“How’s this?” Ivan said. “Now I’ve got a gun on you. Either you let me go or you shoot me, Althea; there’s no other option.”
Althea thought she might hate him yet.
“Let me go, Althea,” Ivan said. His voice had softened, grown gentle. “We both know you’re not going to shoot—”
The sound of a gun has the same aural kick as the kinetic strike of it hitting its target, and that sharp echo rang out through Ananke’s hold, almost deafening, as Althea fired.
—
Ananke watched Ivan wake up one hour and thirteen minutes later. The first thing he did was open his eyes and look around, head wobbling, moving his arms as if to clutch his head, shifting as if to stand, all his actions thwarted as he realized that he was back in the white room, chained again to the chair.
“Damn it,” he muttered, words slurred with the loss of blood that had made him paler than before, and he tried to sit up, which was approximately when the pain from the roughly bandaged gunshot wound in his right thigh hit him.
Ananke watched him scream.
It was only after he had come to again that Ananke saw him realize what else was in the white room with him: Ida, still lying where he had placed her, with her head tilted on its torn up throat to aim her blank black eyes at him, and Domitian, sitting on the other side of the table, staring at him over Ida’s chilling corpse.
Ivan’s breath came harshly panted; his hands flexed against the blood-slick metal of the chair.
—
Once Domitian had arrived and hauled the unconscious, bleeding Ivan out of the docking bay over his shoulder, Althea had gone straight to the computer. While Domitian dealt with Ivan’s wound, Althea worked on undoing some of the damage she had done in attempting to fix the computer. If she could only focus on working, she thought, she could drive from her head the memory of Gagnon crying out as he fell, the memory of the weight of the gun in her hands, kicking back as she pulled the trigger.
But for some reason Ananke was broadcasting on all available screens the surveillance footage from the white room.
The image showing on the screen was the scene from overhead. Domitian’s back was to the camera, and he leaned over the table a dark shape, faceless; Ivan was pale, strained, pain and fear on his face. The dark pool of blood beneath them looked as if someone had opened up a pit in the floor and Ivan and Domitian and the corpse of Ida Stays were just about to fall into it all together.
The white room’s camera still claimed to be unusable, but the evidence of its functionality was right before her. “You could see this whole time,” Althea said. With all her energy gone into keeping herself under control, she could not even feel surprised.
The screen blinked.
YES, said Ananke.
“You just were keeping it from us,” said Althea.
YES.
“Because Mattie told you to.”
YES.
—
“You may have killed Ida,” Domitian said, and Ananke watched, and listened, and broadcast what she saw, “but the System still wants to know what you know. You’re going to tell me the truth.”
Ivan laughed. It was a weak sound. He could not sit fully upright in the chair, arms trembling in the much-shortened chains.
“Sure,” Ivan said. “Just one thing first. What’s the date?”
Ananke knew the date. It had just become the first of November, an hour past.
“What does that matter?” Domitian asked.
“It matters to me,” Ivan said.
Domitian rose and with slow, heavy steps walked through the tacky blood to Ivan’s side, where he laid one hand against Ivan’s neck beneath his chin, pressing his sagging head up against the back of the chair so that Ivan was forced to meet his eyes.
“I don’t care what matters to you.”
—
Althea didn’t know how long it took her to notice Ananke’s latest message for her, but when she saw it, her blood chilled.
YOU SHOT IVAN BECAUSE HE KILLED SOMEONE, said Ananke.
Sitting beside the computer terminal, her arms in the wall of the ship, undoing clips from wires, Althea hesitated.
“Yes,” she said. She had wires snagged around her wrists, as if the ship were trying to pull her in, make her a part of it.
I KILLED SOMEONE.
“No,” Althea said immediately, fear rising in her chest again. She struggled not to let it show in her face, be heard in her voice. “That’s not the same, Ananke. It’s not the same thing.”
Ananke was silent. The silence struck Althea as ominous, and it only made her fear the harder to control.
