As I raised my hand up, my eyes flicked across the drifting snowflakes and ominous statue beside us and I wondered what would have happened if I had just let Driscoll make that combie army, or if Roman and I had rode off into the sunset together. Maybe it wouldn’t have ended like this.
But if things had been different, I would never have had the chance to finally embrace what I was born for. Pacifism – responsibility for not just yourself- wasn’t something you could force someone else to live by. It was something you had to choose yourself. I was choosing it. There’s a difference between killing for something and dying for something.
I smiled, at peace –finally- with fate.
And yet, I was still the Vera Matsumoto who was always looking for another way. Maybe...just maybe...
I gripped his hand as hard as I could and rolled the dice one last time.
Activate.
Chapter Forty-One
Operation Overthrow activated, my implant chirped. I stumbled as pain filled me, searing me to the core. It flowed through my body tripping up my heart and seizing my lungs in an iron grip. I coughed and screamed all at once, shuddering with muscle spasms, but still locked in a death grip with Nigel’s fist.
I was in too much pain to decipher the puzzled expression on his face, but not too much to see the shadows behind him surge forward. My mind roared, like a fire had filled it, but I held on as tight as I could, pushing through the pain, refusing to let go of my consciousness.
Congratulations. Control over all electronic aspects of the Blackwatch Empire has been ceded to you by the authority of Neal Matsumoto. You are the Empress of Blackwatch. Authorized parties will be contacted immediately. Please assume your role and authority as soon as possible.
My role and authority?
Nigel’s eyes were huge. In the darkness I saw nothing but their whites glowing against all the grey. He screamed in guttural rage, releasing my hand and his shadows pushed forward.
We’ve lost, Vera. Driscoll said, despair thick in his voice.
You’ve wasted this army, you fool, Zeta said, talking over him. If you’d only made the sacrifices- I tuned my mother out.
Roman’s green caret was flickering. I shoved myself up from the ground, spat snow from my mouth and wiped my eyes.
Incoming call from Admiral Tagawa. Patching through.
“What’s going on down there? Are you seeing this? Those shadows are multiplying all over Blackwatch! You need to do whatever you were going to do! Now!”
End transmission! I ordered.
I couldn’t listen to her. I had to think. What could I possibly do, alone in a field of snow against a mad man and his shadow army? I felt, suddenly, as if it had all come together. I would have given up my life and my soul to save this world and the others we were responsible for, but maybe I wasn’t the one who needed to.
Without thinking, I reached out to Nigel’s soul. After all, hadn’t the Javierian’s done this very thing to Zeta? And I pulled as hard as I could. I would use his implant against him to absorb him into my shadow army.
His face grew long and drawn, and his features distorted in a silent scream as he flickered in and out of shadow and then he was nothing more than darkness.
I pulled in my shadows, and Nigel, too, forcing them to leave the world and return to the subconscious. A flood of energy hit me and I fell forward onto my face, not even able to put my hands out to catch myself. Consciousness upon consciousness rolled into mine and I pulled them in, sucking them up and stuffing them down into the cage I had woven within myself. But hadn’t my army been almost obliterated?
Shadow after shadow rolled into me for what felt like hours. My own body was unable to move, my eyes were shut, and my muscles spasmed involuntarily, but I clung to consciousness. I couldn’t afford to give them rein, not with Nigel locked within me. It was like inviting the devil into your mind.
After a while my body felt less painful, but still the shadows came. Finally, when I felt no more had arrived for a long time, I rolled them up as tightly as I could and tried to tie them off like I had before.
Do you really think that absorbing me would rid you of me? Immortality seems nice enough, and I always thought that being a woman would have its perks.
Nigel. I would never be rid of his voice. Like Zeta, but not as cheerful.
Worse. I think if I press just so I could take you over...there are fractures in that implant of yours. It was that faulty experimental model...
Well that explained a lot of what had happened these past months. I would go mad and then Nigel would take over my body. I would be worse than he ever was. I would kill and destroy innocents. I would probably kill Roman.
Deactivate implant.
Deactivating.
I sunk into blackness.
SOMETHING WET WAS ON my face and my feet were cold. I nuzzled into warmth against my cheek and hugged my knees in tight. Bones jabbed my ribs and I gasped a painful breath. My head hurt. I tried to lift it, but it was bowling-ball heavy and my arms were like feathers. I settled with opening my eyes.
Snow swirled down, light and dusty, from a velvet black sky. Tiny and far away the two moons of New Greenland huddled together for warmth. It was the dusting of snow that was wetting my cheeks and lashes. It was the frozen ground that made frost march up my femurs. I needed to move. I couldn’t move.
