The Sun Dwellers (28 page)

When we turn the next corner, I gasp, as the hall appears to go on forever, cut straight and true—there’s no way we’ll make it to the end of this corridor unseen. Yet Roc starts down it, seemingly unconcerned, and I have no choice but to follow my guide. As it turns out, the hall is so long it cannot be isolated to only one building. No, this passageway connects five or six buildings. At each intersection, the ceiling of the hall rises to a glassed-in atrium with a one-hundred-eighty-degree unobstructed view of the man-made night sky.

After going through the first atrium, I assume we’ll take this corridor all the way to the throne room, but Roc has other plans. Upon reaching the second glassy connection point, he pushes through a door and into an outside patio, which is surrounded on all sides by buildings, each with similar glassed-in alcoves. We skirt around a lone statue of the current President Nailin—his foot is propped up arrogantly on a large stone, as if he’s just conquered it (another inanimate object defeated, yeah!)—and then into another door that leads into one of the adjacent buildings. Given the maze-like quality of the place, I’m hoping Roc doesn’t faint from exhaustion or dehydration. Without him, I may not reach my twentieth birthday before I locate the throne room.

Into another luxurious hallway, turn right, turn left, down a half flight of white marble stairs, up a half flight of the same type of stairs, out and across another patio, and into another building: we cut a seemingly random path through the collection of buildings that I can only assume is the safest—if not fastest—route.

The entire way, we don’t see a single soul.

I’m still trying to decide whether that’s a good or a bad thing, when I hear familiar voices.

Tristan

“What do you mean, ‘a trap’?” I ask, grabbing the paper and skimming through the text.

Tawni waits patiently for me to find the spot. When I do, I read it aloud, my heart skipping a beat or two before I finish: “I fully expect a convoy of five or six intruders, including my son, to attempt to assault me before, during, or after the Sun Festival event. Your orders are to draw them to me, allow them safe passage—I want them all, especially my son, taken alive.” My heart is in my chest. He knows. He’s waiting.

“So we weren’t as stealthy as we thought,” Trevor says. “The right move is to pull out, try again when he least expects an attack.”

“We can’t,” I say, closing my eyes.

“Why not?”

“Because Adele and Roc don’t know,” I say. “We have to get to them first, try to warn them so we can all escape together.”

Trevor’s eyes narrow. “But the only place we’ll be sure to meet up with them is…”

“Yeah, that’s where we’re going,” I say. “The throne room.”

Trevor opens his mouth to say something, but then stops himself. We all know what he was going to say:
that’s suicide.
He’s right, of course, but he stopped because he knows, like me, that we have no choice. None of us will abandon Adele and Roc, nor would they leave us if the roles were reversed.

“But if they were supposed to let us through, why did those guys try to kill you?” Tawni asks.

“You couldn’t see very well because you were behind us, but the guys were reading the paper as they approached,” I explain. “They were probably given their orders late, were trying to catch up to the situation, perhaps hadn’t read far enough yet, or maybe were just so surprised to see us that they overreacted.”

“Unlucky for them,” Trevor says, resting a foot on one of the dead guards.

“Can you not do that?” Tawni says, motioning toward his foot, her nose crinkled with disgust.

Grinning, Trevor moves his foot from the guard.

I say, “Adele and Roc might already be closing in on the throne room. We’ve got to go.”

“Hopefully all the other guards got the memo and they just let us through,” Trevor says.

“Don’t count on it,” I say.

Although we now know that the guards have been ordered to let us make it all the way through to my father, I still check both ends of the hall before slipping out of the room. You never know who might not be in the loop, like the two dead behemoths we just left in our wake. I go left, determined to make up as much time as possible, running soft-footed down the corridor. Reaching the end, I go left again, followed by a right at the end of the next line of guest rooms. Three quarters of the way to the end of the next hall is the opening to a wide staircase that descends directly beside my father’s favorite room in all of the buildings: the throne room.

I gaze over the balcony, try to see past the curving edge of the spiral staircase, listen intently. I don’t see or hear anything. In fact, it’s so quiet you could hear a pebble drop from the treads of one’s boot.
A trap
. It would have felt like one even if we didn’t have the paper to prove it.

Could Adele and Roc already have fallen into my father’s well-laid web? The plan is for the first team to arrive at the throne room to wait only five minutes and then go in, in case the other team has already been captured. But maybe they arrived only a few minutes earlier and are still hiding below, waiting for us before breaching the final obstacle on our quest to change the future history of the Tri-Realms. If so, will we be able to sneak back into the night and save the conclusion of our mission for another day?

A lot of questions. A lot of doubt. I descend the stairs quietly.

One curve, two; the third—and last—curve. The foyer outside the throne room is empty. Waiting for Trevor and Tawni to catch up, I quickly check behind the base of the staircase, hoping against hope that they’re waiting for us there. Empty. I stare at the splinters of light radiating out from the seven-layered crystal chandelier above me, welcoming the spark of head pain that results from looking directly into the bright light.

“Either they’re not here yet, or they’ve gone in,” I say.

“Do you want to wait?” Trevor says, surprising me. Typically he’s more of the shoot-now-consider-alternatives-later type of person. His cautiousness shows his different-but-equal concern for our friends.

“But what if they’re already in there?” Tawni says. “They’ll need backup.”

Both pairs of eyes are on me, leaving me to make the decision. If they’re in there, my father may kill them immediately, either to enrage me or simply because he has no use for them. Waiting could mean their deaths. Too risky.

“We’re going in,” I say, breaking the wait-five-minutes plan, and potentially making the biggest mistake of my life.

Trevor says, “We’re with you.” Tawni just nods, biting her bottom lip.

