Part Seven

Twilight was deepening. As she gazed at the dark blue sky through the intricately cut holes in the lattice, she heard the cry of a male peacock. That mournful sound traveled across the still air all the way from the garden, reaching her here in this prison that was her wedding chamber. How she wanted to tear off the necklaces of strung gold coins that encircled her throat like shackles, and the fancy robes that this day signified her as another man's property.

My beloved, she said in her heart, please forgive me. I did not want to betray you like this, but I had no choice. I had to do it, for his sake. . . .

She started when she heard the footsteps of someone approaching. It's him! her mind screamed out in panic. But she willed her body to remain calm and not betray her. Fear gave her enemy power. It made evil stronger.

"Do you regret your decision, Zafirah?" the man said at her distant look, when he had entered the chamber and come to stand beside her. "Your decision to marry me?"

"Why should I?" Her voice was sad, but exuded a composure that soothed her body's limbs that trembled slightly. "You have done what the Prophet decreed. I should be grateful to you for providing me with this security."

A satisfied smile spread on the man's lips to hear that.

"However," she continued, "you have murdered my husband whom I loved dearly and faithfully, and for that I shall never forgive you. Hashim."

"Have you any proof of this alleged murder?" The young amir's eyes narrowed as she turned to him silently. "What does it matter now?" he said, his voice devoid of any of the slippery suaveness he had addressed her with in the past. He did not bother to disguise the lust in his look as he gazed at her pale, slender throat, her green eyes, her golden hair done up beneath the sheer veil. "He is dead, and you are my wife: mine to do with as I please. Come. I have waited long enough for tonight."

He grabbed her wrist roughly, pulling her to her feet with a start and causing the wedding jewelry she wore to jangle cacophonously.

However, just as soon as he had done so, a burning sensation like a jolt of electricity and as cold as ice flash-freezing his veins ran up his arm and through his body. He let go instantly, his breath forced from him in a cloud of vapor.

"You witch!" he screamed when he had regained it.

"I may belong to you," she said slowly, "but I will never consummate this unholy marriage."

"You will! As my wife, you will obey me!"

Hashim moved toward her again, his hand raised to strike her. But his falling hand was stopped before it could reach her, and he felt his whole body repelled by an invisible force. He stumbled back a step, gaping. "What devilry is this? What are you doing?"

"It is your brother's devotion that protects me from your evil intentions," she told him, her eyes meeting his steadily. "Even in death he will not allow you to touch me."

Hashim forced a laugh as he wiped the sweat from his lip with the back of his hand. "My brother was an idiot. He never told me the woman he had fallen so madly in love with was a demon."

The woman remained silent.

"Very well," the young amir said. "If I cannot have you, then I shall take your son."

Her eyes widened, her heart jumping in her chest. "What?" She had not foreseen that any such threat had been in the capacity of her brother-in-law. "No. . . . You cannot mean that. What would you do? He is only a child!"

"Then I will make a promise with you never to harm a hair on his head," said the amir, "if you sleep with me."

The woman's shoulders slumped. That was simply not possible. She had made her vows long ago; they could not be broken, not even on account of a man as wretched and perverted of spirit as this. She bowed her head. Forgive me. Now I have truly failed you . . . "I cannot," she whispered.

"What?" The amir grinned, leaning his head closer as though he had not quite heard her. "Are you saying you would rather your own son suffer than grant me just one little pleasure?"

Her shameful silence was all the answer he needed.

"Very well then." The amir seemed almost bursting with pleasure at the sight of her anguish. "If that is what you wish, then I shall leave you in peace. But you will regret it. You will regret ever entering my brother's household. I will make you wish you were dead, knowing what a disgrace of a mother you are, the cause of all that boy's suffering." With that he stormed off, at once both defeated and triumphant.

She whispered after him, "I have no doubt you will," but knew he would not hear.

Tears threatened to overflow her eyes—tears of mourning for her husband and the life that had fallen with him, tears of sadness for her innocent son—but she held them back. What good would they do? She turned toward the lattice screen. The crescent moon hung low on the horizon, as though to bolster her spirits with its presence.

My love, be thankful that you are not here to witness for yourself the debauchery of your younger brother, she said in her heart. As for me, I would die of shame to think that I have brought this upon our son. If not for my vows, if I knew it would not compromise his safety, I would gladly give my life. For whatever befalls him, it will pain me who bore him and who caused it so much worse.

Still, I know in my heart that he will endure, and that he will grow to become more powerful than any of this. In time, the sleeper inside him must awaken. I must have faith, and take comfort in that single, undeniable fact, and for now, let him dream on. This age of evil and darkness will wither away and give rise to something great, even if I am not here to see it. My child, lord of my soul, he will help bring a thousand years of light to this world, if I am but patient for a few more.

I.Idyll

The white trunks of the Martian forest were like the pillars of a cathedral, the canopy of dark branches above them the vaults through which shafts of light pierced the shade, catching the motes of dust alight, while ferns and soft moss blanketed the rust-colored earth, absorbing the sound of their horses' footfalls. Every now and then, the wind could be heard howling through the tops of the trees that reached some hundreds of feet into the air due to the gravity of their world, but it did not reach the hunting party beneath the branches, where there was only stillness, punctuated by an occasional bird cry.

It was not often one of the giant fallow deer entered this deep into the wood, but in their hunt for the smaller varieties of tusked deer, Princess Jupiter's man Gesen had struck upon fresh signs of a young male in the telltale scratches left by his antlers on the trunks of the trees. Princess Mars, who was acutely familiar with the woods of her homeworld, led the party that consisted of Endymion and Zoisite, Nephrite and Jupiter. A buck of their quarry's size would be quite a prize indeed for the visitors from Earth if they could bring it down; and the excitement of their earlier catches had not worn down the Prince's two officers, but rather the adventure hunting one of the legendary giant deer promised encouraged their competitive spirit that was always lurking just beneath the surface of their brotherly camaraderie.

They found the buck grazing near a stream, and though Gesen had promised a young one, it was already as tall as a man at the shoulder, sporting massive antlers that must have spanned ten feet from tip to tip. "A healthy specimen," Mars spoke in a low voice to the others where they waited with their mounts. "He has obviously been eating well. I wonder what he's doing, coming so far into the trees by himself."

"Maybe he wandered off in search of better fare," said Zoisite.

"If that's the case, it will be the death of him," Nephrite said beside him. "His mobility is severely hampered by the trees. He won't outrun us."

"No," Mars agreed, "not easily. But once he realizes that, he may decide to go down fighting."

Nephrite snorted quietly. Both he and his mount looked eager for a race. "I'll take my chances with that," he said, but Endymion quickly put out a hand to calm him. As though reading his mind, Jupiter said at the same time: "This one calls for a shot that is swift and true to make quick work of it—like a bolt of lightning."

"Are you insulting my aim, princess?" Nephrite quipped with a sarcasm that was more intimate than offended.

"The kill should go to the Endymion," Mars told her comrade. "He is our guest here, and it is only fitting the Prince of Earth challenge the prince of the forest."

Whether she issued that challenge with confidence in his skills at the hunt or a lack thereof was not clear; in any case, however, Endymion nodded his gratitude, studying his opponent as he gave orders to the rest of his party. "Nephrite, Zoisite, wear down our quarry and keep him boxed in among the denser growth."

"Sir."

"Princesses, I may need your steady arms to back me up."

The young women uttered an affirmative, tightening their grips on their reigns; and with that as their signal the Prince's two officers spurred their mounts into a sprint with a cluck of the tongue, bouncing over the ferns in quick pursuit of the buck. It turned and took flight at the sound, faster than a creature of its size appeared capable of to look at it, but it could not shake them. Through twist and turn through the wood, the two were never far behind. Zoisite could hear Nephrite encouraging his mare on from the other side of the grove as he kept abreast of their quarry, while the sound of their horses' hoof beats and the buck's much heavier ones on the hard earth resonated under the canopy. The panicked buck tried to switch back and shake them, looking for a wider clearance between the trees, but to little avail. The two stayed fast by its side, slowly pulling ahead, aiming to encircle the beast in an ever-narrowing arc.

Not long after, Endymion caught up with them, together with his mount flying in silently and surely as the wind itself from their aft. Releasing the reigns and sitting erect in the saddle, he put an arrow to his bow's string and pulled back, carefully lining up the fatal trajectory that would put his arrow between the stag's ribs. He let it fly.

The buck stumbled, but the arrow had missed its mark and the beast, sensing that it was boxed in, halted in its tracks and reacted on instinct. In its desperation it rounded on its attackers with head lowered and the sharp points of its massive antlers reared for battle. Fortunately Endymion was outside of its range at the precise moment, but Nephrite's mare, in his attempts to encircle the beast, had all but run right into the path of those swinging antlers. She whinnied in alarm and rose on her hind legs, kicking at the air and throwing Nephrite from his saddle.

"Nephrite!" Jupiter yelled the warning Zoisite could not, for his breath seemed to have left him in anticipation as he circled around, interceding for his comrade just in time.

Though he could sense his horse's uncertainty by the wild flutter of its muscles between his legs, he charged anyway into the buck's line of attack with one hand raised toward it. What must have looked to be a futile gesture was, however, in fact quite the opposite. The buck's antlers clattered against the shield of energy he raised with all the brutal force a rutting bull could muster; and though its progress toward Nephrite was effectively stopped, the recoil threatened to knock Zoisite from his own saddle.

The princesses wasted no time in coming to his assistance. Just as Zoisite was raising his hand to protect Nephrite, Jupiter and Mars let fly their own arrows, striking the deer's tendons and bringing it momentarily to its knees.

Endymion returned with the finishing shot. With nowhere to run and the Prince's arrow buried deep in its breast, the giant fallow buck finally wobbled and collapsed.

Then Zoisite dismounted and helped his comrade to his feet. "Are you hurt?" Jupiter panted as she pulled up beside them, but Nephrite merely laughed as he brushed needles and dirt from his clothes with his riding gloves. "Aside from a bruised pride, never felt better. Or more alive."

She grinned at that. "That was quite an impressive display of corralling, you two. For a couple of sheltered Earthmen, that is."

"It's all in the calculations, my lady," Zoisite answered for his comrade, who was straightening his heavy clothing. "After all, everything is physics."

To his surprise, Jupiter wriggled an eyebrow at that. "Everything, you say?"

Then she left Zoisite to wonder at her meaning. Nephrite's shrug and ambiguous chuckle were little help.

The Prince knelt down beside the felled deer with Mars by his side. When she praised the sureness of his killing shot, he said humbly, "The butcher who knows the Way never dulls his blade."

She stared at him for a moment, perhaps having found herself guilty of underestimating the Prince of Earth, or perhaps with a growing sense of admiration, as she said with a curious smile, "How true that is. I can see why Princess Serenity favors you. She will be thrilled to hear her Prince has caught himself such a magnificent prize as this."

"Without her here to share this world with me, though, the significance of it feels less than perhaps it should. Is that forward of me to say, Lady Mars?"

"No. Or at least I do not think so." She could not keep the smile from her lips, and the expression made her look bashful as a young girl. "It is quite thoughtful of you, in my opinion. And in any case, somehow I know she would say the same thing."

Gesen and the servants who had accompanied them on the hunt arrived soon after to prepare the thousand-pound carcass for transport. While they were thus occupied, Mars clasped her hands and led a solemn prayer of thanks for the success of the hunt, which Endymion reverently joined in. It was difficult to deny the power in Mars's presence; she was not only a royal representative of her world, but its chief priestess as well, intimately tied with the spirit of the planet itself. And so it seemed only fitting that she would offer the blood they spilled as a token of gratitude and peace to the red earth beneath them, and to those spirits dwelling within the trees and stones of the wood itself, which continued to allow such rich abundance of life to prosper on such a delicate planet.

While marveling at the sheer size of the deer's antlers from close up—each was nearly as long as a person was tall—Zoisite turned to look at Nephrite, only to see his comrade watching Mars's prayer with fascination. "Your Jupiter is going to be jealous if you keep staring like that," he mumbled playfully, though he knew it was not Mars herself that had captured Nephrite's attention.

