by Rachel Bach
For the first time since I’d seen him talking to the baron, Rupert’s mask slipped. He lurched forward, eyes flashing with anger. “I’m trying to give you a chance to make your own decisions about your future,” he said. “You think I’m not aware of what’s at stake? That virus could be the end of the war I’ve fought my entire life. I should be dragging you back to Caldswell by your hair, but I won’t. I can’t. Because I love you, and I refuse to fight you anymore.”
“You love me?” I shrieked. “You loved me when you shot me in the head! You loved me when you drove me off a cliff! If there’s anything I’ve learned about your love, Charkov, it’s that it only matters when it’s convenient for you.”
“And that’s why I’m trying to make it right!” Rupert shouted, slamming his hands down on the bench so hard the steel frame bent.
The sound made us both jump. Rupert snatched his hands back at once, then rubbed them over his face. “I’m not lying to you, Devi,” he said, his voice softer but not yet calm. “I know I’ve hurt you too much to ever make you believe that, but it’s the truth.” He blew out a long breath. “Can I tell you a story?”
I almost told him no, but that was just my anger talking. I was actually curious to hear what kind of story Rupert thought could make me trust him ever again. I rested the heavy gun on my lap and motioned for him to go ahead, but Rupert didn’t start at once.
He’d been the one offering to talk, but now that he was on the spot, Rupert seemed hesitant. That was unusual. He was usually the decisive one, the man with the plan. Now, though, Rupert looked almost afraid, and I slowly realized that whatever story he was trying to tell me wasn’t one he told often, or liked to tell at all.
“I’ve been an Eye for a long time,” he said at last. “It was the only thing I ever wanted to be.”
His words fell off again after that, so I prompted him. “How do you grow up wanting to be part of a secret organization?”
“I didn’t grow up wanting it,” he said quickly, squeezing his hands on his knees. “You’ve heard of what happened to Svenya?”
I nodded. Svenya was the Terran core world whose sudden destruction had alerted the universe to the real danger of phantoms, though the Eyes had covered up the true cause of its disappearance.
“Svenya was my home,” Rupert went on. “I grew up there with my parents, my grandmother, and my sister.”
“Tanya,” I said.
Rupert flinched like her name hurt him. He was staring at the floor now, and with every word he spoke, his voice got tighter. “They came without warning,” he said. “Tanya and I were on our way to school when the sirens went off. We thought it was an earthquake, but it went on and on. We tried to go home, but the soldiers stopped us. They said we had to evacuate.”
I knew where this was going. I’d seen his memory, the soldiers tearing him away, Tanya screaming at him to go, but I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt. Even though there were less than three feet between us, Rupert felt miles away. All I could do was sit and listen.
“There weren’t enough ships for everyone,” he went on. “The soldiers were keeping people back, trying to get the children out first. There was one spot left. Tanya made them give it to me. She said she was going to get our parents and they’d be on the next ship. She said she’d be right behind me.”
“But there was no next ship,” I said.
Rupert shook his head. “Five minutes after I got out, the whole planet started to crumble. No one else escaped.”
He looked at me then, and I couldn’t help flinching. There was no calm in his expression now, just a pain so old and deep it hurt to look at. “Everything I knew died that day,” he said. “My family, my friends, my home, even my language, they were all gone. Svenya was a planet of billions. Only ten thousand of us survived.”
As he spoke, I could see his memory clearly: young Rupert, standing by the window, looking out at the floating rocks that were all that was left of his home, his family. I could feel it, too, the incomprehension, the anger, the crushing feeling of being utterly alone. “How old were you?”
Rupert dropped his eyes. “Nine,” he whispered. “I was nine.”
I dropped my eyes as well, because what do you say to that? But as the silence stretched, I realized something was off. “Wait a second,” I said. “Wasn’t Svenya destroyed seventy years ago?”
Rupert didn’t actually move, not that I could see, but I would have sworn his whole body tightened. “Sixty-three.”
“So if you were nine…” I paused, doing the math in my head. “That would make you seventy-two.”
