"I could release you into the void." Sykora rubs the textured chin she spent long and longing nights admiring. "And watch you stiffen and dessicate. Deal with you like I dealt with your coconspirators."

Her alien is scrubbed and sultry in his new Black Pike uniform. There's hair on his arms, she sees, where they swell so hypnotically out of his tunic. A fine dusting of hair. Every time she sees another fascinating difference between their bodies, the sweet corsetry squeeze in her stomach tightens another lace.

She feels his jaw set under her palm. "Maybe you ought to go prepare the airlock," he says.

A spark of anger as she witnesses that determination she was so infatuated with, now pointed at her. This prison guard suddenly playing the victim. She's going to have to cure him of that. Her spirited Maekyonite.

"Now where would the fun be in that?" She taps his cheek. "No. I won't hurt you, and I won't compel you. Not into my bed. I admire this rebellion in you. This fire. It has a hypnotism to it, as fires do. I'm quite content to watch it burn low and flicker out."

She's laying it on a little thick, she knows, but it's been so long since she's been able to speak like this, with the vicious eloquence she's so used to, and have someone comprehend it. The sheer satisfaction of seeing his reaction to every word, of knowing that finally she's regained her power to be understood and feared, spurs her forward.

"And when it's gone, and you need a newer, sweeter warmth, when you're ravenous for me, I'll have you, and have you, and have you. Until you forget your new language, too. Until the only things on your tongue are your bride's name. And your bride's taste."

Oh, she has him. She sees it. The shift is slowly happening. That's not just anger on his face anymore. She's almost done tearing the prison guard drudge down. It's sad, a little, she supposes. But once he's been shucked from that certainty, once the last defects that led him to do such wrong against her are gone, it'll be time to rebuild.

"Unless, of course, you want it now." She indicates the tub. "Still warm in there, darling. And room for two, even one as tall as you. What do you say?"

"I say no goddamn way." But he licked his lips while he said it. He's thinking about it. Keep thinking, Grantyde. Keep imagining. The reality is so much sweeter than you've ever dreamed.

She grins. His eyes stray to her mouth. "Good boy."

The hailing tone at the door. Sykora clicks her tongue and pulses a flash into her new husband's mind. "Stay." She turns to the door. "Is that Vora?"

A muffled but recognizable voice. "Yes, Majesty."

"Enter."

Vora's face peers in from the cabin door. How many times did Sykora dream that face and wake up to cold metal? Her majordomo glances between her and Grantyde with an uncertain look that sends a pang through Sykora's heart. "I can come back, Majesty. If you're busy."

"Never busy for you, majordomo." Sykora half-yanks Vora into the cabin and her arms. "God, Vora. I never thought I'd see you again."

A cautious pat on the back from Vora, and a touch more warmth to her words. "It has been far too long, Majesty."

"How long has it been, Vora?" Sykora pulls back. "I lost track of time on Maekyon."

She sees the fissure opening in Vora's mien. "Majesty—"

"Don't spare me." Sykora projects a more perfect confidence than she feels. "I'm braced."

"Six cycles, Majesty."

"Six cycles." Sykora was expecting a number like this, thought she was ready to hear it. But she wasn't. "Six cycles in Hell."

The hose, the tests, the treadmill. The taste of her blood and her tears. She shakes it off. She is the captor now. Not him. She is in control.

She opens her eyes again. "So much to be done. Is Narika still pressing her claim?"

"She is, Majesty. She has made progress."

"That mad bitch. And I suppose the Ptolek business isn't over with."

"No, Majesty. A few more deaths. Our assassination theory seems likely."

"God. So much time lost."

And what have you gained, really? A new project. A naïve and ungrateful fool who doesn't even realize what an honor it would be to lie with you.

She turns to her new charge. "This is Vora of the Black Pike, Grantyde. My worthy majordomo. Without her, I wouldn't be able to find my ass with both hands, ample as it is. Vora, this is Grantyde, my groom."

"Oh!" Vora bows. "Congratulations to you both. I never thought you'd take a husband-of-the-void, Majesty."

