No, the grief would have to wait until later. Judit cleared her throat. “If Willa wants us here, we need to be somewhere else. Let’s get in a shuttle.”
“We can’t leave her alive,” Variel said, thrusting her chin at Willa.
Judit didn’t want to talk with Variel, didn’t even want to look at her. She wanted to arrest both of them. “Then we take her with us. She belongs in prison.”
Annika and her mother frowned in exactly the same way.
“We cannot appoint ourselves executioners,” Judit said. “Fighting for our lives is one thing. Cutting down an unarmed prisoner is another.”
“Judit—”
“No, Annika,” Judit said. “If we’re going to be together, you have to see my point in this.” She put all the feeling she had into the words, not only love but grief and anger and so much fatigue it was a wonder she didn’t pass out.
Annika stared before she nodded. “I might not understand your point, but I can see it’s important to you. So, that means I’m willing to learn, right?”
Judit nodded, happy she agreed, but how happy would she be when Judit arrested her mother? “Let’s get out of here before whatever Willa thinks is going to happen happens.”
The four of them hurried down through the Eye. Scorch marks and bodies littered the way along with blown doors and shattered consoles. The hierophants who wanted to shape the universe seemed to have crashed into those who wanted to watch it as they’d always done. Mass killings had already started here, and Judit didn’t want to see them spread across the galaxy.
Annika warned off any living hierophants by saying she’d hurt Willa if they didn’t back off. Judit thought they were going to proceed all the way to the shuttles unmolested, but as they rounded the last corner before the umbilicals, Feric blocked the hall.
Annika stopped cold, a myriad of expressions crossing her face. She glanced at Variel, who shook her head. “It’s over, Feric.”
He frowned, and a look of near hatred passed over his face as he stared at Variel. He made a few gestures with his hands.
Annika held the bone knife to Willa’s neck. “Get out of the way, Feric.”
He gestured again.
“I don’t have a destiny!” Annika cried. “It was all a bunch of shit! I got loose. I got your leader, and I’ve got my mom back. I’ve won, and you’ve lost, you darking traitor!” Anguish filled her voice, and tears hovered in her eyes but didn’t fall.
Judit wanted to reach out to her, but she turned to Feric, readying herself in case he rushed them. He shook his head. Annika pushed the blade against Willa’s neck, and a line of blood welled around the sharp edge.
“You know your destiny,” Willa said, her face calm.
“Shut up,” Annika said, eyes locked on Feric.
Judit’s jaw tingled, and she jumped. When Beatrice’s voice said, “Jude?” in her ear, she nearly whooped.
“Here!” Everyone glanced at her. “The Damat is here.”
“Jude,” Beatrice said, relief thick in her voice. “We’ve got to get you out of there. We’ve got Meridian and Nocturna ships entering this system.”
“We’re in the shuttle bay. We’ll come to you.” She turned to the rest of them. “Time to go. Our ride’s here.”
Feric took a step forward, and he seemed to get wider as he pulled his shoulders back, a stance clearer than any words.
Willa smiled, even with the blood running down her neck. “They’re coming, aren’t they? Nocturna and Meridian?”
“We’ll be gone before they get here.” Judit took a step toward Feric, but Annika cried out in shock.
Time seemed to slow like on the edge of the abyss. Willa had rammed her head forward, forcing Annika’s knife into her neck. Her eyes bulged, blood pumping around the bone. She coughed, splattering scarlet drops along the floor, the wall.
Feric charged. Annika’s mother ran to meet him, screaming for Annika and Judit to get out. Annika let Willa’s body fall, then stepped toward where her mother and Feric wrestled in the hall. Footsteps pounded down the corridor, and without Willa as a shield, they were going to be overwhelmed. Whatever Willa had set in motion would come to fruition.
