I should knock him down. Restrain him. Open the door for the Partisans and let them have him. Anger boiled low in my chest, tempting me.
Instead I jumped up onto the bed next to him. “For Helios’s sake, I’ll lift you,” I snarled, seizing his waist and hurling him none too gently into the vent. I steadied him from below until he’d pulled himself fully inside. In one bounding leap, I snared the edges of the shaft and yanked myself up into the crawl-tube after him.
Stars help me, I was a fool for doing this—but I would have answers from him.
Then I would decide whether I wished him to die for good.
39
THE AIR was icy in the crawl-tube. I crouched beside Tyrus, hemmed in on all sides by slick metal sheathing, while he studied the string of numbers that flashed across a rudimentary monitor.
In ancient times, the Alexandria had been retrofitted, upgraded, and rebuilt many times. These crawl-tubes had been built to access parts of the ship that now did not exist. Our search for a computer interface had been painfully slow. Already we’d turned back from a dead end and nearly died when another tube truncated abruptly, opening into a hundred-foot drop into darkness.
The screen cast a sickly greenish light over Tyrus’s grim expression. “All right,” he said finally. “This interface has some limitations—”
“What sort?” I said.
“Be mindful of our volume,” Tyrus murmured. “These tubes are the oldest parts of the ship. I am not sure how far the sound carries.”
And if the Partisans could hear us, they could find us.
“I can’t access the newer systems,” he whispered. “Security, weapons, the like… But I can interface manually with the launch bay.”
“No point,” I said curtly. “We’re surrounded by the Partisan fleet. An escape pod would never slip by them—even if we could reach one.”
I could certainly fight my way over to one, if Anguish was still unconscious and in no position to face me. But Tyrus could not make it that far. Even kneeling here, crawling along as we were doing, winded him. He was in poor shape.
He sighed and pressed his forehead against the grating, eyes closed. I could see his mind working swiftly. “I’ll launch a pod. No, all the pods. It will keep them busy, tracking them down, and then we may seize the Alexandria itself.”
We. I hoped he was not taking it for granted I would help him. The truth serum pressed against my leg and I found myself surveying him, contemplating whether he was strong enough to survive it if I simply forced it on him now and extracted every answer I wanted from him. Then… Then…
In truth, I didn’t know what I would do. My head pounded.
His fingers flashed over the keypad. I focused on the sounds of the Alexandria. The muffled din of frantic activity rose from a nearby corridor—hurried footsteps, words I could not make out.
“There.” Tyrus blew out a breath and leaned back as far as the tube would allow. “All set. I’ll order the pods to launch just before we exit the tube.”
“Exit?” I choked down a sharp laugh, lest it carry too clearly. “And what will we do once we’re out of hiding? You no longer control the machines. Not like Tarantis after all. He managed to avoid having his power stripped.”
“Nemesis…”
He reached for me, but I recoiled and wrapped my arms around myself, my fingers digging into my own flesh. He was alive, and we were safe for now. I did not understand myself—why I should ache for him so fiercely even as anger made me want to throttle him.
Tyrus sighed and sagged back against the wall of the crawl-tube. “I made Anguish sick,” he confessed.
I froze. “What?”
“You were living off the grid, in the wilderness of the moon of Aramis. It seemed like you meant to stay there indefinitely, so I had him poisoned to flush you out, to force you somewhere more public, so word would spread of your survival. To give myself an opportunity to… goad you into action. But”—he shrugged—“you didn’t respond as I’d hoped. You disappeared again—to Devil’s Shade, I suppose.”
I felt dizzy. “You despicable bastard. Would you have let him die?”
“I never meant him to decline that much. You cared about him, and that made him useful to me.”
I could not draw a full breath. “Why are you admitting this?”
