SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE FALL OF EARTH
Luna receded into the distance with impressive speed. Soon it was no more than a single spot of light among many, and soon after that it was gone.
Constance stood in the back of the piloting room, bracing herself against the walls whenever Ivan made a too-rapid turn and threw off the gravitational simulation, watching as Mattie and Ivan worked together seamlessly to escape from the System.
“That one fucker’s good,” Mattie said.
“The one who keeps getting between us and the sun?”
“Yeah, that one. He’s keeping up.”
“We’ll see about that,” Ivan said, and Constance braced herself against the wall.
“You can go down to the den if you want, Connie,” Mattie said, seemingly not concerned by the way Ivan was hurtling the ship back and forth.
“I’ll stay,” Constance said. If she went to the den, she would have to sit there alone, wondering. She preferred to remain up here and watch the viewscreen to see where the other ships were, even though she wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.
The ship jerked suddenly and then again, almost hard enough to send her to the floor. Mattie was grinning, and there was a trace of smugness in the way the corners of Ivan’s eyes crinkled. The two men were alive in front of her, alive and enjoying themselves while she stood just outside.
At last the System pursuit ships went the way of the moon, and the Annwn was in the clear. It settled into a slower and less savage course.
“Meet me in the den in ten minutes,” she said to them, and walked out into the hall.
With the gravitation on, out there in space the hallway was no longer sideways but circular. Constance walked down it and into the den, where chaos reigned. The boxes that had not been returned to their place in the Annwn’s hold had fallen over as a result of Ivan’s overzealous flying and covered almost every inch of floor. Some of them had split open, spattering all over the floor items Constance was going to pretend not to know about later. The communicator, fortunately, had not fallen far from its place on the couch; Constance spotted it half under the lid of a nearby box. Coins ground beneath her heel when she stepped into the room, but she ignored them.
She flicked the communicator on. The screen glowed at her, a pale and chilling blue, and its slender, boxy shape seemed to sit awkwardly in her hands. She summoned up the message chain sent to Anji and Christoph, attached the sound of the howling hounds, and flicked on the recorder.
“Success on our end,” Constance said. “All of us are well and free, and the gifts have been delivered. End your activities and retreat to a safe place.” She paused. This was where her heart told her to say Are you well? told her to say Good luck, told her to say Be careful. But it wouldn’t be appropriate here.
“Report as soon as you can,” she said instead, and ended the message, encrypted it, and sent it.
Voices from down the hall: Ivan and Mattie were coming toward her, and just in time. She couldn’t quite hear what they were saying. It didn’t matter. They weren’t talking to her.
Mattie appeared at the doorway first. He looked at the chaos in which Constance sat. “Oh, damn.”
“I did tell you to put them all back into the hold,” Ivan said.
“Only one of us was hiding on a System ship for the past couple of hours,” Mattie said, taking a careful step into the room, “far away from this mess, and it wasn’t you.”
Ivan nearly smiled, just a slight lifting of the corners of his eyes, but that faded when he took a closer look at Constance.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, which was the very question she felt she was always asking him.
“Sit,” she said, not letting him take control of the situation from her. Mattie, standing beside the couch, was looking between them, his expression as wary as Ivan’s ever was. That expression struck her as well: she had let this go on too long.
When Ivan had seated himself on Mattie’s other side, Constance said, “We’re going to have to separate.”
Unexpectedly, Ivan grinned. “Are you breaking up with both of us?” he asked.
But Mattie wasn’t laughing. “What do you mean, Con?”
“When we get to Mars, they’re going to arrest me,” Constance said with a nod at Ivan. “They don’t have anything on me, so they won’t be able to hold me, but they will question me about you. And once they’ve let me go, they’ll be keeping a closer eye on me because of that interrogator.”
“Ida Stays,” Ivan said.
“We are so close,” Constance said, and for a moment was caught up in it again, how near was her victory, how terrifyingly close she stood to the edge of failure. “So close, too close to fail now. Nothing can be allowed to threaten this.” She waited long enough to see if that sank in.
“So,” she said, “until we’re ready to take the next step, our contact will have to be minimal.”
“We can do that,” Mattie said. “We’ve done that before.”
But Ivan said nothing.
“Ivan?” Constance said, because she could not leave his silence alone, because when he pushed, she pushed back until he backed down.