They retraced their steps to rejoin the rest of their party, and together made the leisurely ride back to the forest lodge on the lower slope of Mount Olympus in which they had for the meantime been staying. The warm rays of the afternoon sun filtering down through the cool forest air caressed the leather tunics and long sleeves of the young women's hunting attire with mottled light as they led the way—up rocky trails where strange, winged reptiles unseen on Earth for eons watched their progress, lichens crunched like dry autumn leaves underfoot, and waterfalls clear as crystal trickled over rust-colored cliffs. In the dreamlike haze that followed the excitement of the hunt, everything sparkled.

At the lodge, bracing the hillside like the great wooden palaces of Eastern legend, Mars's grandfather waited to greet them upon their return. Seeing the spry and dark old man's affection for Jadeite, whom he was already (much to his granddaughter's utter embarrassment) calling "Son," it quickly became obvious to his comrades how the young retired emperor had so easily become attached to this world. It reminded him so much of his homeland, he had confessed to them sometime earlier; each day he spent here his affinity for the planet—and, needless to say, certain of its denizens—only deepened. Even if Princess Mars indignantly scolded her grandfather for his forwardness, it was more difficult for her to completely hide the fact that her feelings were likewise.

Sundown on the red planet brought with it a true atmospheric rainbow. Locals were fond of boasting that no two sunsets were ever the same color, and so far the Prince and his officers had seen no reason to dispute that claim.

And as the stars began to peek out of the deepening twilight, the lodge filled with laughter and music set to a royal feast of game. Pheasant and rabbit and antelope, among some of the more recognizable dishes to the Earthmen, complimented a centerpiece of venison. The giant deer buck had enough meat on its frame to feed their party many times over; and Grandfather promised its impressive pair of antlers would be well-received in the Middle Kingdom court. It had been thousands of years since Earthmen had hunted that buck's ilk. Now the giants of the world were all but gone from the civilized Earth, only their memory remaining in the human subconscious to remind men of a time when they were closer to the gods.

"But civilization does not automatically mean man has to distance himself from the gods who reside in nature," Grandfather quickly amended, licking the warm fat of the meat from his fingers with a smack of his lips. "Take this planet, for example. Our people have long sought how best to maximize human comfort without affecting the delicate functioning of the planet."

"Which is my opinion on art precisely." Jadeite leaned forward in interest, excited for an honest debate. "What is beautiful is not man's dominance over nature, but rather his willingness to submit to her chaos in order that he might find that one pure kernel of perfection and hold it out for all to admire."

"You find beauty in chaos, Jadeite?" Venus said. "I would have to disagree with you there. Something unexpected can certainly excite our minds and hearts, but where we find true contentment is in things going right."

"Actually, I think what Jadeite is saying," Mercury said to her, "is not entirely different. We refer to nature as being in a state of chaos or randomness, when in fact it follows its own sense of order that human beings have merely lost their awareness of. What the ancients knew in their hearts and modern man seeks to quantify is really the same thing. It is the true nature of the thing men refer to, inadequately, as God."

"Everything is physics," Jupiter repeated, nudging Nephrite knowingly with her elbow though she said, "Isn't that right, Zoisite?"

Mercury looked between the two, but quashed the distinct feeling that she was missing some private joke. "One could say that, I suppose." (Jupiter stifled her laughter.) "Ultimately it all depends on how satisfied we are with our method of understanding the universe around us."

Nephrite nodded at that. "The only question then is what sacrifices mankind is willing to make to learn the secrets of the cosmos. Even spacemen, though they pretend otherwise, must have faced this issue when they civilized the outer worlds that had been barren of life. When they brought their wisdom to Earthmen millennia ago, did they take into consideration that they might be polluting some inborn innocence in the process of making man's existence more fulfilling?"

"Man can break the bonds of Earth and fly through space, in other words," Zoisite said, "but the stars lose their mystery."

His comrade smiled at that. "No," he said. "The stars never lose their mystery. That is one thing I feel here. I felt the same standing in Queen Serenity's presence. Earth, and Venus as well, for all their richness are forever changing—and therein lie their greatest strengths—but on this world, on this mountain, one can truly sense the utter insignificance of the moment next to the timelessness of the stars. The energy in this place is old."

"Mount Olympus, the tallest peak in the solar system, where the immortal gods themselves were said to dwell," Mars said as though to herself. "Its fire may be sleeping far below the earth, but it remains a testament to the planet's awesome creative power, and for that we hold it sacred."

"The planet's bowels working right," said Jadeite, "rends and pulverizes its surface. But the sun's violent self-consumption makes life possible tens and hundreds of millions of miles away. No, I do not think you can separate the act of creation from the act of destruction."

"Well, my boy," said Grandfather, "no one is disputing that."

But their minds could not be contented with philosophical matters for long, and they eventually returned to more frivolous subjects; recounting the day's hunt, teasing and bragging to one another of their exploits, and dredging up old stories that their line of conversation reminded them of made the evening pass all too quickly. Nephrite's brush with danger on the hunt made Jadeite recall the time they went on campaign in the northern territories in their adolescence, and Nephrite had saved his cocky behind from an embarrassing brush with death. Like some satiric essay, his elaborate and imaginative narrative seemed in the end to have all been for a moral, even if neither of them took it seriously, that cocksureness almost always backfired—to comedic effect in hindsight.

When they had had enough of the spotlight, having failed to drag Zoisite and a suddenly shy Kunzite into their gags, they steered the conversation in the direction of the young ladies—who, after so many glasses of wine, proved to be just as ribald as their male companions. They gave Endymion a hard time about his pining for an absent Serenity, who was forbidden to travel so far from her palace for as long as her companions were able, but their intentions were good and their admiration for his faithfulness shone through. Mars's grandfather pretended to be scandalized by the talk of young people these days one moment, and was merciless to the other planets' princesses the next, before drunkenly breaking into song and falling asleep. Gesen entertained them with the simple balancing tricks of a street performer, except that the objects he balanced hung suspended and danced in midair, no strings attached; it was his unusual telekinetic skill, Jupiter explained, that had made him perfect for the position of her chaperon and body guard, even if he did have an unfair advantage when it came to one-on-one archery competitions.

At a certain point their conversation lulled as they all seemed simultaneously to run out of things to say, and fatigue finally was allowed a chance to catch up with them. As they listened to the musicians playing an easy melody on their strings, a certain pattern in the latest song captured Zoisite like a fish on a line, tugging him along for the ride, and he hummed it to himself as if recounting something heard in a vivid dream. Before long its notes and metre coaxed a verse from the recesses of his memory, and he caught himself fitting its words aloud to the music:

"Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars
In other words, hold my hand
In other words, darling, kiss me"

It had been years since he had sung in front of others—indeed, the last time he had been a different person—and the clear tone of his voice, as much as the perfect union of the words to the song, made the others stir and take notice. "Yes . . ." Kunzite said slowly as he let the whole sink into his mind, "that's it precisely!"

Venus stirred groggily beneath his arm. "What is what, darling?"

At the sound of her voice, as though just remembering where he was, Kunzite faltered uncharacteristically for words; but fortunately Mercury said, breathlessly, "This music . . . It is as though it was created for those words. But where have I heard them before?"

"I could tell you where," Jadeite spoke up, shooting a wry grin in Zoisite's direction. "I remember writing them myself."

"Wasn't that the poem written in the Chinese style you submitted for the royal anthology some years back?" Endymion said.

To which Jadeite nodded in gratitude. "I'm pleased that you remember my work, my prince. I thought the parallelism was particularly powerful, a perfect combination of classic technique and fresh imagery, but the splash I was waiting for was in reality more like a ripple." He shrugged dramatically. "Alas, such is the irony of fate. My most genius piece of work and it gets buried among a thousand verses on the same old spring blossoms and summer dreams, while this rascal over here," he pointed at Zoisite, "without a single poetic bone in his body (as he'll adamantly tell you himself), makes something truly inspired of it with absolutely no effort on his part. Where is the justice in the universe?"

"I make no claim to it," Zoisite said with a chuckle, trying to sound indifferent. "You wrote the words, my friend. Even if I just put the two together, the credit belongs to you."

"No, it's too late. The moment has already passed, in front of all these witnesses too." As he waved his comrade's attempt at appeasement off, Zoisite laughed. "When they sing that song in the streets of Kyoto they'll say it was written by the Elephant King of Siam, and forget all about their own retired emperor."

"If so, that is only because music is the purest medium for the expression of one's feelings, of one's love. Anyone can write words, but it is a truly visionary soul that can write words that sing from the page—as you have done."

"Ah, so you think flattery will make me forget this offense?" Jadeite quipped. Then, as though it had just occurred to him: "Which reminds me, have I ever told you ladies the story behind the Elephant King moniker?"

"My Lord in heaven. . . ." Zoisite rolled his eyes, but in his chest his heart leaped painfully. "Please, Jadeite, I beg you not to go any further!"

"Need I remind you, my friend, that the gauntlet was thrown down by yourself."

"But nobody wants to hear that old story. Some private jokes are ruined when you try to explain them to others, Jadeite."

"Now I certainly wouldn't mind hearing the story," Mercury said with a playful smile, but Zoisite was saved by some fiasco Jadeite's love poetry had just reminded Venus of; and as she cajoled Jupiter into helping her tell the tale, Zoisite felt for the first time like he could kiss the princess of Venus in gratitude, even though he was fairly confident Jadeite's account of his first time in Japan would have been exaggerated with lies that cleverly neutered the story of anything genuinely embarrassing or private between the two.

Amused and distracted by the two young women trying to get their facts straight, Zoisite slipped an arm around Mercury's shoulders and was pleasantly surprised when she leaned closer to him despite all the witnesses surrounding them. This was all he needed right here, the warm, mirthful conversation and comforting presence of close friends on a majestic and alien planet far from the Middle Kingdom and all the headaches that came with it. This world filled him with a sense of peace and wonder throughout that reminded him of those carefree days when he was a child in the deserts of Araby; and for a little while he was content to forget that there was ever anything other than this.

——

Gazing down at Venus as she lay stretched on the furs of his bed, Kunzite thought his heart might burst with contentedness. With her long, golden hair fanned out around her, her fair skin glowing with the faintest sheen of perspiration, one delicate arm curled beside her head like a shield from the midday sun, it was as though a goddess had come to him out of the very wilderness that surrounded them on this mountainside.

Her cheeks darkened under that gaze, and he watched her breasts heave as she exhaled in silent, abashed amusement. "What?"

"Nothing," he murmured. "It's just that you're so beautiful at this moment . . ." He wanted to save it. "You're making me fall in love with you, princess."

Her smile widened. "I can't help it," she teased him. "It comes with the name. Some sort of cosmic curse."

"Really? I see it as a blessing."

"Really. . . ."

Their flirtatious banter melted away under his sudden kiss. This tender moment, in the dead of a Martian night, could have been one of a dozen others, yet he felt its tenuousness, felt the fleetingness of time like only a moment of that kind of blissful happiness could cause one to feel. It made him sad when Venus pulled herself away and sat up.

He found himself saying without thinking, "Where are you going?" He dreaded she might say, back to her own bed.

Instead Venus gave him an enigmatic smile and said, "Nowhere." She tugged at something loose on her nightgown, and momentarily he saw that she had worked the ribbon that threaded through the top of the bodice free. She sat back on her heels at his feet, and took his left foot in her hands, cradling it between her knees.

Her hands were warm on his bare skin, her touch soft and loving. As he watched fascinated, she tied the ribbon around his ankle.

"What's this for?" he asked her.

"It's a promise." She blushed again. "A sign of my promise, that wherever I go, I will always find my way back to you again . . . my friend."

Friend. . . . She spoke that word so carefully, yet to Kunzite it was a recognition of the fragility of their time here that some irrational part of him feared would jinx their happiness. "It shouldn't be a princess's job to make such promises," he said.

She chuckled warmly. "But you're no longer on Earth, remember."

"I don't have anything to give you in return."

She shrugged, as if to say she did not mind, but her downward gaze that was so trained on the ribbon told him she felt differently.

"Very well." Kunzite hoisted himself up. "In that case, let me do you one better and promise you this. If something should ever happen to us, if something beyond our control should ever separate us, I'll come looking for you in the next life. And I won't rest until I've found you."

