And then I felt it.
A slipping of moisture down my cheeks.
My steps jerked to a halt and my hand flew up to my cheek. I snatched my fingers away to see the redness, but all I could see on my fingers was a glistening of clear liquid. For a moment of dumb shock, I stared at my hand, trying to understand what I was seeing.
This was… These were tears.
Tears.
* * *
Shaezar nan Domitrian awaited me in the medical bay, ready to reclaim the gown he’d placed on me for the meeting. I greeted him by seizing his neck and ramming him back into the wall.
“What have you done to me?” I roared at him.
When his wide, uncomprehending eyes met mine, I pointed to my eyes accusingly.… For even now they blurred and welled with more liquid.
He choked out a garbled reply, and I remembered abruptly through the rage pounding in my temples that he required air. So I released him and thrust him to the ground, where he tumbled onto his hands and knees.
“I am sorry… I didn’t intend to…”
His panicked explanation spilled out: It must have been a function of the medical bots. When they repaired my burned skin, my damaged nerves, they’d regenerated all that should have been there—were I but a normal person.
Including a capacity most humans had that the genetic engineers had intentionally removed from Diabolics: the ability to weep.
“I can remove it,” he pleaded with me.
I tore off the gown and flung it to the floor. “Just begone from my sight.”
This was the last thing I needed to deal with right now. Tears. Blasted tears. They continued to trickle down my cheeks after he was gone, after it was just me at the sleeping Anguish’s side once more, listening to his breathing.
Tears. Such a strange sensation. They made me feel exposed, painfully raw—as though there were nowhere to hide, even when alone. I would pay any price to be but a Diabolic again rather than expose myself this way. It felt like I’d been perforated, cracked up, my very guts exposed to the air. However I wiped the tears away, they continued to streak down my cheeks.
And yet there was something… strangely satisfying about the feeling. Like some poison was seeping out of me.
My bitterness and despair were blunted, and I sagged down to rest my head against Anguish’s shoulder, feeling drained of life.
I awoke to the medical bay doors opening. A coterie of bots floated through, trailed by a Domitrian servant.
“The Divine Emperor has ordered a preliminary treatment for your… companion.”
I sat up warily. My fists clenched and unclenched. “You don’t mean to cure him?”
“A sweeping of his system to remove… many of the damaged proteins.”
“Not all?”
“The Divine Emperor does not wish—”
Of course he didn’t wish Anguish cured. He wouldn’t forfeit his leverage, but I hugged my arms over my chest and stepped back from the bedside, glad for whatever treatment I could get for my last friend—for my brother.
The tears ceased entirely as I watched the bots hover over Anguish, small injectors pricking his skin, funneling out the blood through his veins and purifying it, before injecting it once more.
And then, at last, Anguish stirred.
It had been months since I’d glimpsed such clarity in his eyes. I hastened to his bedside as his lashes fluttered open. His gaze found mine—then widened in alarm.
He snapped upright, his muscles tense beneath his rich brown skin. “Where…?” He seized my arm, and I inwardly rejoiced at his speed and the strength of his grip. “Are you all right?”
“We’re onboard the Alexandria.” I covered his hand with mine. “There are security bots in the corners with lasers locked on you, so do not move too quickly.”
His dark gaze scanned overhead, finding each of those star-shaped metal bots where they hovered throughout the medical chamber.
Calculating intelligence glittered in his eyes. Here was the Anguish of old: I knew he’d already ascertained the best means of evading their beams, of destroying them before they could harm us.
I squeezed his hand, noting how quickly his pulse raced. “It’s fine. We’re safe. There’s a… a deal for your restored health.”
“A deal?” He eased away from me but did not lie back. “What kind of deal?”
“How are you feeling?”
In answer, he flexed his muscles, testing limbs that had betrayed him in recent months. What he felt must have pleased him, for he surged off the bed and rose to his full height.
“I feel… that I could kill a ship full of Domitrian lackeys.”
I restrained my answering grin. In those words was a suggestion, an invitation. If I gave the gesture, he was primed and ready to seize this vessel.
Not yet. I gave a subtle shake of my head. “Your system was swept, the defective proteins removed in great numbers.… But not all of them. They’ll spread and multiply again.”
His eyes narrowed. “Unless…?”
“The Emperor decides.” I could not speak his name. “He expects something of me.”
He nodded once, his jaw tight. He’d been treated, but not cured. “What?”
This would be harder to explain. I turned to stare out at the stars, so many that one might imagine them ungovernable—unless one had the hubris of a god. “You won’t believe it,” I said. And then I told him of Tyrus’s demand.
As I spoke the words, those accursed new tear ducts welled once more, and Anguish stared, aghast, as my eyes overflowed. He interrupted me by catching my arms, drawing me closer to him. “Your face is healed, but… you weep. What has been done to you?”
“They’re merely tears,” I snapped, impatient with myself. “The bots that fixed my face gave me the capacity. I suppose I should get it removed again.”
In fact, a powerful urge gripped me to use these medical bots right now to remove these glands, but…
But I could not issue the order.