"Neither did I," Sykora says, truthfully. "But look at him."

"Did you lift him from Maekyon?"

"Indeed." Sykora's fit of pique at Grantyde is fading again. He's just too cute to stay mad at for too long. His big hands are balled into fists. Even the backs of his hands have hair on them. She wonders what they'd feel like around her neck. "Some minor consolation for my time on that wretched world."

They tarry for a while, falling back into their rhythm, or at least an uncertain facsimile of it. Vora's still not entirely here, still halfway happy, and Sykora has an unpleasant suspicion that it's because of Grantyde. They'd talked about husbands-of-the-void in the past. Vora has never outright stated her discomfort with the practice, but they both agreed that if Sykora ever took one, it would be a love-match, one made in as mutual a decision as an indenturement could be. This isn't exactly the plan. But neither was spending half a decacycle in a barbarian dungeon.

"I'd better get on with it, then. You may go." Sykora plants two quick kisses on either side of her majordomo's face, and is pleased when Vora doesn't shrink away.

Vora glances over Sykora's shoulder. "Is your husband—is everything okay?"

"I'm not her husband," her husband calls.

"He's quite willful." Sykora grins. "But he'll be a wonderful companion, I think, once he's learned his place."

"Do you think he's— uh—" Vora leans in. "Do you think he's proportional down there?"

Sykora bites back a giggle. There's her friend. "Vora, my dear, I intend to find out."

"Will you compel him?"

"I have no intention of bedding him by anything besides his own pleading decision. And no appetite for forcing our first night from him, as heinously as his people may have treated me. Not when his seduction will be so satisfying." Sykora can't prevent the tail-wag of anticipation that brings. "They were so proud of their bare civilization. And so callous in their dealings with me. I intend to extract every dram of pleasure I can from taming this one."

Sykora walks with Vora through the trophy chamber, to the cabin door. The Empress gazes coolly down at them both from her gilded frame.

"Are you sure about this, Sykora?" Vora whispers, at the threshold. "He looks so lost."

"He'll find his way to me," Sykora whispers back. "And when he does, I'll welcome him. He's the one, Vora. He's it. I saw him, and I knew."

Vora shifts her feet. "As you say, Majesty."

Sykora smirks. "You think it's because I lost my mind in captivity. You're worried for when I snap out of it."

"I'd never—He is quite handsome."

"It's okay. You'll see." She gives a final hug to her long-lost majordomo. "I'm home, and it's all okay again. It's going to be beautiful."

She sways back to the heart of her cabin, where her compelled husband has obediently stayed. She finds her drying wand—right where she left it, it's all right here, she's home, she's safe, she's fine. She passes the wand over her hair and its dry warmth draws her further back into the world.

"You've never been in the void, Grantyde," she says. "It's vast, and dark, and cold." She switches sides and draws out another long lock. "You've never been in me. I'm small, and soft, and warm." She wiggles her toes at him. "And clean now."

His eyes are so dark. She didn't know he could look this way. "My answer doesn't change."

She hums. "That's all right. You'll come to understand how truly far from your home you are, and the comfort I offer. An existence of ease and pleasure, and the wonders of the firmament laid before you. And all you'll have to do… is submit." She gives him a look at the twins. That's right, Maekyonite. Nice, aren't they?

For only a moment his attention lingers. Then that stubbornness kicks in again and his glare reaffixes.

"Say yes, and I will give you the first night of your voluptuous new life as my bedmate," she says. "Say no, and you sleep in a cell. I'll even provide you a cot and a bathroom door. I trust you know what those are, despite their absence in my enclosure."

A tingle on her back as she remembers the bars of her old bed. She refocuses on Grantyde, and reminds herself by his tensed body and his frowning face that she is in control, now.

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"Will you share yourself with me?" she asks.

"No."

Ah, well.

She summons Ajax and Fion to take her new prize away. "Good night, Grantyde," she sings, as they bundle him off.

"Go fuck yourself, Princess," he says.

