by K. B. Wagers
I blinked up at him and then at Johar, who was cradling my head in her lap. I was still on the ground, Aiz at my side with his hand pressed to the middle of my chest. My hand was whole again, the pain gone. Gita and Alba looked on, their faces locked in twin expressions of horror.
“Punching the wall or trying to fix my hand?” I asked.
Aiz rolled his eyes at my sarcasm and pushed off my chest as he got to his feet. “Both of them. If you want to hit something when you’re angry, find me.”
“The last time I wanted to fight you when I was angry you told me to go away, remember?”
Aiz’s jaw tightened and he stared at me for a long moment before he replied. “Don’t ever try to heal yourself without supervision again; you stopped your own damn heart.”
“That’s a bad thing?” I snorted when he didn’t respond, then rolled onto my side and tried to ignore Gita’s wince as well as the tear that slipped out of the corner of Alba’s eye.
Johar stood and crossed to Aiz, folding her hands together in a strangely formal gesture. “I’d like to come watch you fight, if I may.”
Aiz studied her for a moment before he nodded. “You may. I think you can resist the temptation to intervene better than the empress’s Dve can.”
“Ekam.” I murmured the correction. I didn’t have to look up from where I was trying to get to my own feet to know that Gita was glaring in Aiz’s direction, but I did manage to stifle the bubble of laughter in my throat. I had to stop laughing at things that weren’t supposed to be funny.
“I’ll keep my hands to myself,” Johar replied.
“We’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
Gita and Alba confronted me the moment the door closed behind Aiz. “Majesty, this has to stop.” Gita reached for me, but I dodged her hand. “Please stop. You can’t keep doing this.”
“I made a mistake. It happens.” I crossed the room to the shower, but my legs gave out halfway there and I dropped to the floor. Johar watched from across the room, arms crossed over her chest and her mouth in a hard line as I struggled to my feet.
“Majesty, you don’t have to kill yourself for the rest of the galaxy,” Alba pleaded, tears still standing in her dark eyes.
“Who else is going to if not me?” I countered, pleased when I made it to the bathroom wall without falling over a second time. “And let’s be honest. My useless life for the galaxy is a pretty good deal.”
“People can fight their own battles, Hail,” Johar said.
“Maybe.” I shrugged a shoulder and looked up at the ceiling. “But this fight’s mine. You are my responsibility. All of you.”
“You’re my responsibility, Hail.” Gita’s reply was soft, but the words hit me like a gut punch as she crossed to me. “That used to mean something to you.”
“It does mean something. It means I’m not going to stand by and let you die for me like all the others have.”
“It’s my—”
“Don’t you dare”—my voice cracked, and I stabbed a finger into her chest—“say it’s your fucking job to die for me. Just don’t. If I don’t do this, everything burns, and I’d rather beat you to death myself if I’m going to be held responsible for it anyway.”
Gita gasped as though I’d struck her, a hand flying to her mouth in horror. She backed away from me and for just a flash I wanted to apologize, but the words tangled themselves in my chest and refused to come out.
I never thought I’d say this, but Aiz might be right about her. Indula’s ghost bumped shoulders with Iza’s. She is straight-up vicious.
Like poking an angry viper. Iza agreed.
“Would you all be quiet?” I pressed both hands to my temples. The voices inside and outside my head were timed perfectly with the pounding of my blood through my skull.
Silence fell for a blessed moment.
Then Gita whispered something to Alba, who nodded and moved away. The ghosts of Iza and Indula vanished, but Johar and Gita remained. I slumped to the bathroom floor, still soaked in my own sweat, blood, and worse. Aiz had fixed me but everything still hurt.
I knew they were watching me as I cautiously got to my feet and sighed. “Out with it,” I said. “Just don’t shout. Please.”
You’re being an idiot, Hao’s ghost said, and I shoved a hand at him, my palm passing through his face. The movement unbalanced me, and I caught myself on the towel rod with a muttered curse.
“Majesty, this is killing you.”