“Seventy-one,” he said, his voice suspiciously sharp. “My birthday isn’t until next month.”
I gaped at him. Rupert didn’t look a day over thirty. “How the hell are you seventy-one years old?”
Rupert shifted his weight, clearly uncomfortable. “It’s the symbiont,” he explained, running a nervous hand through his hair. “If you survive the implantation, it can extend your life.”
The age thing must really bother him, I realized. This was the most flustered I’d ever seen Rupert. If I hadn’t been so angry at him, it would have been adorable. “How extended are we talking here?”
“No one knows for certain since we’ve never had a symbiont die of old age,” Rupert said. “But there are some who are well over a hundred.”
“So do you age at all?” I asked. “Like Caldswell. Did he get his symbiont late, or is he just really old?”
“Both,” Rupert said. “Commander Caldswell had a decorated career before he became an Eye, but he looks exactly the same now as he did when he recruited me.”
“So how did he find you?” I said. “Did they comb the survivors looking for likely recruits?” Considering how the Eyes treated the daughters, I wouldn’t put it past them to recruit new soldiers from orphaned children with no one else to turn to. It would certainly explain why Rupert was so damn loyal.
Rupert must have suspected what I was getting at, because he glared at me. “Of course not,” he said. “I couldn’t even apply to the Eyes until I’d served a decade in the army. I knew about them because of the camp.”
I frowned. “Camp?”
“After Svenya, they couldn’t let us rejoin the Republic,” he explained. “The emperor phantom was the one who actually destroyed the planet, but smaller phantoms always follow the larger. Svenya was crawling with the things at the end, and among those who escaped, nearly all of us had run into the invisible monsters at some point during the evacuation. The Eyes couldn’t let those stories become public, so they took us to an uninhabited colony world at the very edge of the Republic and ordered us to stay there.”
“I’m surprised they let you live,” I said bitterly.
“There are those who think they shouldn’t have,” he admitted. “But even the Eyes didn’t have the stomach to kill ten thousand terrified refugees, most of whom were children.” He paused. “I guess it wasn’t such a bad place, but honestly, I don’t remember much from that time. I’d seen enough of the Eyes by then to know what they did, and I’d already decided I’d do whatever it took to become one. Caldswell himself signed the papers to get me out of the camp so I could join the army when I was seventeen. The Eyes didn’t contact me again until ten years later, but when they did, I signed on at once. I’ve worked for them ever since.”
I sighed. At least my early suspicions that Rupert had an army background had been on the mark. “So why the rush to be an Eye?” I asked. “Was it revenge?”
Rupert shook his head. “Tanya would hate me if I did what Eyes must do to avenge her death. She never held a grudge, ever. No, I became an Eye to make sure what happened to Tanya, what happened to me, never happened to anyone else ever again.”
Now that he’d told me, I could see it. If there was one thing Rupert had a surfeit of, it was responsibility. But there was still one thing I didn’t understand. That I’d never understood about Rupert from the moment I’d learned the truth of what the Eye
s did. “I get why you wanted to stop the phantoms,” I said. “But how could you do that to those poor girls? How could you use and kill the daughters?”
“Because it was worth it,” he said. “Maat and her daughters are the only weapons we have against the phantoms, and phantoms destroy worlds. When you look at it that way, what is one girl’s life? What is one family’s pain weighed against the potential loss of billions?”
He said this quickly and calmly, like he was simply reciting facts, but I knew Rupert’s bluffs pretty well at this point. I could see the tightness in his jaw, hear the too-quick clip of his words. I knew the truth.
“You hate it,” I said.
Rupert’s eyes widened, and then he dropped his head. “Of course I hate it,” he whispered. “Do you have any idea what I’ve done?”
He stopped, running his hands over his face. Then, quickly, he looked up, meeting my eyes like a challenge. “I’ve killed twenty-two daughters over the course of my career. I’ve stolen girls from their homes and killed witnesses who were too compromised for a memory wipe. I’ve shot parents, grandparents, and children. I killed the man who’d been my partner for fifteen years when I caught him trying to run away with a daughter who’d begun to degrade. I shot him in the head while he was begging me to let him save her life, and then I shot the daughter as well. I didn’t even hesitate.”
