Specifically, the Pasus family’s supernova sigil.
Anger sparked within me. This family, this family! For a moment my mind catapulted back to Elantra’s spiteful smile as Sidonia suffocated from her poison, Alectar von Pasus’s taunts as his servants carried a limp and unconscious Tyrus into his ship.
Though Elantra died, her heart pulsing in my hand, and Alectar had followed—sliced apart by Tyrus’s security bots—it struck me now that they had effectively won. They’d destroyed Tyrus, they’d murdered Sidonia, they’d taken all I loved, and now I was setting out to kill the boy I’d loved to end what they had started.
As much as I wished to destroy everything in that vault, I had to preserve it for looting after we conquered this place. Everything we did from here depended upon what we could steal from these vaults. I continued onward.
“… an intruder somewhere in this sector…” came a voice from down the corridor.
Since they were heading toward me, I sprinted as fast as I could to face them on my terms. The Domitrian servants didn’t know my location, so they were startled when I burst into the next hall, my pulse rifle blasting.
They barely managed to get off a shot before all six of them fell. As I charged into the next chamber, an ambush awaited.
I glimpsed the four men before a flamethrower blasted through the air. The wall of fire boiled up between us, but still, I did not hesitate. I squeezed my eyes shut, fixed my mind on the image of where I’d seen them standing. I had already survived fire once, and I could do so again.
Pain screamed through me as I hurtled through the flames and seized the first attacker. There was a lot of flesh and sinew to char away before the flames could truly damage me, so I forged forward, reaching, seizing, tearing. They were all dead by the time I hit the coarse carpet beyond and rolled out the fire.
One of my eyes was blinded, stinging, perhaps ruptured. As I quickly looked myself over, my one good eye showed the extent of my burns, my curdled skin as pale as egg white where it was sloughing away from subcutaneous tissue. My hair was gone. My nostrils felt scorched but I had not inhaled, so my lungs still functioned, though they itched and seized against the smoke that lingered in them. I coughed, then struggled not to vomit as I staggered onward.
Forward. Keep going forward.
I barrel-rolled into the next chamber, where several sharpshooters awaited. A sting lanced my shoulder, but the pain barely registered. I lunged forward to seize the nearest shooter, then held him before me as a shield while I picked off his brethren. In the next room, I repeated the technique.
As I moved onward, I encountered a group of frantic, terrified medics who skidded to a stop when they spotted me. A med bot hovered over their heads.
They did not seem to be armed. “Heal me and live,” I told them.
They complied. The bot sterilized my wounds, then knitted together the torn and melted scraps of my skin. The oozing, putrid flesh turned into hard scar tissue. I required no mirror to know that I was hideously disfigured once more. It would take a half-dozen beauty bots, all working in tandem, to restore me this time.
No matter. What need had I of beauty? I would overcome Tyrus. I would save the Empire from him if I had to maraud to the ends of the universe, under fire the whole way.
The medics’ work was nearly completed, with only my damaged eye remaining, when a rustling came from behind. I ducked a sudden spray of laser blasts. Two medics collapsed beside me, sightless eyes fixed wide. I twisted and rolled to dodge blasts, then lifted my rifle and shot both attackers in the chest. Springing to my feet, I charged forward again.
Diabolics are engineered to thrive on violence. The frenzy that overcame me then felt sweet and hot and exhilarating. I lanced through the next section, then the next, dispensing no mercy: I could afford none. Half-blinded and outnumbered, I shot only to kill.
When I encountered windows, I blasted them out and counted on my strength to hold me to the wall until the wind stopped tearing at me, until I could force open the next door. Incendiary pipes I blasted, then threw myself to the floor until the angry flames abated enough to allow me passage. When I met water mains, I ruptured them and knocked electrical equipment into the liquid. I leaped clear of the talons of bright light that forked over the water and sent my assailants into fatal seizures. On those occasions when my scrabbling hands found no safe grip, I plunged back into the electrified water, trusting that my Diabolic’s heart, designed to withstand combat and torture, would continue to beat as the rest of my muscles locked and froze.
