52
SHE STOOD too close to the edge. Sidonia pointed to something, but I couldn’t make it out. She was wandering ever farther, and every bit of me thrilled with warning.
“Donia, Donia, you shouldn’t go into that water. . . .”
A moment later, the absurdity of the words dawned on me. . . . Though why they were out of place, I could not say. Donia just looked back at me, a smile glimmering over her lips, a soft, tender warmth in her dark eyes.
“Oh, Nemesis,” she said. “I’ll take care of you. That’s painful.”
I knew what she was talking about. My gaze dropped to my bare feet, scorched and lacerated where they bled on the jagged stones beneath me.
Her hand closed about mine, and then she tugged me from the pain to the velvety sands that pooled between my toes. A sigh escaped my lips, and she smiled.
“Look,” she said, and then dipped a toe into the water, a clear glaze reflecting darkness wild with stars. “It’s very warm.”
I followed her lead, but when my toes touched the water, they met ice. Perplexed, I watched her take another step, another, the rippling starscape over the liquid vibrating with her steps. It was so easy for her. But for me, it was impossible.
“Donia, I can’t . . .” I tried to explain it. “I . . . I’ve forgotten something.”
I couldn’t think of what, but she knew the answer and there was a sweetness and purity of love to her face as she told me she understood me as no one had ever understood me. As I’d ever known myself. “I’ll be here.”
And then I was choking, my chest heaving, vibrating, and a blare of a voice, too loud, “Oh, good. Now we just have to hope she’s not brain-dead.”
The voice . . . That voice . . .
I gasped out and tore up from where I was sprawled, but arms tangled with mine, driving me back down, and she skittered back from me, fingers splayed, hands up.
I had to look at her a long moment to make sense of her. . . . To make sense of Neveni, so altered, with most of her hair gone, an angry, thick scar across her face as though someone had tried to cross her out . . .
Then her hand shot forward and tightened on mine. Not small and soft as Donia’s was, but Neveni’s hard, rough one. “Do you know who I am?” she said.
Of course I knew her. I knew pain throbbed through every single fragment of me and an unfamiliar ship hummed about me, the fluorescent lights overhead blaring into my eyes and Donia was gone, and Tyrus . . .
Neveni.
Neveni—who had stranded me.
A scream ripped from my lips and I surged for her. She reared back, lips blazing in a feral grin, but a pair of enormous arms, heavy with muscles, locked around me.
Oh. Oh, him. Anguish.
“Yeah, she remembers me,” Neveni said, leaning against the far wall.
“What’s . . . What is . . .” I cast about for understanding. Then I heaved myself forward, and Anguish abruptly released me—sending me plunging to the ground. Pain banged up my knees, and Neveni started forward as though to help me, then halted . . . rethinking that.
And then . . .
Then it was all there blaring in my mind, and my hand flew down. . . . Tender flesh over my rib cage.
The blade . . . The blade!
“I was . . . He . . . ,” I gasped.
“Let me help you up.”
Her voice rang in my ears, but I couldn’t seem to understand it. Neveni’s arms wrapped around my waist, and she hoisted me up with an oof. I sagged there dumbly, and then Anguish grabbed my arm to help her out.
I looked at her, at him, and I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t . . . What was wrong with me? “How did I get here?”
“Gladdic of all people contacted me. It was the oddest thing, but he gave me a heads-up where we could find you. Let’s get her to a chair.”
Anguish nodded.
I hung there between them as they eased me across the room. “G-Gladdic?” What? What about Gladdic? What was going on?
“He told us what had happened,” Neveni said. “Long before we actually caught the transmission ourselves. I think he wanted us to spirit him away, but I let him know there’d be a price for it. You. He paid us. Whether we pay him back or not, well . . . Maybe if it’s convenient one day.” I blinked at her sluggishly. Yes. I’d given him her frequency. I recalled that suddenly.
“I don’t . . .” My mind fought to untangle as they settled me in a chair. “I’m not . . .”
“Hypovolemic shock.” Anguish’s deep voice drew my attention to him. He gazed down at me. “It’s happened to me before. We don’t respond as they do. Great blood loss, and we go into a sort of hibernation. Easy to mistake for death.”