Instead I prowled away from Anguish and searched for something, anything, to vent my anger upon. I drove my fist into the nearest thing I found—a ceramic statue of Tyrus’s great-grandmother, the Empress Acindra.
Her fine nose shattered at my blow, and the answering pain that slammed up my arm did little to assist with the weeping, but it at least gave more reason for my damnable eyes to tear up than the agony twisting in my chest.
It also caused the Domitrian servant to scurry out, the medical bots trailing him. I waited until the doors slid closed to speak again.
“I should be able to stop them on my own,” I told Anguish, “without removing the capacity altogether. Humans can do it.” I’d seen Tyrus fight them back many times—especially in those early days we were in Pasus’s control.
“Distract yourself,” Anguish suggested.
“I have tried,” I said through my teeth, my throbbing fist clenching and unclenching as I paced the narrow confines of the secured medical bay.
Trying to be helpful, perhaps, Anguish approached me, and then dealt me a backhand.
In a flash, I punched him back, and then for a moment we both froze, staring at each other, gasping raggedly for breath.
He broke into a slow, broad smile, and a savage grin came to my lips, for a sudden burst of happiness surged in my chest. He had received my blow—and kept upright. He was healthy enough to endure it!
I stepped forward to throw my arms around him, and then I remembered the look on Tyrus’s face, demanding to know whether we were lovers.… Anguish’s arms had risen, and now I quickly evaded them, alarm for him driving away the impulse.
“How long will this treatment last?” Anguish said.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
Tyrus had not removed all the corrupted proteins. They remained like a cancer, ready to spread once more and overtake his system, in case I changed my mind and ceased to cooperate. Fail to play a goddess, and Anguish would succumb and relapse into that li
stless, delirious state if his illness took its course. All the rage and frustration ripping through me blazed hotter, for the very sight of his health in bloom once more warned me to do exactly what Tyrus commanded. What alternative did I have?
“There they go again,” marveled Anguish, and indeed, the sun-scorned blurriness of moisture had welled in my eyes once more.
“This is infuriating!” I snarled, dashing my sleeve across my eyes. The angrier and more helpless I felt, the more the tears overflowed. “Humans don’t weep at every hint of dismay. Why can’t I stop this?”
“The Grandeé Devineé’s child used to weep often,” Anguish remarked. “The child would weep too much. She shouted at it oftentimes. Sometimes slapped it. Sometimes the child would stop crying.”
“Sometimes.”
“It rarely worked,” Anguish admitted. “The child just as often wept harder.”
“I didn’t realize Devinee and Salivar had any heirs.” I shook my head, and the distraction had slowed the flow of moisture once more. “Perhaps the child realized their parents were perverse rapists. I understand why they wept.”
“By the time you were at court, they did not have an heir anymore.”
Of course. Another murdered Domitrian. “Was it Cygna or Devineé herself?”
He shifted his gaze away from mine. “It was me. The Grandeé Cygna wished it.”
The breath seemed stolen from me. “She ordered you to kill a child.”
His jaw tensed. He averted his gaze. “I made it quick. Painless. She did not order that.”
I stopped myself from saying another word. I almost asked him: What threat does a child pose? Didn’t you question the order?
But I knew the answer: no, we were Diabolics.
Just as Tyrus said, we were engineered to save those we loved. And that was all.
I’d been luckier than Anguish in the choices I had to make to do that. At least until now. The nightmare of my childhood in the corrals had ended with Sidonia, the most beautiful and gentle of souls, who would have taken a blade to herself before harming some innocent creature. She would never have asked something so profane of me. She would never have tainted me with such a cruel task.
Tyrus’s grandmother, Cygna… She had not cared to keep her Diabolics stainless. She would not have given a second thought to such a profanity. Anguish had fallen into her possession and she used him as she used any weapon, for the infliction of violence upon others, for he’d been nothing more than another tool to her.
A child Domitrian was easier to kill than a grown adult.
Anguish may have done this for her gladly.
It was the curse of a Diabolic—to love others more than ourselves. To serve the interests of a master and sacrifice whatever they required, for after all, we were nothing outside of the service we rendered. Since finding me again, Tyrus had reminded me at every turn of my failure to act on my grievances against him, all the while exploiting the reason for this.
This curse was the reason Tyrus felt so confident I would never harm him. A Diabolic’s love was not something sweet, something gentle. It was possessive, ferocious, all-consuming. I found myself thinking of that nameless child, long dead because of a Diabolic’s love for his master. Our love was crafted for violence, for the infliction of evil.
And I still loved Tyrus. Not who he was now, but who he had been, and all I could think about was the evil of its power over me. Perhaps I would never be free of it.
9
WE WERE PARTING within hours, to reunite publicly at his Imperial Triumph. He summoned me to his study.
I found him once again staring out at the stars. His hands were planted on the sill of the window, and he leaned forward that way, his head centimeters from the clear diamond. For a moment, I just waited for him to register my presence.
And then I asked, “What is it out there that transfixes you so?”
He straightened up without turning. “It’s not what’s out there, but what’s in here.” He gestured vaguely to his temples. “Since I claimed the scepter, at all hours of the day, there is a buzzing in my mind. A sea of machines across this Empire are linked to a central network that feeds directly into my thoughts.”
