30
TYRUS WOULD PASS the evening on Senator von Vanderfuld’s starship, the Zeppelin, and the plan was simple: I would enter the vessel from the outside, bringing a space-sheath for him with me. At my signal, Neveni would tear the Hera straight from its moorings, we’d use the space-sheaths to board the ship, and then we would flee.
Neveni was skeptical: “I really wish we could have more time to plan.”
“We don’t,” I said flatly.
Tomorrow was the eve of our wedding. I was desperate.
This had to work.
My careful glide through the void toward the Zeppelin took nearly an hour. I held my breath every time a shadow stirred in a window near me, fearing the wrong pair of eyes might glimpse me. But I made it.
No one thought to lock their ship from the exterior. I tugged open the Zeppelin’s air lock, thrust myself inside, and then the trickiest part proved prying open the space-sheath with the strength of a regular girl.
I stepped out into the corridor just as one of the Zeppelin’s service bots hummed past. Yet—no alarm. Why would it react to the sight of me? I was just another person. Another bot swept past with a tray of narcotics, and I followed it down the corridor until doors parted for it, revealing a glimpse of laughing, chattering Grandiloquy. I plastered myself against the wall, out of sight, until those doors slid shut again.
All were still awake and about. I had to wait them out . . . assuming Tyrus was among them.
But of course he was. One didn’t bribe Pasus for the Emperor and then fail to exhibit him at a party. So I needed a position where I could wait without attracting attention, where I could hide and keep an eye on him until the party concluded.
My gaze strayed upward toward the ventilation shaft. If I could get up there . . . Indecision gripped me until a Servitor wandered toward me, heading in the direction of the same chamber.
I stopped him. His glassy eyes both aimed at me and did not focus, in that swampy, empty way Servitors always seemed to look at you.
“Hold this position,” I ordered him. I arranged his hands together, stepped onto them, and then climbed up onto his shoulders. My balance, at least, was still as good as a Diabolic’s.
I shoved open the panel, then gripped the edge of the shaft and . . . and I couldn’t do a single pull-up to get myself into it. This was ridiculous! Were people truly this weak?
To the Servitor, I said breathlessly, “Put your hands straight into the air.”
He raised them both, and with that boost, I shoved myself into the shaft. I began to ease the panel back down, but the creature was still standing there with his hands straight up.
Ban Servitors, I’d told Tyrus.
If only we’d done that much.
“Now go where you were going,” I told him. He began to walk, and I hissed, “And put your hands to your sides!”
The hands fell back at his sides, and I closed the shaft at last.
• • •
Once I’d made it to the grate above the reception chamber I’d glimpsed from outside, the voices reached me. Inane chatter. Eight people. The scent of a narcotic crystal, something sweet. The slightest glimpse that way, and I could see the flash of the Servitor who’d come in before me, now being manhandled, enduring it with the empty expression he’d worn with his arms in the air.
A lone, clumsy thump of footprints, and then there was Tyrus, moving through the corridor into the chamber just below me. My heart raced, but I dared not ease myself down.
Wait until he has retired for the night. It must happen.
A voice: “Your Supremacy.”
“I’m ill,” Tyrus responded. “Leave me in peace.”
“I’ll fetch a med bot.” Following him into the chamber was a disheveled Senator von Vanderfuld. Tyrus threw off the hand his host had settled on his arm.
“Leave me be for a few minutes,” Tyrus snapped. “Can I not have a minute away from your lot?”
Vanderfuld stepped back, and then I saw Senator von Aton join him. The two men inclined their heads toward each other. Aton murmured for Vanderfuld’s hearing—and unwittingly, for mine, “Alectar did tell us all to be mindful: he is an Emperor, but he is also newly twenty. Some moodiness is expected.”
“But my guests will get restless,” Vanderfuld said to Aton. “Should I use the Venalox . . . my son is the same age.”
“No. Hold off on the dose. Leave me to speak with him,” Aton said.
Vanderfuld retreated. My gaze focused sharply between the lines of the grate as Aton considered Tyrus, and then cleared his throat loudly to announce his presence.
I angled myself to try to catch a glimpse and saw Tyrus leaning both hands against a podium holding a bust. In fact, the chamber was filled with them, bronze heads of . . . of dead Domitrian royalty.
I stared at the empty bronze eyes of Randevald as Aton said, “A fine likeness, isn’t it?” He nodded to the podium.
Tyrus sighed, weighed it in his hand. “I knew her well, Horatio.”
“Excuse me?”
Tyrus just shook his head, setting the bust back down. I glimpsed whose head it was.
The realization made me start. His grandmother. The Grandeé Cygna.
“It feels as though she is in here with us, watching us,” Aton said.
“Oh, you’d know if she could see through these eyes,” Tyrus said bitterly. “We would never hear the end of her laughter.”
“I was very fond of your grandmother. She was most clever—though not so generous as Your Supremacy. I never did thank you for the Tigris. Such a bountiful gift,” Aton was murmuring.
“Yes,” Tyrus said shortly. “I am continually astonished to discover my own expansive generosity.”
“I have considered renaming it in your honor.”
“The Ozymandias, then. A fine name.”
“Ah, I fear I do not know the reference. I am not so inclined toward perusing those old books as you are. I know you quite enjoy them. The most interesting feature of the Tigris,” Aton said, a sly note in his voice, “is surely the surveillance archives.”
Silence.
