Ramifications played through Thomas’s imagination as he stared at the headless corpse of his biological father.

This scene would not remain a secret.

The whole Megacosm had seen it. Trillions of Torth knew. Ergo, it would be a short time—maybe a few hours, maybe a couple of days—before Garrett checked the galactic news and soaked up the indisputable fact that Thomas Hill was a full-blooded Torth.

The repulsive reality of Thomas’s parentage would spread throughout the free realms like a plague. There was no way to stop the news.

Thomas felt feverish as he struggled to stand up. His eyes burned with unshed tears. He wasn’t sure why his innards were such a knotted mess of emotions.

He managed to keep his balance as he made his way towards the outer vault, where he had parked his borrowed hoverchair. Cherise was going to find out. She would realize that she used to be friends with a full-blooded Torth. No doubt she would be disgusted with herself for that.

And Vy? Vy would realize that her foster brother was not only an emotionless, robotic boy, but an actual alien. The worst kind of alien.

Ariock would look at him in a new light. An ugly new light.

Kessa. Varktezo. Nror. Pung. Weptolyso. How could any of them stand to be around him? Their supposed Teacher was a Torth.

His friendship with Evenjos would dissipate like dust. Evenjos only tolerated him because she liked human hybrids. Her traumatic memories gave her every reason to fear and hate a full-blooded Torth.

The Alashani? Thomas didn’t have to stretch his imagination to guess how they’d react. Flen, Deschubah, Guradjur … they already thought of him as a monstrous rekveh. This news would only confirm their beliefs. Would Daindlor continue to mentor him? No way.

Hatred aimed at Thomas would multiply. The undergrounders would gain traction.

And why not? They were right to despise Thomas as an overprivileged penitent. That was exactly what he was. He was no different from the Pink Screwdriver and her ilk, except he’d gotten lucky enough to make the right friends.

“I’m no different from your kind,” Thomas told the filthy, burned, and blasted corpses of Torth zombies throughout his bedchamber. “I am you.”

It was nothing but the truth. Thomas specifically aimed to zombify only Torth with Yeresunsa powers. That was exactly what he was.

Why was he destroying them by the thousands? What made him act so superior to them? His father had been one of them. His mother had been one them.

And they had both died so that he might live.

They had sacrificed everything. For him.

And he used the gifts they had blessed him with—freedom, life, and a future—to desecrate and murder their own kind of people.

Was there any justice in the universe?

Thomas plopped into his hoverchair and struggled to make sense of his roiling emotions. If not for the illegal sexual union of two morally shady Servants of All, he never would have been conceived or born. He was a literal Mistake. All of the million-plus penitent minds he had soaked up within the past couple of days concurred. Their gestalt told him that he belonged in the Mirror Prison as much as any Servant of All. What made him so certain that he should mastermind a hostile military takeover of his own people’s empire?

He had been wrong about millions of Torth willingly joining him in going renegade.

He had been wrong about his own “human side.”

What else was he wrong about? How much of his own plans should he reexamine? Could he even trust himself to make decisions?

As Thomas surveyed the carnage in his room, he knew that he wasn’t going to ask Nror or Ariock to clean this up. He could not face any of his friends as a full-blooded Torth.

Not anyone.

He could not possibly report what had just happened while pretending to be stoic and emotionally strong. He felt damaged. Something inside him was shattered. His dearest beliefs, perhaps.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He could not simply return to life as usual and pretend that he was okay. He wasn’t going to become a liar.

And he was never going to obey any more damned commands to twist minds and destroy lives.

No more. He could not destroy people like his mother and father. He would not violate the minds of penitents as he’d been doing. He wasn’t sure he could ever look at a Torth prisoner again, let alone rob them of freedom.

He didn’t want to be part of this war.

He didn’t want to destroy one problematic civilization only to replace it with another problematic civilization.

Thomas felt cosmically trapped. He struggled to breathe, grappling with a sickened feeling of self-hatred, discarding all of the awful choices he faced. Until a decision clicked into place.

He needed time to think.

He needed to escape. He needed a safe place, away from the wrongful obligations he had taken on and the messes he had caused and the horrors he had wrought.

He was going to stop being the Conqueror.

Thomas rotated his hoverchair to face the carnage one last time. He channeled heat into the corpse of his father, superheating it until it combusted. The body incinerated in a white hot flash.

All that remained were smoldering, body-shaped cinders.

