13. CHAPTER 13 #2
“I remember like it was yesterday… How you came to visit every day as a boy.” The Phaedra poured a drink for each of them.
“That short time between being a child and a man, when you weren’t off in the territories year after year.
Now look at you.” The Phaedra flourished his hands.
“So close to a promotion. And a wedding. Hopefully, close to fulfilling your family duties, as well.”
The Phaedra expected him to fall in line and start a family like all good Ciondian officers did.
Anyone with sense took the Phaedra’s suggestions as commands, and his actual commands like the word of God.
It didn’t matter what Zayne wanted. The Phaedra bred obedient soldiers by promoting these family values, which encouraged loyal families to produce plenty of offspring for the empire.
The high profile of Zayne's family and the bloodline of the High Generals ratcheted up that pressure.
Mellie gushed about babies, but Zayne refused to hand his children over to the Phaedra.
They'd grow up the way he and his siblings did, constant training and studying at the academy under the harshest conditions, responsibility meant for generals forced upon them, precious days off wasted in this study with the Phaedra toying with their minds.
Any children of Zayne's would be born to dominate others and slaughter the innocent.
Luke saved his daughters from service, but the Phaedra obsessed over Zayne so much that he feared there'd be no sparing his children.
Especially not a boy since every High General had been male.
He wasn't sure how to handle that problem in the long-term, but for now, he had an implant and no intention of removing it. Men and women in Ciondo often both kept birth control implants when they weren't trying, making surprise pregnancies almost non-existent.
Zayne didn't want kids, or a wife, or anything the Phaedra planned for him.
The Phaedra swirled his brandy, dipped his finger in it, and lifted it as a single drop fell back down into the amber liquid. “You have such a good future ahead of you. I saw it in you after the North, son. A man who could rule. You loved those men in your squad, yes?”
The film played through his head.
Gray fingers. Red puddles.
“Yes?” The Phaedra asked, voice deepening.
Gray fingers.
“Yes,” Zayne said, focusing like he was in the middle of the battlefield. “Of course.”
“Friends died and bled, and yet you didn’t utter a single word, not even to say stop.
If there’s no greater love than to lay down your life for a friend, there’s no greater loyalty than to lay down a friend for your country.
” The Phaedra's expression darkened while he wandered closer.
Then he traced his finger along Zayne's collarbone over the body of a snake. “I see the greatness you’re capable of every time I look at your twin serpents.”
The numbness started in his fingertips. There was no room for mistakes today. Dr. Cooper had Kira right now.
“Then why don’t you trust me with my prisoner?” Zayne asked. The Phaedra wanted a war of words, so he needed to stay in the fight.
“Here we go.” The Phaedra tapped his fingers together. “Business. You couldn’t stay away from it.” He sauntered to his desk and opened his cigar box. “You still don’t smoke, do you?”
Obviously not. He rarely drank and certainly didn't allow smoke into his lungs when he needed to stay as sharp as possible for battle. “We’re not here for drinks. You say you want nothing between us. Well, there it is. You’re questioning me.
Reminding me that I watched my friends die and that I can kill my prisoner.
You're toying with me just like Dr. Cooper did last night.”
“Come now. You’re like a dog that’s caught a stench.
” The Phaedra plopped down in his chair and kicked his feet up on his desk.
The smoke smelled sweet. “Don’t tell your brother we did more than discuss your operation today.
You know how fragile his ego can be where you’re concerned.
He has every reason to be jealous. Look at the time I’ve poured into you.
” He took a puff. “That, of course, is because you’ve taken training, boy.
Luke’s a man after my own heart. You’re a man after the people’s heart. ”
Zayne struggled to relax his muscles. He had to stay calm. The Phaedra always talked in circles. No reason to get worked up. It may be nothing more than boredom.
“Believe it or not…” Smoke unfurled from the Phaedra's mouth and nose. “I am too… Luke is a mindless machine. It takes more than that to rule at my side. But then that’s always been the problem with you, hasn’t it?
You’re no machine. No, my boy… You're strong-willed. You’ve taken work.
That's why I want you, not your brother. And that breaks his heart.”
“The Followers are a national security risk,” Zayne said. “I understand what needs to be done.” The twists and turns of this conversation would weave a noose around his neck if he let it happen.
