The Empress

  “I notice you haven’t asked me about today. Did you manage to eavesdrop?”

  A denial rose to my lips. Then at his teasing smile, I could not help but curve my lips.

  “I did. Neveni and I crawled into the ceiling. I believe we may be friends again.”

  “That’s great. What did she say?”

  “You want to know?”

  “I’m not demanding answers to questions,” he said lightly, “but I’m interested. She’s your friend. You don’t tell me about friends every day.”

  “Because I don’t have other friends.” I pressed my cheek to his shoulder and his arm swept me closer still, to rest my weight over his chest.

  “You can invite her to come back with us. She can visit as long as she wants. I’m sure she’d love to see the Hera.”

  “I don’t think Neveni will care for that. The truth is that she—”

  Then I heard a humming. A strange hum. I pressed a finger to his lips, for he hadn’t heard it yet. Then it grew louder, and he heard it too. About us, the chamber began to vibrate, then rattle.

  Only for a moment were we both frozen there. He launched himself to his feet and rushed across the chamber to look out the window.

  “Something’s about to happen,” he shouted to me over the noise. “I think it’s overhead!”

  A dim thought flickered forward in my mind about strange phenomena that took place on planets like this—hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes. . . . But I didn’t believe for a second in coincidences. My mind flew over the exits I’d noticed, and the building’s design. We were on the top floor. Three stories. Then the humming mounted to a clamor that resounded through my bones, and I knew the sound: a starship.

  I launched myself at Tyrus, seized him, and dragged him under the heavy brass desk just as a great blast of light tore open the roof above us.

  An onrush of searing heat. There, a starship loomed overhead, blotting out the stars, and Tyrus and I were already moving through the chamber, which looked now like a mountain of flaming, ashen debris. I urged Tyrus with me, counting on my superior strength if he resisted. He didn’t. He stumbled along to keep up with me, but another blast didn’t follow. Through the stinging in my eyes I saw the starship’s bottom door opening, spilling people in respirators and rubber suits into the flaming structure. . . .

  They had flashlights and scanners, and I could tell they were looking for something.

  Someone.

  I knew who it was they sought.

  Pasus had been clever to attack this way. He couldn’t have slipped armed people into this building designed to neutralize weapons. Instead he’d brought a ship down right from space to blast open the roof and take what he wished. We ducked down low and stumbled through the burning corridor. Tyrus tugged my arm so we swerved into a busted room.

  There I saw her: the Successor Primus of the Empire crouched on the ground, hands over her head, screaming mindlessly.

  Tyrus and I exchanged a glance. He moved to grab her, but I shouldered him aside and did it instead. I was stronger. I could move faster. I seized Devineé and hauled her up. She was the only one of us Pasus wouldn’t kill. The closer we kept her, the better.

  Choking black flames rose in the air, and Tyrus kept his hand on my shoulder so we wouldn’t lose each other as we scrambled forward. A man in a respirator appeared amid the smoke, blade in hand. He aimed a slash at me and I shoved Devineé into his path. He averted his blow, only to receive my fist across his face.

  Tyrus caught Devineé before she could fall, but more flames sprouted nearby and silhouettes of Pasus’s people darted toward us.

  We couldn’t do this. We had to escape.

  They wanted her?

  She’d swallowed the Vigilant’s Bane. Let them have her.

  I kicked her away from us deliberately, where they could see her fall, and then grabbed Tyrus and fled.

  He resisted only a second before survival trumped his misgivings about abandoning her.

  We made it out of the building just as the great black shadow of the starship rose over the roof, and then it fired its cannon to finish off the compound.

  The noise swelled, impossibly loud now, like a mallet striking my bones as I sprawled over Tyrus. I couldn’t hear my own cry of pain as agony lanced through my ears, rattling my skull until it threatened to crack.

  A hot, invisible wall slammed into us, and the ground disappeared, my vision going dark with the dust and debris that choked my lungs, my skin nipped by the tiny bites of shattered glass. Then we crashed to the ground, our bodies crammed together as the building collapsed above us. I covered Tyrus as best as I could, my eyes squeezed shut, rancid air scorching my lungs.

