My mothers never did get used to my rising early for physical training while I stayed with them. I tried to be quiet, but it was an inevitable reminder that I was now in the military and they were going to lose me again. But they did rise early with me, my last day on Sanctuary that year. It’s never easy when loved ones have to leave you, and doubly hard when you know they’re going to serve in the military. Even if I wasn’t headed for a combat zone at that point, they knew I’d wind up in one eventually.
For myself, parting from them wasn’t easy. I knew I had to do it, and I did it, but I never once said any of this was easy.
~Ia
AUGUST 9, 2492 T.S.
Her head ached. Thankfully not from any overuse of her gifts or face-plants on a hard surface. Lack of sleep made her uncomfortable this time. Rubbing at her tired eyes, wishing she could just go back to bed, Ia breathed deeply several times. She also swallowed another mouth of cold caf’, and stared blearily at the last three questions on her Net-based exams. They were being taken in real time over the hyperrelay channels, despite the lag between Sanctuary and Earth of roughly one second for every fifty lightyears, and had to be completed on time, or her scores would be docked.
Ia already had a Field Commission as a Lieutenant Second Class in the Space Force Marine Corps. In order to retain that rank, she had to go through training at an Officers’ Academy; that was standard military procedure, and smart, since it guaranteed all officers above the lowest attainable rank had the same basic leadership training. In order to advance beyond Lieutenant First Class, however—which she would only get after distinguishing herself through at least a full decade of service, if she didn’t play the military’s game—she also had to have a Master’s degree.
Since she needed to be able to advance at a moment’s notice in the future, Ia had signed up for a series of classes on the Nets shortly after boarding the Liu Ji, back when she was just a corporal in the Marines. This particular virtual college simply presented the course materials, expected the students to learn on their own time, and then provided the exams online, all for a reasonable fee. It worked well, but it only worked if the students actually applied themselves to their lessons. It wasn’t just rote memorization, either; each question in the final exams was different enough from the information provided in the resource materials that a student had to know the subject matter to be able to answer them correctly.
The door down the hall opened. Ia answered the question on her screen and hit the send key on her parents’ workstation, without bothering to correct the typo in her answer. It might count slightly against her, but that was alright; she didn’t want to pass with perfect marks, just pass with reasonably good ones.
One of her mothers shuffled out of their bedroom. Thankfully toward the bathroom, not the living room. Ia focused on the next question on her test; this was her final exam in her chosen Master’s field, Military History. Once she was done with it and her scores tallied and registered, she would be eligible for the fast-track program at her chosen Academy. The bedroom door opened again behind her, and she heard her other mother move to wait at the bathroom door, not quite successfully smothering a yawn.
That audio cue forced Ia to smother one of her own, then sip at the cooled remnants of caf’ in her mug. By the time she reached the final question, Amelia had slipped onto the sofa next to her child. Wrapping an arm around Ia’s shoulders and snuggling her head on her daughter’s shoulder, she peered at the screen. With her arm cushioned from Ia’s skin by her bathrobe and her cheek on the fabric covering Ia’s shoulder, there was less chance for her mother to trigger a precognitive vision, but less wasn’t the same as none. Ia slipped her arm around her biomother’s ribs, hugging her back, then helped her biomother sit upright again.
“‘Who was nicknamed the White Death in World War II, Terran Standard Twentieth Century, and what trick did he use to prevent his breath from being seen?’” her mother recited aloud. “Ugh. You couldn’t pay me to study Military History in that much depth. Did you get any sleep at all, gataki mou?”
Struggling against another yawn, Ia nodded. “Some. There’s…mm…a Human on the other end of the testing Net at this time of the morning. I’ve already chatted with her. I need to have this last test witnessed so that when my transcripts arrive at the Academy, the TUPSF will be able to question and confirm that it really was me taking the exams—the voice link is active,” she added, tapping the screen. “She can hear everything we’re saying. That is, if she’s not busy with something else. This is the last question, anyway.”
“I trust you know it?” Aurelia asked, headed for the kitchen. “Fresh caf’, anyone?”
“Mm, that would be lovely, dear,” Amelia murmured. She sagged back on the couch, leaving her daughter free to compose her answer.
Ia touched the keys, typing each letter with her fingers, rather than her mind.
“Simo Häyhä was the ‘White Death’ of Finland. Fighting in the coldest months of winter, he would often put snow into his mouth and breathe through it, so that the ice crystals would chill his breath with each exhale, preventing any puffs of steam from giving away his position. His military service took place during the Winter War of 1939–1940 Terran Standard, involving Finland versus the invading forces of the Soviet Union, and included over seven hundred confirmed, credited kills with both sniper rifle and machine gun. His career ended March 6th, 1940 T.S. when a bullet disfigured his face.”
It was a bit more than the question actually called for, but it was an easy question, and Ia wanted to reassure the test examiners that she did, indeed, know historical military facts. As if I couldn’t just dip into the past on the timeplains and pluck the facts from any stream I wanted—the real facts, not just the accounts written down afterward.
