The Empress

  And Tyrus’s mouth fell open, my head reeled, for . . . for was this really happening? Now? After this?

  “You want . . . restoration of the sciences. After all this time,” Tyrus said.

  “I do, my child. This is your purpose. And I command you to do it. I will impart to you everything on our system, on our computers, all the knowledge lost, so it may be rediscovered with your help. Will you undertake this mission?”

  Incredulous, Tyrus dropped to his knees before the Interdict, torn between hope and total bewilderment. “You are asking me to do this for you, Most Ascendant One.”

  “Yes. You’ve been an agent of this Living Cosmos, and you will be one again, on this much more daunting of tasks. And you, you—the creature Nemesis. To your knees. Let me touch you.”

  Baffled, I practically stumbled down to kneel at Tyrus’s side as the Interdict offered us each a hand and let us both draw them to our cheeks.

  “The divine light of this Cosmos brought you to me, brought you both to me.” His eyes burned with conviction. “And now it will shine a path forward, because you ask me to grant her personhood, my young Emperor. I will not only do that, I will confer on her my holy mark of blessing. She’s been my agent as much as you have, and I don’t believe you were put in my path without design.” He drew us both to our feet. “We are all three of us agents of that which is greater than us all, and isn’t this a glorious purpose indeed?”

  • • •

  The ceremony was conducted right in the heliosphere of the Hera in those fleeting minutes before we reached the Sacred City.

  The Interdict adjusted the reflective mirrors about him, and grumbled about having to make do with very little. Tyrus just leaned against the wall, openly and nakedly bewildered by what had come to pass, like he didn’t know whether to be demoralized or pleased. I knew just how he felt, and as I knelt before the Interdict, the wrongness swelled in me like I’d cheated somehow, and a terrible price awaited.

  And then, a shift of the optics, and something happened.

  Perhaps the diamonds outside, or the strike of the pulsar’s light, but when the light illuminated the heliosphere about us, an illusion of existing in a different universe entirely gripped me. The Interdict rose to his full height, aglow as his crystalline statue had been, and the import of the moment sank heavily over me, and I seemed to float back from myself, from the moment, for I wasn’t sure if it was real, and he no longer seemed to reach down to me as a mortal.

  Lines of sacred chalices lit into flame, and they seared the edges of my vision while prisms slid about us with the shifting starlight, and the Interdict’s voice sounded like a stranger’s, soft and resonant. “Bow your head, Nemesis dan Impyrean.”

  My heart thumped so loudly, I felt as though it resounded through the entire chamber. I closed my eyes and saw red against the bright glare, then the touch . . . Hands settling upon me, the back of my neck, my cheeks.

  Images played through my mind in a great, dizzying flash. . . . The Impyrean vicar scorning me as a thing with no divine spark . . . the walls of the corrals harsh and impregnable about me . . . Sidonia’s arm stretched out as she promised me I had a divine spark . . .

  And the hands were atop my head, words washing over me in and out. “. . . so matter and energy are never destroyed but merely converted as I exalt this creature before me. . . .”

  Strangely, my heart began to pound and my stomach danced.

  This mattered to me.

  Behind my eyes, I felt like I was seeing Sidonia again, as she’d been that day, as she’d been telling me she loved me, telling me I was made of stardust as she was.

  The oil seeped warm and fragrant on my hands, the Interdict himself applying it to me. Then effervescent essence over his hand, which caught aglow in a brilliant stream of light that I thought was the pulsar, and realized then . . . No, it was the quasar, the ejection of whatever brilliance departed a black hole, casting a thousand glorious colors about me.

  Then his touch to my breastbone. A laser-thin slicer in his hand scorching a pattern over my heart, allowing the infusion beneath my skin of effervescent essence. The pain meant nothing in the unreality and brilliance of the moment, and his next touch slicked with healing ointment knit the skin together over the glowing mark of concentric suns. It seemed I’d crossed into some other realm, some greater reality, and Donia was there, her presence so thick on the air I felt it as though she were centimeters away, watching me.