“Because you want honesty,” he said roughly. “So here it is: I poisoned Anguish. It allowed me to set up the entire scenario around the Halcyon. I meant to push you into the realization you wanted to destroy me. I knew if my evils outweighed the value of Anguish’s life in your mind, then you would understand, at last, that I needed to be killed as well. I convinced you that I’d murdered all onboard the Halcyon to cement your enmity. I wanted you to seek my destruction. I needed you to hate me.”
“You succeeded,” I whispered venomously. “I do hate you, Tyrus. I hate you more than you can understand.”
“And now you know all my reasons for this.”
“Your reasons. You didn’t trust me after the Tigris. You didn’t trust me to let you destroy yourself on this insane, mad course—”
“No.” His voice was flat. “I didn’t.” He looked at me. “How could I?”
And there, I had no reply—for had I not proved to him on the Tigris that I would not let him die, even for the best possible reasons? My hands curled into fists, for the truth seared me that in this, he was correct.
He looked away again and released a long breath. “But there’s more than that. I also didn’t want you near me.”
Apparently I did not need the truth serum to tear brutal truths out of him.
“If you were at my side, united with me in this… tyranny.” His voice sounded scraped raw from his throat, his hand gesturing vaguely in the air. “Then that would have ended only one way: a tyrant’s wife shares his fate.”
These words, I hadn’t expected.
“I could face the entire galaxy while they howled their hatred for me, and it would not make me flinch,” Tyrus said. “They could scream for my blood and it would mean nothing if I knew I was doing something right. It would have been another matter if you were with me. If they wished the same for you. I couldn’t endure that. It would break my resolve.”
His hand reached toward me, and then he thought the better of it and dropped it back to his side.
“Neither of us has been willing to do this… to sacrifice the other. Allow me some human weakness. I would pay any price for the future I want to create, but a single one. For the sake of my very sanity, I had to preserve just one thing that remained sacred to me, one person I could not endure to see destroyed. You, Nemesis. Always you.”
“You should have told me.” The whisper scraped over my lips. “I had a right to know.”
He leaned toward me. “And if you’d known the entire truth, would you have willingly led the opposition, knowing the endgame was my inevitable disgrace and destruction? Would you have?”
I did not answer that.
“You had to be my enemy for this,” Tyrus said. “And you couldn’t just be a member of the opposition. You had to spearhead it—because that was the only possible way you would be above suspicion. We are husband and wife. You would never escape my taint once I became an anathema.…”
I slapped my hand over his mouth. I stopped his lying tongue before his words could take effect, could persuade me once again to put love over anger, to prize hope over the lessons of experience.
The anger churned back through me, burning away all else. “You’re a fool, Tyrus—far less clever than you think. Look at your grand design now! You are powerless. You are trapped. You think to play us all as puppets but here you are, and I can’t even devise a means of saving your life from the Partisans. They want your blood and they’ll have it. But you know everything, do you not? How else would you dare—dare, Tyrus—to turn me into your puppet? This grand plan of yours—you gave me no choice in it!”
My voice rang too loudly in my anger. I knew it, but I co
uld not stop the words from firing from my lips. “You engineered me like one of your machines, engineered me to do your bidding, never once explaining why, and you dare to say you love me? That you protected me by lying to me? By letting me mourn for you, to revile myself for the role you engineered me to play? Yes, you set me afire with anger, with hate! And do you know how many I went on to kill in the Clandestine Repository? And then afterward, I killed you, Tyrus—because of you! I mourned for you—because of you! What kind of love is that? Perhaps you do love me—and perhaps I love you, too. But it means nothing! Do you hear?”
His lips moved against my palm. I snatched it away, shook off the feeling of his mouth.
“I hear,” he said softly.
“I saved your life today,” I snarled, “because the cost of taking it would have destroyed me. Now I’ll likely die fighting to save you when they figure out where we are, and it will all be for naught.”
His body grew very still as he thought it over.
“No,” he said calmly. “There is another way.”
I laughed hopelessly. “Yes, you have another scheme. Another plan. Always, another plan! Oh stars, I hate you so. I despise myself, that I cannot rip you from my heart. If we survive this, I will be done with you. Done with your lies, done with your schemes, and done with thoughts of you too. If we escape this place, I will never think of you again. Do you understand?”
