Her father is speaking to her.
Her father is dead, but her father is speaking to her, alien and preserved and faintly glowing within the rectangle frame of this Terra-touched relic, this marvel of technological work.
• • •
These are the things that Selah will remember later:
Dad’s voice, halting and breaking.
Tair’s face, intent and unreadable.
The Stone’s glow, a pool of too-bright light.
And the beat of her own heart thrumming loudly in her ears, somehow steadfast for all that she should be screaming.
• • •
Information. There’s more of it, her father tells her, contained within the Stone, from the world that came before.
Ynglotta. She’ll have to learn it, to understand.
• • •
It’s getting harder for him to speak now, coming out in choppy shivers. Selah is watching her father die, and she can hear the gathering rumble of a hurricane that began two and a half weeks ago, and she does not know how to process what she’s hearing.
Why didn’t he tell her? Selah has dedicated her life to study, thrown herself into history and academia with a ferocity she knows had shocked even her parents. Not just because it was expected of her but because she is good at it. Because she loves it. Drawing the lines of how we got from here to there, the movements like poetry, the rhyming stanzas that dictate the cause and effect of wars and praxis and social change. Dad knew that. He should have known, anyway. Should have known that beneath that first flush of anger and raw, reeling shock, he could trust her with this. Should have known that whatever else she felt, wonder and awe and excitement would eventually come to the fore.
Did he ever really know her at all?
Did she ever really know him?
For all the years of her life, Alexander Kleios had been nothing if not a staunch Imperialist. Unwilling to throw his weight around to ensure preferential treatment for Arran, not since that scandalous first transgression. Unwilling even to help Tair in court. He believed so deeply in duty, familia, empire. That the individual matters only so much as the role they play in Roma’s continued survival. Roma, which is civilization and always has been. Roma, without which they would all be lost. A cog in the great machine. And all that time, he was the cog at the very heart of everything. The one that knew it was all built on a lie.
She doesn’t understand how that could make sense to him, and now she never will.
They could have had years.
“Selah,” Dad is saying now. “This is your burden to bear. No one else’s. No one else can know, you understand?”
The irony of both Tair and Diana Ontiveros standing there, next to Selah, listening to him saying this, is not lost to her.
“I made that mistake, and now it’s up to you to fix it. I’m . . . I’m so sorry. Cato Palmar, the Consul. You mustn’t trust him. He’s building something, building it on a mass scale. Solaric technology, he’s . . . he’s trying to produce it again. He intends to become dictator. To break away from Imperial rule, perhaps even overpower the Imperium itself. And if he succeeds . . . with solaric power like that . . . the Imperium doesn’t stand a chance.
“I threatened to expose him. But I made a fatal error. I showed him the Iveroa Stone. I thought it would persuade him, if only he could see the horror of nuclear war for himself. You can’t even imagine, Selah . . . I tried to warn him, but it backfired. He wants the Stone for himself now. He wants the secrets it contains, the secrets to recreating nuclear power. Solarics are one thing, but nuclear . . . He’ll be looking for it, Selah. He can never get his hands on it. Promise me. It would be the ruin of us all.”
Selah’s grip on the Stone tightens, her knuckles going pale, an unwelcome shiver running down her spine.
“I should have known better,” Dad is saying. “After everything Palmar has done to this family, I should have known. . . . It was such a mistake. He wants the Stone, and I was going to tell the Imperium about his plans. . . . I made myself a loose end. I can only imagine this poison is his doing. There’s so much else I want to say, so many secrets I should have . . . But I have to go now. I love you, my girl. Give your mother a kiss for me, and tell Arran . . . tell him I’m sorry.”
Then Dad’s face disappears, a soft gray glow left where he had been.
Her imagination is good. Her capacity for abstract thought, even better. But they’re not this good. The sheer enormity of it, compressed into a few square inches of solaric-powered stone, and the hundred thousand questions that come with it. Eight hundred years of it. The truth written in Ynglotta, secreted away in a piece of technology that by all rights should not exist. And if the Consul gets his hands on it, he’ll plunge the entire world into destruction.
Why, Selah wants to scream, wants to rage. Why did you never tell me?
It’s too big, too sudden, too new. Too much responsibility for just one person to hold. She doesn’t know where to begin.
She misses her father, so much.
She hates him, too. Just a little bit.
Selah forces herself to look up, forces herself to meet Tair and Diana’s equally bewildered gazes, the deafening sound of silence and the collapse of everything she’s ever known to be real ringing in her ears. The seconds slip by, feeling like eternity, because what do you say now? What can possibly happen next? When the bedrock of reality has just crumbled beneath your feet, anything that follows can only be freefall.
Cato Palmar can’t have the Iveroa Stone. That’s the only real thing left in the world.