by K. B. Wagers
“What’s coming?” She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Mia showed me.” I held my hand out, but Gita didn’t take it.
“We’re not meant to see the future, Hail. Cas—”
“Is dead,” I said flatly. “So is Emmory and Zin and Hao and anyone else who can get us out of this mess. We’re it. The last ones standing. I’ve been wallowing for weeks, but it’s time to get over it and move on.”
She pressed a hand to her mouth and closed her eyes, and when she opened them again the brown depths were filled with desperation. “Please don’t ask me to stand by while these two kill you.”
“That is exactly what I’m asking of you,” I replied, reaching out and linking my fingers through hers. “Not as my Ekam, but as my friend. I won’t lie to you and say this isn’t terrifying and painful, or even that I don’t enjoy it.” Those words hurt to admit but I made myself say them. “It’s not without a purpose. If it’s the only way I have a chance of defeating a being so powerful the Farians think it a god, then I’ll do it. If it keeps Indrana safe and keeps the galaxy safe, I’ll do it.”
“You can’t trust—”
“I saw it.” It was hard to get the words out. “Indrana in flames. The rest of the galaxy burning. So much death and destruction. Not from a war between the Farians and Shen.” I shook my head. “All the things we feared, they’re so inconsequential compared to what’s coming.”
“Majesty—”
“I know. I want you to see this but I won’t force it on you.” I squeezed her hand and then released it. “Believe me. I know. Maybe Emmory would yell at me, maybe he would let me do this. Either way, he’s not here, Gita. We are.”
“What if they’re not dead, Majesty? Can’t you have a little hope?”
I remembered the vision of Emmory but pushed it away as a trick of my brain trying so hard to deny what was real. I’d lost my faith a long time ago, watched it bleed out with my father as he died from an assassin’s old-fashioned bullet. For a brief moment back on Pashati I’d thought maybe I could believe in our gods again, but it was gone. It had been swept away like the colored grains of sand of a mandala in a vicious wind.
“I admire your faith,” I whispered. “I don’t have any left.”
“Hail.” My name was a breath of air from my Ekam’s mouth as she dragged me into a hug. “Please don’t give up.” I clung to her, unsure how to explain that I wasn’t. That this was me fighting as hard as I could to save us all. But the words to explain it in a way that made sense wouldn’t leave my mouth. I just knew with the same kind of bone-deep certainty that Cas must have known when he walked into the palace that I had to do this. No matter the cost.
Or everyone left was going to die.
9
When I sought Aiz out after telling Mia of my decision, the last thing I expected to see was Emmory standing in the middle of the otherwise empty room.
“Empress.” He turned with a greeting and frowned at me when I nodded back.
“What?” I asked. “You’re going to lecture me about this plan, too? It didn’t go that well for Gita and she’s alive.”
“You don’t seem surprised to see me.”
I shrugged. “You’ve been less visible than the other ghosts, but I figured you’d show up eventually.” I passed him by, reaching a hand out for his arm even though I knew it would pass right through.
Only this time it didn’t. My hand met the solid flesh of his arm.
The world tilted sideways and dumped me on my head.
I blinked; my smati was registering him. Standing right in front of me—alive.
“I—” I pressed my fingers to my eyes, removed them to find Emmory still there watching me. “How are you here?” But then his greeting to me cut through everything else. “Emmory never called me ‘Empress.’” I backed away. “Not even when he was mad at me. You’re not Emmory.”
Not-Emmory’s smile was awful, a slow baring of teeth like a predator who’d just cornered his prey. Then the image of Emmory wavered and vanished.
Aiz grinned in his place. “You asked me down in the tunnels how I got past your BodyGuards, but there wasn’t time for me to answer.” He spread his arms wide. “This is how.”
“My smati was showing you as Emmory.” I stared at him in wonder, my relief a strange heat in my chest. “No glitch, no sign it was anything but him. Is that what you used back on Pashati? We’d assumed you had some sort of masking program from Hao.”
