She sighed. “But we have no armada—the Vath fight among the stars. It is where they are at their strongest. And Mathis is the legal sovereign of this planet. His allies will come to fight for him. Winning a war against him is not impossible—but there is a reason we lost both the initial invasion and the siege of Walili.”

“How is it possible we don’t have an armada?” I had never thought of it—we were a spacefaring planet. We’d terraformed two moons.

“We were demilitarized after the conquest,” she said. “Technically a violation of galactic law, but there was no one to petition on our behalf, so—”

“Then this is our best chance at liberation.”

“Yes,” Rabi’a said thoughtfully. “Do you know how—”

“In transit to the Court of Lions. Nadine will have the itinerary.”

Rabi’a raised an eyebrow. “She is out of your favor.”

“But not the king’s,” I said. “She would have been recalled by now if she were. It’s why I continue to have to work around her presence.”

Rabi’a looked unconvinced. “And how do you plan to get the information from her? Befriend her?”

I scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. She will not believe any overture of friendship. But I don’t need her to hand me the itinerary. I just need a tablet plugged into her network. I can ask for such a thing under the guise of wanting to see a recording of my family. And I have a device that will extract the information we need.”

There would be no current recording, of course. But Nadine could not afford to lose face—not after everything she’d suffered at Maram’s hand. She would find an old recording to maintain power over a poor slave girl.

“You’re really a farmer’s daughter?” she asked.

“We know how to survive,” I replied.

“Why would she want to comfort you? She will laugh at your request, Amani.”

“You think highly of her,” I said with a hard smile. “She would have me beaten for insubordination. The gall of a slave asking for a favor. No—I’ll have to think like her.”

“Like her?”

I stood up and walked to the trellis. The two moons hung suspended in the sky, one orange, the other a pale green. The light they shed on the ocean water was strange and otherworldly.

“Nadine was a poor girl once, and she has risen high and will not want to lose power.” I turned around to face Rabi’a. “It isn’t about regaining her favor. Or even offering her Maram’s. It’s about giving her something that will allow her to reassert power over the royal household.”

“How terrifying you are,” she said with a laugh.