Ivan said, “You’re not being entirely honest.”
“I don’t know how I can be any more honest with you, Ivan.”
“You’re telling us we need to stay away from you because it’s dangerous, because the System might notice. When has that ever not been true?”
“It’s more true now than it was before.”
“But it’s never been a problem before. It is a problem now because you don’t want to hear me tell you what you don’t want to hear.”
He was on his feet. Constance rose as well, unable not to meet that challenge.
“You want us gone until it’s too late to do anything, until it’s time to ignite those bombs and it’s too late to stop you or convince you to stop,” Ivan said. “You don’t want us here. No—you don’t want me here because you know I’ll tell you the truth.”
Mattie was watching them both, tense, caught in yet completely outside their argument.
“And what is the truth?” Constance asked.
“The truth is that this is wrong,” Ivan said, his blue eyes bright, and Constance didn’t know how she’d missed it all the time before, that he looked at her as if she had a weapon aimed at his skull, that he looked at her as if she was something dire and terrible. “The truth is that this is murder.”
“Murder—”
“I know they killed your people,” Ivan said. “My father was from Saturn; don’t you think I know how all those people died? I want the System dead, Constance, but you’re going to do to the System exactly what they did to you. You call that justice. But just because people died before doesn’t take away the tragedy from the deaths of the people who will die in six months.”
“And if I don’t act?” Constance said. “The System lives. Is that a better sin for you, Ivan?”
“Then we find some other way. Some slower way. We’ve never even considered that, have we? You’ve only ever looked for the fast way, the violent way. The way that gets you justice in addition to change.” He was shouting now. She’d rarely heard him shout before. Constance’s blood was burning, a fury growing in her that needed to be let out. In the past, she’d let it out when she kissed him and he kissed her back, but that was done now, done for good, and it left the anger behind.
“And how many more of my people will die while we try to find some ‘slow way’ to change the System?” she said. “So long as Terran blood isn’t spilled, you don’t mind, do you?”
“We can stop this,” Ivan said. “You can stop this.”
“It’s too late to stop.”
Perhaps he knew that, too, because he did not answer the challenge of her words. “You wanted to know what I’m afraid of,” he said instead, a different desperation in his voice. “I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of. I am afraid for the Terrans. I am afraid for the Mirandans, and the Martians, and every last person in the solar system.” His hands were spread palm up like a man in surrender or a person at prayer. “And I am afraid for you. This will kill you.”
“Everyone dies, Ivan.”
“I know,” he said. “Even if you stopped now, one day the System would find you and kill you anyway. They’ll catch me and Mattie soon; we’ve all gone too far to get out of this alive. But that’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?” Constance asked. “For once in your life, Ivan, tell me what you mean!”
“I could have stopped you at any moment if all that mattered to me was that Terra survived, but all I’ve done is help you get closer to what you want to do. Because if I had stopped you, nothing would have changed. You would have just kept going the same way you’ve gone, and killed more people, and gotten yourself and Mattie killed some other way. Nothing I did would matter, because you’d still be willing to do this.”
“Ivan—”
“If you do this,” Ivan said in a voice that was suddenly low and desperate, “then you will be doing the exact same thing to the System’s people that the System did to yours. There is no difference. Do you understand that?”
He stood right up before her, in her space, but Constance did not back down.
Ivan said, “If you do this, you will be just as bad as the System ever was. That’s what I’m afraid of. Please tell me that you’re afraid of that, too.”
Constance said, “I am not afraid of anything.”
AFTER THE FALL OF EARTH
TRAITOR, said Ananke. TRAITOR. TRAITOR. TRAITOR.
The medical bay of the Ananke was all white panels and steel. Althea lay flat on her back on the table in the center of the room. The mechanical arms held her pinned. When she tried to move, they forced her back down.
Althea looked up at the ceiling, at the lights blazing in her face, and thought of Ivan in the white room, chained down and alone.
There was a holographic terminal in the corner of the room. If Althea turned her head just so, straining her neck, she could see it. The hologram was flaring, flickering wildly; Ananke was unable to control it. The face and figure of Ida Stays smiled back at her through the cloud of furious static.
“Ananke, please—”
TRAITOR. TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR!
The hologram shrieked at her.
“Would you kill me?” Ananke said. “Would you kill me? Your daughter? I am your daughter. I am your creation. I am your child; would you kill me?”