  On all sides, all sides, we were trapped.

  And Tyrus wasn’t moving at all.

  12

  MY HEAD CLEARED, though it spun with every movement. I tried to rise, couldn’t. Chunks of granite, something crushing my leg. With a scream of rage, I twisted, I arched my torso, shifting the weight above us until it rolled off, and then with a great heave with all my strength, freed us. A lance of a bright searchlight from rescue drones soared in toward us. One of the moons was rising.

  I knelt over Tyrus, shook him. “Tyrus!” I couldn’t hear my own voice.

  His eyes opened, unfocused, and then locked on me. He was alive.

  My ears buzzed. Tyrus and I just clutched hands as bots filled the sky. The Luminar disaster force cleared aside the rest of the debris and tangled wiring, clearing a path for us to escape.

  A medical bot soared in and tended to Tyrus and then me—and the great buzzing in my ears receded. Then, still ragged and stunned by our escape, we were lifted together by one of the rescue drones, deposited out into safety. The sky had gathered a purple light.

  Tyrus and I surveyed each other. He was coated with dust, a dark gash leaking blood from his cheek. His blue eyes struggled to focus, and then they did, and his thumb traced the line of my jaw.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  I nodded, thinking of Devineé.

  She was dead, or Pasus had her. Either way, he would not have a bride very soon.

  “I know you didn’t want it to go this way,” I told Tyrus. “But I had to give her to them. They wouldn’t have left.” And it was a price I was willing to pay. For our lives, I’d throw her away gladly. Let her die if it would save us.

  “I have to try to get her back.”

  “I know.”

  He could try. I didn’t stop him when he lurched to his feet, stumbling a bit with the movement.

  “I didn’t see this coming,” he admitted to me raggedly. “Well. No. I did expect it—but not this soon. Not nearly this soon.” The realization seemed to shake him.

  “We will survive it. Go do what you must. I’m all right.”

  He jerked an unsteady nod, and Domitrian servants and employees were about us now. As Tyrus departed, I waved away those tending to me, trying to wipe the dirt from my face, my hands. My gaze lifted to the vibrant purple sky, bright enough to bite my eyes now. Could I have seen this coming? Had Pasus’s negotiations always been disingenuous, or . . .

  I’d never anticipated he would strike so soon, so decisively. I should have seen this coming too.

  • • •

  Tyrus had a little over eight hundred minutes to recover Devineé. That, according to the Luminars, was the length of time required for a vessel to move from the planet to a safe hyperspace transition point. To save her, she had to be seized before then—or she was gone.

  Pasus hadn’t acted alone. He’d rounded up staunch Helionics to act in tandem with him. Senator von Locklaite, who’d accompanied us to Lumina in the Ironheart, turned her vessel on the other ships and fired wildly upon every Domitrian starship in orbit before zipping out of range of their weapons.

  And Senator von Aton clearly decided he could have other children, for he did the same—and left a trail of automated mines in his wake that latched themselves onto any pursuing s
hips.

  As a consequence, all vessels but the sturdy, powerful asteroid ship, the Hera, were in need of maintenance.

  An outside observer might think Tyrus was drugged with something calming, as the news trickled in. Bit by bit, his Empire was slipping away from him, with a faction forming around Pasus and his soon-to-be wife, Devineé Domitrian. That outsider wouldn’t know there was already a ticking clock counting down the hours of her life, ready to extinguish Pasus’s civil war in its birth pangs.

  I said not a word to Tyrus of what I knew must follow.

  The petite, blond woman, Senator von Wallstrom, did. “What of the Aton boy?”

  “Gladdic?” Tyrus said. “No. We’re not executing him. Not . . . yet.”

  I gazed at Tyrus’s back, since he was counting on time to solve the problem. Yet I knew something: Gladdic had to be killed, and killed now, as a direct response to his father’s defection. To do anything else meant presenting Tyrus as a paper tiger for the rest of his reign. No one would fear his threats.

