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 ships.
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.