The Offering (The Pledge 3)

I needed to show them that all the changes I’d been leading us toward, all we’d sacrificed, had been for the best. That today we would make progress.

That I hadn’t made a colossal mistake in risking so much on one venture.

My gaze slid to the transmitter on the table in front of me, where it sat, still and silent. It was hard to imagine that something so bland-looking might possibly change everything.

I took my seat and waited apprehensively while everyone else in the room took theirs. Several moments ticked by, during which I could feel the weight of their misgivings searching me out, settling over me like a heavy blanket. I explored their faces, too, careful not to fix on any one for too long. I picked out certain features and tried to guess which region each council member might hail from, a game to kill time and distract my thoughts. A man with leathered skin might have been a farmer, or possibly a builder who’d spent many years laboring beneath a baking sun. I thought he might have been from the eastern region, where grains were plentiful. Another woman with perfectly coifed hair made me think of a large metropolitan area. From right here in the Capitol perhaps, or possibly from 3E, which had been recently renamed Charletown, now that cities were allowed to have names of their own. There was another man who had a distractingly bulbous nose, which had nothing at all to do with either region or occupation but caught my attention nonetheless. My cheeks heated when I realized he’d caught me staring for too long.

From outside, even through the closed windows, I could hear the people gathering on the streets below us, both allies and opponents, all awaiting word of the success, or failure, of our . . . experiment.

A thousand worries spun through my mind. A thousand reasons why everything could go wrong on the other end.

What if Aron hadn’t made it to his destination? Or what if he had but work hadn’t been completed on time?

Worse yet, what if those engineers and designers who’d said our project was impossible had been right after all? What if the lines were irreparable?

But if all that were true, if the lines were too faulty to fix, wouldn’t we have learned as much before now? Wouldn’t someone have told us so—at some point before I’d left the palace to stand facing a hundred administrators from different districts and boroughs around the country awaiting our very first message?

Suddenly the walls of Capitol Hall felt too close, and the ceiling far too low. I was suffocating.

“Give it time,” Max assured from beside me.

I turned to Brooklynn, who stood near the entrance in her crisp black uniform, searching the room for the slightest sign of trouble. I hoped in vain that she might offer me the same sort of encouragement Max had. A smile or a nod. Even one of her hallmark winks. But she never even glanced my way.

Nothing much had changed between us over the past months, since we’d returned from the summit at Vannova. Not since that fateful moment when I’d killed her father.

She still couldn’t forgive me for what I’d done.

So I’d spent my time since then focused on Ludania instead, and what I could do to improve my country’s future.

Which meant going back in time, it seemed.

Funny, how things worked. Sabara hadn’t just stunted our country; she’d turned back the hands of time for us. There was a time when Ludania had been considered progressive in the eyes of the world. A leader in both technology and strategy.

Yet Sabara had managed to strip us of those advances when she’d taken the throne. Where Ludania had been making strides in the fields of medicine, manufacturing, transportation, and trade, Sabara had halted all that. She’d stopped production in everything but the basics, putting an embargo on all trade into and out of Ludania, demanding that her citizens learn to be self-sufficient.

Then she’d cut all manner of modern communication, even within the borders of our own country. Because with communication came power. And Sabara would never risk allowing anyone to be more powerful than herself.

And despite her efforts to maintain that power by moving forward, jumping from body to body, Sabara feared change. The real Sabara—whose name wasn’t Sabara at all—yearned to go back to another time, another era, when it was just her and Niko.

When they were together.

I couldn’t afford to look back. I’d decided that reestablishing those once-forbidden forms of communication was the key to our salvation. And that was where I’d decided to focus my first efforts toward reinstating Ludania as a world force.

There was a part of me, one I didn’t dare give voice to, that clung to the desperate hope that maybe this resurrected form of communication might somehow restore peace between Ludania and Astonia. That Queen Elena might listen to reason, if only I could have the opportunity to reason with her leader to leader.

I knew it was foolish, but I couldn’t help myself. The idea of going to war, even on the heels of the assassination attempt the other queen had spearheaded, made my chest ache.

There would be too much loss. Too many lives on the line.

Always the fool, Sabara whispered within me. Technology isn’t the solution. Communication, in the wrong hands, is a weapon in its own right.

I bit my lip, tasting blood as I struggled to keep Sabara’s mounting objections at bay. Her caustic voice burned like acid in my own throat, her words trying to find their way to my lips.

She was wrong. Communication was the key.

My plan would be implemented in stages. We would start by reopening communication ports in the major cities first, starting with Charletown and 11South—a city that still struggled to find the right name for itself. Next the train depots would be outfitted, since it only made sense that word could spread most quickly from there. Eventually we’d have the entire country wired, in some form or another.