by V. St. Clair
She loved you until the end.
~
Topher rubbed his eyes tiredly and glanced down at the buzz from his communicator. A smile pulled at his lips before he could curse himself as a fool for being happy about something that could only end in disaster.
But damn it, I am happy.
“Jessa, it’s late.”
“Were you sleeping?” Jessamine’s face materialized in the window of the comm, arching a skeptical eyebrow.
“No, but most sane people are.”
“Then it’s a good thing neither of us are sane. Come see me, if you can manage it without getting tailed by one of your peers. We can take a trip down memory lane, if you’d like.”
Topher had just been opening his mouth to offer some feeble excuse for why the continuation of their romantic relationship was a bad thing, but he paused at the offer to let him use her emblem to dive back into his visions.
Damn her, she knows me too well.
“Alright, give me a few minutes.” He cut the comm and got out of bed, abandoning the pretense of sleep and pulling on a loose shirt and some slacks. He equipped two Talents: one to allow him to see heat profiles and another to sharpen his senses. After staring at the back of his closed bedroom door for a moment to confirm there was no one immediately on the other side, he opened the door and looked into the hall, confirming he was alone.
He moved with deliberation, but at a casual enough pace so no one who saw him would think he was up to anything important, stepping into the elevator and relaxing his vision. Sharpening his senses for long periods of time—especially in the infrared spectrum—tended to give him a headache.
At the three-hundredth floor, he passed two members of the cleaning staff and nodded politely to them both in greeting. The staff with access to the top levels of the Augenspire was very tightly controlled, and it wasn’t at all unusual for Topher to be up here at odd hours of the night, so neither seemed surprised to see him.
He heard a door opening somewhere in Shellina’s wing of the floor with his heightened hearing and picked up his pace until he had crossed through the sitting room and was well out of sight from the main foyer. If there was one person he was eager to avoid being alone with, it was the Vicerina.
He’d already had to awkwardly turn down her request to go on a date, trying to be as courteous as possible about rejecting her because as the heir to the Viceroyalty she could make his life very unpleasant if he burned any bridges with her now, especially if she ever became Vicereine.
But she’d taken the rejection well–if plainly embarrassed and disappointed–and so far had avoided bringing it up again, though sometimes when they were together she looked like she wanted to say something about her feelings to him.
Topher scanned his biochip at Jessamine’s door and exhaled in relief when the door locks released with a gentle click. Ever since the night of Fox’s attack he half-expected to find his access erased by co-conspirators every time he scanned his wrist here.
Jessamine nearly tackled him at the door, pulling him inside and pushing his back against the closed door to kiss him. Topher let out a strangled moan and held her at arm’s length.
“I have Talents in—give me a second,” he groaned, releasing her arms and removing both Talents from his enhancers as quickly as possible.
“Is that why your face turned so red when I kissed you?” Jessamine asked curiously.
“Probably. I had my sense enhancer equipped, and it heightens all of my senses, so being flooded with hormones all at once can be a little—overwhelming.” Of course, she didn’t help things by wearing skimpy little silk pajamas around him with her hair down around her face. She knew how to tempt him.
“Oh, sorry!” Jessamine clapped a hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh, not looking at all repentant. “I can’t always tell when you’re wearing them because half the time you look and act exactly the same.”
“I hadn’t even crossed the threshold of your door when you set in on me,” he pointed out, not at all displeased by the welcome, which made him mentally curse himself for not being smart enough to stay away from her.
“That’s true. Now you’ve got your Talents out, so come here.” She wrapped her arms languidly around him, pulling him towards her.
“I thought we were going to try using your emblem.”
“We are, after.” She smiled impishly at him and he felt a surge of hormones completely unconnected to his Talents.
“You lured me here under false pretenses,” he teased, pulling her nearer and delighting in the closeness.
“You knew what I wanted when I called you. I just didn’t think you’d come up here unless I offered up the emblem because you’re hell-bent on being dour about this.”
Topher made a face at her and said, “This is an objectively terrible idea. If anyone finds out about us—and someday someone will—it’s going to blow up your alliance with Darius, alienate his supporters at a time when you need all the help you can get, and royally piss off your younger sister. Speaking of which, you still haven’t told her about us, have you?”
Jessamine looked guilty.
“No, I haven’t. I keep trying to set up the conversation, but it’s hard to get a word in edgewise in any conversation with Shellina, and she’s been so attentive to her work and so helpful. I can’t bear the thought of breaking her heart when she’s giving her all for me.”
Topher frowned and said, “I can break the news to her, if you’d prefer. She won’t take it any better coming from me than from you, but at least it will be over and done with and she can stop making eyes at me from across every room.”
“No, it should come from me. I’m her sister, and ultimately the one who is betraying her in this.” She sighed and shook her head. “I wish I hadn’t told her there was nothing between us all those weeks ago, but I honestly thought you had no interest in me and that this—” she gestured at their embrace “—would ever happen.”