“There. Done.” She struck the send key, then tapped the icon for the voice link. “Thanks for keeping me company, Meioa Giltrers.”
It took a few seconds for the reply to come back. Even at hyperrelay speeds, Sanctuary was a long, long way from Earth. “Eh, it’s not like I have anything better to do on the night shift. You go on and have a good night’s rest, or whatever time of day it is all the way out at wherever-the-heck you’re from.”
That made Ia chuckle. “It’s now morning, local time.”
“Says you,” her biomother grunted, still slouched on the sofa, arm over her eyes.
The examiner, Giltrers, spoke up again through the link. “Then I’ll just say good morning to you. Your test will be graded and the results will be posted in three days. If you don’t see them by then, contact the Exam Board via the conveniently named Contact the Exam Board link, and include my name, Maria Giltrers, as the test examiner for verification purposes. Now, any questions before we end this undoubtedly hellaciously expensive link?”
“None—and it’s still technically a brand-new colonyworld, so all links certified for educational purposes only are provided for free by the government. Thank you for your patience, meioa, and have a good night.” Ending the connection, Ia powered down the workstation. Shifting it from her lap to the coffee table, she sagged back against the cushions. For a moment, all she could see was the bleak prospect of packing up her belongings and boarding a shuttle for the space station that evening. But I only have nineteen hours left with my family, and some of those hours won’t be pleasant ones…
Curling over, she cuddled onto her mother’s lap. Amelia stroked her fingers through Ia’s short white locks. “My little white kitten…How big you’ve grown. How far you’ll roam. I do wish you didn’t have to go away…”
“I wish I didn’t have to go back, either,” Ia murmured. “That none of this was necessary. That I could be normal.”
Aurelia emerged from the kitchen, carrying a tray with three steaming mugs of caf’ deftly balanced on it. “You’d be extraordinary, gataki, no matter what your abilities were like. I have proof of it; you were kind enough to prepare an extra pot, so I didn’t have to wait as long for it to brew.”
Ia smiled wryly at that. Sighing, she pushed herself upright and accepted the fresh mug. “So…anything planned for today?”
“Crying, weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and some breast-beating. Possibly some sobbing, if we can fit it into the schedule,” Aurelia quipped, settling on Ia’s other side. She patted her daughter on the leg, then sagged back against the sofa cushions with a sigh. “I don’t want you to go, either. It’ll be, what, two more years before we’ll see you again?”
“In person, yes. And it’ll be three years; I have to spend one year at the Academy in Sines, Portugal, then two more years of duty before I’ll be free to come back home. But I’ll be an officer, with more leeway in making hyperrelay calls back home,” Ia offered. “Once a week, rather than once a month.”
“Scant comfort,” Aurelia groused. “It’s not the same as holding my baby girl. Not that I can hold you for long, even when you are here…”
Mouth twisting in wry acknowledgment, Ia leaned onto her other mother’s shoulder. Aurelia pulled her close, giving her a cuddle, then patted her on the arm and let Ia sit back up again. Drawing in a deep breath, Ia let it out. She tipped her head back, copying both of her mothers, and looked at the white-painted ceiling. “So. My last day here.”
Aurelia patted her on the thigh. “What do you need to do today, kitten?”
“Mm. Finish filling up those memory chips so you can print out my precognitive missives once I’m gone…experiment on my brothers nefariously…and eat Momma’s Restaurant’s famous triple topado pie.” She flashed each of her mothers a grin at that last one. “With ice cream.”
Amelia chuckled. “Opportunist.”
“What sort of experiments?” Aurelia asked, frowning.
“Just some prototype devices I need to have working and ready to go into production, next time I come back,” Ia dismissed. “They’re pretty much ready, though I wouldn’t mind running one last set of tests. Actually, I really should run them on someone…else…oh, bother.” Ia groaned under her breath, realizing there was one last thing she hadn’t covered, yet. “Mom? Ma? We need to have a talk.”
“What sort of talk?” Aurelia asked, her brow pinched and her tone skeptical.
“The Talk.” Sighing, Ia pushed herself upright and edged around the coffee table. Putting physical space between her and her mothers would help. Looming over them would be too aggressive, yet she had to be on her feet, to assert herself visually. Turning to face them once she was a couple body-lengths away, Ia relaxed her shoulders with a shrug. “I love you both, dearly and deeply…but it’s time to have The Talk with you.”
“Alright…so, talk,” Aurelia told her. Amelia scooted closer to her, cuddling subtly with her wife.
Taking a deep breath, Ia gave it to them. “I am not your little girl anymore. I have not been for years, and I will never again be your little girl—and I’m not just talking about being a grown-up,” she added as Amelia drew in a breath to speak. “I am talking about the fact that I need you to support me as the Prophet, from here on out. You are two of the most normal people I know. Everybody sees you as perfectly normal.”