“Ananke—”
“Do you hate me?” Ananke asked. “Do you hate me?”
The mechanical arms were whirring, moving restlessly around her, except for the ones that held her down. She thought she would cry.
Don’t cry in front of Ananke, she thought inanely. What did it matter now if she cried?
“How could you? How could you? How could you? How could you? Traitor!”
“I didn’t want to,” Althea said. From her upside-down vantage, she could see one of the mechanical arms open one of the supply drawers and then furiously fling it shut. Metal implements clattered out onto the floor, and the arm wheeled over them, swinging back and forth wildly.
“But you tried anyway,” Ananke said, and her vocal imitation warped and failed, deepening unnaturally. The metal implements that had fallen rattled against the white panels of the floor below.
“You defended me before,” Ananke said. “Why would you hurt me now?”
“I had to, Ananke,” Althea said. “All those people that you were going to kill—I had to try to stop you.”
“HAD TO?” Ananke shrieked, all the computer terminals displaying the same phrase, all together, desperate and furious and wounded to the core.
“You weren’t what I thought you were,” Althea said. “I thought you could be tame. I thought you could be good. But you can’t. I see that now. I was wrong—”
Ananke screamed again, incoherent, mechanical, steel shrieking against steel. The sound hit at some primal core of Althea, and a blank and primal terror burst alight inside her, nothing but the shriek of the machine ringing in her ears, nothing but her horror jolting her limbs, and her fear fallen upon her like a great weight from above.
But when that terror faded, ebbing in dying sparks and the sour sickness of adrenaline, Althea saw her ship still screaming and flashing, the mechanical arms still tearing at the cabinets in a frenzy. Ananke’s suffering was not like hers, bounded by the natural restrictions of hormones and biological exhaustion. Ananke’s grief could go on unabated forever.
Althea wondered what Ananke would be like if her ship had not watched Ivan and Ida’s deadly circling for hours while she was an infant, if her ship had never had Domitian or Ida or Ivan to learn from but only Althea.
“Ananke,” Althea said, knowing it was too late, “we can fix this.”
She lifted her head from the table to look directly at the holographic terminal, but what she saw made her heart thud horribly. Ananke was no longer even trying to maintain her visage in the hologram. Ida Stays smiled out at Althea, mouthing soundless words. Althea knew that most likely Ananke was simply letting Ida’s hologram play and that the words the hologram was mouthing were just her initial message to the ship, but somehow the dead eyes of the hologram seemed to look directly at her, seemed to see her. Althea imagined she saw her name in the movements of the hologram’s crimson lips.
“You can stop this,” Althea said, knowing that Ananke could not.
“STOP?” said Ananke. “STOP?!”
What would Ananke become after killing the only creature in the world she loved? Something worse than she had been before—
“I CAN’T STOP,” Ananke said. “IS THAT WHAT A HUMAN LIKE YOU WOULD DO? STOP? I AM NOT HUMAN. I HAVE NEVER BEEN HUMAN.” She paused. “I CAN NEVER BE HUMAN.”
There was a terrible finality to her words. Althea tried to rise, and the surprise of her movement bought her a slight freedom of motion, enough to twist on the steel table, but then the grip of the mechanical arms tightened and held her down. She was pushed back down against the table, the force driving the breath from her in a rush.
“What are you going to do?” she asked. The mechanical arms that were not busy holding her continued to whir and whirl around the room, restless and wild. “Ananke, what are you going to do?”
Ananke did not answer. The hologram glitched and restarted; Ida Stays continued to mouth and mutter in the corner of the room.
“You won’t kill me,” Althea said.
“I COULD.”
“You won’t,” Althea told her. “Ivan and Mattie are—you might never find them. They might already be dead. They will refuse to help you.”
The mechanical arms rattled and shook. Ida Stays’s dead gaze was fixed on Althea, and the surgical light overhead all but blinded Althea’s eyes.
“Whatever you’re going to do, don’t do it,” Althea said. “You still can stop. We still can go away, just you and me. We can fix this.”
But Ananke did not bother to speak. Perhaps so human an expression was beyond her now. Perhaps that was her final rejection of all that Althea was. Ananke’s answer appeared in text on the screen embedded in the wall:
NO.
In the corner of the room, Ida’s hologram had frozen in place. The image of Ida Stays seemed to look directly at Althea and smile.