“Gladdic also injected an oxygen pellet into your bloodstream to keep you from suffocating while you weren’t breathing.” Her mouth curled in an uneven smile—with that scar slashing over the corner of both lips. “You think you know a guy, and then he surprises you by not being thoroughly useless. . . .”
Death.
Hibernation.
What?
“Then it was just a matter of trying to make sure we caught up to your tomb before you woke up . . . if you did. Gladdic tweaked the navigation, too. He must have, or you’d be ashes.”
I stared at her, and I couldn’t understand it. It made no sense. It just . . .
My mouth was like sawdust. My eyes were sliding in and out of focus, but when I looked down at the floor beside me, an ugly shock jerked through me.
A crystalline enclosure.
A tomb.
I’d been in there. I had been inside it. I’d been trapped inside, stranded in bare space. If I’d awoken and never been found . . .
She caught me when I keeled over, but nothing escaped as I dry heaved.
“Yeah, it’s rough. Anguish told me it would be,” Neveni said.
Waves of ice swept through me, chills prickling over my skin. I looked at the coffin again.
“Welcome back from the dead,” Neveni told me.
She reached back to retrieve a glass, offered it to me. Desperate thirst gripped me. I drew in a great mouthful, then gagged.
Not water.
Not water—whiskey.
“Unless you prefer water,” Neveni said.
I didn’t. I dumped the glass down my throat, and the burn of my esophagus seemed to be the only point of me thawed from ice.
“Should I give her more?” Anguish said.
“She was dead. Give her the whole bottle,” Neveni said.
• • •
Numbness pervaded my very soul, the hum of the starship about me seeming to vibrate my bones, my skull, threatening to shake loose those muffled thoughts in my mind. I vaguely saw the bare walls of the chamber I’d been led to.
There I sat on a bed where the springs dug into me, and I lifted my shirt to see my chest. . . . Taut flesh over my rib cage with a smear of toneless white a shade brighter than the skin about it, where my life had almost been preserved by a med bot. Or someone had chosen to fix it up for disposal of my body in a star.
Nothing felt real, nothing was as it should be. I had a fog in my head that would not recede, a heavy cloud cover. Anguish and Neveni returned. She plucked up the empty glass bottle, studied me. “So I once got him to drink a whole bottle, and I swear, he was giggly. Can you imagine? A bit scary, actually. You?”
I couldn’t process her words.
She let out a breath. “I really hope you don’t have brain damage, Nemesis. I’m not sure what I’ll do with you then. Actually, I am. I’ll probably kill you. I can’t afford to deal with that.”
Brain damage.
There was a warning in the words, and it didn’t matter to me in the slightest. I pressed my hands over my ears. Tyrus’s eyes were looking at mine in the ball dome, and I screwed my lids shut to block the image, but it was inside me, the image of that gaze just before . . . before he . . . I couldn’t tolerate my memory veering back to that.
I didn’t hear whatever else she had to say, her voice lost in the mire of thoughts swirling in my head. I plunged into dreams of those two distant, remote, cold eyes and awoke chilled in my bones.
Something hard pressed the back of my head.
Neveni stood above me where she’d yanked my pillow out from under me.
“Enough. Anguish said it’s a bit of a shock to . . . well, to come out of shock, but you’ve had time. Now you need to be awake. Get up.”
When I did not move, she scowled at me, the red line of the scar tracing a lurid path across the corner of her mouth.
“Enough of this,” she muttered. She unsheathed a glinting dagger. Then she slashed it down at me.
I caught her wrist, anger spouting in me. “I am not a feeble old man taken off guard!” And to emphasize this, I ground her bones together. I hurled her away from me, suddenly furious. “Desist unless you want me to slice the rest of your face!”
But she did not come at me again. “There you are,” she said breathlessly, clutching her arm. “You’re still very strong.”
“Would you have killed me?”
“Only if you’d let me.” She shrugged, sheathed the knife again. “Remember how you told me once I’d feel better soon? This was soon after I found out everyone I knew and loved had been murdered. . . .”
I looked at her flatly. Yes, I saw now how insensitive that was.
