The Diabolic

  He spread his arms, and I fought back the temptation to leap in front of him and shield him from them.

  And one by one, I saw the hands about me release weapons, fall from the holsters where they’d been clutching guns. Then Tyrus calmly took another drink, and it became very clear to me: he would live. The Luminars had been won to his cause at last.

  We sat together by the window of the Alexandria as it rose from the surface of the planet, and I stared down in amazement to think Tyrus Domitrian had indeed resolved the situation. At least as far as the Emperor was concerned, the planet Lumina had rebelled, and Tyrus came to it and talked them into staying part of the Empire. He didn’t know how, and he didn’t know what Tyrus had truly said, what machinations he’d performed—and he never would. It would seem an act of political genius on Tyrus’s part.

  Before our departure, Neveni had come to see me. She stayed at a careful distance. Then she remarked, “You must know that most people—most Excess like me, I should say—don’t really care for genetically crafted humans. They’re . . . they’re like the Grandiloquy warning us we aren’t necessary. We can be replaced.”

  So that was why the Excess found Servitors repulsive. And Diabolics had to be something more abhorrent than that.

  Neveni’s voice hitched. “Nemesis, I know creatures like you tend to . . . to kill people, so it must mean something that you never hurt me. Between that and what I know now you must have done to Salivar and Devineé, I might forgive you one day for your lies.”

  I hadn’t missed the way she called me a “creature.” “I regret that hurting you was necessary. . . . But, Neveni, I still don’t regret hurting them.”

  She smiled. “Good.” Then her smile faded. “All I want to leave you with is a word of warning. Tyrus may be the enemy of your enemy, but he is still a Domitrian. Never trust them. Not any of them. They are a family of killers and liars. He may not have deployed that Resolvent Mist—but he still brought it with him. What does that say about him?”

  With that, Neveni and I took our leave of each other, perhaps forever.

  Now as the purple ocean and the vast continents and mountain ranges and clouds grew smaller and smaller beneath us, I looked over at Tyrus, my mind swirling with the days we’d passed down there. He was contemplating the phial of Resolvent Mist—the order from his uncle that he’d defied. The old ways, disregarded.

  “I am amazed by you,” I remarked to him. “You think ten steps ahead of others.”

  Tyrus released an unsteady breath and tucked the phial away with a trembling hand. “Perhaps I just make it seem that way. I didn’t antici­pate they’d storm my chamber and take me off for execution this morning. When it happened, I thought I was dead. I thought it was all for nothing. And then you came.”

  It was then I noticed that his whole body was shaking, excess adrenaline spilling into his system. For his part, he gazed at me, taking in every particle of me, awe and amazement on his face.

  “Nemesis, you are absolutely extraordinary. I had braced myself for imminent death, and there you exploded upon us like some avenging angel . . .” His voice caught. “I have grown used to the idea that human beings die or they betray and I could only rely on myself, but that’s not true anymore. I feel I can trust you. That may seem so small an admission”—his eyes grew shadowed, his voice hoarse—“but from me, it is the greatest compliment I can ever give.”

  I flushed, because I knew Tyrus had lost everyone he loved as a child. I had glimpsed his pain when he’d spoken of his mother’s death. I knew he’d grown to adulthood constantly threatened by death at the hands of his own family, trusting only his own wits for his survival. His words meant something significant, something important, and I didn’t need him to explain why.

  The way he was looking at me now . . . no one had looked at me so. I felt unable to return that look, but when my gaze dipped, I found myself staring instead at his mouth, and my face felt hot, my mouth dry.

  His thumb brushed over my cheek. “Look at me,” he said.

  I took a sharp breath and pushed away these unsettling sensations. When I looked up, his keenly intelligent eyes seemed to pierce me, to stare into my very depths. “You are extraordinary,” he said softly. “Is it selfish that all I can think now is that I want you for myself?”

  I stuttered around the words. “Want me . . . how . . . ?”