"You know, I don't think I will tonight. I think I'll save my energy for you." She winks. "See you tomorrow."

The cabin door closes and Sykora's alone. She takes a contented exhale and slips into a seat at the kitchenette as she finishes with her hair.

She keeps thinking about it, that face. And her grin wavers. The rage she saw in him, the self-righteous fury. It kindles a reflective anger in her. Well, let him stew. She hasn't forgotten the measures she had to take to escape from his planet. The compulsion she had to employ on him.

She hasn't forgotten the hose and the cell and the way the Maekyonites looked at her, the way their faces shifted from fear and fascination to wariness and contempt. How their personhood drained away as they drained hers.

Not his. His never did.

Still: there is deprogramming to be done. The man was her prison guard, for God's sake. She's not going to just let him into her heart and pretend nothing happened. He's a long way yet from that privilege.

How splendid he'll be, once he's accepted his place in the Taiikari Empire. She'll feed him and tend him. She'll give him his longevity suite, and she'll learn all his favorite foods, and she'll get him a new guitar. She'll take that virtue she saw in him, that loyalty, and she'll draw it out, and make him wonderful and dutiful and kind. All she has to do is tear the last few flagging bits of that old life off him. And when it hurts, she'll make sure to kiss the pain away after.

She lounges back and the metal bars of her old scaffold-bed felt just like that on her vertebrae, just like her chair's back does, and her seat screeches with how suddenly she stands up. A noise behind her and she whirls round, lungs heaving, heart slamming. The towel that bound her hair has plopped to the ground off the back of the chair. That's all it was. She is home. She is safe. She's fine. She has an address to give.

And if her hands tremble as she searches through her uniform, then she's just hungry, that's all. Just hungry, and Kymai will be here soon with the curry. She nearly drops the diadem she chooses. Stop shaking, idiot girl. Stop shaking.

She shuts her eyes. She imagines his music. His voice. Her body slowly relaxes. Her shoulders droop; her tremors cease.

She opens her eyes again. She dresses herself and sits at her vanity and punches in the code to contact the cell, to see him, and perhaps get some more gloating in. Then she clucks her tongue at her own foolishness and hits the all-hands address button.

She wakes up in the middle of the night and for a second her heart leaps, and she looks out into the dark for Grantyde, for him to talk to her and play his songs for her.

Then she remembers where she is, and where she put him, and she starts shaking all over again, and she's being ridiculous—she's home, she's safe, she's fine.

But it takes her an hour to fall back asleep.

Sykora slams into Sister Mye—

[Threat level: High]

[Control Vector: None. Kill.]

[Contingency: Her holster and pistol are surplus military; likely she's a veteran from the Penitent's ZKZ days. Her marine training will kick in during the takedown; she knows how to use that gun in a grapple. Proximity won't keep you safe. Prioritize a disarm.]

and sends the both of them crashing into the altar. The daemon goes rolling in one direction. The two women go rolling in the other.

Lors—

[Threat level: Medium]

[Control Vector: None. Kill.]

[Contingency: Get that bitch away from your husband.]

shrieks and full-body tackles Grant to the floor, her fangs bared. His arms are limp by his sides and Sykora remembers that he's being compelled by that fucking whore who's trying to tear his throat out and she makes eye contact with his wide panicky face and beams her flash to him, cries out "Erase all compulsion," and it's all blasted away, not just Sister Lors' baneful command but the one Sykora gave him on the walk from the shuttle to the temple, the secret compulsion that allowed him to put more than a token resistance up to Lors', her whispered be free and be brave.

His eyes shut and he throws a vicious, vengeful elbow into Lors' face with a cringeworthy crunch, and then Sykora's flipped over onto her back and she's staring up into the tombstone face of Sister Mye, whose gun is now free from its holster and swinging toward her.

Sykora's tail lashes around Mye's gun hand and wrenches it, twists the shoulder askew in its socket, and the gun skitters across the floor and the two of them go sprawling down the other side of the altar. The projection screen crashes to the floor under their weight.

