Sweep in Peace

Chapter Fifteen

The full enormity of my task mugged me right outside the Merchants’ door. I made it midway down the curving staircase and sat down on the stone steps. How the hell was I going to fix this?

I wished desperately, with all the intensity of a terrified five-year-old in trouble, that my parents were here. I wanted advice. I needed reassurance. What do I do, Mom? Dad? How do I handle this? They all want peace but can’t bring themselves to actually agree to it, and now Sean will die on some hellish planet fighting a war he never wanted to win. He’d signed his life away to save me. Looking into his eyes was like watching ashes rise from a funeral pyre. The vampires hid in their rooms, the otrokars were getting ready to leave, and the Merchants had tried to poison me.

How do I fix this mess…

I wanted to rage. I was so angry, and I’d been keeping it inside me for so long. All the sources of my fury, all the people who’d caused it, they were my guests. They’d lied to me, they’d appealed to my kindness and then taken advantage of it, they’d insulted me, they’d treated me like I was an idiot, and they’d tried to murder me. It was my duty to keep them safe. It was the very essence of who I was, but universe help me, I wanted to collapse the inn on top of them and bury them. It would make me happy.

A pressure built in my chest, a dense, insistent ache. A tear wet my cheek, made of distilled stress. I fought it back, but the pressure ground on me from the inside. I was ready to burst. Either I cried now or I forced it down, which meant I would have to cry later, probably at exactly the wrong moment.

I was alone. Nobody would hear.

I took a deep, shuddering breath and let it go. The dam inside me broke. All my stress and pain came out with the flood of tears. I cried and cried, and my sobs sounded like snarls. I cried because I didn’t know what to do, because I’d almost died, because the anger inside me tore at my soul, because Sean had sacrificed himself for me, and because I wanted my parents to hug me.

Gradually my sobs began to die down. I felt tired but light. My head was clear.

A thin tendril slid out of the wall and brushed my cheek. I looked at it. A tiny white bud formed on the tip of the thin branch and opened into a little star of a flower with tiny turquoise stamens in the middle. A faint, honey-sweet aroma drifted up.

The poor inn was trying to make me feel better.

I inhaled the aroma. It washed through me, sweet and delicate. That’s right. I was an innkeeper. I had seen the universe and survived it. I would survive this too. I would fix this.

I stroked the branch with my fingers and whispered, “Thank you.”

If only all of them were as sensitive as Gertrude Hunt. The inn always felt what I felt…

It hit me like a freight train. George, you bastard. You conniving, manipulating bastard.

He knew. The Arbitrators’ database was one of the most comprehensive in the entire galaxy. He did his research, figured it out, and then he set about finding an innkeeper he could manipulate into doing it. He must’ve approached some of us straight on, which is why everyone turned him down. No innkeeper would do this unless their back was against the wall, and mine was.

Hell, he told me exactly what he intended to do during our very first conversation at the inn. I just hadn’t understood it. He’d laid it out and now it all made sense.

Was Gertrude Hunt even strong enough? Was I strong enough?

I needed information. I had only seen it done once in my whole life, and that was when my mother used our inn to get a murderer to confess. There had to have been others. I got up and went down into my lab.

Two hours later, I had my answers. The good news was that Gertrude Hunt was definitely powerful enough to handle it. The inn’s roots were deep. It was possible. But it would have to go through me. I was the weakest link in this chain. As long as I held up long enough, it was possible. My books didn’t cover the past eighty years, but they did reach back three centuries from that point. The bad news was that four out of six innkeepers who’d tried it during that time went mad in the process.

Lousy odds.

I tried desperately to find another way. Any other way at all. I came up empty. It was this or failure.

If I did it, I would have to do it fast. The otrokars would leave tomorrow evening, and everything had to be ready by then. All of my guests would actively resist it too. All the favors I’d collected wouldn’t be enough. I had to restore my influence and authority as an innkeeper, or they would never submit to the process. Right now I was an innkeeper who’d been poisoned in my own inn, like a bartender who got his ass kicked in his own bar. I had to solve my own poisoning, hit them with it fast, and then dump the rest on them before they had a chance to really think about the possible consequences.