I open the door, which doesn’t lead straight into the throne room; no, that would be way too ordinary for my father. Instead, it opens to an outer ring that surrounds my father’s sanctuary. Every twenty or so feet there’s a break in the raw-cut stone wall, giving multiple entrances (and multiple exits) to the place my father spends much of his time.

Voices echo through the chamber. My father’s voice: loud and firm and relentless.

“Kill them all,” he barks.

“Sir, if we do that there will be no one left to pay your taxes and support our way of life.” One of his advisors. By the sound of his screechy voice it’s a guy who I’ve only ever known as Sanders.

“To hell with taxes!” the President roars. “I want the blood of all those who oppose me!”

“This time we’ll get all the rebels,” Sanders promises. “We’ll round everyone up, interrogate them, pit them against each other by threatening their friends and family, make them talk. Anyone who is even remotely a threat to you will be shot.”

“Hmm, I like the way you think, Sanders. That must be why I keep you around. It’s certainly not because of the timbre of your voice.” My father’s laugh is gruff and out of place. Continuing to listen, I lead Trevor and Tawni along the wall to the first entranceway.

“I suppose we can do it your way, so long as we kill enough of the
lesser
dwellers to ensure their future cooperation.”

We reach the gap and I peek around the corner. A single light is illuminated, highlighting my father’s plush oak chair in the center of the room. Near him stands Sanders, a pitifully skinny man with a heart that’s equally shriveled. He gestures with his hands, like he’s giving a speech to an audience much larger than one.

“Yes, yes, of course. We’ll send a message in the strongest of terms that treachery will not be tolerated in the Tri-Realms.”

My father leans back in his chair, rubs his hands thoughtfully against the red velvet armrests. Sighs. “Yes, that should do just fine. Give the orders to carry out the plan as you suggested.”

“Thank you, my President,” Sanders says reverently, his voice grating my eardrum like cheese. He turns to go, making directly for our gap.

“Send in the generals on your way out,” my father orders behind him.

He stops for just a moment to say, “As you wish,” before continuing his path toward us. I frantically scan the space outside of the lighted area, looking and listening for any signs that this truly is a trap. Hidden guards, unable to stay still for long periods of time, perhaps scraping a toe on the floor, breathing heavily, letting a cough slip from the back of the throat. I see nothing. I hear nothing.

Surrounding the heart of the throne room are black pillars, not required to hold up the ceiling, but instead intended to give the room a solid beauty. Naturally, my father’s idea. The pillars also make great places to hide. Sanders passes between the pillars on his way to the gap, looking more at his feet than up, probably still reliving and relishing my father’s acceptance of his plan.

I pull back behind the wall, wait for the moment Sanders rounds the bend, his skeleton-like face diminishing further as it falls under shadow. I grab him by the throat, crush his voice box so he can’t make a sound, hiss in his ear, “One noise and you die, understand?”

His already buggy eyes protrude even further from his head, and he nods. His silence saves his life, but not his consciousness. I release him, punch him so hard in the head he’ll feel it for days, catch him lightly in my arms, and then set him down in the outer passage. At least he won’t be inviting the generals in anytime soon.

To Tawni, I say, “We’ll enter first. You come in behind us and duck behind one of the pillars. Stay there.” She nods vigorously.

To Trevor, I raise a fist. He raises his own and bumps it firmly against mine. Game time. Adele and Roc don’t appear to be here, but they may have been captured and taken away already. Either way, I have to find out, question my father. And if it turns out not to be a trap, hopefully kill him, too.

I enter the throne room, not trying to hide my presence, striding toward my father as if I belong there, as if I never left, as if he’s expecting me, which he might be. Trevor’s with me every step of the way and I sense when Tawni moves in behind us, ducks off to one side.

My father, who’s looking at his lap, suddenly looks up, as if sensing our presence. His face lights up with a smile that’s as big as it is fake. “Ahh, Tristan, you made it after all!” he booms.

I eye him warily. “How did you know?”

He laughs. “Are you really so arrogant to think you could enter
my
kingdom without me knowing? When you killed some of my soldiers you should have killed all of them.”

The men who killed Ram. The ones knocked out but not dead. Although it’s cost us the element of surprise, I know we did the right thing letting them live.

“I was beginning to think you wouldn’t have the guts to show,” my father says.

“It was never guts that I lacked,” I say, trying to control my sudden desire to launch myself at the man who created me, jam my sword into his heart; that is, assuming the space within his left breast contains an organ and isn’t just a black and empty cavity.

“Mmm, really?” he says, running a hand through his short blond hair. The last time I saw him there were salt-and-pepper flecks of gray on his scalp, and deep lines on his face. I took it as a sign that even the most powerful man in the Tri-Realms can’t fight against time. But now the gray is gone and his face is as smooth as a twenty-year-old’s, tan and chiseled. Hair coloring, wrinkle treatments, tanning beds: my father can even thwart the signs of time. “Last I checked, you would run and hide when I put your mother in her place.”

I immediately feel my blood pressure rise, my head go hot, not from embarrassment but from pure anger, rising to a boil. Through my teeth, I say, “Don’t speak of my mother. She is everything you’re not. Good, pure, gentle, caring. You were never worthy of her.”

“Ha ha ha ha!” my father bellows. “You are so much like her it’s scary. But you misspoke. You said ‘She
is
everything you’re not.’ I believe you meant
was
.”

I freeze, my anger falling away like a warm coat, leaving me naked and cold. I shiver. There’s a pit in my stomach. “What the hell do you mean?”

“Surely you noticed your mother’s not around anymore,” my father mocks. A sudden awareness floods through me, causing my muscles to ache, my bones to feel bruised. It’s as if I’ve swallowed shards of glass, which are now cutting me apart from the inside.

“What did you do to her?!” I roar, the anger returning, white-hot and hungry. I take a step toward him.