My laugh sounded strange to my ears, jagged and uneven. “I only died once today; I think that’s an improvement.”
You killed yourself because you don’t have a clue what you’re doing. Or because you want to die. Either way it’s disappointing as fuck. Hao crossed his arms over his chest and looked down his nose at me.
“Hao, shut up, would you?” I snapped my mouth closed, refusing to turn around and see the looks of concerned confusion Johar and my Ekam were likely sharing. Instead I reached in and turned on the shower, stripping out of my clothes and stepping under the spray.
The screaming panic that the water induced had become more and more welcome over the past few months, a grounding sort of pain that reminded me to keep going. A welcome echo to the memory of my skin splitting and bones cracking against the wall.
“I barely recognize you.” Gita’s lament was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it over the water.
I finished washing off with a sigh and flipped off the shower. Grabbing for a towel, I wrapped it around myself, sitting down on the bench and staring at my knuckles. Somehow the old scars were there; Aiz never wiped them out when he was healing my new wounds, and I was grateful for the consideration.
“I am doing the best I can,” I said. “If you no longer have any faith in me, then I can release you from my service.” I offered up a bitter smile. “Maybe they will let you go back to Indrana, then, since you can’t stand the sight of me.”
“Majesty—”
I waved a hand. “Just go, Gita.” I didn’t look up but I was fairly sure Gita and Johar shared a look before she left us alone.
“Are you also tired of me?”
“That’s not even remotely what she said.” Jo sighed and rubbed a hand over her short black hair, making the ends stand up in little spikes. She sat next to me, started to put her hand on my leg, and sighed when I shied away, dropping her hand into her lap.
“Fuck, Hail. I told you months ago to be careful with Aiz,” she said. “This was exactly what I was afraid of happening. He’s using your guilt against you. He’s using the deaths of the people you loved to get you to fight his battles for him.”
“He’s not using anything. I agreed to this, Jo.”
“Why? Because Mia showed you some future that might happen? She’s got you as tangled up as Aiz does, Hail, possibly worse.”
“You think they’ve brainwashed me?”
“I know you’re not acting like yourself. Oddly enough, though, I think they’re worried about you, too. You freaked Aiz the fuck out with that stunt,” she replied. “They wanted you here, but you’re sliding off the deep end and I don’t think that was part of their plans.”
“You think I’m losing it?” I laughed.
Johar pinned me with a sharp look. “You’re talking to ghosts, my friend, and you just killed yourself.” She was the first person to actually call me on it, and I blinked at her in shock. “I think—” Johar paused and ran her tongue along her top teeth. “You want the punishment and the pain. You think you were responsible for what happened.”
“Am I not?” I rubbed a hand over my eyes. “My ship. My crew. It’s no different just because it’s an empire instead.”
Johar snorted. “In some ways I like the irony that the honor Hao drummed into you stuck so well, but really, Hail, you can’t be responsible in the same way for an empire that you are for a crew of fifteen. You know that.”
“They’re all gone.”
“I’m not going to argue with you about that.” She shook her head. �
��You need to believe there’s nothing left for you to do but to fight.” She didn’t look my way, smiling instead at the wall. “I happen to agree with Gita that this is not the way it should be, but I understand why it’s the choice you’ve made. I just don’t want it to kill you.”
I couldn’t stop the laugh. “It’s hard to even see that as an ending now.”
“I know, and that’s what really scares me. We are mortal, Hail. Even me with all this.” She gestured at herself and shook her head. “And the super cool things the Shen have taught us. We live, we die. There’s no getting around that. We won’t live forever. There’s having a healthy fear of death and then there’s thinking you’re invincible. Aiz has beaten the latter into you, and Mia’s made you think you can control it.” She shook her head, waving a hand in the direction of the main room. “It’s not a good thing.”
“Maybe not,” I admitted. “But what choice do I have?”
Johar sighed and got to her feet. “There are always choices, Hail. We just like to fool ourselves into thinking there aren’t to justify making the shit ones.”
