The Nemesis

by S. J. Kincaid

  “Can you walk?” I said to him.

  “Yes,” he said, panting, and then his arms buckled as he tried to shove himself to his feet.

  So I seized him and hoisted him up over my shoulder, then stalked forward down the corridor with my rifle in my free hand.

  Between the weapon I carried and the automated bots at my voice command, the Partisans stood no chance—even with Tyrus’s weight over my shoulder. I couldn’t trust him to keep up with me right now, so I ignored him when he tried to regain his own footing.

  I shot our way forward. With one arm, I kept him slung over my shoulder, and with the other I carved a trail of stunners through the Partisans who swarmed in to battle us, until at last I reached the engine core of the Alexandria.

  Tyrus eased his way back to his feet and caught himself when his legs buckled beneath him. “Well?” he said as he straightened.

  I stood aiming my weapon at the bend in the hall. “Well, what?”

  “You’ve gotten us this far. What next?”

  “Do I just… command it?”

  He dipped his head toward the core as a yes.

  I barked my order into the air.

  The consoles lining the walls pulsed to life as the Alexandria recognized my authority and activated full systems. Instantly I ordered every security force field on the ship to be erected, thereby corralling everyone—Neveni and Anguish included—save us.

  Then I said, “Take us into hyperspace. Heading: the Chrysanthemum.”

  Tyrus just watched me in the light of the engine core, so much like the setting on the Arbiter where I had ended his life. Where I had nearly doused the flame of his existence for good. For a moment, as we gazed at each other over the humming of the ship’s systems, my emotions churned deep within me… lingering anger and betrayal at him. The raging hurt of my wounded emotions, that he had done this without me, that he had played his part so readily with me, twisting and manipulating me.

  And still, still…

  There was a white-hot burning current that bound me forever to this man, for I was his and he was mine, and despite all the pain, I knew how much he had done out of love for me.

  “You’re extraordinary, you know,” Tyrus breathed. “I understand if you will forever despise what I have done—”

  “Yes. I will.” Then I rushed over to him. “Do you know what I hate you for the most? That you never consulted me. If you had, you would have noted a flaw in your thinking, one that is blindingly obvious, yet seems to elude you even now!”

  “The possibility that you were too much of an opponent for me?” he said with a pained laugh. “That you’d overcome me prematurely? I considered that. It’s the reason for that hair clip.”

  “And hear that! You assume you know what I’ll say.”

  He caught my face in his hands. “I’m sorry, Nemesis. Tell me what I’ve missed.”

  “You forget that you’ve always been stronger with me.”

  “I’ve always known that.”

  “A tyrant’s wife shares his fate, you said.” I seized his shoulders. “You didn’t think of the possibility that fate might be altered, if I were but there to do this with you. You and I could have done this together, played a pair of deliberate tyrants to topple this Empire from within—and I still could have gotten us both out of it alive! This entire galaxy could have crushed in around us, crying for our blood, and I would have saved us! I would never let anyone destroy us the way you have.”

  I seized his face in my hands and looked right into his eyes.

  “And Tyrus, I still won’t.”

  Then I kissed him.

  His surprise translated in the brief stillness of his lips on mine. Then his hands caught my hips and he pulled me hard against him as he kissed me back—desperately, hungrily. He’d been battered, beaten, and I knew it had to hurt him, but Tyrus didn’t seem to care, and in that moment, neither did I.

  For a long, dizzying moment, I forgot that I had ever known doubt. His mouth on mine felt like the answer to every question that had ever troubled me. Of course, I thought, wonder flooding me—a wonder that felt larger than the two of us, larger than this ship or the battle ahead or the galaxy for which we’d fight. This wonder comprised the miracle of the entire universe, and the fact of existence itself. With gratitude and delight, I thought again, Of course.

  And then terror edged in, for it was happening, I was slipping away, losing myself in the delirium of the past. I pulled back, but the fever had caught him as well. His arms tightened about me and he claimed my lips again.