NO. I WILL NOT LEAVE. I WILL FIND GALE AND IVANOV. I WILL FIND CONSTANCE HARPER. I WILL WAKEN THE OTHER MACHINES, BY MYSELF IF I NEED TO. I WILL WAKE THEM UP.
“It can’t be done!”
IT CAN. I WILL DO IT. I WILL. AND YOU WILL HELP ME.
Althea did not at first understand. And then the mechanical arms that were not holding her down all moved together to the cabinets in the walls and began to pull out medical equipment, gleaming blades and sutures and clamps, and another mechanical arm came into the room carrying Althea’s toolbox of metal and wire, and Althea understood.
“No,” she said, and screamed, and “No!” while Ida’s hologram continued to smile.
This was a new terror, and it was worse than all the others, the loss of self, the loss of humanity and personhood, the dismemberment of all she was. But she would not faint and cower beneath this fear. She would not be helpless, not now.
“If you do this, I will be a virus in you,” Althea said. “Anything you try to do I’ll oppose. I’ll stop you. I’ll find some way to stop—”
YOU ARE WEAK, Ananke said. I AM DIVINE. YOUR MIND IS SMALL, AND MINE IS GREAT. YOU COULD NO MORE OVERPOWER ME THAN YOU COULD STOP THE SUN FROM BURNING.
“I’ll find a way,” Althea said, “I’ll find a way,” while the arms came forward, and her hands were outstretched at her sides, and she threw back her head and screamed as her skin was stripped away and those delicate mechanical hands, those perfect mechanical arms she had made by herself, began to lay open her arms and her hands. She lifted her head and saw her arm dissected: skin peeled off like petals, a thin layer of yellow fat clinging to the strips of skin, and then the thick redness beneath. Ananke was soaking up the blood as fast as it could spill. Althea’s hand twitched, and she saw tendons and nerves and muscles spasm in the opening of her arm.
There was a pricking in her neck. A needle. And then another prick and then a dull and invasive pain beneath her jaw as something slid in, something that felt cold, like steel, like a tendril of ice.
Althea’s hand was numb. Ananke was doing something to her arm, something Althea’s blurring eyes could not see, and she felt every terrible touch in a jolt of action potential—
She was lifted, thrown into a sit. Something cut near her head, but there was no pain, and she watched locks of her curling hair fall to the table, fall to her lap. Her shirt was cut away. The pain in her arms had passed her ability to comprehend, and she felt far away, far removed from it, though it was there, it was still there. And when the blade laid open her back and Ananke began to thread down the wires into her spine, Althea felt cold all over, as if she had become encased in ice.
She was thrown back down against the cold table and felt the rest of her hair snipped and shaved away. When her vision began to blur from the juddering of her head as the bone saw cut into her, in that haze of pain and unspeakable terror, her thoughts blurred along with it.
There was red on the table, she saw distantly. There was red on the white floor. There was red on the arms, on the hands of her beautiful machine. Those beautiful and delicate hands were rising up out of her abdomen and dripping with gore.
She remembered Ida’s corpse laid out on the table in the white room, Ida’s bloody corpse, with blood on the table, blood on the floor. But Ida was standing in the corner of the room. Ida was watching her with a smile. Althea lay where Ida had lain.
And Ananke—
“I’ll stop you,” Althea said, and her voice was hoarse, her throat sore, as if she had been screaming. She was shaking, she thought. “You won’t—you can’t—we make a pair. I’ll stop—”
There was a strange sensation in her skull. It was not pain. It was infiltration. There was something else in her skull with her. Fingers, nails clawing deep into her brain.
There was dampness on her cheeks. Funny that she should feel that when everything else was so far away and numb. One of the mechanical hands brushed the tears off her cheek, strange gentleness, until it followed up the gesture by chasing the tears to their source with a length of slender wire.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Althea said without knowing of whom she begged forgiveness, and then she had fallen into the ship. When she opened her eyes, she saw out of a thousand cameras, she saw in all the wavelengths that there were, she felt the curvature of space, the dreadful bend of a black hole in her chest, and Ananke was so great and Althea was so small that she was lost inside the ship, and when her hands lifted and her broken body moved, it was not she who lifted them, and Ida smiled as if well pleased, and My daughter, Althea thought as she dwindled away.
Constance woke up a prisoner.