“Well, if you’re serious about this, then the longer you wait to tell her, the worse it’s going to be when you finally do.” He paused, holding her gaze with his own. “So, Jessa, are you serious about us?”
Jessamine didn’t flinch under his hard stare.
“Deathly.”
She turned in his arms. “It just never feels like the right time to tell her, especially with things just beginning to come together and settle down a little with my reign. We’re making huge progress with the new Equal Opportunity Committee, and I’m starting to get mainstream buy-in from key members of my staff on the whole Integration Initiative. If Shellina goes and blabs about us—and I love my sister, but we both know she is not always discreet—then it could throw us into drama and turmoil before I’ve had time to finish cementing my rule.”
“I know.” Topher sighed, running his fingers casually through her hair. He liked being able to do that now. “I just hate all the sneaking around. You’re right, though. We need Lavesh and Freeman to get on board with the Integration Initiative, and that requires some quick successes to quiet things down with the Minors and the military.”
“And—hopefully—for the murders of the Gifted to stop,” Jessamine added. “We’re making progress, Topher, I can feel it—I can see it. It’s just not going as fast as I’d like it to, and I know if I push any harder I’m going to overreach and lose control of the whole thing.”
“Don’t pressure yourself; you have an excellent intuition for timing on these things, and for how far you can push the limit without it backfiring. We’ll just make it work until things settle down, little though I like lying to others about it.”
Jessamine agreed with the sentiment but still pulled his face down to meet hers, kissing him again and sending fire through his veins. He allowed her to tease him with kisses for a few moments before picking her up and throwing her over his shoulders.
“Topher!” she laughed in surprise, facing his back as he carried her into her room and flipped her onto her bed.
“
You know I like these little silk things on you.”
He leaned over her, tracing a finger up one thigh, intending to take his time, but Jessamine used her combat training to knock his arms out from under him and flip him onto his back, straddling him with her thighs.
“Good technique. Sloppy execution,” he teased.
“Say that again.” She lifted her arms and removed the silk slip in one fluid movement, tossing it to the side.
“Good technique. Excellent execution?” he tried again, and she grinned down at him and pressed her body against his.
Surely this is the true meaning of Heaven, he reflected joyously. It felt strange, being so happy, but he was willing to pay almost any price to hold onto it.
Any price? The voice in his head was most unwelcome right now, and for once he ignored it instead of answering, focusing solely on Jessamine. There would be time to talk to his demons soon, but this moment was for him.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever thrown me over their shoulders like a sack of potatoes before,” Jessamine looked up at him from the bed, still with that girlish delight on her face that made her seem years younger. One leg was draped over his, possessively, and her face was flushed with energy.
“I don’t think I’ve ever thrown a sack of potatoes over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes before,” Topher pointed out, eliciting a laugh from her.
“Let’s just stay here all night and refuse to get out of bed tomorrow,” Jessamine suggested. “Surely the government can run without us for one day.”
“Ha, don’t say that too loudly or they might think they can run without us every day. Besides, you promised to let me use your emblem.”
Jessamine sat up and adjusted her clothing, extracting the plain wooden box from beside her bed and removing the emblem from inside of it.
Topher took it first by the chain, holding it up in front of him and examining the elarium-wrought heart at close range. It still felt strange knowing Jessamine was Gifted after all this time, and she looked like she still half-expected him to call her a monster and run from the room screaming for an executioner.
“It suits you,” he assured her, lowering the chain and relaxing against the pillows. “Alright, you know the drill. Wake me up if it seems like I’m in danger.”
Jessamine nodded, looking nervous, and Topher closed his eyes and clasped the warmth of the imbued elarium.
He was plunged instantly into darkness, falling through the black void while screams echoed all around him, building in intensity and making his ears ache until the world suddenly materialized around him again.
He was standing in an unfamiliar place, with odd, sloping walls and no windows. The artificial lighting cast an unpleasant glare onto the white walls, and the air had a strange, flat taste to it which Topher couldn’t put his finger on. An aging man in a military uniform Topher didn’t recognize was standing beside a metal table heaped with elarium. Judging by the general aesthetic of the room, Topher decided he was in some sort of primitive medical facility, though a second man who bustled around the room making annotations on a notepad was dressed more like a scientist than a doctor.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?” The military man—Topher mentally dubbed him a captain—asked, staring skeptically down at the elarium ore.
“I think we have misjudged the value of this in our preliminary assessment of the planet,” the scientist spoke, his voice so enthusiastic that it shook with emotion.
“Looks like a black rock with some blue in it, to me.” The captain was clearly not impressed. “In your initial assessment you said we needed to get it out of our way before we could settle the planet. Now you say it’s valuable?”
“I told you—and the commander—that my initial assessment shouldn’t be rushed, and that I needed at least a full month to conduct any sort of accurate analysis of the ecosystem, but you only gave me a week—”
“The President of Earth can hardly tell the billions of people still stuck on a dying world that they’re going to have to wait an extra month to get off of that barren rock because our key scientist needs time to conduct experiments,” the captain interrupted him.
