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You’re leaning over a table overlapped with maps. Your hands are running over names that you’ve already memorized—Thuban, Rastaban, Acamar—names that already have formed images of places in your head. The chair’s back is wooden and uncomfortable. Fingers tap against the tabletop in rhythm to the figures in your head. You could make another run against the council again. All you need is money. A thousand for the bribes on the eastern continent, another hundred thousand for the senators in the capital… The sounds of sneakers colliding with the hardwood floors make you look up from the maps.
Your breath is caught in your throat only to be released in a long-suffering sigh. “Would it kill you to at least try to show me respect by knocking?” you ask in a voice that gratingly juvenile to your ears. It makes you shake your head to clear it.
She laughs at your irritation. She’s probably leaning against the bookcase in the far corner, her hair tied up in a bun to keep it from catching on who-knows-what she gets into. You always tell her to cut it but she only tugs your own hair with that same laugh on her lips. “I kept trying to contact you. You weren’t online,” she says.
Who are you?
You want to turn around at her laughter. She doesn’t deserve any mercy for such a slight. Your face is flushing purple already. “I’ve been planning my next project,” you say with none of the anger you feel. Your voice refuses to put together the sentences you’ve so carefully put together. Your voice sounds more sheepish if anything. “I forgot to log on these past few nights. I’ve got to make a big entrance when I head off to the senators, you know.”
Don’t touch me.
Your body hasn’t turned around just yet but she’s snuck to your side. You feel her—lowblood, ignorant, presumptuous, welcome—hands on your shoulders. She brushes away your hair easily. “You always say that,” she says while your traitorous body leans back into her touch.
How would you know? Get out.
“It’s true!” you say indignantly, your anger forgotten. She laughs into your hair. You reach out behind you and blindly grab her by one of her horns. Her response is to simply kiss your forehead and spit out your bangs noisily.
I’ll break it off if you don’t stop what you’re doing.
“You always say that, too. You really have to stop trying to convince them like that. They’ll just say what they always say: you’re too young and too brash to know anything just yet.”
She smiles too broadly, showing off her blunt fangs with impudence. You smile back and idly wonder why she is the only one that doesn’t shy away from your shark-like fangs. Your grip on her horn lessens then it’s gone. “I know plenty,” you say with bravado that you don’t remember having. “I know who my ancestor was. I know her mistakes. I know to make the Empire better.”
You push your chair back. She backs away just enough so you can stand and stretch your arms. How long were you studying the maps again? She just gives you enough time to stretch before wrapping her arms around your middle.
You’re worse than a fool. You’re—
“Feeling daring tonight, are we?” you whisper in her ear. She laughs as you wrap your own arms around her.
“No more than usual, Princess,” she teases gently.
She kisses you on the side of the mouth. You pull her tight against your body. Her body’s curves are far gentler than your own. Your hands move to tug her hair out of the bun. “I’m only princess in title,” you say distractedly. “The senators have yet to name me officially the heir.”
The rust in her blood barely shows through the thin skin of her neck. The whole world should be able to see the lowliness beating through her veins. You bite down on your lip and you feel the drops of regal blood flowing down your chin.
Her eyes widen only for a moment before her hands are at your face. She wipes the blood away with a deft sweep of a white sleeve. Your chest aches. She wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally biting through her lip, would she? “You’ve got to be careful,” she says.
Who do you think you are?
The tips of your ears grow hot. “I wasn’t thinking. Here, let me make it up to you.”
You kiss her. She doesn’t flinch away even as one of your hands clenches around one of her horns. The kiss is fast and messy. You smear black lipstick and purple blood on her lips. She leaves maroon on yours. It lasts only for a heartbeat but she doesn’t miss a beat and pushes you against the table. You have to move to sit on it.
You’re looking at the gilded ceiling. She’s smiling with smeared tyrian on her face and white sleeves. There’s a name she’s saying that you haven’t even thought about for a hundred sweeps. You reach out for her throat.
“How dare you.”
The warm slime greets your grasping hand and your own voice, slurred with sleep, greets your ears. There’s no one else to hear you. You growl to yourself.
“Phantoms and slime-dreams,” you mutter as you settle back into the supor slime for another round. The words sound hollow to your ears.
Then you remember your name, the one you haven’t even called yourself for so long. “The phantoms of the garish day are getting cleverer, I see.”
You close your eyes and think you can see the map with foreign star names.