48
I WAS out of my seat, but the lack of gravity nearly sent me hurtling upward. My hand flew to the ceiling of the box to anchor me in place. The entire rest of the universe seemed to be teetering.
“Sit back down,” said Tyrus.
“I will not,” I said furiously. “You are going to kill him.”
“Yes. I am.”
“You can’t do this.”
“I disagree. Why thermite?”
I didn’t speak.
“Gladdic looked it up after your conversation. Strange inquiry. I noticed. Then I sifted through all the surveillance of his recent hours and saw what put that word into his vocabulary. Tell me, do you know what thermite is? I recall mentioning it to you—in a specific context. And how did you intend to get the scepter? Chop off my arm?”
“I . . . Tyrus, no . . .”
“It’s not there anymore. It’s tiny but it felt rather like a long metal splinter. I had it taken out.” He pulled out a case for a vapor rod, but I drew in a sharp breath to see him extract the familiar sliver of metal. “You wished to destroy this scepter.”
I stared at it. The neural suppressor was off. I’d seen already he could deactivate it in a thought—so I suspected the reverse was likely. Otherwise I’d tear the scepter from his hands and destroy it any way I could. “Yes. Yes, I did.”
“To what end?”
“I’d break your hold over this place.”
“To leave me defenseless before my enemies?” With a twist of his lips, a bite in his voice, “Again?”
“No. No, I meant to spirit you away. By force if it were required. I shouldn’t have given it to you. Look what you are doing with this power. Look outside! Look at all the absent faces! And Gladdic . . . He’s innocent. He didn’t even agree to help me!”
“No,” roared Tyrus, “he didn’t agree—and I would care about that if I gave a damn about him, but I don’t. This is entirely about you. Stars ignite, Nemesis, you are the single person I never expected to betray me!”
“This was for you.”
“Don’t you dare,” he warned me. “You once made a very important decision on my behalf that I never agreed to. I’ve had to live with the consequences for years. That is never going to happen again. The unilateral decisions are all mine. I may love you far too much to hurt you for this, but Gladdic von Aton has no such claim. He dies. Watch it happen, and know that this will be repeated with anyone, Nemesis—anyone—you try to use against me. As for the scepter?”
He looked at it, and with a disdainful flick of his wrist, sent it sailing forward, spinning through the air. A pair of security bots abruptly zipped down and sliced their lasers at it. My every muscle jerked, but the steady beams of the lasers melted the supercomputer.
“There you go. It is destroyed.” He waved his hand and the bots departed, and my stomach dropped.
He still commands them.
“The scepter fires up a link. That’s all. Then it waits until I’m dead so it can link another. Now, I’ve melted it, so there is never going to be another Domitrian to claim it.” He leaned back in his seat, a silent, dispassionate challenge on his face. “Tell me, my love, do you wish to break open my skull? Killing me is the only way you end this now.”
“No,” I breathed. “I wanted to take the power from you so I could save you.”
His eyes flashed unpleasantly. “I’ve seen your idea of saving me, and I’ll have none of it. Not ever again. There is no going back. All we can do is move forward.” Then his gazed dropped, releasing me from the chokehold of his scrutiny. “I hope I’ve made my wishes clear. We needn’t ever do this again.”
“We needn’t do this today. I . . . Tyrus, I see what you are trying to tell me. Let him go. Please.” I stared down at the dancers, my heart pounding. “This isn’t you. Don’t you see, none of this is you? Nova blast me, you killed thousands of people yesterday and that gives you no pause?”
“I acted out of necessity. I won’t apologize.”
“You created malignant space! Malignant space, Tyrus. All you once cared about was fixing that!”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yes. I did. I decided upon it when I had the simplistic mind of a child. I’ve accepted now that the universe has no design, no meaning, no arc toward justice.”
“You will enforce justice!”
