Cassiopeia stared at the red dot, unblinking.

“The doctors have done a masterful job,” Alestra said, though she knew full well that the medical team hadn’t even tried to save a fraction of Cassiopeia’s broken mind. Ultimately, though, her shattered consciousness didn’t matter—brain death was a fate she deserved, after what she allowed Acidalia, and subsequently the Revolution, to get away with. And, even if by some miracle there was a small component of her personality trapped in that prison of metal and flesh, it had no control. Thanks to Dr. Caecelia’s work, Cassiopeia’s body and most of her brain was nothing but a puppet.

She was one of the lucky ones—at least, according to the neurosurgeons. Her death had probably been fast; her head had been bludgeoned with a blaster gun, her skull crushed, her brain turned into a useless mass of chemical-coated gelatin. After the first blow, she’d probably been unable to feel a thing. Whatever part of her brain that processed the sensation of pain had almost certainly been destroyed. That was good for her; if Alestra thought she was capable of feeling anything, she’d have been put through the same torture as her idiotic comrades.

Sixteen men. Alestra had sent sixteen elite assassins, plus a centurion’s worth of soldiers, plus Cassiopeia, and they’d all been so utterly incompetent that Acidalia had gotten away with hardly a scratch, not once, but twice. What was worse was the fact that the first batch of men had lied. They knew Acidalia’s escape would result in severe punishment, so they told Alestra that she was dead, and like a fool, she’d believed them. She should have done a DNA test on the mangled remains they’d shown her. But she believed—or maybe she just wanted to believe—that they were being truthful. In the end, it didn’t matter. Acidalia lived, and the Nova was in danger.

“What the hell were you thinking?” she asked under her breath, though she knew that her question was pointless—there was no way Cassiopeia had enough mental function left to answer it.

With those final words, she turned and left, leaving the shell of Cassiopeia staring at the red dot.

The hallways were suspiciously empty, as they always seemed to be when Alestra was annoyed. She had a nasty temper by her own admission, and her subordinates knew when to avoid getting her attention. It was just as well; she really only wanted to talk to one person at the moment, and anyone else was just a distraction.

She entered the antechamber without knocking. Imperatrices didn’t ask for permission. Kryptos was crouched over his desk amidst a mess of papers and glowing blue holograms, looking at what appeared to be medical reports.

“We have a problem,” he said without turning to look at the open door. “A massive problem.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, what now?” Alestra snapped. “If this is something else about Acidalia—“ Inside, she seethed, knowing she shouldn’t have even asked. Everything was about Acidalia. The little bastard had been nothing but a problem from the second Alestra had seen the + at the corner of the medscanner right under the word gravidam. The girl’s birth had been like opening Pandora’s box. Acidalia had ruined so many things with her very existence—Eleutheria’s future, Aleskynn’s shot at the throne, the only serious relationship Alestra had ever had. And now, apparently, something else on top of all that.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Kryptos said, frowning in a way that suggested he could sense Alestra’s ire. He pulled a hologram out of the air and it materialized into a hard, plastic sheet. Swiveling his desk chair to face the door, he tossed the report to Alestra.

She held it up to her eyes, squinting to see the tiny, luminous numbers. Each figure corresponded to some affliction or illness, all listed in a sidebar. It was a summary of this week’s mortality, a list of dead and dying men in columns and rows. On its own it would have seemed unassuming, but when it was read with the understanding that every number on it was a valuable soldier’s life snuffed out by a traitor, it projected darker energy.

Alestra scanned the list of conditions and the numbers beside them. Initially, they seemed rather ordinary. Amputations, burns, laser wounds, other various injuries from shrapnel, death in combat from unspecified causes. They were tragic inevitabilities, sad but necessary side effects of a military campaign this size. Aside from the deaths, nearly all of them could be fixed easily, whether it be with prosthetics or cybernetics or gene therapy or some other method, and she bore them no mind.

“Keep reading,” Kryptos said, probably realizing that the first half of the report wasn’t very interesting.

Alestra continued to scan the columns. There were secondary infections of all kinds; disgusting to look at, but not too worrisome for anyone but the person experiencing them, and fixed with simple phage therapy or perhaps even antibiotics, if the Medica was old-fashioned enough. Though she felt a pang of sympathy for the two poor men who had managed to contract necrotizing fasciitis and the dozens of others suffering from various other complications of staph bacteria, she knew none of these cases actually mattered in the long run to anyone. She became increasingly irritated as she read more and more data.

“Why are making me read this?” she demanded. “I’m not your secretary, Kryptos.”

“The last row.” He whisked his hand through the air and the blue numbers became larger, shimmering with an incandescent, intimidating glow. Alestra couldn’t even determine what the figure was because it kept changing, digits moving with a little animation as field medics and base doctors updated their statistics. Raising an eyebrow, she swept the number to the right in order to read the condition it was referring to, but the cell in the sidebar was only labelled with an X.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“What is the meaning of this?”

“Beats me, I’m not a Medica. I would have asked Caecelia, but she was busy putting metal in Cassiopeia’s rotted brain. But an avicula told me that this might be more of a Cipher issue. Where did you come across your daughter?”

“Don’t call that nullius filia my daughter,” Alestra said, choosing to ignore the fact that she’d called Acidalia her child to her face earlier. That was beside the point; Acidalia knew damn well that she was nothing, not even worth the scrap of paper her birth certificate was printed on, let alone the gold of the crown she wore for less than a week. “And why do you care?”