  Sidonia—my Donia—was now a part of a star, a brilliant, blazing light just as she’d always been for me, illuminating the dark corners of my soul even when I doubted whether I had one, and finally I was a part of the same light as her.

  Thank you, Donia, I thought, loving her so much in that moment the emotion seemed to rip through my very soul. And I knew then that she had met her destiny, and I would join her there someday too, for I was a person.

  The Interdict stepped back. I rose before him as Nemesis Impyrean, the future Empress of a galaxy. A person. And Tyrus no longer was sagging back against the wall, weary, but watched me with a radiant love on his face. For once, when I returned his smile, I knew—just knew—the same intensity of feeling lit my face, for he’d thought to ask for this.

  I had just been born into the human race. At long last, I belonged.

  20

  LEAVING the Sacred City proved easier than arriving, for we were given an exact path to program into the Hera’s autonavigation. We’d missed the end of the gravital window during which we arrived, but we had returned the Interdict to the Sacred City in time to catch the next one.

  “I will train up dozens of my Inquisitors and vicars in the new understanding of my decree,” the Interdict had told us when we parted. “I’ve left a guide to the gravital windows in your database. I won’t have vicars ready immediately, not in your time—but they will be prepared for the task we mean to undertake in three years on your end.”

  “I thank you,” Tyrus had said.

  Then we departed. And with the beauty of the ceremony behind us, Tyrus became a tangle of repressed anxiety. He settled by the window with his hands balled up, jammed under his folded arms, staring out at space as though he could will the vessel to hurry up with just his mind.

  For someone who had planned every step and the next ten ahead of it the entirety of his life—including backup plans for any scenario his mind could concoct—this unexpected setback had to horrify him.

  “Eleven months,” he said to himself, as though trying to wrap his head around it. “We left for the Transaturnine System . . . and stayed away for almost a year. Children have been conceived and then born in the time we have been away, and we left right on the cusp of a conflict. Stars help us.”

  “Whatever awaits us,” I said, “we’ll make do.” And I believed those airy words as I spoke them.

  Tyrus pressed his forehead to the window, squeezed his eyes shut. “We can’t jump to hyperspace until we’re clear of this gravity. That means . . . eight hours. We have eight hours to wait, and then weeks in hyperspace. Time we can’t afford to lose, if it makes a difference at this point. Eleven months . . .”

  “We can’t change it now. It could have been far longer.”

  “Maybe it should have been. Ten years. One hundred. If we’d returned then, we’d have come back to something so drastically different, it wouldn’t make a difference one way or another.” He spoke with rapid-fire, clipped words. “But we were gone just long enough . . . My cousin is dead, and I wasn’t there to frame it. Pasus armed himself and united allies, and I . . . I just left mine. They probably thought I was dead. Every spy I’ve cultivated has long since found a new master. Helios devoured, we have nothing.”

  “Tyrus.” I gripped his face, and he blinked at me sluggishly like he’d just seen me. “We still have one person we can rely on.” At his blank look: “Neveni. She knew.”

  “She’ll have told them where we went,” Tyrus said. “That’s what we instructed her to do if we had
n’t returned in a month.”

  “Yes. And now she will tell us what we’ve missed. Pasus had her mother killed. Believe me, Tyrus—she can be trusted.”

  “It’s hearsay from an Excess who isn’t even at court.”

  “Yes, and she has links with many Luminars who are, Tyrus.”

  “True,” he said.

  “Then we will find someone you trust at court, depending on what she says. And we will ask them. Who do you trust?”

  He stared at me a moment. His lips curved. “You.”

  “Who else?” I said, patting his cheek lightly, in a mock slap.

  But my levity didn’t reach him. He leaned back against the window, his reflection shifting with him. “Nemesis, I paid for loyalty. Anyone I paid is being paid by someone else now. It is utterly impossible to form deep and intense personal relationships while playing a madman and refusing to trust any of them. I set up a system of loyalty with one party watching another, but none of it works without me there to oversee it.”

