22
I NEEDED OXYGEN. I was suffocating.
A low, droning sound filled the air.
My consciousness returned slowly, and I leaned my head back to escape the pressure on my throat, only to smack it against the wall, and then I was wide awake. A cold shaft of metal was looped about my throat, magnetically trapping me against the surface behind me. . . . My hand flew up, felt the contours of the clamp. A mobile restraint, the sort that was always handy on a starship.
My hands tugged at it.
It didn’t give. The ugly shock of realization registered in my mind just as the memory of how I’d gotten here spiraled back.
Neveni.
It was a trap.
We’d been trapped.
“Hello, Nemesis.”
My eyes shot toward the voice, and there he was: Senator von Pasus. Alive and on the Chrysanthemum, and that’s the moment the knowledge made my stomach plummet. Neveni had been compromised. He’d forced her to send me false information, or he’d done it himself, and . . . And he tilted his head with his blue eyes glittering maliciously.
“Are you weak in the knees at the sight of me?” Pasus said.
That’s when I realized why this magnetic clamp wasn’t giving. Why I felt strange and slow and swampy. Why there was a . . . noise on the air. Just below the buzz of lights, the churning of engines, the roar of oxygen vents . . . Something new. Something that didn’t belong.
The neural suppressor, I realized with an electric prickle of horror. It was there, embedded in my lower back, too dangerously placed to remove.
“Your fellow Diabolics told me of that suppressor,” remarked Pasus. “Remarkable instrument. That enormous one, Anguish, could be felled with one punch.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s been a great amusement for some Grandes to test themselves against a weakened Diabolic. I’ve made a tidy profit from it. And now . . . Here we are.”
Pasus. Here. Gazing down at me with icy blue eyes, his black hair to his chin now, grown with time. I tried to pull free again, though I knew now it would not happen.
“What do you want? Where’s Tyrus?” I knew this corridor. It was just outside the Emperor’s presence chamber. I’d fought Enmity to the death here.
“The Emperor is very close. Entirely unaware of my presence, if those fools have followed their instructions and occupied him with their silly complaints,” Pasus said, nodding toward the presence chamber.
“What are you going to do to him?” I demanded.
“Perhaps you should be more concerned for yourself.”
“Answer me!”
“I’ve been waiting for you a long time now. I was all set to exile myself when Devineé perished, and how furious I was to realize you had poisoned her. Yet you didn’t return. Nothing. So I waited. And waited a while more still. That Excess girl surfaced with news of what had happened and I could have laughed for an age to hear it. I had her abducted right off the planet, taken here so we could learn everything. Do you know how many people in this Empire know the truth of the Sacred City? I could count them on one, no, two hands.”
Sickness churned up within me.
“Luckily, I was one of them. So I claimed the Chrysanthemum.” He knelt down before me, and oh, if he’d just draw closer, so I could kick him . . . “How cleverly he played it, only to lose it all on one devastating mistake. My, I would pay a fortune to have seen the look on his face when he learned of the time dilation factor. I imagine he’ll wear a similar expression when I walk in there.”
I stared up at him, my heart slamming my rib cage, my focus narrowed upon his face. What did he plan? What would he do to Tyrus? To me? Why was I here, a prisoner, weakened, not dead?
“You don’t intend to kill me,” I realized.
Pasus straightened. “I would love nothing more than to strip the skin from your bones, Nemesis dan Impyrean. I doubt I could have resisted a year ago, but I have had time to think. You will be useful to me.” And then an odd look came over his face. He suddenly knelt down again, moved aside the collar of my tunic.
He’d glimpsed it, then. The Interdict’s mark. Just the top, but now he saw the concentric suns and his face paled with the realization the “beast” who killed his daughter was now blessed by the Interdict.
“It’s Nemesis Impyrean now,” I told him, my voice soft and deadly.
Pasus recoiled from me. “He can’t have,” he said.
“He did. I am beloved by your faith, Senator. Release me.”
Rage flared on his face. “You think that means anything? Do you, monster?”
“Your Interdict does.”
He stared at the mark with revulsion, betrayal, almost.
“Senator, release me. And whatever you’ve planned for Tyrus, abort the plan. The Interdict himself has—”
“Has desecrated the Living Cosmos,” spat Pasus. “As our last Domitrian has tried to desecrate our Empire. Not any longer. It stops here.”
My heart plunged. I gave a frantic tug at the clamp, but couldn’t free myself. “What are you planning, Pasus?”
He feasted his eyes upon my face, relishing my distress. “I entertained so many ideas about what I’d do to you to avenge Elantra. So many, Nemesis. And when your fellow Diabolics ended up in my hands, I set out to see what terrified them. What hurt them. What degraded and broke them. And do you know what I found?”
I didn’t venture a guess, just remained mulishly silent.
“They never feared anything. They never broke. All they did was stare at me with the same cold, dead eyes I see in your face, and that’s when I realized they were invulnerable. Vulnerability is too human. So I cannot hurt you.” Then he smiled. “But you do have one weakness. One you will never overcome. You are invulnerable to me, but that young Emperor in there? He is not. I can hurt him. And anything I do to him, you will feel five-fold. So live, Nemesis. And watch.”
I stared up at him in mute horror. He swiped his hand over the wall opposite me to flip on a viewing screen . . . a feed from the presence chamber.
And then he moved to leave me.
“No. Wait,” I said sharply, realizing he was trapping me here. Trapping me here to witness whatever was about to happen, and Tyrus on that screen was giving an impatient nod, and a move-along gesture as Wallstrom kept inserting herself back in front of him . . . babbling about something or other.
Helping Pasus. They were all helping Pasus.
“Pasus. PASUS!” I shouted at him, desperate not to be left here. . . . But he stepped through the door and there I was, helpless. Useless.
On the screen, I saw Pasus enter the chamber. The Grandiloquy about him fell silent. Tyrus noticed their fixed attention and turned with a smile—perhaps expecting me.
His smile disappeared as he saw Pasus too.