“I understand, Nemesis.” His palm covered my cheek, his touch gentle, and I realized that my face was wet.
I knocked away his hand. “The tears mean nothing,” I said bitterly. “The ducts are malfunctioning. I’ll have them removed.”
His hand caught my jaw again, pulled me around to face him. “I don’t know how to love you.”
I yanked free. “Don’t touch me.”
“I was never taught to love. Nemesis—Domitrians do not love. I never wanted to love. But stars save me,” he said roughly, “I love you beyond myself and everything else in this universe. And so I made you think me a monster. Yes. I sent you away when I could not protect you. Yes. And when you all but doomed yourself, I did what I must to ensure that you survived!”
“Deceit and manipulation,” I snapped. “But go ahead, call it love.”
“Yes, love.” His voice hardened. “It was not pretty love, Nemesis. Not noble, not admirable. But it was love that kept you alive. And I will never regret it, even if it costs me everything. I love you more than myself, and more than this sun-scorned galaxy, and more than any ideal I’ve ever been guided by. I have only ever had two aims: to free this Empire, and to keep you alive.”
My head was suddenly pounding. I lowered it into my hands, gripping my temples.
“I had a plan,” he said. “A grand design to right the crime of my ancestors. But there is one price I will not pay for it. Nemesis, you mean more to me than anything else. I’d let this galaxy burn if your life is the cost of saving it.”
I tensed against his words. Such words! How expertly he crafted them and speared them into me!
Deliberately, I curled my lip into a sneer. “Am I meant to find that moving? Your hypocrisy? After all the misery you created—am I meant to applaud you for abandoning your aims, for saying that your ideals mean nothing after all?”
“They mean almost everything.” The defeat in his voice made my throat tighten. “Almost everything,” he said raggedly. “But not as much as you. You are all I love.”
“Stop it. Just stop.” Oh, and stars, the tears were taking a new form. I curled in on myself, trying to fight them down, but they were jerking from me, those pathetic, hideous sobs as though I were back in the heliosphere, mourning a death. All the misery of the last years seemed to be crushing in on me, alive and fresh in my mind as though every bad memory had just happened to me, and I realized in that moment that the wounds had never scarred, never healed. They’d remained there fresh and tormenting me, and I had but ignored them until this moment, when the pain grew too great to ignore.
In the half-light of the nearby monitor, I saw that he was in tears now as well, his face hollow, ashen, haunted. A sudden rush of vindictive pleasure went through me, for at least he felt my pain! Perhaps this was one positive result of these damnable tears, of my inability to conceal my emotions from him—he could not escape them either! Let him drink in the hurt he’d caused me, let him suffer from it as well! I hoped he drank his fill, so he could no more escape it than I could!
At last, he spoke, his voice low, calm, and resolved. “I know what to do now.”
“Of course you do.”
“Nemesis, turn toward the monitor.”
“Why?”
“Turn. I beg you.”
I forced myself to look at the monitor, and a beam shot out to take a scan of me. Tyrus typed in a short sequence, then reached out carefully to take my hand in his. He placed my palm against the screen.
“Repeat the line before you,” he bade me.
With a cold rush of understanding, I looked at him sharply. I knew what he was offering.
“Do it,” he urged me gently.
I read the string of numbers aloud.
COMMAND AUTHORIZATION GRANTED, flashed the screen.
Astonishment prickled through me. But still I did not believe.
Hands shaking, I logged out, then pressed my hand to the screen again.
COMMAND AUTHORIZATION RECOGNIZED.
“Here it is,” he said. “Your offering to Sagnau. The Alexandria is yours. It will save your life.”
And with that spoken, he balled up his fist and slammed it into his own face.
For a moment, I just stared, wondering if he’d gone utterly insane. But Tyrus punched himself again. Then he bashed his head against the wall behind him. At last I reached forward to stop him, but he raised a hand and flashed me a smile with bloody teeth.
