by K. B. Wagers
“Yes, sir.”
“Hail, look at me.”
I lifted my head, smirking at Aiz for staying out of arm’s reach, and swiped the blood from the corner of my mouth with my left hand, flicking it to the floor at his feet. “What?”
“What happened?”
“Did I pass your test?”
“What test?”
“They’re not real.” I gestured. “Well, Jo is, but not the others. It was a test, right?”
He frowned and approached me with the same caution one would use on a wounded animal, sliding a hand over my throat and up into my hair. The energy arced over my skin. The sound of Gita’s choked rage pushed its way past my dulled senses, and the pain vanished.
The discontented noise crawled out of my mouth like a living thing. “I wanted that pain.”
“Get them out of here,” Aiz ordered.
“No! Shiva damn you, let me go. Hail—”
I didn’t look away from Aiz when the sharp sound of a weapon meeting bone was followed by Johar’s wordless snarl. The warning whine of a gun powering up ushered in a silence that my heartbeat easily filled.
“Hail, what are you talking about?”
“You told me,” I murmured, unable to stop myself from leaning my head back into his hand, exposing my throat. “You said they weren’t real. They claimed the others are alive.”
“I said no such thing.” Aiz blinked. “You think Gita and the others are Shen?”
“It makes sense. You said I can’t trust my eyes. That our minds seek the comfort of believing the lie. You’d want every advantage, wouldn’t you? Why not kill my people and replace them with yours from the beginning?”
“Oh, Hail.” He sounded concerned, which made no sense at all to me. “They’re your people. But I could have them removed, if you want.”
His words were sharp, an ice-cold blade cutting into me. My strike knocked his hand off me. I rolled away from Aiz, coming up in a low crouch, my blood roaring so loud in my ears it drowned out everything else.
“Get out of here.”
Aiz backed up, keeping his eyes on mine as he crossed over the threshold and the door slid shut. I collapsed onto the floor, wrapping my arms around my knees in a vain attempt to stop the shaking.
She’s not completely lost.
I whirled around, scrambling back to my feet to find the threat. The ghosts of Emmory and Zin leaned against the far wall, shoulders touching as they studied me critically. My heart broke all over again at the sight of them together.
She’s not. It’s a surprise, I guess, Zin said. I was expecting her to roll over for him, let him kill all three of them like she let him kill us. What do you suppose is keeping her here?
Emmory pushed away from the wall. I tensed as he circled me slowly; that look of disdain on his face hadn’t been aimed at me since our very first meeting. Now it hurt to see, and I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping they’d be gone when I opened them again.
I was not that lucky.
Are you waiting for something, Majesty? Emmory asked. No one is coming to save you.
“I never asked any of you to save me,” I snarled at him. “I never asked for any of this!”
Cry me a fucking river, Hail, Zin snapped back. We never asked for a spoiled brat to disrupt our lives, yet here we are. Or rather, here you are; we’re dead.
My reply died in my throat and I stared at Zin in horror until Emmory nudged me with his boot and crouched down so he was eye level with me.
You’re losing focus. It leaves a nice warm glow around my heart that you feel so fucking guilty about us dying, but it pisses me off to see you playing Aiz’s game. He tapped me on the forehead three times. Wake the fuck up.
I woke, Fasé’s pale face filling my vision like a sad moon in a fall sky. “Majesty, you’re so much clearer now.”
“And you’re still dead,” I answered automatically. Odd that I could finally see her ghost when all I’d had before were her whispers. I swung a hand out, unsure if I was relieved or disappointed when it passed through her.
“I’m not dead.” Her reply was startlingly peevish and I shook my head.
“I know. You’ll be reborn on Faria, but that doesn’t do me a whole lot of good, does it?”
The ghost’s smile was filled with sorrow, and I swore I could feel her fingers on my cheek. “Focus, Hail, it’s so hard to reach you but it’s been getting easier. Was the planet you touched the one you’re on, do you know where?”
