“You already have,” I replied.

The room shook without warning and all eyes turned to the great window behind the throne.

“Heads down!” someone cried just as the glass blew in and a hot gust of wind followed. A shuttle decloaked, its debarking ramp extended into the new hole in place of the window. My knees went weak with relief: Maram stepped into the room dressed for battle, with Aghraas at her side and a coterie of Tazalghit behind her. The sound of boots striking against ground filled the corridor leading up to the throne room, and a dozen more Tazalghit warriors poured in through the still open doors. The two guards by the door unmasked, and I watched Rabi’a punch a code into a panel by the wall. A tile lifted away, and she pulled several firearms from within. She passed one to the woman beside her—Arinaas, unmasked—and a few more to the other makhzen in the room.

“I think you will find, Father, that your occupation is at an end,” Maram said. She looked like a warrior queen from the days of Houwa or Massinia. Robed in black and gold, shimmering Kushaila script adorned the lapels of her jacket, and she bore a janbiya at her waist and a blaster in her right hand.

Mathis looked from her to me and back. His features were as stone, as cold and hard as they had been when we first entered the room. For a moment I thought he might surrender.

“Kill them all,” he said.

The world seemed to slow in my eyes. Nadine’s hand wrapped like talons around my arm. Aghraas pulled Maram back and I watched a glittering plasma-mesh barricade rise up from the ground between them and the blaster fire from Nadine’s droids. Mathis withdrew with two guards to the other side of the room and Idris climbed the stairs, a firearm braced against his shoulder, its muzzle pointed at Nadine.

“Let her go,” he said. He looked calm, dangerously so, though his grip on the weapon was white-knuckled.

Nadine pressed a blaster against my spine.

“The gall,” she hissed, “to speak to me thus when you are nothing. Less than nothing.”

“Nadine, I’m warning you,” Idris said.

“Would you risk it?” she asked. My eyes met Idris’s. Beneath that calm he was as terrified as he’d been when the first fighters had engaged. I nodded, just a little, even though my hands shook, and my heart beat so hard in my chest I thought the rest of me trembled in the aftershocks.

“Do you trust me?” he asked me.

“With my life,” I replied.