Whatever Mye was before she was a cleric, it taught her how to fight. Sykora feels the sinewy strength as the woman's body snakes around in her grip, into a steel-girder straddle atop the grounded Princess. She curls her legs up, tries to get into guard, and Mye sinks a fist into her face, a starbursting bright painful pummeling one, and Sykora catches the followup two in the crook of an elbow and pins Mye's arm to her chest, scrambles with her legs to get in an armbar, and then a shrieking Lors slams into Mye and the weight's off Sykora, who leaps blinking to her feet before she can even understand what just happened which is this:

Grant has lifted Sister Lors by her tail and flung her like a goddamn flail into her coconspirator.

Sykora lets out a vicious whoop and dives for the gun, but Mye's rolled with the blow, is back up on her feet too, and her brown-booted foot skids the pistol away from Sykora's fingers. Sykora catches Mye's kick and spins , hikes herself up on her tail to snap her legs around the Sister into a leaping scissor takedown, flawless around the thigh, that would have Hyax pumping her fist.

Sister Mye thumps onto her back and Sykora heaves, and feels the dry shifting crack of a breaking knee, and Mye bellows, and then with a meaty slap a tail has smacked into Sykora's neck and now it curls, and Lors' fangs flash, and she dives forward onto Sykora—

and a flaring BANG fills the chamber and Lors doesn't so much tackle as collapse onto Sykora, because her stomach's been blown open. Grant's got Mye's gun in his hand and you swore he wouldn't have to kill again, Sykora, but of course Lors isn't dead, is still trying to sink her teeth into Sykora's neck.

A rattling roar bounces crazily across the echoing acoustics of the temple. The fucking bounders. They must be in their default guardian mode and Grant's gunfire just set them off. "Cover," Sykora cries, "Grant, cover," but he's already picked up on it and is sprinting for the stone altar as pews splinter around him.

Lors isn't a warfighter, wasn't ready for the burst from that bounder, and the momentary flinch that gunfire caused is what kills her. Sykora wraps one arm around her head and twists it to one side and bites the way she's practiced, the way she's killed a halfscore people, the way she killed the last corpse that dared to touch her husband. Snap shut early, before you hit gristle, let your fang glide through the flesh, and then wrench, and a great wet hot arterial firework arches from Lors and her eyes go sightless.

Mye's unsteady on her fucked-up knee and the blood-slick floor, and that's what kills Mye, a shoving shoulder-check and then Sykora stoves her throat in with a practiced stomp of her boot, the motion fast enough that the Princess has time to somersault behind the altar before the next explosive trail of gunfire can carve her open. She thumps to the floor next to her husband, crouched low behind the altar.

He's got the gun clutched tight in one hand and the daemon in the other. White-knuckled. She flattens her palm on his chest. "You're good?"

"Did not know they'd do that," he says.

"It's their factory—" Sykora pauses as as chunks of the altar blow away under another rattle of withering bounder fire. "Factory target acquisition programming. I suppose they think that a fellow opening fire in a temple is worth a bullet. Give me the gun."

He hands it over and wipes his face. Sykora's gotten blood on him.

Sykora unclasps her uniform and kicks her boots off as it falls away. She opens the pistol magazine, counts eight and one in the chamber, clacks it shut again. "Do you know what this reminds me of?"

Grant hunkers lower. "What's that?"

"Our first date."

He coughs out a laugh.

"Batty up, Grantyde here," she says, in English. She vanishes.

"Don't die," he says.

"Well," she says, "since you asked so nicely." She lunges out from cover.

The bounders open up again, but their optics see her as a smudge now, a sprinting smudge with a gun floating somewhere in its haze, and that gun is zeroing in even as they fire an imprecise volley toward her. A bullet goes crashing through an optical cluster, and then another catches the stricken bounder in its motherboard, and a third through the mainframe backup on the gun-stalk just below the pivot point. The bounder triple-tap, just like Hyax taught her. Six bullets left.

