The platform to the Pit finally reached the entrance, where Leonora's men and the waiting guard were gathered. As it settled into place, her soldiers took one look at her and knew immediately something had shifted — her eyes had darkened, her whole bearing gone strange and distant. Behind her, still in cuffs and still naked, stood Youri.
Leonora turned on the guard who'd escorted them up. "Are all the prisoners here kept naked?"
The guard caught the look on her face and answered in a rush. "I'll bring a uniform right away." He was gone before she could say anything else, leaving her alone with her soldiers.
"I need a coat," she said, turning to them. "One of you."
They hesitated for half a second, confused, until they registered exactly how dark her expression had gone — and the soldier standing closest shrugged out of his coat and handed it over without a word. Leonora took it and draped it carefully over Youri's shoulders, finally covering him. As she smoothed it into place, her soldiers caught sight of a faint bruise blooming along his cheek and the unmistakable shape of a hand-mark beneath it. It wasn't the first time any of them had seen Youri like that.
By the time she stepped back, the guard had returned with a uniform in hand. "Dress him," Leonora said, not bothering to look at either of them, "and take him to the Director's office. The Minister wants to speak with him." Then she walked off alone, leaving her soldiers and the guard behind her, making her way through the wide corridors of Khalil Fortress with one memory looping endlessly through her mind.
She had been holding him by the throat, right after telling him exactly what she needed him to hear, when Youri had simply smiled and said, "I'd be better off thrown from that platform than dragged back. And honestly, I wouldn't mind dying by your hand — a fitting end for a pitiful man like me, don't you think?"
Her grip had loosened on its own, her hand falling away from his throat before she'd consciously decided to let go. "What makes you think I pity you?" she'd asked, her voice quieter than she meant it to be.
He'd only chuckled. "Isn't it obvious?"
She'd slammed her palm flat against the glass then, frustration breaking through everything else. "Obvious. I see. All that alcohol and self-pity you've been drowning in these last few years has finally caught up with you. Madness has gotten its hooks into you — but don't worry. I'll cleanse you of it." She'd stepped back and locked the shackles onto his wrists herself. "You're a renegade, Youri. The empire's highest-ranking offender. You were sentenced to death a long time ago, and it's taken everything I have to buy you the time you've got left. So drop that empty look on your face, because you are not dying on my watch — not even if it means putting you back inside that thing again. Let's get out of here first. Because whatever madness has taken hold of you, I've already landed on the only solution that makes any sense." Her eyes had hardened. "You're getting back into Altopereh."
Youri was escorted to the Director's office soon after, where Alan sat waiting behind the desk, perfectly composed. The doors hissed open, and two guards walked him in, the cold press of gun barrels never leaving his back until he stood directly in front of Alan. Alan looked up at him and smiled — faint, sinister, radiating nothing underneath it but a kind of practiced emptiness. He cleared his throat.
"It's been a while, Duke."
His gaze shifted to the guards behind Youri. "I'd like to speak with the Duke alone, if you don't mind, gentlemen." He gestured toward the door, and the guards filed out without a word, leaving the two of them facing each other in silence.
"You look remarkably well," Alan said, "for a man who just spent two years in a coma."
Youri said nothing. He simply held Alan's gaze.
Alan studied him a moment longer, then let out a short breath. "Well. Let's cut to the chase, then." He rose from behind the desk and came around to stand in front of it. "Two years ago, we sent two of our own God Units after you and your crew." He began pacing a slow circuit behind Youri as he spoke. "And somehow, despite everything those two units were capable of, they lost. Both of them. To a single God Orbiton." By the time the sentence finished, he'd already circled back to the desk, where he picked up a small decorative piece sitting on its surface and turned it idly in his fingers. "The losses were catastrophic. Both units were damaged badly enough that repairing them was next to impossible — the alloy they're built from doesn't forgive that kind of punishment." He set the piece back down and turned fully to face Youri. "And your own Orbiton didn't come out of it unscathed either. It was pushed to the very edge, barely holding itself together by the end. Which left us with three heavily damaged God Units sitting in storage, and no realistic way to repair all three. So we made a choice. We'd fix one — by stripping the other two down for parts."
He stepped in closer, holding Youri's eyes. "Care to guess which one we chose?"
Youri didn't answer. Alan laughed quietly at the silence.
"We fixed Altopereh. Left the other two cores in storage, dormant. What we hadn't planned for was the other half of the problem — fixing the machine was one thing. Finding someone who could actually pilot it turned out to be another matter entirely. We tried. Thirteen different pilots sat in that cockpit, one after another, and not one of them came back out. All of them children, none older than fifteen — supposedly the ideal age for synchronizing with a God Unit." He paused, letting the number settle. "It wasn't until the fourteenth pilot climbed in that we got anywhere close to an answer. He couldn't sync with it either, in the end. But before he died, he managed to get out a single word."
Alan's faint smile didn't waver.
"Kronos."