Tinit held out her wrist and revealed the same gel-like substance that made up my communicator clinging to her skin. It lit up and a moment later an image projected into the air: my family—my mother and father, my brothers Husnain and Aziz—making their way up a mountain path, surrounded by rebels. And rebels they were, to be sure, for they all wore the red flag stitched onto their left sleeves.

I reached out to the screen as if my fingers could pass through it, and break through space to be beside them. They looked tired, but alive and healthy.

For a moment I couldn’t speak. Dihya, I missed them like a physical ache in my chest.

“It is not your face,” Tinit said to me suddenly, eyeing me. “Though you and your mother certainly have that in common. It is something else that puts me in mind of her.”

I didn’t know how to reply to that. It seemed she knew my mother well; something about the way she spoke, the surety with which she made her pronouncements, made me think she had not just been surveilling her for extraction.

“Where are they?” I asked, without looking up.

Tinit pulled her sleeve back over her wrist and the image disappeared.

“Is that information you want to risk knowing?” she asked softly.

“No,” I said. “The risk if I were captured would be too great.”

Tinit nodded, approving.

“Let me talk to her, Uma. You have much else to do.”

Tinit, it seemed, was used to her daughter’s brusque airs and smiled.

She nodded. “I will see you again, Amani of the Kushaila.”

We both watched her walk down further into the cave and collect a bevy of guards around her.

“I see where you get it,” I said.

“Get it?” Arinaas asked.

“When I first met you and even now—it feels like being around an unquenchable flame.”

She grinned. “Careful. I will grow too flattered.”

I smiled back. “So? What would you have of me until the lady arrives?”

Her face grew serious. “Furat says you are quite close with the princess,” she began.

“Surely that doesn’t surprise you?”

“She is Mathis’s daughter—”

“She is Najat’s daughter,” I interrupted. “She is a direct descendant of an ancient and royal house that has ruled this planet for millennia. But most importantly, she is the only ruler the galactic community will recognize as legitimate.”

Arinaas looked at me, eyes solemn, hands held behind her back. “I suppose that’s why you’ve allied three of the most powerful families on the planet with her?”