Only Hard Problems (Zane Zimmer book)

ONLY HARD PROBLEMS

CHAPTER ONE

ZANE

The words haunted me.

Five little words, seven simple syllables, twenty-three ordinary letters.

And yet the combination of those words, syllables, and letters had rocked my perspective of, well, everything.

Everything I had always been told. Everything I had always believed. Everything I had always known to be an absolute truth—especially when it came to my family.

Vesper Quill is your sister.

Ah, those five pesky little words.

Kyrion Caldaren had telepathically whispered that thought to me while I had been escorting him to Lord Callus Holloway, the ruler of the Imperium, during a midnight ball at Crownpoint palace. Even now, two weeks later, I could still see the satisfied smirk on Kyrion’s face as he tossed out the revelation like it was the ultimate trump card in the cutthroat Regal game we’d been playing our entire lives. Even worse, I could still feel his bloody smugness with my telempathy, like he was standing right beside me and grinding his stormsword into my ribs one slow, painful inch at a time—

“Lord Zane?” A low voice intruded on my dark thoughts. “Is the solstice suit not to your liking? You haven’t said anything in five minutes.”

A seventy-something man hovered by my side and studied me in the floor-length mirror propped up in the corner. He was a few inches shorter than me, with iron-gray hair, tan skin, and long, slender, nimble fingers that could wield a needle and thread with expert precision. Fergus had been the House Zimmer tailor longer than I had been alive.

Fergus’s dark brown eyes flicked over me from top to bottom as he searched for faults in his work. “Per your instructions, I made the solstice suit a sleeker, more fashionable version of your Arrow uniform.”

A crisp white shirt peeked out from the V at the top of the fitted tailcoat that stretched across my broad shoulders. The front of the coat only came down to my waist, although the twin tails in the back dropped to my knees. Two rows of blue opal buttons marched down the front of the ice-blue coat, while matching blue pants and knee-high black boots completed my ensemble. I almost always wore my family’s colors, even though everyone already knew exactly who I was, thanks to the gossipcasts that breathlessly covered my exploits.

Fergus was wearing a similar tailcoat, although his was dark gray with ice-blue trim and silver buttons stamped with tiny Zs, a sign that he belonged to House Zimmer.

“How is it that you can make the same coat look dashing and distinguished, whereas I always feel like a little boy playing dress-up?” I grumbled.

A wry smile curved the corner of Fergus’s mouth. “Skill, my lord.” He gestured at my tailcoat in the mirror. “Although as you’ve told me many, many times, the ice blue of House Zimmer brings out your eyes much better than it does mine.”

I studied my own reflection in the mirror. He was right. The ice-blue fabric did bring out the similar shade of my eyes. My grandmother and my father both had the same color eyes. So did several of my cousins. In fact, just about everyone with even a drop of Zimmer blood had ice-blue eyes.

Except for my sister.

Vesper had the dark blue eyes of her mother, Nerezza Blackwell, although silver flecks often appeared in Vesper’s gaze whenever she was emotional, using her seer power, or tapping into her truebond connection with Kyrion—like she had during the midnight ball.

The memories erupted in my mind, as sharp, bright, and clear as videos playing on a holoscreen. Vesper and Kyrion in the middle of the throne room floor, yelling and crawling toward each other, even as Imperium soldiers tried to drag them away from each other . . . The two of them lunging toward each other, blue sparks flickering around their fingertips like tiny butterflies . . . The couple finally clasping hands, and those blue butterfly sparks coalescing and erupting into bright, crackling lightning that had danced around them in jagged forks as though they were caught in the center of a violent electrical storm . . .

“Zane?” Fergus asked in a low, hesitant voice. “Is something wrong?”

I blinked and focused on Fergus, who stared back at me, concern furrowing his forehead. The tailor was a true friend, and I had confided many things to him over the years, but I wasn’t about to confess my inner turmoil. Not now. Not until I decided how I felt about having a long-lost sister—and all the tough truths and hard problems that came along with the startling revelation.

“Your design and work are impeccable as always, Fergus,” I replied, forcing some false cheer into my voice.

He opened his mouth to ask another question, but I cut him off and spewed out the first lie that popped into my head. “I was just thinking about the solstice celebration.”

The summer solstice was the first major holiday and event since the disastrous midnight ball, and everyone who was anyone in Regal society was scheduled to attend. Except for Callus Holloway, of course. He rarely left the security of Crownpoint for any reason, preferring to force the Regals to come to the Imperium palace to seek an audience with him. But these days, the greedy siphon had a singular focus: finding Vesper and Kyrion so he could take the psionic power of their truebond connection for his own.

More memories crashed over me. Vesper and Kyrion battling Adria and Dargan Byrne, a pair of siblings who also had a truebond . . . A wounded Kyrion staring at me from the back of the open cargo bay while Vesper steered his blitzer, the Dream World, out of the Crownpoint docking bay . . . The spaceship streaking through the sky like a shooting star, carrying the couple to safety, before winking out of sight . . .