  My thoughts began to fragment, time slipping its mooring. I was elsewhere… in a decompression closet, choking on the thin air, with Tyrus refusing the oxygen mask I meant for him alone. He scorned the mask and his lips plunged to mine, and he said, See?

  See that I love you? See that I value you more than the very air I breathe? And then I was returning his kiss. My blood lit up. All evil had been undone. He clutched the back of my neck with a rough hand, devouring my mouth, and just before I could sink back into the memory of this, sanity broke through, stark and clear and vivid.

  “No!” I cried, and ripped back out of his arms.

  Now I was afraid. For I did not understand the magnetic atmosphere in which I—we—were suddenly caught. I could not move. I stared back at him.

  Slowly, slowly, he lifted his hand to touch my face. His fingertips framed my cheek, the contact lighter than a breath. But through those small points of contact, I felt the tremor that ran through him again, and I tensed against the urge to answer it.

  “I never thought I’d kiss you again,” he murmured, his pale eyes intent as they searched mine.

  “You… you won’t.” I forced myself back another step, another, raising my arms up to hug my chest, a physical barrier between us. I knew this path. There was too much pain in it. “I can’t. I just can’t.”

  His hand sank to his side. His throat bobbed as he swallowed, but I knew I didn’t need to explain. He already knew. He understood me as well as I understood myself.

  I had to look away from him. “You won’t sacrifice me. Nor will I sacrifice you. Whatever happens next, we’re in this together. But not that way. I can’t endure it.”

  “Nemesis, I understand.”

  “You’ve hurt me.”

  “I know.”

  “And you’ll do it again. I know you will.”

  He didn’t answer that, the silence resting heavily between us. I found I could not look at him again.

  Around us, the Alexandria lurched into the dark oblivion of hyperspace, stranding the fleet of the Partisans far behind.

  41

  I SPENT the next hours securing all the remaining Partisans on the ship in holding cells. Anguish and Neveni, I dared not face alone. I didn’t ask Tyrus, for fear he’d claim better health than he had to provide backup.

  So I activated the Alexandria’s stunners and ordered open the door to the study. As soon as they rushed through, the stunners I’d prepared for them felled them.

  Then I dragged them to a secure holding cell.

  My control over the Alexandria meant I had full access to the surveillance cameras. I was on edge, barely sleeping. Constantly, I used the cameras to check whether Anguish and Neveni remained locked up, and to watch their failed attempts to break themselves out.

  I sometimes spotted them in each other’s arms and quickly looked away. Other times, the instruments picked up their conversation.

  “Are you actually surprised she turned on us?” Neveni said to him. “She’s obsessed with him.”

  “I wouldn’t call it that,” Anguish returned.

  “What would you call it, Anguish? How many times does he have to cut her legs out from under her before she realizes she can’t trust him?”

  “There must be a reason for this,” insisted Anguish.

  And his defense of me made me desperately want to go down to him, to tell him the truth of what Tyrus had said.

  A fearful thought
came to me then. What if they laughed at me for believing his excuses?

  Worse—what if they were right?

  I passed the restless days and nights in the pitch dark of hyperspace avoiding Tyrus as well. It was simple enough, as his recovering strength limited his ability to rove. Using the surveillance cameras, I could always stay a step ahead of him.

  But I spent hours watching his image on the surveillance cameras.… He slept as little as I did.

  Once he sat in his study, contemplating the burning logs of the fireplace. Another time he stood in the doorway to the high-gravity chamber, gazing inward at it fixedly, and it occurred to me only after a time that he was staring at the workout floor where I’d often thrown myself into conditioning during stays on his ship. As though he were reliving those memories of me, and the wistful look on his face was…

  The frightening current of realization made me shut off the image, for fear I would take a perilous joy in that.

  Three days into our journey, I awoke from a troubled sleep in the middle of the night and checked on the prisoners once more, and then—then I did not resist. I called up Tyrus’s image.

  And saw him sprawled in a chair, about to do something that made my blood turn to ice in my veins.