Never. Not while Judit could draw breath. And they weren’t going to get caught because of a darking killer. Judit leapt at Annika and tackled her into one of the umbilicals. They fell in a tangle of limbs, the flow of air slowing them as they dropped into a hierophant shuttle, but neither of them was facing the right way, and they fell half on top of each other.
“Mom!” Annika cried, but Judit was already reaching for the console. “Judit, wait! We have to get my mom.”
“When she sees we’ve gone, she can make her own escape,” Judit said. “I have to save us.”
Annika lunged for the console, but Judit grabbed her. Annika stiffened as if she might counterattack then stilled. “Let me go, Judit,” she said quietly. “I have to get my mother.”
“It’s too late. We’re disconnected. I’m sorry, Annika; I had to. Once she sees we’re gone—”
“You left her there to die!”
It would be no more than she deserved. The shuttle lurched. Judit glanced around Annika at the console. An automated system had engaged. The shuttle raced forward, and both of them fell. Judit scrambled up and reached for the console, but nothing would respond to her touch. Annika tried, too, but nothing worked for her, either. She turned to Judit with fury in her eyes. “You locked me out!”
“I haven’t done anything!” She clicked her teeth. “Bea?”
She heard a faint response, but according to the screen, they were moving away from the Eye at top speed, away from the Damat.
Judit searched for the shuttle’s destination, her belly going cold as she sorted through coordinates. The hierophants might have preprogrammed all the shuttles in case she and Annika escaped, or maybe all their shuttles were this way. The Eye usually sent its people to one place, after all, and the hierophants might not know how to fly. For where they were going, a computer would be a better pilot anyway.
Annika looked at her with wide eyes after she scanned the information scrolling across the console. “We’re…we’re headed for…”
“The black holes at the center of the galaxy.”
Chapter Twenty
Annika slumped in front of the console, trying to think. One moment it had seemed as if she had everything worked out, everything going according to plan. Now the woman she loved had forced her to abandon her mother, the key to unraveling the hierophants’ plan was dead, and she was headed for a massive cluster of black holes at the center of the galaxy.
What a day.
Judit hunched over the controls, stabbing at them with frantic energy. “The comm will only let me send messages back to the temple. Maybe the Damat will intercept them.”
“But you won’t be able to hear them.” Annika felt still, as if all the emotions inside her had compressed and left her numb, her own little black hole.
Judit banged on the console. “Maybe the Damat can disable this shuttle’s engines.” She put her gloved hands to the sides of her head. Her hair stuck out crazily. “No, we’re too small. Cannon fire could destroy us. Evie will know that…” She paused, and a stricken look came over her face.
The sorrow there broke through Annika’s numbness. “Oh, Judit. What is it?”
“Evie is dead,” she said quietly.
So they were both down a parent and a friend. Even though she was still hurting, still angry, Annika raised up on her knees and pulled Judit toward her, holding her fiercely. Judit hugged her back, making Annika’s arm throb, but she clamped her teeth on that pain.
Judit pushed back, inhaling deeply and wiping her cheeks. The gloves left smudges in her tears.
“There’s got to be a toolkit on board,” Judit said. “Help me find it.”
But the numbness had come back, and Annika stayed where she was as Judit found the kit and pried the panel off the console. Annika stared at the wires and chip
s inside, unable to decipher what they were. Nothing was labeled; the shuttle was different from any she’d seen. She had a random thought that maybe she could figure out how to turn the gravity off, but when it threatened to make her laugh, she thought of anything else.
“Do you think my mom is dead yet?” she asked, wanting to shock herself back to reality.
Judit turned, face sorry and angry at the same time. Annika didn’t even know how she wanted Judit to respond. “I am sorry, Annika, but she… I knew they were coming, and we had to get out of there. I couldn’t let you be captured or killed, and I…reacted.” She clenched a fist. “And we can’t get back there if we can’t turn this darking ship around!”
Judit turned back to the controls, a tool gripped in one hand as if she might start randomly stabbing at things.
“Don’t,” Annika said. “If you damage the life support, we’ll die even quicker.”