"Do you swear it?"

"I swear on my left foot."

Venus's smile was radiant then, as she wrapped a long, bare arm about his shoulders.

——

Jadeite found his princess on the roof of the Martian palace. Her back was turned to him as she gazed out over the slope of Mount Olympus at the capital below, and the tiny network of cities and fields and canals that stretched out far beneath them toward the Amazon Bay in the south, at the western edge of this world. He was aware of all that was there laid out before her, but his gaze remained focused on the feminine curve of her back, from her narrow and stately shoulders over which her raven hair fell like water, to the shapely hips and legs he knew to be hidden beneath the heavy brocade of her divided skirt. It never ceased to amaze him how she had changed physically from that young tomboy he had met as a child, though she still pretended to be exactly the same.

With a beating of wings, two coal-black crows larger than any of their ilk on Earth glided down toward her, and she elegantly raised one arm out to them in beckoning, clutching the long sleeve of her blouse in her white fingers. The first alighted on her wrist like a falcon, the second on the banister, and he watched as she whispered words he could not hear to them with a smile on her lips. Perhaps they were not even words that existed in any human language, by the way the crows cocked their heads at the sound of her voice.

The bird perched on her arm tilted its head in Jadeite's direction. At that, and knowing he would be found out at any moment anyway, Jadeite cleared his throat as he approached to announce his presence.

Mars turned to acknowledge him with a smile, then turned back to stroke the birds' wings tenderly. "How long have you been standing there?"

"Not too long, I suppose. Long enough to learn my lady's secret."

"Her secret?"

"Her ability to communicate with animals," Jadeite whispered near her ear, and Mars grinned all over again.

"These are my dear friends, Phobos," she said, pointing to one crow, then to the other, "and Deimos."

"Fear and Terror."

"Imposing names, I know, but they will not harm you. Unless you give them cause, of course."

"Oh, I don't doubt that." He took in the two crows' size again, and made a mental vow not to try any of his usual antics on the young woman in front of them, lest he lose a finger or two—or an eye. "You've named them after the moons."

"Just as the moons watch over this planet," Mars told him, "so these crows watch over me. Our souls are connected."

Jadeite lowered his voice and asked boldly, "Are our souls connected?"

Her hand stilled on Deimos's back, and he could not tell if she hesitated because she did not know the answer, or because it was all too clear. She muttered something to the crow and he and his brother lifted themselves back into the sky. It almost seemed to Jadeite as though they were playing a game to occupy themselves as they glided upon the updrafts far enough away to be out of earshot, but not far enough to lose sight of their mistress. Then Mars took his elbow and bid him follow her to what she promised was a special place.

She took him to a quiet spot nestled between the burnished onion domes of the palace, where the view of the foothills and the sea beyond was just as fantastic and the breeze less intrusive; and where the real Phobos and Deimos watched over them, their asymmetrical, pockmarked surfaces seemingly translucent in the clear, deep blue of the sky. In the distance to the southeast, the Peacock Mountain silently blew a fine cloud of steam from its crater, as it had for a thousand years. The erratic puffs thinned in the upper atmosphere, disappearing into a cloudless sky.

It was there that Mars spun around to face him, hands clasped behind her back in an unusually girlish gesture, and asked him, "Was there any more to that song of yours, Jadeite?"

"My song?"

"That poem that Zoisite put to music."

"You liked that, did you?" Her sheepish smile as she tucked a lock of her long, glossy black hair behind her ear was affirmation enough. "As a matter of fact, there was. It went something like . . . 'Fill my heart with song, and let me sing forevermore,'" he sang clumsily, trying to remember the melody. "'You are all I long for, all I worship and adore/ In other words, please be true/ In other words, I love you.'"

"You see?" she said when he had finished. "It was meant for music all along."

He looked down, unused to the feeling of his own cheeks burning.

She sat down beside the banister and turned to look back at him. "Did you write it about me?"

"It isn't proper for a young lady to ask such a question, is it?" Jadeite chided her, but he said just as quickly, "But yes. I wrote it for you. For how you made me feel that time we first met in the Moon Palace."

"Even though you had only seen me once. And I wasn't exactly kind. . . ."

"Mm, 'not exactly kind' is something of an understatement, princess. You were cruel, plain and simple." He took a seat beside her, unable to hide his grin, and tucked back the same stubborn lock of hair that had worked itself free. "But you made quite an impression on me nonetheless. No matter where I was, I never forgot the spark in your eyes. Oh, when did that spark become your fire? . . ."

Mars sighed. "You haven't changed at all, have you? Always a casanova. Always a li—"

She shut her mouth quickly, regretting what she had almost said, but she had said enough. "Always what?" Jadeite said. "A liar? No. If I told a lie it was only to help myself forget you, because I thought you didn't care for me."

"How could you think— Of course, I cared for you! I just was never very good at showing it. But every time I thought of how I had treated you, every time Grandfather spoke of you, my heart would leap of its own accord and I could not deny it if I wanted to." She smiled to herself. "Grandfather is very fond of you, you know."

"Yes, I know."

"He already speaks of you as though we were married, but you can't fault him for it. He raised me like his own child. A part of him wants to see me continue to serve the planet's spirit nobly as I have been doing, but yet another part is eager for great-grandchildren."

She said the last part with just a hint of derisiveness, but even Jadeite knew better than to trust it. He said gently, "What is it you want, princess?"

Mars blinked up at him. "What is best for the Silver Millennium. I am the Princess Serenity's faithful servant, and you are Endymion's."

"Objective and ambivalent as always, Mars," Jadeite sighed.

"I am not ambivalent—"

"Torture me no longer, then. Tell me: haven't you any desires of your own?"

He was treading on dangerous ground, he knew, by the way her eyes were slowly narrowing. But what he wanted to hear himself he could not say. A confession his feelings were returned? Ah, but that was never the problem.

"You know," he said instead before she could answer, "in my country, they call this planet Firestar. The Romans envisioned it as the heart of the god who governed war-making, because surely, they thought, only bloodshed could soak the soil of the planet so red."

"What are you saying, Jadeite?" Mars sounded skeptical. "Are you trying to make a point about the Martian spirit being a belligerent one?"

He shook his head, a smile on his lips. "Those are your words, not mine. If anything I was going to remark what complete peace I feel being on this world. Nephrite was right: the eternal calm here fits more what the ancients would have expected of the planet Venus, if their names are any indication. Then again, even Venus was notorious for her violence when crossed. I must remind myself that even this planet was shaped by cataclysmic forces; it could not sport the largest volcanoes and the deepest valleys if it had not first been ruptured and torn apart at its seams. Through agony it was born, while Fear and Terror gazed down upon it."

"You're speaking nonsense again."

"Am I?"

Nonetheless, something poetic and distant had entered his voice, like a man speaking to himself.

"You think I don't know the history of my own world?"

Jadeite chuckled lightly. "No, princess. If anything, I think you know its history only too well. As you said, your souls are connected. But fire and blood are sacred things, and have been since the dawn of consciousness when we Earthmen worshiped our gods with the only things we had to transcend the base earth around us. Flames rising into the sky; blood steaming in the cold air. Battle itself is a feat of great passion, is it not? And victory on the hunt sustains life. Blood is spilled in passion, and the flame burns and scars the memory into us."

"Like this scarred world," Mars said distantly.

Jadeite leaned closer to whisper in her ear, his breath stirring the dark veil of her hair: "Can you still hear its heartbeat deep below us, princess, echoing the pounding of the blood in our veins?"

She closed her eyes as he spoke and retreated to some place of peace within her mind, tilting her head slightly so that she might catch a faint strain of that heartbeat he spoke of—whether the planet's or his own—and all that it might reveal.

——

Smooth cliffs as red as rust rose up on either side of Bunbo's boat, glowing in the midday sunlight and reflecting like hills of copper in the crystal mirror surface of this strait within the great Sea of the Mariners. Though they were quite a distance away from him, their sheer faces that rose up hundreds of stories seemed to tower intimately over his tiny boat like the walls of a fortress of giants, leaning in to whisper their secrets of ancient creation to him on the wind. There was nothing with which he could even think of comparing these walls on Earth, or even the Moon, for it seemed as though some all-powerful force had taken this planet that was smaller than his own and made everything out of proportion. On Mars, rivers were seas, lakes oceans, and volcanoes grew to the size of small satellites, whole worlds in and of themselves. The monumental features of this world were to him, in a word, awe-inspiring.

He passed narrow sheets of rock that had been torn by the earth and sculpted by the water and the wind into fins, rising out of the waves like the backs of fabled leviathans. In places the forces of nature had chiseled great holes in the softer layers of rock, leaving windows that let the blue sky through, or bridges that the surface of the sea completed perfectly in its reflection—or overhangs as big as amphitheaters that led an Earthling to recall a primitive memory held deep within his subconscious of a time without agriculture or permanent settlements when every thing in the world around himself was magic.

Scraggly junipers and rugged wide-leafed pines clung to the cliffs with bleached, knotty trunks and roots that looked as if they would let go of the rock and plummet to the sea at any moment. Every once in a while a raptor circled above looking for prey among the cliffs, and for a moment it made Bunbo feel like home, until he reminded himself of the scale of everything, including the fauna, on this world. That familiar-looking hawk might have had a wingspan easily as wide as he was tall.

He let the current take him downstream, and eventually he came to the place Mercury had told him about. It was a small, wooded island that rose out of the strait where the walls were not so close or massive, representing the highest point for miles which was capped by a rounded structure built in the Greek style. There was a small dock on one side of the island where Bunbo moored his boat. Then he slung his day pack over his back and began to climb up the steps that had been hewn out of the rock face. A tall, copper post-and-lintel gate at the entrance brought him for a moment back to his childhood in Japan.

Tall cypress trees shaded the steep climb, and a pattern of turquoise moss and lichen dotted the stairs. Bunbo did not meet anyone along the way, nor when he reached the outlook at the top, but it was difficult to say when the last visitors to the island had left. In his own home country, he knew it was not necessarily the case that the most overgrown shrines were also the least well-tended. Rather, the thick growth of plant life was a sign that the spirits of nature favored the place so as to make it prosper this much, and it would be irreverent of human beings to seek to undo that prosperity for some aesthetic sake.

The structure that stood in the clearing at the very top was shaped like an oracle's temple: a perfect, enclosed circle surrounded by an outer ring of sturdy, white columns, capped by a copper dome roof the same color as the stone cliffs. On second thought, Bunbo mused, the dome must have been made of gold to have gained such a ruddy patina over however many centuries it had stood here, rather than the turquoise finish that copper soon achieved.

From below, the temple, its dome glinting in the sunlight, had appeared to hover on the very edge of a cliff, but from this perspective it proved to exude an air of complete stability that was needed to balance the feeling of disorientation one felt looking at such a view. From this height, the network of long islands and straits that made up this mere section of the Sea of the Mariners, seemingly stretching on out to eternity, and the rich variety of life both human and otherwise that lived on top of its austere cliffs, was revealed to the human eye. From this height, Bunbo could see, however faintly, the very curve of the planet itself. At this moment, he was very far from the Martian capital.

He went inside the temple, which was larger than one could have imagined from the outside, as though space had been warped inside of it. The interior was plain but for the cracks and discolorations nature had given it. It magnified every sound made within it, as though if one only lay still and listened he might catch the sound of the planet itself, its heartbeat of magma flowing deep underground.

That was precisely what Bunbo did. Sunlight streamed in through the large oculus in the dome, warming the center of the floor, and he put down his pack and lay down beside it to watch the clear blue sky overhead. He imagined a younger Mercury coming here alone like himself, and staring upwards in this same sense of wonder, experiencing the same feeling of insignificance. When sunset came, he could watch the sky through that hole gradually change colors, and at night see the stars drift by, watching for any constellations he might recognize. Would they seem different in his ancient place, that predated by far any ruin he had ever visited on Earth? Would he be able to catch a faint strain of the "music of the spheres" Nephrite so often spoke of?

For now the birdsong of the island's woods and the warmth of the sunlight beside him lulled him into a dream-filled midday slumber, a sleep to span a millennium.