I blinked again. This time, I managed to banish the memories to the back of my brain, although annoyance sparked in my chest at the gigantic bloody mess Kyrion and Vesper had left behind—a mess that I was tasked with cleaning up. The truebonded couple might have escaped Holloway’s clutches, but in doing so, they had caused a multitude of problems for me.

Holloway had offered an enormous bounty for Kyrion and Vesper’s capture, but no one had seen them since they had fled Corios, the planet that was the Imperium’s seat of power.

There was a slight chance the couple was dead. A flight director had reported seeing Adria Byrne slip onto Kyrion’s ship before it had left the Crownpoint docking bay. She could have killed Kyrion and Vesper in retaliation for her brother Dargan’s death, but if so, she would have returned to Corios with their bodies. Adria’s continued absence led me to believe that Kyrion and Vesper had ended her instead.

Holloway also thought they were still alive, which was the only thing we agreed on. He would probably spend the solstice holiday poring over supposed sightings of Kyrion and Vesper and listening to his generals theorize about where the couple might be heading. Arrogant fool. He should be worrying about what the Techwave was plotting next. The terrorist group was much more of a threat to the Imperium than Kyrion and Vesper, but Holloway always put his own dark desires and unending lust for power above everything else, including the people he was supposed to lead and protect.

“The solstice, eh?” Fergus said, drawing my attention back to him. A teasing grin spread across his face. “Wondering how many times you’ll have to dance with Lady Asterin at the solstice ball to placate your grandmother?”

I bit back a groan. Lady Asterin Armas was yet another one of my many problems. “Something like that,” I muttered.

Fergus reached up and clapped me on the shoulder. “Ah, don’t look so dour. Asterin seems like a lovely woman. Dancing with her shouldn’t be a chore. Besides, it’s nothing you haven’t done for the gossipcasts before, right?”

“Right,” I replied, giving him a bright, cheerful smile in hopes of ending this unwanted topic of conversation.

Fergus’s dark eyes narrowed. My patented smile might dazzle the gossipcast reporters, but he’d known me too long to be so easily fooled. Fergus hesitated, then squared his shoulders, as if bracing himself for an unpleasant task. “I’ve noticed some . . . tension between Beatrice and Wendell lately.”

I dropped my gaze from his and tugged down my right sleeve, even though it was already perfectly in place. “What sort of tension?”

“Wendell seems to be greatly upset with your grandmother for some reason. Of course, I’ve asked Beatrice about it, but she said it was a minor squabble. Some new design that your father is having an issue with that she doesn’t approve of.”

I tugged down my left sleeve with a sharp motion, almost ripping off an opal cufflink. “You know how cranky my father gets when he’s stuck on a project, and how much crankier my grandmother can be when she doesn’t immediately see the results she wants. I’m sure they’ll both figure it out soon, and then things will return to normal.”

The lies dripped easily off my tongue, although guilt knotted my stomach. Fergus was a dear friend, and I hated deceiving him, but it was a necessary evil, like so many other things in my life, both as an Imperium Arrow and as the heir to House Zimmer.

I raised my gaze back to Fergus’s and gave him another false smile. This one must have been much more convincing than the last, because some of the tension and worry eased out of his wrinkled face.

“Good to know,” Fergus replied.

He smiled back at me, then gathered up his pins, scissors, spools of thread, rolls of fabric, and other supplies. Unlike many Regal tailors, Fergus eschewed magnetic and robotic technology in favor of simple, old-fashioned tools. His designs, like my beautiful tailcoat, often took hundreds of hours to complete, but the fit, stitching, and other details were exquisite and well worth the wait.

Fergus packed everything into a battered wooden sewing box, which he hoisted into the crook of his elbow. “See you at the ball, Zane.”

“I wouldn’t miss it, especially when I look this good.” I winked at him, then spun around, making the tailcoat flap against my legs.

Fergus chuckled, then left the room.

As soon as the door shut behind him, the smile dropped from my face faster than a meteor plummeting toward the ground. I stepped down off the raised dais, moved away from the mirror, and wound my way past the tables, chairs, and settees piled high with books, weapons, plastipapers, and wayward tea mugs that filled my tower library. The housekeepers always clucked their tongues about the mess, but I found the clutter comforting—and I needed all the comfort I could get right now.

I went past a long table covered with chrome appliances, including a brewmaker and a beverage chiller, both designed by Vesper, and stopped in front of one of the windows. In the distance, catty-corner across a busy thoroughfare, Imperium soldiers were stationed in front of Castle Caldaren, an enormous, hulking, dark blue stone structure that looked as grim and dour as its absentee owner.

The soldiers had been guarding the castle for two weeks, more than long enough to know that Kyrion wasn’t coming back anytime soon, and they shot bored looks at the horse-drawn carriages that rattled over the Boulevard, the wide cobblestone avenue that fronted many of the Regal homes, including my tower in Castle Zimmer. Several more Imperium soldiers were stationed nearby at the edge of Promenade Park, their bloodred uniforms and silver blasters making them resemble man-size flowers with metallic thorns that had sprouted out of the park’s grassy, rolling lawns.

My tablet chimed. Time to finish getting ready for the solstice celebration.