The Shadows

“Don’t kill him!” he shouted. “I’ll go! I’ll go—just don’t hurt him!”

s’Ex stood where he was, that notched, bloodied blade catching the light as he held it aloft. As if he were considering major organs for the next stab.

“It’s up to you, Trez. It’s all up to—”

Something snapped.

Later, when the white light had faded from Trez’s vision and the cresting wave receded, when the roar was silenced and a strange pain in his hands began to ride up his forearms, when he was no longer standing but on his knees, he would realize that the first guard he had killed that night was far from his last.

He would realize that he somehow murdered with his bare hands all who had surrounded him . . .

...and s’Ex was still standing there with his brother.

More than the deaths he caused, and the horror at iAm’s imprisonment with him, more than the copper-scented blood that was so red and now not just marking his footprints, he would remember the soft laugh that percolated through the mesh links covering the executioner’s face.

A soft laugh.

As if the executioner approved of the carnage.

Trez did not laugh. He began to sob, lifting bloody, torn hands to his face.

“The astrological charts did not lie,” s’Ex said. “You are a force in this world, well suited for procreation.”

Trez slumped to the side, landing in the blood, the jewels embedded in his robes digging into his flesh. “Please . . . let him go. . . .”

“Return to your quarters. Voluntarily and without hurting anyone else.”

“And you’ll let him go?”

“You’re not the only one who can kill. And unlike yourself, I have been trained in the art of making living things suffer. Go back to your quarters and I will not make your brother wish, as you do, that he had never been born.”

Trez looked at his hands. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“No one asks for life.” The executioner hiked iAm’s body up higher. “And sometimes they do not ask for death. You, however, are in the position to control the latter when it comes to this male. So what are you going to do. Fight against a destiny you can’t change and sentence this innocent to a wretched, prolonged suffering? Or fulfill a sacred duty many before you have found great honor in providing our people?”

“Let us go. Let us both go.”

“It is not up to me. Your chart is what your chart is. Your lot was determined by the contractions of your mother. You can no more fight this than you could fight them.”