darted over to the boy she was still hunched over. He seemed just as stunned as her with his dazed expression and lack of movement, but at least he appeared uninjured. The doors themselves seemed to have taken the brunt of the damage, despite their now-buckled and shattered state. If only they didn’t skimp on the damn glass.

“The garage. Which way to get to the garage?” Noa asked, shoving herself to her feet as her mind finally kicked back into crisis mode.

“There’s a stairwell back where we came from,” Greed said, pointing back toward the hall. “That should take us all the way down to the garage. Let’s pray it isn’t blocked off like the doors to the main hall here.”

“And them?” Gluttony asked.

“They’re coming with us.” She jerked her chin in the direction of the corridor. “Gluttony, scout the way to the stairs, make sure whoever might’ve locked this place down isn’t lurking around any corners while we get the hell out of here. Greed and I will follow with these two.” She grabbed the boy’s arm, pulling him to his feet as Greed did the same with the girl.

At first, Gluttony didn’t move, like he was about to argue. His lips pressed into a thin line, and then he spun on his heel to carry out his orders. This left Noa to her own trust exercise of letting him guide them to safety while she mulled over the fact that she was dragging along some half-Amaraian through the palace, which is the last place she’d expect to find one. Sure, there’d been a few far-flung foreigners on their way into the country, most claiming some sort of business on their documentation just like she had—not technically a lie, though one could argue it. But here? In the midst of an Amaraian council party filled with territory leaders? Then again, he could possibly be staff, a ward, an illegitimate child, or—

Noa shook the list from her thoughts, trying not to scrunch up her face as they navigated the turns. Though, the weirdest part was that neither of them were calling for help or struggling to escape when they started down the stairs and encountered movement behind one of the doors.

Well, they were sneaking around the palace while everyone else was enjoying the party.

She held onto that sentiment as Greed started past her with a shaky, almost-inaudible whimper from the girl, pushing through the exit at the bottom of the stairs into the garage. Noa’s jaw nearly dropped at the sight of so many white cars. The overhead lights revealed the metallic sheen of some and sparkling glossy coat of others. Sleek town cars, sports cars, muscle cars, and SUVs…

Gluttony grabbed a square key from the rack by the door and jogged toward one of the SUVs—the practical choice. Her heart sank as she walked past a muscle car, letting her gloved fingertips trail along the hood. It must’ve been a year since the last time she’d actually driven a car, seeing how most vehicles were typically out of the average person’s price range. The feeling of the wind whipping through her hair and the warm sun tickling her skin wouldn’t be an easily recreated memory here either, considering how she was far more likely to be inhaling snowflakes at any given second. 

The soft purr of the engine brought her back to the present, where Gluttony sat in the driver’s seat.

“You drive,” Noa said with a motion to Greed.

“Fine by me.” He pulled open one of the back-passenger doors, nudging his captive forward. “Get in.”

She hesitated, glancing back at her companion still in Noa’s grasp.

“Go,” Noa barked.

She jumped and scrambled inside as the boy pulled free of Noa’s grip to help her. With Gluttony taking the other front seat, Noa got in behind their abductees, cueing a chorus of slamming doors.

As the car nudged forward, the garage doors began to part at the top of the exit ramp, allowing Noa to lean back with a sigh. That is, until the stairwell door burst open. The resounding clang of the heavy, reinforced metal thrown back so hard against its hinges sent Noa twisting in her seat to take in the mix of wait-staff attire, guard uniforms, and street clothing. Shouts rang out with orders to apprehend them. Some shot toward the control panels to try to close the doors again while a few bolted for the key rack. However, the most alarming part wasn’t the fact that they were trying to stop them, but rather the sight of some of the wait-staff pulling daggers from hidden folds in their clothes.

“This night just keeps getting better,” she grumbled, yanking a disc from her pocket and shoving the door open again. “Floor it!” she yelled to Greed, hurling it behind the vehicle. It erupted into a wall of smoke the second metal scraped against sleek tile—a satisfying sound to hear right before she pulled the door shut. They jolted up the ramp, peeling out onto the street.

