Purpose and righteousness flowed through Talis’s veins as Illiya pushed the brand against the inside of her forearm. Talis smelled the flesh sear. Felt the thrill run up her arm, all electric.
“All who see this mark will know you serve my purpose,” Onaya Bone said, sitting up straight, shoulders back, her eyes burning with fire. Somehow, despite the green tint to the screen, Talis saw the magenta of the goddess’s eyes as plainly as if she was in the room. “Get the ring back from the aliens and bring it to me at Nexus.”
Talis bowed to the flame-silhouetted figure on the screen, then turned and marched herself, unescorted, from the room.
In the high priestess’s chamber, the acolytes stood over the crumpled bodies of the four aliens. Slain. Wretched piles of pale limbs. Vicious tri-bladed daggers dripped blue blood. Scrimshaw lay atop the Yu’Nyun captain, arms outstretched, as though xist last act had been in defense of xist commanding officer.
Talis inhaled their dusty smell and the acrid tinge in the air that must have been their blood. It sent cascading prickles down the length of her arms. Her fingers twitched for the weapons in her holsters.
“Load their bodies into the litter,” she said, confident in her right to command the acolytes. “I will return them to their ship before I blow it out of the skies.”
“Oh gods, no.” It was as though a fog was lifting from her mind. But rather than a sense of clarity, all Talis felt was dread. Dread and panic. Dread, and panic, and something like food poisoning. She struck the side of her head against the door frame of the dark taxi cabin. “No, no, no, no, no.”
Whoever that bloodlusting woman had been, she was gone. Illiya’s drug had worn off, leaving her nauseated and shaking somewhere in the middle of the desert road between temple and port city.
Talis sat with her arms wrapped around herself as the litter bounced along. Ankle-deep in the bodies of her alien travel companions.
In the span of a single breath Talis cursed Illiya’s name along with Onaya Bone’s (because, really, what was the goddess going to do to her that she hadn’t already?). And especially, she cursed her own.
She didn’t think she had killed them. Remembered sapphire blue blood dripping from vicious dagger tips. The hands that gripped the ornate blades had been dark-skinned and talon-tipped. Not hers.
But that mattered little. Talis was the one who would emerge from the litter in front of the alien starship with its dead officers.
Then a wave hit her. Desolation. Aching emptiness.
Silus Cutter is dead.
And she was kneeling among his murderers.
Disgust, rage, grief. They pushed up through her throat like the steam through a constricted boiler valve, and she let out another wail, half scream and half prayer. She clutched at her prayerlocks with both hands and tugged, harder and harder, as if by that motion of worship she could bring a dead god back into existence.
Something touched her arm and she screamed, now in terror.
From the pile of tangled limbs, Scrimshaw reached out xist hand in a silent plea. Blood, dark in the curtained litter, welled up and seeped from a jagged wound across the front of xist torso. The strike xe’d earned in protecting xist captain, a dagger slash that was angled wrong for the killing blow. It had destroyed xist carapace but left xin alive.
Talis panicked. Relief that the murders that would be laid at her feet were lessened by one collided with the impulse to crush xist head under her boot.
“Sneak,” hissed xist voice in that awful accent, barely audible. Spoken with wrenching effort. Here at the moment when she has to decide xist fate, xe chooses that word.
She pressed back, as far from xin as the confines of the litter would allow.
“You lied to us,” she said.
Her throat was on fire. Her arm hurt where the swirling lines of Onaya Bone’s mark was seared into her flesh. The skin was red, almost purple, and the slightest turn of her wrist or bend of the elbow hurt like hell.
Scrimshaw laid xist head down, weak. Xist cheek rested on the leg of the former Representative of Commerce. Blood soaked the delicate veil.
“Withheld the truth,” xe said. Xist nictitating eyelids blinked slowly, and did not fully open again.
Talis glared at xin. “Whatever you call it,” she said through clenched teeth. “You got what you deserve.”
“We all do…” Xe paused for a moment, resting. “. . . what we must to survive. Act for what we believe is the greater good of our people.”
Sometimes, she thought. And other times we act selfishly and court disaster.
She’d almost sold out her world for a million meaningless presscoins. If she couldn’t get that ring back, it was as good as done. But how in five hells was she going to manage that?
Scrimshaw pushed xist-self up from the floor of the litter, sat up as straight as xe could, and leaned back against the seat opposite Talis. A fresh flow of blood spilled over the edges of xist wound.
“Finish me.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“You won’t kill me?”
She considered. “No. At least not yet. You may have value as a hostage.”
Xe gave a sharp coughing rasp. It was a rueful laugh, which brought more blood out of xist wound.
“I have no value at all, damaged as I am.”
“You’ll heal.”
“I will scar.”
Xe held xist hands out, away from the wound. It was a nasty crack in xist carapace, along the middle of xist torso where the heart might have been if xist organs were arranged at all like those of Peridot’s people. But apparently the Yu’Nyun heart hid elsewhere. All the same, the damage was extreme, the carapace plating broken off, leaving a wide expanse of ragged blue flesh. A scar was guaranteed.
“The Yu’Nyun do not accept an imperfect being. This scar will remain with me. Ruin my future molts. I will be branded with this damage if I survive. I