I watched her follow Gita’s path from the room and lay back on the bench, tears leaking out of my eyes and disappearing into my hair.
Don’t listen to them. You dishonor us all if you quit now. Cire’s ghost crouched at my side, smoothing a hand over my forehead. We all died to put you here, sister; what becomes of that if you walk away and let the galaxy burn?
Several days later I came to a stop in the corridor as the familiar sounds of strained voices wafted out of Mia’s office toward me.
“I did not expect this recklessness, not from her,” Aiz said. “And it is only getting worse.”
“We can’t stop now,” Mia replied, though there was a hesitation in her voice. “It’s not a surprise. Everything she’s loved has been stripped away from her and then we push?” She exhaled and I heard the sound of footsteps pacing the floor. “The future holds for the moment. You need to find a way to reach her.”
“I am the one out there snapping her bones!” Aiz’s furious whisper surprised me, as did the strange grief clinging to the words.
“She trusts you more than you know, Aiz. We knew what this would cost. The scouts reported spotting a Farian ship in sector forty-seven. You know who it is. They will find us soon—”
The sound of footsteps behind me in the corridor forced me into movement and I wiped the expression from my face as I came in through the door of Mia’s office.
I stopped, adopting a surprised look at the pair of Shen in the room, and then smiled. “I’m sorry, am I interrupting?”
“Not at all.” If I hadn’t heard the conversation I would have missed the forced smile as Mia turned around. “Aiz was just leaving.”
He crossed the room, eyes on me, and inhaled as he passed as though he wanted to say something. I watched the indecision flash through his eyes and then it was gone. “Hail.” He murmured my name, but nothing more as he left the room.
“Hail, I am sorry,” Mia said with her hands outstretched in my direction. “You don’t know how much.”
“You’d think I’d get used to the idea that all of you sat around and watched my life implode like some cheap vid-drama.”
The bitterness in my words was designed to cut like knives, but I got very little pleasure from watching Mia flinch.
“I understand it.” I shrugged. “If anyone had come to me years ago and claimed to know how this was going to play out, I’d have laughed in their face and then probably shot them.”
“Hail.”
I dodged Mia when she came toward me. “Don’t, please. Don’t touch me. It still hurts. Don’t you get it? Even knowing why you and Sybil kept all this to yourselves, it still hurts. I’m still angry.” I spun on my heel, hooking my hands behind my neck as I walked to the far wall. “There is so much rage in me, you don’t understand. I don’t care about what happens to me, but there are a hell of a lot of people who are dead. People I loved. They didn’t have to be tossed onto the fire.”
“You think you could have stopped it?”
“I think it was my duty to stop it, to keep my sisters and brothers safe. To keep my people safe. Naraka, even to keep a galaxy’s worth of strangers safe! Isn’t that what you all want from me? To kill mighty beings and stop worse things from dropping in on this galaxy?”
“It’s different, Hail.”
“It’s not!” I whirled around. “It’s no different. Those were my people, my family. I owed it to them to keep them safe and I failed.” I crossed the room to the console in the back, tapping it and bringing up a map of the surrounding space. “Now the Farians are closing in on us and I’m once again helpless to do anything about it.”
Mia joined me at the console, none the wiser as she put a hand on my arm. “Hail, look at me. You didn’t fail.”
I lifted my head. My eyes were dry, but rage and misery battled it out in my chest as I met Mia’s gaze.
“The hardest part of seeing the future is knowing that people are going to die and knowing you can’t stop it.” She attempted a smile, her lips only curving briefly before she gave up. “I had my first glimpse of the future when I was five. Too young to know what to make of it. Too young to realize that telling my father would result in a worse moment coming to pass. Too young to understand that some things are meant to be and they will play out no matter how many times we try to stop them.
“Your people didn’t die because you failed at something. They died because we all die.”
I laughed. “Mia, do you realize how that sounds given our entire plan is about ensuring your immortality?”