A pair of cinnamon eyes moved into view.
“Hello, beautiful,” Roman said.
I smiled, or I thought I did. My mind was still clogged up with heaviness.
“If you’re just about done sleeping there’s a sign here that says: ‘No overnight camping. Vagrants will be prosecuted.’”
“How will they know we’re vagrants?”
“I hate to break it to you, but none of us look our best. Not even you, princess.”
I managed to pull myself up on an elbow.
“Easy, girl,” Roman said, steadying me.
Ryu was cuddled up against him, sleeping. He was the one who had been so boney. Three meters away, the corpse of Ayumi sprawled, red blood staining the snow.
“You didn’t want to move us to a better location?” I asked.
“Bad leg,” he said with a rueful smile and tapped his prosthetic. The jagged tip had cut wicked scars into the ice nearby, but the stump wasn’t nearly long enough to walk on.
I nodded, studying his face to be sure he was ok. I bit my lip. For the first time in so long, I couldn’t feel his emotions through the channel and I felt so naked that I almost reached for it without thinking. With a start, I pulled myself together. I would never again be able to access my implant. I didn’t dare. The demons in there were real, and they wouldn’t hesitate to tear me to pieces.
“I was worried you were dying because I couldn’t feel you in here,” he said, tapping his head. He was studying me as intently as I had studied him. “You couldn’t hear me when I called.”
“I had to turn it off,” I said, gripping one of my arms with the opposite hand in a protective gesture. “They’re all in there. All of them. I can’t contain them if I open up that box again.”
I released my arm and grabbed my mouth with my hand instead, and as grief and terror whipsawed through me I bit down hard on the webbing of my hand and tasted blood.
“Shhhh,” my husband said, reaching out, and pulling me to him.
I sobbed through my hand as he gently stroked my hair and rubbed my back.
“It’s all over. It’s done. You worked hard, Vera, and you did it.”
“All those people. Trapped in my mind forever. I promised them freedom, but they’ll never see it.”
Another broken Matsumoto promise.
“Shhh. It’s not like that.”
“I’ll never fight like that again, or see things that way again, or read those histories I didn’t get to read, or feel your emotions when you kiss me. I’ll never swap bodies with you again. We’ll never communicate like we did ever again.”
“We’ll find other
ways,” he said, smiling in a way that was rich with humor and laced with compassion. He wiped my tears with his thumb. Ryu stirred beside me. “Maybe not right now.”
I laughed through my tears, heartbroken, but still able to see how ridiculous I must look. My first act as Empress was sobbing in the snow like an overly emotional teenage girl.
“I’m ridiculous,” I said.
“Never,” he assured me, and kissed me gently, and then firmly, and then with the passion that comes when the worst that you feared hasn’t happened after all.
“I’m cold,” a little voice said from beside us.
“I hate to ask,” Roman said, blushing just a little and gesturing to his leg, “but we’ve been waiting for you. I don’t think I can get very far without you.”
“That makes two of us,” I said with a twisted smile, and I hoisted him up, wrapping his arm over my shoulders. “Can you walk, Ryu?”
“Are all the shadows gone?” Ryu asked, glancing around at the pillars decorating the Killing Fields.
“Gone forever,” I said, and I felt a stab of pain as I thought of Patrick Driscoll. The one thing he’d wanted was to see me as Emperor. “We’ll never see them again.”
“Where are they?” he asked.
“Locked up tight, little one.”
Chapter Forty-Two
“Wait up, you goose!” Roman called, scrambling behind me over the loose rock. “You take too much joy in seeing me crippled!”
I laughed and kept climbing. The truth was that I was barely able to keep ahead of him with that new prosthetic he’d acquired. Only the best for the Empress’s guardian.
Here in the mountains just outside of Osatalik the purple pines towered where hardly anything else could find root. I had always loved hiking here as a girl and I’d chosen this as my very first leisure activity as Empress. The citrus and pine smell of the trees combined with the freshness of the melting snow to calm my nerves, and the physical exertion was helping too. It was the first time in a long time that I hadn’t heard the call of my ghosts.
We clambered up onto the rocky summit and looked out from the edge of the cliff, breathing hard from the hike. The sun sank low and painted Osatalik in pinks and oranges laced with purple. Between the sun’s fading rays the city’s lights glared out, visible even from so far away.
South of the city I saw the light of the Killing Fields where workers were actively uprooting the pillars that had grown there. To the north of the city lay the Spring Palace where I had once been sentenced to Capricornia. Only last week, I had ratified Mastumoto Two, to the shock and delight of my citizens. Internal elections for representatives were set for this spring and the Emperor’s unchecked control was over. I’d kept only one of our original rules in my new oath to the people: we Matsumotos would be pacifists. Real ones.
