by Jenn Lyons
“Shouldn’t you be escaping right around now?” I said to him, trying to twist my shoulder to see where he was.
“I’m working on that,” he admitted. “Campbell just made contact with Belisle and reported that we’re inside and Kaj-Shae Threllis has been taken into custody. Belisle is calling back his ship, which means that Threllis’ shuttle is still primed for launch.”
I didn’t answer. I was too busy staring at Kaj-Shae Threllis’ corpse.
Zaladin should have covered the body.
“Why?” I asked.
I could hear Zaladin typing behind me. He didn’t answer at first.
“Why did you do this!?” I repeated.
“I don’t understand the question.”
“Why did you do this to ME,” I screamed. “Why did you force me to kill that man? I didn’t want to do it. You knew I didn’t want to do it. Why?”
His shadow crossed in front of the light and then Zaladin came into view, looking like some old Earth devil with his orange eyes and black skin. He touched a finger against my cheek. “Ah, sweet Lory. I am sorry about that.”
“Fuck you,” I spat. “You made me murder a man. You’d already captured him. He didn’t need to die. You owe me an answer.”
He squatted down next to my chair, put his hands on my thighs. I was too angry to notice or care what might have been very suggestive under other circumstances. “Humans sometimes refer to something called a dead man’s switch—a bomb that only goes off if the person holding the trigger dies.” Zaladin tilted his head towards Threllis’ corpse. “That’s what they are. Tirris Vahn turned her closest friends into dead man’s switches to protect the secrets she was using to blackmail Emperor Kathosis. He didn’t dare move against them, or the secret would be released.”
“Okay, so Kathosis cared, but wouldn’t that cease to be any kind of meaningful blackmail once he was dead?”
“Very much. In fact, the very thing that Tirris Vahn would have used to blackmail Kathosis becomes blackmail against her. Surely the new Emperor would not take kindly to her daring to blackmail the Diamond Throne.” He touched the side of my face and I moved my cheek away from him. “I gave her a choice: throw herself on the Emperor’s mercy or watch as all her sins are brought to light.”
“Something tells me she’s not paying much attention to your generous offer.”
“So it seems.” Zaladin pulled back his hand. “You see now? He had to die.”
“No he didn’t. You just had to convince people he was dead. You could have faked their deaths. You helped Les Dieux de Guerre do the same. Why not Threllis and the others?”
He paused, looked away. “Maybe I didn’t think Threllis and his friends deserved to live.”
“That’s not your decision.”
Zaladin looked surprised. “Yes it is. I’m High Guard—and they were, all of them, traitors, plotting to put Tirris Vahn on the throne. Removing any threat to Emperor Kathanial and his scions is my duty, one that I have pursued for twenty-five years.”
“Then why didn’t you go to Kathanial? Leave a note? Something! Why didn’t you just...” I sighed. “If she’s such a threat, why didn’t you kill her first?”
He looked embarrassed then. “She’s omashaikon.”
“What?” I blinked at him. “But that—”
“There hasn’t been an omashaikon-strength telepath in hundreds of years,” he agreed. “And by rights and tradition—”
“If she’s the stronger telepath...she should be Empress.”
“Yes.” He stood. “And I’m not strong enough to kill her. She would tear my mind apart. So I can’t face her directly. Knowing that, I had to take a different approach.” Zaladin walked away, hands behind his back, and then turned around and marched back to my chair. “Help me, Mallory. I only have three more names on my list. Help me kill them and once that knowledge reaches Kathanial, he’ll know I was right and he’ll have Tirris arrested. The Sarcodinay need an Emperor like Kathanial—Tirris Vahn as Empress would be a disaster. She would restart this war and scourge this whole solar system.”
The answer lodged in my throat, choking back pain and regret. “You—” I shook my head. “You should have come to me. Keepers, if you had just come to me when this all began—”
His face hardened. “That’s a no, isn’t it?”
“Whisper Jack wasn’t wrong, Zaladin. You chose the easy way, not the better way.”
He scoffed to himself. “That sounds like something your father would say.”
There was no air in the room. I couldn’t breathe, but I knew Zaladin had tossed out that comment as a distraction, a deliberate feint. He knew all my buttons.
“Then I’m sure my father wouldn’t approve of what you’re doing.”