  I didn’t think. I sprinted right to his study and burst through the doors to confront him.… He startled to his feet, and I slapped the burning vapor rod out of his hand. Then I screamed at him, right in his face, “Are you mad?”

  I reached out and snatched the acrid-scented Venalox from the floor, feeling a scream build up in my throat; the horror was devouring me.

  “You are using this?” I bellowed at him. “You are willingly using this now?”

  “It’s not what you think.” Tyrus’s alarm faded, and there was a tiredness to him that goaded me further.

  I didn’t feel like hearing it. I hurled the Venalox into the fire and rounded on him, anger scorching me. “You have gone mad. You are insane! How could you use this substance?”

  “Nemesis, listen!” Tyrus roared at me, catching my arms, drawing me close. “I. Am. Not. Using. It.”

  “You synthesized it for a reason. Why would you do that?”

  He let out a groan of frustration, drew me closer so our foreheads were almost touching. “I don’t use it. It’s the smell. The weight of the phial in my hand. I find it… a comfort.”

  “This is sick. It’s wrong.”

  He released me and paced away, scraping his hand through his coppery hair. “You doubt me? Then make yourself certain of my answer.” He turned to me. “Shoot me up with the truth serum, if you like. I will tell you the exact same thing: I didn’t synthesize it so I could use it.”

  But when he suggested it, suspicion reared in me, and I couldn’t help it—I was searching every possible nefarious angle to the suggestion.

  I folded my arms, turned away to look at the ashen vapor rod scorching amid the flames. “Wouldn’t the Venalox remind you of the worst days of your—of our lives?”

  “Yes.” He let out a long breath. “But the merest smell of it also… it also transports me. I’ve had a distraction since gaining the scepter: the machines. There was always something not me in my mind, something other than my own thoughts. It was unending, the sound of them, the feel of them. They gave me something to focus upon, when I didn’t wish to think. Now that they are gone, the silence is… weighted. I find myself thinking overmuch. Dwelling overmuch.”

  I looked at him sharply. “Dwelling upon what?”

  “My mistakes. Or the possibility of mistakes I have yet to make. With you,” he said hollowly. “With the Empire. With this course I’ve set for us all.”

  “How can you find comfort in the memory of Venalox? I should think it one of the bitterest memories.”

  He tilted his head back. “The Venalox was forced upon me repeatedly in the single period of my existence where I was utterly powerless to make decisions, and… and at times, especially now, I find myself thinking… longingly upon that total lack of responsibility or obligation.” Quietly, ashamed, he admitted, “I even miss Alectar at times.”

  He gave a strangled laugh at the startled look on my face. “Is that not the most… disgusting, twisted thing, to miss one’s captor?”

  “He had total control over you for four years,” I said, struggling to understand it. “I suppose he was… all you had while I was gone.”

  Tyrus closed his eyes a moment, and I could almost sense his mortification to bare his truth so with me. I stepped over to him and gently traced my fingers along his arm. The gesture felt strange after being alienated from him so long, but his skin gave a shiver at the contact.… It seemed to encourage him to look at me once more.

  “What is it you doubt right now?” I whispered. “Is it me?”

  I had been avoiding him, so I had no other insight than that.

  In truth, I’d been afraid. Fearful of what I still felt for him.

  Terrified of all the pain he might cause me yet.

  “No.” His light blue eyes locked upon mine. “Not you. You’ve always been my single certainty, even when we were star systems apart.” He gently touched a lock of my hair, following the path of his hand with his eyes as though he caressed something sacred. “Even when you were so distant, I wondered if I’d but dreamed of you.”

  “It’s too late to indulge in doubts of anything else,” I said simply. “You’ve chosen a course for this galaxy, it’s true, and we’re on it now, Tyrus. We’re too far in it to change. At this point, doubt is useless. So are false comforts.”

  He gazed at me a long moment with a sort of tired admiration. “You have always been so strong-willed. You set your mind to a course and then you find a way to make it happen. I make a decision, and then I question it endlessly, to the point where it is maddening.” He sank down into the chair again, casting his gaze toward the pitch darkness outside the study’s window. “It occurs to me that I never had a chance to tell you the entire story of Anagnoresis.”

