”High Majesty.” Sykora recovers first in the wake of the Empress’s doleful pronouncement. Her rivals remain stunlocked; Dantia with dizzy delight, Narika with staring intensity. “I—I must protest strenuously.”

“Must you?” The Empress smiled humorlessly. “I suppose you must.”

“The tenets are sound, High Majesty. Have you read the report?”

“I have.”

“Not just my document,” Sykora says. “The infortunity report, I mean.”

“That, too.”

“Then you know the calamity that awaits Maekyon on the path we’ve set before it.”

“It is a grave crisis, indeed,” the Empress says. “Made graver by the presence of this Penitent who you have thus far proven unable to satisfactorily address.”

“Unable to—I fought the Penitent. I beat her. I took the—” Sykora’s grip has tightened into a choking claw in Grant’s hand. “I solved the mistake that you made.”

“Dantia,” the Empress says. “You will disconnect at this juncture.”

“Just now? When it was getting good?” Dantia isn’t even bothering to hide her glee. “Cousin Sykora’s head is filling with so much blood I can’t imagine you’ll even need a passphrase to blow it up.”

“Disconnect now,” the Empress says. “Or be castigated.”

Dantia’s sneer takes on water, but she affixes it back on in the moment before her feed cuts out.

“What about me, Majesty?” Narika asks.

“You remain,” the Empress says. “Observe in silence, and think, as I deal with this situation, on how you will address Maekyon. It is, as we have said, in crisis. I am not blind, Cousin Sykora, or foolish. But by approaching me in this willful fashion, with this protean plan, you have confirmed for me a fear I have had for some time. You are not fit to take Maekyon.”

“I…” Sykora’s optimistic bravery siphons through the hole her Empress has punched in her heart. She grasps for it before it’s all gone: “What about this plan is the point of objection? I can fix it—”

“This plan?” The Empress repeats, with incredulity. “This wholesale abandonment of doctrine?”

“You have abandoned doctrine at every turn, High Majesty. You have stripped it away when it no longer served your uses. You have constantly turned to, to wisdom and to boldness and I don’t—” Sykora tries to breathe. She’s shaking so hard. “I will accept that this is some unacceptable rubicon, if that’s your judgment. But I need more of a reason than doctrine.”

“You need a reason? You need nothing, Princess Margrave. Nothing beyond what you have been given, which is the height of profligacy. I have tried to ensure that you remember your place but I have clearly failed, and you are clearly spoiled. The proper course is not to continue giving into your tantrums. I require an unobstructed view and an unfettered hand. Narika will suffice.”

“High Majesty. Please. I know my emotions are…” Sykora looks to Grant with terror and love and apology. “Are… unseemly. I will try to control them. But Maekyon is at stake. The passion I have for the world is why I have done this, why it must be done. Nobody has made so close a study of their people as I have. And now all eyes—all eyes will be on Maekyon. We have a chance to—”

“My decision is final, Sykora.”

“I will obey it. I swear I will. I… I swear I love you and I will obey you. Only tell me why. Tell me plainly and I—I can help, somehow. If to help is to get out of the way, I’ll get out of the way, but surely I can—”

“You know why, Princess Margrave.” There’s an unsteady fissure growing in the Empress’s voice; Grant feels a need to find something to hold onto. “I will not embarrass us, nor bring shame to your sister.”

“Embarrass..?” Sykora’s lip trembles in wounded confusion. “I don’t know what you mean, High Majesty. Please.”

The Empress’s palms slap into the arms of her seat. “You let him dominate you, Sykora!”

Something falls off the highest shelf in Sykora’s mind and shatters irreversibly. Grant sees it happen.

The Empress is on her feet now, pacing. “You prostrate yourself to your Maekyonite and let him leash you like a kindek and fuck you into the floor of your vassal’s guest room. You call him master; you bend for him. You tell him sorry. You, you—” Zithra XIX swallows her rising gorge. “You have made yourself into an alien male’s plaything.”