“Don’t worry. This will work.”
He dealt himself one last blow that made his nose crunch, and then kicked out behind him.… The side panel of the crawl-tube burst open and sudden light flooded in with us. A dozen voices of searching men roared out below us, and Tyrus managed a ragged whisper: “Trust me.”
Then he flung himself down to the Partisans hunting him.
40
MY HEART gave a lurch as the Partisans shouted out below us, their footsteps beating against the ground. I did not think. I leaped down after Tyrus, only to find him stumbling gladly toward the armed Partisans, his hands up.
“Oh, thank the stars, thank the stars!” he sobbed, throwing himself to his hands and knees before them as they shouted threats, weapons raised. He crawled toward them pitifully as they aimed their rifles at his head, and practically pawed at the legs of the first one he reached. “Please help me. Please. She’s insane!”
A few weapons swiveled toward me, and frightened young Partisans shouted for me to put my hands up, but I just stared at Tyrus as he sobbed. He practically hugged the legs of the Partisan, and received a blow to the head from the butt of the man’s rifle.
Still, he recovered and pleaded, “Protect me from her. Please keep her away from me.…”
What in the stars…
“She brutalized me,” he howled. “I gave her all she wanted and she brutalized me, the fiend.”
For a moment I stood there in stark disbelief, at last understanding what Tyrus was doing. He was casting his life away. He was saving mine… framing our disappearance together as something in the service of their cause.
“Protect me from her. Please. Please, she’ll kill me.…”
“We’ll kill you, Your Pathetic Reverence,” roared the Partisan, who shook his legs out of Tyrus’s grasp, then delivered a stomp to his ribs.
I stepped forward toward the raised rifles, and my voice rang out: “Stop.”
It was authoritative and firm, and these Partisans had to have been told of what I’d done, that I’d absconded with Tyrus. I knew they trusted me not at all, and they kept their weapons aimed at me—but for a moment they ceased
to beat Tyrus. He took the opportunity to continue the pitiful display, dragging himself away from me, throwing frightened looks back at me, as though I were a demon come to collect his very soul. As though the Partisans who’d gladly torture and kill him were his sole protection from me.
And despite everything, I felt something in me warming, calming. For yes, I saw what he had done for me. He’d just placed me above suspicion. I would not perish alongside him.
“I have the command authorization codes now,” I said calmly. Then I called to the air, “Assemble defensive forces.”
Weapons hidden in the walls of the corridor jutted out at my command, and the Partisans all looked up and about with amazement to see what I had done—extracted the prized authorization codes from the captive Emperor through sheer terror.
“We really have the Alexandria,” said the Partisan who’d stomped on Tyrus, who was once more shaking off the pitiful Emperor clinging to his legs again—from behind now. “We have the Domitrian Emperor’s ship.”
“Yes. It’s ours,” I said. The Partisans began to lower their weapons. “Or rather, mine.” To the automated weapons: “Sweeping stunners—1.2 meters!” Then I hurled myself to the floor.
The weapons along the walls blasted the air at 1.2 meters of height, and those Partisans who had not ducked in time were blasted against the walls. The few who managed to throw themselves out of the range of fire were close enough for me to surge at them, to drive their heads against the ground. The man Tyrus clung to was now in his grasp, and he drove the other man down beneath him, snaring him in a headlock.
I snared a fallen weapon and raised it to pick off the stragglers who’d been farthest from us, who were bolting away beneath the wall of automated fire.
“Cease fire!” I shouted, and the weapons died away into silence.
Tyrus—weakened—was still struggling with the Partisan, who was about to escape his grasp. I swept over to them and delivered a blow into the man’s temple, knocking him out cold. Tyrus shoved him aside and the man flopped to the floor, and for a moment we just stood there looking at each other—I above him, Tyrus on the ground, his face bloody where he’d struck himself.
The Nemesis Page 26