The identity of the poisoner wasn’t the problem. I could assemble all the Merchants together, turn out the lights, and the guilty party would light up like a Christmas tree. But that wasn’t impressive. I had to figure out who had done it and why so the big reveal would be an icing on the cake.

Twenty-one centuries ago Lucius Cassius, censor and consul of Rome, had asked, “Cui bono?” To whose benefit? Every crime had come to pass because someone had something to gain by it, whether it was money, fame, or emotional satisfaction. I had to figure out who would benefit from my death.

I found a pen and a piece of paper and began writing my thoughts down.

Guests who wanted peace had nothing to gain. If I died, the negotiations would end. This included the Arbitrator. His ultimate goal was peace as well.

Guests who wanted war had nothing to gain either. The negotiations were in shambles as it was, and my death, while it definitely would put a final nail in the coffin of peace talks, carried risks. It would be investigated, and the guilty party would be barred from Earth. Why risk it when the summit had broken down so completely?

The Holy Anocracy had no reason to want me dead. First, Arland and Lady Isur liked me. I was an instrument of Robart’s punishment shortly after his arrival, but he had much bigger concerns right now. I wasn’t directly involved in the brawl that took place in the dining hall either.

The otrokars owed me a favor, but it wasn’t enough of a burden to risk my death, especially not so obviously, by serving me tea. Not to mention that sharing tea was a sacred tradition. Poisoning it spat on one of the cornerstones of their society.

The Merchants owed me a favor too, and more importantly, they wanted Sean to sign away his life. But Nuan Cee had no way of knowing that Sean would offer to trade his life for mine. We’d had no contact in the past six months, except for that one time at Wilmos’s shop. Sean never reached out to me, never sent me any letters, and never expressed any feelings for me. The only way Nuan Cee would be aware of Sean’s possible motive for sacrifice would be if Sean told him that he cared for me. I hadn’t known Sean for very long, but the few days that we did spend together put us through a pressure cooker and I knew him well. Sean wouldn’t share his feelings. If he truly loved me, he would keep it secret.

I stopped and squeezed my eyes shut. Sean Evans had traded his life for mine. That probably meant he loved me. Okay, I would have to deal with that later. Not now. Now I had to save him.

I looked at my paper. Unless Sean confessed his love for me to Nuan Cee in a heart-to-heart talk—and Sean just wasn’t that kind of a guy—the Merchant had nothing to gain through my death. Even if Sean had betrayed his feelings somehow, there still wasn’t any guarantee that putting me in danger would get the Merchants their lifetime contract. If I did die and the Merchants’ involvement was discovered, the Nuan family would be barred from Earth, and that was a hefty price tag. Killing me simply didn’t make financial sense.

I stared at my paper. Nobody had anything to gain from my dying. I was an innkeeper, a neutral party. It’s not like I was some criminal mastermind or a former tyrant with a constellation of bounties on my head…

Oh.

Well. That made complete sense.

I walked into the kitchen wearing my innkeeper robe. Beast shot out from under the table and bounced around my feet. She must’ve abandoned Sean, because he was alone in his room. Orro slumped motionless in his chair. He saw me, and then my world turned dark and furry, and powerful limbs squeezed all the air out of my lungs.

“Let her go, dear,” Caldenia called out. “You will crush her.”

Orro released me, and I sucked in a hoarse breath. Quillonian hugs weren’t for people with weak bones.

“Wonderful to see you moving around,” Caldenia said.

Orro retreated to the chair and turned away, suddenly embarrassed.

“Did you save the kettle?” I asked.

Her Grace raised her eyebrows. “Do you take me for an amateur?”

She stepped to the island, where a cake stand waited covered by a metal hood, and lifted the cover. The kettle, still filled with ruby tea, waited on the stand.

“Sadly, we are still unable to identify the poison,” Caldenia said. “Orro offered to taste the tea, but of course the Arbitrator refused to allow him to put himself in danger. But the Khanum provided us with another pot and I can tell you that there are definite chemical differences between the two liquids.”

“So the entire kettle was poisoned?” Just as I thought.

