<Where do you think?> Eris replied. <The testing facility. There’s a firing range.>

Beside Clo, Nyx let out a breath. <You had better be prepared for whatever it is he wants. He might not be as straight-up evil as his sister was, but this bastard is sneaky and ruthless.> The soldier had her gaze fixed on the back of Prince Damocles’s head, as if through pure force of will she could make it explode.

Clo saw Eris’s jaw clench, but she said nothing. Clo nudged Nyx with an elbow. <If he catches you glaring at him like you’re about to commit murder, he’s going to test it on you.>

Nyx gave her a brief death glare, then forced her features to relax. <You don’t think he’s done it before?> came her bitter response. <Even his citizens are nothing more than sacrifices.>

They made their way through more lavish corridors, then through the painstakingly manicured grounds. Some of the flora there was from the Old World, carefully managed in greenhouses, and found nowhere else in the universe. They were kept as reverently as artifacts, a historical record of how far humanity had come: from a backwater speck of a planet light-years away from this place.

The capital of a vast empire that spanned galaxies.

The firing range on the palace grounds was used only for royalty or the highest military personnel. No one else was practicing. One of Damocles’s guards took the case holding the weapon from Clo and opened the latches.

Prince Damocles took out the gun. Royal guards hovered nearby, hands on their own weapons. Another appeared at the end of the field, marching someone else out.

Eris, Nyx, Clo, and Ariadne all sucked in their breath.

An Evoli.

He was shirtless and in shackles. Like her fellow Novantae mechanic Elva, he looked almost Tholosian save for the specks of darker markings along his skin. Evoli were all natural-borns, like Clo and those in the slums. Clo knew from Elva that their markings were unique to the individual. This man had thicker splotches, but like Elva, they mainly bisected the body, curling around the face and down the limbs like freckled stripes.

Elva had told Clo a little about the Evoli Empire, whispered in the middle of the night they had spent together. She had come to the resistance after she’d lost faith in her own Empire. Something to do with her sister, was all she would say. She, like the Novantae, hoped for a future peace between their people. Elva claimed Tholosians and Evoli shared common ancestors, not all that many generations ago.