——

We spent those few years between our meeting and the present in pleasure. All the luxuries of youth were ours, and the horizon of possibility was wide. Though I was only an observer, princess, I experienced yours and my master's happiness as though it were my own. Amid the grandeur of Mars and its monuments to the system's distant birth whose austerity moved us to awe, or wrapped in the heat of Venus's tropics and its rich abundance of botanical life whose only rival was Earth herself, there was no shortage to our pleasure. We dined on foods which made us swear we had died and gone to paradise, and spent long nights singing and laughing so hard our bellies ached. We skated on the frozen surface of Europa, and on Io watched the glowing haloes of volcanoes erupting at night from a palace nestled among the ice spires, while the planet Jupiter loomed like the awesome visage of a god himself on the horizon, greater than anything any of the terrestrial worlds could have prepared us for.

It was not just we few who enjoyed such prosperity, either. All the planets of the solar system benefited from a newfound cooperation. As Venus increased food production, just as Zoisite dreamed, the Earth responded with scholars who were eager to bring the thinking of the planetary kingdoms back with them to their home countries, and even contribute to the advancement of mankind's collective learning themselves. Once the pathway for space travel was made straight and open, the flow of people and material from one world to another could only come with greater ease; but such was doubly true for ideas.

Trod upon and all but abandoned was the fear of the spaceman, and the naivety of Earth. Young princesses of earthly kingdoms dreamed of lunar gentlemen who would whisk them away to impossible palaces of crystal and stardust, where they would wear the latest fashions and be liberated from the restrictions placed upon their sex in their homelands; and Venusian and Jovian ladies made plans of marrying into Earth royalty and inheriting all the wealth it had to offer—culture, land and connections, and exotic jewels that would make them sparkle like the night sky. The young men of the Imperial Service worked harder than ever in their scholarly pursuits for an opportunity to see a new world beyond their imaginations, and if they should return home from their travels with a bride all the better.

In those few years, the ministers of the old court whose xenophobia had once been praised as prudence saw their power begin to waste away. No longer did a young man's enthusiasm for space call into question his loyalty toward his own planet and its traditions; such a thought was outdated and crude, an embarrassing holdover from a less enlightened time. Queen Serenity's influence was paramount, for she was at once to Earthmen and spacemen alike so much more than a distant monarch—she was a symbol of all things to be desired: justice, prosperity, and fraternity for all nations.

Did we lose our sense of identity as a result? None of us believed that to be true at the time. We knew who we were and what history belonged to us. We appreciated beauty where it existed, and sought to mend the mistakes of our past with a collective future of righteousness. What we wanted to create, from the goodness of our hearts, was nothing short of a living paradise. Will history fault us for our dreams? Perhaps that is not for even me to say.

Perhaps, too, our happiness had nothing to do with what happened, except in what ways we might have been blinded by it. Who is to say that was not our right? At the time, we really thought those days would last forever, didn't we?

——

Artemis made haste when he received the message. When he first glimpsed Luna pacing the hallway, her head bowed in solemn thought, he feared the worst. Even the smile she flashed him when he rushed forward to take her arms was marred by tears in the corners of her eyes.

"I came as soon as I heard," he said, watching those eyes. "What has happened?"

To his surprise, when she spoke, there was beneath her words a low rumble of pleasure. "Oh, Artemis," she told him, "the oracle has given me such wonderful news—"

"You were in communication with Pluto?" When one who was not the Queen spoke to the guardian of that border world, it was rare and usually under grave circumstances. He was not so quickly reassured. "Luna, this—"

But Luna shook her head. "I could not hold it in a moment longer. I had to tell you right away. What Pluto summoned me to tell me, is that I will have a child—that we will have a child, a daughter, whom we shall name Diana."

She paused for his reaction, but suddenly Artemis found himself speechless. He could only stare at her and gape as the meaning sank in, and exhale a small laugh, at once of disbelief, relief, and a shyness he had not felt in years. "A child?" he finally managed. "You and I? Are you. . . ."

"Not at the present. But do you know what this means?" Luna said, her voice rising in tandem with his. "It means our race will live on in the Silver Millennium! We will survive another generation. Is that not good news?"

It was good news indeed, but Artemis could express that in no better way than by throwing his arms around Luna and holding her tight. The tears in her eyes, tears of happiness he now understood, threatened to overflow his own; he could feel them being churned up by the rumbling in his throat. He shut his eyes tight as he whispered over her shoulder, "Oh, Luna . . . I cannot tell you how happy I am at this moment to know that." The reverberation of her purring over his heart was all he needed to know she felt the same.

——

Good news came from the southern kingdom of Earth while they were sailing the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, news that Zoisite's plan for Venus's agriculture had after almost four years become a great success. The numbers that had just come in were astounding, so that even the hard-lining ministers of that planet could not deny the good it had done the Silver Millennium. For the first time, there was a surplus of food grown in the planetary kingdoms, and the agricultural ministers of his own territory on Earth felt themselves freed of their age-old shackles.

"Now they can haggle with the Moon Kingdom a proper price," Zoisite related the message's contents to Bunbo, who had brought it to his attention, "instead of rationing their own children's suppers in order to dress the tables of spacemen."

"Princess Mercury will be pleased to hear the news," Bunbo said.

He did not sound half as excited as Zoisite was, however, and, his own green eyes sparkling, he searched his apprentice's face for a glimmer of any emotion beneath its stony surface as he said, "And you, Bunbo? Are you not proud of how far your homeworld has come in being a top competitor?"

"Earth has always been a competitor," Bunbo began; but he corrected something within himself as soon as those words were out of his mouth, and instead smiled at Zoisite, even if the smile did not quite reach his eyes. "But I do hope this quiets some of your more vehement nay-sayers."

Zoisite returned his smile. Some nine years had passed since he first brought Bunbo under his wing, and though in those years he had hardly seemed to age a day himself, adolescence passed slowly for the boy as well. He was still not quite Zoisite's height, and something of his boyish self remained in his soft face and small lips, and his wide, dark eyes which had always struck his master as the eyes of a philosopher old beyond his years. If anything had changed in these last few, restless years, it was only that the rebellious spark in his manner had grown tempered, his quick wit just as quick but its edge dulled by the patience cultured by wisdom.

Through it all he had only grown into a more trustworthy confidant, like a comfortable extension of Zoisite himself.

He clutched the message carefully in his hand, and lowered his voice. "Have you seen Mercury?"

Without thinking Bunbo pointed toward the rear deck. "I believe she is taking in the view."

Zoisite clapped the boy on the shoulder in gratitude, and made his way to the deck in question, where—true to Bunbo's word—Mercury stood with Jupiter in the open air, holding the hair out of her eyes as they talked animatedly, their words whisked away into the golden clouds of the planet Jupiter by the wind off the ship.

When they saw him approach, Princess Jupiter bid her friend to excuse her. "Zoisite," she said in passing, a mysterious smile on her lips as she did so.

"Jupiter. Won't you stay to hear my news?"

She glanced back at her friend. "I'll hear it one way or another, but don't let me get in your way."

He had the feeling that she misunderstood what he had come out here for, but he was thankful for the privacy nonetheless when he turned his gaze back to Mercury. She was dressed in a loose shirt and slacks like the time years ago when their romance had been new and uncertain, and they met in the grand library of the Moon Palace; and the wind made the fabric cling to her fey frame, teasing him with a glimpse of girlish curves so coy and yet so chaste, like Mercury herself.

"What is it you wished to tell me?" she said with a slight tilt of her head, still holding that lock of hair in place.

In her presence, suddenly it seemed insignificant, but he told her all the same of the message he had just received, that told of the sheer bulk of Venus's produce under the program he had first proposed to the council in the Moon Kingdom.

"Congratulations," she said, taking the leaf of paper into her own hands. "This is some victory."

"It is the Venusian farmers who deserve the credit for their efforts." Where this sudden selflessness came from, he did not question as he took the paper she handed back and tucked it securely into his jacket. He leaned back against the ship's railing. "This is more by far a victory for the common man than it is for me, or any of us who merely championed the plan."

"Yet everything has happened as you planned. What do you deserve for that?"

The temptation was too great. "This," he said simply and softly, and leaned toward her.

She did not turn her cheek to him, but instead raised her face in invitation, letting him place a kiss upon her smiling lips. They were cold from the Jovian air against his skin, but her breath escaping from between them to mingle with his was warm, oh so warm and tender. The contrast brought a shiver up from the base of his spine, and the cloudy sky that surrounded them without end in every direction glimpsed through his eyelashes made him feel as though he were flying, buoyant as a balloon upon the airwaves.

They parted only reluctantly, her azure hair now blowing without restraint across Mercury's face. "I have something for you," Zoisite confessed to her.

"Do you?"

He nodded and put his hand put to his mouth. Curling his fingers into a loose fist, he blew lightly into his palm while he watched Mercury over his knuckles. As she watched, he opened his hand and concentrated on drawing the cold up from within him. He could feel the biting coolness moving through his veins up to his palm, freezing the moisture his warm breath had left there. His energies he put to work changing the very molecules of water themselves, and very soon a flower of ice crystals materialized in the palm of his hand, starting as a bud in the very center and unfolding as more and more petals crystallized around it.

Mercury breathed in in wonder, her blue eyes widening. "You really have been practicing."

"For you, princess, this is just a small gesture. A symbol, if you will." Zoisite smiled down at his work, glancing at her from under his eyelashes. "Monks who follow the Way believe that a person can change the shape of a molecule of water with his thoughts alone—thoughts of anger, happiness, and most beautiful of all, love."

Mercury looked up at him. "And your feelings for me take on the shape of a lotus. Would you call that a symbol?"

"Certainly. Lovers talk of being reborn on the same lotus blossom in heaven."

"But you don't believe in karma."

Zoisite's cheeks colored faintly. "All I believe is that the present is tenuous enough not to waste time dwelling on the uncertainties of the future."

"In that case, I have something to give you as well." And so saying, Mercury cupped his hand in her own, pursed her lips, and gently blew across the ice blossom, as one might blow an imaginary kiss to a child. The skin of Zoisite's hand where hers touched him tingled, and before his eyes a thin mist rose from his own hand, sparkling in the air cupped within it. From the opening of the ice blossom tiny bubbles rose and were carried away by the wind into the atmosphere, sparkling like chips of diamond, until it had completely evaporated.

When it had, it was Zoisite's turn to capture Mercury's hands in his. "Come with me to Earth," he said. "I know I have entreated you a dozen times already, but you cannot make excuses forever."

Mercury's eyes turned away, and for a moment he thought for sure that she was going to refuse him again.

After only a little thought, however, before he could attempt to convince her further, a shy smile appeared on her lips, and she said quietly and simply, diplomatically, "I would like that very much."

II.Space Oddity

The metallic chiming of a million tiny bells bouncing against one another heralded the wedding party. Through the streets of Kathmandu they snaked to where the celebrations would be held. The fortunate couple was carried aloft on a palanquin bedecked with golden bursts of marigolds and a rainbow of other large, fragrant flowers. A chain of them draped around their shoulders encircled both the bride and the groom. The groom was beaming, and beneath her heavy jewelry the bride's pleasure was also apparent on her face, though both were perhaps too overwhelmed by the ceremony to join in on the singing and merrymaking that surrounded them.

It was the chiming of the bells and the flashes of brilliant color glimpsed from beneath his eyelashes that gently shook Zoisite out of his reverie. This was the life that he had missed while on his travels in the planetary kingdoms—the rich cacophony of the jubilee, the sea of colored flags that cared not a whiff for some higher, colder aesthetic sense, the mix of sounds and smells and age-old ritual that made the common people of Earth great—the life that he had wanted for so long to share with Mercury.

As she stood beside him now, her blue eyes wide with all the wonder usually reserved for a new theorem as she took in the world around her, he could hardly feel more fulfilled.

"It wasn't all that long ago that we were wedded like this to our true names," Nephrite said to him.

"The particulars were a little different, though," Zoisite said with a sleepy smile.

Jupiter linked arms with his comrade, pulling him toward the parade. "Let's join them and give the lucky couple our blessings. What do you say, Nephrite? Mercury, you'll come too, won't you?"

"Oh, I don't know . . ." her friend said, suddenly shy, but Nephrite was more obliging.

