Empress of a Thousand Skies(54)
He’d always been nervous around girls, but keeping to himself had been an all right strategy—without fail, Vin would bring some pretty girls back to base and talk Aly up. Vincent was the ladies’ man, saying charming things, laying on the compliments. Aly was cool enough by association.
When Kara was finished, Aly stood up and squinted at his reflection. “Okay, this is definitely not going to work.” She’d wrapped cloth around his forehead and diagonally across his left eye and nose. “I look like a half-assed mummy.”
“I should’ve bandaged your mouth too.” She smiled at him in the mirror. “Look, it’ll work because no one actually wants to look at a victim. Even if they do want to look, they’ll steal a glance. They’ve been taught it’s impolite to stare.”
Aly wasn’t sure about her logic but really didn’t have any other options—she’d opened up a brand-new possibility for him, an out from his fugitive status, and a way to broadcast the truth. They just needed to survive long enough to get to Rhesto.
They slipped out of the bathroom, and he and Pavel followed Kara as they moved through a series of passenger cars toward the front of the zeppelin. She either knew her way around or was picking a route at random. There was no hesitation as she turned one way or the other, doubled back, climbed up a flight of stairs and back down a different one.
“We need to get to the cars with the labs in them,” she said over her shoulder. “We can hitch a ride on one of the vessels they use to transport supplies there.”
The lower the numbered capsule, the more streamlined the zeppelin became—the prettier too. The hallways were quiet and flooded with a soft light. The seats were made not of patched synthetics but brushed velvet. Instead of dozens of passengers packed on bench seats, businessmen and businesswomen reclined in practically empty cabins.
Aly had taken zeppelins sometimes on leave, always in one of the high-numbered capsules. They were cheap and slow and not even a little bit fancy. He’d park his butt in one of the worn seats while a rusty droid rammed his elbow with the drink cart. The air was always stale and it took forever to get anywhere, but he’d still give his right arm to be one of these folks. He’d take a lumpy chair so long as it reclined, and a packet of calories delivered right to his hand.
There was no cruising now, no kicking back in one of the poky seats. They double-timed it down the aisle, without moving so fast they’d be suspicious. Kara’s stolen badge did the trick again and again.
By some miracle they hadn’t run into any guards, but he remembered Nero had boarded the zeppelin at Navrum City. Probably the entire security team was guarding Nero’s next fart. Aly never thought he’d thank god to be anywhere near a politician—but it was working in their favor now.
Or it was—until Kara swiped a door and they barreled through into a room packed with reporters. They were all facing a podium with none other than Nero standing behind it. And he looked pretty steamed. Everyone turned in their direction.
Alyosha was paralyzed. He was the most wanted criminal in the universe, and only a few flimsy pieces of fabric separated him from a room full of people who wanted his head. Literally.
“Oops,” Kara whispered under her breath. Aly felt the weight of at least one hundred sets of eyes on him—one hundred sets of eyes attached to one hundred souls who believed he’d murdered the last princess of the Ta’an dynasty. He tensed up, ready to run. But his eyes landed on a girl, Fontisian by the look of her clothes, whose face was half-covered by an oversized hood. He could see her mouth, though, and the quicksilver flash of relief as she sighed.
An aide near the podium charged their way, and the girl lowered her hood and vanished into the crowd. The aide—public relations, you could somehow always tell—pushed them back out into the hallway. A big-ass Tasinn followed at her heels.
“What in the hell are you doing? Who let you in? This is a private event.” Her voice had gotten so high she was practically screeching.
“We were looking for the medical wing,” Kara said quickly. She’d shifted her accent seamlessly—now she sounded like she’d come straight from a high-society Kalusian country club. “The layout of this zeppelin is simply impossible to navigate! My apologies!”
“Zuilie.” The girl’s yellow reptilian eyes flickered as she looked them up and down. “The patients are to be kept strictly quarantined,” she said, flinging a hand in Aly’s direction. Kara was right; the girl didn’t want to look at him. When their eyes met for a split second, her blue skin flushed.
“Understood,” Kara said evenly. “It won’t happen again. They just needed to get his circulation going,” she said. Aly did his best not to move, react.
“You’re not even close to the medwing,” the Tasinn said behind them. His eyes were narrow with suspicion.
Kara hesitated a beat too long, but Pavel piped in just in time. “That is entirely my fault,” he said. “I led them out of the medwing. But my software must be outdated, and I lost the layout during the blackout.”
Aly tried hard not to express surprise. Look at my little man, learning how to lie. He guessed there’d never been a reason to before.
“Unbelievable.” The woman brought her hand to her face, her long fingers curling halfway around her head. “Okay, okay, what’s done is done.” She took a deep breath in and a long exhale out. Her eyes went cloudy as she checked her cube. “Take this hallway down until you hit a spiral set of stairs, up one flight and then two immediate lefts. There’ll be signs from there, and it looks like the patient bay is up top, lab on the bottom. You got that?”