“Except for the Church,” Amelia snorted.
“They’re not normal themselves,” Ia dismissed. “My point is, I need you to stop seeing me, addressing me, and treating me as your little girl, your daughter, your child. People need to start seeing me as the Prophet of a Thousand Years, foretold in V’Dan folklore and the Sh’nai faith, the master of the Fire Girl Prophecies, the protector and defender of the future. Our future, on this world. If they see you, two perfectly normal, sane, well-adjusted adults accepting, honoring, and following my directives…
“Look,” she tried again, raking a hand through her hair before dropping it to her hip. “There’s a certain momentum that needs to build, here in Sanctuarian society. Rabbit has the teenagers covered; the key members have met with me and they now believe in me, and she’ll keep them believing. Thorne is working on presenting me to the support services, manufactories, and other businesses, and so forth. Fyfer will be going into the political and legal venues. I need you to reassure all the other perfectly normal people that I am a viable, sane alternative to falling in step with the madness of the Church. And you cannot do that if you keep calling me ‘kitten’ and gataki mou and thinking of me as your sweet little girl. It will come out in the littlest, subtlest ways…and that will undermine everything I need to do.”
She eyed her parents, waiting to see how they would take all of that. Amelia twisted her mouth, while Aurelia huffed and frowned. Arms folded, Aurelia retorted, “Well, you are our little girl, first and foremost.”
“No. I am not,” Ia countered. “Not anymore, not ever again. Think. You’re resisting me right now. You’re not taking me seriously now. Hell—you don’t even take the fact that I’m in the military seriously!” She flipped her hands up, then dropped them back to her hips, hoping and wishing her parents could see why this was necessary. “I would give up almost anything to still be your little girl…but I cannot, and will not, give up all the lives that will be slaughtered if I cannot pull off a gods-be-slagging miracle, both here and abroad. And I cannot be here.
“I need you to do what I cannot. I need you to be my hands and my arms and my legs here on Sanctuary. I need you to lead by example. You’re still very strong figures in the local community. You’re business leaders. People look up to you, they like you, they’re friends with you…discounting the Church’s brainwash victims and persecution hounds,” Ia allowed. “You need to be more active in local business meetings. You need to circulate more, and talk about the things your sons are trying to do. You need to make friends and contacts, and be the couple to go to for safe, sane solutions in an increasingly insane political environment. And you need to do it with an unshaking faith in both myself as the Prophet and in the future predictions I have made. Which you must distribute when the time is right. Not Thorne, not Fyfer, not Rabbit. You.
“Which means you must stop thinking of me as your ‘little girl.’ Stop trying to shelter me, stop trying to protect me, and stop trying to defend your status as my parents and thus ‘always superior’ to me.” Realizing her shoulders were tensing up, Ia shrugged and sighed, relaxing them. “It’s like your joke earlier, that a mother will always outrank her daughter. I’m sorry, Mom, Ma…but you do not, you cannot, and you must not ever think that way again, or it will ruin the things I’m striving for.”
Her biomother didn’t look too happy. Her other mother looked even less pleased. Aurelia rolled her eyes. “Fine. So we can’t call you our little girl anymore. We get the point.”
“We’ll do what you want, gata…er, Ia,” Amelia amended. “I’m sorry. You can’t expect us to give up being your mothers in a heartbeat! I mean, we’ll try, but…”
Ia didn’t have to probe the timestreams to know it was a reluctant, unhappy acceptance. She did anyway, double-checking the probabilities. What she found didn’t make her happy, either. Raking her hands through her hair, Ia checked her options. The potential possibilities ended with her angling a hand back toward the hallway. The door to her brothers’ bedroom opened silently, telekinetically, and two faintly glowing circlets floated out of the darkness.
“I’m treading a very fine line, here,” she told her mothers, catching a head-sized, lumpy ring in each hand, matched pairs of her prophetic circlets. “The Church tricks its followers with its rhetoric and its verses and its dogmatic interpretations. They even do subtle subliminal advertisings already. And they will one day resort to outright brainwashing, and worse. I do realize the irony of what I myself am trying to do in return. I am building up my own cult of followers, filling them with my own dogmas and my own demands.”
The words hurt to admit, but Ia admitted them bluntly, accepting responsibility to her parents for what she needed to do to the saner half of their homeworld.
“I am, in so many ways, doing exactly what they are doing. My methods may be slightly different, and my message vastly different…but the end result is the same. Two ideologically opposed camps filled with fanatics on both sides. Their side, and my side. What they do with rhetoric and coercion, I must do with truths and persuasion.” She looked down at the lumpy, wreath-shaped, translucent peach rings in her hands. “And, like them, I must use tricks to get my message across…and I must use them on my own mothers.”
“What are those things?” Aurelia asked her, eyeing them warily. “I know you’ve been working on them, but…what, exactly, are they?”
