Lexi’s smug expression meant she was very pleased with herself. She looked at me. “I started digging again when you asked me about it the second time,” she said. “I know you said it wasn’t a priority, but I figured whatever was bothering you was worth looking into, and I was right.” She winced apologetically. “But it wasn’t cheap.”

I suppressed my own wince. Lexi’s “not cheap” generally meant thousands and thousands of credits—if not tens of thousands. But if it led to Cien, then it would be worth it, especially because I totally intended to hold Torran to his promise of bonus pay.

Lexi’s screen displayed a scan of a very old set of blueprints. It took me a moment to figure out exactly what I was looking at because all of the labels were in Valovan. The blueprints showed a cross-section of the monitoring station. The little building sat on top of a much larger underground structure.

I sucked in a sharp breath. “All the equipment on top of the building isn’t for the monitoring station itself, but ventilation for the underground rooms. That’s what was bothering me about the building.”

“There’s also this,” Lexi said, pointing at a tunnel that led off the page. It was labeled with an arrow and Valovan text. “I’m not a fluent reader, but as far as I can tell, that says ‘to palace.’”

“It does,” Nilo confirmed quietly. The charming Valoff had used the excuse of looking at the screen to ease closer to Lexi. She didn’t seem uncomfortable, so I left it alone.

I turned to Torran and pointed at the screen. “Did you know about this?”

He held my gaze, his expression shuttered. “No.”

“Does the empress?”

This time he hesitated. “I don’t know, but it is likely because it seems as if it was designed as an emergency shelter.”

Dread pooled in my stomach. If it had taken Lexi this long to find the information on the monitoring station, then a group of FHP soldiers wouldn’t have just stumbled across it. But if someone had tipped them off . . . Surely the empress wouldn’t use her own nephew as a pawn to start a war.

Right?

The grim set of Torran’s mouth told me that his thoughts tracked with mine. “Perhaps we should keep this information to ourselves for now,” I said. “Just in case someone in the palace isn’t trustworthy.”

Eli looked at the map still up on Kee’s screen. “Is the monitoring station far enough away that Cien couldn’t contact someone in one of those fancy houses at the edge of the forest?”

“No,” Torran said. “Cien is strong enough that he would be able to reach me here from that distance.”