I stood at my window and watched the snow fall. It came down in lazy flakes that accumulated on the sills and the garden walls and the shoulders of the palace guards making their rounds below.
The first heavy fall of winter had the rooftops under white and the Ashen River thick along its banks.
I dressed in the traveling coat, collar up, and the hat my father had insisted on.
In the mirror, I looked like a merchant's son.
I descended to the East Wing entrance where my escort was supposed to be waiting.
Two people stood by the door.
I had expected a full detail. Six guards at minimum, rifles and sidearms, with at least one senior Relic-user. That was standard protocol for any member of the Imperial family traveling outside the residence grounds.
A single soldier in a heavy coat, a rifle slung across his back, and a woman in civilian clothes with a satchel over her shoulder.
The soldier was young. His name badge read CORPORAL YENIN. I didn't recognize him.
The woman was older. Thirty, maybe thirty-five. Brown hair, cut short. Practical boots, worn at the heels.
"Your Highness," the woman said. Her voice was clipped, professional and bored. "I'm Daria. Civilian liaison for your outing. Corporal Yenin is your military escort. We'll be with you for the duration."
Two people. For the heir to the Empire. On the busiest day of the year.
I studied them both. The corporal met my gaze for a half-second, then looked away. Daria held it without blinking.
Is this negligence, or is it deliberate?
In my first life, I had been wrapped in layers of protection that I had taken for granted. I had never questioned the competence or loyalty of the people assigned to guard me.
Two people. Minimal escort. The heir, outside the palace, in a crowd of two million people. If someone wanted an accident to happen.
"I was told there would be a full detail," I said. I pitched my voice carefully, a child's complaint.
Daria's expression didn't change. "Resource constraints, Your Highness. The festival draws significant deployment."
"Fine," I said. "Let's go."
I looked up. Three zeppelins drifted across the gray sky. Their hulls were painted in the deep blue and silver of the Imperial merchant fleet, and their gas envelopes were rigid-framed, their surfaces dulled by condensation and the perpetual haze of coal smoke that hung above the city.
I forgot how many there were.
In my first life, by the time I was old enough to notice the sky, the zeppelin fleet had already begun its decline. By the time the Revolution came, half the fleet was grounded.
But here, now, the zeppelins still flew.
Lower, cutting through the air beneath the zeppelins' altitude, monorail cars glided along elevated tracks that spanned the avenues on latticed iron pylons. The cars were sleek, painted the same imperial blue, their windows fogged with the breath of packed passengers. A system the Ministry of Transport had built twenty years ago and neglected ever since.
I stopped walking. Daria nearly collided with me.
"Your Highness?"
"I'm fine."
The boulevards were packed.
Vendors lined both sides of the main avenue, their stalls draped in garlands of pine boughs and colored paper. Roasted chestnuts, coal smoke, wet wool. A brass band somewhere north, the melody bent by the buildings.
Noblemen walked in clusters with their families, their coats trimmed with fur, their boots polished, their children dressed in miniature versions of adult finery. Workers walked beside them in rough wool and shawls, children in patched clothing. Lords and laborers brushed shoulders at the same chestnut stall.
A day of truce. How convenient.
The shops along the main avenue blazed. Windows packed with toys and tools.
In my first life, the event had been mentioned in passing, a footnote in the palace's internal security briefings.
A bombing. The South Square, near the city's southern gate. The Red Army's first major act of violence inside the capital.
The details had been thin. No one at court had discussed it openly. The Ministry of Internal Security had classified the incident report. My father hated confrontation. He had not pressed for a full accounting.
But I remembered the date, location, and time.
The victims were six children. Noblemen's sons and daughters.
The noble houses had erupted in outrage. Security was tightened. Arrests were made. Most of them were wrong. The real perpetrators vanished.
The nobility blamed the workers. The workers blamed the nobility. The gap between them widened, and the Revolution moved one step closer.
Saving six children would change the timeline. It would prevent one atrocity, remove one grievance. But the disease that produced the atrocity would remain.
I need to know who planned this. How they planned it. Who funded it. Who inside the government looked the other way.
I felt sick. The calculation was cold and rational and it sat in my six-year-old stomach.
You're going to let children die so you can gather intelligence.
No. I'm going to find the people responsible so that I can prevent every bombing that comes after this one.
And if you fail? If you watch six children die for nothing?
Then I write it in the Diary and I try again in the next life.
The thought was monstrous. I held it anyway.
If the pattern holds, everyone I love dies. My father. My mother. Yelena, Sonya, Natasha.
I kept walking.
The South Square was in the lower quarter of the city, near the southern gate. The old wall still stood there, maintained as a historical landmark. Merchant's Way, Gate Road, and the Workers' Promenade met in an irregular plaza. It was ringed by shops and taverns and a small public garden with benches and bare-limbed trees.
I needed to be there by four. Early enough to observe the preparations.
At half past three, I turned south.
"Your Highness," Daria said. "The southern quarter is outside the approved route."
"I want to see the old wall."
"The approved route—"
I stopped walking and looked up at her. "It's Zimavek. My tutor told me about it. The stones were laid during the War of the Five Princes."
Daria's jaw tightened. She glanced at Corporal Yenin, who shrugged with disinterest.
"We stay for fifteen minutes," she said. "Then we return to the approved route."
"Thank you, Daria."
We turned south.
The crowds thinned as we moved away from the main avenues and into the lower quarter. The buildings here were older. The streets narrowed. The festive garlands thinned to scattered ribbons tied around lampposts.
But the festival spirit persisted. Vendors still lined the sidewalks, their offerings more modest, and families still walked together, bundled against the cold, children darting between the adults.
The South Square opened before us at ten minutes to four.
It was smaller than I expected. The plaza was maybe fifty meters across, cobblestoned, with the old southern wall rising behind it in a sweep of moss-darkened stone.
The public garden occupied the northern edge. Shops and taverns formed the eastern and western walls of the square, their windows glowing with lamplight, their doorways busy with customers.
The square was crowded. A hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty people, milling between the vendor stalls and the tavern doorways and the benches. Families and workers sharing bottles of something amber.
I saw them immediately. A cluster of six children near the fountain, five to ten, fur-trimmed coats. Noble children, accompanied by two adults who had the look of private tutors or household servants.
Those are the ones.
My chest tightened.
I scanned the Gate Road for the car.