Page 29 of My Noble Disgrace

For the first time, I began to regret saving Dominic’s life.

Chapter

Nine

I cuffedDominic to a post in his cabin before daring to leave him alone. He was more underhanded than I’d given him credit for and I couldn’t give him another opportunity to give us away. I went up on deck, stars dotting the sky between swaths of clouds, the rain now gone. The wind filled the sails, pushing us consistently forward.

I made up my mind not to tell anyone what I’d found with Dominic. It wouldn’t go over well, for either of us.

I discreetly put the pistol back in its place but kept the radio securely in my pocket. I wanted it with me from now on. Cait and the rest of the crew were at the bow, speaking together without noticing my ascent. Keane sat alone on the stern.

I headed over and sat close, but not too close, to Keane. Whether or not he’d killed his wife, I felt wary of him.

“So, you have a son,” I said.

He laughed bitterly. “I’m having a hard time replacing my mental image of a pudgy toddler with an Enforcer who wants to kill me.”

“Tell me what happened,” I said. “The truth.”

He sighed deeply and stretched his legs out in front of him, leaning back onto his hands. “I loved my wife more than anything. I never would’ve killed her.”

The way he paused told me, before he even admitted it, that he wasn’t free of guilt. “But?” I asked.

“I involved her in my rebellion,” he said. “We wanted to find . . . well, I’d overheard my father and the king speaking and we needed to know . . . but we were caught. Someone shot her. I’ll never know who. She died on the spot.” His voice faltered and broke with his words.

The story was too incomplete for me to make sense of. “What did you want to find?”

He looked up, nodding at someone behind me.

I glanced back.

“Can I join you?” asked Cait. “I’ve had enough of those guys.” She gestured with her head toward the other end of the boat.

I scooted over, making room for her, which pushed me closer to Keane. His body trembled with emotion, and I wondered if it was due to grief or guilt. Maybe both.

“What did you overhear them speaking about, Keane?” I asked, determined to find out more.

“Technology. And weapons,” he whispered, his eyes glazed. “An entire hoard of them. When my father became First Immortal, I sometimes overheard his conversations with Imperator Brennin. They spoke of impossible things just believable enough to get me thinking, and I had to know for myself. I told my wife about what I’d heard and we both got obsessed with finding out what was hidden beneath the Academy.”

“Beneath the Academy?” asked Cait. “Do you mean that in a figurative way or?—”

“Nope,” said Keane. “We believed there was an underground arsenal deep beneath the Academy full of treasures from anotherage and world-destroying inventions. Things like that behemoth of a gun.” He gestured toward the barrels on deck. “And worse.”

A chill ran down my spine. I thought of the book I’d stolen. It had never directly stated an arsenal existed, but it had seemed written around a secret, revealing just enough to make me consider Keane’s words. I wondered if maybe everything in that book— the technology it claimed was long gone—were things Cambria secretly owned.

“But I hoped there might be some good hidden there too. My father spoke of transportation devices that could take a person from one island to another at a speed no sailboat could ever travel.”

“Really?” Cait leaned forward. “Did you find anything?”

“No,” said Keane, “so I’ve believed for fourteen years that I was mistaken, that it was too impossible to be real. But when I saw that gun and those radios, my suspicions returned.”

I was reluctant to believe it, but I was already getting sucked into the possibilities. Where else did these tools on our deck come from? The possibility of technology that could make incredible things possible—like the radios, or new ways to travel—piqued my curiosity. What else might the Academy be hiding?

Cait listened intently to Keane, her eyes gleaming in the moonlight. “I’ve known for a long time that the Academy is corrupt, especially after what I experienced in prison. But wouldn’t an arsenal like that go completely against everything they preach? Wasn't Irvine’s entire mission to create a utopia of peace, virtue, and stability? To abandon the corrupt, machine-dependent world?”

Keane shrugged. “That’s what they say.”

I looked at Cait, our expressions mirroring each other as if we’d come to the same understanding. The Academy wrote Cambria’s history in their favor. Anything we’d ever been told had to be re-examined, even the belief that Cambria wasfounded on peace. If Keane was right, the Academy was literally built atop violence.

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