The unmistakable shriek of a dying woman cut the air like a knife, and in the distance, a body hit the floor with a sickening thud. Acidalia pulled her gun closer and forced herself against the alabaster wall, sitting as still as she could bear. Underneath her clock, her heart beat at the speed of a metronome at prestissimo. If her skin hadn't evolved to tolerate Martian sun instead of Terran cold, she'd be sweating bullets, but she would never let them know that. She was an Imperatrix, not an animal, and she could battle her fight-or-flight instincts for as long as it took to win this battle—or, more accurately, win this war. Because now there would be war. There was no more chance of a peaceful resolution anymore, if there had even been one in the first place.
But that was the future. War was imminent, but not immediate, and Acidalia couldn't afford to think of things as distant as tomorrow when she was cornered in a hangar awaiting her own doom. Above her, the laser fire grew ever stronger, and she knew she had to find some way to escape this place before one of those wayward shots came too close to her head. It would only take a single shot and she'd be dead or lobotomized, and that simply couldn't happen. She had to live with her mind intact—martyrdom was not an option. She needed an exit.
Breathlessly, she glanced around the room, but she couldn't turn her head too far; movement attracted the eye, and if she ventured too much from her hiding place, the warmth of the engine protecting her would no longer cover her heat signature. She'd be a sitting duck once more, and even the best crack shot in Eleutheria couldn't take down a dozen enemies at once with just one gun. I should have brought bombs, she realized stupidly, knowing that thinking such thoughts now was utterly useless. As it was, she was very nearly unarmed, and completely incapable of fighting any of these soldiers hand-to-hand—they were Eleutherian brutes, and she was a half-Martian woman with bones so fragile they may as well have been made of paper. Fighting was not an option just as death was not an option. She had to get out of here quickly, or she had to get into a place where she could shoot from far enough away that being physically manhandled was impossible.
Acidalia surveyed her surroundings. She was reasonably close to a broken window, and if she was willing to deal with being stabbed by glass shards, she could probably make it outside. But they were thousands of stories above the ground, battling in an impossibly high skyscraper that reached above Eleutheria's artificial clouds. Humans could hardly even breathe without assistance at this altitude, even if she miraculously didn't fall. And, to make matters worse, she was already wounded–between the laceration Ace had left behind and the burns she sustained when Cassiopeia tried to shoot her the second time, she doubted she could even move without cringing in pain.
This pain is nothing compared to what they'll do to you when they catch you, she told herself, but that thought was not very comforting, and she could feel her pulse quicken in response. Alestra had always told her that she needed to learn how to control herself—Ciphers could master their bodies' innate responses, override their subconscious mind and their human DNA. Acidalia had never managed to learn that skill, and in the fire of battle, she had to admit to herself that her mother was right. She couldn't keep up like this, with her traitorous panicking brain and her inability to curtail her animalistic instincts to flee. If she couldn't calm down, reduce her body temperature and her light speed pulse, they would find her, and it would all be over. She couldn't fight and she couldn't run, so she had one option left: weasel her way out of here with logic.
Acidalia bit her lip and concentrated on the few advantages she had, envisioning herself as a player of chess and seeing the hangar as the board. She was the white king, backed into a corner, and Cassiopeia was the black player, incredibly close to a checkmate. But Cassiopeia was no grandmaster, and it didn't take a genius or a Cipher to see that. Despite being a Generalis by birth, she had never led a military campaign before, and she was firing with all the accuracy of a child playing laser tag. Acidalia was outnumbered, but she was smarter than her adversities. That was both helpful and problematic—helpful because it made manipulation easier, problematic because Cassiopeia was not insightful enough to see the value in keeping her prey alive. If they wanted her imprisoned or interrogated, Acidalia would willingly surrender and escape later, but she had a sneaking suspicion Cassiopeia would put a bullet through her skull the minute she could just for the glory of saying she was the one to kill the bastard Imperatrix.
But Cassiopeia might not shoot if she couldn't see her target.
Acidalia pondered briefly just shooting Cassiopeia in the face. It wouldn't be difficult from where she stood—she could probably kill any man in this room without even trying. That part was simple. The danger came from being caught—if someone saw a shot come from this direction, they'd shoot back, and even thick metal engines couldn't block laser ammunition. The metal would bursting a thousand little bullets under the heat and the pressure, and Acidalia would fall back, her body riddled with tiny holes, blood leeching out of her skin. That would not do.