Sykora’s face burns. “High Majesty,” she mumbles. “I—”

“I pass no moral judgments on your paraphilias.” Zithra battles herself back into calm. “They are… distasteful. But as long as you continued to function to my satisfaction, I was content to turn a blind eye. Now I see I should have intervened earlier. Your sickness has hobbled your judgment. It is crucial that we succeed on Maekyon. I cannot trust its annexation to a woman who spends her nights as a purring pet in the lap of the alien whose home she is expected to conquer.”

Narika is frozen again. Not even blinking this time.

Grant isn’t either. The ways she looked at him. All the worshipful, terrified, joy she showed him when they were together. When she killed her shame and gave herself to him. The lie they told each other: that she could be his, that they could be safe, that he could protect her.

It’s all come back around. It’s all finished.

“I expected great things from you. Great things. God, I hoped the whole firmament for you.” Zithra sighs thunderously; her shoulders droop. “But in granting you these freedoms, I have failed you. You are a fine and capable Princess Margrave despite your disorder, and provided you seek proper psychological care for this deviance, you will not be stripped of rank. But your ascent ends here. You are not my heir, as dearly as I had wished for it. As much as I had hoped, beyond the mounting evidence to the contrary, that you weren’t compromised. That this…” Her lip curls. “This submission was fondness and not weakness. I now see otherwise.”

“How—how—” Sykora blinks rapidly.

“I have ways and agents,” The Empress says. “Did you truly think—”

“How dare you,” Sykora snarls.

Grant’s horrified heart restarts like a paddle-shock. Behind her spindly glasses, Zithra’s eyes bulge.

“Grantyde isn’t—he’s—he’s not a fucking kink, High Majesty.” Sykora is incandescent with rage. “He’s not a disease. He’s the father of my children, he’s the love of my life, he’s—he is the greatest man I have ever known. The greatest person I have ever known. How dare you?”

She barks a laugh, giddy and liberated and terrified.

“Me, his pet? He makes me stronger than I ever imagined myself to be. You could never understand that, you—you lonely, bitter old woman.”

Zithra has ceased pacing. She sits back at her desk. She removes her glasses. “Be astoundingly careful, Sykora of the Black Pike, in the next words you speak to me. Choose as if they were your epitaph.”

“Here, then. I’ll speak slow for the chiseler.” Sykora sounds each word out with scorpion-tail venom. “I do not care if I am disqualified from the Imperial seat because I. Don’t. Want it.”

Her tail latches around Grant’s leg. He wills himself to stillness, to being the anchor she’s always needed him to be.

“Do you know what I saw,” she continues, “when I spoke to your daemon? Do you know what she told me? She—”

“I don’t know and I do not care to know,” Zithra says. “I am not an algorithm and neither are you. This is the real world.”

“She was alone.” Sykora does not relent. “Monstrously alone, in a barren, stripped-out world, with nobody to turn to but great edifices of herself. The environment that fit her best, that kept her going. It had nothing in it but her, and a dead reality to be reshaped by her. You call me sick? That is sickness.”

“You think I wanted that? Or this? You impudent fucking infant?” Zithra stands from her desk again with a swirl of silken sleeves. Her face fills the camera, gaze bulging and furious. “You think I wanted this Empire? I despise this Empire. This firmament-wide mess we made, that I must spend my entire loveless life cleaning up, and you imagine me pleased with this?

“I am standing atop a castle of wickedness,” Zithra says. “And brick by minuscule brick, I am dismantling it, because it must be dismantled, must be stripped to its foundation before we can build something of virtue on its bedrock. I will be cold and in the ground before a yard of it is gone. And if I knock the ghoulish fucking thing over, if I misplace a single stone, then hundreds of billions of innocent lives will be crushed by its collapse. The project of ending the Empire goes beyond my lifetime. It goes beyond my descendant’s lifetimes and their descendants’ lifetimes. And this… this petty, selfish rebellion you flaunt in front of me. This is a sledgehammer where a scalpel must serve.

“You love your husband. You are loyal to your husband. Your husband is a college dropout night janitor. The fact that I have not had him shot is a testament to how worthy a man I find him; and he has many fine qualities; and his love is pure, and his heart is just; and he will never be able to make the decisions that must be made or feel the prudence that must be felt. Never, never, never. And as long as he cannot, nor can you. You are blinded if you cannot see this.”