  An odd smile curved his mouth.

  And then he kissed me.

  34

  THERE WAS no one around to see us—no one to fool into believing he cared for me. But his lips were pressed to mine, his mouth soft and warm.

  Bewilderment gripped me and held me perfectly still as his hand slid through my hair. As he rubbed his lips over mine, a strange melting feeling ran down through my limbs. His clever fingers knew that, too. They chased the sensation, smoothing down my neck. He was not weak. I could feel the power in his grip as he wrapped his fingers around my neck. But there was no threat in it. It felt sweeter than any touch I had ever known.

  His mouth grew more demanding. My hands somehow found their way to his body, testing the density of his muscled upper arms. Below us, the planet was receding, the darkness of space enveloping us, dizzying. I leaned against him. Every part of me seemed to be awakening, thrumming to life. I hadn’t realized it was possible to feel this way. I was made a stranger to myself in this moment, the mundanity of everyday reality no longer imaginable.

  Suddenly his body seemed a wonder. I ran my palms over his feverishly hot skin, over his broad chest. He stepped into me, putting my back against the wall. Over his shoulder, I spied the curvature of Lumina shrinking away, the stars expanding in all directions.

  His mouth opened mine, and I tasted his tongue.

  This! This was living. This was being alive, being human.

  I never wanted it to end.

  But at last, Tyrus pulled back, searching my eyes intently with his own. My legs felt unsteady. Such weakness should have alarmed me, but it felt, in this moment, trifling, a distraction from the revelation unfolding here. I stared back at him. I had never truly seen him before—so it seemed in that moment. A hundred details announced themselves, demanding my attention: the flecks of pale green in his gray-blue eyes. The intensity of his gaze, the way it felt as though he were staring into the depths of my being. How had I never smelled the scent of his skin, or noticed the strength, the skill and confidence, of his hands? My fingers trailed down the swell of his bicep, and my very skin seemed to spark with the contact.

  Now, at last, I knew what it meant to be intoxicated. I could see why other people felt giddy and dazzled, inclined to foolish laughter. Perhaps I even understood the lightning better: my awareness felt electric, expanding to encompass the entire universe.

  Tyrus smiled, a crooked secretive smile, as he drew my chin up and pressed his lips to mine again.

  Yes.

  We found our way to his plush lounger and sank down onto it together, our bodies never parting, locked together like two magnets. Was this wise? I could not say. A curious but wonderful fog filled my brain. It felt right. That was all that mattered. A sensation of utter wholeness spilled through my being.

  After long minutes, Tyrus traced his finger over the bridge of my nose with its bump.

  “How did you get this?” he murmured.

  “Fighting in the corrals.” I studied the cleft in his chin, the arrangement of his freckles. “You don’t self-modify like the others.”

  “Waste of time. Why? Do you think I should?”

  I thought about that. “No. I’ve come to identify every one of your aspects as the signature I use to recognize you. The freckles, the hair, the chin . . . Your eyes.”

  Such extraordinary eyes. They never wavered from mine. “You observe me,” he said.

  “I observe everyone. But yes, especially you.”

  I saw him fight a smil
e, and lose. He buried his head against my shoulder, letting out a long breath that raised goose bumps on my skin. I combed my fingers through his coppery hair and felt the tension still bracing his muscles, the fatigue he was fighting to conceal. “People need sleep after stressful ventures,” I said softly. “Take yours.”

  Tyrus pulled me around so I fit against his chest, then eased me down so we lay together, his breath tickling my neck. I had never before slept so closely to someone—but after a moment, I found I didn’t mind. It was peaceful, to be held like this.

  His lips traced the back of my neck: “Good night, Nemesis.”

  I smiled, though he could not see it. I smiled at the bare room, and the cold, unfeeling starscape out the window, and I lay in perfect contentment, listening as his breathing grew deep and steady.

  I felt the last thing from sleepy myself. The feel of his body against mine would not allow for it. My skin thrummed all over, every bit of it curious to explore the person pressed against me.