"I don't think they would terribly mind having us," he said. Then he turned to Zoisite. "Shall we catch up with you at the reception?"

"Perhaps," Zoisite said ambiguously, but the two were already fast leaving him and Mercury behind to join the throngs of revelers.

"Are you sure it's all right?" Mercury asked him when they were alone.

"Certainly." He smiled to himself, recalling an adolescence that felt like so long ago. "Nephrite is like a god to these people. Or, at very least, they see him as their most beloved son. He has ascended not only to the Capital but to the stars, and returned to them again. —Oh, but don't be surprised by it," he told Mercury quickly when she opened her mouth to speak. "They hear tales of the Moon Princess's grace, and the beauty and virtue of her guardians in the planetary kingdoms, and speak of you as goddesses yourselves."

Mercury lowered her eyes in modesty. "Are they really so superstitious?"

"On the contrary, I don't think spacemen are quite as democratic as they would like to believe." It was not necessarily to defend what he had once thought of as Earthmen's superstitions himself that he said so, though at the same time he would be lying if he said being in the midst of the life of an Earth city did not cultivate in him a strong sense of pride and patriotism. "I see how they look on their princesses with awe and adoration. I hear what is being said in the forums—"

"What is being said?"

Zoisite chuckled. "You're not very observant when it comes to yourself, are you, princess?" he chided her, but he could not be sure from her expression whether Mercury particularly appreciated the jest. "Don't you know they frown upon Nephrite and myself? And Kunzite and Jadeite as well. They worry we will corrupt the perfection and grace of the young ladies who represent the very hearts and souls of their planets."

"What a ridiculous accusation," Mercury said, with a small smile of her own. "They should trust us more than that."

"I have no doubt they do. The ones they don't trust are us, Endymion's officers. They would rather we stuck to women of our own world, while they applaud our Prince's wooing of the Princess Serenity."

Mercury laughed, brightly and honestly, though Zoisite could not help resenting it just a little bit. "You see," she said, "that is precisely why I don't listen to rumors about myself and my sisters. When we fill the kinds of positions for our people that you and I do, some things are bound to be thrown out of proportion and misunderstood."

"Misunderstood?" Zoisite wanted to ask, but before he could murmur more than a syllable, she added quickly, "But why do you mention it? Are you jealous, Zoisite?"

"As a matter of fact, I am."

Some remnant of a smile must have still been on his lips, because she didn't seem to take him seriously.

Or else, she simply did not want to. She said eagerly, as though she had not heard him, "Do you know what I would most like to see? No more temples, no more dances and ceremonies. I want to see an Earth market."

"A market?" he echoed.

She hummed in confirmation. "I've always dreamed of it, since I was a child learning about the kingdoms of Earth in my schooling."

His smile returned at that, as did his energy, and he offered his hand with a gusto when he said to her, "In that case, princess, shall we get ourselves lost?"

Lost they may have become, but doing so anonymously was not quite as simple. With his golden hair and hers as blue as the ocean, the two stood out among the locals who crowded the vendors. Among the dizzying aromas of fresh produce and lilies in full bloom and roasting meats, and the brilliant colors of bejeweled icons and strands of gold and silver and gossamer silks and brocades billowing in the air, they were greeted with wide smiles and reverent bows of the head from those they passed, and merchants eager to show the two their finest wares. At one stop it was the fabric that brought the green out of Mercury's eyes, or the heavy silver pendants that made her pale skin shine like moon-glow; at another, incense to soothe her mind and soul, or the sweetest juices to refresh her in the summer heat.

They reached a bustling crossroads, where a crowd had gathered to hear a woman strum her lute and sing in a pleasing, lilting voice:

"Poets often use many words
To say a simple thing
But it takes thought and time and rhyme
To make a poem sing

"With music and words I'll be playing
For you I have written a song
To be sure that you know what I'm saying
I'll translate as I go along"

When she went on to play a familiar refrain, Mercury gasped and gripped Zoisite's arm tighter. "Isn't that . . . Yes, that's the same song you sang when we were on Mars, the one that Jadeite wrote. But another verse has been added."

Zoisite's smile widened more and more as he listened to the musician's version. "Yes. And the new part sounds just like one of Jadeite's disclaimers."

"I wonder if he wrote it himself."

"I wonder if he knows just how popular his verse has become." Of course, if he were here, Zoisite knew, he would hide his own pride cleverly by giving Zoisite a hard time to no end about being responsible for it.

He snorted to himself and closed his eyes, letting the song drift around him. "It would not surprise me if that song were with us for a thousand years," he said to Mercury. "If we heard it sung in every nation, in every language, outliving us all."

He was silent for a moment, and then the words more or less slipped out: "I was serious, you know, when I said I was jealous."

Mercury smiled demurely. "What do you have to be jealous of—you who has everything?"

"Do I have everything?"

She turned her head slightly at that and did not answer right away. "I wish you wouldn't say that," she finally said.

"Don't worry. No one will overhear us."

"I don't mean here," Mercury sighed. She kept her gaze locked on the musician as she said, "You know my feelings for you. I have never doubted you when you've said how much you love me. What reason have I given you to think that you don't have my heart as well?"

"Don't you see, Mercury? That isn't enough."

She turned to look at him then, and it pained Zoisite to see the uncertainty in her eyes, the feelings at war within her that he could not read. The ache in his chest only emboldened him to say, "When I said I would wait a lifetime if that was what it took to make you mine and mine alone, it was not entirely the truth. Waiting is the most difficult thing in the world. I grow weary of it, Mercury. I wish I could only show you how much it pains me when you are called back to your own duties alone, so that perhaps then you would understand—"

"Please, Zoisite. I wish we wouldn't discuss this."

"I want to make you my wife," he said below the murmur of the crowd, holding her arm so that she had no choice but to hear him out. "Coming here with you has made me realize that like I never thought possible before. I don't want to wait any longer."

However, rather than appreciating the intensity of his feelings, a glimmer of distrust flashed across her expression before it softened once again with her characteristic patience. "I am sorry," she said, "but what you're asking of me simply is not possible."

"Because of Serenity?"

Behind his question was a hard edge that he instantly regretted—not because he did not feel it genuinely, for he did, but because it only widened the gap between himself and Mercury.

"I cannot go against her plans for us," she said.

"But there are ways it can be done in secret. She will never have to know."

In response, Mercury averted her eyes again, and said nothing.

"Why?" he persisted. "What else would keep you from accepting my love?"

——

"Ahhh. . . ." Jupiter moaned as she tugged in an unladylike fashion at her night shift. As if the sweat glistening on her shoulders and at the hollow of her throat was not proof enough of her trouble, she groaned as she dropped melodramatically down onto the mattress beside Mercury, "Why must the nights on Earth be so hot and oppressive? At least on Io one can always throw another fur on the bed to get warm; but one cannot, on the other hand, remove their own skin to keep cool. How do Earthmen sleep during the summer?"

Mercury laughed. "I never hear you complaining you can't get to sleep when we visit Venus."

"You can't be serious," Jupiter said, turning onto her stomach. As though they were even comparable, in other words.

"And here I thought you enjoyed living like a barbarian."

"Is that right? Wherever did you get . . . that idea?" And so saying, Jupiter pushed herself to her hands and knees and grabbed Mercury by the shoulders, promptly lost her balance, and pulled them both backwards onto the silken sheets.

Mercury struggled feebly at first, murmuring through a grin, "How is this going to help you sleep any better?" before their laughter faded away and Jupiter leaned her chin on Mercury's shoulder.

"It reminds me of when we were girls," the taller of the two young women confessed. "Don't you remember how you and I used to huddle together through the long lunar nights, and map out the constellations above the Moon Palace?"

Yes, Mercury had to admit, she did remember. "We were being trained as Serenity's protectors then, and when we felt particularly overwhelmed or lonely, we would fall asleep in one another's arms and dream of our homeworlds far away."

Jupiter hummed, already sounding miles away. Even then, she had always craved a warm body beside her to help her fall asleep.

"But these days it seems you would prefer Master Nephrite's arms."

Where her sudden coldness had sprung from, Mercury herself did not know. Jupiter stiffened beside her, and raised her head as though certain she had heard her companion wrong.

"Excuse me, Mercury," she said, pushing a lock of wavy hair behind her ear, "but do I detect a note of resentment in your accusation?"

"Not resentment," the other said quickly, abashed. She could feel the blood rushing to her face as she amended, "I would not exactly call it envy, either. But you and Nephrite have become rather intimate, have you not?"

Jupiter narrowed her eyes. "The Princess's guardians are to remain celibate. You know that as well as I—"

"Yes, I know the rules. I was raised on the same dogma as you were. But would you deny to me, who is practically your sister, that all is not what it seems?"

She could not, and yet she could not incriminate herself either, so she remained silent, allowing Mercury to continue.

"You two seem so completely trusting of one another, and I feel the same when I see Kunzite and Venus together. There has even been a certain peace between Mars and Jadeite of late that I don't remember from before—"

"What are you trying to say?" Sensing her friend's distress—as Mercury said, they were sisters in all but blood—Jupiter sat up, serious and concerned. "Are things not well between you and Zoisite?"

"I would not say that—"

"You know, just because we have hit it off, no one is going to hold it against you if you don't like him—"

"But I do love him," Mercury said with a sudden conviction that surprised even herself, and led her to amend diplomatically, "At least I think I do. I know it. When we are apart, all I can think of is how dearly I would love to be back in his company, and all I can dream of, his gentle smile. When he takes my hand in his, and it's so cool in this heat—"

"That man is strange."

Mercury shook her head to herself at her companion's derisive tone of voice. "He makes me so happy. You have no idea, Jupiter, what it's like to find yourselves thinking of the same propulsion theory at the same time, how . . . exhilarating it can make you feel, just to know that your heart is understood so deeply. It's like we're in each other's minds sometimes."

"I take it back," Jupiter said, though she didn't seem to find it as amusing as she tried to make it sound: "You're both strange. You two deserve each other."

"Do we?" A distant smile pulled at Mercury's lips. "Is there something wrong with me?"

"Because you haven't given yourself to him?"

"Or is it him? Honestly, Jupiter, how can I know what he wants of me? Sometimes the not knowing . . . it's frightening."

Jupiter turned to her, brows knitted in concern.

"Oh." Mercury started. "It's nothing like that. It's the loneliness I sense in him that frightens me. Something in the way he stares too intensely, or how his hands hold mine like they never want to let go. . . . Oh, I know love will do that to us, but it's deeper than that—deeper than I can explain. And it makes me fear for him. I'm afraid that if I let go, it would destroy him; but if I gave into his desperation. . . ."

She shook her head to herself in confusion. "I'm afraid it will only drag me down as well."

She was no stranger to loneliness herself; the most reserved of the Princess Serenity's companions, she had felt envy's sting more times than she could remember. But Zoisite was something else entirely. He needed her—or, at least, that was what he had decided. He had decided that she could save him. She sensed that much from him clearly.

Save him from what, however, she did not know.

And it was not as though she did not want to help him. She loved him. She had to or else it would not pain her so to see him in this agony he kept carefully hidden from her. But was it even realistic to think she alone could save him?

Jupiter's cheek resting sympathetically on her bare shoulder warmed her heart that had grown cold despite the sweltering night air, the fingers stroking the back of her hand calming the racing jumble of her thoughts. Mercury allowed herself to be pulled back down onto the mattress, where Jupiter held her close and caressed her like she had done when they were girls in the Moon Kingdom, and—though they had thought different at the time—things were far less complicated.

"I don't know what advice I can give you," Jupiter said against her hair. "Your heart knows itself better than I ever could; and even though sometimes we don't want to hear what it has to say, we are fools if we don't listen. But I can tell you this for certain. We will always be right beside you, whenever or wherever you need us."

That was the greatest comfort Jupiter could offer her. But even after she had fallen asleep, Mercury found herself kept awake by her thoughts.

——

I guess there is no need for me to recount what happened next. You were there. You heard the news at the same time as I did. I remember, because the look in your eyes at that moment still haunts me.

