“Useless shots!” the despot spat.
A warning voice in my head grew louder than the speed-of-light pulse in my ears. I needed to distract the Overseer away from our fake Bridgebane. Shade had already slipped a few times with his voice. What was next? The Overseer was bound to hear something that didn’t make sense.
“What do you even want? What more could you want?” I asked the man who used to be my father in name only. The Overseer loved to hear himself talk—and to give me lessons in how stupid and useless I was while trying to convince me of his own perceived virtue. It had been an endless cycle when I was a kid. He reveled in the sound of his own voice, and right now, he had a literal captive audience. There was no way he could resist.
He focused on me again, his ire sucking at my soul like a black hole that wanted to inhale everyone’s happiness and crush it into a dark mass. “What do I want?”
Soundlessly, I breathed in and out. More than air fed my body. I’d seen Shiori again. Jax was with me. Shade and I had said what we needed to. I’d even found my father. Now, I would draw the Overseer’s fire. I hadn’t been able to save my mother or Miko, but I’d be damned if I’d let him murder anyone else I loved.
“You control the entire galaxy.” I nodded out the clear panel toward the Dark beyond, my home planet still taking up half the panoramic view from the upper deck of the starbase. “Why do you need to hurt people, too?”
“It’s not about hurting people.” He actually looked shocked—almost believably so. “I’ve protected them for years.”
A hard laugh burst from me, a spasm of disbelief I couldn’t control. “What are you talking about?”
“The war your grandparents lived through? I stopped it.”
“Yeah, by nuking a planet and poisoning another. And bombing the Outer Zones to pieces. How many innocent lives did galactic harmony cost?” Or had he conveniently forgotten the mass casualties, as dictators do?
“Humanity had been tearing itself apart for generations. It wasn’t the Sambian War, Quintessa, it was the Sambian Wars. One bled into another, endless. People courted conflict across planets, and I didn’t invent conquest.” The Overseer stood there, bullets in his jacket, armed guards all around him, and something made me stop and listen to him for once. There was a to-hell-with-this tone to his voice that I’d never heard before. It scared the crap out of me. A predictable Overseer I could almost deal with. An unpredictable one was a loose cannon of cosmic proportions.
“Planets’ worth of people had already killed one another because they couldn’t agree on the most basic of things. One faction had to have power over another. Sycophants had to crawl up the ranks. No one was ever happy with what they had,” he spat. “Ever.”
“It’s called free will, asshole,” Merrick ground out. “People argue.”
“Argue?” The Overseer aimed a missile-blast look on Merrick. “They mowed each other down in the name of freedom—a concept that can’t apply to an entity this big. People tried. And failed. Unified needs and desires could barely work on a planetary level. At a Sector level, they started to unravel. No one could agree on what liberty looked like. What it should be. For whom. One person’s utopia was another person’s hell. Each wanted their version of peace and happiness to win.”
“So you came along to impose yours?” I scoffed.
He shrugged. “Someone had to.”
“No, actually, someone didn’t. Democratic planetary rule worked in a lot of places.”
“Until someone ambitious on Planet A decided he or she should rule longer, or without the consent of the majority. And then why not do the same on the rock next door? Why not the whole Sector? That’s how wars start, Quintessa. Don’t you know your history?”
Now he was impugning my schooling? Fuck him. “Millions of people annihilated in order for your version of perfection to take over?” His version was my hell. “Books burned. History erased so people won’t understand that revolt works. Unfairly distributed resources and medicines. Power abuse rampant across the military.” My voice almost shook with disgust. “Not a single vote in my lifetime—for anyone or anything. Existence across the galaxy determined by a dictator with zero sympathy and more firepower than anyone else. How many people did you kill to get what you want?”
“Less, I imagine, than what endless war would have eliminated.” His cold, unfeeling response was a slap in the face after my outburst.
I gaped in shock. “Do you actually believe you’re the good guy in all this?”
“I don’t really care anymore, Quintessa, because when I’m done, I’ll have wiped forty years from existence and can start again—thanks to you and your blood.”
I stared at him. He’d just said a bunch of words, but I didn’t understand. Confusion and sudden terror choked off my breath. My heartbeat sped up, battering wildly in my chest.
“You’re bluffing,” Jax growled. “No one can do that.”
Sanaa took a sharp step forward to stand next to Shade. “What do you need from us, sir?”
I shot her an angry look on instinct. She was still playing her role, standing tall and straight, seemingly unaffected by anything the Overseer said, no matter how awful or preposterous. Sanaa’s ability to adapt and carry on, no matter what, kick-started mine and got my brain back online. She was a force of nature, and right then, she reminded me of lava hardened into strong black rock and polished smooth by the trials she and my father had been through to try to contain this lunatic. The time would come when she would heat and crack and fucking explode all over. I couldn’t wait. The Overseer had no idea what was coming for him in the form of Sanaa Mwende.
Or Tess Bailey.
My fingers curled around the flash blast in my hand. I found the detonator switch and rubbed my thumb across the corrugated knob as my gaze whisked over Jax and Merrick. Wrath. Shock. Revulsion. Dread. The same storm crashed inside me. I needed to understand what the Overseer had planned.
Shade kept quiet at the forefront with me and Sanaa, probably thinking his Bridgebane act was up but not quite certain. Not speaking just condemned him further. His disgust came through the mask. No one could hide that kind of visceral reaction. Behind me, Ahern didn’t say a word. Shiori murmured a soft prayer, her lilting whisper a reminder of times and places worth fighting for. I swallowed.
“I don’t need anything at this time, Lieutenant,” the Overseer answered. “Quintessa’s already given me all the answers.”
“What are you talking about?” I’d never given this man anything. Not affection. Not trust. Not an inch of me or anything else.
“You see…” The Overseer flipped a switch on his console and lit up a monitor. He swung the screen our way. Explosions popped and burst all over the place. Phaser fire sped across the screen. Unarmed ships and cruisers disintegrated, picked off by blinding flashes as they tried to flee. My eyes widened. There was a war zone somewhere in the galaxy.