“It appears to be so. This was either very calculated or extremely sloppy.”

Or due to inexperience or desperation. “Thank you.”

“Whatever I can do to help, dear.”

I went to George’s quarters and knocked on the door. He opened it. Behind him Sophie sat on the couch next to Gaston. Jack leaned against the wall in his favorite pose, one foot propping him up.

“I know,” I told George.

An understanding showed in his eyes. “It is the only way,” he told me.

“You are despicable.”

“I will have to live with that,” he said.

“Yes, you will. We’ll revisit this later. I need to know when the Merchants were notified that the peace summit would be held here, in Gertrude Hunt.”

“On 2032, Standard,” he said.

The Standard galactic year had five hundred “days” of twenty-five “hours” each. The days were divided into four “seasons,” each a hundred and twenty-five days long. The first of the four digits identified the season, the next three identified the day. Today was 2049 Standard. “You didn’t give them much warning.”

“No,” George said.

“Good. I will be back in a couple of hours. Keep the peace while I am gone.”

“Where are you going?” Gaston called out.

“To see the weapon merchant,” I told him and shut the door.

Wilmos’s shop was an island of calm in the chaos of Baha-char. As I stepped into its cool depth, the soft, lilting melody of a now-dead planet wound about me like fragrant smoke from an incense burner. Gorvar, Wilmos’s huge lupine monster, lay on the floor, sprawled on a pelt of long golden fur that no doubt once belonged to some ferocious creature. Gorvar glanced at me with his orange eyes but decided moving wasn’t worth the trouble. I didn’t present enough of a threat.

Wilmos emerged from the back room, wiping his hands with a rag.

“You sent him to Nexus.”

“I’ve been expecting this conversation.” Wilmos pointed at a horseshoe-shaped couch. “Let’s sit.”

I sat. “You said he was your life’s work. Then you sent him to Nexus to die.”

Wilmos growled under his breath. Yellow light rolled over his irises. “I didn’t send him. I tried to talk him out of it.”

“Not hard enough.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered. It was the impossible job. The one that killed every creature that took it. He had to have it.”

“Why?”

Wilmos sighed. “It’s complicated.”

“Try me.”

The old warrior leaned forward, his eyes dark. “Soldiers aren’t born. They are made. Under the right conditions, most people can be forged into soldiers. They follow orders, they respect the chain of command, and when occasion calls for it, they will perform heroic deeds for the good of the many. But at heart those soldiers hope there is no war. Given a chance, they prefer to avoid combat and, if forced to go into battle, they fight so they can eventually go home. Sean isn’t just a soldier. He is a warrior. War is a thing he does as naturally as you breathe. It draws him like flame pulls the night insects to itself.”

And then they die, burned by the flame. “But why this war? Why not any other war, the kind with an expiration date?”

“Because he wanted the roughest job I had, and when I offered it to him, it had an expiration date. A six-month tour. He was supposed to come home ages ago.”

Wilmos dragged his hand across his face. “As to why he did it, there are many factors. His parents are one. He wanted to know that he could stand shoulder to shoulder with the two people who sacrificed so much to bring him into this world. In some way, if he proved to himself and to them that he could cut it in the roughest war, it would mean that everything they went through to give him life was worthwhile. He wanted to make them proud. His own sense of self-worth was a factor. He wanted to be able to look his reflection in the eye and prove that all his skills and power meant something. You want to be the best innkeeper you can be. He wants to be the best soldier he can be.”

Wilmos shrugged his massive shoulders. “I was a contributing factor to this. I told him to his face that he was the pinnacle of my work. That’s a hell of a lot of expectation to put on someone, and if I wasn’t old and stupid, I would’ve recognized this. He wanted to show me what he was capable of. Sean hates to disappoint. You were a factor.”

“Me?”

“I asked him if he was leaving anyone behind. He said he’d met a girl with stardust on her robe, and when he looked into her eyes, he saw the universe looking back.”

“He said that?”

“He did. The blood of Auul flows through him. We were warriors and poets, often both. I asked him if he thought this girl would wait for him, and he said he wasn’t sure.”