Mia shook her head. “Even the Farians. Even the Shen.” She gestured around us. “This all ends someday. There’s no escape from that.”
“The abstract notion that the universe ends doesn’t change things much.” I rested my forearms on the console and went back to studying the map, my eyes seeking out section forty-seven. I found it and quickly cataloged the distance between Sparkos and the sector. It was strangely absent of any red-marked Farian forces, and I wondered again what Mia had meant by her words.
“I know,” Mia said. “I was thirteen when my mother died, and during her funeral rites I saw a future of a young woman weeping over her dying father before she was dragged away by BodyGuards. The grief was a mirror of my own. Six months later I saw a future of a young woman with green hair facing down a man twice her size in a bar. It took me longer than I want to admit to figure out that it was the same person.”
13
I laughed and pushed upright. “I wouldn’t feel too bad. In so many ways the person I was died there with my father. Cressen Stone and the princess Hailimi Bristol were two different people for a very long time.”
Now it was pieces of Cressen who had died on the floor of my Sophie more than a year ago. Here I was, the Empress of Indrana, struggling to hold it all together in the face of my shifting fate. I wanted to ask Mia how it ended, or better yet to tell me what to choose to take this awful, yawning emptiness out of my chest. It didn’t seem to matter that I knew I couldn’t trust them; I wanted someone else to tell me what to do. “How much of my life have you seen?” I asked instead.
“A lot of it.” Mia was smiling when I looked at her. “Some were of choices that weren’t made, but mostly I’ve seen pieces of your life play out the way you’ve lived it, just a little in advance. I know this may make you uneasy, but I needed you to know.”
“It doesn’t.” I shook my head. “That’s strange, maybe, but it doesn’t bother me.”
“I feel like I know you, Hail, but it’s hollow and more like a dream than anything. I’d like to change that.” She tapped the edge of the console. “We are here, now, and I have been waiting for this moment my whole life. There was no way to change the things that happened up until now without bringing ruin to the galaxy. Your family still would have died, no matter the scenario. The only ones where they didn’t, it all ended in disaster. I’m sorry.”
Just like Cas. I rubbed a hand over my face as the thought intruded and couldn’t bring myself to ask about Emmory and the others. “I could have made a difference, if you’d been willing to work at the negotiations.”
Mia smiled. “I admire your determination, but you do not understand the depths to which the Pedalion will sink to keep their hold on power. We would have been willing if they had been.”
“Aiz told me they tried to kill you when you were a girl.”
Mia turned toward me and tugged the hem of her shirt upward. The rough knot of tissue ran in a jagged line just under her breast all the way to her side, as if someone had stuck a knife between her fifth and sixth ribs and tried to slice her open sideways. It was pale against the tan of her skin and made my stomach twist with both anger and horror.
“I was dying when Aiz got to me. He dragged every bit of energy from the room around him and almost everything from himself to save me.”
“You were a child. How could they have—” I stopped myself just before my fingers made contact with her skin and pulled back, fisting my hand so tightly it hurt.
“The Farians are not your friends, Hail,” Mia replied. “They are cold and methodical and ruthless in their devotion to the universe taking a path they believe is right. The path that placates their gods. The rest of us are nothing but pawns to be thrown away on an opening gambit.” She dropped her shirt and stared past me.
I bit my tongue before I could make a joke about pawns; it hit too close to home given what I’d overheard. Pieces of my brain grappled—some wanting to go back to Gita and apologize for my stubbornness. We hadn’t spoken since I’d suggested I should fire her. A larger part wanted to ask Mia about the conversation I’d overheard and demand answers.
You can’t trust anyone, sha zhu. Hao appeared on the other side of the console, arms crossed and leaning against the wall.
“I am sorry for the pain you have gone through, and what you are still going through. It is a time of hard choices. The ones I have made helped you to be here, and I would make them again even knowing the pain. I understand what is at stake, not just the future of my people but of everyone in the galaxy. So do you. Your gut tells you the truth of this. You are the Star and people will wade through blood and fire for you.”