——

This time, when Queen Serenity was called to the Crystal Tower, it was with a sense of deep foreboding that she was not used to. Something had changed for the worse in the balance of the solar system, but she could not say what it was, only that she felt it in the Silver Imperium Crystal she kept close to her breast at all times. She had no doubt, if anyone could shed light on the source of this feeling it was the oracle of Pluto.

For too long she had relied on the princess and guardian of that distant, border world to comfort her with careful promises, to set her mind and her heart at ease. The Queen understood that now. However, there were things that even she was not privy to, whispers among the cosmos, and she knew she must learn to accept that.

Even though it was unacceptable.

As she flew through the halls of the Moon Palace, the long train of her robes billowing behind her, no one dared to stop her and ask the matter, or offer their assistance, though it was evident on the faces of all she passed that their own nebulous worries were only compounded by the urgency in her stride and the rare cloud over her bright eyes.

Only Luna managed to speak to her, as she ushered her Queen into the tower. "Your highness, Pluto is waiting—"

"I am well aware of that," Serenity told her coolly. She did not mean to be terse, but she knew Luna would understand that the gravity of the situation was such as to unsettle even the Moon Queen. "Please make sure I am not disturbed," she added in a gentler tone of voice, and Luna bowed her head low as she backed away.

Serenity could not open the line of transmission soon enough, once she had sealed herself within the tower.

Yet despite her fears, it surprised her nonetheless, when Pluto's holographic image appeared, that the signal from deep space was choppy with static. Such had never happened before.

When she spoke too, it was as though through a thick fog.

"It took us by surprise, my Queen," she said, her breath quick with urgency. "Slipped past our defenses without any trouble whatsoever. It all happened so fast we were unable to do anything—"

"Please, Pluto," Serenity managed in a calm tone of voice. "I don't know what it is you're talking about. Please try to slow down and explain the situation to me."

The oracle gestured to someone out of sight with a dark, long-boned hand from beneath her cloak. "Yes. Yes, I understand," she said, and Serenity could not tell if it was meant for her or those who were there with her on the very edge of the system.

"Some hours ago we received a message from our posts on the frontier that an entity of indeterminate size and composition had penetrated the Kuiper Belt. The message was delayed. However, even if we had received it in time, I still doubt our efforts would have had any effect. The entity entered our system much too rapidly. We simply had no time in which to prepare an organized effort, and as a result it was able to slip by our gates. As I speak, the intruder is on its way to Neptune's orbit, and . . . it is not natural, my Queen. It is slowing. . . ."

The oracle trailed off, and Serenity saw a moment later, as her shoulders shook just noticeably across the distance, that she was having difficulty keeping herself together. And as for Serenity, rarely had she heard the oracle so plain spoken; it could only mean Pluto felt a wrongness from this entity she mentioned that could not be explained even by the likes of her.

"Are you injured, Pluto?"

The other slowly shook her head. "No, your majesty. No, but my energy was drained by the effort to keep the intruder out. Would that I were, at least I would have a proper excuse, but it was so fast and so powerful . . ." She trailed off again, only to utter so quietly Serenity could barely hear her: "I am sorry, my Queen. I failed you—"

"Do not say such things. You did what you could."

"But it was not enough. History shall judge that—"

"Then History shall show that you did all that was in your power. Why didn't the frontier outposts send the message sooner? Did they not judge it was emergency enough? Why did they not use force? Is that not why they are equipped with such sophisticated weaponry?"

When the oracle hesitated in her reply, it was as Serenity dreaded. Her hopes were dashed by Pluto's revelation.

"They were destroyed, your highness. Only a few were left unharmed outside of the intruder's path of entry. And it was only because of the computers that we received any warning at all." The guns on the frontier stations were pointed outside of the system. What went without saying was that they did very little good indeed against a possible enemy inside the outer planets' orbits. "Though we have suffered casualties, we were fortunate not to suffer the same fate here. However, we are defenseless in this position. We are standing by to evacuate at your word, my Queen."

Serenity sighed as she weighed her options; but there was little else she could do.

"Give the order, then," she told Pluto. "I cannot afford to lose you. If the outer gates have been penetrated as you say, you can do much more good here by my side than where you are."

"Thank you, your majesty." Pluto bowed low.

"But come only if you can risk the flight. I fear what would become of this system if we lost you to this terrible thing as well."

"We shall continue to diligently monitor its progress en route—as much as we are able." Pluto hesitated then. She raised her face, and Serenity could barely make out the somber line of her lips beneath the hologram's veil.

"I must tell you, my Queen, what I have said thus far fails to convey the magnitude of my misgivings about the intruder. There was something deeply malignant about it; dare I say, I believe it wished us evil. It blocked out the stars as it rolled past us, like a thunderhead blocking out the sunlight, for so far that we could see no end to it. It was darker than the blackest night, for even the darkest night, even the dark behind our closed eyelids, is possessing of some light and pattern. Only death could be as black as that. I tell you, my Queen, there was a while I thought I might never see the starlight again."

The air inside the Crystal Tower was temperate, but Serenity felt a cold course through her body like she had never known before at hearing those words. It was all she could do to continue in a steady voice, but she knew she must, for Pluto's sake, and the sake of those who were with her.

"You must be going," she said. "I will expect your arrival in the Moon Palace before the new moon."

"And what of the people of Neptune? They must be warned, your majesty—"

"You have nothing to worry about. I shall contact them immediately with our next plans."

"Your majesty," Pluto acknowledged with a hand on her breast, relief flooding her voice.

"Make haste, but be safe. Be sure to keep me abreast of your progress."

The hologram faded from the center of the floor, and Serenity was left alone in the Crystal Tower once again. For once, the ensuing silence, disturbed only by the faint hum of the computers deep beneath her feet, was cold and unwelcome.

She missed Pluto's comforting presence already, that presence that reassured her that the future's course was already plotted out. Now, it was for the first time completely uncertain, and she knew she could not depend on anyone else to tell her what to do next.

——

The silver spaceship waited in the courtyard to take them to the Moon Kingdom. The stone tiles in the Indian capital were not used to such weight, but there was little else that could be done. Queen Serenity had declared a state of emergency and the princesses of the planetary kingdoms were called back to space, immediately.

Those on Earth were not told much, but what they knew was that some unknown force had entered the solar system; and that until the nature of such force could be determined—and whether it was benign or dangerous—the princesses were desperately needed on their homeworlds, not only to give their people comfort, but to lessen the system's vulnerability. "Serenity will need all the support we can give her."

"I understand," Zoisite told Mercury. He did not touch her, even in reassurance, but his small smile and the promise that things would work out that it seemed to hold was warmer than his hands could ever be. "Nephrite and I will be rallying around Endymion as well in this time of uncertainty. I suspect that if the Capital was in turmoil during the nova, this latest news can only cause another panic. We must not allow that to happen."

"No," she agreed. "We will get to the bottom of this, whether it be by the efforts of our scientists or the Queen herself."

As Zoisite nodded, he glanced over the balcony to the courtyard below, where Nephrite was bidding Jupiter farewell. Even in a time such as this, he could not help feeling a pang of envy as he watched his comrade gently caress the side of his princess's face. At the same time, he wished bitterly that his old friend had more shame than that. One way or another, Zoisite did not want to hear what promises they whispered to one another.

"Stay safe," he said simply when he turned back.

"I will. And you as well."

"I'm sending Bunbo to accompany you as far as the Moon Kingdom. —Please. It's the least I can do," Zoisite added when she looked about to protest. "I only regret duty will not allow me to go in his stead."

When he said that, Mercury smiled warmly. That was the farewell she would leave him with, that he would treasure until they could see each other again. Bunbo, who had been waiting patiently by his master's side, did not flinch when Zoisite announced he would be leaving on the same ship. Perhaps it was true that, even though they had not discussed it, he had been prepared for just this. Or else it was simply a sign of his loyalty, that he should be prepared to leave at a moment's notice if Zoisite wished it.

"We should be boarding, Princess," Bunbo said, with one arm raised to graciously lead the way.

Mercury's gaze lingered on Zoisite a moment more, before she turned to him and said, "Yes. The sooner we leave. . . ."

She did not seem to find it necessary to finish that sentence, and just trailed off.

Zoisite watched them go until they disappeared from his line of sight. Like some great bird eager to take off, the ship tested its engines while the final passengers boarded, its crew yelling orders and replies back and forth at one another. Caught by some melancholy, or else uncertainty about the events that had caused this emergency to be called—at least the nova years ago he had been able to see and explain—Zoisite stayed and watched the ship depart from the balcony, not minding the wind that whipped across the courtyard in its wake and wrapped his cloak around his shoulders, his hair around his face.

"I came as soon as I could," Kunzite's voice came from behind him just as the roar of the engines was beginning to fade. He strode forward to look over the balcony the same as Zoisite, glancing down at the bustle in the courtyard as he said, "I see the princesses' ship has already departed."

"It could not leave soon enough for Serenity," Zoisite sighed, "yet I was loath that it had to leave at all."

Kunzite turned to look at him then.

"No matter," he said. "All that means is that we four will have our ship to ourselves, like old times."

At that Zoisite finally met his gaze, curiously.

"I've come to collect you," Kunzite elaborated.

"I thought you were with Venus in the Middle Kingdom."

"Venus is already at the Moon Palace with her Princess. And that was months ago that we were all together in the Capital. Have you forgotten?"

"Sorry," Zoisite murmured. "It seems as though, aside from that time we spent together on the slopes of Olympus, you and I have hardly spoken to one another in years, and even that was more incidental than anything."

"But it has not been for wont of trying. Which is why I've come for you myself."

"You needn't have taken the trouble." Zoisite crossed behind him. "I'll be returning to the Capital immediately—"

Kunzite shook his head after him. "No, you won't. You'll be coming to the Moon Kingdom with me."

Zoisite spun to stare at him, incredulous of what he had just heard. "But our place is beside Endymion. We are his generals, his guardians, duty-bound to serve him when he needs us most."

"And normally I would agree with you, that returning to the Middle Kingdom would be the best course of action. But right now Endymion is already on his way to visit with Queen Serenity. If duty calls us to stay beside him, then that is the place where we are wanted."

Something about that did not sound right. Zoisite held his head as he paced the balcony, as though trying to massage an answer from the mixed messages he had received. If something had occurred in the outer reaches of the system that was urgent enough to make the Queen call Endymion to her side for answers, it was a greater problem than they had been led to believe. And if such were the case, his conscience battled over his duty to his Prince versus his duty to his homeworld. "The ministers in the Middle Kingdom will not be pleased about this, to say the least," he said aloud to himself.

"And what of it?" The other grabbed his elbow and stopped his pacing. "I thought you didn't care what they thought?"

"When it was about us, Kunzite. When it was about the distrust of spacemen." His gaze flickered over Kunzite's, searching his silver eyes for some sign that his concerns were understood. "But like it or not, they represent the feelings of our people. We represent the feelings of our people. And if we abandon them, how do you expect they will react?"

"I don't have a people—"

Zoisite sighed in frustration.

"I have always been treated like an extension of Endymion himself," Kunzite said.

"Then you go to him, and let me reassure my kingdom."

"And you seem to have forgotten that your Prince is your kingdom now."

Zoisite turned his head. He could not pinpoint it, but something in his comrade's words struck him as a defeat, a loss. It more or less slipped from his lips: "Then there is some truth to what they say. Serenity's power must be absolute, if she can summon the Prince of the entire Earth from his post with a word."

The bitterness in his tone surprised more than himself. Kunzite forced a laugh and spread his hands at his sides. "Where else would you have us turn for council? Like it or not, where the law is concerned, it is the Moon Palace that stands at the center of the system. Have you forgotten in these last four years that all our worlds are connected now? God knows you've spent them through the eyes of a girl from another planet—"

"How fitting, that you would be the one to make such an accusation."

Zoisite had hardly taken a step to leave the terrace, however, when a hand closed around his wrist. He spun, and was surprised to see his comrade's brow furrowed as though he had been the one insulted.

"Am I to apologize now for my feelings?" Kunzite hissed. "I would not have thought I would need to explain myself to you of all people. Don't tell me that you don't believe one can care deeply about two people at the same time. Did you think my feelings had at all changed?"