So she would wait. Wait for an opportunity, wait for backup, wait for something, and pray that they didn't kill her in the meantime. Artemis had called her and she hadn't answered, so if anyone in the Revolution had any sense at all, they'd be sending in the cavalry any minute now. It would only be a few minutes before—
"Inveni eam!" somebody screamed. "Inveni eam—
Never mind, Acidalia thought. She'd been hidden well, but she'd forgotten that her feet were bleeding—she'd been running in heels across a floor covered in shards of glass, but the adrenaline coursing through her body had been so strong she'd hardly even noticed the sharp edges cutting into her skin. That didn't stop the blood, though, and there it was, moving across the floor at the pace of a snail and leaving red streaks on the quartz. It wasn't much, but it was enough to be noticeable, especially here in this platinum-coated, white-gold luxury.
As the soldier rounded the corner, Acidalia's laser bolt hit him in his chest, ending his brief victory, but there were more soldiers hot on his tail, and she couldn't relax for very long. Acidalia shot intermittently into the crowd of men and watched two or three of them drop, but there were far too many for her to ever fight off. She ducked to avoid being hit and dived sideways, her wrist throbbing with every jagged heartbeat, her ankle screaming in pain. There was nowhere to go. The outside was a dead end and her only exit was blocked.
I cannot die, she thought for the thousandth time. I will pry the reaper's scythe from his hands if that's what it takes. Death will just have to wait.
She aimed at a reflective piece of glass and fired. Her shot was well placed; it ricocheted off her improvised mirror and flew into a soldier's head. As he toppled, Acidalia took down his comrade, who tripped haphazardly on his dead friend's body before succumbing to her laser fire. In retaliation, someone else started shooting; a bolt whizzed past Acidalia's arm, leaving blistering burns across her skin. She elected to ignore this, and focused instead on killing as many of them as she could. Normally, she wasn't this vicious, but normally she wasn't outnumbered and alone.
Christ, how many of them are there? she thought. Whipping her head around, she turned to look in the other direction. Men were jumping down onto the balcony she'd just escaped onto. Before she even registered what had happened, someone's hands were in her hair. Pure revulsion surged through her as she wrenched herself away from the man on instinct alone, but he was far stronger than she was.
His eyes were pure pride. He had to be her own age or younger, just a kid, had no idea what he was doing other than that he captured the Imperatrix. His curly hair showed through his helmet. He was terrifying because he was so goddamn human. He held her fast, pulling the gun away from her side and pushing her against a wall. She kicked him hard in the shins, but he didn't react, and her own foot started to bleed again.
"Vae," she cursed. "Get off of me!"
His expression didn't change. She raised a leg to strike him again, but was momentarily distracted by a flash of green eyes. Generalis eyes.
"I apologize for what I'm about to do," Cassiopeia said cordially, without an ounce of regret apparent in her expression.
"My mother sent you to kill me, then?" Acidalia replied. "It's just like Alestra to make someone else do all the dirty work for her. If you kill me, her hands are clean."
She snickered. "I won't be killing you. You don't deserve the waste of a bolt. You'll die at the hands of a nobody and be laid to rest in a pauper's grave, like every other bastard Martian who thinks they can contaminate our gene pool."
"Like your life is any more valuable than mine?"
Cassiopeia sneered. "I'll be more prolific than an Imperatrix with a two-day reign."
"You'll go down in history as a traitor," Acidalia countered. "I'll be a martyr for my cause; what will you ever be but Alestra Cipher's dragon?"
"Trust me," she said, "I have a whole list of what I want to do. And I'll start fulfilling that list right now." She reached a slender, bony hand out and grabbed the crown. With a swift movement, she pulled it off of Acidalia, taking strands of her black hair with it. She did not wince. Her deep brown eyes bored holes into Cassiopeia's, intense and vivid.
"You can call yourself an empress if you wish," Acidalia said lowly. "Your power does not rest in the title you bestow upon yourself, but in the people who choose to follow you."
"That philosophical bullshit will be your final words," Cassiopeia warned.
"So be it." Her heart pounded and every instinct in her body screamed at her to run as fast as she could, but rather than follow it, she simply leaned back and closed her eyes serenely. I'll die with dignity, at least.
The man next to her cocked his blaster.
I'm a martyr, she reminded herself. It's not all in vain. My people will avenge me. My death will send shockwaves through Eleutheria. We can win this war.
The gun was against her temple. It was cold.
Are those good enough last words? What if people quote me? How would anyone ever quote me? No one is here right now. I'm going to die surrounded by my worst enemies.
His fingers were on the trigger.
My brother will be devastated. Artemis will cry. Andromeda will punch something, or—or kill someone, or—oh, Jesus Christ, my death will be a catalyst for her committing a war crime. What if there's a God? What if there's a Heaven I'll never reach because I just killed two dozen people?
"Get the fuck off my sister!"
The gunman's shot went up into the air as T tackled Acidalia to the ground. He jumped in front of her and began firing shots at everyone in his reach, his eyes pure fury.