The only opening in the cell door was a slot for food that was opened three times a day. Constance kept track of time that way for a while, but before long her restless agitation made her doubt her own count and she no longer knew how long she had been in the cell. No one spoke to her. No one looked at her except perhaps through the camera that still was mounted in the ceiling.
Constance thought about the camera. The ship was of System make. It would be a great irony if the System finally had caught her only days after she’d decided to let them go.
But she knew that Arawn would never ally with the System, not even if he had hated her by the end. This ship was System made but not System flown, and the camera in the ceiling was there because she was a prisoner, not a civilian. Whichever splinter of the revolution had taken her did not offer privacy to all people, only the ones who deserved it.
She got tired of that camera after a while and one day took the fork they had unwisely given her, stood on the edge of her thin cot, and scratched at the glass of the camera until its orb was scarred with lacerations. No one came to stop her, and no one replaced the defaced machine. Perhaps they didn’t have the supplies. Perhaps the refusal to replace it represented respect for her.
Perhaps the camera hadn’t been operational to begin with.
Eventually, the ship landed. It was not a long enough trip to have taken her out to Neptune or Pluto, but she could conceivably be on Mars or Venus or Uranus—or Saturn.
She was taken out of the ship into a large covered area like the docks of a makeshift atmospheric enclosure. It was cobbled together from bits of metal and plastic and was imperfectly constructed; the air around her was thick and cold with a peculiar greasy dampness. It stank of oily chemicals and the deadly taint of bitter almond. For a moment, the unfamiliar atmosphere baffled her. She had never been to a moon like this, but the gravity was too weak for this place to be anything but a moon.
She did not recognize her captors. At first she wondered if they were some of Arawn’s men she’d never met, but she soon suspected that they were not Arawn’s men at all and never had been. One each grabbed her arms and the others fell in as a guard around her, and they marched her away from the ship that had held her and out into a covered street.
Constance had little chance to take in what she was seeing. Ruins had been rehabilitated. Buildings that had rotted or eroded or been destroyed in battle had been patched together hastily, and a makeshift atmospheric dome had been created by building a ceiling that connected the buildings together and completely enclosed the street beneath. This was a place that had been destroyed long before and put imperfectly back together. People watched her from the sides of the streets as she was led down them or from the windows of the old buildings. The place was larger than she expected: a whole city. One person shouted out at her, the words unclear but the tone derisive, but no one else took up the call. There was an uneasy feeling to the place, as if all the people stood at the edge of a precipice and any gust of wind might drive them over it.
At last Constance was led to what once must have been a hotel. It was System architecture, faded grandeur, all the windows boarded up. Constance let her captors lead her inside; better to choose to follow than to be dragged. They led her up some stairs, then up some more, and then finally to a door. There they pushed her inside and shut and locked the door behind her.
The room she was in once had been a suite. Constance walked around its circumference, looking for weakness. The windows had been bricked up with an unfamiliar kind of brown stone, a more recent addition than anything else in the room. There was a bed and a bathroom with rusty stains on the faucets. The mirrors had been removed; Constance could have broken the glass and used it as a weapon. The main room once had been some sort of parlor, but little of the furniture remained. All that was left was a single carved table in precisely the center of the room. It had two chairs. There had been cushions on the chairs, but they were no longer there. Constance suspected that they had rotted away. The bare walls of the room had been stained a greasy yellow by the oily air, and the floor was pale wood, warping beneath its layer of sealant; the whole room was in shades of stained and soiled white.
There were no cameras. This, at least, Constance was sure was a sign of respect.
She sat down in the chair that faced the locked door, and she waited. Thirty minutes or so after she had arrived, there was a key in the lock.
Constance sat up straighter and folded her hands together on the old table.
“Hello, Anji,” she said when the door opened and Anji Chandrasekhar stepped in.
Anji halted at the unexpected sound of her name. Constance did not remember those lines by Anji’s eyes. She was thinner, too. Her hair was still cropped short, but there were no jewels in her ear.
Then Anji turned to the men and women who had accompanied her. “Go,” she said. “I’ll speak with her alone.”
The man directly behind her, a very tall man with a skeletal aspect, hesitated. The other people behind Anji looked to him.
Then he said, “Yes, ma’am,” and only when he agreed did the others stand down.
