The massive wrought-iron gate at the street entrance is mostly for show—the air shines with the telltale glimmer of a security field. Tarver punches in a string of numbers that makes the field shimmer, then vanish.

“Lilac’s code,” he murmurs. “No one’s bothered to change it.”

Beyond the gate stretches a field of lush, green grass, and gardens planted with dozens upon dozens of pale pink roses. Lilac’s favorites, according to the gossip columns and architectural magazines that interview the family. We pass a bench shaded by a weeping willow that makes Tarver’s jaw clench. Something about it is familiar, nagging at me until it clicks. This is the garden where their engagement photos were taken.

The grounds, like the city outside, are eerily empty. If there was to be a summit here, even an informal one, there should be…people. Valets, servers, bodyguards, staff…Instead all is still, and silent, like the castle in a fairy tale abandoned for a hundred years. I half expect to find servants and cooks asleep at their posts. Instead there’s only us, our footsteps in the grass and on the stones, like the five of us are the only people left in the world.

Us, and the ghost of Lilac LaRoux.

I’ve never been to the LaRoux estate on Corinth. Simon and I used to go after school to their mansion on Paradisa, one of their many vacation homes, and play—Simon played, anyway. I’d spend my afternoons watching them through the banister of the loft over the playroom, which was as far as I was allowed to come before Simon would chase me off. I remember them giggling over electronics as Simon showed her how to rewire the automatic cleaning bots to play music at random intervals or start eating all the fringe on the rugs. I’d watch, longing to be included with the big kids when they set off firecrackers in the tennis courts with Lilac’s cousins, or, later, as they’d watch movies in the den, carefully sitting a hand’s breadth apart. I remember watching that distance close, week by week. I remember thinking—as my big brother watched her out of the corner of his eye instead of the movie, gathering his courage to put an arm around her shoulders—that I’d never end up like that, terrified of a girl.

And now Sofia can pretty much stop my heart with a glance.

Tarver steps off the path and leads us around toward the east wing of the house, where a servants’ entrance might give us more cover as we break in. Despite the emptiness of the grounds, there’d surely be guards on the front door—if nothing else, the bodyguards brought by the various senators and their delegations. I catch glimpses of the house through the windows as we go. A grand piano here, a sun-filled solarium there. Every room empty.

The servants’ entrance has both a keypad and a hand scanner, and while the system cheerfully accepts the code Tarver enters, it offers up only a blaring tone and a flash of red when he places his hand on the scanner.

“Did they know we were coming?” murmurs Jubilee, reaching—unconsciously, I’m sure—for the gun strapped to her hip.

Tarver tries a second time, with the same result, expression grim. “Hard to say. He could’ve easily revoked my access a week ago, just to piss me off. We’re not exactly father and son, LaRoux and I.” He moves off to the side to cup his hands around his eyes and peer through a window.

Sofia glances at me, and I know why—I give my head a little shake. “I might be able to hack the security pad, but it’d take me a while, probably a couple of hours. It’d be different if I’d had time to plan ahead, but…” I grimace.

“Maybe we try the front door after all, then.” Sofia’s quiet, eyes shifting from me to the others. “Flynn’s part of the Avon delegation, and we could leave Tarver out here and then come open the door for him once we’ve talked our way—”

Her murmur is interrupted by the loud, sharp crash of breaking glass, making me jump back half a step. Tarver, ignoring the rest of us, shakes shards of glass off the elbow of his jacket. “Can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to do that,” he comments as he reaches through the broken windowpane to unlatch the frame.

We’re all on alert as we make our way across the first floor, but no one seems to have heard the breaking window. I can’t shake the chills creeping up and down my spine, the wrongness of a house like this, barren of life.

“You’ve been here before,” Flynn says to Tarver, as we creep past a large, darkened kitchen. “Where would he hold an impromptu summit meeting?”

“Probably the formal dining room,” Tarver replies, brow furrowed. “Or the grand hall. We never spent much time there.” He pauses, steps faltering, then takes a deep breath. “Stop for a second and listen—we ought to hear them speaking if they’re either place.”

We all pause, our footsteps on the marble floor echoing half a breath longer before fading into silence. A grand staircase sweeps off to the left, curving around a fountain in the form of a column, some invisible force drawing droplets of water from the pool sunk into the floor up to disappear somewhere above. For a few seconds, all I can hear is the quiet burbling of the water.

Then there is a sound—but not of voices. It’s a low hum, mechanical, vibrating deep in my stomach. I look up, glancing round to the others. They hear it too, and for a moment we all stare at each other.

Then Jubilee gasps. “It’s a shuttle. Warming its engines.”

Tarver’s moving before any of the rest of us, abandoning stealth to break into a sprint, and we all take off after him. Despite my own fitness—climbing and abseiling aren’t nothing—my lungs are aching trying to keep up. If there’s any chance Lilac is here, Tarver’s not letting her go.

We burst through a set of wide French doors into a sunlit courtyard and skid to a halt, blinking. One shuttle—an orbital craft, designed to reach the Corinthian spaceport station—is already lifting off, vertical takeoff engines slowly rotating as it angles up toward the sky. Tarver’s got his weapon drawn, and for half a heartbeat his hands waver, starting to jerk up toward the craft, then falling.

“You’re earlier than I’d anticipated.” The voice belongs to Roderick LaRoux, and this time Tarver’s hands are rock steady as he swings his gun around to train it on Lilac’s father.

“Where is she?” he demands, taking a few steps forward.

He’s forced to stop, however, as a number of people in the courtyard turn to face him with a subtle—but very noticeable—threatening air. They’re not guards—most of them are too slight, too well dressed, or too old for that role. And it’s only after I’ve scanned their faces and found some of them hauntingly familiar that I realize who they are: senators from the Galactic Council. I’ve seen them on the HV, in the newsfeeds.

And every one of them has the black eyes and blank faces of the whisper’s husks.

“I don’t imagine you want to shoot a dozen elected officials just to get to me,” LaRoux says, and though he’s trying to sound calm, amused, even, I can see something’s wrong. His suit, normally so impeccably tailored, is frayed at the cuffs, and marred by spots of ash and dust. His white hair is in disarray around his temples. His eyes sweep to the side to rest on Sofia, and the amusement in his gaze hardens. “You again. You’re the one who tried to hurt my girl.”