When he’d started, he’d clearly been trying to shock me, but as Rupert listed his crimes, his voice grew thinner and thinner. By the time he finished, he wasn’t even looking at me anymore. He was staring at his hands, which were fisted so tight I was amazed he hadn’t broken something.
“I know it was for the greater good,” he whispered. “That I did what had to be done. But when I look in the mirror, all I see is blood. I don’t think Tanya would recognize me if she saw me now, and even if she did, she wouldn’t call me brother.”
He stopped there and took a long, shaky breath. His shoulders straightened as he pulled the air in, and I could almost see him pulling the calm back on as well, wrapping it around him like a protective mantle. When he looked at me again, his eyes were clear and still, like the last minute hadn’t happened.
“Someone has to pay the price, Devi,” he said solemnly. “The daughters don’t get a choice, but I did. I chose to become an Eye knowing full well what it entailed.”
“Because you can’t change the past,” I said.
“Because I can’t let the past happen again,” Rupert corrected.
I looked down at the disrupter pistol in my lap, thinking of my own family, my parents and sister. They’d driven me crazy every day of my life before I left for the army, especially my mom, but the thought of them vanishing, of Paradox crumbling—I couldn’t even imagine it. With that in mind, I could see now why Rupert did what he did. But if the point of Rupert’s story was to make our current situation make sense, he’d failed, because I was now more confused than ever.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I’m the one who can end all of this.”
“You could,” Rupert agreed.
“Then what are you doing?” I cried, frustrated. “I’m your solution. If this virus can actually kill all the phantoms, that means you’d never have to shoot anyone ever again, so why would you let me run away?”
Rupert dropped his eyes to his left wrist, the one with the tattoo across it dedicating his life to Tanya. “Because I’m done hurting you.”
I stared at him, uncomprehending, and Rupert sighed. “I’ve lived my whole life looking back at the past,” he said softly. “After what happened on Svenya, I thought it didn’t matter if I lived or died, didn’t matter whom I killed. Even when I knew that what I was doing was unforgivably wrong, so long as I could look back and remember what was at stake, everything was justified. I could do anything, be as terrible as the Eyes needed me to be, and it wouldn’t matter. All the good things in my life were safely locked away in those bright years before I lost my home, and without them, I was empty.”
A sad smile drifted over his lips. “I liked it,” he said. “Being empty, being cold. It made the hard things easier. But then, this year, everything changed.”
“What happened?” I asked.
Rupert looked at me like I was crazy. “You did.”
I jerked back. “Me? What do you mean me?”
Rupert smiled at me, and I nearly dropped his gun, because it was his real smile, the one I hadn’t seen since before that wild kiss in the rain on Seni Major. The one he showed only to me.
“You made quite an impression,” he admitted. “After you put Cotter in his place before we’d even left Paradox, I started watching you. I couldn’t help it. You were the craziest, bravest, loveliest thing I’d ever seen, and I knew at once that I should keep my distance. I even argued with Caldswell when he ordered me to flirt with you because I knew I wouldn’t be acting.” His look grew sheepish. “I’d never argued with an officer before.”
I couldn’t help chuckling at that. “Old man should have listened.”
“It wouldn’t have changed anything if he had,” Rupert said. “I would have done it anyway.”
He looked down again, and I swore a blush spread over his face. “I invented reasons to spend time with you. Before, cooking was just something I did. But when you watched me, when you told me you liked the food I made, I really enjoyed it. It made me happy. Before I met you, I couldn’t have said the last time I felt that way about anything.”
He blew out a deep breath. “I was appalled by my selfishness. This life, my life was supposed to be for Tanya. A life of duty to honor what she’d sacrificed so I could live. Before I met you, that’s what I was: an Eye, a soldier. But when we were together, you were what I thought about, and even when you were gone, you stayed with me.”
He paused, running his hands through his hair. “At first, I couldn’t understand why. You ruined my calm, disrupted me. You even made me lose my temper.”