“We don’t need a program. What you see is just light,” Aiz said with a shrug. “And light is energy. We can channel it, shape it, create and destroy it.” He passed a hand in front of his face, and it morphed back to Emmory.
“Don’t.” I turned my head, squeezing my eyes shut. “They’re really dead, aren’t they?”
“At this point would you believe any answer I gave you besides yes?”
I laughed; it was brittle and fell to the floor in pieces. “No. I wouldn’t. I know they’re gone.” I looked at Aiz and took a deep breath. “Aiz Cevalla, I will help you fight these beings, whoever or whatever they are, to stop this future your sister sees. I will help you reclaim your homeworld, or a piece of it at the very least so that your people can have their lives back.
“Understand this, I would prefer a peaceful resolution, but if the Pedalion will not listen to reason, I will help your forces defeat them.”
“Very good,” he said, and stuck out his hand, grabbing my forearm when I reached for it. He tugged me forward until we were nose to nose. “Thank you, Hail. I mean that.”
“Thank me when this is still over and we’re still alive.”
His grin flashed and he released me. “You want to tell me what you meant by ‘less visible than the other ghosts’?”
“Nope,” I said, and walked out the door.
“Aiz brought Talos back from the dead without batting an eye and then went on to fight me, heal me, bring me back.” I shook my head in amazement several days later. Mia and Aiz had left the compound the same day I’d agreed to help, though the reasons hadn’t been explained to me. My repeated questions to Talos had been met with “The Thínos have a rebellion to run, remember?”
“He did it all without breaking a sweat. He made himself look like Hao, like Emmory. They were near-perfect copies and the only thing that gave him away was how he walked as Hao and that he assumed a formality between me and Emmory that never existed. How?”
Mia laughed but didn’t look up from the tablet as she paged through her now familiar morning sign-offs. Vais stood next to her chair, hands folded as she waited. She winked at me, her easy grin smoothing over some of my anxious tension.
“The Farians have taught you this is something amazing,” Mia said finally as she handed the tablet back to Vais with a smile. “Thank you, Vais.”
“Of course, Thína.” Vais gave a short bow, threw me another wink, and headed for the door. She paused, exchanging words with Hamah.
“This, Hail, this is just energy.” Mia held up her hands, tiny blue sparks arcing between her fingers dragging my attention away from the Shen at the doorway. “That Farian talent you humans revere so deeply? It’s just energy. Anyone can learn to manipulate it—Shen, Farian, human.”
This time I was unable to stop myself from reaching out to meet the hand she held out to me, and those same sparks jumped from her hand to mine, skittering over my palm and settling under the surface of my skin. I stared at my hand in fascination until the sharp sting on my other arm jerked me out of my awe.
“Bugger me!”
Mia slipped the tiny silver blade back into the sheath at her wrist. “Fix it.”
“You cut me.”
“Of course I did.” She looked pointedly at the blood running down my left arm. “Fix it. It’s easier and safer to learn it on yourself. All you’re really doing is transferring the energy I gave you from one arm to the other.”
I frowned but put my hand over the cut. It was shallow, less than ten centimeters,
and already the bleeding had slowed. My right palm was warm, the heat soaking into my forearm, and I closed my eyes.
Nothing happened.
“It’s all right.” Mia smiled and put her hand on mine. The strangest sensation of what I could only assume was her forcing the energy through my hand and into my skin rolled through me. “I would have been stunned if you’d figured it out right away. I will teach you this. Aiz will teach you how to fight.”
“I know how to fight.” Even as I said it, the memory of the fight with Aiz flooded my head. I tried to ignore the feelings that swarmed to life along with it, but it was like trying to stomp out a wildfire.
Mia shook her head. “Not like Shen. You are fighting beings of immense power, Hail, not brawling in some lonely space port bar. You will have to learn how to fight like a Shen in order to have a chance. As well as this.” She extended the knife to me. “Try again. This time envision your skin as if the wound had never existed.”