After that, I completed the formal ceremony to become their Empress, and signed a document that we hoped would become the formal armistice between Blackwatch and The People’s Freehold. Nothing was ever as easy as that, but after the last few months the thought of hammering out a treaty to end an interstellar war didn’t sound as daunting as it once would have. Even Admiral Tagawa held out hope, though she still disliked me.
“You cheated. You said it was an easy climb!” Roman said, grabbing both my shoulders from behind.
“You couldn’t tell I was kidding?” I asked, faking innocence. I liked to tease him about our broken connection. It was like scratching at a healing wound.
“If you mean lying, then no,” he said, spinning me around, pushing me up against a purple pine with a trunk as wide as I was and kissing me.
I clung to him after the kiss, inhaling his scent with the scent of the pines, still amazed that we had both lived to be here.
“I don’t ever want to let go of you,” I said.
“Eventually we’ll have to go back down, or Ryu will pester the life out of me with calls. He doesn’t like his new guardian. He claims the man reinforces the backs of his pants to make him stand up straighter.”
I laughed. I hadn’t liked Edward the first time I met him, either. It takes time to get used to a guardian.
I hugged mine even tighter at the thought, enjoying his warmth and love. It was funny that even with the implant offline I could still feel that love radiating out towards me.
The sun disappeared and the stars winked to life, and out in their depths I saw the slight movement and color change of starships coming and going - but mostly going - as Refugees returned to their home planets and Fleet vessels escorted them there. Hopefully our Armistice would hold. Hopefully I could find a way to prevent any more lives from being lost at the hands of Mastumotos. Hopefully-
“Stop,” Roman pushed back from me and looked deep in my eyes. “You weren’t supposed to be thinking about the troubles of the Empire tonight, remember? You promised me a warm cabin up here and a trout stream tomorrow morning. You said something about Neal Matsumoto bringing old earth fish to stock it.”
I laughed, but the mention of Neal Matsumoto reminded me of Driscoll. I reached up and rubbed my scar as I often did when I thought of him. I hated that he and Kitsano were trapped forever in the hell of my mind.
When I was honest with myself, I had to acknowledge that I feel empty with only my own soul occupying my mind. It’s very quiet in here – quiet enough to hear my ghosts whispering that I chose poorly. I long for the power that I gave away, but if I ever took it back it would destroy everything I fought for. And yet still, when I have a moment of quiet, I find myself reaching for it like an old addiction and it becomes harder every time to say ‘no.’
Roman grabbed my chin in his palm and gently turned my wandering gaze back to him.
“I meant it, Vera,” he said, kissing me before continuing, “Stop. Brooding does no one any good. Some things can’t be fixed. Besides, before you know it he’ll have them all bent to his will.” He smiled. “You know your father. He’s just like you. Zeta and Nigel won’t stand a chance against his tenacity.”
“Did you just read my thoughts?” I asked, wonder filling my eyes.
“I do that sometimes,” he said, with a mocking grin.
“But without the implant...” I said.
“Remember what you said, Vera?” he said, softly. “It never worked the way it was supposed to between us. Maybe that was because it was always something more.”
His hand ran down along my throat and chest and abdomen, winding to the side to curve around my hip and slip up under the edge of my shirt while he kissed me like it was his lifelong ambition. I kissed him back, enjoying the numbing effect that his sweet kisses had on my pain. Enjoying, for the first time without fear, the sheer delight of his company and his touch.
“I thought you wouldn’t be able read my mind anymore,” I said, when we finally broke apart.
He leaned in close with smouldering cinnamon eyes and paused so that I had to wait for his answer.
“You wish,” he whispered, and pinched my waist.
Somewhere down below the planet waited for me to finish bringing them justice, but up on the mountain I chased Roman through the trees to the cabin beyond and wondered what else might have survived that I had thought was lost forever.
THE END
Behind the Scenes:
USA Today bestselling author, Sarah K. L. Wilson, hails from the rocky Canadian Shield in Northern Ontario where she lives with her husband and two small boys. Her interests include the outdoors, history, and philosophy. Her books are always about fantastical adventures in other worlds.
Sarah would like to thank Curtis Crowe and Sarah Brown for their incredible work in beta reading and proofreading this book. Without their big hearts and passion for stories, this book would not be the same. She would also like to thank her patient and supportive husband Cale, without whom these stories would not be possible.
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The Matsumoto (The Matsumoto Trilogy Book 3) Page 26
