*COMPLETE* "People don't believe in us anymore. They don't believe that in the end we will do what is right. We can't let them down. We can't let Ben win."
Decisions made on top of the lonely, wind-swept cliff of Lethinor reverberate around the five...
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"People think it's easy when you're born into power, but the only easy thing is falling out of it," Mother says. "I've worked very hard at keeping my power. I've worked very hard at squashing out my weaknesses."
They are in the Throne Room, the orange beams of sunlight splattering on the dais. Outside, the world is bright and warm, but in here it is dark.
"Being the only child of the Imperator meant, of course, that I would inherit the throne and rule my father's lands," she says, her voice ringing into this void, this perpetual nothingness, so it bounces back, magnified, multiplied, "but that did not guarantee greatness. I guaranteed greatness."
When she turns, her black eyes fix on Isati.
A test. Another game to learn and play. Which way? What to say?
"Father was the first weakness," Abadi Chaudri says instead, needing no answer yet. "The old man knew a few tricks—and taught me a few too, despite his best efforts—but he was a soft spot. He would have let everything go to waste had I yielded to it."
She had seen pictures of him before, in the hallways of the Plinth, crumpling portraits of an old, soft-eyed man. Mother had them burned. Mother had them destroyed. In the beginning, Isi had given his face to one of her creatures, a metal mirror of the kindly eyes but Mother had set him on fire too and he had screamed and wailed and burned until the air was thick with it and the metal warped, melting into his face.
"The second was your father. That was entirely my fault. He was someone who never learned how to master a heart, and I suppose I thought I could show him how."
Isati never made the same mistake with her father.
I already knew he was weak.
"Third was your brother." And there it is: that small, snake-spun shiver of rage, coiled up and slithering through the words, the hidden viper Isati had been waiting for. "That stung the worst. I tried. Gods know, I tried to exorcise it. And he sniveled and he cried and he groveled."
She can feel these words' acridness, feel the acid corroding them in her Mother's mouth. They are poison, dripping in the air around her, and so long as Isati is very still, they don't touch her.
This is the game.
"Why, why did his puny, half-functional little brain never get it? I wanted him to fight back. I didn't keep all of this, feed all of this, by whimpering at my father's side."
The beams of sunlight cast orange rays upon Mother's face, striking only slivers of it and all the dark, gleaming suit below. She never takes the armor off.
They are all gone now, Mother murmurs in her mind. Nothing but the smoke of memory and time. They were too weak to last, too feeble to endure. I did not make that mistake.
I will last.
I will endure.
"Do you understand, Isati?" Mother asks now, her black eyes glittering. "They are coming."
They are coming.
Isati can hear it in her hive mind, the hum of the approach, muffled by the precautions, the fear, but not completely obliterated. She might not know where they are right now, but she knows where they are going.
To me.
Isati spends a lot of time looking in that direction—westward, toward the slow dying of the suns on the horizon, a sky of blood and dust, fractured by the ghosts of clouds.
It's all coming together, she thinks, fingers running circles over the smooth metal of the armrest. It's all tapering off to an end.
She wonders what will come out of the end of it, what will happen after the flesh and bones are broken. Will she sit on a throne and look westward toward only nothingness? No fire, no foe on the horizon. No challenge rippling at her seams. What will she be left with when the fight well fought is at its end? Just livestock and Mother, and her, alone in the twilight.
Her, alone.
"Don't, Isi, please—"
Her nails dig holes in the chair arms, puncturing the metal in a shaking grip. One of the shadows stirs and then buckles to its knees under the weight of its mistake.
Alone in a universe of bodies, the only thing left thinking.
The thought trawls across her face, twitching in her brows, warping along her shaking lips, and squinting in her narrowing eyes.
The reaction isn't a thought; it's an instinct, a state of being, born of physicality:
