Seven Devils

by Laura Lam

  She’d neglected to mention that she had done most of the killing.

  Eris read the change in Clo, but she wasn’t quick enough. Clo had the Mors from the small of her back pressed against the princess’s head before she could blink. Gods, there was four minutes before the bomb went off. What was she supposed to do now?

  One shot. Discordia was supposed to be dead anyway. One shot, then Clo could run and disappear. Worst case, she blew herself up and died a godsdamned hero.

  But she didn’t want to be a hero. She just wanted to live.

  “Let me go,” Eris—Discordia—hissed. “We have to get out of here. There’s no time.”

  Clo hesitated.

  Discordia jabbed her elbow into Clo’s stomach. Clo wheezed, her grip on the Mors loosening. Discordia ducked and sprinted away from the bomb. Clo followed. She gained speed as she moved through the tangled underbrush as easily as she’d darted through the slums of her homeland.

  She caught Discordia, tackling her to the ground. She shoved the Mors into the small of Discordia’s back. Were they far enough? How much time?

  “Shoot me, then,” Discordia’s voice was low, almost a growl. She still sounded so much like Eris. “Kill the person who’s best placed to help take down Tholos.”

  “No royal would turn their back on the Empire. Especially the Heir.”

  Discordia’s expression went hard. “Well, I did.”

  “You’re lying,” Clo said, her finger tightening on the trigger. “Kyla—”

  “Kyla knows,” Discordia said. “So does Sher. Both of them helped me stage my death.”

  A rushing in Clo’s ears. They knew, they knew. And Kyla had kept it from her. Sher had kept it from her.

  “You lied to me.”

  “Clo, there’s no—”

  A warning beep blared in the dark. Discordia turned toward Clo, eyes wide. Clo had thought they were far enough away. But if they heard—

  A boom, so loud it reverberated in her chest.

  The world burned bright as the flames of the Avern.

  Clo went flying and slammed into the trunk of a tree. Leaves, debris, and heavy branches rained down. She couldn’t think. Her ears rang, the world roaring like spaceship engines. She saw only the brightness of fire, then the warm, almost-red blackness. She let out a moan. Everything hurt.

  Movement above her. Clo couldn’t turn her head.

  “Come t’kill me proper?” Clo managed to mumble through swollen, bloody lips, Imperial accent forgotten in pain.

  Princess Discordia crept closer, her face illuminated by the dying fires. She was lacerated with small cuts that were already healing over. Nanites like that were only for royalty.

  The shifter had half-kicked back into place, her features a blend of the Eris she knew and the Discordia she feared. One iris was still green as forest moss, the other luminous as a sun. They were steady, no ocular dilations to indicate activated programming. Royalty, like Clo, were not influenced by the Oracle.

  Which meant that every life taken by Discordia had been a choice.

  “Tempting, after what you just did.” A pause, her mismatched eyes flickering down. “Your left leg is trapped by debris. You wouldn’t want to see it. By all rights, I should leave you here. You let emotion overwhelm you, and you jeopardized this mission.”

  “D’it, then,” Clo said through a mouthful of blood. She’d lost a tooth or three. “Leave me or kill me.”

  Discordia gave a frustrated huff. “You’re not going to thank me for this.” She rummaged beneath her oversized coat, bringing out a large, very sharp knife.

  That was how Clo would end, then. Cut open, her blood feeding the twining vines beneath her. No marshland burial for her.

  Discordia made an incision along Clo’s upper thigh, and Clo hissed in a breath. One more stab of pain on top of so much more.

  Discordia sliced her own wrist and pressed their wounds together.

  “Whit’re ye doin’?” Clo asked, consciousness beginning to blur around the edges. She felt weak, floating. She’d lost a lot of blood.

  “The nanites will stay localized for a few minutes.” Discordia took off her belt, tying it tightly above the shallow gash. “They’ll help.”

  “Oh, no,” Clo said as her mind worked through Discordia’s plan. “No, no.” A futile wriggle. She was stuck.

