When Ani returned the next morning, concerned for her friend and troubled afresh by the part she had played in the death of Andrus, she found Syl sitting upright on the edge of her bed. She was scrubbed clean, though her face was pale and her eyes were red from crying. She had changed out of her white hospital gown, and was wearing the red robes of the Sisterhood.
“What on earth are you doing, Syl?” said Ani.
“I’m giving myself to the Sisterhood,” Syl replied bleakly. “Again.”
Ani was all but dumbstruck. “But why would you do that?” she asked.
Impatiently, Syl brushed a runaway tear from her cheek.
“I can’t hide forever, Ani. I must face the One. I don’t have a hope in hell of winning if I don’t even turn up for the fight, do I?”
“But . . . but you could die. You will—you’ll die, I know it!”
“Someone has to do something, Ani. What if I’m the only one who can?”
Ani was shaking her head—no, no, no—and her features crumpled in devastation as she battled the potential horror of losing her friend, all over again.
“Please no, Syl,” she said. “I can’t. I couldn’t bear it.”
“You said that the One wants me,” Syl said, and she found a new firmness both in voice and in purpose as she spoke. “Well, I want it too, Ani, and you’re going to give us both exactly what we desire.”
• • •
The Diplomatic task force moved through space: five carriers and eight destroyers, supported by twelve heavy cruisers. To starboard, the Derith wormhole rippled.
Rippled, then bloomed.
The Cayth fleet emerged so suddenly that even the lightest of the task force vessels did not have time to come about before the first of the torpedoes were unleashed upon them. Had any of the Diplomatic crews survived long enough, they might have glimpsed a single female figure standing on the otherwise empty bridge of the Cayth command ship, a goddess of war made flesh. Fara watched as the Illyri were utterly destroyed, and their vessels—now cleansed entirely of tens of thousands of crew—left to drift like ghost ships through the blackness.
The Cayth retreated back into the Derith wormhole, and it was as if they had never been.