44. MESSIAH #2
Ysira took a quick inventory of her allies. Thirty-six of them had crossed through the Gate from Otavok. Only a dozen had made it this far, to the platform between the spires:
Goran and Azaharo, struggling to bar the door shut.
Two unfamiliar militiamen, one weeping as the other comforted him. Saraida, obsessively checking over her weapons.
Jacen, manic and pacing.
Seth, unblinking, sitting cross-legged and still as a statue.
Nines, hovering over him and trembling like a sparrow in the wind. Teheda, praying on his knees.
Ged, slumped on the ground and bleeding.
Urien, squinting at the eclipse and searching for the transport that had to be coming any second now.
And Neri, staring out across the expanse of the canyon with no expression at all.
This was all that remained. Their world’s last, desperate hope. It had to be enough.
With little else to do but wait, Ysira took the medicinal pouch from her belt and knelt beside Ged. “Hold still.”
He regarded her with suspicion but let her tie a tourniquet above his knee. He swore when she pulled it tight, but when she touched the macerated muscle and bone below, he did not react. He felt nothing.
“Not good,” he bit out. “Is it?”
Ogden couldn’t have saved this leg. Ged would be a liability at best, no use to them in the fight ahead, and he must have known it. Ysira shook her head.
Ged took a long, deep breath. “This is delusional. Even if we make it to the station, we’ve taken too many losses. It wasn’t a bad plan, but it’s over. We failed.”
He might have been right. But, gods above, they’d fought so hard to get this far. So many of their own had died. Jacen had killed thousands just to give this plan a chance. And they were so close. It wasn’t over. It couldn’t be, because the alternative—
Ysira shuddered and stopped the thought in its tracks. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because we understand each other.” Ged spoke so only she could hear. “And I need your help.”
He fell silent. She followed his gaze to where Neri stood alone. “We understand,” Ged said. “But he doesn’t. I know him.” For a moment, there was something like fatherly affection on his face. “He still has hope.” He paused. “We have to take it away.”
Ysira’s insides clenched. Suddenly, it hurt to breathe.
“Do you think Neri is capable of doing what we both know must be done, if he thinks he has any choice at all?” When Ysira could not speak, Ged went on. “You’re not sure, are you? Are you willing to stake the future of this world on something you don’t know? On faith?” He scoffed. “I’m not.”
His meaning was clear enough. He would sabotage the plan, make it impossible for them to reach the station. Then Neri would have no choice but to summon the necessary power to destroy the gods from there on the ground. To integrate with Naxal.
Ysira looked at Ged’s leg. “Do you think you’re doing this for the greater good? Or as one last thing that might earn you a place in history now that you’ve lost everything else?”
It was a pointed question, leveraged as a knife at his throat, but Ged gave a weary shrug. “Does it matter? Look around you. It doesn’t change that I’m correct.” With a pained grimace, he palmed another spherical explosive. “I take out the shuttle. You cover me. We give him no choice.”
In all her life, Ysira had never hated another person as much as she hated Ged Semira. She hated him for the words he’d just uttered, for what he planned to do, and for everything he’d done. For every part of him that she would never escape, because it was part of her, too.
She had come upon a precipice, gazing down into an abyss, and to truly consider Ged’s words would mean falling. Because it wouldn’t end today, would it? Even if they won, the Firstborn Empire remained. Ysira had said as much herself—they were obligated to plan on a grander scale.
She finally felt the weight of that obligation, and it was unbearable.
To defeat Zivora’s gods would be like cutting out a cancer, this massive tumor at the heart of the Scar.
It would not come free without damage to blood vessels, nerves, and organs: vital pieces that had grown and changed to accommodate the invader even as it sucked the life out of them.
Ysira had seen it in enough patients to know excision was not always possible—or worth the cost.
She spoke again, so quiet, it was a wonder Ged heard her. “What if Naxal destroys the world?”
“It’s already been destroyed.” Ged choked out an awful, despairing little laugh.
He gestured at the ruins below. At the irradiated wasteland where once had been an empire, stretching out farther than the eye could see.
At the smoke, still rising from Zivora in the distance. “It was destroyed a long time ago.”
Behind the door, a crash echoed. Someone shouted, “They’re breaking through!”
But Saraida was pointing, screaming over the wind, “The transport!
It’s here!”
Hope flared to life in Ysira once more as she spotted the dark shape descending between the spires. Neri shielded his eyes, almost standing on tiptoe, like he might reach up and grab hold of it.
Then Nines cried out. Ysira spun to see that Seth had opened his eyes. Something else peered through them, alight with malice. An inhuman grin split his face.
“What have you been up to?”
“There’s no more sedative!” Nines held Seth by the shoulders as though she might restrain the goddess inside him with her bare hands as her power failed. “She’s waking up. I need help.”
Jacen ran toward her. “We just need a little longer—”
The transport vessel was bizarrely organic, unfurling legs like an enormous beetle as it touched down on the obsidian disc.
Goran reached it first, Azaharo and the two remaining militiamen close behind.
Two panels twisted apart to open a ramp.
Someone inside had begun to disembark. Goran seized them, hurled them off the side of the platform. They fell screaming to the depths.
Another crash sounded from below, much nearer now. “Ysira!” Jacen shouted. “The door!”
Of course, it had to be her. She was the only one who could last long enough for the others to board the transport, corner the last of the gods on their station, and end this with one clean, surgical strike.
It was still possible. She could give them a fighting chance.
Someone else gripped Ysira by the arm, shouting over the roar of the otherworldly engine. Urien. She couldn’t hear a word he said, and then he was already running.
Ged had pulled himself to a standing position, leaning against the stone outcropping. As Ysira raced to the door, readying herself to hold the line, he met her eyes.
She saw two choices before her, two futures, laid out at this final threshold.
Ged was vulnerable, wounded and alone. Ysira could stop him. She could stake the fate of this world on faith that somehow, their plan might succeed.
Or.
She could cover for Ged as he destroyed the transport and with it any last hope of victory—save one. One desperate, awful thing that might mean their salvation. One scourge to devour another.
As the light of the eclipse blurred behind stubborn, pointless tears, Ysira had to catch her breath. She wiped her eyes. She could never look back, and so she looked up. She saw nothing but sky—and beyond, at last, the stars. Eternity, within her grasp.
She looked at her son. Still determined, still clinging to hope. Neri tried to run toward the transport after the others, but Ged pulled him back.
Ysira chose.