A chunky thwump from the other bounder as one of its chalk bombs launches. It's read her invisibility and is trying to coat her for acquisition. Sykora somersaults over a pew away from the great feathery plume of hot pink. She comes up into a slide across the powdery floor and bolsters the gun with her tail as she empties it toward the bounder. The volley shreds it into scrap.

"Dove," she calls, across the newly silent chamber. "Does Mye there have any bullets on her?"

She steps around the splinters and shards as she crosses the nave, to where Grant is searching Sister Mye's furious-faced corpse. He holds up two sleek black single-stack magazines.

She studies his face as he hands them off. His eyes meet hers. "You checking whether I'm freaking out?" he asks.

"Are you?"

He shakes his head and crouches to her level. He cups her chin.

"I've got blood in my mouth," she murmurs.

He kisses her. Her tail swishes spent brass across the floor as it wags.

"Go do what you do, Batty," he says.

"Back behind the altar, please. Just in case. I'll be back in a tick." She flits back into invisibility and pauses at the edge of the chamber to wipe the sludgy mix of chalk and blood from the soles of her feet. "No monologue, Penitent?" she calls. "You were making such confident statements a moment ago. Wouldn't you like to tell me about my friends aboard the Pike burning to death?"

Silence from the speakers.

"No?" She slots a magazine into her pistol. "I'll see you soon, then."

And she steals out of the nave, into a still and sweltering hallway where the next noncitizen is already creeping his way toward his invisible annihilator.

When the last gun is silent, and the last scream has faded, bloody bare footprints track across the nave to the altar, and the bloody silhouette resolves into the Princess. Grant has laid the two dead Sisters face down in a corner of the raised platform that houses the altar. He's sitting atop the altar's cratered surface, staring at the wooden daemon.

She touches his shoulder. "It's done."

"Is it?" He holds the statuette out to her. "Is this the Empress in here?"

She flips the statuette and checks the serial number. "K-77272," she reads. "We were told to retrieve a daemon with this serial, and so we have. I've canvassed the building. The only other daemon I found was the security J." She hands it back to Grant. "And if Inadama has some additional twist or quibble in store, I'll bite her fucking throat out. Come on. I hid all the bodies."

He follows her out. "You really didn't have to do that. I'm acclimating. Honestly, I am."

She sighs. "I don't want you to have to."

"Majesty. We're gonna spend three centuries dealing with these sorts of bullshit shenanigans." Is that wryness in his voice? After all this death? "You can't protect me from all this for three centuries."

"No?" She opens the gate. The Chassak evening is the color of a sickness spill. "Watch me."

Grant takes the shuttle controls and floats them back up into the firmament. Sykora gets dressed. There's always something of a fugue when you come out of massacre mode. She feels it as she gets back into her uniform, zipping the boots up over the dried blood on the soles of her feet, the contusions on her body from the thrashing and the killing.

She returns to the shuttle. She doesn't speak, just sits in his lap. He settles his palm against her stomach and pulls her tighter against him.

"You knew the Pike would be okay?" he asks.

Sykora nods.

"How?"

"Waian told me so," she says. "There's two people who when they tell me, I know it's true. You and Waian."

"Not the Empress?"

Sykora lets out a humorless snort and tilts her head back against his chest. "Insufferable."

Their tiny pool of light lances through the dark. The Pike's speck grows across their viewscreen until it's the wide and welcoming world they live in. The real world. Far more real than that swampland of corroding ghosts.

Waiting on the hangar catwalk as they slip into the bay is a cluster of crew. Black Pike marines, displaced bridge personnel, the command group. Most of them cheering and buoyant. Most of the command group.

Most of the command group. Sykora squints.

At the group's fore, Hyax stands separate from the revel, her expression solemn and watchful. It takes a moment for Sykora to recognize what she's holding. An artificial arm, its wiring melted and bubbled in garishly colored clumps, its metal fused and blackened.

"Majesty—" Hyax begins.

"No," Sykora says. She takes an unsteady step forward out of the shuttle and nearly falls. "No."

"I know. I paid a fucking fortune for that thing."

Waian pokes her head out from behind a marine.

"It vibrated, y'know," she says.

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