STAR FALL PEOPLE Chapter 39

Nadia: San Francisco

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Time, that endless river, slowed to a crawl. Sley teetered, groaning. Mang sputtered on the floor in a spreading pool of his own blood. Mike darted, running into the recesses of chrome and steel, letting out a tinny wail.

Nadia let out a compulsive giggle.

Mang’s saber. This was her chance. She froze. Had the drug worked? It had instantly shriveled Becker into a husk. Sley was still here on his feet, whimpering in some kind of agony, but might it pass? And Mang looked unlikely to recover right away. But he would recover.

All this time, all these years, one blurring into the next, and yet here she was facing one simple decision, and she couldn’t muster the courage. Not while Mang was still breathing.

Sley crumpled to his knees. The drug was doing something. The drug could do something to her too. Where had that little rat run off to? She picked up Mang’s saber, felt its mass, appreciated its reach. “Mike,” she called, trying to sound sweet.

Sley crawled to the counter on his one hand and two knees. Nadia walked to him, Mang’s saber in her hands.

Finish them both off. Enter the reign of Queen Nadia.

Sley reached the dead girl, Sofia. He clutched her one hand with his own one hand. He was crying, but it didn’t strike Nadia as the tears of a dying man, but of a sad one.

“Don’t tell me you had feelings for this hussy,” Nadia said.

Sley looked up at her with the expression so intense she struggled to categorize it.

“She was my daughter,” Sley said, a trickle of blood oozing from the corner of his lips.

“I’m tired of your insults.”

He ignored her and stroked the dead girl’s cheek. “I…I think maybe we’re more than ghosts, Nadia.”

The rage that had driven her for so long rounded on her with a vengeance. How could he taunt her this way?

All she had desired was to have children, like any woman on this earth. Her first two natural-born and naturally deceased, and then Sley’s seed, the start of one abomination after another, each monstrosity intensifying her need to give birth to something human, something alive…

“But it’s not possible.”

He didn’t reply. He seemed to crumble before her eyes.

She looked back at Mang. He was still unconscious. His throat was exposed, bare.

A child. Was it possible? What secret had Sley uncovered?

Time’s river had reached a bend. Instead of Queen Nadia’s reign, could she begin something greater—a dynasty?

Empress Nadia, mother of a long line of heirs. A new kind of imperium, one in which she ruled alongside her princes and princesses.

Mang opened his eyes. He looked right at her. Nadia had the sense that he could see right through her. She hated him with the cold fire of five hundred years of sunsets. If Sley could father a child, then Mang… Mang’s just a man.

She raised the saber high.

Sley had gotten to his feet, leaning on the island counter. His face was a red mess, not just from his weeping or his woe. His skin looked as though it were erupting in rashes. His face, his one hand, she guessed his entire body. “Sley, are you…dying?”

A drunkard had more grace than Duke Kong as he wandered past her.

“Where are you going?”

He shuffled to the exit. “If you’re going to betray your master,” he croaked, “you’d better hurry up.”

Mang grunted, his eyes boring into her. She aimed for his neck.

“Nadia?”

She whirled around and nearly beheaded Gideon.

He fell on his rear, bleeding from his forehead. He must have taken a knock during the fight. He cringed, raised his hands. “Don’t hurt me!”

She turned back to finish the job. Mang was rolling onto his side. Sley had left the lab.

“Mike?” she called.

Maybe the kid would give Mang a shot. So if it didn’t work, Mang wouldn’t blame her.

Now. Do it now.