“I am not sorry for the choices I have made. If you think I’m going to let the fate of our family, of the system, ride on the selfishness of a single girl and boy with adolescent feelings for each other, you do not yet understand the role of a king.”
The anger burned in Father’s steel-gray eyes now, and he turned off the image on the wall with a grip of his fist. “For you, I am sorry. I failed you—failed to teach you soon enough that difficult decisions are not those made in comfortable moral exercises. The choice a leader must make isn’t whether to hurt someone, but whom to hurt, and how much.” I stared at him in shock, but he didn’t seem to notice, or care. “We are going to hurt the Alaxan as little as possible and help billions of people stay safe and prosperous in the process…a trade I would make over and over as long as I live, and one that I hope you someday possess the fortitude to make as well.”
I found myself with my back to the door. I hadn’t even noticed his advance until I had nowhere to run.
“Now, your fascination with the Alaxan has gotten quite out of hand,” he said finally. “Go to your quarters, talk to no one, and stay there until I tell you otherwise. That is an order.”
I opened the door and stood in it for a moment, shaken. I wasn’t sure how to respond, but there was only one thing that kept coming to mind.
“Her name,” I said quietly, “is Qole.”
At first, the light was so blinding I couldn’t see what was happening. But I’d reached…and found what I was looking for. There, lying in wait in a massive containment center even deeper in the citadel than where I was trapped in the laboratory, was more Shadow than I could have ever fit into the Kaitan’s hold. Only one of many such caches. They must have been storing it for a purpose.
But now it was mine. Deep or not, it hadn’t been too far for me to touch. To seize, even, and drag toward me. It had all happened so fast: darkness as deep as a void, followed by the brightest white from the core of a star.
I still couldn’t see. I only felt the strange intensity somewhere between hot and cold—yet somehow an extreme, all-consuming sensation.
And then I heard the screams.
Sight returned to me with sound, and I blinked to find the room crawling in liquid black flame. It flowed in seductive waves, like fire in zero gravity. Burning white glowed within the center, giving the blackness a purplish cast.
Like my dress was my first delirious thought.
Except when this flame touched flesh, it didn’t flutter around it like a party trick. It devoured it.
The screams rose from the half-dozen or so guards lining the table I was on. Some of them tried to run, but the flames leapt at them the fastest, unwinding like a sinuous predator to bring them down. Their blackened bodies fell to ash before they hit the ground. But even those who didn’t run and simply shielded their faces died like that, frozen in dark silhouettes lit by fire. And then they crumbled like pillars of sand.
A few guards discharged their weapons, but the bright bursts of white plasma were no match for the flames. The fire swallowed the blasts, absorbing the energy, and then swallowed whoever was shooting.
It took me a few seconds to realize I was the one responsible for this, that this was what I’d reached for and brought back with me. This was the force I was controlling, if not entirely consciously. And that was about how long it took for the Bladeguard to come to the same conclusion. In a flash, his Disruption Blade was gleaming white in his hand, and then he charged me where I was strapped to the table, sword raised over his head.
I had time for a single thought: Help.
The burning Shadow reacted not as if I’d forced it to, but as if it were responding to me. It moved between me and the Bladeguard faster than I could blink. Maybe it was my imagination, but for a moment it looked like it parried the blow—and rendered the blade into molten goop—with flame that had a point and an edge, almost in the shape of a blade itself. But then the fire dissipated, as did the Bladeguard in a shower of ash.
The room was suddenly empty. Everything was blackened and sizzling. The doors to the lab were mangled strips of dripping metal, opening onto an equally charred and silent hallway. The way out was open, if only I could get to it. And there wasn’t even anyone to witness. Anything that had once been a comm or a video camera was now a melted lump of synthetic material like all the others coating the flaking walls and warped countertops. Still, someone, or several someones, would no doubt be here soon to investigate why their feeds had gone dead.
My head whipped over to Arjan. The flames hadn’t touched him—the damage to his body had still been done by human hands only. My own dress was stuck to my legs in places, scorched to nothing in others, from when actual burning Shadow must have replaced the mimicry, but I wasn’t badly burned. I was, however, still bound to the table.
Breaking my restraints should have been easy in comparison to what I’d just done. But when I lifted my head and tried to leverage my arm against one of them, dizziness crashed over me like a breaking wave. The weight of the entire citadel suddenly seemed to press down on my body, and the back of my skull hit the metal table with a thump.
The ceiling shivered above my face, and I thought for a second it might actually be about to give way, until the cracks that rippled along it began to glow. The eerie fissures fractured the air in my vision as much as the ceiling. They ran down the walls, along the floor, and up onto the table. When my hands and arms started splitting apart, I knew I was hallucinating.
The hallucinations didn’t stop there, though. My skin began peeling away like the ceiling and floor, exposing tissue and bone. I saw my ribs, and then my beating heart before it, too, dissolved.
I tried to breathe, but I wasn’t sure I could without lungs. Stop, stop, stop. At some point, I started screaming the word.
Arjan groaned.
Arjan. I had to move. I had to get him out of here. But time was cracking like the room, like my body. I had no idea how long I’d been here, watching it happen. Maybe only seconds, but the seconds felt like hours. And I still couldn’t break the restraints.
I tried to talk to him, but my voice only erupted in screams. The noise was disturbing him; I could tell from the grimace on his ravaged face, though not from the emptiness of his eye socket. That told me nothing.
…Other than that I had to kill whoever had done this to him. The blackened, crumbled ruins of bodies on the ground weren’t enough. They would never be enough. My screams turned to cries of rage, and I reached for Arjan again.
Like last time, I didn’t actually reach him in the attempt. Or maybe I did.
The breaking room vanished, and Arjan along with it. All I could see was a strange, glinting outline of him, a framework. It was as if his veins were all that was left of him, lit like glowing wires. The lights were racing around his circulatory system, moving almost too fast to trace.
I tried anyway; I followed them to where the light grew brightest, somewhere inside Arjan. And then I could hear him.
Qole…?
Arjan?