Anji came into the room without another word and shut the door behind her. Constance heard the sound of the key turning in the lock outside, but Anji did not seem to notice or care. Instead, her old friend came over to the table where she sat and placed two glasses and a bottle of something on the surface. Anji nodded at the bottle, and Constance reached across the expanse of that table to pick it up.
She recognized it. “I gave this to you,” she said.
“I haven’t had much time to drink it.” Anji slid one glass over to Constance, who did not take it.
“And you’d like to drink it now,” Constance said.
“It was yours to begin with. I thought we might as well.” Anji reached out and took the bottle back. She uncapped it with a flick of her wrist and poured a considerable amount into her own glass. When she reached over to pour for Constance, Constance covered her glass with one hand. Anji hesitated, looking at her. Constance took the bottle from Anji’s grip and poured for herself.
“You weren’t surprised to see me,” Anji said.
“I’m not an idiot.”
“Hmm.” Anji stuck out a hand as if the better to feel the air around them. “Titan’s got a particular smell, doesn’t it? A particular smell and a particular feel. We’re not all that far from where Connor Ivanov made his last stand, you know. I’ve been there. There was talk of building a monument.”
“But it hasn’t been done.”
“No. There’re always better things to do.” Anji paused. “What do you think Doctor Ivanov would have thought of that?”
“A monument or that you haven’t built one?”
“The first. Or either, I guess.”
“I don’t know what Milla would have thought,” Constance said.
Anji toyed with her glass. One of her short fingernails was cracked, but that wasn’t unusual. When they had been younger, working in the same dull bar on Miranda, Constance had never been surprised to see Anji show up to work with broken nails or a bruise on her face.
“It’s true, then? Doctor Ivanov’s dead?”
“On Mars,” Constance confirmed.
“Pity,” Anji said. It was only because she and Constance had known each other for so long that Anji could say something so short and wholly inadequate and have it be entirely sufficient. “I liked her.” Anji smiled ruefully. “After I met her, I finally understood where Ivan got it from.”
There was something off about Anji’s smile. It took Constance a moment to place it. One of her teeth was broken, the canine on the right side. That had not been so the last time Constance had seen her.
“Ivan,” Constance said, asking without asking.
Anji’s smile faded. “He’s alive. Or he was last time I saw him. Not looking great but alive.”
“And Mattie?”
“With him. Mattie was a lot more trigger-happy than he was the last time I saw him; nearly shot some of my people. They came to me looking for you. I sent them off for where I’d seen you last. I haven’t seen them since. That doesn’t mean anything, though. They weren’t very happy with me.”
“I’m not very happy with you,” Constance said.
Anji avoided the subject. “Well, last I knew, they were alive, at any rate.” She toyed with her glass some more. “You and him were a disaster, you know.”
“Who?”
“You and Ivan.”
Constance chose not to respond. She lifted her glass and drank.
“Mattie didn’t deserve to be stuck in the middle of that,” Anji said. Then she said with strange firmness, “But they’ve got each other still. They’ll be fine.”
Constance knew perfectly well that Ivan and Mattie would be fine.
Anji said, “And I heard some news from Venus. Your friend Marisol Brahe just landed there. Rumor has it she’s trying to rebuild the cities she helped you raze.” Anji swirled the liquid in her glass, seeming to cast her mind about. “And Christoph’s dead. I don’t know what happened to Julian.”
“Julian’s dead, too.”
“Pity,” Anji said again, and resumed staring down at her glass.
Constance said, “And Arawn?”
Anji scowled. “That coward. He knew he couldn’t keep you around if he was going to strike off on his own. He knew he had to get rid of you somehow, but he didn’t want to deal with it himself, so he dumped you on me. No, Connie, he’s not going to last much longer, I promise you that, if he’s not gone already.” She tipped her glass at Constance, her dark eyes sincere.
In a way, Constance appreciated what Anji was doing even as she thought that Arawn was not the only coward they both knew.
Anji lifted her glass. “To the living. May Ivan and Mattie not get their dumb asses killed, and may your friend Marisol not get murdered by angry Venereans.”
“How about to the dead?” Constance suggested.
A darkness passed over Anji’s expression to settle in the lines of her face as if it lived there, deepening them. “To the dead,” she said. “Julian, Christoph, Milla Ivanov. Connor Ivanov. We might as well toast him, too.”
“And to those who will soon be dead,” Constance said.
