Chương 433: 204.Visitors Don't Always Knock 1

After Hedwig left, Maki gathered the corrected speech pages, squared them against the corner of the desk, and checked the numbering one last time—presumably to make sure nothing else was left that might give her a 0300 urge to commit murder—before finally looking up at me.

"Go to sleep."

"You sound like a medic talking to a patient who just lost half their blood."

"Because you look like a social event just bled you dry."

"Thanks." Maki didn't answer that. She grabbed her change of clothes and disappeared into the bathroom. A few seconds after the door clicked shut, the sound of running water drifted out—steady, quiet, unhurried. Just like her. Even showering sounded like she was executing some properly scheduled, procedurally correct maintenance routine. I lay back on the bed, one arm folded under my head, and stared at the ceiling. Couldn't sleep. Not surprising. Banquets were never built for anyone's relaxation.

Stripped down, they were observation decks dressed up in lighting, music, fine cutlery, and expensive clothes. Everyone smiled with perfect manners while their eyes ran the numbers. Who moved toward whom. Who avoided whom. Whose pause ran half a second long. Whose invitation came too smoothly. Whose hand dropped half an inch too low. Whose gaze didn't lift off clean. All intelligence. Just packaged as socializing. I rolled onto my side and spread the whole evening out across my mind again.

Start with the surface layer. Baroness Laetitia had vanished. Not the ordinary kind of dinner-party absence—the kind that seized up the entire southern dispatch grid along with her. Which meant she wasn't decoration. She was a node. Sever a node, and the whole web shudders. Go deeper. What the Empire actually feared wasn't just Federal pressure, and it wasn't simply the inconvenience of some trouble-student who'd crawled out of nowhere. The wariness in both princes ran visibly deeper than that, and wider.

Elisabeth von Hohenlohe. And Hohenzollern. One was the Empress. The other was an artificial celestial fortress, one hundred and twenty kilometers in diameter, massing roughly six hundred trillion metric tons. A normal person, looking at that scale, would feel awe first, and second, some serious doubts about whether humanity had lost its mind. But to the Imperial family, those two things weren't just power. They were legitimacy. They were symbols.

They were physical proof heavy enough to tilt whatever table power was being negotiated across. Which meant the real problem with Hedwig had never just been Hedwig herself. She was a key. Not in the poetic sense. Not the "she unlocked someone's heart" variety of cheap metaphor. I meant a real one—political, military. Whoever held her had a shot at doors that didn't normally open.

Whether what lay behind those doors was peace, a ceasefire, transfer of command, fortress control, or something considerably uglier—that depended entirely on whose hand was on the key. The problem was, Hedwig probably knew that too. I pressed my arm over my eyes and let out a breath.

"For peace." For one second, coming out of her mouth, it had almost sounded real. That was the part I hated. If she'd been a standard Imperial princess template—arrogant, hollow, fluent only in pretty speeches—this would be so much easier. File her under dangerous political ornament, observe, use, cut loose when necessary. Clean. Efficient. No wasted feeling. But Hedwig wasn't that. She'd stood next to her own oversized portrait and quietly complained about it being hung up.

She'd come to Maki's room in the middle of the night to fix her speech, and she'd actually been fixing it—not performing the act. When she heard someone wanted her dead, what crossed her face wasn't shock. It was grief. Which meant she already knew things she hadn't said yet. And the not-saying didn't read like calculation. It read more like she was carrying an entire structure behind her that couldn't be opened easily. That kind of person was the worst.

You couldn't treat her as a clean enemy, and you didn't dare treat her as your own, so she had to stay balanced on that most exhausting middle line: dangerous, but I'd rather not let her die just yet. Ugly category. I moved my arm and went back to staring at the ceiling. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. Next: tomorrow. The whole second year was heading to Lunar City Copernicus. The itinerary looked like a field trip.

In practice it read like a carefully sanitized operational route map. Morning: the embassy. Afternoon: back into school uniform, fold back into the class, pretend to be some reasonably decent ordinary student, and follow the herd to view whatever curated demonstrations of Imperial civilization had been cleared for Federation eyes. As for that "ordinary man"— I almost laughed out loud. Diplomatic infrastructure really was a remarkable thing. The less ordinary a person actually was, the more ordinary they looked.

Even now, trying to reconstruct his face, all I got back was someone who'd queue at a convenience store for canned coffee and remind a junior colleague not to lose the receipt. But when he'd talked about three hundred uniforms, his tone had been as flat as a man confirming tomorrow's lunch order—how many, what filling. Three hundred. Details classified. Drop an order like that into the ordinary world, and some logistics officer gets escorted straight into an interrogation room.

Drop it into this particular situation, and it fits exactly. Because the lethal detail was never the quantity. It was who ended up wearing those clothes, and under what time, what place, what light. I turned my head slightly toward the corner of the room. The suitcase stood there, quiet, black shell resting right at the edge where the desk lamp's light gave out—behaving itself like the luggage of a perfectly innocent traveler. I knew better. Or at least, it wouldn't stay innocent for long.