And always, always, I eventually staggered back to my feet and continued onward.
A little farther, just a little more… I kept moving, shooting anyone who tried to kill me, operating on sheer instinct now. Humans had designed those instincts. Humans now died by them.
As I progressed, the med bot’s restoration was quickly ruined. My left arm was shredded, bone and subcutaneous tissue visible. I left bodies like litter in my wake. Each step felt as though a burning-hot poker had been jammed up my thighs. Stiffened scar tissue tore as I leaped, nerves raw and screaming. I had to claw away blood that seeped and stung blindingly into my good eye.
Then, through the haze of violence, I spotted something fixed to the wall before me.
Another sigil of a great family, the sun rising from behind the curvature of a gas giant.
This was the vault of the Impyreans.
21
MY LEGS went weak. My burning fury collapsed into cinders, my vision blurring as I stared at the sigil of the Impyreans. Hands numb, fingers tingling, I limped toward the door and laid my palm against it, not daring to hope.…
My breath caught as I heard a telltale chime.
The door slid open.
For a moment, I stood stunned on the threshold, transfixed by an ache far worse than the physical agony of my wounds. Donia, my beloved Donia, must have snuck my DNA into the authorization database. The system recognized me as Impyrean.
How long ago had she done this? She had been dead for so many years. How had she guessed that one day, I would need her help?
Grief made my throat tighten, clench. My grip loosened so the rifle slipped from my hand, clattering to the floor.
I stepped past the array of empty shelves. Once, no doubt, they had held antiques and other valuables, which had been seized after the family was wiped away. I stepped past empty pedestals that had once lovingly displayed data crystals and personal effects.
And beyond these, at the end of the vault, were the smaller personal vaults, more priceless to me than a tower full of ancient gold. For one of them belonged to the heiress of the Impyrean family, long perished.
My hand shook as this one, too, opened for me. Within it, I found one remaining trinket, something priceless to Sidonia, and yes, now priceless to me—but useless to any thief.
It was a precious child’s toy. A thing of our shared childhood.
It was Sidonia’s cloud sphere.
I withdrew it and sank down to the floor. I’d had nightmares about her where I screamed at her, where I punished her for making me learn to feel, to experience the pain that came with love. Now it was pain that rushed through me, and yet my anger at her was gone, a disgraceful, shameful memory, for I still loved her. I still loved Donia, and oh stars, I missed her.
If only she were alive. If only she were here with me. If only I could hear her sweet voice one last time, and tell her how I loved her, how sorry I was for everything that had happened.…
In the distance, muffled explosions continued, the destruction I’d wrought now taking on a life of its own. In this room, a strange silence descended, a hush that felt thick and sacred. My hands shook a little around the crystalline sphere, the bright glowing gases swirling and dancing.
Donia had liked to play a game when we were small. The Impyrean fortress orbited a gas giant planet, and she would point out all the shapes she saw in the swirls of red, yellow, and orange clouds. A bunny. A frog. If we were on the dar
k side of the planet, she would use this cloud sphere instead, pressing her eye close to it, trying to find shapes in the gases.
She always tried to convince me to play.
I refused.
I told her I saw nothing in the clouds, that such games were a waste of time.
But I’d lied. I had indeed seen shapes in the cloud sphere:
An injured man dragging himself along, one leg a stump.
A face contorted by terror, mouth wrenched wide in agony.
Pools of blood splotching a trail across the clouds.
I would sooner have died than tell Donia that truth.
She’d loved that game, and when she’d outgrown it, she’d kept this toy. She must have slipped it in here unnoticed. The Matriarch would never have tolerated the preservation of something so silly.
