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 himno 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 FirstbornEmpire 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. Shecould never look back, and so she looked up. She saw nothing but sky—and beyond, at last, the stars. Eternity, within her grasp.