The surge of energy. The sharpness of the pain. These things were familiar.
The warmth of healing was not, and my frustration grew as it eluded me. We practiced it over and over again as the hours passed. Shen came and went in the room, Mia conducted her business in between watching me, and the whole time the healing hovered just out of my reach.
There was endless motion on this base, always someone needing something from Mia. She seemed glad to give it, so settled and sure in her place among her people.
I wondered what that felt like.
If you had stayed home you would have known. Instead my unfit, ungrateful daughter chose the black over her own family and left us all to die.
My mother’s voice made my hand slip, and I cut deeper into my arm than I’d intended.
“Hail.” Mia turned away from Hamah as her knife clattered on the floor. “Too deep.”
Not deep enough, a voice insisted.
I couldn’t stop Mia from wrapping both hands around my forearm, nor could I stop the shudder that rolled through me as she healed the wound.
I was unfit and ungrateful. Too fascinated with this woman instead of finding a way out of here and back to my empire.
“You don’t look well. You’ve pushed yourself too hard; come sit down.”
“No!” I jerked out of her hands and Hamah snarled a warning at me in Shen from the door. Unlike so many other Shen, Hamah had not warmed up to me at all, and the sound of his weapon powering up was more comprehensible than his words.
I put my hands in the air. “I’m going to go back to my rooms,” I said.
Mia watched me with curious gray eyes before she nodded and waved a hand at Hamah, who followed me. He waited until I was out the door and out of her line of sight before giving me a shove.
Instinct kicked in and I spun, jamming two fingers into the base of his throat. He dropped, gagging and gasping for air, and I stepped on his hand before he could bring the gun up. “You should be more fucking careful about who you shove,” I whispered.
The clapping startled us both.
I glanced over my shoulder. Aiz was leaning against the wall at the juncture, clapping his hands in exaggerated approval. He pushed away from the wall with a smile and tipped his head to the side as he approached.
The signal for me to let the Shen up was clear, and I removed my foot from Hamah’s hand, taking a step back as he got to his feet.
“Hamah, you really do need to be careful,” Aiz said. “You’ve been bested twice now. The empress will kill you if given half a chance. In fact, I’m rather surprised she didn’t.”
“Dead men don’t learn lessons,” I replied.
“They do when they’re Shen,” Aiz said, and my stomach clenched when he glanced pointedly at Hamah’s throat. “Next time kill him. He deserves it for not paying better attention.”
“Lo syngo, Thíno.” Hamah bowed his head.
Aiz smiled and ruffled the Shen’s dark curls. “Don’t let it happen again,” he replied in Indranan. “I will walk her back to her rooms; you go get some breakfast.”
“Lo syngo?” I asked as we headed down the hallway.
Aiz glanced my way and chuckled. “It means ‘I’m sorry.’”
“I thought as much. And Thíno is?”
“An awkward title that comes with the job.” Aiz made a face. “It is much like ‘Your Majesty,’ I suppose. Mia got used to it faster than I did.”
“She is not the killer you are.”
Aiz chuckled. “How little you know. Mia has killed her share, Your Majesty. Don’t let her sweet face and kind smile fool you. We were not granted leadership of the Shen simply because of our father. We fought for it. Proved our worth in a contest of skill, and strength, and intelligence. It was a ritual not used since the days when we first split from the Farians.”
It would be too easy to fall into a rhythm with Aiz. Part of me hated him for what had happened on Earth no matter how much he protested they hadn’t blown up the embassy, because it was his feud with the Farians that had put us there. I knew how dangerous he was, how determined to see this through no matter the cost.
Another part of me was far too interested in both of them. It was shameful to admit I admired their dedication to their cause. That the more I learned about the Farians, the more I questioned just who was wrong and who was right in this conflict. I felt a curious little tug at my soul when either of them spoke.
