Page 21 of My Tiny Human Wife

I key Torvak. “Incoming,” I tell him. “The real one. He’s here.”

“I know,” Torvak says, and there is a note in his voice I have never heard from him before, a stillness underneath the steel. “I can see his flagship on the grid. Avery—whatever he says when he comes, and he will come to say something, do not let it move you off that board. The truth is still going out. Keep it going out. That is how we win, no matter what walks through the door.”

I do not understand the warning yet. I will, very soon, and I will wish to every dead god I had never had to.

CHAPTER 32

TORVAK

The man who built the war lands his shuttle in the middle of it, because men like him have never believed the fire they set could ever turn and burn them too.

He comes down behind the last of his loyal units—a hard core of Coalition troops too compromised to defect, flung at us now in a final wave with the desperation of people who understand that our survival is their prosecution. And walking behind them, unhurried, immaculate, a tall human with silver hair and the bearing of a man obeyed his whole life, comes the voice from the override. I do not require an introduction. Avery read his name off the flagship registry minutes ago, and it means nothing to either of us and everything to the planet: Admiral Rake. The architect. The one Avery traced to the very peak of all of it, come at last to stand in the ruin of his own design and watch it burn.

His troops strike us harder than anything that has come before, because they are fighting for their own survival now, not a general’s pride. For a brutal stretch it is all I can manage to keep the center from folding inward. Every reserve I committed is committed. There is nothing behind my line now but the core room, and the wounded, and her. We have the numbers we scraped together from defectors and the turned, but Rake’s core are elite and cornered and they fight like it. I lose ground I cannot spare. I take a wound along my already-scarred side that I do not have the seconds to feel. Beside me a defector goes down and does not rise again, and a refugee I taught to reload three days ago steps wordlessly into the gap he leaves, and we purchase the center one more minute with lives we cannot spare and pay it without flinching. And the whole while, Rake advances behind his men with a calm that tells me he does not expect to die today, because his sort never do—they expect, always, to be the exception to the rule they wrote for everyone else.

He reaches a vantage above the control room, then does the thing I did not anticipate: he opens a channel. Not to his troops. To us. To Avery. He wishes to be heard.

“Miss Quinn.” His voice fills the tower, smooth and terrible. “You have been very busy. I will grant you that. Do you know, in thirty years of managing this war, no single soul has ever cost me quite as much as one radio operator on a frozen rock.” A pause, and I sense the trap in it before it closes, the way boots find a buried mine a half-second before the weight comes down. “I looked you up, when your little tower began making noise. Quinn. It is a familiar name to me. I wondered whether you had made the connection yet. I do not believe you have. You would be behaving very differently if you had.”

Over at her board, Avery has gone rigid. I am already moving toward her, though I cannot yet see what it is I am moving to prevent.

“What are you talking about,” she says into the channel, and I hear the thing moving beneath her voice, the old grief stirring in its box.

“Your brother,” Rake says, gently, with the false softness of a man for whom the cruelty is the entire point. “Elias Quinn. Coalition Infantry. Killed in action, year one, a real tragedy, a real hero. That is what they told your mother, is it not? That is the story you have built your whole sad little life around.”

I reach her console. I set myself between her and a blow no body can block, because nothing here is a thing I can shield her from—the blow is coming down a radio channel, and I cannot armor her against words. I have faced a great many enemies across my years. Never in any of those fights have I felt as helpless as I do now, watching this man reach across a battlefield to press his thumb into the one wound Avery has never let close, and I understand, with a cold falling certainty, that whatever he is about to say is the true weapon he flew here to fire. The troops, the assault, the wave breaking on our walls—all of it was only ever meant to hold us in place long enough for this. He did not come to kill her. He came to break her, on an open channel, in front of the planet she just woke.

“Say it,” Avery whispers. Her hand has found mine on the console, gripping hard enough to hurt, and I hold on, because it is the one thing left that I can do for her. “Whatever it is. Say it.”

And in the smoke and the roar, with a whole planet listening and a battle balanced on the edge of a blade, Admiral Rake prepares to tell Avery Quinn how her brother truly died.