Wilmos sighed. “How do you think he felt when he met you? If I give you an obscure sentient species, I bet you can tell me their favorite color. You walk the streets of Baha-char and bargain with Merchants, you open doors to planets thousands of light-years away, and you use complicated technology like you grew up with it, because you did. He knew nothing except what he’d learned on Earth. You weren’t equals.”

“But I never wanted him to…”

“I know. He knows too. He wanted to learn everything in a hurry. He learned, all right. If you ever have trouble with an armored rover or your particle cannon, he’ll fix it for you.”

“I don’t want him to fix my rover. I want him to come home.”

Wilmos dragged his hand across his face again, as if trying to wipe away the pressure. “He wants to come home too. But he was designed to withstand a siege and protect civilians, and everything he has known since he was born—his parents’ moral code, the military training, and his service—all of it reinforced that core programming. That idiot Nuan Cee loaded Nexus with exiles. There are whole families there, hiding out in the colony bunkers. Sean couldn’t walk away from them. Biological programming isn’t everything, but you can’t discount it either. In this case, his programming aligns with his ethics. That’s a powerful urge.”

“Sean Evans won’t walk away from someone who needs his protection.” I had learned that when our neighbors were attacked.

“Yes,” Wilmos said. “It’s about doing what he believes is right. Beings depend on him for their very survival. He already proved whatever he set out to prove. He is the best there is. He lasted a year and a half on a planet where seasoned mercenaries died in days. He doesn’t have the manpower to win, but he sure as hell isn’t backing down. He is what we envisioned when we created his parents.”

I exhaled. “He traded a lifetime contract to save me from dying when I was poisoned.”

Wilmos grimaced. “It doesn’t surprise me.”

“It surprised the hell out of me. Wilmos, we spent a week together. One week. We flirted. We kissed once. Where is this… devotion coming from?”

The veteran werewolf studied me for a long moment.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m trying to figure out a way to explain it and not screw things up between the two of you. I’ve done enough damage as is.”

“Why don’t you just say it straight?”

Wilmos took a deep breath. “You’re young.” He made some uncomfortable motions with his hands, as if he were trying to juggle something and failing. “Just… try not to take it as a blow to your ego. When the night is long and dark, you picture dawn in your head and you wait for it. It sustains you and gives you hope. In a war you search through your memories and you find that one thing, that anchor that tethers you to home. You are that to him. You are everything that is clean and peaceful and beautiful. You are someone who would cry if she heard he died. Soldiers do this. Sailors and long-range space crews too. Men, women, doesn’t matter. We all wish for someone at home who might be waiting for us. It’s not always fair to those who stay behind, but that’s the way it is.”

Gorvar rose and trotted over and Wilmos patted the big wolf’s head.

“Sean is no fool. He knows there wasn’t anything solid there, but he thinks there might be if he ever made it off Nexus. He thinks there is a chance. When he fought his way through that dark night, covered in gore and with no end in sight, he thought of you. He thought of coming home and seeing you smile. You are worth living for. You kept him going. He couldn’t let you die, Dina. I knew this was a long shot. I hoped that if worse came to worst, you’d let him down gently so he had some piece of a heart left. Now it doesn’t matter anymore. He will go to his fate knowing that he kept you out of harm’s way, and he will be perfectly content.”

“He won’t be going anywhere. I’m going to save him,” I told him. I would deal with being Sean’s dawn later. Now I had to keep him alive.

“You can’t.” Pain brimmed in Wilmos’s eyes. “The only way to save him is to bring about peace on Nexus. It is impossible. I know the Arbitrators are trying, but it can never be. They’ve been enemies for far too long. That’s why the Office of Arbitration gave it to some greenhorn Arbitrator nobody ever heard of.”

Nice to know this was George’s first try. I leaned forward. “You said yourself I have stardust on my robe and the universe in my eyes. I want to save Sean. After I save him, I’ll decide if I am going to give him a chance or not. Right now that’s still up in the air.”

Wilmos’s eyebrows crept up.

