“Nemesis.”
Anguish’s low voice startled me. I turned to face him, this friend who had supported me when no one else could.
My brother.
“I launched Donia’s cloud sphere,” I said.
“I watched you.”
He nodded toward the doorway, where he must have been lurking.
I realized I did feel something: the mildest, most muted anger. “You should have insisted that Neveni wait for me before she incinerated him. Why didn’t you tell her to wait?”
His gaze shied away, and my anger strengthened.
“Why, Anguish?” I said. “I killed him. Was that not enough?” My voice cracked. “Now I have nothing else to send. Scorn me if you wish. I know what he became. But—but I know what he was before, too. Before the Venalox. And that Tyrus deserved—”
“I know.” He sounded defeated, too tired to argue. “But it seemed best to act quickly, Nemesis. I’m sorry.”
“Did anyone close his eyes? Tell me they did that, at least.”
He frowned at me.
“Anguish, did someone at least close his eyes before the launch?” I could hear my own voice rising, but I couldn’t help myself. The thought that he’d been sent into the star like that—eyes wide, mouth hanging open, shocked by my betrayal—
“I am certain someone did.”
“Do you know or don’t you? Weren’t you there?”
His jaw firmed. “Nemesis, I have something you’ll want.” He reached into his pocket to withdraw something. Metal glinted as he held it out. “I didn’t think to give this to you sooner, but this is the best time.”
My breath caught at the sight of that familiar bejeweled metal hair clip, crusted with my blood. I’d used it to break my own nose.
I grabbed it, and some animal noise erupted from me. I sank to my knees.
This was the first gift Tyrus had ever given me, and given me again that evening in the oubliette after our wedding. Within it, he’d concealed the means of blocking Pasus’s ability to eavesdrop on us.
At the time, it had meant everything. It had meant hope: that he hadn’t been damaged by Venalox, that he’d saved himself from its ravages, that he still loved me.
I hugged it against my chest, and suddenly I was weeping—great, ugly, hoarse, gasping sobs.
A child’s sobs. A child’s grief, racking and bottomless, inconsolable. But not a child’s, for this was ancient, crushing, it would kill me. I could not bear it. I wailed and I could not stop.
Distantly I felt Anguish’s arms wrapping about me, crushing me against his chest. But what point? What comfort? For it was over, it was all over. I’d killed Tyrus, and I’d had no choice, I’d had to kill him, but it was done, there was no recovering what had been lost. He was dead. There would be no redemption. The nightmare of the last years was over, but a new nightmare was upon me, and it would last until I died.
I had lost him—and all possibilities I could yet save him from himself—and I would have to live with this forever.
In that moment, it didn’t matter why I’d had to do this. All that conviction that drove me to end him faded away beneath the reality of losing him forever. The universe contracted about me. A black hole opened at the very depths of my being, crushing all of me inward, into something empty and gaping and eternal. I could not endure this, I could not. I’d had to do this. I’d had to—and yet now I could not live with it.
Gradually I understood this. Gradually my sobs diminished, for they helped nothing. This was reality. This hell was the reality in which I now lived.
Anguish still held me, offering comfort in a way that no Diabolic should rightly be able to do. And I accepted it, turning my face into his chest, miserable and wordless as the tears died away and exhaustion seeped through me.
Anguish stroked my back amid the silence of the empty heliosphere, the dim light of the distant star gilding the floor.
“How?” I asked at last, my voice threadbare. “Where did you find this?”
“You’d left it on the floor of the washroom—shortly after we retrieved your tomb from space,” Anguish said. “I knew one of the Partisans would steal it, hawk it, but they had no right. I stashed it in one of the ducts here.”
“Thank you. Anguish, thank you.”
“Do you wish me to place it into the launcher?”
“I…” The magnitude of my loss opened again, directly within my chest. I put my fist there, unable to speak.
He reached up, brushing tears from my face. “Wait. Just wait. There’s no reason to do anything right now.”
His kindness was undeserved. “You hated him. Even before the Venalox.”