He smiled. “No. No, he most certainly does not.”
Zaladin leaned over and kissed me again. I could lie and say I fought it, tried to bite out his tongue, tried to resist in some token show of protest, but who am I kidding? I kissed him back.
That kiss felt like goodbye.
He rolled the shock stick along the floor towards me as he backed up towards the door. “Thank you for the assist, Lory. It was a pleasure and an honor to be able to work alongside you. I don’t think we’ll see each other again.”
I shook my head. “You’re wrong. You know you’re wrong. I am going to stop you. I’ll stop you and Tirris Vahn both.”
He gave me a rebel salute. “You’re not strong enough to kill me. Whereas, I don’t need to kill you to stop you.” He ducked out the exit.
“Zaladin? Zaladin!” I yelled after him, but he neither answered nor returned.
I reached for the shock stick handle with my toe, and started working on how I was going to get out of my restraints.
TWENTY.Stewart
“Tell me you stopped Kaj-Shae Threllis’ shuttle. Give me that good news at least,” I said as I rejoined Belisle and his men inside the main control room.
Untying the knots on my restraints had taken an embarrassingly long time, and even longer for me to undo the security precautions keeping the doors to the forward spaceport locked. Finally, an eternity later, I was able to disable enough of the lockdowns to be reunited with the real Stewart Campbell, Belisle, and the rest of Belisle’s striketeam.
The striketeam was called the Kurokamis, led by a wilder named Tetsuo who looked like he could probably break a steel bar in half by staring at it in an unfriendly fashion. His team had the rough, weathered look of professional strikers: not any people to mess with, people who took shit from no one.
They were a sight for sore eyes.
Petrov was the first to pull a gun on me, and as he did I mentally processed what I should have noticed right away: the group was quiet and the looks they gave me were something other than friendly. No one seemed surprised by Petrov pulling the gun, indeed, they seemed to take it as a signal.
They all pulled guns on me then.
“Did I miss a memo?” I said as I looked at all of them. “I’m pretty sure I just saved everyone’s life. Why doesn’t anyone want to be my friend?”
Belisle sighed and shook his head. “I am afraid that one or two circumstances might have come to light while you were off having adventures that might change the landscape just a smidge.” He pulled a hand out of his pocket and gestured towards me. “We’ll need your weapons and that shock stick, along with anything else you might have collected along the way that could be used as a weapon.”
Petrov seemed pleased. “I always knew you were no good.”
I looked at Campbell. “What’s going on?”
He was nursing a nasty bump to the head and he didn’t look very happy, but Campbell put the ice pack aside and turned to Belisle. When Belisle didn’t answer, he shook his head and said, “There was a courier packet delivery while you were incommunicado. A briefing report from Emperor Kathanial on the assassin responsible for these murders, a High Guard named Zaladin.”
“And you know what else that report mentioned?” Petrov
took the opportunity to gloat a little. “That this Zaladin fellow used to be your teacher. Bet that makes you feel special, huh?”
I glanced over at Petrov. “Why would it? Did the report mention how many times he put me in the hospital for nanite repair?”
“I don’t know,” Belisle said, “If I was trained in fighting by the same guy who taught the crown prince, I might feel a little special. Just a touch. No wonder you’re so good. You weren’t just trained by High Guard, apparently you were trained by the best one they have.”
Petrov snickered. “Not to mention the shortest one they have.”
I felt cold. “Zaladin trained Kathanial?”
“Yeah. He was his personal bodyguard too for a while. But mostly, seems this Zaladin fellow can pass for human and likes to spend his time mingling with the locals.”
I narrowed my eyes at Belisle. “Ernak didn’t tell you that? This isn’t exactly unknown information.”
“Yeah, but the Admiral didn’t know about a sleeper program, he didn’t know about a top secret project to create human High Guard, and oh yeah, he sure as mom’s apple pie didn’t know about this.” He toggled a switch, so the holographic display taking up most of the far wall lit up with an image...
...of Zaladin and I kissing.
I winced. “Oh, that is so not what it looks like.”
I could hear, see and feel the disgust spread through the room and the striketeam members looking at me like I was something diseased. The stare that hurt the worst was Stewart Campbell’s. If we didn’t precisely have a relationship before this all began we sure as Rio