Zoisite's glare was hard despite the conviction in his comrade's voice. Did Kunzite really think he was so blind he could not see for himself what had happened? "What I believe?" he echoed. "What I believe is that when things become a little uncertain, it's easy for you to come running back to me, to a comrade. But when all of this is straightened out. . . . Where will you be?"

Zoisite snorted, and he shook his head to himself. "I know where you'll be. Which is why I must ask you to drop the subject, and let us focus on the matter at hand." He added in almost a whisper, "I've learned to put those futile hopes behind me . . . as I hope you can, too."

"Futile hopes—"

"Why are you bringing this up now? What's passed is passed. There are more pressing issues—"

Zoisite tried to pull his arm away politely, but he would have to work much harder if he wanted to free himself, and gave up out of his sense of decorum.

"Because," Kunzite finally confessed, his voice low, his gaze intense, "ever since the news came about Pluto you're all I've been able to think about. How much distance has grown between us since we first arrived together in the Moon Kingdom—"

"Stop it," Zoisite said.

"I don't know why now, but something about what happened made me feel I might never—"

"I said stop, didn't I? That's quite enough!" He jerked himself free. He didn't want to hear another word. Not about that. Not now of all times, of all places. "Queen Serenity has declared an emergency and you want to discuss frivolous things? Please be scientific, Kunzite, or at least civil!"

Terror had gripped Zoisite as he said those words, as if he were trying to hold back an elephant that might with a well-placed charge break through its restraints. He tried not to let it show in his tone of voice, but he could not be sure it went unnoticed. Kunzite said nothing, and gradually something changed in his gaze—a sort of surrender, if a defiant one.

"How soon can you be ready to leave for the Moon?" he said instead, any trace of the passion of moments ago vanished.

"Immediately. There is nothing I cannot take care of en route."

"Good," Kunzite said. "Then I'll see if I can't help Nephrite get everything in order."

As he turned to leave, a thought like he had forgotten something struck Zoisite from out of the blue, and the words more or less slipped out: "What about Beryl?"

"Beryl?"

"Will she be joining us in the Moon Palace?"

It had been some time since her name had last come up between them. Kunzite had to think, but only for a moment. "She is on tour of the outer planets with Governor Prism, I believe. I am sure she'll be well taken care of." But his explanation struck them both as rather vague.

Nor did he have to say what occurred to them both, that even in a time like this, but for their passing thoughts, her presence beside them and their Prince was hardly missed.

——

"Be-e-ery-y-yl. . . ."

Beryl started. She was sure she had just heard someone whispering her name. It could not be possible, yet at the same time she was sure her ears had not deceived her. The sound washed over her like a gust of wind rustling the branches of trees. But there were no trees here. Just the rivers shining like poured galena that snaked around the city, and the rosy gray ridges beyond, where crystalline towers of boiling water rose from geysers high into the Tritonian atmosphere, and sparkled against the starry sky. Looming large like a chandelier in the ceiling of the sky was the planet Neptune, who cast its vibrant, blue light over everything.

It was a scene of deep tranquility that could not be outmatched, even by the Moon itself. Here on the edge of the civilized worlds, orbiting the last of the solar system's giants, as Beryl looked out beyond the cloistered halls of this world's royal city, she was stricken by an overwhelming sense of awe and mystery—a feeling of balancing on a fine line, on the other side of which lay the great plain of unknowable eternity.

Perhaps it was out of that very eternity itself that that voice came, whispering her name again from all around her. Calling her, to some unidentified purpose. "Beryl . . . Beryl. . . ."

". . . They say that on some evenings you can hear the most beautiful strains of string music, floating on the air like shadows on the deep, still bottom of the ocean, but no one has ever seen the player."

"Ah, but it is most assuredly the playing of the princess of Neptune, if in fact the story is true. And you shall never see her if Serenity has any say in it. What the Moon Kingdom would be loath to admit is that the openness of the inner planets' infrastructure is a careful ploy to distract Earthmen from realizing just how closed the outer planets with all their secrets remain. And can you really blame them, given our own history of close-mindedness? It's a small miracle that we were even allowed on this tour, and you see how closely they watch us. . . ."

Prism trailed off and paused when he noticed Beryl hanging back. His companion stopped as well, and said, "What? Is something the matter?"

"Did you hear something just now?"

"Perhaps it was the princess's music," their companion said half in jest, but Prism's raised hand silenced him.

"No," Beryl said, as much to herself as the two men. "It sounded like a voice . . . like someone whispering. . . ."

"Unless it was the hiss of a geyser, you may have simply been imagining it. Something about the proximity of the planet has a way of warping one's aural perception." Prism flashed her a smile that effectively ended any further protests; and Beryl knew he was a rare sort of man among Earthmen, who was not given to dismissing a woman's concerns out of hand as some sort of hysteria; but his impatient manner she nonetheless could not help take personally, with a slight twinge of betrayal. "Come," he said, as though by way of apology. "If we dally here too long, we may garner suspicion."

Beryl very much doubted that, for all the security she had seen around the palace grounds, but she said, "I'll catch up with you two shortly. I want to take in this view just a few moments longer. How often is one privy to a sight such as this?"

To which Prism could not but agree, as already his companion was eager to regain his attention in some other line of conversation.

Beryl had every intention of keeping her word. However, when she took the first steps to follow them, some invisible force seemed to have seized her legs, if not her mind. Making her heart beat faster, like a seductive scent caught on the breeze. For reasons she did not understand herself, she had no desire to follow them; instead, the whispering voice would not let her be. Driven by curiosity as much as annoyance, and by an inexplicable sense of purpose, she retraced her steps instead to the wide and shallow staircase that led down from the hall to the rock face below.

Beryl's heart raced in her chest as she paused on the landing, ears and eyes open for any other signs of life, but she could no longer hear Prism's voice or his footsteps in the building. It appeared she was alone. There was no one there to ask her why she felt compelled to descend those steps, or, once she had reached the bottom, to follow the ancient, crumbling pathway she did around the side of the rock face that ran below this arm of the city. She would not have been able to explain it herself if stopped. The blue orb of Neptune hanging high in the sky, and the hush pervading everything that almost seemed to emanate from the planet itself, or from the water roiling deep below the moon's crust, had put her in a kind of trance; she did not have the will power, nor the desire, to go back.

She came to a strange structure that did not match the architecture of the city's buildings. Though it was carved out of the rock, it was rather as though the rock had built itself up over the structure over the centuries, like coral over a sunken ship. Its entrance gaped like the foreboding mouth of an ancient creature, its teeth the tapered mica columns of a Minoan palace.

Surprised to see it emerge from out of the hillside, Beryl glanced back at the way she had come. She could not have come far, but already she felt a great distance from the castle. She could not see even the highest towers over the weathered shelves of strata rising sideways like clouds out of the rock face. And Neptune seemed closer than ever before, gazing down upon her like an ever-watchful eye. Pressing down upon her.

"Come, Beryl. . . ." the voice rose again like an exhalation from out of the man-made cavern, and Beryl obeyed it without fear.

Brushing the waves of hair out of her face, and picking up the long skirts of her gown, she boldly climbed the steps to the structure. The heels of her slippers clicked on the cracked onyx floor that had once been polished to an immaculate, mirror-like surface. The sound ricocheted off the walls, piercing the silence that had descended suddenly upon her.

Still the disembodied voice called her: "Beryl. . . ."

"Who are you?" Beryl asked aloud, her voice echoing in the ancient chamber.

She was not sure if she expected an answer, until she got one.

"I am what I am," it came, resounding through the structure. "I am the Law of this universe. Since the dawn of time have I traveled alone through time and space to arrive at this system full of life. . . . Long have I searched the void for the one who would hear my voice, for you, Beryl. . . ."

For the first time, Beryl felt fear. But she did not flee. "How do you know my name?"

"I know all that is in the hearts of all men. Their true names. Their true desires. Their true natures. But I have chosen you among all of them, Beryl. You alone have answered my call. I have peered into your soul, and you alone have what I seek."

"What is it you seek?"

The word rumbled through her like a slow quake: "Power."

Beryl shook her head. Perhaps the voice was all an illusion after all. "I have no power," she said, more to herself than anything. "I am nothing here but a visitor, and where I come from, a symbol of not much of anything. I am sorry, for you've come all this way, but you called to the wrong person."

The voice seemed amused at her words, and her conversationalist manner.

"On the contrary, I find it most fitting that the one I have sought should be a woman of the planet they call Earth. Perhaps you are not powerful," it conceded, "perhaps not now, but I could make you so. I sense the yearning in you, the outrage that has been growing deep inside of you at the injustice of your existence. You were born for greater things than this. You were born to be recognized! to be feared and worshiped with awe like the first goddess among man. Reverend mother of creation as verdant as your namesake, beautiful as the black, fertile soil, cruel as the unending night of death. Isis. Gaia. Eve. . . . Are these not the names the people of your world have used to describe it? What a vise this world of men has placed you in: companion to a prince who cannot love you, to an officer who cannot wed you. How they have neutered you—"

"How do you know these things?" Beryl said, looking about her in awe. She had been so careful about keeping her feelings for Endymion—and her trysts with Prism—secret, to say nothing of the other things her conscious mind knew nothing of.

"As I said," the voice reminded her, as though reading her mind: "I see all that is in men's hearts. And all the evil that is done against them. There is no secret that remains hidden from my all-seeing consciousness. There is no unborn possibility that remains unlamented within me. You, dear girl, could have been a queen of Earth—"

"No." Beryl shook her head at herself. "Now I know this is naught but a delusion. A queen of Earth? Never in a million years. What girl has not dreamed of it, and I who grew up closer to my Prince than any other, but . . . No, it was never in my destiny to rise to that—"

"Never in a million years?" the voice repeated, in mockery and amusement. "Perchance that you would say that. Destiny? What a joke. Nothing is written but what I write. As I said: I am the Law here. If I desire this system to be mine, it is mine. If I desire it now, it is now, not eons away."

"What you speak is nonsense," Beryl snorted. "Besides, this system already has a queen."

She quickly silenced herself, but the words were already spoken; and even so she could not silence what was in her heart, as the voice had said. "Of course," it murmured in something that was not quite a hiss nor a chuckle. "Queen Serenity rules this system, does she not? hidden away within her Crystal Tower where she exercises her absolute power over the other worlds with her . . . Imperium Silver Crystal. . . ."

The voice paused to savor these words and all that they implied. Power was what it said it had been looking for, and those words resonated with it. Lust and envy for that power resonated within the voice, within Beryl's mind, and it at once thrilled and terrified. The thing that had spoken surely must have taken that knowledge from her own thoughts, meaning she had betrayed the Moon Queen, however unwittingly. Yet for some reason it was not that knowledge that frightened Beryl so, so much as not knowing what the entity would do with that information. To ordinary men, these were just facts; but what a being such as this one that could infiltrate one's own thoughts could do was another matter. A question mark as large as the solar system itself.

She had been brought up to believe nothing was more powerful than the Imperium Silver Crystal, but now she doubted the certainty of that assertion. Nothing known to man was greater than that Crystal; and this entity that spoke to her now was most assuredly not known by anyone else.

A great weight lay on her shoulders with that revelation. If she alone knew of this entity, she alone was in a position to stop it from doing potential harm to the balance imposed by the Moon Queen.

But what could someone like herself do?

"What can a powerless girl like you do?" the voice kept on. "You wish to stop me? You do not even know what I am capable of doing."

"Nothing," Beryl said. "No one can topple Queen Serenity's authority."

"Then no one I am, for I will make this system mine, and all its untapped energy shall be released for all who would embrace me. Am I not great? Am I not fair?"

Beryl knit her brows. Was the entity talking about what she thought? Freedom from a Moon-centric system? But wasn't that just a product of her own interpretation?

"You are not mistaken in your assumptions. I have come to this system to liberate a great power, and in doing so, to liberate the people of its worlds. Are you surprised, Beryl? Has Serenity placed you under such a heavy yoke that you cannot see beyond your feet, see that you and all this system has been enslaved? Have you not heard the arguments in the universities of Saturn? The educated circles of your own Earth? I hear their whispers even now. Have they not all raised the same doubts about Serenity's intentions?"

