Hovering camglobes catch every word.
You’re my favorite character. I remember the orphan girl’s words. This is all show, and Phaestion is the star. We’re merely players in his drama, but what story is he telling?
“In acknowledgment of your achievement, I will grant you any wish that’s within my power.”
For the first time since we’ve known each other, Phaestion’s praise means nothing. I steel myself against his warm feelings, though they radiate off him like sunshine. After today, I don’t believe I could ever think of him the same way again.
“Take me home,” I say.
Phaestion freezes. His eyes narrow.
“Before we travel to House Wusong-Leontes, grant me the boon of traveling back to the Isle of Bone.”
“So be it,” he says quietly.
Phaestion cocks his head to the side and nods. “You fought well,” he says, addressing the room of academy soldiers. “There will be a feast this evening for all. You’re dismissed.” The teachers lead the academy soldiers out in formation. The Companions bow their heads and take their leave, but not before Hanschen grabs Phaestion and kisses him on the cheek. Phaestion pets his cousin’s blond hair then pushes him off playfully.
Edgaard looks at me with a question. I nod to indicate he should go ahead.
Phaestion couldn’t have been the one to order the attack. He couldn’t have been. But who else?
Edgaard exits after the others. The double doors close with a thunderous slam. Phaestion returns to his throne. His consorts run their long slender fingers through his hair. They massage his feet. The whisk of the camglobes hovering is the only sound.
“Edmon, before we go to Bone, there’s something I need to tell you—”
“I want to talk alone,” I say, cutting him off, staring at the concubines, the camglobes, and Talousla Karr still in the corner. “Like before,” I say. “It was you and me and the beach. We shared everything without anyone else watching.”
“Not everything,” Phaestion says with more venom than I expect. “I know that you saw the girl without me.”
Does he mean Nadia?
“This is part of everything now.” He gestures to our surroundings. “Part of who we’re going to be.”
“Who you’re going to be,” I respond angrily.
Phaestion shakes his head. “You know what our birthright destines us for.”
“Your birthright.” My words taste bitter.
“Do you think I love you any less than before?” he asks. “Just because we share ourselves with the world?” He steps from the throne and comes close. He holds my face in his hands.
I’m reminded of the mirror-Edmon in the Arms of Agony. Sometimes we war. Sometimes we touch. “I’m beginning to love you less.”
A shadow crosses his smooth face. No trace of blemish mars his skin, unlike my own, which suffers the marks of transition to adulthood. The muscles of his tall, wiry form flex. He looks like a demigod, but his physical beauty is a distraction right now.
“People were murdered in the street, Phaestion. Someone gave the order.” My voice is flat. It’s in the open now. He won’t let others hear now that he knows this is what I want to talk about.
“Leave us,” he says. His voice is quiet but hard. His gray eyes hold me in place. The concubines exit through the rear of the chamber. Phaestion presses his palm against a panel on the arm of his throne. The camglobes whisk away, too. Talousla Karr flashes a scowl but slinks off into the shadows.
Phaestion takes a seat. “Those deaths were necessary.”
It was him.
“They were innocent. All they wanted was to be heard. I promised I would speak for them. Now they’re dead. Tell me it wasn’t you.”
“What they wanted was too dangerous,” he says calmly.
“Dangerous?”
“I didn’t make the final decision,” he says evenly.
Thank the Elder Stars. He’s still my friend.
“Who did?” Anger tinges my voice. “I told those people I’d help them. I don’t like being made a liar.”
“Our people were bred as soldiers,” he says. “Soldiers obey, or the army collapses. The commanders became the Patriarchs of the Pantheon. The enlisted became our working class. Hard decisions had to be made for the first colony to survive. We had limited resources and a harsh, yet fragile environment. Too many voices, pulling in too many directions would have torn us apart. So our forefathers made sure not to repeat the mistakes of Miral or even Ancient Earth. They needed an efficient government and a way to ensure that the best among us were given the reins. The Combat was instituted not only as a way to manifest our darker impulses, to give us an outlet for the skills we had been bred with, but also to ensure that the strongest and most capable were the few with power.”
“Thanks for the civics lesson.” My voice drips sarcasm.
He ignores my gibe. “The most successful houses consolidated power through primogeniture. They trained us, their offspring, to master the Combat or sponsored others to win and rule on their behalf, like your father.”
It’s patently obvious why combatants rarely rise from the Under Circuit. Unlike the nobility, they are unable to train their whole lives for the event. It makes the success of my father an even more remarkable achievement when I think on it. His subsequent alliance with House Wusong certainly paid off. He is the old emperor’s de facto heir.
“That structure still needs to be maintained, at all costs.”
“Your structure is barbaric and stupid,” I sneer. “Look what it wrought today—the death of dozens of innocents who were only asking that their world not fall apart.”
“Tao is falling apart. It’s dying.”
His statement hangs in the air.
“It’s not going to explode or anything dramatic like that”—Phaestion waves dismissively—“but our best scientists have determined that even with the Combat and the Pavaka, even with birth controls and plebeian law mandating only one child per healthy couple, the population will reach a maximum capacity within a generation. Tao’s diminishing resources will no longer be able to sustain us, and there will be a crash.”
“What kind of crash?” I ask.
“Population, economic, ecological, technological, famine, plague . . .” His voice trails off. “You name it. Total collapse.”
He has that far-off look he gets when he talks about the future. It’s as if he can see something beyond the edge of normal vision.
“However it begins, the end is the same—cessation of our civilization. Those that survive will be reduced to scraping life from the barren rock of this world,” he says bitterly.
He leans back on his throne, a boy-king of a dying corpse. The prince of nothing.
“The Fracture.” My mind races for a solution. “We can get resources from other worlds now.”
“Paid for with what?” Phaestion says scornfully.