“Technically…I suppose you could call them biokinetically activated, parapsicognitive, temporal consequence feedback enhancers.” At her mothers’ blank looks, Ia let a touch of humor twist the corners of her mouth. “Don’t worry about it. Just call them the Rings of Truth. It’s a lot easier to say.
“This one,” she said, lifting the one shaped vaguely like a crown of brambles, with lumpy bits suggestive of thorns, “is the Wreath of Pain. And this one is the Wreath of Hope.” She lifted the other one, which had rounder, less linear blobs, which, in a certain light, suggested the thought of flowers. Looking back at her mothers, she lowered them, her smile fading. “You will get to try on both.”
Amelia slipped her hand into her gynowife’s, gripping it. Aurelia eyed the devices warily. “Why does the thought of putting on something nicknamed the Wreath of Pain fill me with deep reluctance, Daughter?”
Aware that both mothers shared that reluctance, Ia answered obliquely.
“The difference between the Church’s methodology and my own is that the Church wants to take away the free will of its followers. To brainwash everyone into following its dogmatic beliefs, smothering logic, truth, and free thought. ‘You will follow the teachings of the Church of the One True God, because God says that there is no other way,’” she mocked dryly. “‘Every other way is a sin, and to follow any other path means condemning your souls and the souls of those who follow you into the agonies of eternal hellfire and damnation…’ And for the Church in the decades to come, that eternal hellfire and damnation will become a very real and physical fire for those condemned as heretics. Stop thinking and conform, or die.
“Or be ‘reeducated’…which for the psychically gifted will include lobotomizing certain portions of the brain in an effort to stop such abilities from forming and being used. After all, if you can read another person’s thoughts, that means someone out there is actually still thinking, and isn’t being a perfect little sheep in their flock. Or worse,” Ia added sardonically. “The psi in question might find out what the Church Elders are really plotting behind the woolly little backs of that flock.”
“And your methods?” Amelia asked her quietly.
“My methods?” Ia asked. She spread her arms slightly. “I believe in free will. As ironic as it is for me to say this, of all people, I have always believed in it. I believe in people choosing the best lives possible, both for themselves and for others. But how can you make a good choice if you do not yet know the consequences of your decisions? These will show people those consequences.
“Both of the things they have done in the past,” Ia stated, lifting the Wreath of Pain, then the Wreath of Hope, “and the things they should do in the future. I need people on my side, working for my cause, because they know it’s the right thing to do. People who, after having been fully informed, have consciously decided to do the right thing…these people can move mountains, worlds, and even whole star systems when they put their minds and their wills and their efforts into it.
“So I am…I am asking you,” Ia said, stumbling a little over the words, because these were her parents, her beloved mothers, and she knew this would change their relationship that last little irrevocable bit, “to put these on. To see with your own eyes what I have seen—just a fraction of what I have seen—and to choose. I need you to decide of your own free will whether you will follow me as the Prophet of a Thousand Years, and not just because I’m Iantha Iulia Quentin-Jones, your very strange, very troubled, but well-meaning little girl.
“You raised me both to see the problems around me, and to step up to the responsibility of fixing them. You raised me to do the right thing,” she reminded her mothers. “For that, you should be proud as my mothers…but it is time to let me go and let me do it. And it is time for you to decide whether or not you’ll do it as well. After you have seen the choices and the consequences that await.”
Stepping around the coffee table, Ia held up the Wreath of Pain. Her mothers eyed it for a long moment, then Amelia started to reach for it. She hesitated, though. “Um…gataki…isn’t this the one you called the Wreath of Pain?”
“I need you to wear both. For the next thirty years, everyone will have to try on both. It’s the best way to get the right kind of momentum going. And I need you to try the Wreath of Pain first, so that…well, so that you’ll have the Wreath of Hope to look forward to—don’t worry so much,” she said, rolling her eyes as that statement made her biomother hesitate even more. “You aren’t a mass murderer, so you won’t be seeing the points of view of your victims. You’ll just see some of the consequences of bad decisions you’ve made in the past. I won’t lie; it will be unsettling. But you’ll come out of it okay. My Prophetic Stamp on that.”
Aurelia let out a short, dry chuckle at that. “You keep saying that, little kitten. I suppose I ought to see if you really mean it. Ah…is there anything I should do?”
“Well, Mom should move away from you,” Ia told her, grateful when Amelia complied. “But otherwise, the only thing you need to do is be sitting or kneeling when trying one of these things. I’ve foreseen that some people might sag a little if they’re startled by what they see. Here, let me put it on you, Ma…”
The device had a subtly tapered, thicker segment on the inner side. Part of that was to help augment the psychic resonances of the device, but part of it was simply to ensure that it would fit on any head it encountered. Almost any head; the K’katta, the Chinsoiy, and the Dlmvla didn’t keep their brains in the same physiologically analogous location as most of the other currently known sentient races. But since her mother was a fellow Human—more so, given who and what Ia’s father had been—it was just a matter of aligning the ring so that it settled comfortably onto the crown of Aurelia’s skull.