Water still ran behind the bathroom door. Maki wasn't done yet. I pulled my attention back and kept working through the thread. If Hedwig really was a key, then tonight's "for peace" wasn't simple idealism. It was a directional statement. But peace was a filthy word. Anyone could hang it from their mouth.

The only difference was that some people said peace because they wanted fewer corpses, and some said peace because they wanted to finish killing everyone who disagreed and then announce that the world had finally gone quiet. Which kind Hedwig was—still too early to tell. But at minimum, she hadn't come to the Federation for sightseeing. That much was settled. Coming here at all meant she'd effectively put herself on a hostage list. If she knew that and still came, it meant she wasn't betting on safety.

She was betting on necessity. She'd decided this trip was worth trading herself for. Which left two questions. First: what exactly was she trying to buy. Second: who on the Imperial side was already preparing to blow the exchange to pieces. I'd just reached that point when the small terminal on the nightstand lit up. No call. No alert tone. Just a very disciplined pulse of white light in the dim room—the kind of interruption that had been trained to be polite about itself. Very embassy.

Even the intrusion had manners. I reached over and picked it up. No name in the sender field. Just an ID code so clean it looked deliberately generic. The message was even shorter. Cargo prepared. Storage arranged. I stared at that line for two seconds, then let out a quiet, dry laugh. Fast. And exactly his style. No pleasantries, no exposition, no unnecessary reassurance. Just: it's ready, it's placed. How you retrieve it, how you use it, when you pull the drape off—that's your problem.

I set the terminal down and looked back at the suitcase in the corner. The room was quiet. Water hissed behind the bathroom door, steady, like the rhythm of a separate world with nothing to do with this one. But I knew that from this moment, tonight was officially over, and tomorrow had already started ahead of schedule. I watched the case, and something cold pulled at the corner of my mouth.

"Well then," I said to the shadow.

"Let's see if the Empire's actors feel like taking the stage." I gave the suitcase one short, sharp laugh, and left it at that. The first thing I did when I woke up wasn't brush my teeth. It wasn't checking that I was still alive, either. It was checking the terminal. I rolled over, fished it off the headboard, and the moment the screen lit, I almost smiled worse than I had the night before. The Federal Intelligence Department. God bless efficiency in the right hands—it made the world look a little less hopeless.

I'd gone to sleep wondering how far that "ordinary man" would carry things through. I woke up to find he'd already handled it, in the most boring, most reassuring way possible: everything I'd asked for, exactly where it needed to be. No explanation. No self-congratulation. Just a few words. Cargo prepared. Storage arranged. Clean. Sharp. Like a fist to the face of bureaucratic inertia—and the bureaucracy having the grace to say, well struck.

"What are you doing?" Maki's voice came from the other bed—that particular calm of someone not yet fully in combat readiness, but already suspicious of me. I turned to look. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, half in uniform, buttoning her cuff, a faint crease between her brows as precise as a trained interrogator's.

"You're smirking." She watched me.

"What kind of trouble are you sitting on this time?" I pressed the terminal to my chest and sat up, adopting the gravity of someone about to receive a medal.

"I resent that. I am working extremely hard to fulfill assignments from upstairs while simultaneously managing Seitokai business. A long-suffering, capable student of my caliber does not deserve a crude word like trouble." Maki looked at me for two seconds. The kind of look that was calculating whether it would be more efficient to throw me out the window with or without the pillow.

"You're hiding something from me, Shimo？" When she says my name like that, something in my chest always catches for a moment. Not guilt. Something more inconvenient than guilt. I set the terminal aside and met her eyes, smiling as harmlessly as I could fake it.

"I can't tell you about things that haven't happened yet." She looked at me again. Then she said one word.

"Okay." Just that. No follow-up. No interrogation. No you'd-better-explain-this-later dressed up as comradeship. She just accepted it, like she was setting a thread aside and leaving it entirely in my hands. That kind of trust was harder to deal with than any question. For one second, I actually wanted to tell her everything. Wanted to say the suitcase wasn't packed for a normal student field trip. Wanted to say the aggressively ordinary man at the embassy hadn't prepared a civilian's idea of a safety plan.

Wanted to say that if the Empire really meant to play this out to the last curtain, we weren't planning to sit in the audience. The words hit my teeth and stopped there. Not because I didn't trust Maki. Because I did—which was exactly why I couldn't say it yet. Some words, once spoken, drag people in. Maki was already standing close enough to the edge. I wasn't going to skip that last step and shove her straight into my contingency plan.

So in the end I just looked down, reached over, and pulled the black suitcase toward me by the handle. The wheels rolled quietly across the carpet. When I stood, the apology I hadn't said rose up through my chest like hot water—slow, and not entirely comfortable. Maki had probably noticed. She still didn't ask. So I just kept hold of the case and made my voice sound normal.

"Come on. We've still got Her Highness's speech today. Let's hope the Empire's willing to act like civilized life-forms, at least in daylight."

"That's optimistic of you," Maki said.

"Thanks. I'm working on becoming a more positive person."

"Failing visibly."

"Your encouragement is very warming." At the door, I couldn't help glancing back once. Then I made a quiet, private note under the apology I still owed her.