I met his gaze. “I’m not an angel who will soothe all his wounds, I’m not his dawn, and I’m not his perfect sweetheart who is waiting for him to come home from the war. He’ll figure it out very quickly, if he doesn’t know that already, and then he will have to decide if he wants to let go of that and work on getting to know the real me. But none of this can happen until I pry him out of the Merchants’ contract. Are you going to help me or not?”

Wilmos stared at me for a long time. “What do you need?”

I passed him a piece of paper. “There are many bounties on this person.”

Wilmos glanced at the name and raised his eyebrows. “Yes.”

“I need to know if any of those contracts came off the market after 2032 Standard.”

“I can check that.”

“And I need the psy-booster.”

Wilmos leaned back. “The psy-booster has to be fed with life energy.”

“I know.”

“It’s agony. One of the worst pains known to a human.”

“I know.”

Wilmos thought it over. “Okay. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

So did I.

After the heat of Baha-char, the cool interior of the inn was more than welcome. And I could finally stop rolling the bag. The psy-booster wasn’t something I wanted close to my skin, so Wilmos’s dealer had packed it into a large wheeled bag. The bag was cumbersome and made for an easy target. I had dragged it through a mile’s worth of Baha-char streets, worrying that some enterprising thief was going to make a play for it. But I was finally home. I strolled through the hallway with the bag rolling behind me, and opened a screen to George. “Meet me in the grand ballroom.”

He nodded.

This wasn’t going to be a pleasant conversation, but I didn’t really care.

I walked to the back of the ballroom. Where would be a good place…? To the side? No, I’d want them to be in a circle around me. I stopped in the center where the mosaic floor offered a depiction of Gertrude Hunt circled by a stylized broom. This had to be the best spot.

A hole opened in the center of the mosaic, small, but growing larger and larger, swallowing the mosaic pieces. That was okay. I would redo it later.

George walked into the ballroom.

“So this is your first assignment,” I said.

“Yes.”

The hole was now three feet wide. Good enough. I raised my hand, coaxing one of the inn’s bigger roots out. Thinner roots wouldn’t work. They were capillaries, and I needed a nice thick vein, a direct access to the heart of the inn. This would take a while.

“Was this supposed to be a feather in your cap? Your first assignment, which you must accomplish without any regard to the cost to everyone else?”

“Feathers are for people who seek recognition,” George said. “Recognition does not matter to me.”

“People don’t seem to matter to you either. You came here and appealed to my trust. You pretended to know nothing about the inns or how they work. Then you systematically manipulated events and chipped away at my resolve until you brought me to this point.”

“You wouldn’t have reached it unless you were desperate,” he said.

“Yes. Did you know Sean was Turan Adin and he and I have a history?”

“Yes. There was a chance that his presence would give you that final push. Nuan Cee was growing increasingly frantic. His back is against the wall. Both the Holy Anocracy and the Horde are martial cultures, and the lees are not. The prolonged war is harder on them than on any of the others. Ancestral worship is so ingrained in the lees’ society they’ve killed each other over the privilege of taking care of their elders. Nuan Cee is half-exile; his obsession with forging the cast-outs into a clan has dominated his business strategies for the past twenty years. He did take the time to cover his tracks, but when you examine his financial maneuvering with his ancestry in mind, the pattern emerges quite readily. When he finally acquired the rights to Nexus, it must’ve felt like a triumph. Finally he could make his people whole. He jumped the gun with colonization. It was quite possibly the most emotion-driven decision of his entire career. Then he saw it all fall apart.”

“He put his own people in danger.”

George shook his head. “He thought he was doing the right thing. But without peace, there is no clan, no shrine, no closure. He wanted to bring Turan Adin into the negotiations because he is their biggest weapon. I just needed to give him an excuse. With the negotiations breaking down and the Khanum’s eldest son having died on Nexus in the past year, she would need the Autumn Festival. It was her only chance to see her son again. She would do almost anything for it. So I suggested to Robart that sometimes people do not truly understand the situation until they had a chance to see it through their own eyes. His budding alliance with House Meer was tenuous; he was blinded by grief over his beloved. House Meer understood this and placed very little confidence in him, so when he offered them a seat at the metaphorical and actual table, they jumped on the chance and sent three of their finest to ruin the negotiations before Robart came to his senses.”