Her mother sucked in a sharp breath, brown eyes widening until the whites could be seen all around them. Amelia eyed her partner warily, then looked to Ia for reassurance. Holding up her empty hand, Ia waited. Trial and error over the last three weeks had led her to this version of the torus rings, which she hoped was the final one. In particular, the Wreath of Pain was the most difficult to judge. She had tried it on her brothers, and Fyfer—who had broken more laws than Thorne—had reacted more strongly to what he saw, but neither of her brothers were lifelong criminals. Neither of them had lived all that long, period.
By comparison, her mothers had a couple extra decades of life-choices on their consciences; the law of averages dictated they had more things to regret and atone for. They also had calmer natures than either the exuberant Fyfer or his phlegmatic stepbrother. A corner of Ia’s mind considered this one part of a proof-of-concept experiment, since the Wreath of Pain was meant to thoroughly punish only those who thoroughly deserved it. The rest of her waited tensely, uncomfortable with making her beloved parent suffer.
Tears gathered in Aurelia’s eyes. They didn’t spill until she blinked and lifted her hands, removing the heavy, crystalline ring from her head. Sniffing, she held it out to Ia without a word. Ia accepted it, and settled the Wreath of Hope on her mother’s dark hair…then reached over and placed the Wreath of Pain on her biomother’s curly brown locks. Amelia stiffened, eyes wide and sightless. Aurelia sagged, eyes shut and fluttering as she strained to process the new images.
Experiments on her brothers had shown her that the images being seen would be the ones most crucial for Ia’s purposes. Truths would be shown about how certain tasks needed to be undertaken, and the consequences of both success and failure. That part was necessary. It wasn’t what the wreaths showed that concerned her now, but rather their intensity.
Amelia finished before Aurelia. She reached up and pushed the ring of crysium from her head. Ia stooped and plucked it from the sofa before it could flop over and land on her other mother. Her experiments had also proven it wasn’t wise to mix the two; the chaos of the dual effects had given Fyfer a painful migraine for a few hours. When Aurelia opened her eyes, sniffing hard, Ia transferred the Wreath of Hope to her biological mother and waited. And waited. Finally, Amelia opened her eyes as well, tipping her head forward so Ia could remove the device.
Aurelia sniffed again, then nodded. “Alright. I see now what you mean. I mean, I’ve seen some of your visions; you’ve showed me things in the past, but this…This is…”
“This is what we can do about it,” Amelia finished, finding and squeezing her gynowife’s hand. Aurelia glanced at her and nodded. Together, they looked at Ia. Looked to her for guidance. For approval.
For the first time, she sensed her parents were finally looking at her as a fellow adult. More than that, they were looking at her as the Prophet. The little girl deep inside of Ia, the one who just wanted to curl up on their laps and let them stroke her hair, wanted to cry at this last loss of her childhood. Instead, that little girl curled up and faded into the shadows of her past. It hurt. Ia acknowledged silently that it hurt…and she set it aside.
“I’m glad,” she murmured, “because I really do need you. In fact, I’m going to put these rings into your hands. Yours, and my brothers’ hands,” she amended. Ia set them on the coffee table, two clacks. Molded though they were, the peach gold rings were still very much a hard, unyielding crystal. “Use your contacts within the community. Figure out who you think can be trusted with exposure to these.”
“What if…what if we choose wrong?” Amelia asked her. “And some Church sympathizer gets hold of one?”
Ia lifted her chin. “I’ve already considered that. If they’re really Church agents, or Church sympathizers…or anyone who is bound to betray us to them…well, they’ll just get a dose of the Fire Girl Prophecy. A rather large dose.”
Aurelia snorted. “That should be enough to send ’em running for the leafer-hills.”
Twisting her mouth in a wry smile, Ia nodded at the rings. “I’ll be taking them out later this afternoon, once Thorne gets back from college. There’s one more person who needs to experience them before I leave, to make sure they’re working properly. We’ll be back at least two hours before I have to leave for the spaceport, don’t worry.” She paused for a yawn, and scrubbed at her face with both hands. “Ugh. I got up way too early. At least my ship is already docked at Gateway Station, busy with unloading cargo for the colony and arranging for exports to the rest of the known galaxy. I can sleep as soon as I’ve been shown to my berth.”
“Do you want breakfast?” Aurelia asked, leaning forward to pick up her forgotten caf’ mug.
Ia stooped and picked up her own. “Not yet. I need to go for a run, first.” Swallowing half of the still warm liquid, she set it back down again. “The Naval Academy will be putting us through regimen training, and they’ll be expecting me to wear my weight suit, so I need to stay in shape. But I’ll cut it down to half an hour this morning, so you can make me a really nice going-away breakfast.”
