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 hadn’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.
“Despite all of that,” Tyrus murmured, “Arion ended up letting me stay. I was there almost a year. I might’ve passed my life there.”
My breath caught. “The malignant space?”
He closed his eyes. “The Excess on that planet honestly believed they could . . . just solve it themselves. They wouldn’t evacuate. They embargoed information from the planet, and that meant they risked delaying a proper evacuation force until it was too late for anyone to reach them. It was ludicrous and they didn’t understand it. And how could I explain to them that they were making a mistake? I was a kid. The Grandiloquy looked at me as a Domitrian above all, but to the Excess, age matters. A child is insignificant, a creature to be reassured by meaningless words and sweet candy and hugs. They were all going to die and I couldn’t get them to see otherwise.”
“They truly believed they would solve a problem the entirety of the Empire had not?”
“They had no perspective,” Tyrus said. “Most hadn’t even left the atmosphere of that planet. The scale of this Empire can’t be understood unless one has seen it. I knew how much effort had disappeared into studying and fixing that monster in their sky, but they didn’t. And when it became absolutely clear there was no convincing them to see it my way, I had to . . . I had to call my uncle and tell him I was alive.”
“Oh.”
And that’s what he’d done. Tyrus had told his Domitrian family where to find him. The Empire then had to have learned of that planet’s situation, and evacuated it.
“And your father?” I said.
He shook his head.
Of course Arion hadn’t survived. Randevald and Cygna would have no mercy with Excess who dared to hide a Domitrian from them.
“Maybe we’ve done enough,” Tyrus said quietly. “The Interdict is training his vicars. He will make certain his decree is widely known. Maybe this is the solution I vowed to pursue. Perhaps we are done.”
I slipped out of the covers and sifted through his clothing and the lump beneath it all: the box with the Interdict’s decree. The restoration of the sciences. The goal Tyrus had sought his entire life, the justification for outliving so many others.
There were a great many ways we could get this out there and known to the galaxy without returning.
“Where would we go?” I asked him.
He was staring at the box. “We wait for the next gravital window and then we aim for the black hole. It wouldn’t take long for us. A few months. The key is, we stay somewhere we won’t end up torn apart.”
A few months outside of time and we could leave it all behind us. What a strange thought.
I could do it. All I’d leave was Neveni, but she likely believed me dead, and had moved on already. I could shed this present with ease. This starship had value. We could sell it, or use it, and live quite well, I assumed. . . .
Then I regarded Tyrus, and grew very certain he couldn’t do this.
Not the way I could.
I tightened my grip about the box with the decree. He’d secured it. The first step toward vindication. But this was a decree, and it needed an enforcer. The Interdict was a well-learned man of theories, not one who oversaw their application. If we abandoned this galaxy and entered the future, only to find no one had solved this . . . Tyrus would never be at peace again.
Even if malignant space was fixed, he wouldn’t live with his own defection. No. Not Tyrus. I knew him too well. Everything we saw that was wrong—for there was always something wrong—he would see as his own failing. He would see it as something he’d allowed when he’d washed his hands of this responsibility.
The conviction welled up within me, because I knew this, even if he didn’t realize it.
So I would refuse this, and take the burden of refusal out of his hands.
He was afraid of what awaited us. The unknown we would soon confront. I would be his strength.
“No, we can’t leave,” I said, crossing back over to him, letting him draw me down into his arms. “Not because it isn’t tempting”—my hand stroked over the plane of his cheek—“but because this isn’t you. What of the imbalance between the Excess and the Grandiloquy? What of the stagnation of this Empire?”
“Someone else will fix it. Someone always does.”
“Yes, someone like you comes and fixes it. So that is what you’ll do. We go back, we do whatever we must to survive, and then we do exactly what we planned. Whatever happens, we’ll face it.”
He was silent a long moment, my words sinking in. Then his lips grazed my bare shoulder. “One condition, then. We contact Sagnau—but only after you tell me what it is you want from this.”
“What I want?”
He reached over for the scepter, left lying across the bedside table. “This,” he said to me, “is a lifelong commitment. It’s more final than any marriage. You will exist as public property, with demands that never cease even when you are tired, even when you grow old, and there is no getting away from it once it begins. Tell me what you want to do as this galaxy’s Empress. Give it thought before you get trapped in this role for good.”
I plucked the scepter from his hands and considered it. The device was a warm weight, resting in my hand, the jewels winking in the starlight.
This should have been an easier question to answer: what did I wish to do as Empress of this galaxy? I’d always wrapped my thoughts in his own visions. And before him, in Donia’s. Had I given thought to my own desires?
Yet . . . I did have one dream. There was something I wanted. The realization ripped through my mind.
“I want to ban Servitors.”
The words were in the air, and then I knew this was something I could do that was profoundly right. Excitement drove me upright. “Tyrus, they do nothing that can’t be done by a service bot. They can’t even save their own lives. We saw your uncle order one to skin herself alive, and she . . . that pitiful girl did it. How can Grandiloquy ever see creatures as anything but worthless when they have Servitors about them their entire lives?”
Tyrus looked inward. “They learn to devalue others from them.”
“Yes.”
“The Excess despise them too.”
“Yes.” I gripped his chin. “That’s what you can do for me.” Then, I realized, “No, it’s what I can do. That’s what I want to do. For everyone. And not just Servitors. Harmonids. Creatures, Tyrus. Humanoid creatures. We put a stop to them all.”
“I swear that we will,” Tyrus vowed. His mouth found mine, and I met him with an insistent, eager kiss, the heady anticipation of what lay ahead for us blinding me to any lingering fears.
And only then, only then, did we let Neveni know we were still alive.