“You didn’t know what you were doing,” Althea said. “Ivan did. He knew.” She kept telling herself that you couldn’t expect a toddler to understand these things. Ivan, though. Ivan was a grown man. It was not the same.
I KNEW.
“Yes, but you didn’t—” Althea stopped, trying to find a better way to explain; she did not even know how to begin to explain the value of a life and how Ivan must have known it, and Ananke must not. “You were defending yourself,” she tried.
SO WAS IVAN.
“It’s not the same,” Althea said, and bent back over the open wall panel and hoped Ananke would let it go.
It wasn’t the same. It couldn’t be.
—
“Why did you kill Ida?” Domitian asked, releasing Ivan’s neck, letting his head sag forward again. He could not seem to hold it upright on his own.
Ivan snickered with the humor of the light-headed, and Ananke accessed her data—her memories—wondering how badly injured he was. Could an injury to a limb kill a man?
“Tell me the date and maybe I’ll tell you,” he said.
“There will be no more trades,” Domitian said with eerie calm. “No more deals. No more exchanges. Only you will talk, and you will tell me the truth.”
“What do you want to hear?” Ivan asked. “I don’t know anything. Ida was going to kill me because of it, so I cut her throat.”
“Ida Stays,” said Domitian in a voice suddenly so loud that Ivan flinched back against his chair and Ananke heard the shout echo through the room, “was an honest woman.”
“Ida Stays was a sociopath,” said Ivan just as fiercely. “The only reason you liked her was because she needed you to like her. She would have had you tortured just as happily as she did me.”
Ananke did not expect the blow, and neither, it seemed, did Althea—in the hallway she flinched, her hands coming up to cover her mouth—but Ivan had braced himself and did not look surprised when he raised his head again to smirk at Domitian, blood trickling down his nose.
“Stop being such a little bitch,” Ivan said, “and execute me already.”
“I found traces of someone living in the walls of the ship,” said Domitian. “Who was it?”
“The Devil,” said Ivan. Ida’s body continued to gape and stare.
Ananke was not surprised this time when Domitian struck him again.
Domitian asked, “Who was it?”
Ivan looked up at him and did not flinch away. “Go to hell,” he said with remarkable calm.
Domitian knelt at his side. Ivan looked uneasy, then frightened. Uncaring of the blood sticking to his uniform trousers, Domitian reached forward toward Ivan’s leg and stuck his thumb against the bandages covering the bullet hole, pushing until spots of red stained the fresh whiteness and Ivan’s scream filled the white room.
“Mattie!” said Ivan. “It was Mattie, but he’s long gone now.”
“The maintenance shafts were occupied for days,” said Domitian. “Gale was only here for a few minutes.”
Ivan laughed, breathless. “That’s what you were supposed to think.”
“Supposed to?”
“You were an easy mark,” Ivan said. “You ate it right up. Mattie leaving in the escape pod.”
“He didn’t leave? He was on the ship?”
“He didn’t leave,” Ivan said. “Not
then.”
“But he told you he was leaving,” said Domitian. “He stopped by your cell, and when he couldn’t get you out, he told you he was leaving.”
“You mean the Scheherazade thing?” Ivan said. The blood from his nose was running down into the seam of his lips. “Scheherazade isn’t a nickname; it’s code.”
“Code for what?”
“Code between me and Mattie,” Ivan said. “Scheherazade, she told the Persian king stories for a thousand and one nights to keep him from killing her. Scheherazade was a message. Mattie was telling me to stall.”
“Stall for what?”
“Until he could get me free,” said Ivan.
Ananke knew that Domitian would have hit Ivan again—his hand raised, that cold directed fury on his face—but Althea burst into the white room before he could.
“Domitian, you need to come,” she said frantically, and Domitian lingered a moment at Ivan’s side before following her away, leaving Ivan to gasp and sag in his chair beside Ida, his blood joining hers on the floor.
—
An urgent broadcast had come through from the System. Eager to watch anything other than the surveillance of Ivan being beaten by Domitian, Althea had played it.