Rising, Aurelia lifted onto her toes and kissed Ia on her cheek. “It’ll be hot and waiting.”
“Mm, good, I can go back to sleep, then,” Amelia murmured. She closed her eyes and snuggled into the corner of the sofa.
Her wife leaned down and slapped her lightly on one bathrobe-covered thigh. “Oh, no you don’t, meioa-e! You’re a far better chef than I am, and you know it. Get into that kitchen and start cooking, love.”
Amelia grumbled something uncomplimentary in Greek, added an Irish expletive for color, raspberried her wife half-heartedly, and hauled herself upright. Relieved that her parents hadn’t changed that much in the wake of the wreaths, Ia headed for the door to the stairs. Rain or shine, space or ground, she had to keep herself in shape.
Edwin V’Sasselli lived in one of the apartment complexes built during the Terran–Dlmvla tensions. In fact, he lived in one of the basement-level apartments, formerly a series of storage rooms and janitorial facilities converted into living quarters. As a result, he had at the back of his spare bedroom an access door which led down into the escape tunnels for the Terran bunkers.
Of course, all such doors were supposed to be sealed with Terran military-grade locks, to reduce the chance of the colonists pilfering or vandalizing Terran military equipment. Edwin V’Sasselli had taken great pains to neutralize and remove those locks. He had taken even greater pains to make sure that the path to the door was kept clear, and the door itself hidden by a rather large, showy rug which he had hung up like a tapestry.
He never mentioned the existence of the door to anyone, never mentioned that it was unlocked, and only used it infrequently at best. So when Ia and Thorne opened the door from within the dusty, musty tunnels and slipped into that spare bedroom, set up as his office, he had no clue that anyone else knew of it, let alone intended to use it as the means for committing illegalities. Then again, Edwin V’Sasselli was something of an expert on committing illegalities, himself.
Thorne might have protested at this act of breaking and entering, save for the facts she had given him when explaining the necessity of this one particular home invasion. When he had heard those facts, when she had sworn they were true with her Prophetic Stamp, he had agreed to accompany her. Coming here on her own would have defeated the purpose of this little visit, after all.
This was something Ia was not allowed to do for her brother. All she could do was assist him just a little bit. Thorne was the one who had to carry it through.
The plexcrete floor under the carpeting was old, but not yet old enough to squeak under the compression of her footsteps. Padding quietly into the living room, Ia held up her hand. Startled by her sudden appearance in his home, the short, balding, wiry Edwin rose from his couch where he had been quietly watching the evening news. Grabbing him telekinetically, Ia held him in place, half crouched, half erect, and unable to move. At least, unable to move his limbs; she hadn’t done anything about his mouth.
“What the—! How dare you!” he snapped, struggling in little twitches. “Let me go! I’ll call the Peacekeepers for this!”
“I think you’ll find that impossible, as I have cut power to the emergency pickups in your apartment,” Ia returned calmly. “Just like you yourself have done, time and again.”
Glancing at her brother, she nodded. He swallowed, nodded back, and shifted the backpack he was carrying, swinging it around on one shoulder so that he could open the main compartment. Fishing out the thorn-themed ring tucked inside, he lifted it in one hand.
“Edwin V’Sasselli…by the authority invested in me by the Free World Colony…the paperwork for which is still being processed by the Alliance courts,” Thorne stated, clearing his throat, “I hereby charge you with the murders of Vanessa Smythe, Erika Johnston, and Clattica Jjoll, among others.”
Edwin twitched at those names, eyes widening. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What is that thing? What are you going to do with it?”
“What, this?” Thorne asked, his voice deepening. He lifted the Wreath of Pain above the smaller man’s head, but didn’t place it yet. “This is Justice. And it, not I, will deliver your sentence and your punishment.”
Setting it squarely on the man’s head, Thorne stepped back. Edwin sucked in a sharp breath, eyes first rolling up, then squeezing shut. Ia eased his half-bent body back onto the cushions of the couch. She loosened some of her mental grip on him, grateful to be relieved of his weight, but still kept some of it in place. It was a good thing, too; he opened his mouth in a hissing, near-silent scream, and started thrashing, trying to beat at his chest. Or rather, trying to beat something away from his chest.
Thorne started to move toward him.
“No,” Ia countered sharply, firmly. “He must endure this until he himself takes off the wreath.”
“He’s trying to thrash it off his head,” Thorne grumbled, voice deepening in his distress. “Isn’t that a form of trying to take it off, himself?”
Sighing, Ia stepped around the padded corner of the coffee table. Reaching up, she pinned the coronet-like wreath in place and sunk her gifts into the material, altering its shape slightly. Not just altering the physical suggestion of thorns, but the interior striations of pink-tinged gold, where her blood had been fused to the faintly luminescent stone.
Edwin’s thrashings quieted. She removed her touch. He still twitched, but his head lolled back against the cushions of the sofa, the makeshift crown of crysium still lodged firmly on his balding head. His mouth still opened and shut, but it did so with eerie silence.