  “We are going to have to change that when we’re back,” I murmured. “We need to figure out a way to win support.”

  “We have to ensure we survive that long. They may have an entirely new government by now. We’ll . . . we’ll count upon Mistress Sagnau’s animosity toward Pasus. And beyond that . . .” He looked about us. “Would that we had a different ship.”

  “The Hera is why we are alive.”

  “Yes, it was most excellent. Now it’s our liability. It’s too recognizable. If we had another vessel on hand, I’d say we aim for somewhere visible, as visible as possible. Eurydice, perhaps.”

  I knew that planet. It was the wealthiest province for the Excess. It was center of the galactic media.

  He rubbed his temples. “But we won’t get there in this ship. There will be too much advance warning, too much opportunity to stop us.”

  “So why not head directly to the Chrysanthemum without warning?”

  He looked at me, turning it over in his mind.

  “Think of it, Tyrus. We are both quick on our feet. The entry and exit corridor is too narrow for any alert foes to chase us in. We will be there and at the palace before anyone can muster a decent ambush.”

  “Once we are there, we are virtually trapped,” he said.

  “It’s been almost a year, as you said. Who will expect us? It’s the best of many poor options.”

  He leaned his forehead against the window again. Released a jagged breath. “I suppose we have eight hours to think of an alternative.”

  Though he was strung like a tight wire, I felt almost like I was floating freely in an exquisite ocean. I stepped up behind him, ran my hands over the tense muscles of his back, felt him relaxing despite himself. My gaze kept straying to my bared arms, for there was something within me that had stirred with the starlight bathing me. I was a real person. It had happened. A strange peace hummed in my veins, and I wondered if I looked different somehow.

  Tyrus glanced back at me with heavy-lidded eyes, and a smile tugged at his lips. “You’re glowing.”

  “I’m a person now.”

  He turned. His broad hands settled on my waist, and he nuzzled his lips over the curve of my cheek. “Don’t tell the Interdict,” he said gently, “but I think you always have been.”

  “Blasphemer,” I teased him.

  There was a shift, so subtle, like a charge on the air. A buzz, and I melted into his arms and he guided my lips to his. I parted his mouth, and stroked my tongue over his, and he responded with a sudden fervor that rippled down to my core. I looped my leg about him to draw him closer, ever closer to me, and there was a low sound in his throat that made me smile against his lips.

  Then it was all still about me, the ship, the galaxy, this Empire, and everything was his heat, the taste of his mouth, his skin, and I dipped my mouth to the hollow of his throat.

  Now.

  My fingers threaded through his reddish hair and my lips touched the shell of his ear. “I’m ready.”

  Tyrus’s blue-eyed gaze shot to mine, electric with his need for me. “You are certain?”

  “Yes. I love you. I’m sure.”

  “I love you, too, Nemesis. More than you can know.”

  The broad, deep kisses accompanied us as we made our way through the ship, a rapturous sense of possibility, of beauty seeming to unspool in this moment I wished I could capture and relive at will. I was his equal and a child of the Living Cosmos, and all I wanted now was to show him how I loved him. I aimed us for my own chamber, but he slipped his arms around me and steered us into the nearest one we came across. I recalled with a soft laugh that these were all my chambers now. . . . In the haze of glorious happiness, I couldn’t touch him, feel him, taste him enough, his feverish, hungry kisses drawing an exquisite fire to my surface. Then he was over me, balanced on those limbs corded with muscle, and we looked into each other’s eyes. The silken sheets were cool against my back, his body radiating heat into mine. . .

  He took that moment, that breathless moment, to just gaze at me as though he saw the most wondrous of mysteries in this Cosmos.

  “I can’t believe it,” he remarked, “that you and I are here. That we found each other.”

  And I understood what he meant. I knew, and the miracle of it seemed to pulse through my very being as I wrapped my legs about him and drew him closer to me.

  Our bright figures formed ghostly reflections rippling across the brilliant, vibrant light of the star system. He was mine and I was his, and for a fleeting moment as we joined together again within the endless void all about us, there were no prying eyes, there wasn’t another soul, just the two of us, and the universe ignited golden and complete.

