Page 125 of Good Losers (Lochkelvin Academy)

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Partway through the week, our last in Edinburgh before Lochkelvin restarts, Luke pulls me to the side of the hall with a determined look on his face. Diligently, he tugs the large heavy drapes beside us to conceal the diamond windowpanes, our eyes into the city, from view.

“I didn’t want to ask, but I don’t know who else to turn to.” Worry lines his brow.

“What is it?”

Luke doesn’t respond for quite some time, as though the words take an extraordinary exertion to voice. “It’s… I want you to record me making my speech. My… abdication speech,” he clarifies, and he fixes me with a dark, intense gaze, as though daring me to refuse on some kind of pro-monarchy principle. Luke stands so close to me, his voice in such a low murmur, that I can make out each of his long, individual eyelashes. It’s as though he daren’t breathe his plan to anyone, not even in the radius around me.

“Record… what?” I blink up at him. “You’re going to do it?”

“I have to,” Luke says, swallowing, and I wonder if it contains his entire pride. “This nightmare circus has to end.”

And since Oscar Munro had come out with his magnanimous support for Antiro, life had well and truly descended into a circus — with the media gleefully adopting the role of clowns. In high spirits, they slapped breathless headlines onto the front page, one after the other:PEOPLE’S CHAMPION!declared the first edition ofThe Sunfollowing the Prime Minister’s speech, with a split-picture of a grinning Benji eagerly rousing a crowd and Oscar Munro, stern but magisterial and achingly handsome behind the wooden lectern. It seemed to imply a process of evolution: of boy to man, of a brief look into Benji’s potential future.

The idea makes me shudder.

“I don’t want to tell the chiefs — not yet — I don’t even want to imagine Finlay’s barely concealed joy,” Luke whispers with a wince, as though the thought is almost too much for him to bear. “But you don’t judge. And Danny doesn’t, either. And I’d like the two of you to be there for me tonight.”

“Of course,” I say, still stunned, but Luke plants a soft kiss to my lips like he always knew I’d say yes.

That night, the three of us crowd into my bedroom, which is considered the most neutrally decorated in the house. Danny unboxes the camera he’d bought from the tech shop, whose receipts Rory had frowned at, wondering precisely why Danny had thought spending their shared reserves of money on a DSLR was considered acceptable to him.

“Memories, right?” Danny had said, sounding almost blasé about it. “I thought I’d get into photography. Practice my camera skills by getting some pics of the festival.”

Rory’s gaze had narrowed. “And you decided to useour moneyto fund your budding photography hobby?”

“Yep,” Danny had said cheerfully, much to my amazement. “Well, you’ve been a right dick to me in the past, so I figure it’s time for compensation.”

Now Danny stands in my room, consulting the camera’s thick manual as though the instructions are in another language. “Does anyone know how to work this thing?” he asks, looking hopefully in my direction. I shake my head, at a loss.

He picks up the camera with a sigh and slumps onto my bed, fiddling with the buttons and trying to figure out how to turn it on.

“Do you know what you’ll be saying?” I ask Luke, who paces around my room with his eyes shut, looking like he’s internally rehearsing his grand speech.

Luke tugs out a crumpled slip of paper — a short, brief paragraph of handwritten text, with several scored-out words and phrases rewritten in the margins.

It’s the kind of thing, I realize distantly, that people will go wild for in years to come, if this note were to ever see the light of an auction house, to be exhibited under the bright sterile glare of museum spotlights.

A handwritten letter of abdication from an illegitimate prince.

And yet, funnily enough, it may as well be a letter from anyone off the street. It’s what Antiro insists. It’s what Finlay agrees with. Royals are born, not made.

But history is being made right now, weighty and tangled and complex, the weave of a tapestry knitting different possible outcomes. An ordinary, everyday kind of person wouldn’t command such an effect. Luke may not be a royal, but he is, nevertheless, famous.

“I’m doing the right thing,” Luke says, his long confident strides coming to a stop as he regards me. There’s something in his dark eyes, a crystallization, that makes me think of being frozen in terror. “Aren’t I?”

“That isn’t for me to decide,” I tell him gently. “But for what it’s worth, if you want Antiro off your back, then how could they possibly complain? Abdicating means you’re out of the picture. It means you’re free.”

Luke’s brows furrow. “There’s still that feeling… that I’m negotiating with terrorists. That maybe I should hide, just lay low for a while until this blows over.”

I don’t say anything, watching instead as Danny scans the instruction booklet and examines the camera between his palms. A small green light has appeared at the side and Danny glances through the viewfinder as he plays with the zoom function, the snout of the camera gliding in and out with a mechanical whir.

“You know you aren’t legitimate,” I eventually say, when it seems as if Luke is still waiting for an answer. I don’t know how I suddenly became the chiefs’ moral arbiter, but the demands of the position weigh heavily on my body like a torque. “And they know you aren’t legitimate. I don’t think you have the option to cling to power.”

“Lord knows my mother’s doing her damnedest.”

“Have you told her? What you’re planning?” I ask, curious. The line of communication between Luke and the rest of his family is patchy at best, implying they’re somewhere remote, somewhere hidden from all the madness. Luke had mentioned, undaunted, that his family had access to extensive underground bunkers in the countryside, where they’d be able to survive the worst possible outcomes.

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