“We are not going to die!”
“This must be what Willa wanted,” Annika said, “what she’d seen. The rest of them will make up some story about us going out here, maybe how we were trying to see into the future so we could help.”
Anger began to bubble inside Annika’s chest, breaking her calm again. Every time she or Judit had thought they’d been rebelling, they’d been following someone’s script. Even Judit’s “rescue” of her, tackling her into this ship, had been part of someone’s plan. They’d been led through their whole lives as easily as someone who had the darking worm!
Her gaze slid to Judit again. They’d miss so many things together. They had so many memories to share, and there was still a giant secret between them.
“Okay,” Judit said, staring at the console again. “So, we know where we’re going, but the shuttles don’t automatically go over the event horizon into the black holes. Most hierophants come back. So there must be a way to fly the shuttle when they get there. Maybe it’s automated this far so the hierophants can’t change their minds before they get out there.” She took a deep breath, frowning. “So, instead of going into the black hole, we might come back and find out time’s moved on without us. That will solve all our problems. The galaxy will probably have exploded by then.” She put her head in her hands. “But if Willa knew this would happen, she probably programmed this shuttle to hurtle into oblivion!”
“Judit,” Annika said softly.
Judit put her hand up. “We’re approaching the last transmission gate. Maybe the Damat will be able to disable it, but I don’t know where they are because I can’t get the darking sensors to work!”
No, she couldn’t wait any longer. “Judit.”
“Just a second.” She clicked her teeth. “Bea? Slattery? Anyone on the Damat, can you hear me? They’re either too far away or something on this darking shuttle is blocking me.”
The shuttle had no window, no way to look out except for the feeds from the cameras, and those only showed the forward view as they approached the gate. The shuttle slowed, and Annika shut her eyes as the gate caught hold of them. The shuttle sent an automated transmission, and then came that feeling of being stretched, laid thin over the whole galaxy. It passed quickly, and they were through the gate closest to the galaxy’s heart, into the one area of space that had never been contested.
A dark filter slid over the view from the screen, but the cabin still filled with the light from all the stars being eaten by the black holes, the epic singularity that would consume the entire galaxy one day as similar clusters would consume the whole universe.
Judit’s mouth opened, and a look of wonder came over her face as it was bathed in light. It covered her, and she looked every inch the chosen one, a bright star all her own, the woman Annika loved with all that was left of her heart.
And she didn’t deserve all the lies she’d been told.
“Judit,” Annika said. “I have to tell you something.”
Judit turned to her, and the wonder deepened as she smiled. “I love you, too. I hope you can forgive me.”
“Well, since you mentioned forgiveness…” She paused, not knowing how she could put this into words, but if they were going to die, she had to say it. “My house never intended my marriage to Noal to be…a happy one.” She sighed a laugh, but it had no humor in it. “Their plan, our plan, was for me to use biotech to take over Noal’s mind, to slowly separate him from his family, and one day, when he’d fulfilled every purpose Nocturna had for him, to kill him. I was supposed to kill you, too, if you got in the way.”
Judit blinked, face blank as if she was a computer trying to process Annika’s words. “You…” She swallowed. “But after you got to know us, you changed your mind, right? It was what your family wanted. You weren’t actually going to…”
Annika breathed deeply. “Honestly, I didn’t want to.”
“Didn’t want to?”
“But it was what I was trained to do.” Her heart hammered, and she had to wonder if it’d been a mistake to say anything. She might be spending her last few moments alive with Judit hating her.
“You were going to kill us, to kill me? You said you loved me before you were kidnapped.”
“I did…I think.”
“You think?”
“Judit, please! You have to understand. Love…I had no idea what that meant, not really. I loved my mother, but she left, and my grandmother said she abandoned me, and my grandmother never showed me love, not like you do, not like Noal does. I thought I loved Feric, but now I don’t know. I never met anyone like you and Noal. You…you changed me.”