“You are my family. It does not matter that I hated who you loved.”
Gratitude mixed with my sorrow. I buried myself in his arms again, breathing deeply. It was my great good fortune that I was not the only Diabolic who had learned of love.
An intuition came to me then, strengthening as it clarified. I remembered how, after I had awoken, he had joined Neveni in the bedroom. The looks they had traded. His touch on her arm, causing her to pause, to speak more carefully.
I pulled back, scrubbing my face with my palm. “You and Neveni seemed… different when I awoke. Have you two…?”
He gave a quick, abashed tug of his lips. “We had the talk you suggested. Trapped together in the cargo container—wasn’t much else to do.”
But some emotion wanted to break through his carefully schooled expression. As I watched, it briefly lightened his features, like the sun breaking through clouds.
They’d resolved something. He was restraining his joy out of respect for my own grief. I leaned forward and placed a kiss on the salty skin of his forehead.
“I’m glad for you,” I said softly. Then I sat back, clutching the clip tightly in my lap. “Go to Neveni. Cherish what you have, Anguish. I want you to be happy.”
“But you—”
“I would like to be alone.”
After a moment of studying my face, he nodded and rose, leaving me to the company of my thoughts.
I turned the clip over and over in my hands, thinking of the future. Anguish would want to stay with Neveni. But I would not.
Nor would I join the Partisans in their bloodbath at the Chrysanthemum.
I would not be paraded before the galactic media, a puppet tasked to herald some new order of things.
I’d had enough of meddling in the fate of galaxies. Let others do it.
I rose, intending to place the clip into the launching chute. But my hand tightened, refusing to relinquish it.
He had touched this clip that I touched now. Had retrieved it bare-handed from a nitrogen fountain for me. Touching it was as close as I would ever again come to touching him.
I could still see his clever fingers brushing over this piece to withdraw the small device that jammed Pasus’s surveillance. A hundred times after he’d killed me, I’d tried to replicate that trick. Now I did so once more, tracing amid the jewels as Tyrus had once done, not in the hopes of uncovering some hidden weapon, but for the simple sake of touching the exact place he’d once touched.
And this time, something revealed itself.
One of the jewels suddenly ruptured into splinters to reveal a cube of metal, no bigger than the tip of my finger.
My heart lurched.
This was a data cube.
My heart began to hammer against my rib cage. Trembling, I carefully extracted the data cube with my fingernails, then held it up on the flat of my palm to study in the dim glow of the star.
Impossible. This was impossible. It had been waiting here all along. Waiting for…
For what?
I flew from the heliosphere to my chamber, shoving past Partisans, blind to their salutes and reverent addresses. Locking the door to my chamber, I placed the chip in the holographic projector.
Light bloomed into an image, painfully precise. I swallowed a noise, made fists to stop myself from reaching out to touch
his face.
A dead man spoke to me.
“Nemesis,” he said, “I hope you never have cause to see this. I mean this transmission to erase itself if all goes to plan, but if you are seeing this, it’s because my heart has stopped and sent the trigger signal to activate it. So. I am dead. In that case, I’m profoundly fortunate you kept this hair clip.”
I looked down at the hair clip, shaking in my hand. A tear fell, drawing a rusty trail through the old blood.
“I owe you an explanation for everything I have done.”
I looked up again, seeing new details through the blur in my eyes. He wore his own face—that faint cleft in his chin, a scattering of freckles across his sharp cheekbones. The silvery coat that covered his shoulders was stained with fresh blood.
Stars.
He’d recorded this holographic the day he killed me in the ball dome.
I could not breathe. My head swam as the holographic showed Tyrus holding up the very hair clip that had been fastened into my hair when my corpse had been launched into space.
“I am placing this with you,” he said, “in a few short moments. The oxygen pellets will keep you alive long enough for the Partisans to find you.”
No.
“No.” My hands flew up to grip my head. “No, no.”