“I haven’t really left the compound. I don’t know.” I slipped from the bunk and padded across the floor to the window Johar had been trying to get loose. The moonlight shone down on the jungle beyond the compound. Fasé peeked over my shoulder and made a soft sound of frustration.
“There’s a compound? What does it look like?”
I brought the map up on my smati. “I’m assuming since you’re in my head you can see that. Though again I don’t know what a ghost can do with the information. There are plants with tiny blue flowers around the camp. A jungle out there with big-leafed trees. They look like the ones on Si Ket and HiCrown, in the Thaimay system. I don’t know what it matters, Fasé, you’re all dead.” I rested my forehead against the window. “I’m starting to think I’m dead, too, and I’ve been sent to Naraka.”
“Hang on for us, Majesty. We’re coming.”
“No, you’re not. No one is coming to save me.”
“Majesty?”
I jerked away from the window. Fasé’s ghost was, of course, gone, and Gita stood behind me, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
“Majesty, what are you doing?”
“I was…” I looked back at the window, frowned. “It was just a dream.”
“Come back to bed.” Gita reached for my arm and tried unsuccessfully to hide the hurt in her eyes when I flinched away from her touch. Despite Aiz’s assurances I wasn’t wholly convinced she was real.
“What’s going on?” Johar appeared behind Gita.
“Nothing. I was just restless,” I said, avoiding contact with both of them as I slipped away from the window and went back to my bunk.
No one said a word about Emmory and the others being alive. It hung in the air with all the weight of the ghosts who still haunted me. I wrapped myself in the blanket, curling toward the wall.
“She was talking to Fasé,” Gita whispered. “She’s been talking to all of them, Jo, thinking they’re dead. Whatever they’re doing to her, it’s killing her.” Her voice broke. “We have to get out of here.”
16
Several days later, I was lying on the floor, battered and dazed from the latest round with Aiz while he and Mia talked at the doorway.
I was swimming in a sea of pain, lost in the mists with nothing but ghosts to keep me company.
The fight had been close. Aiz was nearly as injured as I was, but he’d healed himself and then touched my bare shoulder before joining his sister. I could feel the energy rolling through my blood. I liked it when he left me to heal myself, liked being able to hold on to it and let the razor teeth of my pain shred just a little more of my soul.
Gita, if it was her, was right. I was a mess.
There was a small, conscious part of me that knew not using the energy to heal myself was wrong. It screamed, almost unheard in the back of my mind, getting weaker with every second that ticked by. It was the same voice that kept trying to get me to ask about Emmory and the others. That part wanted to believe they were alive.
The rest of me didn’t want to deal. The pain was better.
I shifted, a broken rib stabbing into a lung with the movement, and the clean kiss of pain broke my drunken haze.
“Hail?”
I felt rather than heard their footsteps crossing the mat to me. Mia snapped something at her brother, too fast for me to comprehend.
“I did heal her,” he replied in Indranan. “Katadiki—” His curse was in Shen, a word I didn’t have a sense of beyond universal damnation. “I gave her energy to heal her
self.”
The mat shifted, and I cracked an eye open as Mia knelt by my head. “How can someone so intelligent be so foolish?”
My reply was cut off by the bubbling blood in my lung and Aiz muttered a second curse when I coughed, spraying blood across the mat.
It was a close call between his hand on my side or the energy jolting through me as to which hurt worse, but then Mia tightened her fingers against my scalp and murmured something to her brother. Electricity skittered down my spine and over my skin again. Now Mia’s power felt cooler than Aiz’s. It washed over me like a wave, sweeping away the pain.
“It’s too much,” she murmured, leaning in and pressing her lips to the crown of my head. “I am sorry, this is going to hurt.”
Every cell caught on fire and I blacked out.
I woke a moment later, still on the floor, only now my head was in Mia’s lap. “She’s all right, Aiz,” she murmured. “See. How do you feel?”
