The king’s hold on my hand loosens with his relief.

“Great,” I say, lifting my torso off of the bed. “That means I can go, right?” I ask, trying to rush this along.

The doctor hasn’t looked away from the main screen. “Hmm,” he says.

Montes’s grip tightens again, and he pushes my chest back down. “What is it?” the king asks.

The doctor sucks in a breath, and the king’s hand begins to crush mine.

“Ow.” I pull my hand out of his.

“Sorry,” Montes says, distracted. He recaptures my hand and watches the doctor.

My heart thumps. Montes actually apologized. For squeezing my hand too tightly. The man who apologizes to no one.

“What is it?” King Lazuli asks the doctor.

The doctor pauses. “The queen has cancer.”

Chapter 19

Serenity

There it is, the burden I’ve been hiding for a year now. Radiation-borne cancer. It was common in the WUN, especially in and around big cities where the king deployed the nukes.

Montes stands up and drops my hand. “Cancer?” I’ve never heard that tone in his voice. Like devastation and disbelief wrapped into one. Surely I’m not the source of that anguish.

“We’ll have to do a biopsy to be safe, but judging from the imaging here,” the doctor says, returning his attention to the screen, “it’s overwhelmingly likely that what I’m seeing is cancer. It looks like it’s metastasized.”

And that’s the other discovery I made earlier today when I coughed up blood. I’ve had stomach problems for the last year, not lung problems. However, I’d seen several bunker residents suffer through the various stages of cancer. I know this is the tail end of the process.

The Pleiades granted me my wish. I’m going to join them soon.

Montes glances down at me, and I see true fear in his eyes. “What can we do?” he asks the doctor.

“It depends on the particulars. The queen will need to be placed in the Sleeper to remove the cancerous tissue where possible.”

The Sleeper?

“She’ll also need to be put on the same medication as you, Your Majesty.” The doctor gives Montes a meaningful look.

“It’s already done,” Montes says, and there’s something fierce in his voice now.

I glance at him, my heart constricting. I’ve fantasized about killing the king—there have been times in my life where I wanted nothing more than to see him suffer and die for all the pain he caused me. And yet now that the tables are turned and my life is in danger, the king seems to want to do everything in his power to keep me alive.

I can’t stand that my ethics might be more corrupt than the king’s.

The doctor comes over to us. “Have you experienced any unusual symptoms up until now?”

I give him a long look. “I’ve lived most of my life in wartime conditions. I have no idea what ‘unusual symptoms’ might be.”

The doctor’s eyebrows dart up. “Were you exposed to radiation during that time?”

“Of course.” It was everywhere—in the soil, the drinking water, the crops. No one living in the western hemisphere could totally avoid it, but especially not me, who lived so close to D.C.

The king’s hand squeezes mine, and I glance at him. His expression is carefully blank, but that vein is pulsing in his temple.

War tears down everything. Morals, loyalties, lives. Its aftershocks can ripple long after it ends. This is merely one more way that it’s ripped my life apart. And now, maybe for the first time, it’s affecting the king’s life on a personal level.

“We will fix this,” the king says in that commanding voice of his, like this is just another minor obstacle.

Suddenly, I pity him, because some things simply cannot be conquered, and this might be one of them.

The next evening we sit on a jet flying to what was once Austria. Next to me, Montes drums his fingers on his armrest, his leg jiggling. His eyes keep returning to my stomach.

“Cancer,” he murmurs. He’s said that word several times today. Stomach cancer, to be precise. It’s one of several types of cancer caused by radiation.

I can’t help my next words. “Ironic that you caused the cancer you’re now trying to stop from killing me.” There’s poetic justice in that, though only the king gets the luxury of justice. The rest of us just pointlessly suffer.

He rubs his eyes. “We—we are trying to stop it from killing you.” I notice that he doesn’t address the other part of my statement. I guess he has to pretend it all away, otherwise he might actually realize what a despicable human being he’s been.

“Have you taken your medication?” he asks.

I shake my head. It’s the same mystery drug the king takes. Neither he nor the doctor told me what it does, but it leaves me wondering what exactly an undying king would need a prescription for.

Montes digs through a bag at his feet and pulls out water and a bottle of pills.

I take them with me into the small restroom and shake one of the small white pills into my hand. Staring down at it, I try to divine its use. Perhaps I’ll turn into the same douchey prick the king is. The thought makes me smirk, despite my circumstances. I unscrew the bottle of water and toss the medication into my mouth before taking a long drink.

Almost immediately my stomach clenches. I’m sure even a healthy stomach might rebel against this medication if it were as empty as mine.