  Instead I contacted Neveni. “Where is Gladdic being kept?”

  She hesitated before answering me. “Right here with me, Nemesis. I . . .” She glanced back over her shoulder. Gladdic had to be in the house with her. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I think he understands the situation. He knows what has to follow.” Anger flashed over her face. “His father just threw him away.”

  Apparently.

  But it fell to me to make certain of it.

  While Tyrus saw remotely to a pursuit of Senator von Pasus’s vessel, the Colossus, I quietly slipped away from the Luminar handlers assigned to me.

  There weren’t a great many Helionics on this planet, so the single heliosphere was just outside the capital city, a small, sad thing on stilts to approximate the expansive view one might obtain from a heliosphere in space. The moon’s orbit was swift, and it had set—and the sun hadn’t risen, nor had the second moon. It was true night.

  Neveni was sprawled on the steps of the staircase leading up to the heliosphere.

  I threw an urgent look around. “Neveni, are you the only one guarding him?”

  “It’s Gladdic,” Neveni said, as though that was an explanation. I felt the weight of her gaze in the dimness. “So you’re really going to do it. You’re going to just kill him.”

  “You have a dozen more hostages who aren’t related to Grandiloquy who just betrayed us. You can forfeit one.”

  “I know. It’s just . . . You know Gladdic.” She was searching my face, this girl who’d known only my facade, who’d only begun to see me as I actually was.

  I withdrew a blade, one sharp enough to make this swift. “It’s necessary to send a message. His father defected to Pasus. He chose this. I didn’t.” She was silent a moment. There was a smell drifting on the air, something sweet and fragrant that I picked up over the acrid scent of Luminar streets.

  “It’s strange how easy it is to forget you aren’t the person I knew,” she murmured. “I think that’s why I felt most angry with you afterward. Because I missed what was right before my eyes. I missed more than anyone else did.”

  That smell, the sweet smell, some sort of flower . . . It nagged at me. “I’m not cruel, Neveni. This isn’t something I’ll enjoy. If we don’t kill him, not only will Tyrus be known as a weakling unable to follow through on his own threats, but your people lose any leverage they’ve gained from the lives of the hostages because you will be doubted as well. You should thank me. Not condemn me for this.”

  “I’m not condemning,” she said tonelessly. “I know what’s happened today. Pasus has openly moved on the Emperor. He’s a traitor. His holdings are forfeit. Including Lumina.”

  I nodded. Including Lumina.

  “Which Tyrus will free.”

  “I’m sure he already has. He won’t be your enemy. That doesn’t mean other powerful people won’t plot against your planet. They will fight your independence.” I held up the blade. “And this is how you’ll need to keep it.”

  She met my eyes. “Would you rather I killed him, then?”

  The words surprised me, but searching her face, I grew certain she’d do it if I asked her. For Lumina, she’d commit a murder. I shook my head. “I’m very good at this.”

  I started up the stairs, the blade in hand. When I reached the top, I found Gladdic Aton sitting on the floor in the farthest reaches of the dull glass chamber. He’d lit a chalice of oil to lend him a flickering golden light, and he didn’t move even though his ears had to pick up my entrance. His hair was coming out of its usual golden wraps, and he looked delicate against the view sweeping before him: those crowded Luminar buildings, and beyond, the bare countryside leading up to black mounds of hills.

  No, not hills. Those were small things.

  Mountains.

  “I know what you’re here to do,” Gladdic said in a wavering voice. “Can we please . . . If you don’t mind, can we wait for twenty minutes?”

  “Why twenty minutes?”

  He whipped around, surprised that it was my voice. “Sidon . . . Nemesis?”

  I nodded. He’d been infatuated with me once, because he’d believed I was Sidonia. I’d attempted to feign interest in him when I posed as her. Then I saw him for the sniveling weakling he was and cast him away. He hadn’t been worthy of her.