“Yes, well, when you rush science you’re bound to miss things of importance, and this is important.” He gestured to the elarium again. “The properties of this are astounding. If we could harness it properly, the implications for our technology are almost limitless. We could build a civilization here more technologically advanced than Earth could ever hope for, even in its glory days. Hell, the people on Paxis-4 will be stuck in their cramped air domes for another hundred years before they can even think about having a breathable atmosphere, and Mars is still decades away from being viable, whatever the President says to the media when commenting on it. This is the first planet we’ve come across that doesn’t require significant terraforming, and this ore can give us the technological prowess to make Elaria the new capital of humanity. I need to go planetside as soon as possible and obtain a larger sample.”
The captain looked more interested now. Topher was barely paying attention, as he had suddenly realized with a thrill of excitement where he was.
We’re in space! We’re on an actual spaceship in outer space!
They must be hovering somewhere above the atmosphere of Elaria, on one of the initial colonization visits. Topher wished there was a window so he could run to it and look outside into the vastness of space.
“You think it’s that important?” He gave the elarium an appraising glance. “Then by all means, make another surface trip and get as much of it as you need for analysis. Lord knows we need to move the bulk of Earth’s remaining population sooner rather than later, and this lends itself naturally as the new capital for humanity for that reason alone. The President wants an answer on when arrangements can be made to begin relocating people within the week.”
The scientist nodded, glancing through his notes, but a frown creased his face.
“What is it?” The captain caught the expression as soon as Topher did.
“I think we may have made a mistake with our deployment of the Sarin gas. It seems to degrade the outer layer of rock significantly, and I’m beginning to think it may have a chemical impact on the ore that can’t be reversed. It could render the entire thing useless, unless we intervene—and rapidly.”
The captain looked alarmed.
“We don’t need a major new raw material rendered useless at the get-go or there will be hell to pay from the President when he gets here for his visit. Can we undo the damage we’ve already done?”
“Mmm, maybe not. I think our best hope at this point is to stabilize the system rather than wasting time trying to reverse our own shortsightedness. If we can capture a clean sample—a pure one, free of Sarin contamination—we might be able to work around the rest.”
“Scour the planet. Take whatever resources you need. Find that sample and bring it here for safekeeping until we can build a better place to house it.”
The vision dissolved and Topher was rushing through the blackness once more, but this time the voices weren’t screaming all around him. The silence was somehow more unsettling than the screaming he had grown accustomed to.
“That was the original colonization team for Elaria,” he said aloud. “This happened after the other place you showed me, where the scientist was opening the canister of gas—the Sarin.”
Yes.
Relieved that the voice was speaking to him, Topher continued to try and get information out of it while it was feeling cooperative.
“So they released the Sarin for some sort of terraforming, to make the planet livable for humans, but they didn’t realize the impact it would have on the elarium ore until after?”
Yes.
“Did the scientist ever find a clean sample to preserve?” Topher asked, before considering that he must have done so or they wouldn’t be able to use the elarium-based technology they enjoyed so much today.
Yes.
He wasn�
�t really fond of the one-word answers, and had the distinct feeling the voice in his head was angry about something, though he had no idea how he could tell when the tone was the same as usual.
“I didn’t realize they were intending to make Elaria the new capital of humanity,” Topher continued aloud, hoping to elicit more conversation from the voice in his head. “The history books tell us the President visited, of course, and a large number of people came from Earth. But the new President and his retinue were off-world when the Isolation happened and no one has been back since. I suppose it’s lucky the scientist was able to determine the importance of elarium before it all went bad, or we’d be hundreds of years behind on our technology.”
The voice didn’t answer him this time, and Topher had the impression it was annoyed with him, though he had no idea why. After all, it had chosen to show him this, hadn’t it? Was it tired of being asked questions all the time?
My anger is not with you. The voice shocked him by reading his thoughts. Topher always seemed to forget it could do so since it usually waited for him to ask questions aloud. You know not of what you speak. Your ignorance is expected.
Topher frowned.
“Who are you angry with? If you gave me some useful answers to my questions then I wouldn’t be so ignorant,” he insisted, annoyed. After a long moment of silence, he decided to steer the conversation in a different direction entirely and said, “Why can I hear you in my head and no one else can?”
The other Gifts were not working. I am desperate.
Topher opened his mouth in surprise. “What do you mean? Are you saying I’m Gifted too?”
Not like the others. But, yes.
“But the Minors would have seen the elarium turn green at my testing,” Topher insisted, his heart hammering rapidly in his chest. “I would have received an emblem, and I wouldn’t have been able to join the military, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to have enhancers installed in my head. Elarium-based technology goes to shit around the Gifted.”
You are different than the others. The other Gifts are not working. I am desperate.