It was a printed broadcast from the Lunar System representatives. She read it quickly and then read it again, then a third time, and still could hardly understand what she had read.
Domitian, she knew, would not have wanted her to interrupt his interrogation of Ivan. Althea did not think twice.
“What is it?” he asked tersely as she urged him out of the room and into Ananke’s halls, where the broadcast was still playing on the nearest screen.
“Look,” said Althea.
PEOPLE OF THE SYSTEM, the message read. THERE HAS JUST BEEN A LARGE-SCALE TERRORIST ATTACK ON EARTH. AT PRESENT WE HAVE NOT RECEIVED CONTACT FROM THE SYSTEM CAPITOL AND DO NOT HAVE ANY INFORMATION ON THE STATUS OF THE PLANET OR OF THE SYSTEM—
The printed broadcast was interrupted by a video that stuttered and flashed static before finally becoming clear. Althea nearly leaped forward to bring back the earlier broadcast, instinct having her believe that Ananke had suffered another glitch, but when she saw what had interrupted and replaced the broadcast, she stopped.
On-screen was a woman, a familiar woman, dark hair and eyes like coals, strong chin and broad shoulders, regal in bearing.
It was Constance Harper.
“People of the System,” she said in a low alto lifted and fierce with fervor, “former slaves of the System, I am the Mallt-y-Nos. A few minutes ago, I and my people liberated us all from the System by destroying its source. For so long has the System destroyed your planets and killed your people, and now we have destroyed theirs. Earth was a symbol of oppression and control. It will be no longer. The System is dead. Let freedom reign.”
Chapter 9
DEGENERACY
Domitian burst into the white room in a murdering rage, his gun out, and Althea could do nothing but follow at his heels, filled with such a force of anger, of fear, that she wanted to scream. The moment Domitian threw open the door to the white room so that it struck and rang against the wall, he fired his gun high, the crack and roar of the bullet filling the room. It hardly registered in Althea’s ringing ears, but Ivan flinched, jolting as if he would duck and cover his head, but there was nowhere for him to go, and now, off balance and dizzy with loss of blood, he sagged in his chair, trapped and shaking like a wounded animal.
Ida was still lying on the table in front of him, her limbs limp and loose in the nearness of her death, and the sight of her made Althea’s stomach roil.
Domitian had crossed the room before the echoes of his shot had rung out; he grabbed Ivan now and forced him back against the chair, digging the barrel of the gun with its thin wisp of gray smoke into the soft skin under Ivan’s chin, metal pushing against his pulse. That, too, disturbed Althea, disturbed her almost as much as the way Ida’s head was tilted, angled to face between Ivan and Domitian, as if she were watching Althea, her death-dilated eyes without cognizance.
Ivan was breathing hard.
He said, “She did it.”
It was realization, resignation, and Althea said, “How could you let her?” before she could remember not to plead with him.
There was a long silence that stretched taut in Althea’s breast, in which Ivan and Domitian had some unspoken confrontation she could not understand, but at last Ivan spoke, raising his voice to be heard even though Althea was behind him.
“There would have been a genocide one way or another,” he said, speaking as if the muzzle still dug up beneath his chin, its deadly promise, meant nothing to him. “Either Constance destroyed Earth, as she planned, or the System found out about her plans—and how close she was to succeeding—and they killed her and everyone who had ever known her. Half of Mars—everyone who was even the slightest bit suspicious. Miranda and the other Uranian moons. She was a poison, and they would have amputated half their body to get rid of it. The System has done it before. Connor Ivanov was from Saturn; no one lives around Saturn now. Why do you think Con chose to blow up Earth? Because that’s what the System did to her people, time after time. Saturn, Haumea, Oberon. And they used the very bombs she used on them. So one way or another, billions of people would have died. I chose the side that included the people I loved.”