"Get away!" he yelled hoarsely.
"Like hell I'd abandon you," she said, reaching for her gun. "Why on Earth did you come here?"
"I didn't want my sister to die," he replied, sounding oddly childish. "What was I supposed to do?" As he grinned at Acidalia, he took down three soldiers at once without even glancing at them. He'd always been an incredible shot, even if he liked to deny it."
"T, you're the most aggravating brother in the galaxy, but by stellae do I love you." Acidalia pulled herself upwards and killed another man, letting the blood from his crushed head leak through her fingers and bury itself under her nails. Cassiopeia, bewildered, sat in the middle of the room, stumbling around the corpses of her own fighters. She drew her own laser pistol and fired quickly at Acidalia, but both shots missed; she was never a sharpshooter at close range. Without the support of the rest of her comrades, she was useless. Acidalia aimed without thinking, concentrating only on making this shot. One millimetron to the right, and the fire in Cassiopeia's eyes would die-
Something smelled like ash, and someone next to her collapsed.
Cassiopeia shot at her again, but Acidalia fell to her knees so quickly the bolt didn't have enough time to hit her. "T," she whispered. "T, no, you're-"
She whirled up, searching for anyone with a gun, anyone who could have just—no, not killed him, he couldn't be dead, he wasn't dead-
The realization hit her like a hovercar. Cassiopeia's shots were never meant for her.
The sadistic grin on her face was enough to replace every ounce of panic in Acidalia's body with seething, hot rage. She launched herself at the woman, grabbing her brother's gun, no longer thinking about her own death, and wrenched the crown off of Cassiopeia's head. It hit the wall with the force of a thousand stars, carefully arranged crystals of a thousand-year-old artifact shattering against the marble, platinum cracking under stress. Acidalia fired the gun two, three, six times. Some dim, dark part of her mind knew how suicidal this was, how much of a kamikaze stance she was taking, but the larger part of her brain simply didn't care.
Mortuus frater meus. The thought echoed in her ears, louder than Cassiopeia's incoherent yelling, louder than the laser blasts all around her. Mortuus frater meus. My brother is dead, he's dead, et mea culpa, It's all my fault, that shot was meant for me-
Emotions she couldn't describe with words swelled in her chest—hatred, pure hatred, rage, like darkness bubbling in her heart, longing, sadness, and damp tears were sliding down her face and landing on the ground and the gun was out of power because T had been shooting it so much, shooting it for her, for Acidalia, for a woman who would be dead in five minutes, and Cassiopeia was laughing-
She took the blaster, T's big, powerful gun bigger than her own arm, and smashed it on Cassiopeia's skull as hard as she could.
Blood splattered the walls with red and Acidalia jumped backwards to where her brother's corpse lay pushed to the side, still warm, so warm under her hands. His eyes were glazed over, the same brown eyes she'd first seen at thirteen, not blinking, just there, open. He had the same cocky smile and his last words played again in her ears: "I didn't want my sister to die. What else was I supposed to do?"
Anything but this.
Everything came flooding back to her in a torrent of memories and thoughts and feelings. Cassiopeia was on the ground, her head invisible under tangled onyx hair. Corpses lay scattered against the wall, T's just another body among them. Everything smelled like blood and smoke. The pain of the glass in her foot, the burns where the lasers had not quite come close enough to hit her, the death of her brother who only ever wanted to help, ached so badly she could hardly stand. T's sacrifice was physically painful, burning like no visible injury ever could. Acidalia collapsed against the wall, grappling for control over her subconscious desire to flee. She clung to a piece of her broken crown with one hand and her brother's empty gun with the other, shutting her eyes tight against the cold air. T's body convulsed in agonal rasps, like a post-mortem death rattle, a parody of breath. She pressed her fingers against his neck, hoping without really hoping that he was alive.
There was no pulse beneath her fingers.
He gave another strangled gasp as the final reflexes of his dying brain gave a last-resort effort to get oxygen back in his body, but Acidalia knew how fruitless it was. His heart had already stilled. His consciousness was gone, his body empty. There was something equally sad and endearing about just how hard his lungs were trying, and how little it actually mattered. He was already gone, his brain already dead, everything that made T T already lost to the stars above. Acidalia had fought off Death and won, but she left casualties in her wake, and that made her question if her survival was even worth the cost.
She blinked back more tears and breathed in deeply. This was a bad time to have a meltdown. She knew she'd bought time, but it couldn't be all that much; if she remained where she was, T's sacrifice wouldn't matter. Reinforcements were arriving, and there was no way she could stay here unless she wanted to be caught in more crossfire.
