“Then why are you…you, and why am I me?” he asks, turning around completely.
“Because I gave up trying to please him, and you never did. I honestly don’t think you ever cared about any of this.” I wave to the walls around us. “With every new endeavor, there’s always the hope that you will find happiness, be less lonely. Let me tell you what I’ve learned: the moment you become Sovereign, you become loneliest person in all the worlds, because there is no new endeavor, no new height to which you can ascend. Whatever loneliness is already inside you is magnified, because if you were lucky enough to have anyone understand you before, they won’t understand you after you sit in the Morning Chair. Only one person alive at a time knows what it means to be Sovereign.”
He traces the lines in the marble floor with his toe as if it were a puzzle. I glance back at the flowers. There could be one alive on the other side of the vase.
“Do you know why I did this?” he asks. “I did it because Lilath told me it was the only way I could see you. You would kill me if you were not at my mercy, I know. You think I am a freak. And I am. But thank you for speaking to me as if I weren’t. I recognize the gesture, even if it isn’t a kindness.”
“Do you hate her?” I ask him. “Lilath.”
He replies with a slight pause and no inflection in his voice. “On the day she took me to see the cows die, I had a thought. I asked Lilath to build me an iron cow. She built me the iron wolf instead, as I knew she would. One day soon, I will melt her inside it.”
I forget the flowers and stare at him. “Why?”
“Because she doesn’t understand irony.”
He means it, and he doesn’t sound upset, proud, or even excited about it. “And doing that would make you feel happy?” I ask.
“It doesn’t make me feel anything. It is just an opportunity for novelty.”
To do that to Lilath, who gave birth to him, who breastfed him, and woke in the middle of the night when he cried as a baby, who trained him to walk, to speak, to read, seems in the moment to be the cruelest act I have ever heard. My brother was many things, but even his evil led with the heart. This thing is just bored.
“Just like making the Republic eat itself?” I ask.
“Indeed.” He smiles, pleased. “I knew if anyone could understand me, it would be you. I only wish Father were here. Cruel though he may have been. So I could see this cruelness. Look in the eye. Smell its ugly breath. To see if I felt it.”
“Felt what?”
“Evil. What precipice of the mind could conjure anything more terrifying than a cruel father?”
“I think,” I say slowly, “perhaps you have spent too much childhood indoors, young man.”
He reels back, annoyed that I dare try to pull out of the discussion with affected rhetoric. In his mind it is disrespectful. “You don’t think I’m Adrius at all, do you?” he asks. His mood darkens. “I suppose to you this must all feel as if you are with a voyeur.” He gestures to the puzzles. “I am not real to you. I am an interruption. At very best, an imposter.” His lips pull upward as his eyes narrow. “Am I wrong?”
“Naw, kid, you’re not wrong. If Adrius were here, he would be eating lobster as he gave this lecture on a table containing the body of a conquered foe. If Adrius were here, he’d have sex slaves brought to him after the battle and fuck them on Octavia au Lune’s bed. And it would make him so very happy to dilute the most expensive liquor bottles with piss and then give them to his Boneriders to share. And then, after all that, he’d tell it all to no one. His war on the world was a joke built around a central need to prove he didn’t yearn for the approval from the only man who wouldn’t give it. You, on the other hand, are just a joke built around me. A visitor to this world who doesn’t belong. A ghost.” He looks stricken. I finish it. “And what Father was to Adrius, I am now to you.”
He steps closer as if to confess. “It would appear so.” Emotion leaks into his voice. “It must end in your death then, I suppose.”
I spot the flower I need. It’s moments like this I sympathize with Darrow.
There is a patient, longer scheme available, where I earn the clone’s trust over days, even weeks. I could fix more things then, perhaps. I could ensure the rescue of Sevro, Pebble, and Clown. But if I wait so long, how much of the Republic will be left by the time I am in a position to save it? The fleets will be at it again soon if they aren’t already. Both navies were built to protect us from the Golds. The prospect of their destruction at the hands of each other is more urgent a calamity than the safety of my friends.
I make the same choice my husband had to make.
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” I say to the clone. “I am not like Father, because I do care about you. Even if I don’t love you. You killed my friends when you didn’t have to. Lilath put that in you. What I said, it was in reaction to that. I don’t want to be your enemy. There are things Lilath is wrong about. Things that will jeopardize your life. For instance, the Pandemonium Chair. Did you know Octavia only used it twice? It is dangerous.”
“Are you trying to tempt me into asking for the codes to the Crescent Vault?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “I’m trying to tempt you into asking about my research with the Pandemonium Chair. How the psychoSpike functions…”
He lifts his datapad and sends tendrils of pain racing along my spine. “I think I have discovered it for myself.”
“Of course, but you haven’t cracked how to actually erase the memories, have you? They’re quite different functions, viewing and destroying, and more than twenty-four steps to the latter.” I lean forward with a smile. He couldn’t figure out the puzzle. “I’m sorry, rude of me to not put in an easy little button for idiots.” He wants to know how to do it so he can do it to me, and make me his companion. What sort of companion, I can only guess.
He looks scolded, but walks closer. “And you would just tell me?”
“In time, all things are possible, brother.” I pick the night lily out from amongst the dead flowers in the vase. And hand it out to him the way Bellona knights did as they returned to loved ones from war.
His response is a basic human response. When you’re caught off guard and someone reaches to shake your hand in a comfortable setting, you usually shake it. When someone displays a deep and respectful flash of cultural esoterica that you value as well, you respond. He does both. If he had had proper kinesthetic training by a razormaster, he wouldn’t. After all, genius or not, he is still only ten years old. He takes the flower. But he doesn’t take it the way I would, or the way Adrius would. H