“The experience has now been intensified internally, not externally. He won’t throw it off. Nor will the others—don’t stop watching him, Thorne,” she warned her brother. “You have to watch it. Everyone has to watch this happening with the future criminals you will find. It will become one of the requirements for ascending to adult status in the coming years. You, I know, will have the fortitude to apply the Wreath of Pain to criminals. Fyfer won’t do it more than twice at most, and Rabbit’s too softhearted to do it even once, herself, though she must watch at the very least. Your mother might drop it on some-one’s head—Aurelia has always been the tougher of the pair—but we both know my mother won’t.
“You won’t have the facilities to incarcerate criminals,” Ia reminded him, ignoring the way V’Sasselli continued to twitch and spasm on the sofa. “Not in the long term. You won’t have the resources to spare to build long-term prisons, let alone maintain and guard them. You also won’t have the means to chain your criminals to a topado patch like the Terrans do, either. Instead, you will have to use this technique. Together, the Wreaths of Pain and Hope will be your greatest tools for dealing with criminals. Those who are redeemable, they will work to redeem themselves.”
“And if they’re not?” Thorne challenged her as Edwin V’Sasselli continued to grimace and twitch. “What if being caught up in a postcognitive loop of the victims’ sufferings from their point of view isn’t enough to convince them to rehabilitate themselves?”
“One of three things will happen. If they have a conscience, they will work hard to make reparations. If they are beyond redemption, they will most likely end their own lives. And if they are fated to continue…they will continue. After that point,” she acknowledged, not even flinching at the hard look her half brother gave her, “if they break the law again and you catch them, you will put them through the Wreath of Pain a second time. If they choose to break it a third time—and I haven’t written any precognitive missives countermanding it—then you will execute them.
“I believe the term back on pre-interstellar Earth was ‘three strikes and you’re out,’” she added dryly, dispassionately watching the man on the couch twitching and suffering in breath-huffing quiet. “Once Edwin here removes this Ring of Truth, if he doesn’t head straight for the kitchen and the nearest knife…his favorite knife…then you will put the Wreath of Hope on his head. There’s a roughly thirty percent chance he will kill himself straight away, just from the Wreath of Pain. After the Wreath of Hope…it jumps to forty percent.
“However,” she cautioned her brother, “if he chooses to rehabilitate himself by swearing to follow you and me…you will use him. Remember, Thorne, your resources will be severely limited when the civil war hits. You will need men and women like Edwin, here. Murderers who will become assassins, thieves who will become infiltration artists and security specialists. Spies who will become counterspies and double-agents.”
“You told me,” he muttered, slowly shaking his head. “You told me, but I didn’t believe it…”
“The criminal element must become a part of the Free World Colony’s government. You will need every trick of their trades to counter every trick the Church will try to throw at you,” Ia reminded him, word for word. “Cities can be attacked, tunnels can be collapsed, food and water and even clean air may sometimes be in short supply, but your greatest resource will always be the people you command. Use. Them. Wisely.” She returned her gaze to the man on the couch. “Even if, personally, you think serial killer skut like this piece of slag should be thrown into the ocean.”
Thorne snorted at that. “What, and poison the devilfish? Ironic as that might be, not even those things deserve to choke on a murderer’s flesh.”
“If he doesn’t kill himself, you’ll get five, maybe six good years out of him,” Ia told her brother. “He’ll itch to kill, so you may need to find targets…but in five to six years, he’ll break loose and try to freelance. At that point, don’t hesitate; just kill him, quickly and cleanly. Your alternative option, whether or not this one cracks and goes under now or later, is outlined in the time-sensitive files. You’ll encounter him about a year from now—one way or another, you will need to remove a couple of key players in the Church’s inner circle, in a year and a half, and you’ll need the help of someone, ah…eminently qualified, shall we say?”
That made him wrinkle his nose. “I am not comfortable contemplating the cold-blooded assassination of anyone. Even a fanatical Church member.”
“I know.” She softened her tone with a touch of pity, compassion, and understanding. “Believe me, I do know. No one’s life should have to be wasted…but if it’s a choice between shooting down a rabid stubbie or letting the dog bite everyone in sight, shoot that one dog quickly and cleanly, and spare everyone else. If it helps, you can always put on the Wreath of Hope and remind yourself why we’re doing all of this.”
“Oh, I do know. You made me and Fyfer wear the damned things repeatedly over the last three weeks,” he grumbled. “I feel like I could almost write a couple of prophesies myself.”
Ia rolled her eyes. “Do try to refrain. Oh, and crack down hard and fast on anyone who tries to forge my prophecies,” she added. “God knows the Church will try, but so will some of the less stable elements on the Free World Colony’s side. I’ll be leaving a definitive list with both you and the Afaso Order, so you’ll know exactly which ones are real and which ones are being faked.”
