Page 164 of The Demon Star

“We’ll find another way,” said Jacen. He looked up. “We will not be what the Firstborn were. This list . . . It’s a last resort.”

What had brought them here other than a series of last resorts? Ged’s coup, Ogden’s failsafe, Neri integrating . . . Seth saw it stretching on ahead into infinity. Because against the galaxy-spanning nemesis they’d provoked, what else could be enough?

This would never end.

“Do you think,” Seth said through gritted teeth, “thatNaxal, the devourer,has the restraint not to use that technology?” As the silence dragged on, he threw his hands in the air. “He—” He couldn’t use Neri’s name. “He almost murdered a fourteen-year-old girl because she wouldn’tkneel.Have we all lost our minds?” He stabbed a finger at Jacen. “Haveyou?”

“He didn’t do it,” Jacen pointed out. “It was only a threat. He had to—” “Had to?” Seth exploded. “This is Nines, Jacen. Fucking Nines!”

“Naxal is an incredibly complex entity,” Jacen admitted. “There is . . . conflict. But Neri is meant to be the balance, and he is still there. The fact that he spared Nines is proof—he only punished the guilty.”

“You’re taking that on faith?” Seth demanded. He thought of the woman who’d tried to run, and her peer, the ones who’d seemed baffled by the crimes for which they’d died. “You’re sure about that?”

“If you could see the full scope of what he sees now,” Jacen said stubbornly. “I can’t grasp it. It’s beyond me, beyond any of us. All I can do is help guide him.Wehave to help guide him.”

Seth looked back and forth between Jacen and Ysira. An empty, broken sort of laugh escaped him at the sheer absurdityof it all. “Say you’re right. Say Neri’s still in there and that he possesses any modicum of control over this thing. Willwebe enough?”

Or can we only encourage the worst in him, whether we mean to or not?

“Did you know?” Seth directed this question at Ysira, brutally blunt. “Did you know what Ged was going to do? Could we have avoided this?”

When Ysira said, “No,”Seth wanted, more than he’d ever wanted anything, to believe her. He looked into her fathomless eyes, begging her to tell him it was true when he said, “We had no choice. Right?”

“We had no choice,” Ysira repeated. But her confident mask had cracked, and beneath it he beheld something like pain. A brittle shell of doubt.

Jacen said nothing. If Ysira had lied, he must have sensed it. But he saidnothing,and his silence was suffocating.

“How can we be enough,” Seth said quietly, “when we’re the ones who destroyed him?”

Because Seth thought he knew a truth Jacen did not—that a god was something they made. Something both more and less than human, limitless power held in thrall by whoever spoke in his name—be they a demon or only a man.

When neither of them answered, Seth paced away. After a moment, he turned back to see Ysira hugging herself with one hand as she hid her eyes with the other. Jacen stood by the window, staring listlessly into the night.

The sky was exquisitely clear, and the air smelled of fragrant flowers. An aurora danced across the rings of Oe, amber and turquoise against the inky black. Come morning, the sun would rise, and it would have no shadow.

But when the shadows faded, so had the dreams, leaving them all in this brilliant new dawn with nothing but the truthof who they were and what they had been forced to become. An impossible victory at an unspeakable price. No small part of Seth wanted to leave it all behind—go his own way as Nines had, see the rest of this newborn world.

A far greater part could not fathom it.

To stay would be a knife between his ribs, but to leave would be to pull it out and bleed without stopping. In the Scar, this was simply the way of things. To hate what had made you. To love what destroyed you.

Seth had been a coward for too many years, and in a just world, he’d have either died like his father or burned with those merchants. What right did he have to turn away—from these people he still needed, the better future that might yet be possible, and that spiderweb’s shimmer he had glimpsed of Neri?

If Seth had not imagined that, perhaps hope remained. If not . . . then let Neri be somewhere better, free of pain and fear. Let the rest of them fix what they had broken. Let them create a world worthy of that sacrifice.

It was just a wish, and it was all so fragile. Such a delicate, impossible thing, and yet Seth clung to it, because without it, he feared they were all lost. And he wondered—was this what Jacen felt like when he prayed? For the first time in his life, Seth thought he understood.

If a god was something they made, then perhaps faith must be too. Not an immutable trait but a series of choices, day after day, even when one might never live to see them bear fruit.

So, let this choice be the first. He would stay. He would try. He would hope.

He watched them, the prophet and the mother of his god, a deep weariness settling into his bones.

They watched the stars.