“You hear them all at once?”
“But the noise, not the substance.” He slanted me back a long, searching look—as though inwardly debating what to tell me. After a moment, a shrug. “I receive intelligible information only from those directly before my sight, or sometimes in the same star system, if I focus upon them intently. There are other factors at play. A nebula, an active star, the like, can all distort the information.” After a pause, his face cleared, and he said, “I have a gift for you.”
He swung back around to gaze out the window, and then—responding to his thoughts—a starship swerved into sight and gracefully arced toward us, coming to a halt just outside the window so we might look upon it.
It looked fast and sleek, with a jutting triangular shape, like the tip of a spear.
“Consider it yours,” Tyrus told me. “I constructed it out of the remains of the Colossus.”
Pasus’s vessel. The one I had destroyed with the Hera. I drew toward the window, and despite my wariness and mistrust of my benefactor, his gift pleased me. It was all that remained of our mutual enemy, who had tried so hard to kill us both.
“It’s called the Retribution,” Tyrus murmured.
An unwilling smile curled my lips. “A fine name.”
As it turned out, Tyrus meant me to arrive in this ship to the Imperial Triumph on the Halcyon—the setting for my public return. Tyrus had invented the holiday. The entire event was a tribute to himself, and he’d imposed the first of the festivities last year.
It was a celebration of the Divine Emperor’s ascent to godhood.
“And I have full command over it?” I said.
“You’re keyed in as the ship’s master.”
I slid him a mistrustful look.
“I’ve told you, Nemesis, I want your cooperation. Our reunion needn’t be painful.”
“Heal Anguish and release him. Then I will be a perfect friend to you.”
He cast me a mocking look. “Ah, yes, forfeit my leverage. Very wise.”
I stepped closer to him. So close, his muscles tensed as though in anticipation of attack. So close, I could feel the heat of his body in the air between us.
“I don’t think you even believe yourself a god, Tyrus,” I whispered to him, though none were here but us. “I think you are playing a game for your enjoyment, forcing this galaxy to grovel to you like one. You’re a con man.”
He leaned down toward me, his eyes dancing with a cruel sort of glee. “In that case, I’d be more than a con man. I’d be a propagandist. A tyrant. A dictator.”
“And sickeningly unashamed.”
“Oh, I feel quite clever,” he said cruelly. “My reforms were foiled by religion. So I have reformed the religion itself. I am now the divine authority. It’s a remarkably powerful tool, divine authority. I have believers now. Actual believers who cling to every word I say. Don’t you see why we failed, Nemesis, when we dreamed of creating a better galaxy?”
“We failed,” I said through my teeth, “because we did not know the theory of relativity. That was it. Tyrus, it all would have happened differently but for that.”
A wistful look passed over him. “No. We would have failed, either way. Every institution and tradition resists change for a reason: their very survival depends on things remaining as they are. If we had overcome the Grandiloquy, do you think we would have triumphed? No. We would have had to face all their co-conspirators among the Excess who helped them reinforce the status quo.”
“You impose a falsehood upon this galaxy,” I said. “Reality itself will undermine you.”
“Reality has no power against a collective delusion,” he said. “Every system is essentially a vast, shared delusion that exists merely because everyone has agreed to believe in it. The whole reason there’s power i
n such a thing is because most people want to believe in the same thing all those about them seem to believe. And sometimes those delusions are blatant mistruths, but it doesn’t change matters. Some will be outright fooled by their own brains into genuinely embracing a collective mistruth. As long as they are fashionable, and they are in fashion by believing it, people will uphold any falsehood proudly, for doing so makes them belong.”
He swung around and began pacing. “This is what we missed before, Nemesis. You and I tried to do away with falsehoods altogether. We wished the body of this Empire to swallow unpalatable truths when the vast majority of human beings crave conformity to shared lies. We should have been crafting a falsehood that suited us as I have now done.”
“You cannot fool everyone. There are Excess who see through you.”
“I know. They invoke your name.” Tyrus’s grin was malicious. “You are the hope of the dissidents. They long for you to rise up and speak for them. They pray for your voice to speak the questions they cannot make heard, for you to put doubts in those who otherwise would simply believe. And this is why, tomorrow, you will shatter their hopes—when you publicly cast your lot with me. Imagine what it will do to these restive few, this irate and tireless minority, when they see you playing goddess at my side. I cannot silence them, Nemesis. But you can.”
My heart gave a curious twist, though I could not say why. I wanted them to stop revering me. I wanted them to stop placing their hopes in me. I knew I could never fulfill those hopes.
Yet suddenly I understood what I would be doing to them. This was worse than ignoring them, than disavowing them entirely.
I would be crushing them.
Despite myself, I thought of Stalis begging me to help the Excess.
And then I thought of Atmas.
What would it do to her, when she’d had such an attachment to me, to see me playing God at Tyrus’s side?
She knew who I was. She had believed in me, in a way.… Not in Nemesis the legend, but in the Nym who’d looked at her drawings and talked to her about the stars by the acid pools.
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