“Gladdic will have to take credit for this,” he continued. Some noise offscreen diverted his attention briefly, and when he looked back into the lens, his face was grimmer, his mouth tight. Yet he managed a brief, wry smile, regardless. “I’m going to dose him with Scorpion’s Breath so he never argues with his heroism. I can use his avatar to contact the Arbiter. I just hope on all the stars that Sagnau will take the risk of saving you.…”
A moan broke from me.
Tyrus had killed me. And then he had saved me.
It had been Tyrus all along.
36
“YOU ARE lying in blood-loss-induced stasis at this very moment,” Tyrus continued, “from a wound that I inflicted on you. I set this up intending to send Gladdic away from here—to free him of me—but instead, it will have to be you. I mean the Arbiter to retrieve you.”
My mouth was moving in a silent refusal, No no no no. I put one hand over my lips, forcibly stilling them. I watched from somewhere outside my body, my senses all dimmed as though I were at the end of a vast, dark tunnel. All I could do was stare at Tyrus’s ghostly image, the ashen smudges of sleeplessness beneath his eyes. He stroked the hair clip like some precious thing, like his most treasured possession, as he spoke grimly of saving me.
“You will survive,” he said harshly, his clothes still saturated with my blood. “This was the only way I could devise to ensure it.”
As he fumbled with the clip, he paused and took a breath that audibly shook.
“I’m sending you away sooner than I planned,” he said. “I owed it to Gladdic, after what I’ve put him through, to set him at liberty. I thought if I sent him to the Partisans, I could use him later, somehow, but… Oh, I knew you’d react to his execution, but I hadn’t realized you’d force me to do this in his place. I thought it would happen later, the day I drove you from me, after I’d had time to…” He grimaced, shook his head. “No, perhaps I meant to keep you as long as I could. Selfish of me—I knew I should let you go, that it would be safer that way. But—” His throat jerked as he swallowed. “Even now, a part of me wishes to walk over and revive you and tell you the truth of all this. But I can’t.”
He stepped closer to the camera. A flush colored his cheeks, but otherwise, his face was deathly pale. “If you’re watching this, I failed somehow. I’ve died, and stars know where you find yourself. But you need all the information now, so know this: I spoke the truth to you in the oubliette. I overcame the Venalox. It did not destroy my mind. I am not mad.”
I put the clip to my lips, dug it hard into the tender seam of my lips. “Impossible,” I whispered. Impossible.
Tyrus clawed a hand through his hair, setting it into wilder disorder. “I broke Alectar’s control over me, and then I faked the symptoms for years. I was waiting for you—waiting for a chance to free us both, to break this Empire from its chains. And then I saw…” He blew out a breath. “I found something in the Grandiloquy vaults at the Clandestine Repository. I talked Alectar into taking us there. He wanted the Domitrian treasure stores. But I saw a chance to find information, something, anything I could use to blackmail the other Grandiloquy. To force them from his side to mine. Instead I found…”
He shook his head, his gaze briefly unfocused, as though to behold something far in the distance. “I found out that everything is a lie, Nemesis. The legitimacy of the Empire, the power of my family, the hold of the Grandiloquy—it was all born from a lie. I’ve included here a transmission from my family databases: the truth of Tarantis von Domitrian.”
“I know.” I spoke raggedly, to a man who would never hear it. “I know, Tyrus.”
An option screen blinked up before me, asking whether I wished to access the auxiliary file. I waved it away, desperate to see Tyrus’s face once more.
He looked so tired. So burdened. His voice grew raw with frustrated despair.
“The worst of it is, we’ve known the mechanisms of malignant space all along. We knew centuries ago, millennia—since the ancient migration itself! My ancestor Tarantis used that knowledge to weaponize malignant space. He caused the supernova that almost destroyed civilization—and then he used the chaos that followed to secure his hold over the Empire. I think he even deceived the Interdict about the cause of it. He buried it all afterward to conceal the truth of what he’d done—the cause of malignant space, and how to cure it.”
Cure it.
Tarantis had known how to cure it? There was a cure?
