“It’s some sort of disease, Keko. I don’t know why it strikes, or who it will hit, but the numbers are . . . growing.”
She pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead. “A disease. And you’ve been able to hide this how?”
He looked to the candle, and then down at his fingers that had held the flame. “There are some Chimerans, healthy ones, who know and who . . . help us. Give us flame when we need it.”
“Cover for you.” A subtle, secret passing of fire from one hand to another. And it had worked. “Who else? Who else is afflicted?”
He shook his head. “You can take me down, but I won’t betray the rest.”
What a fucking deceiver. “So you’ll protect and hide others exactly like you, but throw your general, your own family, into the Common House.”
“Two completely different things. You made a terrible mistake. And you broke kapu.”
“I know what I did. But at least I’m admitting it.” She advanced toward him. One step, then another. “Who. Else.”
Chief just shook his head.
“I see. So in keeping their secret and by not sending them to the Common House, by not exposing their ultimate weakness, they protect you, too.”
His silence was answer enough.
“It doesn’t matter.” She waved a hand. “I don’t want them.”
I want you. I want to be ali’i.
“It’s been going on longer than you think,” he said. “Longer than I’d imagined. Maybe going back to the Queen. This thing . . . it’s not new.”
It was horrifying information.
It was useful information.
She started to back toward the door, her bare feet going toe-heel, toe-heel on the tile that now felt like ice.
“What will you do?” Chief started to follow. When she did not respond he cried out, much louder, “What will you do?”
She looked to the bank of smudged windows overlooking her aunt’s dead garden. The moon hadn’t risen yet and it was so very dark outside. It was the same within.
“I came here,” she said, “to actually beg you to give me another chance. That’s not what I want now.”
“What do you want? Do you want me to accept your challenge? Do you want to be ali’i?”
Her life’s most precious dream, wrapped up and handed to her.
Except that Chimerans never wanted anything that couldn’t be fought for and won with sweat and power and magic, and this, to her surprise, was no different.
Her gaze found the small black lava rock that he wore on a rope around his neck—the very stone that the great Queen had picked up the day she’d grounded her canoe on Hawaii and declared it her people’s new home. Keko had wanted to wear that rock her whole life, to feel its scratch on her skin and its weight against her chest. To know the Queen’s power and hold her blessing.
Looking at it now, Keko thought something entirely different, and she stood there for a long time, trying to wrap her head around it. Trying to figure out what it meant.
The great Queen had had a purpose in bringing her Polynesian people to this string of islands over a thousand years ago—a worthy purpose. A heroic purpose. The first Chimerans had loved her for it, and had followed her willingly across the ocean. Keko knew now that she, too, needed a purpose. She wanted her race to look up to her not because it was required, but because it was desired. She would not get that through begging. She would not get that through blackmail or trickery.
The only way was to earn it.
Yes, she could challenge Chief right now, and she would win his position, but it would be false. Yes, she could expose his lies, but that would also expose other innocents who would in turn be cast out, and where was the honor in that? She would assume power over a stricken people, carrying with her this terrible secret of their affliction. How would ascending to ali’i now do anything to help them?
When she was ali’i, she wanted power and glory for all her kinsmen, not less for others through no fault of their own. She wanted strength, not scandal.
The lava rock moved on Chief’s chest as he breathed. Waiting for her to speak. To decide.
Every night since Keko’s fall, she had prayed hard to the great Queen for her blessing, for answers, for explanation, for a way out. And tonight, it had finally been given.
“What will you do?” Chief pleaded.
Personal revenge was a single sentence away. Except that rash, emotional decisions had destroyed her in the first place. She’d done enough damage. Now she needed to heal.
The Queen—through the events of this night—had finally given Keko the answer. And Keko embraced the sacrifice that it required.
She lifted clear eyes to the ali’i, feeling absolutely sure of herself for the first time in months. Maybe years. “Thank you, Uncle.”
Turning, she went for the door.
“For what?” he shouted at her back. “For what?”
He couldn’t come after her, she knew, or he’d risk the clan knowing he’d allowed her audience. Let him wonder. Let him fear. It was powerful fuel.
She slipped back into the night, the answer she’d wanted and all Chimeran power in her hands.
TWO
“I don’t like it, sir.”
Griffin hated when David called him sir in private, but of course that’s why David did it: to show his ultimate displeasure with his leader and best friend when no one else was around.
Griffin stared down his head of security. No room for friendship right now. The two men had managed to draw solid lines between personal and professional, and it had served them well in the five years of Griffin’s Ofarian leadership.
“Don’t have a choice,” Griffin replied. “The Senatus premier invited me back to a gathering after three years. Me. Not an Ofarian contingent. I’m not walking in there with my cabinet behind me and a row of soldiers along the flanks.”
David made a frustrated face and pinched his lips between his fingers, staring out the windshield of the car in which they sat on a sloped South San Francisco neighborhood street.
“Not after we just narrowly dodged a war with the Chimerans,” Griffin added, much quieter. “Not after what happened the last time the Senatus invited me to sit around their fire.”
Thinking of fire made him think of Keko, as always. He shook his head at his lap, still unable to believe how she’d suddenly reappeared in his life two months ago . . . and then had disappeared again, leaving him unexpectedly shredded.
Three years apart from her, he discovered, hadn’t cut into any of his want.
Griffin unfolded himself from the car and David followed, pushing out from behind the steering wheel. “Fine. You’ll come with me,” Griffin said over the roof. “Gwen’ll meet us there. That’s it. That’s all I’m bringing.”
David ran a hand through his curly blond hair and nodded tightly, knowing there would be no further discussion on the matter. “I’ll make sure you’re safe, that all the roads to the gathering are clear.”
Their eyes met, smudging that line between personal and professional. “I know you will.”
David jogged around the hood and hopped up onto the sidewalk. The mild winter day was punctuated by music streaming from an open window. A Primary man washed his car in his driveway. A couple walked their mutt, heading for the two Ofarian men. The working class neighborhood was where Griffin had grown up, and it smelled and felt the same. Wonderfully the same.
He let the couple and the dog pass by before saying to David, “They’re throwing me a peace offering. As they should. The Chimeran chief owes me a massive apology, I owe them a first-person account of Keko’s capture, and then we’ll be back on even footing. I hope.”