The boy turned to take in the scene unfolding out the back window, his eyes wide as the doors began to collapse shut in their wake. Noa expected panic or mumbling, likely accompanied by him shrinking into his seat with the realization that he’d just been kidnapped. So, when his eyes hardened and his jaw set as he faced her, she stiffened in surprise.

“What do you want with us?” he demanded.

Ah, a spoiled brat.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, leaning a little closer with her eyes narrowed on his. “Did you not want me to stop you from getting a head full of glass? I’ll try to remember that next time—Or would you rather me have Greed here turn the car around and drop you off with those very nice individuals back there? Because I can arrange that.”

He opened his mouth to reply, but it was cut off by the Amaraian girl’s gasp that coincided with the SUV’s deceleration. They both followed her wide-eyed stare out the windshield where dozens of cars lined the streets, blue lights flashing through each vehicle’s dashboard. Barriers and makeshift checkpoints were being set up at the chokepoints of the main intersections, corralling gawkers and those hurling obscenities at the officers.

“There’s no way we make it past all of this,” Greed mumbled, craning for a better view before he spun the wheel to take them down an alley. Another set of lights flashed off the windows of a storefront up ahead, and he cursed under his breath. “We might have to get out and walk.”

“Are you insane?” Gluttony hissed. “Just floor it past them! We can’t just blend into the crowd here. They’ll take one look at us, and we’ll be detained—”

“Quiet!” Noa shouted, bringing a wave of tense silence through the SUV. The girl fumbled with the small handhold in the door, taking in a shaky breath, as if she was considering saying something. “Spit it out.”

Greed’s seat complained as he shifted, but Noa’s focus kept on the girl while her hand rose to the window. Her eyes closed right as her fingertips grazed the glass, and the car dimmed—the windows darkening at her touch. Noa sat up straight, repositioning herself to peer in the driver’s side mirror. On the side of the car, a logo matching the other officer-driven vehicles emerged from the plain white surface.

No. Way. Chills ran down her arms at the display of power—of magic. When she turned back to the girl, she was struggling to maintain slow, even breaths. The clock was ticking.

“Drive,” Noa commanded. “Hurry up and get us the hell out of here.”

* * *

By the time they reached the hotel on the other side of the city, the girl—the Mage—was pale. She’d held the illusion for about ten minutes, long enough for them to get all of thirty seconds outside the palace sector. After that, the rest of the twenty-minute ride was endured in complete silence.

A Mage. In Amarais. 

Noa’s head spun at the mere implication that she’d managed to step foot inside the palace in the first place. She’d heard stories of Mages declared as traitors to the throne on the front steps of the palace before they were dragged away and executed. Anything to do with magic here became a muttered curse under one’s breath. It was a threat of rivaling power—or whatever the hell else that gave them the reason to hate it and everyone who supported it. And yet she’d somehow lived, further adding to Noa’s growing bafflement.

The SUV rolled to a stop in the parking garage, and she yanked on the handle, stepping out onto the concrete with both Amaraians on her heels. They followed her without a word to the back of the car, where Noa waited for the twins to join them. It was enough time for the girl to shiver, running her hands up and down her arms while the boy slid off his suit jacket and draped it over her shoulders. She kept her eyes on the pavement, angling away from him, despite how his face fell.

There was shame there. But was it shame because she was an Amaraian with magic, or shame because she helped their abductors escape? That also brought Noa to her next question: why not let the authorities catch your abductors? And: how could she use them to salvage at least part of this mess?

They piled into the elevator and then their hotel room, where Greed sat the two Amaraians at the foot of the bed. Noa ripped open the nightstand drawer and grabbed out her phone. She put it to her ear, squeezing it during the single ring it took to hear a voice on the other end.

“Where are you?” Sloth asked.