Thomas wasn’t entirely sure why he’d cremated his biological father. He didn’t care to examine his own reasoning quite yet. He just did not want to leave obvious evidence of what had happened here. Nor did he want anybody to examine the headless corpse and make conjectures about what the fight had been like.

The cinders cooled. Thomas used thermal currents to scatter them.

Gone.

He turned his hoverchair and floated out of the bunker. He unlocked his broken control sleeve—he had to bang the frozen piece of junk until it fell open—and he dropped it in the hallway. The numbed, frostbitten feeling began to ebb.

Once he emerged into the slumbering city aboveground, he donned his floppy-brimmed hat. There. He could pass as a shani from a distance. Most of his bruises from the enemy zombies were hidden by his clothes.

Not that he had to worry much about being seen. The city remained fearful of the rogue brainwasher, so there were few pedestrians outside at this hour. Thomas avoided street lamps and moved swiftly towards the spaceport.

If only he had time to visit Azhdarchidae.

His sky croc might feel abandoned, but Thomas dared not detour to the Dragon Tower. Azhdarchidae was a resourceful monster. He would be fine on his own.

A glowing streak lit the dark sky as a jumper shuttle landed in the distance. The city’s makeshift spaceport was busy at all hours, even on a quiet night like this. Military pilots logged a lot of practice hours. Most of them had learned the basics of how to operate small shuttles or even streamships, but training was important. Maintenance protocols and military maneuvers were a work-in-progress.

Thomas took a casual path uphill. He parked his borrowed hoverchair amidst a cargo lot with pre-loaded hovercarts, ready with supplies for the upcoming morning work shift.

He checked the power charge on his leg braces. Satisfied that it was good enough, he climbed into a nondescript delivery vehicle. The dashboard was easy for him to unlock. He had memorized override codes for almost every machine in Freedomland.

Soon he was steering past hulking aircrafts and sleek jumper shuttles.

“Hey.” A sleepy govki waved to Thomas, mistaking him for a fellow maintenance worker. “What brings you here at this quiet hour, good shani?”

Thomas steered close enough to the govki worker for a mental scan, although he took care not to reveal his own face. “I’m helping to repair a thruster,” he mumbled in a terse voice, impersonating the mushy accent of an Alashani.

He soaked up the worker’s thoughts. That gave him a rough idea of which streamships were in decently flightworthy condition. He even learned which ones were pre-loaded with enough drinking water and nonperishables for a voyage.

“Oh, is it an emergency that can’t wait until morning?” the govki asked, interested. “Which ship?”

Thomas sensed what the govki needed to hear in order to update the maintenance logs. He called out an acceptable answer without slowing down.

It was easy for him to choose an optimal streamship. He didn’t need to run through a long checklist of criteria or look up access codes. He already knew those things. All he needed to do was abandon the hovercart and walk up the ramp, into the ship.

Walking was not easy for him. But as long as he used his exosuit regularly, the braces should continue to aid him. Kinetic energy caused the battery to recharge.

Thomas entered the ship.

He checked to make sure he was alone. There were no accidental stowaways. He checked the ship’s supplies.

As Thomas sank into the command chair, he asked himself if he was doing the right thing.

One domineering part of his brain reasoned that fleeing his own city was an overreaction. He had designed and founded Freedomland. So what if the locals tried to murder him for being a full-blooded Torth? People were stupid. He was a rational, logical, smart, and magnificent being. Wasn’t he capable of handling any fallout from the revelation of who his biological father was? Couldn’t he weather whatever storm Garrett wanted to hit him with? Did he actually care about an uptick of hatred aimed his way?

Why did he even need friends? Or emotions?

Thomas slammed his head down into his hands.

His Torth brain was stoic and calculating and undeniably dominant. He could not rid himself of his Torth qualities. He was a rekveh.

Yet it seemed he had absorbed enough humanity to feel things deeply, despite his cursed genetics. This pseudo-human aspect of his consciousness wanted to curl up and swallow toxins until he could no longer think.

When he urged himself to go to his Dragon Tower, to work on suppressing his mess of fear and anger and behave like a hero again, tears leaked from his eyes.

Running away was bad. It might be yet another evil act; another terrible decision made by the traitorous Conqueror. It was stupid, primitive behavior.

Even so.

Thomas could not bear to soak up another penitent’s soul. He could not twist another prisoner’s mind. Those acts were destroying him.

And he could not bear the judgment of a friend or ally right now. Those judgments would break him.

Running away was wrong, but it was the right choice for his mental health.

Thomas fired up the engines and prepared for lift off.