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I can’t kill her.
But I can’t let her live, either. Not in this state of perpetual triumph. Not in my orbit. Not anywhere near me. Ever again.
“You are not coming back to my ship.”
“Malik will want to see me.”
“I’ll tell Malik what you did, and I’ll tell him where I’ve put you.”
“You can’t put me anywhere. I’m the one in charge, Shah. We’re on a Colony ship, if you haven’t noticed. I’m the one who executed this plan, flawlessly. You’ll do what I say now.”
I laugh in her face. It’s not the reaction she expected.
“Take this seriously, Shah. I have more power than you know. I’m linked into the Colony and the outlaw world.”
“One of those things is true,” I acknowledge. “You have no place in my world anymore. You deceived me. You got rid of Dreamy. You also got good people killed and made your brother mourn your death. You will never be welcome on my ship again. I am certain that everybody who hears this story will want you as dead as you should be. You got what you wanted, but you burned the rest of your life with it, Zeki. There’s no coming back even if I wanted you to. And I do not want you to.”
I almost feel sorry for her. At first, I was furious, of course. I wanted revenge, until I realized the depth of her misery and how truly she has fucked up. If news of her survival becomes widespread, she will be hunted to the ends of the universe by every criminal she has ever been in contact with, and they number in the thousands.
“What do you think will happen when the friends and family of Tolsten, Vortis, and Mhak discover they died so you could attempt to get revenge on me?”
She looks at me blankly. Zeki is not stupid, but she is the kind of supremely selfish that means she doesn’t consider the ramifications of other people’s emotions. It’s not that she doesn’t care. It’s that she’s nearly incapable of caring. That is why I did not pursue a relationship with her. What’s missing from Zeki can’t be put back. I never thought she’d be this dangerous, but here we are.
“What are you going to do with me then, Shah? Still can’t kill me?”
She’s smiling as her plan crumbles around her, so stuck on her triumph that she can’t even react properly to the fact that she’s destroyed everything she ever cared about in order to get back at me for what she thought was an unreasonable rejection on my part.
“I’ll find something to do with you,” I tell her. “Don’t worry about that. Get in the shuttle.”
She gets in the shuttle, because nobody is more stupid than the person who thinks they have already won.
* * *
Malik is still on the bridge when I return. I kept the comms off, not wanting Zeki to start squawking over them. She wants a scene and a big homecoming. She’s not going to get what she bargained for.
Having secured her cursing form inside the shuttle capsule, locking it from the outside and removing the propulsion plugs so it cannot be started, I make my way up to the bridge.
“I am sorry, brother,” Malik says. “I know that can’t have been easy. But they’re gone. So maybe this is all finally over.”
“It’s not over.”
He cocks his head at me. “What do you mean?”
I look at Malik, my oldest friend, a man who has suffered losses greater than I could have imagined up until this very point. What I am about to tell him will destroy him all over again.
“I have good news and bad news.”
12
Dreamy
The authorities take me away from Shah, handling me not roughly, but indifferently. It wasn’t easy to do this. I wanted to cling to him and beg him to save me, but I couldn’t put everybody at risk just so I could have what I wanted.
I can already feel the walls of the Colony closing in around me as they lead me away. This ship feels just like the factory did, calm and mechanical and overwhelmingly beige. I want to scream and cry. I want to break down, but I can’t. I don’t know why. It feels as though I am shutting down, as if all the parts of me that make me a person are hiding away to protect themselves.
I stay quiet because I do not want to disturb the one I love. I do not want his last memory of me to be of pain and chaos. But internally I have never felt this much pain. It feels as though I am being ripped away from the one place in the entire universe where I make sense, my one source of love. Everything outside it is cold and unforgiving and mechanical.
“You’re going to be debriefed, Unit 4392,” the Colony personnel holding me says. “Answer every question honestly and fully.”