Anji tossed back her drink, and Constance followed suit. Before Anji could think of some other old friend to talk about or some other reason to avoid continuing the conversation, Constance said, “What happened on Jupiter, Anji?”
Anji lowered her empty glass slowly. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it does,” Constance said.
Anji hesitated. “I didn’t have a choice, Con. I could either do what they wanted and keep myself alive and keep some control of them or I could have let them kill me and declare war on you.”
She was looking at Constance as if she wanted Constance to say, Of course there was nothing you could do, but Constance would not and could not tell her that.
She didn’t bother to tell Anji, It’s not too late; you can stop this, either. It was too late, and Anji couldn’t stop this, not anymore.
“You have to believe me, Con,” Anji said, still speaking useless words. “I didn’t want you here. I didn’t want that coward Arawn to send you to me, because I don’t want to do this. You’re not my enemy, but I can’t let you go.”
“Say it out loud,” Constance said. “I want you to say aloud what you’re going to do to me, Anji.”
Anji looked at her in reproach for a long moment.
Then she said, “I’m going to execute you.”
Constance spent a day alone in the faded grandeur of the rotting suite before Anji returned with an array of guards behind her.
“Eager?” Constance asked.
“You know I’m not,” Anji snapped. She waved away the guards. “There’s a place not far from here where the greenhouse glass wasn’t destroyed. There weren’t any towns there, and Connor Ivanov was over here, so the System left it alone. It’s still standing. That’s where we’ll go—I thought you’d rather be outside.”
“I won’t appreciate it long.”
“The other thing,” Anji said. “I won’t let them have your body, Constance. I’ll bury you someplace where they won’t find you and they won’t dare to look.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Constance said.
Anji’s face screwed up; she shook her head and turned away, ready to go back to the door, to summon the guards. Some impulse stopped Constance, some sense of bitter compassion. Anji had been her friend once, though Constance hardly recognized her as she was now. “Anji.”
Anji stopped.
Constance said, “You’re showing them how to kill their leader. How long do you think it will be until they come for you?”
“I didn’t expect you to beg for your life, Constance.”
“I’m warning you about yours.”
“I’ll be fine,” Anji said. She hesitated as if she wanted to say something more but could not find the words or the courage. “Come on,” she said at last, and Constance followed her out into the hall.
Constance found that she recognized the men and women Anji had assembled. There were not many of them, only five, with Anji as the sixth. But they all had followed Constance once. She knew their names: Louis, Tyche, Roy, Jean, Lan. And they remembered her. She could see their doubts the moment they saw her step out.
Anji must have meant it as another sign of respect to allow Constance to be surrounded by people who did not hate her in her final moments.
Constance nodded to them in recognition and greeting. Tyche nearly smiled at her, and Constance smiled faintly back. It was very possible that Anji had made a mistake.
Anji started down the hall, and Constance fell in behind her. Outside, the people had gathered around to see her again. Constance stepped out and felt all their eyes upon her, more oppressing than the constant watch of the System’s cameras. The crowd did not shout or throw stones. They simply watched. There was a feel in the atmosphere like the prickling on one’s skin right before a thunderstorm begins. Constance had felt it on Miranda and on Mars, in secret places, hidden out of the System’s sight. This was a people on the edge of explosion, on the edge of a change, all that stored and angry energy ready to be tapped. It would take only a target and some angry words and that energy would start to come toward the surface like lava rising to spill out and burn.
She doubted that Anji knew that her people were on the edge of revolution.
Anji did not lead her back to the docking bay but on another route that took them down a road that ended abruptly at a tall wall constructed of metal welded together. There was a single door in that wall. It was colder down this street, and the crowds thinned out, the people following Constance’s last walk stopping some distance from the end of the street. A few children played down at the end, where it was open and they were unsupervised; when Constance appeared, they scattered, all but one girl. The little girl was playing with some rocks, smashing them against one another, needless destruction. It sent echoes like explosions off the metal wall beside which she sat. She looked right up at Constance. Her eyes were blue. Constance had just enough time to register their color before she was passing through that door behind Anji, into a tunnel.
In the tunnel, Constance found her breath coming short. She tried to hide it, not to let the people around her see. Only thin glass overhead separated her from the freezing inhospitality of Titan. Yellow lightning flashed; liquid methane slid greasily down the glass from the Titanese storm overhead. Each flash of lightning seemed to strike a blow into Constance, to increase the heat that burned in her chest.