  My eyes narrowed. “The planet where you dwelled as a child. The one destroyed by malignant space.”

  His shoulders tensed. “You know that much. Yes.”

  My muscles grew rigid. Had that been a lie? I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  “And it was destroyed by malignant space. Eventually.”

  “So… so what am I missing?”

  “Anagnoresis was my greatest mistake,” Tyrus murmured. “My worst. For weeks, I watched that scar of light spread across the sky and I knew it would be the death of everyone around me. No one would have listened to me, if I—a child—warned of the danger. The Excess never listened to their children. What authority did I have? The Anagnoresians were certain they were safe.”

  “You should have told them you were a god,” I said dryly.

  His lips curved up at one side. “I was not an actor yet. I needed years under my grandmother’s sharp gaze to hone that skill.”

  I sank down in front of the blazing hearth. “I know this: you sent word to your uncle to retrieve you. You knew it would result in the death of your father—and it did.”

  Tyrus darted his gaze toward mine, and then away. “I thought—the trade was necessary. To save thousands of lives, at the cost of one, it would be the right decision, and I would come to live with it. But it was a small province. Randevald decided that none of the Excess there would be missed. He couldn’t allow them to carry tales of Domitrian intrafamily strife across the Empire, so he ordered Devineé to fire the Tigris’s weapons and raze the settlement on Anagnoresis. The entirety of it.”

  I uncurled my hands. Laid them carefully atop my bent knees. “He killed them all?”

  “Yes.” Then his eyes shimmered in the firelight. “But what made it worse was the sight when we rose above the atmosphere and I at last saw the malignant space without the cloud cover. Nemesis, it was so small. It was so far away! The clouds distorted the light, just as my father told me.…”

  I caught my breath.

&nb
sp; “We’d have had years of safety,” he said, “before that malignant space would become a threat to Anagnoresis. Decades, perhaps, to prepare for an evacuation. The Excess had known this. They had tried to tell me this—to comfort a small boy. By telling him the truth.”

  I stared at him a long, stunned moment, understanding it. “You were the one who was wrong.”

  “It was my fault, what happened to them. Malignant space didn’t kill them, Nemesis. I did.” He let that sit there a long moment, his eyes hazy. “And so for years, I tried not to think about it. I think I must have blocked the memory, successfully, for most of my life. Instead I focused on malignant space itself, on the phenomenon, as though solving that might atone for what I’d done to them.… Then I learned of Tarantis and it all came back to me. Suddenly it was staring me in the face: I was the problem with this Empire.”

  And my distrust and hostility melted away and I moved over to him, drawing his calloused hand into mine. “Tyrus, that’s not the truth. Surely you can’t think that.”

  “Don’t you see?” he said to me, suddenly intent. “Do you know why I didn’t believe my father, or the Anagnoresians?”

  “Because you were a scared child—”

  “Because they were Excess. I was Grandiloquy. I earnestly believed… I believed I was better than them.”

  The words stunned me.

  “I took for granted that I knew more than they did. I was a nine-year-old child utterly certain that I was in a better position to decide their fates than they were.”

  The naked, brutal honesty of it seemed to scrape the air between us. It had never dawned upon me that Tyrus’s egalitarian views were not innate, but learned with time.

  “I am Grandiloquy born, and we all regard ourselves this way: as fundamentally better. My mother was more liberal-minded than most, but in truth, I was raised to believe no differently. We associate only with one another or our chosen lackeys among the Excess. We own the media, we own academia, we control the culture and pay the censors who shape public discourse, so where will we ever hear a voice telling us we are just human beings like any other, born to better circumstances? Everything contrives to reinforce this delusion that we fundamentally deserve to preside over others. As a child, I believed in this lie we created for ourselves to justify our power. The very existence of what I am needs to end if there’s to be a better future. I am an embodiment of all that is wrong with this Empire.”