“Because that X denotes an unidentified virus, most likely one that’s been genetically modified,” Kryptos said casually, ignoring Alestra’s anger. “If she was found near the Terminal—“

“She was.”

A deafening silence fell upon the room, and Alestra knew she didn’t have to finish her sentence. They both understood the events that had happened; Acidalia had done the thing she was raised to do. She took matters into her own hands and used her Cipher upbringing to regain control of the capital city via bacteriological or viral means. The system had worked as intended. The eldest heir reigned supreme. Ordinarily it would have been ideal—the dauphine, of course, was usually Eleutheria’s future leader, the co-ruler of the empire, the daughter of the Imperatrix before her.

Usually.

But Acidalia was not an ordinary Cipher child.

Kryptos said something, but Alestra didn’t hear him over her own excruciating, pounding thoughts, moving and flowing over themselves in her mind, all eager to come to the forefront of her consciousness. She was furious at Acidalia, daydreaming about wringing her neck, driving a knife into her carotid artery and tearing it through her flesh, spilling her bastard blood until it ran in streaks of red along the palace’s marble floors like the gold in lapis lazuli. But, more than anything, she was irate at herself for letting things get to this point, for allowing the child of nobody to grow into a person more dangerous than any other human being on the planet Terra, for not killing her a thousand times over when she had the opportunity to.

And then there was a tiny, almost unnoticeable fraction of her mind screaming in the background, she’s your daughter, she’s of your blood, you can’t—, and Alestra cursed herself for that too, for allowing herself to ruminate on the ethics of filicide, for having an emotional connection to a person who was barely a person, who wasn’t human enough for human rights, whose DNA was a strange, illegal, alien combination of Cipher and low-caste Martian farmhand.

She could hear nothing, see nothing, but the pure anger bubbling in her blood, frothing like the waves of the sea, pulsing with her heartbeat. Gripping the table, she tried to force it back down into a place where it could be controlled, where the white-hot fire in her mind could cool. She took a deep breath. Acidalia would die. At the moment, she was almost certainly safe, definitely still breathing, but it wouldn’t be long before she was six feet under like Alestra’s sisters and all the others who didn’t deserve their status and asked too many questions.

“Call off the attack,” she commanded, not bothering to listen to the rest of Kryptos’s speech. “Now. I want all of the affected quarantined, I want everyone important to be kept separate from the masses until this blows over, and I want someone to find out where the hell Acidalia is and bring her to me.” Acidalia was gone by now, most likely hidden away in some secret base the Nova could never hope to find, but it still made Alestra feel marginally better to have some sort of task force dedicated to tracking her down. The situation was less than ideal, but the only other option was to do nothing about Acidalia’s continued existence, and it would drive Alestra mad to admit that she had no control whether her daughter lived or died for the conceivable future.

“Do you mean to surrender?” Kryptos asked, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Did I stutter?” Alestra didn’t like the word surrender; it implied that they were giving up, when in reality they were only abandoning this battle to win a much, much greater one some distant time in the future. It was sacrificing a pawn to capture the queen. “We can talk about morale later. This is now. If we don’t curtail this, it will spread and spread and spread, and then there will be no way we can control it. There are only three ways to control a virus, and we don’t have a cure or a vaccine, meaning isolation is the only shred of a defense we have left.”

She turned to leave, wanting to feel the satisfaction of slamming the door, but Kryptos jumped up from his chair, blocking the exit. “Where are you going?”

“It takes a Cipher to beat a Cipher,” she snarled. “If you think I’m letting her get away with this, you’re mad. She may have won Appalachia, but just wait until she sees the hellfire we rain down upon her. I don’t care if I have to burn all of Eleutheria to the ground and start anew, I will have vengeance.”

“Don’t do anything rash,” he said in a matter very atypical of him. Then a strange smile crossed his face, and he added, “Wear a respirator. We can’t kill that bastard bitch without you.”

Alestra calmed slightly at the flattery, but she left without a thanks, not wanting to show weakness. Kryptos was only trying to win her favor now that Cassiopeia was dead in all but name; his words meant nothing.

Still seething, she glided down the hallway filled with a quiet type of rage, now acutely aware of every breathing person, every molecule in the air. There would be no way to tell if anything here was contaminated with whatever hellish pathogen Acidalia had unleashed. She could be infecting herself with every breath she took. Kryptos’s suggestion was useless as his words were vapid and shallow; a mask would do nothing to protect anyone if this thing was a virus small enough to pass through the holes. She would need a respirator at the very least, and she couldn’t be seen in a biohazard suit. Imperatrices wore ballgowns and jewels and didn’t fear anything—for Alestra to wear any form of PPE in public would be ridiculous.

She almost had to admire Acidalia, though, for all her ingenuity. It was a perfect attack on every level. Bioweapons were nowhere near as noticeable as traditional warfare; the perpetrators was long gone before symptoms even began to appear. It left critical infrastructure intact, meaning all of Appalachia City’s precious monuments remained untouched by Revolution bombs. And, most importantly, it spread like wildfire. Normally, dangerous substances dissipated over time, but for a biological weapon, every human being was a chance to amplify itself.

But there was no use in even thinking of Acidalia now. The damage had been done. Now it was up to Alestra to avenge the dead and restore order and glory to the Nova.

Acidalia had won this battle, but Alestra would win the war.