My breath caught in my chest and I locked my hands in my shirt before I gave in to the temptation of grabbing Mia by the face and kissing her.
“Better,” I admitted. All my injuries were gone, along with the blood in my lung. But I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin and collapse from exhaustion all at the same time, and the ache remained. A longing for the pain I couldn’t put words to even if someone had put a gun to my head.
I wish someone would put a gun to your head and save us all the trouble.
I winced away from the vicious, unidentifiable voice. Mia helped me sit up, rubbing circles on my back with one hand for a moment before she got to her feet.
“Why didn’t you heal yourself?”
“I like the pain.” The admission slipped out of me and I heard Aiz’s ragged inhale. “It’s better than feeling anything else.”
Mia uttered a little wounded sound. “No, Hail, it’s not.”
Aiz muttered under his breath and got to his feet; whatever he’d said, it made Mia wince.
“Aiz—”
“No.” He shook his head, a hand in the air as he headed for the door. “It is my fault. I was inattentive.”
Mia followed him to the door and put a hand on his arm. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the worried frowns creased across their faces were more than enough to give me a guess.
I got to my feet, swaying a little, and braced myself on the stack of mats Mia had been perched on during our fight. This was the first time she’d watched us fight and it had been distracting—painfully so—to say the least.
“How long have you been doing that?”
I didn’t trust myself not to fall over if I turned my head to look at her, so I kept my eyes fixed on the mat in front of me. “I don’t know, a month or so? Maybe more. I lose track.”
“Your smati isn’t on.” Shock laced her words. “You’ve cut yourself off from your people?”
“I don’t—”
Trust them, Hao said, boosting himself onto the mat next to me. You don’t trust them.
“I don’t trust myself,” I snapped.
“Hail, will you look at me?”
I managed to turn and leaned against the stack, telling myself that it was just my imagination tricking me into feeling the vibrations from Hao tapping his heel as he swung his foot back and forth.
“Don’t trust yourself with what?”
“To feel anything.” I bit down hard on my lower lip and closed my eyes. “To know what’s real anymore.”
“You don’t deserve to be in pain.”
I froze at the feel of Mia’s hand against my cheek and gripped the mats behind me to keep from reaching out and pulling her against me. The laugh that spilled out of my throat was brittle, snapping against the air.
“You don’t know what I deserve.”
“I know more than you want to admit. Open your eyes and look at me.”
I did, digging my fingers so hard into the mats it made my bones ache.
The fear was clear in her gray eyes, and my skin burned when she took her hand away. “Aiz was trying to see how much energy you can take and hold, since you are having such a hard time accessing it from outside yourself. It is not as good as the alternative of you being able to pull energy to heal yourself, but it is better than nothing. When you refused to use it because you were determined to do penance for the crimes you think you’ve committed, you upset the balance.”
“I seem to have a talent for that.” I was surprised by the smile that took over my mouth.
“You do.” Mia did not return the smile. “This is not a path I wanted you to go down, Hail. It worries me. You are slipping away.”
It was starting to worry me, too, but there wasn’t anything I could do. So instead I feigned nonchalance. “You want me to fight, I’ll fight. There’s not much else I can do for you.”
“You are putting us all at risk!” The shove was surprising, knocking me back onto the mats, into Hao had he still been there. Instead my brother’s ghost had appeared behind Mia, a look of impressed surprise on his face. “You’re not a mindless brawler, Hail. You’re an empress who should be wallowing a little less and thinking of her people a little more.”
“Leave my people out of this. Most of them are dead. The rest—” I shook my head. “I wanted you to send them home and you refused! Now I don’t even know if they’re real or not.” I wanted with all my heart to take a swing at her and my hand closed into a fist, a move that didn’t go unnoticed by Mia.
“Not everything is about the fight, Hail,” she said. “You need to think more, feel more, and stop behaving as if you are the only one who has ever lost people that you love.”