“You will. You’re strong enough to do it. That I don't doubt, as I’ve made clear. But do you really comprehend why it must be done?”
“They aren’t devoted to the Empire.”
“Bah.” The Phaedra waved his hand, scattering ash over the gleaming hardwood floor. “Have I shown you my room? I think it’s about time I do.”
“What?” So much for steering the conversation.
The emperor pushed his chair back and rushed to the end of a hall, where he unlocked a door. “Ready?”
He just wanted to know if Kira was okay. Not see this secret room. “I suppose so.”
With that, the Phaedra swung the door open so the light from the hall cut a rectangle into the darkness. He flipped a switch.
Stars and swirls of purple and red and pink lit the dome over their head in a replica of deep space.
The Phaedra lay down on his back. “Don’t stand there with your mouth hanging open. Shut the door.”
How did Zayne not know this room existed?
He sought out the constellations he looked for in the territories. “It’s incredible,” he said. “It’s always been here?” There were so many sections of the tower unknown to even the Phaedra’s inner circle.
“Spend a few days in here, and you’ll fix your vision problem.
” With the click of a remote, a laser appeared on the dome, and the Phaedra maneuvered it over a speck of light.
“There we are. Our galaxy.” Another click and the sun flared beneath the Phaedra, red and sparking with energy.
“It’s as close to scale as we can accommodate, but we're still larger here than in reality. You see our planet?”
It looked like flakes of dust orbited the sun instead of planets.
Another click. A blown-up image of the Earth spread under his feet.
“Us. Look at our great Empire.”
Zayne knelt, running his finger over the Great Phaedran Range, to the flat of the Ruins where the Old World lay preserved beneath sand, on to the plains of Antor, and over the ridge of the Apalachee Mountains in the east.
Over the years, when he'd managed to sneak a secret trip to the Ruins, he’d hunted for Old World histories and maps.
The towering mountain ridge that rose like a wall of protection between Ciondo and the rest of the empire had once been called the Rocky Mountains, but such knowledge was forbidden now, as if the empire were eternal, and had always been named after the Phaedras.
Zayne wondered if rulers ever realized the mountains and the rest of the Earth existed before them—bore different names through the rise and fall of empires—and would outlast their reign. Their power.
“We’re specks,” Zayne said. It was the Phaedra who was a speck, no matter how powerful he felt.
“We're less than specks,” the Phaedra said. “Centuries of the Phaedras ruling like pharaohs and raising a dead continent back to life—all that greatness and still we're so small. So human.”
Ciondian schools taught little history of the Old World, but children did grow up learning anything that pushed the myth of a god-like Phaedra.
They took so much inspiration from the Pharaohs, but the Followers, who passed on histories of their own, salvaged some of the forbidden knowledge from before the Collapse.
At some point hundreds of years ago, they began calling the emperor of Ciondo 'Phaedra' because of the ruler's unquenchable lust for power.
That was Zayne's favorite historical fact: that some emperor long ago did not understand the insult of his nickname, and now permanently bestowed this name upon all the emperors to follow him.
Their current Phaedra knew this history, but he said he rather liked Greek mythology and found the powerful feminine energy of Phaedra in those ancient stories to be misunderstood.
“This all keeps moving without us. God has the universe, but we only have this. Who would care if it blinked out?” The Phaedra's jaw clenched and unclenched in the red light of the sun. “If we can’t make the tough calls, our light will vanish and the rest will continue without us. Forever.”
Kira’s eyes flashed.
Tough calls.
The Phaedra’s voice swelled in his mind, strangling his own thoughts.
“Our history is made from the broken glass of collapse,” the Phaedra said. “The world could end for good this time. The Old Ones abandoned us all to die here. But we survived. The lineage of the Phaedras bears the fruit of that survival.”
After growing up with the Phaedra's rhetoric, Zayne still forgot not to listen too closely. This was how the Phaedra overpowered him in a conversation.
“If we blink out, who’d care? The Neanderthals and Denisovans were human, but they’re gone.
” The Phaedra laid his head against the floor beneath the universe of his own making, voice wilted with sorrow that sounded authentic, but Zayne knew was manufactured.
“Our species is here, and theirs is not. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?
That’s all the world remembers because mankind is the god of history. ”