Part V: Martyr
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins. —Soren Kierkegaard
Epilogue
Funeral Procession, Midnight Hollow
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.3.9 Interstellar
It rained on the day the funeral procession entered the bounds of Midnight Hollow, although Ryler was the only member of the Cult to see it. Every member of the Cult of the Survivor had been ejected from the village as thousands streamed in to express their outrage and their sorrow.
The clear casket was unloaded from the Carverite crawler and walked into the city. Ryler had managed to procure some small anti-grav devices so that the body seemed to glide through the air as the rain pattered against the glass.
He walked behind the pallbearers, along with Lira, Mick—still short an arm—and Fury. Isaac, the Motragi sniper, and Elsbeth, the Pugarian trapper, walked with them. The two aspirants had no living relatives, or at least not close ones, and hadn’t yet decided what they would do. Koni was up front, guarded by several members of the Tlali-Acamatl clan. Ryler knew her face would be dignified, somber, balanced on the edge between grief and vengefulness, a Verazlan to the bone, both old and new.
He was still reliving the moment in his mind, four days later—the faint hum as Donnika’s weapon came online, her mad grin as she raised her arm to point it at Koni. If Fury had been with them, she might have reacted—she’d always been quick to respond to threats—but it was Janus who recognized what was happening before all of them and sprinted to get between Koni and the gun.
Then, the flash of bright light triggered the polarization in Ryler’s retinal implants, and he was deafened by the thunder of firing weapons. Ryler blinked the afterimage from his eyes, fear for his friend consuming his thoughts, but he’d turned to find Janus kneeling next to the body.
Janus had been too far, despite his reflexes.
Brago had been closer, hugging Koni to his chest and turning his back to Donnika.
Ryler felt rage fill him, and for the first time, he’d felt what he’d always thought of as the Invarian temper. He pulled the grav-staff from his hip and stomped toward Donnika’s prone and broken body with murder in his heart.
***
Janus walked at a steady pace, accompanying Brago’s casket. The anti-grav units were silent, which seemed strange to him. He would have thought that they’d emit some sort of comforting electric hum while violating the laws of physics.
Brago Tlali-Acamatl seemed smaller than he’d been, lying in the casket. The man, while living, had possessed a sort of momentum to him, like a mountain moving through the crowd. Maybe it was the technological weightlessness of the casket or the thousands who lined the streets, but the Verazlan champion almost seemed human in his glass case.
Janus’s thoughts flashed to that moment when he saw the killing smile on Donnika’s face. He had recognized it instantly, even before her arm came up, because it echoed something inside him.
It was the smile he would have worn if he’d been killing her, the destroyer of his people, the murderer of his parents.
He’d seen her arm rise, not pointed at him but at Koni, and all his experience as an aspirant had screamed at him that this was the beginning of a cascading failure of the system, of war, of self-destruction. He’d run toward Koni, hoping to… he wasn’t sure what he’d hoped to achieve. He’d acted without thinking. He hadn’t wanted to die.
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The plasma weapon fired, blinding him, and he saw a large shape falling as he rushed to Koni’s side. Brago had managed to shield her, absorbing the blast before falling on top of her.
Brago? Koni said, confused.
The air smelled like cooked meat. Janus had seen Koni’s desperate eyes staring at him above Brago’s limp arm.
Help him! she’d pleaded.
Donnika was down, and Ryler was walking toward her, but Janus put that out of his mind. Spurred by Koni’s voice and the adrenaline of the moment, Janus managed to roll Brago off her to get him on his side.
He was still alive. His eyes were laughing. He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out, and there was a moment of confusion there, followed by panic.
Brago spent his last moments in utter terror. Janus could feel the heat coming off the man’s body, could see the bulge and cracked skin where the shot from the mad cultist’s weapon had almost burned through him entirely. It gave Janus a sobering thought, because of how big a man Brago was: if Janus had reached Koni first, the bolt would have killed both of them.
There was nothing Janus could do, but Brago still fought. His eyes glowed blue as he tried to access his wrist implant, to send one final message, and then he went still.
The light faded.
Brago was gone.
Koni’s honor guard, made up of members of the Tlali-Acamatl’s action groups and Citlalmina herself, wailed in anguish, and Janus felt it to his core. What had the man been trying to say in that moment? What had stricken someone so strong with that much fear?
He walked through the mud with his head uncovered and Brago’s casket on his shoulder, and the only sure answer he had was that Donnika’s death had not been recompense for the harm she caused. There was a reckoning coming, one that would shake the Cult to its foundation, and Janus planned to be there to set tinder to flame.
They reached the center of the village, where Brago would lie in state under guard by all the major clans and corporations of the region so that everyone could see what the Cult had done. It was, perhaps, the most damaging thing Donnika could have done to her faction. Janus wondered if she’d realized that before she died.
The elders of the Pugarians, the Motragi, and the Verazlans stood in attendance as Koni and her aunt took the stage and spoke passionately about breaking with the past, about forgiveness, about healing old wounds and steering their own destinies. There were some dubious nautical metaphors in their speeches, but the crowd was with them, and Janus could feel it building like, well, a tidal wave.
The force assembled here spanned cultures and centuries. There would be some of the new peace and conciliation Koni had found within herself and some of the more forceful ways that characterized the present-day clan. It would not stop at the region’s borders. Krandermore’s future was being changed before his eyes.
The procession and speeches were followed by several ceremonies and receptions. Janus did his part in them, but he wasn’t really present. He was looking ahead, at what needed to be done.
When they’d done what they needed to do to make sure history had been set on the right track, the four Irkallans and their jungle dragon slipped away.
***
Janus, Lira, Mick, and Ryler drove their buggies into the muddy clearing and pulled up ten meters from the waiting shuttle.
“You made good time!” Nikandros said, smiling as the rain pelted him. A proper storm had formed in the Twilight Valley, and Janus knew it was going to be a bumpy ride into orbit and beyond. “Are you ready to go?”
“Are we?” Janus asked his team.
Lira nodded.
Mick shrugged. “Can we afford to stay? It’s already cost me an arm, mate.”
Lira punched Mick in his good shoulder.
“I’m assuming we have a few things to discuss,” Ryler said, his words awkward and stilted.
Nikandros laughed. “Only commendations and your next job, my boy. You did everything I could have hoped for.”
“I’m sure he did,” Janus said, and not without bitterness. It had occurred to him, as he walked the body to the bier, that while none of them had known Donnika was that dangerous, there was no way Ryler could not have.
“Don’t think ill of your friend, Janus,” Nikandros said. “He has a good heart. He sees many things and is blind to others. He does his best, just like you.”
“I’m getting out of the rain,” Lira said, shouldering her pack and walking past Nikandros into the shuttle.
“Wait up!” Mick said.
“Hey, Mick,” Ryler said, avoiding Janus’s gaze. “Catch.”
Ryler tossed his collapsed grav-staff, and Mick caught it with his good hand. “What gives? I thought you’d never let me use it.”
“I thought a Hunter would never join us,” Ryler said with a shrug. “Welcome to the Cult of the Survivor.”
Janus felt sick to his stomach. He’d intellectually accepted that to finish the work they’d started of freeing Irkalla and all the people of Survivor’s Refuge from the machinations of the Cult, they would have to go to the Cult homeworld of Lumiara.
All those misgivings went away, however, when he saw Callie, Ivan, and Lee with a bundle in her arms, waiting for him just inside the shuttle door.