She stares at her spindly fingers, flexing them as if to watch the thinning skin fold.

“I am older than I have ever been.” Her anger has vented out; her roar is reduced to a croak. “I am more in command of my faculties now than I will ever be again. I decline further. Another generation closer to death. Another generation has grown, and its brightest, most promising prospect has been leashed by a Maekyonite. How deeply, desperately sad.” She looks flatly up into the camera. “How gravely your heart has damaged the Empire’s destiny, Grant Hyde.”

Grant wants to be defiant and brave like Sykora. He stumbles after the feeling—he still hasn’t caught it by the time Zithra moves on from him, and he hates himself for it.

“My hopes that were in you, Black Pike, I now transfer wholly to your sister. The taking of Maekyon, I can no longer trust you with. I lay that at her feet as well.” Zithra nods wearily to Narika. “Earth is yours, Glory Banner. Proceed as you will.”

“Thank you, High Majesty,” Narika says. “Kindly transmit your plans for Maekyon’s mandate in full to my vessel, Black Pike. We will begin to implement them at once.”

The Empress’s frigid fresco cracks all over again. “What.”

“I will require the chance to provide my own input,” Narika says. “But in its broad strokes I see merit in Sykora’s plan, and though Maekyon may now lie within the Glory Banner sector, I intend to aid her in its execution and rule its embassy city in triumvirate with my brother and sister.”

“You cannot,” Zithra says, “be fucking serious.”

“Sykora is blinded by her husband.” Narika is emotionless as a mountainside. “You are blinded by your solitude. I recognize it. I have been the same way. You are suspicious of love. You consider it weakness. Perhaps it is, if Sykora will sacrifice her candidacy for it. Or perhaps it is sanity. I see all that she would surrender to become Empress and I understand entirely why she doesn’t want it.”

Narika plants her fist against her chest.

“But I do,” she says.

Zithra’s picking the pieces of her glare back up and pasting them together. “And yet you proceed with her delusion. Her recklessness.”

“You call it reckless,” Narika says, “because you are afraid. I am not. When I am Empress of Taiikar, I will do what you wish you could.”

“You think I would name you?”

“Yes.”

“You think you can match me.”

“I think I will be better than you,” Narika says. “Is that not the wish of all mothers? To see their children excel themselves?”

Silence.

“That’s what you are,” Narika prompts. “Aren’t you, Mother?”

The Empress rests her face in her hands. “I should have vented that ridiculous pest Inadama into the fucking void the first time I saw her,” she says.

“Probably,” Narika says.

Zithra XIX scowls ferociously from between her fingers. “You materially damage your candidacy with this.”

“Banish Sykora and I from the running, then, and be left with your unadventurous, avaricious vipers,” Narika says. “Throw your hopes behind some spoiled unworthy and watch her ruin your life’s work in a tenday. Or allow my sister and my brother and I what we demand.”

Zithra’s mouth opens, and shuts, and trembles, and then she murmurs, “Fine.”

She cackles, high and cracked.

“Fine. Fine, go do your idiocy. Go with your sister and take your planet if you can. Better this way, I suppose. If it works, perhaps you are worthy, Narika. And if fails and knocks a bloody great hole in the Empire, who cares? I will die and the rest will crumble. And the firmament will burn and belch its ashes over my grave.”

Her hands ball into fists. Her eyes shut. A tear carries her eyeshadow down her cheek.

“We are finished,” she says. “ I am tired.”

She tips her face forward and out of frame. The crown rests askew on the top of her head.

“I am so fucking tired,” she whispers.

Sykora says her first word since the pyrotechnics began: “Mother—”

“I am mother to nothing,” Zithra XIX snaps, reanimated. “Nothing but ruin. Glory to the Empire. Whatever is left of it.”

She stabs a button offscreen, and her image flickers away. The solemn stare of the new ruler of Grant’s world now fills the wall.

“It seems we three are now the future stewards of the most consequential planet on the frontier,” Narika says. “You are invited to the Glory Banner sector, Prince and Princess of the Black Pike, and I suggest you make haste. Let’s figure out how to save Maekyon and the Empire with it.”