“Children seek fairness,” he shot back. “I sought out that Excess man I knew to be my father, and then I despised myself for leading the wolves to his door. He died because I’d been forced to tell my uncle that he’d been hiding me. That haunted me. I made sense of it by trying to rationalize the tragedy as one step toward greater good. How much easier, to blame a simple natural phenomenon for destroying it all—rather than to realize my father was a fool who brought his death on himself.”
I stared at him.
“They all did. Those Excess who stayed on that planet, knowing what was coming, deluding themselves into thinking they would stop it. . . . I told Arion. I told him, and I wept, and he hugged me. He reassured me it was all going to be fine, and little idiot that I was, I let myself be lulled by his words. It was intoxicating to feel protected.”
“That . . . that wasn’t foolish, Tyrus. You were never allowed to be a child.” Neither of us had been.
“I nearly destroyed myself again seeing this galaxy like one!” he said bitterly. “Do you know what I would do in that situation now, Nemesis? I would blow up their oxygen tanks, their water supplies, their granaries. Then if they still refused to leave, I would strand them there to meet the fate they’d chosen. I’ve wasted enough time raging against the wind.”
“Tyrus, you don’t hear yourself. You don’t see yourself—”
“You’re the one who isn’t seeing,” he said, suddenly frustrated. He surged out of his seat and floated toward me, planting his arms on either side of me. “You say I committed an atrocity? Well, I would do it again. I may do it again. Because I may have to. I created malignant space. Yes. All that time I devoted to stopping it was a waste! The ability to destroy a star system is a superweapon, and I could do so much with that in my arsenal! And you”—he had fury in his eyes—“have no grounds to condemn me for this. Once you would have done this in my place!”
“You have no remorse about what you’ve done! That gives you no pause?”
He gave a wild laugh. “Of course I have none. I have passed years waiting for this. To see the malignant space I created devour my foes . . . That was a time of sweet and glorious ecstacy the likes of which I have never experienced. If their terror in those dying moments was a draft, I would drink of it deep and never tire of the flavor. Why would I feel the slightest remorse?”
I couldn’t look away from him. He had to be saying this to make his point, to rub it in. Surely he couldn’t mean this.
“Now, it’s all over,” he said. “It’s done. We are safe. We are secure. We will only stay that way if we move forward as I plan, so that’s what we’ll do. If today I must kill an innocent man so you never seek another to use against me, I will do it. I’ll do it gladly.”
“And is my distress another draft you could imbibe without quenching your thirst?” I said quietly.
His hand flew up and for a disbelieving moment, I thought he’d strike me. But his shaking palm hovered just next to my jaw, and did not touch. “I love you to the very depths of my soul,” Tyrus noted quietly, “and sometimes I truly hate you for that.” Then with a push of his arms, he propelled himself away from me, and dropped back toward his seat.
I stayed there with my back to the wall. This was how it would be. This would set the tone for everything going forward. If I accepted this, I had to accept everything.
He meant to leave me no choice but to accept it.
The dance was entering its final act, and I could see that Gladdic had finally been granted freedom of movement. He arched his legs to drive himself as far as possible from the people he knew would soon try to kill him, panic blazing on his face.
He had to know there was no escape.
I stared down at Gladdic. Soft, weak, well-meaning, fearful Gladdic. He was just one person. It was just one life. It was just the tiniest fragment of the atrocities yesterday, and yet it was the one that meant everything.
Tyrus had asked when we’d poisoned Devineé—when was one life taken a death too many? And now I knew the answer.
It was this one.
Today.
“This is being your Empress,” I said to Tyrus. “This is how it will be from this day forward. You mean to kill him and I cannot stop you.”
Tyrus closed his eyes a moment, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You are amplifying the significance of this. Gladdic dies. We move on. We wake up tomorrow and move on as though this never happened.”
But that wasn’t me. It wasn’t.
“Do you recall telling me what it was you loved about me?” I asked him. “You love that I act.”
And with that, I hurled myself onto the floor to save Gladdic.