“Once I realized all this, I knew I’d been battling the wrong enemy, using the wrong approach.” He began to pace now, back and forth to the edges of the screen. “Malignant space isn’t the disease, it’s only a symptom. The Empire—my Empire—should never have existed. My ancestors stole this galaxy for themselves and divided up the spoils among the Grandiloquy, and we’ve been living with that injustice ever since. Learning this taught me what my true task must be.”
He stopped, staring fixedly at the imager, as though desperate to see right into my eyes—into the soul of the future Nemesis who, if watching this, had also witnessed his destruction.
“I was never supposed to save this Empire. I’m the one meant to destroy it.”
“Tyrus,” I whispered. The pain in his face caused me to ache.
He had tried to save me.
He was addressing his own murderer.
“Hephaestus will go supernova,” Tyrus said. “And once it does, I’ll put my plan into motion. I haven’t”—he gestured vaguely in the air—“entirely figured out the particulars yet, but I intend to avoid the trap we ran into when we openly attacked the order of the galaxy. The Grandiloquy stopped us because we were trying to reform that which resists reformation. It was my fault. I underestimated how deeply rooted the institutions of power are.”
He resumed pacing, tension gripping his tall, muscular frame.
“I can’t count on allies. Not even among the Excess. We’re all too deeply entrenched in this system. The indoctrination goes too deep. Our media, our educational system, the very myths we use to understand ourselves—there’s no story, no institution, no “truth” that hasn’t been corrupted by Tarantis’s propaganda. And when someone, somewhere, has thought to question all we take for granted—they’ve been shouted down by the crowd, bullied into silence, into ignoring their own instincts, their own reasoning, their own sense of right and wrong. It’s a collective mass delusion, one that persuades us to ignore reality in favor of what we are told is true. No one is allowed to question, and so, critical thinking is made impossible. It’s that shared, societal delusion that I need to break, if there’s any hope of creating something better.”
My legs sank out from under me.
So this had been on his mind as he spoke about conformity and belonging. I drew my knees up to my chest, locking my arms around them, holding myself tight as his words hammered the air between us.
“But how does one smash a centuries-old delusion? I can think of only one way: I need to corrupt the delusion, remold the lie into a narrative so absurd that it strains the ability to believe in it. Cognitive dissonance, that is what the philosophers once called it. I want to break that instinct to subscribe to the dictates of a reality that does not exist, by creating a false reality so ludicrous that belief in it cannot be sustained.”
He halted, staring for a moment at the clip, then looking back to the imager. “So. Instead of fighting the system, I will use it. All the poisons that lurk in the mud will hatch out—because I myself will hatch them. I will become the lie, embody all the corruption of this Empire and make the problems we’ve buried burn so intolerably bright, none can avert their eyes.” He gave a faint, hopeless laugh. “It’s always been fashionable to repeat the lies of the elite, but I will create a lie so ludicrous, every fashionable person discredits themselves by retelling it. They will forfeit their power by merely believing in me—and with any luck, many of them will come to question their own obedience to the Empire as well.”
It hit me like a blast: this was the reason he declared himself a god.
“Oh, Tyrus.” I did not know whether to laugh or to weep again.
He had declared himself a god, knowing it was a lie too ludicrous to believe, even by those who most desperately craved the belonging that came from a fashionable, shared delusion.
I knew he’d already succeeded in one sense, for those who had enforced and repeated the lies that held together this Empire had, indeed, conformed. They’d been rewarded with Tyrus’s bribes, and approval from the other fashionable liars of the Empire, and they’d repeated the most ludicrous of lies as readily as they’d repeated all the Domitrian propaganda before it. They had hailed Tyrus as their God.
The galactic media had fallen over themselves to praise their Divine Emperor. The spiritual leader of the Empire had proclaimed him a deity far and wide. The Grandiloquy had competed to worship him most extravagantly. Those followers on the Halcyon—how eagerly they had fought among themselves to more reverently hail him for what he could not possibly be!
The Nemesis Page 23