Present day
Nyx watched as Cato tended to everyone’s wounds.
She sat, curled up in the corner, with the biggest damn glass of hooch she could find—they’d emptied the supplies off Lysicrates before returning to Zelus.
Zelus was their ship. They’d made it a home.
In the corner of the room, Eris was still passed out and attached to the monitors as the drugs left her system. She’d come out of this the worst by far.
Or—maybe the resistance had. After Sher’s betrayal, the Novantae were fucked. Completely burned. All their secrets out there for the Oracle to sift through. Ariadne had set up an encrypted line, and the rebels were packing up and leaving Nova. Many were going dark. Their small rebellion had become even smaller.
After all her scheming, Nyx would never set foot on Nova sand in the end. It upset her in a way she didn’t understand—the lost potential. That plan she, Rhea, and Ariadne had worked for over the course of a year. A life she could have lived, but would never happen.
Now it would be something else.
Or maybe nothing at all.
Nyx downed more hooch. The world was getting a little softer around the edges. Her senses dulled. Her mind was less sharp.
It made it easier to deal with the pain.
“What are you going to do about her wounds?” Nyx asked Cato, tilting her chin at Eris.
“Stabilize for now. Let her heal. If she wants the face she wore in the resistance, between me and Ari, we could manage. Not so sure about the tongue.”
“If she got it back, I wonder what she’d say,” Nyx said.
“She’d have a few choice swear words, that’s for damn sure,” Cato said, with an easy smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
“No going back from here, pilot,” Nyx said. “You’re stuck with the most wanted crew in the Iona Galaxy, blamed for the deaths of thousands.” She raised her glass. “Cheers to a clusterfuck.”
Guilt flashed in Cato’s features, but he shook his head. “At least the rest of Laguna was able to evacuate. No one outside of the perimeter was infected and the spores were contained in the spharias. We saved close to a million lives, plus the millions off planet. All of the Evoli, many Tholosians. That’s not nothing.”
Nyx found a smile. “Silver lining. Well done.”
Nyx went up to the top of the ship, a small room that reminded her of her barracks back on Tholos. She could look straight up through a porthole at the stars above.
Stars didn’t judge.
In the privacy of that room, Nyx coughed into her hand. Her palm was speckled with blood. Her whole body burned, like splinters were growing in her muscles.
The others hadn’t showed any signs of infection. But she’d felt this illness before she’d landed on Laguna, if she were honest with herself. She’d felt it not long after Ismara. She’d stumbled against the walls of the ichor in that underground crypt. Her hand against the rough rock, the tear in her suit. The tiny scrape. Small enough she’d thought nothing of it. Large enough for endospores in the rock to infect her.
With the first speck of blood, she’d known.
The others were safe from her. It was the first strain, the one that had taken Talley. Not infectious, or the rest of her team would have shown symptoms before they even came close to Laguna. She didn’t know how long she had.
There was no honor in this. No battle. Just a slow, painful ebb into nothing.
Nyx lay back, shooting herself up with an antitoxin when Cato wasn’t looking.
She knew it was useless. There was no cure, or at least not one they could access or develop quickly enough. So, she’d enjoy what little time she had left. It could be days. Weeks. Months. Years.
She’d do what she could to destroy the Empire before the end.