The words hit as intended. A well-placed strike to knock the wind from me. And that was the problem, wasn’t it? I didn’t want to feel what I was feeling. The paranoia, the loneliness, the fear. All my worst nightmares had come true with the deaths of nearly everyone I held dear. The pain of it made my response cruel.
“Says the woman committed to genocide simply so she can win a family argument.”
Mia stared at me, her mouth open in shock, and I watched her own hand start to form a fist. However, she stopped, shook her hand as if shaking the anger from it, and smiled. “Not everything is about the fight,” she repeated, and turned for the door.
Less violence, not more, honored sister, is always an option.
I didn’t see Dailun’s ghost, only felt the brush of air as the words were whispered in my ear.
None of it stopped me from charging at Mia’s retreating back.
She moved faster than her brother, so fast I barely registered that she’d spun to the side in a move that would have made Zin insanely jealous. I realized too late she wasn’t trying to avoid my strike and my palm connected to her shoulder.
Mia caught me by the hand, barely stepping back an inch as though the force didn’t bother her at all. Then a wave of pain rocketed up my arm and slammed into me with all the force of a railgun.
I dropped to the floor.
By the time I was able to get my lungs to cooperate and rolled over onto my back, Mia was gone.
“Bugger me.”
You always were horrible at flirting. Hao crouched at my side.
“Oh, fuck off.”
Hao raised an eyebrow at me and then vanished. Ghost or not, the room felt emptier without him there.
Covering my face with my hands, I held my breath until the urge to scream had passed.
You are so fucked. The unidentified voice held a wealth of glee. You’ve come completely apart at the seams. So much for the legendary Star of Indrana.
“You can shut up, too, whoever you are. If you’re not brave enough to show your face, just fuck off.” I hissed the order as I dropped my hands and rolled onto my side so I could push my aching body to its feet.
I staggered out of the gym and down the hallways to our rooms. There was no one around, but I wasn’t sure if it was a blessing or a curse. The silence made it hard to hold on to the world around me, and
the voice started an endless litany of questions.
What if you’re the one who’s dead and everyone else is alive? Would you like to see how they’re happily living their lives without you? What, you thought they’d mourn the loss of a worthless daughter?
Bile rose in my throat and I barely made it to the toilet before it spilled free. I clung to the edge as the shudders worsened and hot tears streaked down my face.
I’m serious, why are you still holding on here? There’s nothing left for you. No great victory looming in the future. You’re not special, Hail. You’re just a fool who got everyone around you killed because you were too stubborn and arrogant to know when to give up.
“Stop. Please.” The words were raw, scraping against my throat as they clawed their way out past the tears.
Baby. Portis’s voice chased away the other, and I imagined his hand was gentle as he brushed my hair from my face. Breathe.
I dragged in a breath and threw myself into his arms. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
You don’t get to choose that option, he replied, his arms tightening around me. Because you can do this. I know it’s hard. I wish I could say it’s going to get easier soon, but it’s not. You’re about to face even worse things and I need you to fight. The whole universe needs you to fight.
“Why me?”
Portis pressed a kiss to my temple and then dragged me to my feet. What do you want me to tell you? That it has to be you? That no one else will? You and I both know that’s not true. Someone always steps up to take the place of the fallen; none of us are so special that we’re irreplaceable. And yet— He smiled. Here you are and there is no one else in all the universes who will make the choices you make, Hail. There are people out there who love you and aren’t giving up on you.
He gave me a little shake. Go get yourself cleaned up. Get some sleep and get up in the morning ready to fight again.
I didn’t have a chance to respond before he vanished, so I did the only thing left to me and that was follow Portis’s orders.
17
I woke with Johar’s shoulder in my stomach and the realization that my arms were bound together from wrist to elbow. All I could see was the dark brown dirt of the ground and the leaves slapping me in the head as we made our way through the jungle.