  Very carefully, so as not to wake him, I twisted around to study Tyrus. The silvery starlight flattered him, gilding the sharp thrust of his cheekbones, the proud square of his jaw. I brushed my fingertips over his arm.

  The strangeness of the moment dawned on me. Diabolics were not designed to desire. But I could find no other name for this electrified, hungering awareness of him.

  A curious pressure expanded in my chest. I had not been bonded to Tyrus. There was no genetic cause for what I felt, what I was experiencing.

  It could only be my humanity. Pure, inborn humanity.

  Donia had been right. I’d had it in me all along.

  I swallowed hard against a swell of feeling. I wanted to rouse Tyrus, to thank him as he’d thanked me for saving his life, because in so many ways, he had saved mine also.

  Very gently, I touched his face. He needed more sleep than I did. And there was a certain unusual pallor to his appearance. His near execution had taken a greater toll than he’d admitted, I thought.

  And so I let him sleep after all.

  As we dropped into hyperspace, the silvery light outside vanished into pitch blackness. I rose quietly, stealing one last look at him before leaving the room.

  Everything looked different to me: beauty, appearing at every mundane turn. The sleekness of the consoles lining the hallway; the graceful flutter of my gown around my ankles. I felt as though I were moving in a wondrous dream. My shadowy reflection flickered across a console beside me, and for a moment I stopped to consider it. I wondered at this smiling creature. She looked nothing like the flat, empty-eyed thing I’d seen in the mirrors at the Impyrean fortress.

  She was alive.

  In my chamber, I clapped my hands together, waiting for Deadly to rouse so I could do that thing he liked where I danced my fingers over the floor like they were small animals and he barked at them. My gaze found the pitch darkness out the window, and I marveled that even the void could be beautiful in its emptiness. Then my creature shuffled languidly forward.

  I stared at him a split second longer, long enough to register the glossy sheen to his eyes, the way he seemed to be dragging his limbs rather than bouncing with easy power. His tail thumped once, halfheartedly, and then his legs collapsed from under him.

  “Deadly!” I dropped down beside him, and it was then that I felt him vibrating, shaking, his body both stiff and far too lax in points, and I knew something was very wrong.

  I fished out the case of med bots Tyrus and I used during sparring practice, then flipped up the lid. They swarmed out and flew over to Deadly, flashing their alarm lights—but then they retreated without treating him. Whatever was wrong with him was beyond their capacity to fix.

  He was heavy, but I swept him up in my arms and charged out into the hallway. It took me a moment to think of where Tyrus’s physician was, but I succeeded in waking him as I pounded on Doctor nan Domitrian’s doorway.

  He glared at me balefully for waking him up over this, but prodded at Deadly as I held him still. “Did he ingest anything on the planet?”

  I looked at him blankly. I hadn’t been with him every moment, not when we were separated during the lightning storm. “He may have.”

  “If the med bots can’t help him, I don’t know what you expect me to do. This is the danger in taking your pet to a strange planet. There are any number of pathogens and microorganisms in a wild environment that you won’t encounter in space. He’s not bred to be invulnerable.”

  Worry gripped me. “He’ll recover, though.”

  “Senator von Impyrean, these beasts were made for fighting. No one engineered them for longevity.”

  “There has to be a way to heal him! He can’t just get sick like this.”

  At that moment, something on the doctor’s belt buzzed. He glanced down at it and then moved to the door. “I have to attend to something else. I’m very sorry that there’s nothing I can do.”

  I glared after him. Then Deadly began to shake harder, thrashing, and I pulled him to me.

  “Stay calm. I’m here to protect you. Be calm.” I didn’t know where the words came from, but they passed my lips like a chant. I took him to my chamber, at least somewhere familiar to him.