“But you would have killed us anyway?” She stood, anger shining from her face. Annika stayed on the floor. If Judit wanted to strike her, well, at least she could understand that.
Annika felt tears gathering and not from grief. She tried to summon what she’d been like before this whole adventure started, tried to remember how she’d felt, but it was like a different time, even though it wasn’t long ago at all. She let the tears fall and hoped Judit saw the truth in them.
“I can’t be that mad at Feric, at the other hierophants,” Annika said. “They set me free. It wasn’t until I realized that the marriage was off, that I might never go home again, that I could open myself. I realized what it meant to love you, to be loved by you. Would I have gone through with Nocturna’s plan? I don’t know.” She lifted her hands, dropped them. “That’s the most honest answer I can give you. I didn’t want to do it; that’s the truth. But it’s what I’d been trained to do ever since I can remember, and that’s a hard thing to break free of, a hard thing to abandon. And if I hadn’t done it, if I’d tried to warn you, if I’d tried to do anything but run, Nocturna would have found another way to get what they wanted. Even if I’d defected to your house, they would have found a way.”
Judit didn’t move, and Annika wondered if she was waiting for more, but Annika didn’t know what else to say. Well, maybe there was one more truth.
“I love you,” Annika said. “Now. I loved you then in my own sorry way, but I love you now with everything I have. I’d never hurt you or Noal now. And whether we survive this or not, I swear to you that there will always be truth between us.”
Judit took a shuddering breath, then another and another until she seemed able to breathe normally. Annika wanted to beg her to say something, no matter what, but she forced herself to be patient. A light on the console blinked, and they both turned to look.
“Transmission sent,” a line of text read.
Annika drew a sharp breath. Everything she’d said had been sent to the galaxy at large. She’d forgotten they were aboard a hierophant shuttle, and that every word got recorded for the hierophants to pick apart. Indeed, the light was still on, waiting for more speech, more clues about the future.
So, now everyone would know. No more lies. The idea should have scared Annika, but it filled her with a wondrous sense of peace. She looked back to Judit, who watched the light, too. Maybe she was thinking of what Noal would do when he heard it.
The sh
uttle still had them on course for the black holes, no indication that control would be returned to them. Maybe this was all Willa’s doing after all, and they would serve some cause whether they believed in it or not.
“Our houses did this.” Judit took a seat at Annika’s side, but Annika didn’t dare touch her, not yet. She couldn’t stand the thought of her touch being rejected. “My house had a plan, a secret fleet built to annihilate Nocturna if they put a foot wrong in the marriage plan. If the marriage had happened, Meridian wouldn’t have dismantled that fleet. Whatever happened, they would have found a reason to use it. It’s not…exactly like your family’s plan, but they weren’t willing to take a chance on peace, either.”
Annika nodded. Nocturna had planned to absorb Meridian. They would assassinate key players, but they’d never planned to bomb entire planets, unlike Meridian. She didn’t point that out, certain Judit wouldn’t see the distinction, not when the assassinations would start with Judit and Noal.
“But you weren’t involved with the secret fleet,” Annika said. “The moment you found out about it, you were appalled. Unlike mine, your family didn’t teach you to be just like them.”
“They didn’t trust me or Noal. They knew we would have told you.” She gave Annika a look of pure accusation.
Annika nodded, knowing she deserved it even if Judit didn’t understand what would have happened if Annika had told her and Noal about the plot. Annika would have been removed as heir, and one of her cousins would have been promoted to the role. If Judit and Noal had taken the news to Meridian, the secret fleet might have been launched. Whatever had happened, the two of them wouldn’t be together.
“I’m sorry, Judit,” Annika said. “I don’t know what could have been different, if I could have been different, but I’m sorry I kept this from you for so long, even after I knew it wasn’t going to happen.”
“Why tell me now?” She gestured at the transmission light. “Because you wanted everyone to know they shouldn’t trust your house?”
House of Fate Page 29