“So you and Hamah and the others are extra protective of her even though she can handle herself in a fight? Is that because she can die, or because she won’t defend herself?”
Aiz stopped at a crossroad as a group of soldiers passed. They murmured greetings to him and eyed me with curiosity. “My sister is special, Hail. Her birth was celebrated by my people. The Farians denounced her immediately. They tried to have her killed as a child.” His dark eyes waited for my reaction, and it took all my self-control not to give him one.
But the fury was there, no matter how well I hid it from him. The thought of the Farians trying to kill a child was bad enough, but I had to admit to myself it was the thought of Mia almost dying that brought the anger to life in my chest.
“We already knew about the soul problem for the human-born Shen, but my father was in love,” he continued, turning down the now-empty corridor and leaving me to catch up. “Even with the heavy guard on my sister, the Farians nearly succeeded in stealing her from us.” He glanced my way. “I was almost too late to save her, almost killed myself to do it. You should ask her to show you the scar sometime. She was six years old and yet she asked me to leave it, so she would remember.”
I glanced down at Aiz’s hand. He clenched and unclenched his fist as the memory consumed him, and I swallowed. I knew that pain. Only I hadn’t been around to save my sisters. They’d died.
Everyone you love dies, sister. Pace wrapped her fingers around mine, the cold seeping into my bones, and walked with us down the hallway. She was wearing the same lavender dress she’d been in the last time I’d seen her, her golden curls piled on her head and a smile on her dark face. I’d seen images of her from after I’d left home, but this picture of her was burned into my brain.
“Mia is special,” Aiz repeated, unaware of our companion. “She was the first piece of the puzzle of our redemption. You are the last.”
10
The days blurred into one another: a haze of pain and violence, broken bones, and crushed windpipes, always followed by the jarring electricity of Aiz’s healing. He killed me more times than I could count, or else I killed myself by refusing to submit long after I’d lost the fight. Weeks stretched into months. Fasé’s ghost pestered me about our location until I wanted to scream, and I started to ignore her persistent questions.
My grief took a grateful back seat to the sense of purpose the fights brought me as I threw myself into fighting with Aiz. I preferred the fights; there was a strange peace woven into the violence. There were often spectators for our fights, but Mia did not watch us, and when I pressed her about he
r absence she only gave me a sad shake of her head as a reply.
What she did do was insist on endless attempts at teaching me how to use the energy the same way the Shen did.
Johar joined us on occasion, far more interested in this talent of the Shen’s than either of the Indranan women, and she took to it startlingly quickly. Whereas I failed at it, over and over again. Pain was easier than healing. Healing meant comfort, and there wasn’t any to be had in the wasteland of my heart.
In between all of it, I watched as Mia and Aiz ran a rebellion against an enemy who still outnumbered them and had a tenacity in fights that was impressive despite their somewhat straightlaced tactics. Bit by bit I did what I could to influence their strategy into something that I knew would confound the Farians even further.
I slowly learned Shen as the months passed, from listening to endless meetings and lessons with Talos in our rooms when Aiz and Mia were too occupied to bother with me. Gita, Alba, and Johar often joined us for those, and I was grateful that it seemed my people had given up on their plans to escape.
The Shen had, with my urging, pulled their ships from the human sectors and were running missions closer and closer to Faria. The tactic worked as I’d hoped, forcing the Farian ships out of the human sector and closer to their homeworld to deal with the threat.
They’d left the mercenaries on their payroll on standby, and despite my queries Mia didn’t seem interested in having me coordinate anything with them. I didn’t blame her. There was a decent chance Po-Sin would blame me for Hao’s death, and it was friction this operation didn’t need.
The guards vanished from our quarters and as the days passed I was left to wander more freely, though I noticed there always seemed to be someone trailing behind the others when they left our rooms.
I felt more and more at home here in Mia’s office instead of with my own people. The ghosts reminded me of my betrayal, but most of the time I simply ignored them.