From where I observed them, suspicion stirred within me. I’d never liked Gladdic’s father. What was he up to? For his part, Tyrus did not move for a long moment. Then, “Senator, I vastly prefer you delete the logs.”
“Your Supremacy, I assure you that I am discreet. I’ve no intention of exhibiting them. Such insights I have gleaned from them! I understand you better, Tyrus. I know just how vexing this entire situation must be.”
“Do you.”
“No time to yourself. Always used as the entertainment. So many powerful men seek to invert that in their private lives, but not you. I respect that.”
“What,” Tyrus said, rigid, “is it you want from me, Senator?”
“I am offering to help you.” And Aton produced a phial. Tyrus’s posture grew rigid. He couldn’t know the raw, unquenched need for it all over his face—because he would have been desperate to hide it. “We might keep this between us: I have obtained the chemical recipe. You needn’t rely only on Alectar. Won’t that be a relief? An occasional reprieve from scraping and pleading when he wishes to withhold from you?”
Tyrus’s face twisted. “What’s the price for this?”
Aton took a step back, another, and Tyrus trailed him with sharp, watchful eyes that never left the phial. “I want to invite you to my starship. Once, twice a week, perhaps, if it can be contrived. And when you are there, I will have nothing to do with you. Would you have any use for such a thing?”
Tyrus didn’t answer. He knew—and I knew—that Aton was still angling for something. This was a hard sell and he had yet to demand his price. But something passed over Tyrus, and he pressed his hands over his face. “I just wish I could sleep.”
“Sleep?”
“I am so tired. All the time, I am tired. It may be the Venalox, or it may not be. I am never at liberty to sleep when I wish, or so long as I wish and I just . . . Senator, name your price. You’ve drawn it out long enough that I am growing certain it is dreadful. If all you desired was my presence on your ship, you’d speak to Pasus.”
“No, you don’t understand. My price is not dreadful by any means. All I seek is what I’ve asked for: visits to the Tigris. And I would like you to bring your . . . future wife with you.”
Silence.
Tyrus’s hands dropped from his face. He just stared at him.
“I have watched her in your surveillance archives, and in the ball dome, and I am entirely bewitched. If you tell her to accompany you.”
“Are. You. Insane?” Tyrus’s voice seemed calm. But there was a deadly rage in the words. “You must be. You must be utterly mad. You think I would ever . . .” Tyrus stopped. Then, “No. A thousand times, no! Delete those archives and put those thoughts from your head!”
Aton had abandoned any shade of deference, his tone sour. “Surely Your Supremacy realizes denial only strengthens one’s ardor. Now I must insist. I came to you as a courtesy, but you are correct—I have the means to circumvent you entirely. I needn’t ask you, or even ask her. . . .”
Tyrus swept up Cygna’s bronze bust and slammed it into Aton’s skull. The movement was so abrupt, even I didn’t understand what I was watching for a moment as the next and the next plunge of Tyrus’s arm and the sickening thuds that followed split Aton’s head open. . . .
Voices from the next chamber, partygoers pouring in, then screams.
My mind snapped back to action and I gripped the edges of the shaft. It was all I could do not to tear it open and fling myself down there.
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. My hands felt like claws as I forced them to open, as I forced myself back. Below me, Tyrus pummeled Aton’s head long after it had been reduced to a mass of blood and pulp. There were horrified onlookers ringing them, but none dared approach. When Tyrus finally took notice of them, his tunic was smeared with blood in a surreal pattern.
He straightened, rubbed clean his grandmother’s bloodied bust, and set her back on her podium. Then he swiped up the fallen phial of Venalox and settled by the window to use it like nothing had happened.
Deathly silence descended. He’d ended the party.
I closed my eyes in the ventilation shaft. All I could hear now was my own breath in the air as my plans for rescue died away. I had no choice but to wait it out as people swarmed the ship, and then Pasus himself came, sending the others away with a gruff voice.
“Well, now you’ve done it, Tyrus.”
“Have I?”
“That man and I have shared a half century of friendship. You know the consequences.” Then, in a louder voice—so a servant lurking near the door could hear him—“Fetch Nemesis. Bring her here.”
My heart gave a lurch. They’d go to the Hera. I wasn’t there. Neveni was.
I debated throwing fate to the wind, plunging down there . . . But Tyrus just chuckled. “Alectar, you won’t hurt her.” His voice was slightly thick with intoxication, but his words were clearer than they usually were immediately after use of the substance.
“I’ve told you any violence on your part will be met with violence against her!” thundered Pasus. “She will lose a limb. I am tempted to take two. . . .”
“Aton was not your friend,” Tyrus said. “Would a true ally give me this?”
Silence. I peeked down to see Pasus had taken the empty phial of Venalox, the one Aton had gone behind his back to slip to his Emperor. “I trust this buys immunity from consequences.”
Silence. Then, “Yes.” And after another second, “This time.”
“A half century of friendship. You were truly fond of him, weren’t you?” Tyrus’s whisper was mock sympathetic, filled with poison. “Such treachery. How cruel the universe can be.”
Indeed.
The universe was cruel. Tyrus had secured me a reprieve from paying the price for his violence, but he’d also ended any chance I had of removing us from this cage altogether. He’d be too closely watched tonight for me to sneak him away.
My eyes sank closed. My head throbbed.
One more day of liberty, and then the next day, that liberty ended. We would be married, Pasus would have the Hera, and I saw no way out.