Starbreaker: Prologue
Imaginos took a step backward. He had selected every element in the scene before him to enrage one man: the woman lying on the floor, the strands of his own hair beside her and on the pillows in the bedroom, and the manner of her impending death. From another angle, he saw a set of dominoes waiting to fall into place. A single gesture would set everything in motion.
He felt a hand caress his shoulder, and turned to face a pale, amber-eyed woman. Her hair shimmered as black in the moonlight as the evening gown she wore. As he took her hand from his shoulder, she asked, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“It’s too late for such questions now.”
Ashtoreth shook her head. “Not at all. Your victim is still alive. You could spirit her away from here, remove all evidence of your presence, and find another way to ensure the destruction of the Power beneath the ice. You could endow her with a mind and let her have a life.”
He considered her words. They were words he had spoken to himself often in the past month, after learning that his time was more limited than he had realized. Though the body on the floor did not contain a mind, her existence still represented a significant investment of time and money. It would be a shame to destroy her.
“Destroying the Insof is no longer enough,” said Imaginos, referring to the Power by the name it gave its own kind, “That will not be enough to set the devas or humanity free.”
“You could still reason with M—”
“No names. Not where humans can hear us.”
“We still have time to overcome his skepticism and persuade him to aid our cause.”
“Even if you persuaded him, destroying the Power beneath the ice would not solve the entire problem. We will do this my way, and I will pay the price.”
He withdrew a handheld from an inner pocket of his jacket and used it to trigger a routine that he had preprogrammed into the body lying on the floor. The woman began to convulse as the nanoengineered cells of her body kicked into overdrive and began to cook her from the inside out. After a minute, all that could be recognized of her was her hair.
He shook his head as the scrubbers built into the flat’s ventilation system cleaned the smell and the smoke from their air. “We are finished here.”
Ashtoreth nodded, and disappeared from sight. He regretted not being able to do the same, but one final bit of business required his attention. Another woman stood in the foyer of the flat. Had disgust not twisted her features, they would have revealed her as a reflection of the woman that Imaginos had just destroyed in order to set his gambit in motion.
The woman pulled away as his fingers brushed her temple, but the brief contact was sufficient for him to use an energistic pattern to wipe her short-term memory and put her to sleep. As he caught her and drew her into his arms, he whispered in her ear: “I told you not to look.”
© 2010 Matthew Graybosch. All rights reserved.