My legs felt weak with gratitude that she’d preserved it. Now, as I stared into this little orb cupped in my scarred and shaking hands, I found myself remembering something else: the sight from the window on the Hera as Tyrus and I departed the Sacred City. That day, after we’d made love for the first time, he’d fallen asleep in my arms, and I had found myself tracing the Interdict’s mark over my heart, that mark of blessing that deemed me a person, as strings of dust and starlight unfurled out the window. And for the first time, staring at that view, I had seen beauty in shapes: not hideous and violent things, but two hands interlinked, a current passing between them.…
A pair of humans wrapped in an embrace…
Trees, mountains, shooting stars. So many wonders. My eyes had been opened to them.
Donia, I had thought. Donia, I see them now.
A great thundering boom ripped me out of my reverie just as the floor rocked beneath me. The asteroid shuddered violently as—I guessed, I hoped—Anguish’s onslaught began. If all was going according to our plan, then the Atlas had just jammed itself into the docking bay and was picking off the security personnel who hastened to attack it.
Anguish would not leave the ship until the way was cleared, or until he saw me. I needed to leave this place, to fight onward to meet him.
I took a deep breath and slipped the cloud sphere into my pocket. Then I touched the Interdict’s mark on my chest. But it was no longer there. Scar tissue met my touch.
I looked down to see the mutilation of that concentric sun mark. It had been lost amid the twisted, contorted scars of my skin.
Feeling oddly numb, I stepped back out into the main chamber.
My victims littered the room, their blood swirling in the ankle-deep water. As I stepped through the bodies, the mutilated mark of personhood seemed to burn. The butchery around me made a mockery of my claims to humanity. I didn’t know how many people I’d killed to get this far. I hadn’t kept count. I did not want to know.
I stepped back into the previous chamber I’d torn through, and the corpses there floated and bobbed as though on an unseen tide. My stomach felt acidic and unsteady. In the whisper of the water along the walls, I heard echoes of names that others had called me, names that had angered Donia. You are no monster, she had told me. You are as human as I.
Something nudged my leg: the foot of a corpse, which had drifted toward me.
I turned away and vomited.
When I straightened, wiping my mouth, I made myself stare through the open doorway into the room before that, to the bodies that waited there as well. I could count all the corpses on this asteroid, and all the others I had killed in my lifetime, and still they would not make up a thousandth of the total murdered by Tyrus. And he would not stop now. In his pursuit of absolute power, he would kill anyone who offered him an excuse.
A thundering of footsteps approached. I took a deep breath, then made myself bend to pick up an energy pistol floating beside the nearest body.
I had never claimed to be good. But I was better than Tyrus. I had been engineered with a thirst for murder, but I had leashed it. Now I would use it only to end his murderous reign, to rectify the mistake I’d made forcing him back into Pasus’s hands.
And maybe it took a monster to fight a monster.
I lifted my energy weapon and turned.
A pair of Excess men skidded to a stop in the doorway, their hands on their weapon holsters. They looked young, untried, their horror plain as they surveyed the carnage. And then one of them raised his eyes to me, his hand tightening over his weapon as he studied me.
“Don’t,” I said. “Let me spare you.”
He aimed the pulse rifle—
And dropped to the floor, dead from a shot at point-blank range. I hadn’t fired my weapon.
His companion had. He lowered his own energy pistol and looked at me with awe.
“Nemesis lives,” he whispered, his face aglow with wonder. He plunged to his knees beside his victim, in this flooded chamber strewn with my victims. “It’s a miracle!”
22
THE SURVIVORS of the Clandestine Repository surrendered rapidly, with several more of them hastening to declare, “Nemesis lives!” I’d killed so many of their colleagues. I searched their faces for terror and saw only wonder and devotion.
I was no Tyrus, to accept this as my due. I told them to get off their knees when they tried to bow to me. But I was grateful for the surrender that put an end to the bloodshed. An enterprising female engineer offered to jam all subspace communications, and I followed her to the transmission array to watch this be done.
