Behind Kyla, Clo shook her head rapidly and cut her fingers against her throat. Oh, right. Rhea had mentioned that the Tholosians were keeping news about the destroyed palace a secret. If the Evoli caught word about an attack, it might potentially undermine their peace ceremony. “Uh, nothing. Never mind.” She turned to Sher and grasped his hand. “Sir. Pleasure to meet you off screen.”

“Likewise.” Sher glanced at Clo, who smiled back sheepishly. “Don’t give me that look, Alesca. You failed to report you had a Tholosian pilot aboard, and Kyla had to talk me down from handing you your ass. Take me to him.”

The co-commanders of the resistance interrogated Cato for a couple of hours. Nyx didn’t envy him that; answering questions after a round of deprogramming was like having metal nailed into your skull. And they couldn’t leave him on the ship on Laguna, not when they needed all the help they could get.

After, they clustered in the command center, where Ariadne was hard at work readying the shifters for their new faces. She had already spent hours putting together a plan based on the layout of the palace on Laguna. Nyx had to hand it to her: that kid knew how to multitask like nobody else. At sixteen, Nyx had barely been able to plan which trousers to wear in the morning—and they’d all been the same damn trousers.

Ariadne pulled up the blueprints for the Laguna palace and projected the three-dimensional image in front of them. The palace was so vast that it took up most of the space in the center of the room.

“How did you get these?” Sher asked, visibly impressed.

Ariadne gave a dry laugh. “That was the easy part,” she said. “The Evoli sent them to Tholosian officials so they could coordinate security. Both empires will work together to scan and search any ship that comes into port, and they’ll flag anything that looks suspicious. So, if Damocles has the ichor and the weapon prototype with his entourage, they’ll be hidden somewhere the scans won’t pick up.”

“I don’t know about the blaster, but the ichor will be in a sealed container,” Cato said, his focus on the ship manifests Ariadne had up on the computer screens. “Probably disguised as something every ship would need but in a quantity that’s not suspicious.”

“Food tins?” Nyx suggested. “They’re sealed.”

Cato shook his head. “Maybe, or fuel tanks. I’d put my scratch down on that, myself. But there would be thousands to look through. It’d be impossible to pin it down.”

Everyone deflated a bit at that.