“It’s the last thing you ever want to hear, but you turned out to be right,” Neveni said. “Blowing up the Sacred City and becoming the greatest heathen in the galaxy really did cheer me up. So did getting this ship. So did grabbing you before you burned up. Think of it: the whole galaxy knows their Empress killed their Interdict. Imagine how terrified they’ll be when you come back from the dead for real this time and say you’re going to kill more than that.”
I closed my eyes. “What do you want?”
“I want to tell you that I know what you’re feeling. I lost everything. You loved Tyrus so much, you went back to certain death, and what did he do? He married you, and then as your brand-new husband, he killed you.”
She’d said it, she’d given voice to that thing so unbearable to think about, but now I had to. Now I did. I pressed my hand to the new skin of my chest and turned the concept about in my mind, again and again.
Tyrus had killed me.
Tyrus. Killed. Me.
He’d done it. He’d truly done it. He killed me.
“There’s only one way to bounce back from this, and you know what it is,” Neveni said, her eyes glittering savagely. “Find him and return the favor. And tear down his Empire around him. I know you want this. If you don’t yet, you will soon. I’m sure of it.”
Just listening to her excited voice made me feel lousy.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Neveni said. “How can three people do anything? But we’re not any three people! The strongest man and woman in the galaxy—and the greatest terrorist! Nemesis, you’re a Galactic Empress publicly murdered by her husband who will come right back from the dead. The Empress who isn’t Grandiloquy, the Empress who killed the Interdict . . . You think there’s no use for that? You’re a legend. We all are—and imagine what we can do!”
I imagined nothing. Later, after she’d left, I moved mindlessly to the washroom on legs still aching, sore from disuse. I beheld a reflection, the ruins of a person I’d been days ago donning a gleaming silver gown, determined to salvage what had already been lost.
My gray eyes ran down over that frame, honed into a version of itself acceptable in an Empress, a Grandeé. A Diabolic who had squandered her purpose twice. It took me a moment to notice that wisps of my hair were bound up. I reached back and unlatched the clip holding it . . .
And an ugly pain wrenched at me as I examined it. The very clip Tyrus had retrieved from the nitrogen fountain. The gift he’d offered me for our wedding. How much hope this had given me . . .
My fist tightened on it, a wild urge to break it all apart tearing at me. I raised my eyes to meet a pair of savage, feral gray ones, glaring at me above a nose so fashionably uneven. Donia loved it that way. So did Tyrus.
Then I decided something: I didn’t love it.
I despised it.
It wasn’t perfect. I could be. I was symmetrical and lethal and powerful, and this intentional and unnecessary mar needn’t even be there. I was done with it. With a gritting of teeth, I balled up my fist over the clip and positioned the sturdiest of its gems right where I wanted it.
Then I smashed it over the bridge of my nose.
Pain burst before my eyes, bright, welcome. I struck again, again. . . . Blood dripped down to splatter about my feet. Red-hot waves of agony reverberated through my skull, but it didn’t matter, none of it did. I flung the clip away, seized the broken bridge of my nose, and then arranged it. I twisted, yanked, pulled it until it was exactly where it was meant to be—dead center, tugged into straightness. Exactly as it should have been all along.
Any other girl—any ordinary person—would be crying. I hadn’t blinked. I was more than a person. I was a Diabolic.
Blood still seeped, so I raised the corner of my shirt to blot it away, then blot it again. If the swelling receded and the nose remained crooked, or uncorrected, then . . . then I would simply break and correct it again.
Neveni startled awake when I kicked the foot of her bed—and next to her, Anguish opened his eyes lazily, a subtle tension in his great muscles that told me he was poised to spring and break me apart if necessary. . . . But for now, he wanted to lounge in bed.
They’d somehow carved some happiness out of the ashes. I saw that, gazing down at them. My heart felt hollow, like I would never feel anything again.
“Whatever you want of me,” I told Neveni, “I don’t care. I’ll do it. I am alive because of you. I’ll repay the debt. I’ll destroy anyone you wish.”
I whipped around to leave them.
“Nemesis,” Neveni called after me. I turned to see her sharp, intense gaze. “Anyone?”
I knew what she meant. She only cared about one person. Just one.
Rage and hurt boiled within me, and I hated that I felt them at all. All I wished was to turn to stone, to ice.
My voice, when I spoke, held a remorseless certainty.
“Anyone.”