The Stargazer's War - Chapter 33

Chapter 33: Nick

I hope after all the ice cream adventures and the scathing quips and the grand mysteries, after all the close calls and the glorious victory, after how, for so long now, everything has turned out okay, you haven’t forgotten what kind of story this is.

I haven’t.

Cold sweat ran down my neck. Shadows crept in along my periphery, blotting out the others, the hallway, the window. I saw only Nick, deep in the throes of void-induced psychosis, standing over Brady’s pallid corpse.

No. Wait. That wasn’t right.

The housing D custodian, the faceless mortal whose name I’d never bothered to learn, lay dead. Did his life matter so little I had to substitute another?

I wasn’t in deep space anymore.

The words came unbidden to my mind, a desperate denial, a futile prayer that maybe, just maybe, all was not as it seemed. I blinked.

Nick was still there. His eyes were still black. His hand still twitched.

This couldn’t be happening. He was just a kid. He’d already suffered through so much. He wasn’t even qi-deprived. Threads, he was getting extra focus hours!

I wasn’t in deep space anymore.

I clung to that mantra as if it could save me. As if it could save Nick.

In the face of cruel reality, my protests, my pleas, my frenzied rationalizations didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

That’s when I gave in.

Amidst the horror, the panic, the quiet wrenching of my heart and the black ichor wrung free that was despair, a hauntingly familiar sound echoed through the hall.

Cedric laughed.

I took an instinctive step back. The boot of my vac suit clanged against the maintenance tunnel’s metal floor. My muscles locked up. My thoughts scrambled. I tried to run, to turn, to at least avert my eyes from the nightmare before me.

I failed. As that vicious cackling seized control of me, I could but look down roofie’s dark hallway, the emergency lights dull and flickering from the core’s failure, and gaze into the abyss of insurmountable power and inevitable defeat.

I’d been here before. I’d dreamt this dream a thousand times. I’d seen its grisly end. Its terrors never changed.

But I had.

I’d grown. I’d learned. I’d overcome the hurdles in my Way and come out stronger for it.

I wasn’t in deep space anymore.

Qi flooded from my copper core into my heart, my blood, my brain. The laughter fell silent. RF-31 dissipated around me. I stared not at unstoppable Cedric and my fallen brother, but at poor, young Nick, the lonely kid I’d taken under my wing.

And I knew what I had to do.

Charlotte and Xavier kept defensive positions as I advanced down the third floor hallway. Even a stage above, they knew the dangers of approaching a VIP. I carried no such risks.

If he could’ve drained my qi, he wouldn’t have hungered so.

Shiver was already in my hand before Nick’s vine lashed out at me. I severed it with a sharp, decisive swing. That trick may’ve worked on me once, but against the speed and strength of my copper body, it made for little more than an annoyance.

It didn’t even slow me down.

I stopped just shy of the custodian’s body and stared deep into Nick’s eyes. I scoured them, searching their black abyss for a spark, a single star in the endless night, some small part of him that yet remained, that rejected the hunger, that might still flail against infinity rather than succumb to the madness that it wrought.

Only emptiness stared back.

I plunged Shiver into his chest. It was easy. The blade slipped between his ribs and pierced his racing heart.

Nick collapsed.

I followed him to the floor.

He reached out a balled fist towards me, craning his neck to meet my gaze.

As I took his hand, it opened to press two tiny lumps into my palm. He looked up at me with a smile on his face and triumph in his voice as he breathed his last.

“I found it, Cal. I found it.”

Nicolas Vesper, sixteen years old, the youngest cultivator to reach tin in Fyrion’s history, and one of startlingly few that I called friend, died with my sword through his heart and his hand clasped in mine.

Xavier and Charlotte raced to my side, the former stopping to confirm the custodian’s death as the latter wrapped an arm around my shoulders.

“You did the right thing,” she told me.

“I did this to him,” the words came cold and quiet, an admission more to myself and to the Threads than to Charlotte.

“You couldn’t have known—”

“The signs were there,” I interrupted. “The depression, the appetite, the staring off into space, I saw them. I recognized them. And I did nothing. I wasn’t in deep space anymore. How does someone planetside, someone getting focus room hours, contract VIP?” I looked up at her, gazed at her with my qi-enhanced eyes, black as the night sky, only a few specks of starlight different from Nick’s, from Cedric’s. “How, Charlotte?”

She didn’t answer.

Xavier placed a broad hand on my back as he knelt next to me. “You did everything you could have. You were his friend. You looked out for him. You risked your life to avoid abandoning him. You can’t blame yourself for this, Cal.”

Oh but I could. I could blame Cedric for make me like this. I could blame Nick’s parents for their mistreatment. I could blame this entire cursed sect for creating such a hostile environment for those that needed help the most.

Above all I could blame myself. I alerted him to the vast well of power in the emptiness. I drove to him try injecting seeds with dark qi. My own inability to complete his experiments sent him to find it for himself.

But that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

Together the three of us stayed there, kneeling in silent vigil until the paramedics forced us away. We watched them gather up the two bodies, cover them in a blanket as they readied the wheel them away. Xavier took it upon himself to clean Nick’s blood from my sword. I didn’t thank him. I should have.

Through it all I clung to the qi running through my mind, chilling my heart and slowing my breath, like my life depended on it. It certain ways it did.

The world moved in a blur around me as I gave the medics my statement, heard the others corroborate my story, and watched the two shrouded forms disappear into the elevator. Only when but a bloodstain in the lush carpet remained as evidence of the day’s tragedy did I return to my room.

Charlotte and Xavier tried to follow, tried to offer their sympathy and support.

I locked the door behind me.

Lucy had sent me a message. She whispered comfort and condolences in her gentlest of tones, assured me she would land as soon as she could. Apparently there was some sort of delay in obtaining a berth.

I paid it no mind.

I sat on my bed and finally opened my first to stare down at the two lumps Nick had handed me, the obvious source of the grin on his face, of the victory in his dying words.

A pair of apple seeds greeted me, one alive with light and fire and a complex weave of qi I couldn’t begin to untangle, the other quiet and dark, its center wrapped in shadow and familiar stillness.

He’d done it. Of course he’d done it. He’d always been a prodigy.

For some time I sat there, gazing down at Nick’s achievement, his one and only bid to leave his mark on this uncaring galaxy, until it proved too much for even my qi-hardened heart.

I slipped the seeds into my pocket. I lay back. I expanded my spiritual sense.

And I drifted off into infinity’s uncaring solace.

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