I drew a sharp breath. “Madam, the Senator is becoming a threat to all of you. Let me—”
“You are not to kill him.” She launched herself to her feet. “Don’t you see it’s already too late? Our necks are under the Emperor’s blade now. It’s done. And as usual, it falls to me to clean up my husband’s mess.” She closed her eyes, drawing several bracing breaths. “All we can do is wait. Whatever happens next, you and I will protect my daughter’s interests—at any cost.”
“At any cost,” I agreed. If it meant I had to spirit Donia away from this place, I’d do so.
Her grip clamped my wrist. “You will tell Sidonia nothing of this. She has a social forum coming up. She must have no stain of guilt on her conscience. If she seems totally ignorant, word will filter back to the parents of the other children. If Sidonia knows of this matter, she won’t be able to fool them. My daughter is many things, but a skilled liar she is not.”
I nodded slowly. Donia’s innocence was her only protection. Her ignorance would shield her as nothing else could, not even me.
“I’ll tell her nothing,” I assured the Matriarch.
Donia was no liar.
Luckily for her, I was.
She stirred when I returned to her chamber that evening, and rubbed at her sleep-clogged eyes. “Nemesis, is something amiss?”
“No,” I answered soothingly. “I was restless. I left to exercise.”
“Don’t . . . ,” she said, yawning, “pull . . . a muscle.”
I made my lips smile. “That never happens to me. Go back to sleep.”
And she did, plunging back into a slumber of total innocence.
I didn’t sleep again that night.
The Emperor’s next move came quickly. I received a summons to the Matriarch’s chambers.
It was rare that she requested me directly. The summons put me on edge. When I stepped inside, I found the Matriarch lying in her low-gravity bed, a beauty bot coloring her gray roots and smoothing the wrinkles from her face. At a glance, the Matriarch looked to be in her twenties. False-youth, it was called. Only her eyes betrayed her age. No young person could look at me the way she did now.
“Nemesis. I was partaking of an opiate rub. Have some.”
The offer surprised me. My eyes found the jar at her elbow. The opiate was a lotion applied to the skin. The Senator was fond of it, but it was rare for the Matriarch to partake. She scorned it as a weakness. The recreational chemicals she abused were those that made her sharper, more alert.
“It would be wasted on me.”
She shoved away the arm of the beauty bot with an impatient gesture. “Of course, you Diabolics metabolize narcotics too quickly. You’ll never know the thrill of a good intoxicant.”
“Or the burn of a lethal poison,” I reminded her.
She propped one high-cut cheekbone atop her fist as she studied me. The drug had made her pupils tiny and put an uncharacteristic sloppiness in her manner. I waited, painfully alert, to discover the reason she’d called me here.
“A pity,” she said at last, dipping her finger in the opiate rub and smoothing it onto the pulse point of her wrist, “that you can’t feel this. I suspect you’ll shortly require it as much as I do.”
“Why?”
“The Emperor has ordered us to send our daughter to the Chrysanthemum.”
The words were like a fist to my gut, an impact that drove the breath from me. For a moment, all I could hear was my own heartbeat, thrumming wildly in my ears.
“What?” I whispered. “He wishes her to go to the Imperial Court?”
“Oh, this is how it works,” she said bitterly. “My grandfather displeased him and he executed my mother. The Emperor rarely strikes directly—it’s the influence of that wretched mother of his. The Grandeé Cygna believes in striking at the heart to inflict more damage. . . .”
Before I knew it, I had crossed the room. My hands closed on the Matriarch’s shoulders—more solidly formed than Sidonia’s, but no greater challenge for me to crush.
“Sidonia won’t go.” My voice was low and bestial, cold dark anger like ice within my heart. “I will kill you before I let her go to her death.”
She blinked up at me, looking curiously unmoved by the threat. “We have no choice, Nemesis. He demands her presence within three months.” Her lips curved in a sluggish smile, and she snaked a hand up to cup my cheek, her long fingernails pinching my flesh. “That’s why I intend to send you to the Chrysanthemum in her place. You will be Sidonia Impyrean.”
It took me a moment to understand her words, and even when I did, they made no sense.
“W-what?”
“How stunned you look!” The Matriarch’s laugh was unsteady, but her pinprick eyes bored into mine, unblinking. “Must I repeat myself?”
“Me?” I shook my head once. I had no great fondness for the Matriarch, but I had always supposed her to be intelligent. Sane. “You truly mean to suggest that I will pose as Sidonia?”
“Oh, it will require some modifications, of course.” Her gaze raked down my body. “All that’s been seen of Sidonia is her avatar, which resembles her as little as you do. Your coloring, your musculature . . . We can fix that. As for your disposition, I’ve summoned my Etiquette Marshal to come teach you the essentials that she taught me in my own girlhood—”
I reared back a step. This woman had lost her mind. “An Etiquette Marshal can’t give me humanity. You can tell just by looking at me that I’m not a real person. You’ve said so yourself numerous times.”
The Matriarch tipped her head, her eyes glittering maliciously. “Oh yes. That cold, pitiless gaze . . . so utterly devoid of empathy. The very mark of a Diabolic! I rather suspect you’ll fit in better than you expect in that pit of vipers.” She laughed softly. “Certainly better than Sidonia ever would.”
She rose with a swish of her gown, still smiling.
“The Emperor wishes me to send my innocent little lamb to the slaughter. No. Instead, I’ll send him my anaconda.”
4
SIDONIA was in her art room when I returned, sketching a bowl of fruit. My eyes picked out her frail form silhouetted by faint starlight spilling in from the windows. I gazed at this frail entity I was going to impersonate, trying to imagine myself posing as her.
It was total and utter madness. Like a tiger playing a kitten. No, not a tiger—something more monstrous and unnatural.
My thoughts reached back to the thing I’d once been, the creature I’d been before I knew my own name, before I was civilized.