Chapter Fifty-Four Poor Fool

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

POOR FOOL

Heavenly death is silent.

The station’s twin rings fracture in spectacular bursts of flame and debris. Glass, soil, metal, and more fling apart, yet there is no sound.

Helan’s arms slacken in Yizhi’s grip. They gawk at the destruction, face blanched by the dithering light from the cockpit’s display.

Qin Zheng and Yizhi exchange a long glance. Despite all that’s happened between them, they’ve always been excellent partners in deception. What did Yizhi tell Helan to make them think we’d comply with negotiations instead of blowing the whole thing up at our first chance?

Poor, foolish false god.

I aim one of the Hive Queen’s barrels at the escape ships, but they’re either obscured by debris or right in front of our planet. I don’t know what could happen if my beam strays. I hope our tribute girls made it off in those ships.

“How long do we have before the stronger ships come from Melia?” I ask Helan.

They still have a band of spirit metal around their mouth, yet they make no effort to remove it. It’s like their brain is stuck buffering, their attention bouncing between me, Yizhi, and Qin Zheng.

“Six months,” Yizhi answers instead. “It’ll take at least six months for new ships to get here.”

“ Six months? ”

“You know how, in the legends, they say a day in the heavens equals a year in the mortal realm? That’s kind of real, except not that precise. Time passes differently across the universe. Relative to Melia’s base planet, our days move faster. Even if they rush out a fleet the moment they hear about this, by the time it gets here, at least six months will have passed on our end.”

I can’t really wrap my mind around what he’s talking about, but that is way more time than I expected to have. Nothing more will come for us for six months. This particular battle is over. We survived it.

We were not supposed to survive this.

The future I kept myself from thinking about explodes into color in my head, branching into untold possibilities. For at least the next six months, Qin Zheng will have unlimited power over Huaxia. He can do everything he held back from doing before. He can plunge us into all-consuming war, turn the entire nation into a machine dedicated to killing as many Hunduns as possible. Each battle will generate more husks that can be turned into Chrysalises. Each Chrysalis will pull more conscripts into his army. There’ll be devastation like never before, and he won’t stop until the Hunduns are extinct, even though that can’t possibly be done in six months, and the escalation would put us in a disastrous position when the Melians come.

Yet I no longer hold any power to stop him. No leverage to change his mind. Before this, he couldn’t kill me or mistreat me too badly because he needed me to navigate to the Heavenly Court, but not anymore. He doesn’t even have to keep me around as a co-pilot when any other girl would do. He can strip away my armor as soon as we land back in Huaxia and dispose of me however he wants, so I don’t interfere with his plans.

The sensation of him running his thumb over my knuckles startles me. I’m still holding his hand. He gazes at me, eyes weary but mouth curving into a smile.

“We’re going to live, empress,” he says.

A hot pressure builds in my eyes.

Am I overthinking this? He cares for me, doesn’t he? He’s done so much to show me that. Even now, the way he looks at me is so different from the way he looks at anyone else. Did he not apologize for the terrible things he had done to me? Tenderness doesn’t come naturally to him after the life he’s lived. He knows he was awful to me in the beginning. He regrets it. He won’t do it again, because things changed between us.

I’ll be fine. I can be his empress. Together, we can prepare for the Melians’ retribution. Maybe he’ll listen to me and try to communicate with the Hunduns so we won’t be fighting on two fronts. All I have to do is trust him.

My head goes woozy. Tingling pain reignites in my burn wounds. I guess the numbing effect of the healing substance wears off after a while. I grasp the tops of my thighs and double over in my seat. My eyes squeeze shut.

“Empress?” Qin Zheng’s voice drifts nearer. His fingertips land on my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

My eyes flash open. I detach my sword from my hip and plunge it into his heart.