“Excuse me? Instead of asking where I am, maybe you should explain what the living hell just happened back there?”

An eerie quiet fell into a sigh.

“Nyx.” Noa gritted her teeth.

“That’s what I’m in the middle of figuring out. Nothing should’ve happened, but everything went black. So I tried to restore communications and force my way back into the system, but when that wasn’t getting me anywhere, I went back to the forums we discussed—Noa, everything’s shut down.”

“What’s that supposed to mean to me, Nyx?”

“I can’t tell you what happened because I was locked out. Not even the rebels’ network is online. Something went sideways, and I don’t know what it was. None of this was supposed to happen yet, so believe me, I’m just as pissed and confused as you are.”

Noa tilted her head back, angling the receiver away from her face. “Pack. Now.”

Greed and Gluttony began shoving everything into their bags as Noa rolled her head forward again to stare down her two new problems.

“All right,” she said. “So what’s the damage, then?”

Something jostled at the other end of the line. “It’s… not great. The most important thing is that you need to be leaving right now. You’ll have to cross the border to the southwest since they’ve already started shutting down all major traffic to and from Miralta, starting from the east.”

“What?” Noa asked, huffing out a disbelieving breath. “Why? There weren’t any Miraltans anywhere.”

“Turn on the news or look at a feed, Noa.”

Noa tapped the side of the TV, waking the screen to reveal red ticker tape scrolling along the bottom.

“The regent’s dead…” Noa’s voice was barely above a whisper.

Of course, he is. She clenched and relaxed her fist, tamping down her frustration as she faced two slack-jawed survivors.

“I’m going to need two new IDs when we get to Miralta.”

“Names?” Nyx asked. “Assuming you didn’t pick up a couple of ID-scrubbing criminals within the last hour.”

Noa pointed to the girl. “Name.”

She glanced over at her companion, hesitating as she choked out, “C-Cecilia Angelis.”

“Cecilia Angelis,” Noa repeated. “I’m assuming her record doesn’t have her marked as a Mage.” She paled at Noa’s comment, clutching a hand to her chest now while the boy looked between them with a renewed, fighting spark.

“You can’t just—”

“Name.” She pointed a finger at him, watching his vision catch on the TV again. His shoulders fell, and that fight fizzled out. Annoyed, Noa stepped in front of him, but he might as well have been looking straight through her.

“Glacier Caelius,” he finally said, lifting his head for her to take in those sapphire-blue eyes again. The phone almost slipped out of her hand.

“What?!” Gluttony dropped his bag with a light thud.

“TV, mute.”

All the movement in the room came to a halt as Noa pulled the phone away from her face to put it on speaker. She leaned against the TV stand and set it down, steepling her hands in front of her face with closed eyes. So, maybe breaking into the Amaraian palace had been the stupidest thing she’d ever done, but perhaps she’d managed to hit a stroke of luck after that unexpected mess.

“All right,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. “Let me paint you a picture of what just happened. I saved both of your lives. I took a gamble that both of you were worth something I could cash in on later. So, I find it a little strange that you two were not only wandering around the palace so freely, but you were also cooperative with us because one of you is a Mage and the other is the Prince of Amarais—a prince who’s been kept out of the public eye because of rampant rumors that he’s half-Amaraian. A rumor that’s clearly not a rumor, and I’m thinking that there’s also a fairly damning reason for why there’s an Illusionist Mage attached to his side… Much like me, you two decided to take a gamble in assisting in our escape because you didn’t want to get caught, and you’ve just discovered that your last line of defense is dead, right?”

Glacier let out a bitter laugh. “What? Do you actually think that man wanted to keep me alive? That was all—” His eyes lit up with sudden realization. “I’ll give you whatever you were looking for if you take us to Miralta.”

Noa hesitated, faltering with that sudden push-back. “And what, exactly, is waiting for you in Miralta?”

“Katerina Caelius. My cousin and the new regent of Amarais.”