He was more powerful than he’d ever been, but he was also tired. The kind of bone-weary exhaustion he couldn’t quite shake.

It’s just stress, Valen thought back to his sister. Probably brought on by the medical droid you’ve had following me for two days now. Which, if you haven’t noticed, has mysteriously disappeared.

Her silence told him that she knew she’d been caught. He sighed as Nor backed away from the door between their minds, sending him a final image of the scene before her. A makeup artist with deep blue eyebrows was dabbing something colorful onto her cheeks, helping her prepare for the speech she’d be making in a short while.

You look beautiful, sister, he thought. The people will fall in love with you all over again when they see you on the feeds today.

Valen felt Nor smile just before the link faded. He knew she was worried about him, but there were so many other things Nor needed to focus on right now.

Like the Unaffected attacks.

It was something Valen had feared from the beginning, after he’d learned that some wouldn’t be affected by his compulsion. Their numbers were slim, if Aclisia’s extensive testing of the Zenith virus was anything to judge by. For every hundred that fell to Valen’s compulsion, bowing to Nor despite their original feelings toward her, only one resisted. So despite his unease, he’d never truly thought they’d be able to fight back.

But barely a week into Nor’s reign, a group of Unaffecteds had banded together and destroyed the military barracks on Tenebris that housed many of the newest recruits to the cause. Valen had felt the moment those minds beneath his compulsion had died. As if they were matches snuffed out. There one moment, gone the next.

It happened again, mere days later, on Adhira. A small but organized group of Unaffecteds had emerged from the jungle sector of the terraformed planet and struck down the communication towers. Nor’s video feed, which was on a constant loop across the galaxy, had been cut off for half a day’s time.

Though news of more attacks continued to trickle back to Arcardius from every corner of Mirabel, it wasn’t enough to strike terror in Valen’s heart. No, it would take a lot more than that to break him. But he saw the way Nor’s hands were often curled into fists. How her lips, normally smooth and polished, had crusted over with small scabs, from biting at them in her sleep. The last thing she needed was to spend even a single moment worrying about him.