  His eyes rolled back over and over, the whites taking on a sickly yellow sheen. Only occasionally did his gaze focus on me and stare helplessly, as though Deadly wondered why I wasn’t making him feel better. All I could do was stare down at him in mute horror as he shook and then thrashed in my arms, a strange choking sound coming from his lips, foam frothing at his mouth.

  I’d been so careless. I thought he’d enjoy being on a planet, having new things to smell, new places to explore. This was my fault. Better to have left him to die fighting in the ring than to let this happen.

  I couldn’t weep. All I could do was pet him behind the ears and hope he knew I hadn’t abandoned him, but soon his seizures were continuous and his gurgling sounds unending, his tongue clamped between his teeth. That was when reality sank in: I couldn’t let this go on.

  I wrapped my arm around his neck and tightened my grip until his kicking legs went still.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered to him, still clutching him tightly.

  I did not let go. His body grew stiff and cold in my arms. I still didn’t know whether he’d eaten something on the planet or caught some disease, and it opened up a pit in my stomach to think this could just happen, that life could simply be stolen away.

  And while he’d been suffering in my chamber, I’d missed it. I’d been with Tyrus.

  Tyrus.

  I needed to see him. I needed to hold him again and be taken back to that place of contentment where death meant nothing. I wrapped Deadly carefully in a blanket, then rocketed down the corridor.

  When I stepped through the door of his chamber, voices reached me. Tyrus and Doctor nan Domitrian’s.

  “Easy does it, Your Eminence.”

  Retching sounds.

  A cold haze swept over me. I remembered the doctor being called away, someone summoning him. Oh. Oh. Oh no.

  Deadly wasn’t the only one sick on this ship.

  35

  TYRUS straightened up, abashed, when he saw me in the doorway. He looked grayish, sweaty. “Sidonia, best stay back. I don’t want you getting ill.”

  Horror filled me. I thought of Tyrus dying just like Deadly. I looked at the doctor, aghast. “What’s wrong with him? We received inoculations before going to the planet. How is he sick?”

  “Just some planetary fever,” Tyrus answered for him.

  “What is that?” I cried.

  “An umbrella term.” The doctor shook his head. “I told you how microorganisms thrive in natural environments, and space dwellers have little exposure to them. Those inoculations I gave you before you left couldn’t cover everything. His Eminence never takes precautions when planet-side, so
he always catches the local bugs.”

  Tyrus grimaced. “And believe me, I always vow to listen to you next time, Doctor.”

  All I could do was stare at Tyrus, looking so wan already, just hours after I’d left him. Now that I thought of it, his skin had felt warm, feverish. Why hadn’t I thought to wonder if he was getting sick?

  Tyrus saw the look on my face. “There’s really no cause for concern,” he said gently. “It will pass.”

  “Drink this. I’ll return to check on you shortly,” the doctor said to Tyrus, handing him a glass of some steaming concoction.

  I remained rooted in place at the foot of his bed, stunned and stupid. Why had I never noticed before the fragility of living beings?

  “You’re not feeling ill yourself, are you?” Tyrus sipped at his drink, his face waxen with sweat. “It struck in my sleep, but I did notice a few aches and pains earlier.”

  “I rarely fall ill.” My voice sounded toneless, detached. I felt strange indeed, like I’d come untethered from myself.

  Had I told myself, earlier, that I was seeing him clearly at last? Now all I could see was his fragility: those bones, so easily broken and that skin, so easily ruptured. Deadly had been engineered for strength, designed to fight and survive—but that had not saved him, either.

  What arrogance to forget, even for a moment, my difference from Tyrus. I was the deadliest creature ever engineered, and he was a fragile human being. I would live and thrive while others broke and shattered.

  “The doctor told me your dog is ill. Is he all right?” Tyrus’s voice sounded hoarse.

  I stared at some point over his head. “He wasn’t a dog.” Now I sounded harsh, unfeeling, as a Diabolic should. “He was a fighting beast engineered to kill. That’s all.” My vision blurred, and I blinked hard to clear it. “He . . . It died.”