  Discordia leaned close again. “Do you want to die here, in the dirt, your bones left for the bugs? Do you want this to be your last day in the universe?” She didn’t blink. Clo didn’t see Discordia in that gaze.

  “No,” Clo whispered again, the word catching on a sob.

  “All right. Bite down on this.” Eris shoved her scarf into Clo’s mouth. “For what it’s worth, I befriended you for real. And I have chosen this side. I’m not a spy. I don’t care whether or not you believe me.”

  Eris brought the knife down, her strength enough to break through the bone.

  Clo screamed through the gag, the pain taking over every cell in her body. She spit out the gag, panting. She wanted to tear off her own skin to make the pain stop.

  “If I ever see ye ’gain, I’ll drain ye t’ the dregs,” Clo managed with the last of her breath before all went dark as the void.

  5.

  CLO

  Present day

  At least they got to use Clo’s favorite ship.

  It was one of their smallest ones, called Asteria. Class C. Repurposed from the Empire, like all of their ships. Agile and moved like a dream, with an engine that hummed. The cloaking tech was so good, it could sneak up on almost any craft. Over the past few years, Clo had taken it apart and put it back together more times than she could count. She knew this hunk of metal better than anyone, even the myriad pilots that took it on missions.

  Asteria had sentimental value. This ship had saved her life.

  Clo set her hand on the side, patting it like a friend. She opened the hatch for Eris. “After you, my . . .” She gave a pause. “Former potential sovereign.”

  “Thank you.” Eris looked the ship up and down. “This craft barely looks like it could get off the ground.” She swiped a finger across the dash, wrinkling her nose at the resulting dirt. “Seven devils, how long has this been sitting here? Longer than I’ve been alive?”

  Clo glared at Eris and patted the ship’s dash. “Shh. She doesn’t mean it, sweetheart,” she whispered to her craft. To Eris, she said, “You still carry around that ancient junk blaster with the fancy etchings? This ship is like that to me. Sentimental. Say one more bad word about it and I’ll deck you.”

  Eris didn’t even look up from the dash. “I was giving you two hours for your first show of insubordination, and you displayed it in fifteen minutes. Congratulations.”

  “I agreed to the mission. Kyla made you leader, but that dinnae mean you’re my leader.”

  “Look,” Eris sighed. “I’m just as unhappy about this as you are. But we’re stuck together and I need to know you’re going to follow my orders and not shoot me in the back at the first opportunity.”

  “Your orders? Ohh, but it’s so tempting.” At Eris’s glare, Clo rolled her eyes. “Fine. No back-shooting. No front-shooting. No shooting, except in emergencies.”

  Clo thought Eris might argue with her, but the other woman only nodded once. “Fine. I’ll take it.”

  “Good. ’Cause that’s the best you’re gonna get from me.” She stood. “I’ll check over the engine. The sooner we’re out, the sooner we’re back, the sooner we can go our separate ways and I’ll stop thinking about shooting you.”

  “Fair enough. Is your Pathos on?” Eris asked.

  “Of course.”

  They took a moment to sync their devices by turning back to back and gently touching their heads together. Clo stiffened at the contact with the other woman. She hated even being near a member of the
Imperial family after everything they’d done—not just to Clo but to others throughout the galaxy. Eris might not have been personally responsible for the deaths of people Clo cared about, but she’d hurt so many others.

  There was a reason Discordia had been known as the Servant of Death.

  The microchips embedded within their brains’ cerebrums connected the software with a soft .

  Clo jerked away. Eris didn’t seem bothered, but then, she was as emotionless as a statue.

  Eris said in Clo’s mind.

  “This is such a bad idea,” Clo said out loud with a grimace. “Just hearing your voice in my head makes me want to flip a table.”

  “I don’t want to be killed because you’re too stubborn to communicate. Now test the damn thing.”

 

  “Loud and clear.”

  Clo narrowed her eyes.

  Eris shook her head and completed an inventory of supplies. This mission would only last one week. Seven days. Clo could last that long. She’d have to.