Shakily, Acidalia stood and grabbed her own gun. She left T's on his corpse, folded his arms together like it was a proper burial, and kissed his forehead, like she'd done when he was eleven and scared and she was trying to be a good big sister. "Requiesce in pace," she whispered.
Shards of glass dug into her foot with every step she took, her wrist throbbed and swelled even more than it had before, and the rest of her body felt weak, sore. She focused the pain intently, trying to concentrate on the sting of burnt flesh, the disgusting ooze of popping blisters. It was easier to deal with that than everything else. She shoved any other thoughts out of her mind as pure adrenaline propelled her towards the Revelation. There was no time to think or grieve or do anything.
As she clambered up the steps with all the dignity she could muster, Acidalia made out the silhouettes of two more women. She didn't recognize either of them, but that meant she had no way of knowing if they were friend or foe, and she wasn't stupid. She raised her gun instinctively, hoping it would be just enough of a threat to keep them from trying anything.
"Woah!" one of them half-shrieked. "We don't want to hurt you, put that thing down!"
"Who are you?" Acidalia asked through ragged breaths.
"Um, Athena." She blinked again. "And this is Carina—we were sent up here to warn you about Cassiopeia—your brother said—"
"You knew T?" Acidalia could feel panic rise in her throat again. She had a duty to tell these people about the death of their friend, but she had no idea how she could manage such a thing without having a complete mental breakdown. Perhaps it would be easier now, she mused, before she really reconciled T's passing with the image of the calm, healthy teenage boy she still had in her mind. The corpse on the ground and the smiling brother whose dog tags were in her bag still felt like entirely different people, and that combined with the adrenaline made the burden infinitely easier to bear.
Athena looked at Acidalia's blooded dress and back up at her bruised visage. "He's dead, isn't he?" she asked.
Acidalia nodded wordlessly.
"I'm sorry."
"Not your fault." Acidalia was suddenly acutely aware of the black ash on her shirtsleeve—the debris from T's laser wound, and the only remnant she'd ever have of her dead little brother. Dead little brother, her mind echoed back. Your brother died for you. He's gone.
A terrifyingly warm, inexplicably yellow sensation flooded her consciousness. Everything in the world ceased to exist for a moment, and the sensations of drying blood and clinging fabric and sharp, painful breaths dissolved into background nothingness. The only thing left in the universe was the image of T's cooling corpse in a room of other bodies strewn about in Eleutherian heat, the faint trace of a smile fading from his face. He was gone. He was gone and—
And Acidalia couldn't do this right now.
"Get in the ship," she said hurriedly to the girls. They were teenagers, clearly—Athena couldn't have been older than eighteen, give or take. How dare Cassandra do this? Acidalia asked herself, seething internally. What person in their right mind would send two teenage girls to a war zone to accomplish a mission that could just have easily been done with enlisted soldiers? As if the death of one seventeen-year-old wasn't enough, as if Acidalia needed more blood on her hands, as if any of these peoples' lives were any more valuable than that of a woman who had just smashed someone's skull in with a gun twice her size.
"Wait, what?" Athena asked. "What—"
"There are people following us. If my mother's men see you, they will kill you—and me—on sight. Go. Shields up, cloaking on—" The Revelation hummed in response to her commands, sensing her featherlight touch on its hull and matching her fingerprints to its security system. "We'll fly to Mars. It's safer there, and I'll blend in."
"But—"
"They'll kill you! Move!" In the distance, people were moving, and soon enough, they'd see the remnants of the battlefield, the sea of black-clad corpses. Then there would be hell to pay, and Acidalia was in no state to fight, let alone defend two people. She couldn't die, not now, not after T sacrificed his whole future for her survival. Too many people were depending on her too much for her to ever let herself give up.
"I'm sorry, T," she whispered to nobody and everybody all at once. The planet seemed to echo her sorrow back to her, the stars above singing a chorus of paenitemur, paenitemur. The world mourned the loss of one of its brightest young subjects in a way Acidalia could never afford to—not now, not ever. T was dead, but Acidalia was alive, and the Revolution would live to see another victory. There was no time for grief.
Wrist throbbing and heart pounding, Acidalia straightened herself and marched into the Revelation, determinedly ignoring the pain that seared through every fibre of her being.
She was an Imperatrix, these were her citizens, and this was her empire. The first battle was over, and she had lived. T had died, but she had lived, and she'd would put the life he had given her to good use. Her survival wasn't really her choice anymore, if it ever was in the first place. She belonged to Eleutheria as much as it belonged to her, and this planet needed her to keep herself alive. She'd fight for this little blue marble until the day she died, because her brother's death would not—could not—be in vain.
I will fight for you, Acidalia silently promised, and I'll keep you alive, even if it's only in memoriam. This time she had no living brother to promise anything back, but he would have if he could, and that was enough.