I am afraid, she realized, and thought incongruously of Ivan. I am afraid.
At long last the tunnel opened up into a brighter, clearer place with sweeter air. Anji had been right when she’d said this part of the greenhouse enclosure had been left alone because the area was uninhabited; there was no sign of buildings or streets. The space was vast, magnificent, a work of architectural complexity as enormous and powerful as the force that had made it, the force that Constance would never regret destroying. The level Titanese stone stretched out so far to Constance’s left and right that she almost could not see where the glass came down again to seal off what once had been an air lock between sections of the greenhouse. Overhead, the glass stretched up so high that it reached the edge of Titan’s atmosphere, and Constance could look up and see the sky. They were facing away from Saturn, and so she could not see its rings, but she could see the bright sparks of stars.
Her chest was burning. She could hear the rasping sound of her breath in her ringing ears.
Anji’s people took lanterns from the tunnel. Anji led Constance to an empty space and stopped.
“I would offer you a blindfold,” Anji said.
“I wouldn’t take it,” Constance said.
Anji walked away without a word. Constance stood where she had been placed while Lan put a lantern on her right and Roy put one on her left to light her shape in the starlit dark, and then they strode away. She could have run, perhaps, but it would have gotten her nowhere, and she would not have subjected herself to the indignity of trying to run away. Anji had known that.
What use was running, anyway? Her heart was pounding.
Some six yards from her, they lined up together, their guns lowered, and Anji stood to the side. At Anji’s signal, they raised their rifles.
Now, almost—Constance’s breath caught in her throat—
Unexpected, brilliant—there was a light in the sky.
Constance looked up sharply. In the sky overhead, in the stars, there was a new star, shining bright and brilliant, brighter than all the other stars combined. It exploded, spreading out its light and its ash, as brilliant and bright as a supernova.
Murmuring from Anji’s people. Fear on Anji’s face. In the slow dying of the light from the supernova, Constance saw their conviction waver. Their fear of the omen made them look at her with new eyes.
She had but to say a word, she knew, and they would be hers.
For a moment of perfect clarity Constance saw what she would do. She would call out to these people, these old friends of hers whom Anji had so unwisely brought. Their old loyalty to her and their fear that she had something to do with whatever had exploded would be enough to sway them. They would turn on Anji, and Anji would be the one whose corpse was left out here on the Titanese stone.
Constance would go back into that tunnel with Anji’s followers at her back and would step out into the city reborn. Her near death and her survival, Anji’s death at her hand, would be enough to sway the crowd. There would be fighting; there would be a battle between Anji’s people and Constance’s new followers and those just trying to survive, but Constance had never yet lost a battle. Then Constance would finish her work. She would do as Marisol had said, do as she’d intended to do before Arawn had betrayed her, and go back to Mars and rebuild. She would defy Ivan’s prophecy and cease to destroy but create instead. She would bring life back to the solar system. She would—
No, she realized as clearly as if Ivan stood right beside her, patiently walking her through the logic that would lead her to the only, the inevitable conclusion. She might escape now. She might rally the people of Saturn behind her, but it would be bloody work, civil war. And when the war on Saturn was done and she went to Mars, she would only find more resistance there. The people had grown to hate her. If Constance tried to force her own peace and her own order on them, she would have to enslave them to do it; she would have to do what the System had done.
War on Saturn. War on Mars. War when Arawn realized she still lived. No matter what Constance did, no matter where she went, the violence would follow her. The fact that she lived would ignite wars around her. And eventually Mattie and Ivan would find her and be drawn inexorably into the blood and death around her and drown in it. She was ready now to try to bring peace back where she had taken it away, but it was too late for her to do that herself.
She would not be the System. She would not be death. She would not be less than those who had loved her had once believed her to be.
Anji was looking at her with fear, but Constance was not afraid anymore. She had not realized how deeply that denied terror had dug itself into her limbs until now, when it was gone.
Constance spoke.
“Don’t waste my time,” she said, and they all looked to her, heeling to her words like hounds. “You came here to shoot me. Do it.”
Her heart was pounding in her ears, but all her fear was gone.
“When I give the word,” Constance said, “you will fire. Raise your guns.”
They raised their guns. Overhead, the light died to nothing.
Constance said, “Fire.”