“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, Pip!” she says, grabbing him by the shoulders and shoving him, sputtering and yelping, toward the door. “So dreadfully clumsy. You know, I think all that cocaine I did must have really done a job on my reflexes! Let’s go get you cleaned up, shall we?” She heaves him out, throwing Henry a thumbs-up over her shoulder, and shuts the door behind them. The queen looks over at Alex and Henry, and Alex sees it in her eyes at last: She’s afraid of them. She’s afraid of the threat they pose to the perfect Faberge veneer she’s spent her whole life maintaining. They terrify her. And Catherine isn’t backing down. “Well,” Queen Mary says. “I suppose. I suppose you don’t leave me much choice, do you?” “Oh, you have a choice, Mum,” Catherine says. “You’ve always had a choice. Perhaps today you'll make the right one.” In the corridor of Buckingham Palace, as soon as the door has shut behind them, they fall sideways into a tapestry on a wall, breathless and delirious and laughing, cheeks wet. Henry pulls Alex close and kisses him, whispers, “I love you I love you I love you,” and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter if anyone sees. He’s on the way back to the airstrip when he sees it, emblazoned onto the side of a brick building, a shock of color against a gray street. “Wait!” Alex yells up to the driver. “Stop! Stop the car!” Up close, it’s beautiful. Two stories tall. He can’t imagine how somebody was able to put together something like this so fast. It’s a mural of himself and Henry, facing each other, haloed by a bright yellow sun, depicted as Han and Leia. Henry in all white, starlight in his hair. Alex dressed as a scruffy smuggler, a blaster at his hip. A royal and a rebel, arms around each other. He snaps a photo on his phone, and fingers shaking, types out a tweet: Never tell me the odds. He calls June from the air over the Atlantic. “T need your help,” he says. He hears the click of her pen cocking on the other end of the line. “Whatcha got?”