She could not allow herself to believe him again. She could not allow herself to feel for him. A series of bombs had been detonated all over the Earth in sequence, the broadcast had said. All of the System’s most powerful bombs, the seven that had gone missing, had been planted at key points on the planet. Detonated all together, most in populous centers of System government, they had destroyed vast swaths of landmass and irradiated more. On their own, though sufficient to render a planetoid uninhabitable, the bombs could not destroy Earth, but they had not been the only attack. The distraction of the simultaneous detonation of the seven bombs had lasted just long enough for someone to hack into the systems controlling the nuclear power plants dispersed over the planet’s surface and send them into meltdown as well.
It had been run as a con, Althea realized. The System had been so busy looking for the Class 1s in the outer planetary systems, where they had been stolen, and so busy trying to quell the riots on Titania and the other moons, that it had failed to recognize the danger to Earth. They had expected the Mallt-y-Nos to strike in the outer planets, and so they had directed all their resources there and left Earth comparatively undefended. Then, while the System had been distracted, horrified, by the detonation of the seven bombs, the Mallt-y-Nos and her people had struck the killing blow with the power plants. Whatever Terrans survived the explosions and the initial fallout would die in the famine once the smoke turned the sky black and cast nuclear night over the Earth, or they would freeze in the sunless nuclear winter. Some people might survive by escaping from the planet, but no one would live there again, not in a hundred generations.
It would have taken someone very skilled with computers to hack into the mainframe of the power plants in the short time afforded by the shock of the bombs’ detonation, before the planet had gone on lockdown. And the bombs had been detonated in unison, with computerized precision, like the detonation of charges around a vault door. Althea remembered the program she had seen on Ivan and Gale’s computer and was sick at heart.
“The System would have prevented the death of billions,” Domitian said. He dug the gun a little deeper. “You worked to cause them.”
“It’s over,” Ivan said. Neither man was paying attention to her. Althea thought to leave, to creep out and hide in the curves and veins of her ship, but she did not dare to move. “There’s nothing more either of us can do. So do it.”
Domitian’s face grew so dark that for a moment Althea thought he might do it, might fire then and there, and that thought terrified her as much as anything Ivan had said, her hand creeping up to her mouth as if to contain the cry she was not making.
But instead of firing into Ivan’s skull or the cavity of his chest, Domitian drew back and holstered the gun, nearly drawing a gasp of relief from Althea that she suppressed when he slid his arms beneath Ida’s body, lifting her up. Althea flinched when he passed her with Ida’s body hanging in his arms, carrying with her the stench of death, iron and meat.
The door shut behind Domitian, loud and echoing in the silence of the white room, and Althea knew that he would be back.
Ivan was very still, pressed into the chair where Domitian had pushed him, as if he did not dare move. The mark of Ida’s body was still on the table in her congealing blood. Althea felt sick.
She stayed in the room, guarding Ivan as she had been ordered to do ages and ages ago, and they said nothing to each other for a very long time.
“When you shot me,” said Ivan at last, “where were you aiming?”
Althea was still standing behind him. She could not see his face. It was just like being in the hallway again, with Ivan hidden behind his cell door, except that here Althea could see him for what he was, covered in blood and sitting in the blood of one of the people he had murdered, and from that sight she found the venom to spit, “The heart!”
“Is that true?”
He spoke so evenly, so without rancor, that it drained away her hatred and her anger and her desperate confusion and left only the exhaustion and the grief. Two people had died because of her, one of them her friend, and it had been so long since she had last slept, truly slept. “Does it matter?” Althea asked.
“Of course it does,” Ivan said, and Althea, fearing some other trap here, trusting not a word he said, did not answer. Leaning his pale head against the gleaming back of the steel chair, as if he, too, were exhausted, he said, “You should’ve aimed better.”
—
Ananke knew all about the stages of death. Ida was limp and pale now, but in the next hour or so rigor mortis would set in, reaching a maximum in eight hours. At that point Ida would be frozen in place, stiff, eyelids stretched back, jaw pulled open into a voiceless scream, hands curled into claws. Domitian would not be able to carry her the way he held her now, in his arms; she would lie across them like a board.
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