39 Tragic Veins
Tragic Veins
L ater, Spie would regret abandoning Artemis Ialan alone on the beach, shivering and afraid. But in that moment, she could only focus on an encroaching and debilitating sense of dread.
Artemis couldn’t begin to grasp the severity of what she’d confessed. She didn’t understand the chain of command that would have to be invoked in order to cover up multiple contestant deaths.
If this were simply a matter of someone murdering the contestants, then filming would’ve been halted weeks past. Love Galaxy was important but not important enough to risk lives over.
Particularly the lives of the daughters of the empire’s elite.
People like Jasmine Gross and Cailin Frederik and Arbora VinVanxin.
No, if this had been a case of a sociopath committing mass murder, the show would’ve been postponed, and an investigation would’ve taken place.
A cover-up meant something else entirely. Something far more harrowing.
Spie didn’t bother bridging ahead. When she reached her room, she went straight for the closet connecting her suite with her brother’s. She pounded on the door, not caring that it was after midnight.
Nix knew something, she was sure of it. And he’d blocked her out.
When he didn’t answer immediately, she tried the doorknob. Locked. She pounded harder. Their rooms were well soundproofed everywhere but in this single closet. “Nicky!” she yelled. “Open this door; we need to talk!”
A click click denoted the turning of the lock. The door swung outward. Nix stood on the other side, his hair a mess, his eyes fully bloodshot and swollen. His room was dimly lit, a plain open bottle of what looked and smelled very much like liquor in one hand.
Nicky never drank. Not even recreationally.
Spie snatched the bottle from his hand and shoved past him.
“Is Temmi back in her room?” he asked, his words slightly slurred. He stumbled to an armchair and dropped into it, his glasses askew. “She’s going to hate me so much.”
But Spie hadn’t come to discuss Artemis. She sniffed the open bottle she’d stolen from him and made a face. “This isn’t you, Nicky.”
“It is, actually. I’ve been drinking privately for years. Make the stuff myself. Haven’t gone to sleep without a couple drinks since before the press tour.”
Spie stared at her brother and saw in his place a stranger. This half-drunk man wasn’t her Nicky. She set the offending bottle on a dresser. “I would’ve noticed if you’d turned into a raging alcoholic.”
He snorted a very un-Nicky-like snort and shook his hair from his eyes.
“Effects don’t last long for my body. Hard to really ‘get drunk.’ Surely, you’ve noticed you can tolerate alcohol better than most people?
Or that every time you smoke a joint, the high just doesn’t last as long as it does for everyone else?
You’ve smoked a lot, so I’d only assumed you would’ve noticed. ”
“Nicky.”
“Spie.”
“What’s going on with Jasmine Gross.” A statement, not a question. Spie couldn’t summon the inflection required.
Nix sat up straighter in the armchair, adjusted his glasses. “Who told you about Jasmine? I guess it doesn’t matter—everyone’s going to know soon. I thought Kalvin had it in hand. But the more bodies, the harder it is to clean up the loose ends.”
Spie swallowed. Backed up a step. The room felt like it was tilting sideways, her life felt like it was tilting sideways.
“How many?” she whispered, unable to voice the full question, unable to even think it.
“Dead?” Nicky provided. “Three now. Kya after night one, Rosaria last week, and Jasmine like an hour ago. I didn’t mean to touch any of them; outside of Temmi, the only one I deliberately touched was Cailin.
And I only did that because I already knew she had immunity.
We tested her years ago, to make sure she’d be a viable candidate for me.
Mother would’ve never agreed to do Love Galaxy without that guarantee.
But I’m rationalizing—the deaths are still my fault.
“And Jasmine’s will be impossible to cover up entirely.
I never expected her to kiss me; I was supposed to play it close, play up the fact that you and I were both dating her, so my body language was probably too inviting, and then her face was right there and.
..At first, her symptoms seemed mild, so I thought she was going to be okay, like Cailin, but then she started seizing and bleeding, and that’s when we knew we’d have to enact our contingency plan.
Mother is calling personally to inform Senator Gross as we speak. Better to get in front of it.”
“I don’t understand.” Spie needed to sit down. Lie down.