“Any other last-minute directives, O Prophet?” Thorne asked her dryly.
Unlike her mothers, she didn’t expect him to stop treating her like his sister. They were as close as any set of twins born from the same mother, though they only shared the same absent father. He knew she was an adult, and knew she was the Prophet of a Thousand Years, but unlike their parents, Thorne had agreed to help carry out her plans years ago.
“Yeah, I do. Remember me. Me, I mean. Your sister,” Ia explained. “The woman, and not just the Prophet. I need you to obey me as the Prophet…but I need someone who’ll remember me.”
“What, you think Fyfer will start worshipping you?” he asked, snickering briefly at the thought.
“More like he’ll get so wrapped up in his own life, he won’t think much about me. The original me,” she clarified.
Edwin spasmed, gasping. He panted for air, eyes almost opening…then they rolled up into his head again, fluttering shut.
“Uhh…how long will he be like this?” her brother asked her.
“Approximately forty more minutes, give or take a few,” Ia estimated, skimming the timestreams with a brief close of her eyes. “Then either he’ll run and kill himself, or you can drop the second ring on his head. Then we get to wait another twenty minutes to see if he’ll be willing to live and cooperate with us. It’s all about free will, Thorne. It’s always about free will, and about taking responsibility for our actions—or not—and about making our own choices once we know what’s at stake. Even for skut v’shakk like this. He does have a choice, once the wreath is done with him.”
Thorne snorted. He covered his nose hastily, broad shoulders shaking. “Ow. Please don’t combine those two slang words again. Owww…They do not go together. I almost turned my nose inside out! You’re lucky I wasn’t drinking anything.”
“Awww,” Ia mock-sympathized. Hands clasped behind her back, she returned to watching Edwin V’Sasselli suffering through first-person perspectives of each of his brutalized victims. “Remember, if he goes for the kitchen, don’t stop him, just head for the bedroom exit. I’ll do a sweep for any stray bits of DNA on the way out. If he doesn’t head for the kitchen, drop the next wreath on his head.”
This really was the most humane way she could think of to deal with someone like Edwin V’Sasselli, given the ethics of the situation. She knew he was a serial killer, yet she knew her brother needed someone with that exact set of skills on his side. Normal on the outside, psychotic on the inside, and fully capable of killing just about anyone, given the right opportunity. Edwin would be a dangerous tool at best, but one which her brother had to learn how to use. This tool, or the next.
If she hadn’t needed Edwin V’Sasselli, if she didn’t believe even someone him like had a right to life, so long as that life didn’t adversely affect the future…her personal preference would have been to kill him. Quickly, cleanly, and mercifully. It was far more humane than what he had done to his own victims, and far more than he deserved. It was also why she was willing to risk him committing suicide after undergoing this…treatment.
Her next psychic ethics review was bound to be an interesting one, having to explain and justify this to Leona and the others.
Skin crawling, gifts twitching, Ia hugged her mothers long and hard anyway. This was her last chance to do so for another three years. If everything went right, that was. If it didn’t…She hugged her mothers a little bit longer before turning to Fyfer. They mock-tussled a moment, her knuckles rubbing over his dark curls and his fingers trying to pinch her vulnerable points, then they hugged. Patting her on the back, Fyfer let her go to the open arms of her half-twin.
“I’m still not happy that you made me do all that, earlier,” Thorne muttered into her ear, hugging her tight enough to make her ribs ache.
Ia hugged him back just as hard. “It could’ve been worse. Keep an eye on him. Use him. Above all, give him no cause to doubt that your hand and mine are one.”
“And give none of the others cause for doubt, either,” he recited under his breath. Dropping his cheek on her forehead, Thorne hugged his sister. “Mizzu ’reddy.”
“Gonna mizzu, tu,” she agreed. One final squeeze and Thorne let her go. Ia stepped back, relieved her gifts hadn’t triggered while hugging him. Looking at the four members of her immediate family, she gave them a wistful smile. “I will miss you…but you are never far from my thoughts. I love you all very much. Remember that.”
Aurelia waggled one naturally tan finger at her daughter. “I am not Jewish, meioa-e; you are not allowed to make me verklempt.”
“Go on, Sis,” Thorne added, lifting his chin at the modest-sized spaceport terminal. “That shuttle won’t wait forever.”
Nodding, Ia picked up her kitbag and turned away from her family. She heard Fyfer opening the ground car’s doors for their mothers, before the rumbling of a shuttle lifting off in the distance covered up any further noise. Crossing the road from the parking garage to the terminal, Ia entered the building. She did not look back. Instead, she looked forward, dipping briefly into her future to make sure everything would be on track.
Three years, and counting…Oh, god, she thought, wincing. It looks like I am going to get stuck next to that chatty grandmother type who will want to tell me all about her current medical ailments. I swear, the Creator has a bowl of popcorn as big as a leafer beast nestled at Her side, tonight…