  Now I walked toward him, and his eyes latched onto my crooked nose—as though my stature weren’t enough to give away who I was. There weren’t many natural-born women as tall as I was. He darted one quick glance at the blade in my hand, swallowed hard and averted his gaze.

  “In twenty minutes, the sun will begin to rise. Even at night here, the atmosphere is too thick to see the stars. But I can gaze upon one star when you . . . when I die.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  And so I settled just behind Gladdic, blade in hand, to wait out the twenty minutes until I killed him.

  13

  THE ONLY SOUND was the frantic, quick rasp of Gladdic’s breathing in the heliosphere. He didn’t move, but he was in terror. He’d seemed calm upon my arrival, but as we ticked down to the last minutes, his breathing rasped, his body trembled visibly. I sat behind him ready to spring if he panicked, if he fled. My idle gaze roved the heliosphere and determined all the weapons he could seize and deploy on me. The best was that chalice of burning oil.

  I would overcome him and kill him, whatever he did, but I expected him to fight.

  Yet he did not.

  “Aren’t you at least going to try to run away?” I wondered. “Or fight me?”

  “There’d be no point.”

  “Of course not, but you’re dead one way or another. I’d try.”

  He let out a shuddering sigh, and I saw his chalice was burning the last of its oil. “I know this is how it works. My father always found me disappointing. He wouldn’t mourn long. I . . . I don’t blame you. Or the Emperor. Don’t feel guilty.”

  “I won’t,” I said, perplexed.

  Before us, the midnight black sky lightened to a deep purple. A brilliant orange line snaked across the horizon. My gaze had been fixed on Gladdic’s back, but the sight captured my attention. The dark purple grew to a brilliant purple edged with clouds of brightest pink and orange, and the golden orange over the mountains grew larger, burnishing the mountains gold.

  A star as those ancient humans must have seen it. All the trees between us and the horizon, all those peaks, seemed to gleam, and the mountains grew dimension and form wherever the brilliant starlight set them alight.

  Planets were stifling and dirty and crawling with viruses and microorganisms; the skies were open to any true threat from space, and their inhabitants were so vulnerable without realizing it. I reminded myself of this, and yet there was some very primitive part of me, perhaps something of the humanity that had never been removed from my genetic code, that made my skin prickle in a wondrous way to see this star through atmosphere. This was a sight that should remain in Gladdic’s eyes as I killed him. This w
as the time to strike.

  My muscles wouldn’t seem to move.

  If he didn’t die now, Tyrus would seem weak. His bluff had been called, and all his bluffs would be called from now on, so better to kill Gladdic than to stay my hand and face more opponents later.

  Gladdic had begun to tremble. He knew any moment, any moment . . . The goblet at his side had burned out.

  He accepted what I had to do. This was our universe, the way it worked. This was our Empire, the system, the order. Tyrus sought to change so much of it, but the fundamentals of life and death were always going to remain. The bonds of lovers, of parent and child, and those were such potent weapons that had to be used at times like now. Aton had allied with Pasus in full knowledge we held his son. He knew he’d forfeited Gladdic. He must not be spared this consequence.

  “By the stars, what are you waiting for?” Gladdic said, suddenly breaking into tears. He buried his head in his hands.

  I rose to my feet soundlessly, twined my hand in his hair, and yanked his head back to expose his throat. One quick slash. One I’d delivered so many times.

  Yet I found myself looking outward again, for it was difficult when enshrouded in endless darkness, the stars such distant things, to comprehend it all . . . to understand what tiny beings we all were. There was an odd melancholy washing over me, as though for a second I’d stepped back from behind my eyes to glimpse something I’d never once noticed. How fleeting our lives were, not even a blink to the universe. I’d believed an atmosphere confining, but I saw now the richness of it, the oddity of having taken for granted that this perspective was totally insignificant.

  All I’d seen the first years of my life had been the force field about me, the walls of the corrals, never the sky, and perhaps that had all been deliberate. That honed one’s focus into a blade, narrowed one’s perception until all that mattered was the heartbeat in my chest, which required ending the heartbeat in theirs. . . .