  Less than an hour later, Asteria fired up and blasted into the sky toward Myndalia.

  * * *

  —

  Home hadn’t changed at all.

  Myndalia rose in the distance, a small dot growing larger as Clo navigated through the stars. It’d taken fourteen hours and one hyperjump from Nova to reach the planet. Clo and Eris did their best to avert conflict by avoiding each other. They’d had one brief sleep on opposite sides of the ship, respective doors bolted tight. Clo had slept in the pilot’s seat and had a crick in her neck.

  “I never thought I’d see this silthole again,” Clo muttered as she maneuvered Asteria into the asteroid belt near the planet.

  Though the Novantae had employed hackers to hide their ships from enemy detection, the thick layer of rock and debris would help protect against scavengers looking for parts to steal. It was easier to take the smaller pod to the transport hub. It was a military issued mini-craft with forged permissions the Novantae hackers had put into Tholosian detection systems for situations exactly like this.

  Just a quick, easy jaunt into the enemy’s territory. Get in, get out.

  “Me neither,” Eris said. “Can’t say I missed it.”

  Clo scoffed. The princess’s experience on this planet wouldn’t have been anything like Clo’s. She would have grown up far above Clo’s rundown slums in that golden and opulent academy, which circled around the city of Kersh like a second sun. Clo had looked up at that building every day of her childhood, wishing for even one hour up there. Eating fine foods, being clean, not having to look over her shoulder.

  Eris had that upbringing—she and her monster of a brother, Damocles. They’d grown up scheming together, right over Clo’s head. She stared at the other woman. Did you know? Did you know what your brother did on Jurran? Did you approve?

  She kept these thoughts from Eris, out of the range of the Pathos. It was a skill, to keep from projecting thoughts. It didn’t always work.

  Eris caught her look. “What?”

  This spoiled woman had everything, and she’d walked away from the whole damn galaxy. What made her run? She wondered if Eris had told the truth about losing someone. That question had kept Clo up at night, those first days in the Novantae hospital, numb below the waist as they fixed the remnants of her leg.

  She’d decided it was a lie.

  “Nothing.” Clo turned her head. She slid the ship into a perfect place in the asteroid belt and unbuckled the chair’s straps. “You didn’t see much of the slums, did you?”

  Eris flattened her lips. “If this is another dig—”

  “Assumption.” Clo stood. “And I’m guessing a correct one. The Snarl was only something that ruined the pretty view from your floating palace when there was a break in the clouds.”

  “Floating palace,” Eris murmured with a bitter laugh. “Yes, I suppose it must have looked like paradise to you.”

  Clo’s expression hardened. “There was so much gold on that building that it heated the ground below. Sometimes, it melted the pavement, if the light went through glass.” She glanced again out the window as they flew closer and closer to her former home. “Don’t try to make this mission into a bonding thing. We may have both spent time on Myndalia, but you don’t know a fluming thing about where I lived.”

  “I’d watch your assumptions,” Eris said, coolly. “I may not have stayed there, but I did go down to the Snarl. I killed one of my brothers there.”

  Uncertain of how to respond, Clo focused on their landing point.

  Most of Myndalia wasn’t solid enough to build upon, and what little land there was wasn’t exactly habitable. Arable land was used for farming food Clo had barely been able to afford on her mother’s meager benefits. Most of the planet was nothing but swamp and bogs parents warned their children about. Monsters lived down beneath the water, they whispered in the night, and loved to snatch tender morsels. Clo had never seen anything bigger than the fishes, but the tales had worked. She’d always kept to dry land.

  The planet looked beautiful from above, all green, blue, and purple swirls, like a marble Clo had stolen from the market half her lifetime earlier. The parts of the planet not covered in swamps were rich in natural resources. The Empire grew crops and exotic fruits, enough food to feed dozens of other planets.

