I’d imagined that they’d be concentrated in the neighborhoods where anti-othersider sentiment was highest, but the opposite was true. They were targeting us. The tags were emblazoned on the walls and doors of known othersiders, and the stables where our dinos were kept. Like a warning; like a threat.

Slowly, I steered us toward the address Niv had given me. I tied up Maraud a block away. No sense drawing attention to the place, especially if Ash really was there.

When I knocked on the front door, I heard a lot of whispered conversation happening on the other side.

“Hey!” Niv said, opening up for me. Beautiful dimples bloomed in his cheeks.

“Hey,” I said as sullenly as I could.

“So happy you came. It’ll do her so much good to see you.”

“I brought pie,” I said, holding up the box I’d bought at Momma’s Bakery. “Apple. Ash’s favorite.”

He ushered me into a big, desolate building. Palace guards eyed me uneasily. They knew me, of course.

“We’re only here for another day or two. We try to move every five days. Just in case, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said. The Refugee Princess; the greatest mystery in Darkside. Everyone knew about the assassination attempts; everyone had their own theory about what was behind them. Everyone wanted to know where she really was.

Niv led me into a bright, bare, sunny room. “Were you followed?” asked a grumpy old man. It was Ed. Part of Ash’s security detail since she was born—he had never liked me.

“Nobody knows who the hell I am,” I said.

Ed harrumphed. I wondered how he felt, this wise old soldier, obeying a head of security as young as Niv.

Ash sat in a chair by the window, looking out. The sunlight made her seem fragile, like paper. Her hair was cut boy-short. She wore black leather pants and a coarse workingman’s shirt. I wondered who dressed her. I figured it must have been Niv. Someone who cared for her; someone who remembered who she had been, back before the queen made her mostly catatonic.

I was eight, when she found me. She literally pulled me out of the gutter. Some boys had been pushing me around; she’d watched the whole thing from her royal carriage. Ordered it to stay, even when her mother the queen demanded they move on. She saw them calling me names, saw me call them names right back . . . and then she saw the three of them kick me to the ground and stomp me like a bug. Her footmen picked me up and carried my stinking, bloody little self into the carriage.

Her mother was not amused.