“When?”

George arched his eyebrows. “When what?”

“When did you suggest that to Robart?”

“On the second day of the peace summit.”

I stared at him.

“It was the kind of seed that needed to be planted in advance. Robart is a sensitive man, possessing an unfortunate combination of nobility of spirit and a certain inborn belief in the fairness of the world. His instincts tell him that if only he does the right thing and makes sure that everyone around him does the right thing, life will respond in kind and reward him for his efforts. He is a more sophisticated version of the proverbial knight in shining armor who believes that if he slays the evil dragon, he will rescue a beautiful princess who will love him forever and they will live happily ever after in their castle. He worked so hard, he had fought his way past the dragon, but his princess is dead and his castle stands hollow and empty. He’s come to learn that life is a bitter bitch. She is inherently unfair. She took his happy future and crushed it, grinding it into dust. That realization is too much for him; he is emotionally volatile, swinging from one extreme to the other. A man in that emotional condition isn’t able to make quick, reasoned decisions. I had to give him time to process the nudge, until his emotions finished churning. Meanwhile, the interaction with his opponents began to foster some sympathy in him. He had come here with the desire to burn everyone and everything to the ground, and yet here he was, feeling compassion toward his enemy. This created a conflict within him, one he wasn’t capable of resolving, so he did what I suspected he would do—he reached out to his allies, hoping that they would assess the situation and point him in the right direction, eliminating his doubts. He came to the inevitable conclusion that the Meer should witness the summit for themselves.”

He couldn’t possibly be human. No human being could calculate the odds that far in advance.

“The rest fell into place,” George said. “The poisoning was a wild card, but it worked in our favor. Given a choice, I wouldn’t have poisoned you, Dina. It was too risky. I need you for the final act to this drama, and I am genuinely fond of you. For all my ruthlessness, my friends are very dear to me. That’s why I have so few. I try not to form friendships.”

“Because you might have to kill people you know?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

A thick root slid out of the opening in the floor, wrapped in a network of thinner shoots. I let it rise about three feet and opened the bag. A round white jewel sat inside, as big as a soccer ball and rippling with all the fire of a diamond. The thinner roots bent toward it, scooped up the gem, and pulled it to the main shoot, wrapping tightly around it, forming a cocoon. The psy-booster was in place. Hopefully Gertrude Hunt would bond with it in the next few hours.

“I understand the Khanum, Robart, and Nuan Cee.” I shook my head. “I still don’t understand you.”

George sighed, his handsome face resigned. “Very well. I owe you that much.”

He raised his walking stick and gently tapped it on the floor. A huge projection burst out of the top of the cane, curving in front of us, taking up almost an entire half of the ballroom. Jagged mountains thrust through the barren brown and green soil, their yellow cliffs reflecting the light of a green sickly sun, puncturing the sky like an infected wound. Nexus. Hot during the day, cold at night, ugly at all times, yet hiding immense mineral wealth just beneath its crust.

“I was five when my grandfather died,” George said. His voice was hollow. “He was a pirate, a swordsman, and a vagabond. He told great stories. He was the best grandfather a child could have. Our mother was dead, our father had abandoned us, so it was just my older sister, Jack, me, and my grandparents. So when he died, I was very sad.”

On the screen George walked into the desolation of Nexus. He wore plain pants and a simple white shirt. His loose blond hair streamed around him. His face was serene and so beautiful… He was almost angelic, a strange haunting mirage conjured up by a planet wishing for something other than a wasteland.

George’s voice was soft, intimate, the kind of voice that reached deep into your soul. “I was so sad that I called him back to life. Everyone thinks the dead rise as mindless monsters. It is always that way for necromancers. The dead rise without the burdens of their past lives, without a mind, and without pain.”

I sensed what was coming and braced myself.

“The thing that came back wasn’t my grandfather. It had claws and fangs. It devoured stray dogs. But it could speak and it knew my name. It remembered me. It remembered how the man it used to be died. It remembered the pain of his passing and it mourned the love he had lost.”