“I know you don’t.” Slowly, he tugged off his gloves, one at a time, and threw them on the carpet. He flexed his fingers. “Because we never told you. You’ve spent so long begging me to open up to you, but once I do, you’re going to wish I never had.”
“Nicky.” Spie stared at his hands.
A memory pressed against her mind. She and Nicky at seven or eight, stuck on a star cruiser for the four-day ride to New Terra.
She’d convinced Nicky to sneak down to the lower cargo bay with her.
There, they ran into the young sons of some operators and got into a game of hide-and-tag.
One of the boys was a couple years older.
He cornered Nicky behind the plugged-in podships.
Taunted him, made fun of his leather gloves, ripped them off.
Spie came careening around the corner in time to see the older boy shove Nicky up against the wall, and Nicky, afraid, tried to hit him with his bare hands.
Spie, being the more physically confident twin, kicked the boy between the legs and yanked her brother back to the upper decks.
The next morning, she overheard the maids cleaning her cabin whispering about a strange illness that had killed a ten-year-old boy on the passenger deck.
Bleeding eyes, they’d said. His father had been a podship mechanic.
Spie never told Nicky. Or anyone. Had forgotten about it as the years wore on.
After all, it’d been insane to assume her brother could’ve had something to do with the boy’s death.
He’d worn gloves his whole life because he was touch-averse or because of a sensory tic or because it made him feel more confident, not because there was something wrong with him.
People didn’t die from touching other people.
And anyway, Nicky could touch Spie just fine.
“I don’t have to tell you,” Nicky said. “You don’t have to know. It’s better if you don’t.”
“There is no universe where I walk out of this room without you telling me everything.”
Nicky exhaled loudly. “I figured. Do you remember that genetic test you ordered on our aunt forever ago? The one that never came back? You were always so concerned about how we didn’t look anything like Rigeni Robertson’s family, how Mother never liked us to associate with them if she could help it. ”
Spie nodded. She had a sick feeling in her stomach. A feeling that said whatever she was about to learn would cleave her world in two.
“If the test had come back, it would’ve shown that we share no DNA with Rigeni Robertson’s sister. How familiar are you with the Uiyoni delegation that grandfather invited to the Prop a year after first contact? The one that preceded the Uiyoni Conflict?”
Spie didn’t like where this was going. “Is this a history lecture? Out with it already.”
“Our mother would’ve been twenty-three at the time.
She’s never told me anything that happened, but I’ve pieced together what I could from context.
The delegation’s visit was when she had to have met our real father.
She never told me his name, but—” Nicky pulled himself out of his armchair and went rifling through his bedside table’s top drawer.
He withdrew a plain DC cartridge, inserting it into his CB’s port and turning back to Spie.
“I found this in her room years ago. Took me a long time to work around the security encryptions, but once I did, I copied what I found to my own DC.”
An image projected above Nicky’s CB. Five men and women, all of them dressed in long, tailored robes, stared blankly into the camera.
They appeared to be standing on some kind of landing strip.
Likely outside Elsidor, based on the trees in the background.
All of them were statuesque and bore sharp, alluring features.
“What am I looking at?” Spie asked.
“The only surviving image of the Uiyoni Delegation. Search for it—or anything about the original delegates—on the internet, and you won’t find a single crumb of information. Mother had everything scrubbed. Look at the man on the right.”
Nicky pointed at a man standing slightly behind the others. He had flawless yellow-gold skin, loose, long hair blacker than night, a narrow, hollowed face, and his eyes—it was difficult to discern from the small image, but Spie would’ve bet good money they were violet.
“No,” Spie said automatically. “No, that doesn’t make sense.
Your timeline is all wrong. If Mom was twenty-three when the delegation arrived, then how could he—how could we—” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.
“She had us at thirty-one. After her season of Love Galaxy . After her marriage to Rigeni.”
“The Uiyoni Conflict lasted eight years,” Nicky said.
“Did you know our mother was involved in Fleet operations? Probably not. She doesn’t talk about it, and the records of her involvement no longer exist. Except for what I found on that DC.
And what I found? She spent a fair amount of time during those eight years out in the Ranger System, where most of the war was waged.
It’s how she met Kal. I found a picture of them from thirty years ago on the DC.
They were together on the Ncklogui Station.
Here, I’ll show you.” Nicky tapped at his CB.