But I was not that frightened child now. I was not a trapped creature, at the mercy of others. There was no Matriarch here to make this decision in my stead, and I no longer believed there was a better, kinder life awaiting me if I but shed a few more drops of blood. No. All that lay down that path for me was more death, more ruin, more destruction.
His eyes were screwed shut, muscles braced, head bowed in surrender to fate.
“What is your name?” I said to him.
“Janus.”
“Janus what?”
“Janus Metz, Your Supremacy.”
My jaw clenched. Your Supremacy. I’d hoped never to hear that accursed honorific again. But since he’d used it, I seized his hair and tilted his face up to make him look at me. “You will not tell another soul you saw me.”
“No,” he said.
“Good, because I will remember your name, and if you are lying to me…” I ripped a handful of hair from his head, and held it up for him to see. “I have your scent, Janus Metz. Do you know Diabolics can track like bloodhounds?”
It was a lie. My sense of smell was as dull as a regular human’s. He couldn’t know that.
He nodded, wide-eyed. “I know I can’t run.”
“That’s very wise of you. You will take care of these bodies for me.”
“Of course!”
“And you will never do anything like this again: no victimizing people on the street.”
“I didn’t want to—”
“You were weak. You gave in to them. Never do that again. I will find out if you do.”
I would not find out, but I let him think so. He looked upon me with a strange, slack-jawed expression. “You truly are what they say you are,” he whispered. “You seek justice.” His eyes were actually shimmering with tears. “I will prove myself. I will deserve your mercy!”
I sighed and knocked him back to the ground with my heel, then stepped past him. But something made me turn back.
He was still sprawled on the ground. But over his head, on the rude brick, a pair of painted eyes glared into mine, their look accusatory.
I glared back. Nemesis the icon, the galaxy’s own hero—a legend who did not and never had truly existed.
The Excess had believed me dead. Not at my husband’s hands, but supposedly at the hands of the Partisans years before, during their attack on the Tigris.… It had been my attack, but blame was laid to them, for all the truths of the Empire were cloaked in lies. Apparently, the Nemesis slain in full view of the galaxy in the ball dome was a Partisan imposter.
Yes, I’d been dead as far as everyone knew, and in retrospect, I’d been better off for it. I could have lived a life of obscurity, forgotten, a short-lived and tragic memory.
Instead I’d set out to show myself alive by assassinating Tyrus—and then I’d truly ruined everything.
2
TYRUS, I can’t imagine myself without you.
No. But… I can.
Those were our last words before Tyrus drove a sword into my chest.
Gladdic von Aton had delivered me—a body in a coffin, lingering on the cusp of death—to Neveni onboard the Arbiter. She’d saved me from my coffin, which had been launched toward a star for my burial. Even with my heart beating and eyes wide open, I could not shake off that deathlike sleep in those early, hazy months onboard the Arbiter.
Neveni had joined forces with the Partisans, the Excess who formed an organized resistance to the rule of the Empire. There were more crew than use for them on the Arbiter, and I had no technical skills, so I had no purpose among them.…
Neveni at first meant to have me among them like a person of leisure, doing nothing, even having meals brought to me. It was unendurable enough to be on the Arbiter without endless empty time for my thoughts to swirl down and down, so I’d insisted on doing something. Anything. Cleaning was as tolerable as anything else.
The engine core of the Arbiter was my preferred sector of the ship, because it was remote and there were no windows to behold the stars. Tangles of wires and panels, stray equipment that had not been returned to their holding places, and crumpled food wrappers were always littered there.
It was something to do, to remove the trash. To find the cleaning spray meant for use by a service bot and scour that grated metal to gleaming.
The hours passed quickly that way. Mindlessly. That was the most important thing, after all: to detach from the great and cavernous hollow that had become existence.
I went through my new life in that manner, lingering over every task at no cost to anyone, to anything, since my actions made no difference with or without me. I remained in the lumpy bed each morning until my back throbbed. I undertook slow walks through the colorless corridors with legs that grew heavier with each step. Long hours I passed over whatever communal meal the Partisans had produced that day, usually a lump of synthetic bread and meatstock, with a different chemical condiment to glob wetly at the side of the plate.
All the while, the Partisans watched me, whispered about me—unaware that I could hear every word they spoke.
“… not sure she’s actually the Empress, whatever Sagnau says. That doesn’t look like the same person.”
“The nose is all wrong. There’s something so eerie about the way she just looks right through you.…”
“… still think we should just kill her…”
“Sagnau has to mean to do it eventually, right?”
They viscerally disliked me. I was very much the enemy come among them—the wife of the Domitrian, even if he had cast me away.
All about me, the world felt muted.
The colors were dim and edges sharp.
I tried never to gaze out the windows, for the sight of those distant and indifferent stars called to mind those memories of my life with Tyrus. Then questions poured through me.…
Did he ever truly love me?
Was it all my imagination?
I could have endured a thousand years of torture and I never would have done to Tyrus what he did to me. Everything I had done for him, all I’d felt and meant and imagined and dreamed up, it simply had meant nothing to him in the end. Even the Venalox could not account for his willingness to kill me.
It was intolerable to remember, and Tyrus’s words beat through my mind over and over again:
The universe has no design, no meaning, no arc toward justice.
Was that simply the truth? Did dreams bloom to life in one’s palm and then get crushed, and that was the end of them?
I loved Sidonia and she was gone.
I loved Tyrus and now he was gone.
Without Tyrus, without Donia, was there anything left of that Diabolic who’d been anointed a person, recognized as a being with a soul? For I felt empty. I felt like my soul was gone and wondered if I’d truly had one.
Sometimes, I grew angry.
Not at Tyrus. It was too painful to think of Tyrus.
No. I raged at someone who did not deserve my animosity.
At Donia.
In troubled dreams, she stood above me, always above me, and we were back in the Impyrean fortress. But I did not sit and watch her do art, or contemplate the gas giant out the window with her. Instead I screamed at her for what she had done to me, because the entire framework of my existence was a sham, a joke, a farce, and it was her fault She was the one who told me I could be more, that I mattered, that I had a soul, and then she had died and left me to this hideous delusion, and in my dreams I made her suffer for it.