The other George kept walking. The jagged cliffs parted and a vast valley, its floor rough and uneven, stretched before him. He was utterly alone.

“When the Office of Arbitration gave this assignment to me, I reviewed all the files and found I couldn’t understand this war. Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of strategy and tactics could see that it was unwinnable by any of the factions. It devoured resources, time, and lives, and the longer it went on, the weaker everyone involved became. Why would these three nations, all pragmatic, all used to weighing the odds in battle and in trade, hurl themselves at each other, dying for years in a war they couldn’t win? Why continue this senseless slaughter at such a terrible cost? It made no sense.”

On the projection George stopped. His blue eyes blazed with a pure white light. He raised his right hand, his fingers pointing up like claws.

“I couldn’t understand it, so I went to Nexus.”

A wind stirred his hair, growing stronger, tugging at his clothes.

“You see,” he said, his intimate voice filled with regret, “the living lie. They can’t help it. They lie out of kindness, necessity, and self-interest. But the dead always tell the truth.”

On the screen the ground broke around George’s feet, as if the dry crust of Nexus’s desert turned liquid.

“So I went to Nexus and I asked them.”

Bodies rose, some rotting, some skeletal, but all reaching to him, hundreds and hundreds of corpses, their limbs held out as if pleading, and then I heard it, a muted, desperate wail, coming from hundreds of creatures at once, so terrible I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears and run.

“They say the dead have no memories and know no pain.” George’s voice was barely above a whisper, but somehow it was louder than the pleas of the corpses. “It’s not that way for me.”

The dead cried out, louder and louder, grabbing at George’s clothes, begging. George stood in the center of this maelstrom, his eyes brimming with pain. Tears wet his face. He wept and the dead cried with him.

“I understand them now. They fight because they cannot stop,” he said, his voice somehow reaching me despite the wails. “They have buried their friends and lovers in that ground. It is watered with their blood, and they have nothing to show for it. The idea that those they lost died for nothing is too painful and frightening to contemplate. It’s not a war of the living, Dina. It’s the War of the Dead. Trust me when I say this: the dead do not care. I can call on their last memories and feelings, but they’re not the same beings they were during their lives. They are echoes of the dying minds. They have no soul.”

On the screen white lightning tore out of George. The corpses fell as one. He stood alone.

“Those who remain have forgotten they are alive. They think they have more in common with their fallen than with their enemy. Nothing could be further from the truth. I know the difference between life and death. Two live beings from the opposite boundaries of the galaxy have infinitely more in common with each other than the living and the dead from the same family.”

The real George, the one next to me, touched his cane, and the projection vanished.

“The war on Nexus has to stop,” he said. “It won’t be ended by noble means, because if good intentions, compassion, and meaningful dialogue could’ve solved this, peace would’ve been reached already. Sometimes to stop something this terrible, you have to do something equally terrible in return at a great personal cost, and that terrible thing can’t be done by one of the principals in this conflict. They must be able to walk away clean, united and guiltless, or the peace won’t last. Someone must remind them that they are still alive. Someone must bear the blame and the rage that will bring. I am that someone. I take full responsibility for tomorrow. I forced it to happen. I’m sorry that you must also be involved. It is unfair that I used you. Nobody will ever know what you have done or what it will cost you. Your name and mine will be forgotten quickly, but we will both know and remember what we have done and why it had to be done. The psy-booster runs on magic. I will fuel it for you tomorrow.”

He turned and walked away, leaving me alone on the mosaic floor.

A while ago I told Sophie that George was merciless. She told me that he was compassionate and merciless at once, a contradiction. I understood now. There was no contradiction. George was merciless to himself. At the end of this, everyone, including me, would look for someone to blame for the pain and the suffering that lay ahead. We’d need a target, and he’d willingly painted a bull’s-eye on his chest. He took it all on himself, because the dead wept on Nexus when he returned their memories. He would take all the guilt and carry it away with him, absolving me because he had forced my hand. He had even done it a moment ago when he told me he had used me.

I would have to watch him very carefully tomorrow. He would give as much of himself to the psy-booster as he could. I didn’t want George to die.