As though on cue, we both looked at the dent where his hand had landed earlier, and Rupert shook his head.
“I told myself I should hate you,” he said. “I tried to, actually, but I never could manage it. Even when I was furious at you, you delighted me. I knew I was being unforgivably reckless, that it would be better for everyone if I could just leave you alone, but I kept finding excuses to stay. I wanted to spend more time with you, not less. I wanted—”
He cut off suddenly, scowling like he was trying to find the right words, and even though I knew it was pathetic, I held my breath, waiting.
“You made me want a future,” he said at last. “For the first time since I’d lost my family, I started looking forward instead of back. Even after I took your memories and made you hate me, just knowing you were still there, still safe, it made me hopeful. I didn’t even realize how much until Caldswell put the gun in my hand and told me to shoot you.”
I winced. Even though I’d been there myself, hearing him say it out loud was like a punch in the stomach. But Rupert wasn’t finished.
“I’ve always believed there was nothing I wouldn’t do to stop the phantoms,” he said. “For sixty-three years, that’s been my pride. The heart of my control. When you were on your knees in front of me, I knew it was the ultimate test of my resolve. But it wasn’t until I passed that I began to realize just how badly I’d failed.”
Rupert looked at me for a moment, and then he slid off the bench, landing on his knees on the floor in front of me. I still had his disrupter pistol, but he seemed to have forgotten the gun entirely as he bowed down and pressed his lips against the back of my free hand.
“I failed,” he whispered into my skin. “Failed you, failed the Eyes. I thought I could go back. I thought if I returned to being a good soldier, everything I’d done to you would be justified. A sacrifice to the greater good, just like all my other sins. But I was wrong. There was one thing I couldn’t do to stop the phantoms, one person I couldn’t sacrifice, and I didn’t even realize it until I’d already thrown her away.�
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With each word, his voice got hoarser, and when he finally looked up, there was no trace of his cold mask left. Only Rupert, staring at me like he was trying to make me believe him through sheer will.
“I can’t do it anymore, Devi,” he said. “The moment you jumped off that cliff to get away from me, I finally understood. I don’t care what that virus of yours can do, I don’t care if you’re the one who can save the universe, I can’t hurt you again. That’s why, when the order came down to bring you in, I prepared this ship so you could run instead. I know it’s too little, too late, but I wanted you to have the final choice.” He bowed his head over my hand. “I wanted to do right by you this last time.”
I didn’t like the way he said that. “And if I run, what will happen to you?”
Rupert shrugged. “I’m not sure. A court-martial, certainly, though whether or not they kill me after depends on my symbiont. They might decide I’m too expensive to shoot.”
His calm tone was giving me the jeebies. No one should be that blasé about their own death. But when I opened my mouth to say so, Rupert cut me off with a sad smile.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’d rather die helping you today than live another seventy years knowing I let you down again.”
He reached up as he spoke, taking my hand just like I’d taken his the night I’d found him drinking alone. “I’d like to look forward with you, even if it’s only for a little while,” he whispered. “But I won’t ever help them take your freedom away again. I’m sorry I did it the first time. I’m sorry for everything.” He closed his eyes, his face stricken. “I am so, so sorry, Devi.”
I’m not normally a fan of apologies. I’ve always believed that you should own your actions, good and bad, but this was different. Rupert wasn’t trying to get away with anything. I could hear it in his voice. He truly believed he’d done me wrong. I believed it, too, but I couldn’t work up the usual anger. It was impossible to be angry in the face of such sincerity, but I wasn’t sure what else to do.
Forgiving him felt like a cheat. I’d loved this man, and he’d betrayed me. He’d also saved my life. He’d fought me, but he’d never tried for a lethal blow. In the end, neither had I. Even when the cold rage had me by the throat, I hadn’t gone that far, which was a big deal for me. I’m not exactly known for my mercy or coolheadedness. Even now, after everything that had happened, I didn’t hate him. I couldn’t, because deep down, I’d never really stopped loving him.
