GENESIS #3
“She couldn’t know for sure.” Nines lifted her shoulders. “She may have known what she tried to make them into, but . . . I choose to believe that isn’t destiny.” She paused, and finished softly, “You can believe that too.”
Jacen stared at her, bereft. “What if you’re wrong?”
“I don’t know yet.” Nines looked up, out the wide circular window to the desert beyond. In that moment, she appeared lighter, more certain than Seth had yet seen her. She smiled. “I suppose I can decide.”
“Nines—” But something made Jacen stop.
“Thank you,” she said. “You gave me the chance to choose my own path. Even if it wasn’t yours.”
She offered him a nod, and Seth could only guess at every emotion that gesture conveyed. Gratitude but not quite trust. Anger but not quite hate. Respect but never deference. Sadness . . . but not regret.
She walked out of the audience chamber. She did not look back.
Seth, Jacen, and Ysira stood in silence—equidistant points of a triangle, alone beside the great window. The stars were coming out.
Nue was full and bright. Ixion would have been, too, but its shattered face haunted the sky.
It was a constant reminder of what they had lost, what they had done, and what they might yet have to overcome.
Seth could not look at it without being reminded of that awful hunger in Neri’s eyes, burning blood-red as he ripped the moon in two.
He stared at it as he finally asked, “What was he talking about?” He turned to Jacen and Ysira as they stared at him, puzzled. “Nines is too strong, he said. He spared the weaker telepath and had him imprisoned. He wants that list. Why?”
No answer.
“Ysira,” Seth said, sharper this time. “What does he need telepaths for?” Jacen’s rigid demeanor suggested he knew too but would not say it.
At last, Ysira reluctantly spoke. “Nothing we intend to use.” She averted her eyes. “The Firstborn have several distinct advantages we don’t, and the most important of those is that they’re not confined to a single planet. The distances are so vast, they have to travel through the Source.”
Seth frowned. “Through Gates?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know exactly how they do it, but we need to learn. We need the means to travel beyond Celes Lor. We’re searching for alternatives, but right now, the only way we know of to replicate that technology—faster-than-light travel—is through the use of—”
“Telepaths,” Seth asserted, disbelieving.
“Their brains,” Ysira said. “Merged with a vessel. A—a navigator, they call it.”
Telepathic brains, used to power the Firstborn Empire’s technology. Specifically, weak telepaths like the ones always taken in—“The Harvest,” Seth said faintly. “That’s what it was for.”
Utterly at a loss, he raked his fingers over his scalp. He braced his hands behind his head, breathing deep, until he thought he could speak without screaming.
He asked Jacen, who was staring blankly at his hands, “How long have you known?”
“A few weeks,” Jacen muttered.
“Does Hesaya know? The Disciples?” They couldn’t possibly accept this. “And who would have been stupid enough to tell that thing—”
“Neri saw the navigator,” Ysira said flatly. “When we were aboard the station. No one knows but us.”
She said that as though Seth was meant to find it reassuring.
“We’ll find another way,” said Jacen. He looked up. “We will not be what the Firstborn were. This list . . . It’s a last resort.”
What had brought them here other than a series of last resorts? Ged’s coup, Ogden’s failsafe, Neri integrating . . . Seth saw it stretching on ahead into infinity. Because against the galaxy-spanning nemesis they’d provoked, what else could be enough?
This would never end.
“Do you think,” Seth said through gritted teeth, “that Naxal, the devourer, has the restraint not to use that technology?” As the silence dragged on, he threw his hands in the air.
“He—” He couldn’t use Neri’s name. “He almost murdered a fourteen-year-old girl because she wouldn’t kneel.
Have we all lost our minds?” He stabbed a finger at Jacen. “Have you?”
“He didn’t do it,” Jacen pointed out. “It was only a threat. He had to—” “Had to?” Seth exploded. “This is Nines, Jacen. Fucking Nines!”
“Naxal is an incredibly complex entity,” Jacen admitted. “There is . . . conflict. But Neri is meant to be the balance, and he is still there. The fact that he spared Nines is proof—he only punished the guilty.”
“You’re taking that on faith?” Seth demanded. He thought of the woman who’d tried to run, and her peer, the ones who’d seemed baffled by the crimes for which they’d died. “You’re sure about that?”
“If you could see the full scope of what he sees now,” Jacen said stubbornly. “I can’t grasp it. It’s beyond me, beyond any of us. All I can do is help guide him. We have to help guide him.”
Seth looked back and forth between Jacen and Ysira. An empty, broken sort of laugh escaped him at the sheer absurdity of it all. “Say you’re right. Say Neri’s still in there and that he possesses any modicum of control over this thing. Will we be enough?”
Or can we only encourage the worst in him, whether we mean to or not?
“Did you know?” Seth directed this question at Ysira, brutally blunt. “Did you know what Ged was going to do? Could we have avoided this?”
When Ysira said, “No,” Seth wanted, more than he’d ever wanted anything, to believe her. He looked into her fathomless eyes, begging her to tell him it was true when he said, “We had no choice. Right?”
“We had no choice,” Ysira repeated. But her confident mask had cracked, and beneath it he beheld something like pain. A brittle shell of doubt.
Jacen said nothing. If Ysira had lied, he must have sensed it. But he said nothing, and his silence was suffocating.
“How can we be enough,” Seth said quietly, “when we’re the ones who destroyed him?”
Because Seth thought he knew a truth Jacen did not—that a god was something they made. Something both more and less than human, limitless power held in thrall by whoever spoke in his name—be they a demon or only a man.
When neither of them answered, Seth paced away. After a moment, he turned back to see Ysira hugging herself with one hand as she hid her eyes with the other. Jacen stood by the window, staring listlessly into the night.
The sky was exquisitely clear, and the air smelled of fragrant flowers. An aurora danced across the rings of Oe, amber and turquoise against the inky black. Come morning, the sun would rise, and it would have no shadow.
But when the shadows faded, so had the dreams, leaving them all in this brilliant new dawn with nothing but the truth of who they were and what they had been forced to become.
An impossible victory at an unspeakable price.
No small part of Seth wanted to leave it all behind—go his own way as Nines had, see the rest of this newborn world.
A far greater part could not fathom it.
To stay would be a knife between his ribs, but to leave would be to pull it out and bleed without stopping. In the Scar, this was simply the way of things. To hate what had made you. To love what destroyed you.
Seth had been a coward for too many years, and in a just world, he’d have either died like his father or burned with those merchants.
What right did he have to turn away—from these people he still needed, the better future that might yet be possible, and that spiderweb’s shimmer he had glimpsed of Neri?
If Seth had not imagined that, perhaps hope remained. If not . . . then let Neri be somewhere better, free of pain and fear. Let the rest of them fix what they had broken. Let them create a world worthy of that sacrifice.
It was just a wish, and it was all so fragile. Such a delicate, impossible thing, and yet Seth clung to it, because without it, he feared they were all lost. And he wondered—was this what Jacen felt like when he prayed? For the first time in his life, Seth thought he understood.
If a god was something they made, then perhaps faith must be too. Not an immutable trait but a series of choices, day after day, even when one might never live to see them bear fruit.
So, let this choice be the first. He would stay. He would try. He would hope.
He watched them, the prophet and the mother of his god, a deep weariness settling into his bones.
They watched the stars.