CHAPTER 33

AVERY

Rake tells me how my brother died, and for one long moment the war, the tower, the whole waking planet, all of it goes silent and very far away.

“Elias Quinn did not die in a battle,” Rake says, and I can hear that he is enjoying this, that he has been saving it, that he flew into the middle of a collapsing conspiracy for the specific pleasure of handing it to me. “There was no battle. Year one, we needed a Coalition atrocity to hang on the Vakutans—needed the outrage, needed the enlistment numbers, the war was in danger of ending before it had properly begun. So we arranged one. A Coalition unit, spent on our own orders, in a staged engagement, and laid at the feet of the enemy. Your brother’s unit, Miss Quinn. Your brother. He did not fall to Vakutan guns. He died because I decided the war needed a reason to keep going, and his death was a convenient one.” A pause, exquisite and cruel. “You have spent your whole life hating the wrong people. You built this entire crusade on a lie I wrote. And the truly beautiful part is that the Vakutan standing beside you right now, the one you have given your heart to—his people did not kill Elias either. Mine did. I did. You have been sharing a bed with the wrong enemy this whole time.”

I do not remember standing. I am on my feet and I have no memory of getting there, and the board in front of me—the signal, the truth, the whole reason any of us are dying tonight—has stopped meaning anything at all. Everything I built myself out of is coming apart at once. Eli did not die a hero in a war. Eli was murdered, on purpose, by his own side, as a line item, to sell a lie—and I spent ten years hating an entire species for it, and I fell in love with one of them, and none of it, none of it was ever true. The grief I kept boxed for ten years tears the box apart, and it is not grief anymore, it is rage, white and total, and it wears a face now, one with a name, a man standing forty feet off who I could⁠—

Rake wants this. The clarity comes cutting through the roar like a cold hand laid flat on my chest. He is not here to kill me. He is here to make me stop. To make me abandon the board, forget the signal, spin away from the truth and come for him with my bare hands, because a grieving woman hurling herself at an admiral is a woman who is not finishing the broadcast. My grief is the last weapon he has left, and he is firing it point-blank, and if I pick it up the way he wants me to, he wins even as everything else he built burns down around him.

Then Torvak’s hands are on my shoulders, turning me, and his voice cuts clean through the noise, low and only for me.

“Avery. Look at me. Not at him. At me.” His molten eyes lock onto mine, the one still point in a world that has come off its hinges. “What he says is true, and it is monstrous, and you are allowed to burn for it. But not yet. He has arranged this exact moment to take your hands off that signal. Do not hand it to him. Grieve your brother the way your brother would want—by finishing the thing you started. Elias enlisted to protect people. You are ten seconds from protecting an entire planet. Do not let the man who killed him take that from you too.”

I look at Torvak, and at the board, and once, up at Rake, waiting there with his cruel patient smile, so certain he has finally found the switch that shuts me off.

And I choose.

I choose as I have chosen every hard thing since the storm-night I dragged a bleeding stranger in out of the killing cold. I choose the living over the dead, the truth over the wound, the whole planet over the one man I want to take apart with my hands. I turn my back on Admiral Rake—the single most satisfying act of my entire life—and I put both hands back on my board, and I speak into all of Armstrong’s frequencies together, in a voice that does not shake, because Eli’s little sister was never going to give this man the pleasure of watching her break.

“This is Beacon Station Seventeen.” A whole planet hears me. “The man giving the order to destroy this station is Admiral Rake, and he has just confessed, on this channel, to staging the massacre of a Coalition unit in the first year of the war—to manufacture the outrage this entire conflict was built on. I have the recording. It is going out now, with everything else. To every soul still fighting on either side: you are not dying for a cause. You are dying for his career. Put it down. It is over.”

I send the last package. Rake’s confession, his voice, his crime, out to a planet that is already turning—the final blow that brings the whole rotten wall down.

Behind me I hear Torvak’s voice drop into a register harder than anything I have caught in it before, addressing the tower, the defenders, the turned soldiers, the whole ragged host of us: “The truth is out. Now we finish this. Take the admiral. Alive if you can. But take him.”