Plyno, the Excess man who’d shot his own colleague before hailing me, had disappeared to contact Anguish and signal the Repository’s surrender. By the time he returned with Anguish, I was battling dizziness, my vision fading in and out.
Anguish wore a ferocious smile as he joined me. “An entire battalion could not have done what you did here today.”
My head pulsed with a stabbing headache. “Not without cost. I am injured, I think.… At least the workers here are feeling cooperative.” Then my legs buckled.
Anguish and Plyno both caught me. Whatever they said was lost to the haze in my head, but I was dimly aware of being gripped by the waist and steered forward.
My consciousness slipped in and out as I staggered under someone else’s direction. Arms steadied me, catching me when I stumbled. Our slow progression felt like hours, but at last I registered familiar surroundings: I was being guided aboard the Atlas.
Relief drained the last of my strength. As I dropped to the floor, someone caught and lifted me.
The world lurched and my shredded arm bashed into the wall, yanking me awake on a wave of pain.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” cried Gladdic.
Before I could reply, all went dim again. I roused once more in the medical bay as Gladdic summoned one of his servants. “Doctor nan Aton, attend to her.”
He made to withdraw, but I snared his arm.
“Wait,” I managed, my voice a threadbare whisper.
Gladdic eyed me nervously.
“Thank you,” I managed. Then the med bot was hovering just above me and the world faded once more.
* * *
Gladdic was there when I awoke, a glass of water in his hand.
My mouth was bone dry, and my skin was raw and tingling where the med bots had debrided and healed it once more. With his hand supporting the back of my neck, he helped me sit up, and then offered me the water. As soon as the cool liquid touched my lips, I realized I was desperate for it.
After several voracious swallows, my head cleared enough for my vision to focus. His brow was knitted over his troubled green eyes, his handsome face soft with kindness.
He would have been a fine healer, in another life.
I at last turned my head, and he withdrew the cup. If I’d had the strength to shove myself upright, I would have slung my legs over the side of the medical bed and left straightaway. My thoughts were already returning to my surreal, horrific triumph at the Repository.
I had killed people. I’d had to do it, if I meant to stop Tyrus, but that made it no less a crime. They had m
erely defended themselves from me. Done their duty to their Emperor, their Empire. How much blood would need to be shed to reach Tyrus? How much more would I have to defile my hard-won humanity, to strip him of his power over this galaxy?
My arm buckled under my weight, and I collapsed to the mattress, gasping for air, my body a vast, throbbing wound.
“It’s all right,” Gladdic told me, straightening the sheet over me. “Anguish is working with the… the survivors in the Repository. He has everything in hand. He told me to keep you here.”
I snorted. As though Gladdic could stop me if I meant to leave!
Then again, right now, he likely could.
“Do you need anything? I know medications don’t tend to work with crea—with you.”
“With creatures. You can speak that word.”
He looked unhappy, folding his arms over his chest and shifting his weight as though frustrated by something.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I wish to be of help.”
“The Repository is secured now,” I said.
“Not that kind of help. Help to you, Nemesis. You’re in pain.”
Bewilderment washed over me. “Why?”
He blinked, as though it were a bizarre question. “Why what?”
“Why help me? Why do you care if I’m in pain?” He must have seen the interior of the Repository. The hallways riddled with corpses. Did he not understand what I was?
He still looked uncertain, and also—was it my imagination?—hurt. “I won’t blame you for doubting me. After what you went through during the last years, to hear me speaking so—”
What was he talking about? “Gladdic. Are you sympathizing with me? You cannot be this… idiotically compassionate. It will be your undoing.”
He gave a small smile. “This is who I am.”
“It doesn’t serve you well.”
“No,” he said, looking off into space. “The last person I tended like this was… not kind to me afterward.”
This caught my attention. The haze cleared from my mind, leaving in its wake a crystalline sharpness. “Was it Tyrus?”
The Nemesis Page 14