  Those crops had become more strained since Charon’s mass die-off; that planet had been a huge source of the Empire’s food. The farmers on Myndalia were trying to pick up some of the slack, but the planet didn’t have enough arable land. What resources they did have? They were sent to the floating palaces or other Tholosian planets. The inhabitants of the Snarl, many of whom worked in the fields, received the same food given to gerulae: gelatinous nutrition made from ground-up bugs, cheap oil, and cheaper grains.

  From their hands, the Empire was fed. And the workers were starved of the very crops they helped grow.

  Clo fucking hated this place.

  Growing up, she’d never known how beautiful Myndalia could be. All she’d ever been there was a small cog in the machine of the Empire—like everyone else who lived in the Snarl. The Oracle couldn’t weave One’s tendrils into the slumrats; they were the last natural-born humans, created within the womb instead of engineered in birthing centers. One’s programming hadn’t taken well within the Snarl. Too many people were left comatose.

  After losing too many farmers to programming experimentation, the Empire decided to control those in the Snarl through other means: addiction to drugs supplied by the Empire to keep them “docile to influence.” Meant the slumrats were constantly off their face. Clo’s mother protected her from those drugs. That was the only reason Clo had been able to run away.

  Once the natural-borns had all died out, Clo figured the Empire would let the swamp take the Snarl back. It’d sink into the bog as if it had never existed at all, just another forgotten place in an insatiable, vast Empire. The farming would be left to the gerulae.

  “Let me do most of the talking once we arrive,” Eris said as they got ready.

  Clo lifted a shoulder. “Fine by me.”

  Clo watched as Eris made sure everything on her uniform was perfectly in place. It all had to be. Guards were trained to notice the small, imperfect details that betrayed a Novan spy who wasn’t born into the role they were playing.

  The threads on Eris’s cuffs were the brown and purple of a middle-ranked Publican. In contrast, Clo’s uniform was a dark gray, embroidered with a silver chain around her own cuffs to mark her as a mechanic.

  Over both of their left breasts, right across the heart, were the crossed scythes of the Tholosian crest, the blades dipping down like harpies’ wings. Between them rose the black circle symbolizing that death claimed all in the end. Eris’s hand kept creeping to it, as if she wanted to rip it off. C
lo longed to do the same.

  Publicans had the power to conduct surprise inspections, with the assistance of a mechanic to check the engines for any unapproved tracking, and then collect any fines or extra taxes. They would not be the guards’ favorite people, but they should command respect and a little dose of fear. Just what they needed.

  They walked through the dusty Asteria to the transport room, stiff and silent. It’d been a long fourteen hours with a weapon always within reach. The small shuttle down in the hold looked like every other military emergency transport vehicle. It was an oblong craft that could barely fit two people. It looked like a bullet. Or a coffin.

  Eris and Clo settled into the pod and Clo prepped the coordinates. She wasn’t nervous, exactly, but she was sparkish—it had been so long since her last mission. If Eris was on edge at all, it didn’t show. Clo remembered Eris as a chameleon, able to shift into someone else at a moment’s notice. She’d seemed to thrive on that knife’s edge of danger, as if it made her feel alive.

  But as the lights in the craft dimmed, throwing the other woman’s face into sharp relief, Clo heard Eris release a shaky breath. Maybe the perfect princess had her own nightmares from this place, after all.

  “Takeoff in ten seconds,” the ship’s calm voice intoned.

  “Let’s go spy on the Empire,” Eris said. Clo didn’t reply, her fingers tightening around the throttle.

  The ship’s computer gave them their final warning. “Three, two, one.”

  Clo shoved the throttle forward and the pod burst out of the ship and toward Myndalia.

  * * *

  —

  It’d been a long time since Clo had barreled through the atmosphere in such a small craft. She’d forgotten how much she hated it.

  The interior grew warmer, until the controls were almost too hot to touch. A halo blazed around the small ship. The world grew clearer, closer, the ground seeming to rise up to meet them. A few thousand feet from the ground, Clo swallowed hard and wrenched the controls, slowing their descent and making sure the cloaking tech was engaged.