  • • •

  I awoke thrumming with expansive joy to find Tyrus watching me, his thumb trailing circles over my bared hip. His lips curled as our eyes met, and we shared that moment of hazy, sweet contentment under the ivory sheets.

  My voice was bleary. “What time is it?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Mmm. No.” We just smiled at each other in a ridiculous way like we were any other pair of young lovers.

  But we were not.

  We never had been.

  I needed to protect this. To protect us.

  That cleared my thoughts.

  I eased myself up. “How long until we can enter hyperspace? We should contact Neveni as soon as we’re in standard time.”

  Silence rested heavily on the air. Then, in an odd tone, Tyrus said, “We cleared the Transaturnine System about a half hour ago.”

  His face was remote now—his eyes trained on the ceiling.

  “Did you contact her already?”

  “I . . .” His pale lashes flickered. “Not yet.” He looked at me. “I thought we’d talk about it first.”

  “What is there to discuss?”

  “Well, we were gone a long time. We didn’t time our entrance with the gravity window—a short delay, and we might have missed it and been destroyed. They may think we’re dead.”

  “Yes. We’ll have the element of surprise on our side when we return.”

  I gathered the smooth sheets about me, noting the way his gaze automatically traced down the bare expanse of my leg where it had slipped out of the covers. Tyrus was so self-disciplined, so controlled, that there was something gratifying in these small moments of his where he reminded me that beneath it all, he was a nineteen-year-old boy who was entranced by me.

  Tyrus cupped my cheek with his broad palm , stroked my skin with his thumb. “I was caught up in just . . . just looking at you. And then I remembered—I have fallen behind on whatever narcotic I’d planned to use today to keep myself accustomed, and then a thought came to me: What if I didn’t bother?”

  I gazed at him blankly. If he didn’t wish to do it, he didn’t have to. He imposed that regimen on himself. No one else did.

  He gave a soft laugh and drew me closer, my weight resting entirely on him, the heat of his skin soaking into
mine. “What,” he said hoarsely, “if I never bothered doing that again because I never needed to do so again, because . . . because a year ago, the Emperor Tyrus von Domitrian vanished with his wife-to-be, and . . . and never returned.”

  I smiled at the absurdity of the idea, but his eyes remained deadly serious.

  “They think we are dead, Nemesis. If we want to, we can stay that way.” His fingers stroked my skin, his gaze distant. “I did it once before. Years ago. After my mother was slain, and I’d escaped her killers . . . I decided that I was sick of being a Domitrian so I tore out my identity chip. Bit it out, right then and there, and smashed it. Then I stowed away on a ship and just meant to disappear.”

  “You’ve never told me about this.”

  “I’ve never told anyone about this.” He spoke quietly. “You see, I had a father. ‘Father’ in the loosest definition, of course, since he was an Excess who hadn’t even known my mother chose his DNA for her offspring. I found him and I showed up at his door and finally met this red-haired man with a huge beard and freckled skin and he was just so . . . astoundingly ugly.”

  I laughed. “I can’t believe that.”

  “It’s true. He was dreadfully ugly,” insisted Tyrus with a grin. “I hadn’t seen enough of people without beauty bots. And Arion—that was his name—lived with too much sun, too much chemical exposure, too many fights.” He touched my own crooked nose lovingly, that relic of my own history of such skirmishes. “I meant to get him to claim me as a son so I could secure a new identity chip, but my very clever plan failed. Arion had a husband. He’d never been interested in women, so I couldn’t sell myself as a one-off of a forgotten lover. He learned who I was, because my Excess accent was terrible, and I slipped into the speech tones I have now, and he was spectacularly clever.”

  “That’s no surprise,” I said.

  “He learned I was a Domitrian. My family—if they found me there—would most likely kill the entirety of his family just for the crime of concealing me.”

  I rested my chin on his chest, knowing there could be no good outcome of this story, or I’d have heard him speak of Arion sooner.