"Man was meant to be free," Beryl agreed, albeit reluctantly, lowering her eyes. "It is his birthright. The spacemen loyal to Serenity swear themselves to the god of democracy, but they live as kings while the women and children of Earth starve and succumb to disease."

"Yes. . . . Precisely right," the voice encouraged her. "They believe men of all worlds are equal, so long as they are spacemen. No one is more responsible for this injustice than Serenity herself. She has made sure that all the power in the universe rests in the hands of one arbiter: the Moon Queen. But who has said that she is a worthy arbiter, but she herself? Look up, Beryl, and see the truth!"

Beryl did look up, and her eyes flew open in surprise. Her heart skipped a beat in her chest, hovering in the still realm of death for one eternal second before she remembered to breathe. Before her the black onyx depths of the cavern had been transformed, and instead of her own reflection stardust danced on the black surface—within the black surface. Stars flew by and opened up in great blossoms of fire around her, leaving her unharmed; tendrils of the galaxy stretched out impossibly across the dark of the cavern. It brought Beryl to her knees. "How can this be happening?" she whispered to herself. Was this an hallucination?

"I have power too," said the voice, "a great power which I will give you if you would swear yourself to me. Help me, and I will restore you to the position you rightly deserve, that you were born to inherit. I will make you a queen, a queen of all worlds—of all cosmos. This system and endless others, all of them I will lay at your feet, at your command, and no one shall oppose you. Those who try will be destroyed. Not even their bones will remain to give testimony to their existence."

The words washed over Beryl like the visions that swarmed before her. "It is all too great to imagine," she said to herself. "But what you say cannot happen. It simply cannot come to be." There was nothing that should have been able to make that promise, let alone to one like she.

Not that she believed herself undeserving, of course. Quite the opposite. She could feel a thrill course through her body, a tingling, tense sensation that started at the tips of her fingers and rushed hot through her limbs into her very core. A feeling that, if she only stretched out a finger, she could make a sun burst into existence, or just as soon wink out. She knew she could become drunk on this feeling—a feeling of righteous supremacy, like the universe itself was granting her its blessings to carry out its divine will in her person—but was that so wrong? How she would love to have that kind of strength, that kind of power, the very elements at her beck and call.

Only rational thought, distanced from those emotions that urged her to seize this opportunity, resisted the skewed logic of it.

"Stop thinking like a slave!" the voice urged her. "You bow to no one!"

Which was the very start that Beryl needed to shake her out of her indecision; and with that new clarity, she began to see the pattern behind the field of stars—a pattern that, like the entrance of the man-made cavern, had eerily recognizable features: nebulous eyes, and a wide, grinning mouth full of cosmic teeth—and it disgusted her.

"There is nothing you can offer me that I need," Beryl told that boundary-less face. "As I said, you have come to the wrong person. I am not this queen you speak of!" Yes, you are, a voice inside her insisted, but she stubbornly ignored its seductive logic. "I am happy as I am."

"Are you?"

Beryl was stopped by that simple question. A familiar face rose to the fore of her mind, and a name to her tongue, that instilled in her such longing even after all these years of separation that her body trembled just to think it:

Endymion.

Her Prince.

This entity who knew her heart and her mind surely also knew how this love she struggled to hide so silently within her engulfed her like licking flames.

If a thing could give her the universe on a platter, could it not also give her the heart of one man?

But—this was folly. Was one man, any man, really worth so much? To her surprise, Beryl found she did not have a ready answer. Only the entity behind the voice could have known which way she would answer, for it did not hesitate to seize upon this opportunity for certain victory.

——

Once again the operators in the communications tower of the Tritonian royal city tried to get through a message to the Moon Kingdom, with the same results: no luck. They threw up their hands at Governor Prism, who presently leaned over the back of one chair himself. "Are you sure you've tried every channel?" he said for what felt like the dozenth time. "How can none of them be receiving a signal?"

"I don't know what to tell you, Governor," said one of the technicians. "We've tried them all, but some sort of interference seems to be blocking the signal."

"Interference?" One of the more scholarly-leaning of the party of Earthmen stepped forward to join him when he heard that. "Activity on the sun?"

"No, sir. Solar activity is low this time of year. But it does seem electromagnetic."

"The tides couldn't be causing it, then?"

The moon's proximity to Neptune made for an unusual tidal pull that presented itself on this world with fantastical waterworks twice a lunar day. But the operator's shake of the head seemed to indicate confidence that was not the problem.

"It should be the wrong time of day for that, but if that is the case then we will just have to wait until it passes."

More waiting, was it? Prism considered himself a man of great patience and understanding, but the smoothness of all operations in Serenity's kingdom had spoiled him these last couple of decades. "Well, keep trying," he told the operators with a final pat on the back of the chair. "I would like to have my ship in the air within the hour."

"Yes, sir," said the operator, as Prism stepped away to speak to his companion.

"One would think Serenity would do something about the technology of these outer worlds," he muttered to the other. "For the system's first line of defense, they are terribly outdated, to be put out of commission by natural processes."

"Perhaps they are in need of a bit of Earthman ingenuity," the other suggested, recalling their homeworld's latest technological triumphs, and even Prism had to agree it could not hurt.

"Perhaps." He stopped his companion with a hand on his arm. "Have you seen Beryl, my friend? With any luck we can still get off the ground and be on our way back to Oberon before long, and I have not seen her in hours."

"She's probably returned to her quarters. I will inform her of the plans."

Prism patted the man on the shoulder in gratitude, but his satisfaction was short-lived.

A commotion by the windows made both men turn to see what was the matter. First the operators closest, then other visitors and Neptunians alike, with anxious murmurs, turned their gazes to the plains below. One did not have to actually see the floor of the valley to grasp what the excitement was about. If the loud hisses that reached them even in the palace were not enough, the great plumes of boiling water that shot toward the heavens certainly were. They rose higher than the natives around them appeared to have ever witnessed, judging by their open mouths and frenzied gazes. Watchers' murmurs of awe grew in volume and fear as the ground beneath them began to shake, first in barely perceptible tremors, then in a steady rumbling that showed none of the signs of moving on that an ordinary earthquake would.

"What is it now?" Prism spoke to his companion, but could not turn his eyes away from the sight. "Is this too just an effect of the tides?"

The other could not answer.

There were shouts at the window. The valley floor groaned and hissed as the river winding below them was turned to pillars of steam that obscured the stars. Many, fearing a cascade of boiling water, shied away from the windows; but Prism, with the careless boldness of an Earthman, rushed toward them to take in the cataclysmic sight for himself. The pressure that was mounting all of a sudden beneath the earth was so great it was visible, and even the vents that had opened sporadically in the crust to let some of it off did not appear sufficient.

A shadow descended over the valley, and Prism looked up. Past the rising fountains of water—normally a beautiful and calming sight, now something to instill dread—a black haze was rolling like storm clouds over the sky, slowly snuffing out even Neptune's brilliance. Not since he was a child had Prism been seized by such a terror as he was then, all the worse because it was a terror whose cause he could not even know.

"Master Trapezoid," he called once again to his friend, an uncharacteristic panic in his tone, "where is Beryl?"

"Does this sight not move you, Governor?"

Prism started, for it was not Trapezoid who had spoken, but a woman's voice. And one that was at once familiar to him and entirely alien—a husky and flirtatious yet at the same time sinister voice, beautiful and unsettling in its intensity. He glanced in the direction from which it had come, and swore his eyes were deceiving him.

The woman standing there was tall and voluptuous, her hourglass curves and long legs sheathed in a long, dark-violet gown that trailed on the silver floor. Large, dark eyes held his boldly, and looked upon him with an air of superiority that for some inexplicable reason—coming from this mysterious person—felt utterly deserved. Long, thick tresses fell upon her shoulders like waves, but unlike those he had combed through his fingers so many times before, they were fiery red.

Still, there remained enough similarity for him to know his eyes had not deceived him. A loud rumble made the room's inhabitants jump and forced the name on his lips from him, in disbelief: "Beryl?"

The woman did not answer him aloud. But her smile—the cruel upturn of her full lips—was answer enough before the city was plunged into darkness.

——

After that, an immense stretch of transformed and empty land appeared like a patch of flayed flesh on Triton's equator where its capital had once sat. Whatever happened there to cause it, we never knew, as there was no one who survived to explain.

At least, this was what we assumed; this was what the evidence suggested. The only other communication to come from Neptune was to inform us that the planet's guardian was fleeing to Uranus's orbit to solidify a front there. In short, that she had given up hope for the salvage of her own world.

But from Triton, we never heard another word. We had no reason to believe there was anyone left.

That was the moment it started. No one could blame Serenity for what followed, however. If there were any precedent for this sort of thing, it had long ago passed out of human consciousness.

III.War

Even without sound, the video images sent from the satellite cities of Uranus were terrible. Once magnificent buildings and life-sustaining utilities burned and crumbled, and the bloody injured huddled together in the crowded halls of the palaces and universities. There were no images of the dead, or of the mysterious enemy, but a picture captured from a balcony told their progress; even across the great distances of space and time, their army swelled like a living thing through those streets that had once stood for all the supremacy of spacemen's civilization.

It was a scene that was similar to the scattered territories on the outskirts of the Middle Kingdom's jurisdiction on Earth. On an outer world, however, it was completely alien and incongruous. Even the Earthmen gathered in Serenity's court felt this like a great lead weight settling in their stomachs.

"These are the images sent us from our friends on Oberon," Serenity said, the gravity of the situation making her voice ring frostily across the crystalline chamber. Even the way she spoke the word "friends" had a new weight to it, as though more than ever it was a rare jewel to guard jealously. "From Titania, and Umbriel as well. The conflict has even reached as far inward as Titan, but so far our forces there have managed to keep it contained. However, the struggle in Uranus's orbit is much more difficult. Many lives have already been lost and our forces are stretched thin across the moons."

She hesitated to say what she said next. Though she did not look at Endymion and his four officers, all gathered there knew it was a reluctance to say it in front of them.

"I fear we will have to pull out of the Uranus system."

Thoth was quick with a rebuttal. "My Queen, to do so would be to admit defeat to these rebels. They accuse us of abandoning the outer planets in favor of Earth and its sons, essentially of betraying our long ties with them—"

"You know as well as I do that is a boldface lie."

"Yes, I do; but if we retreat to Saturn, we will only be solidifying their cause. We will have left Uranus in our enemy's hands, when they must be quashed!"

"And if Titan falls because we have spent too much energy on a lost cause?" Kunzite spoke up levelly, though much to the other's displeasure. "What will they say of her majesty then? There are half a million innocent people on that world, many of them citizens of Earth—"

"Of course," Thoth snorted, "you would be concerned then. You consider the Queen's struggle to be your struggle as well only as long as there are people from your own world in harm's way."

"Please," Venus said with a pained expression from her place by her Princess, and Mercury added for her, "Must we really continue this bigotry in light of the suffering of our brethren in the outer systems?"

"We are representatives of Earth," Endymion spoke up over all of them. "We are only doing our duty when we look out for the well-being of our compatriots abroad." He turned to the Queen, head lowered in supplication. "May I remind her majesty's advisors that there are Earth-born soldiers among her forces. My generals and I as well would pledge our help if her majesty would have it. We can fight. We can supply existing troops with our planet's resources. We would only be too glad to do our part to put this rebellion to rest once and for all."

"Endymion—" the Princess Serenity spoke without thinking, reaching out to him in spirit, but she quickly caught herself.

He glanced up at that, and something passed briefly and silently between the two young lovers. "At least let us oversee the evacuation of our own people from the outer planets," he tried in a softer voice.

The Queen's gaze softened, though her words showed him no sympathy. "I have already given orders for non-citizens to evacuate."

"But, your highness," said Zoisite, "there are not enough ships!"

Thoth opened his mouth, but a gesture from Serenity kept him still, and Kunzite nodded in agreement.

"Nor are the existing ships large enough to handle the demand. We have all heard the stories of comrades forced to draw lots between them for available seats—young families torn apart because Earthmen's native wives and young children are not allowed to flee to safety with them. This is not justice, your highness. Something more must be done."

"And it can," Zoisite said again. He stepped forward boldly, one hand over his heart as he spoke with conviction. "We have the resources on Earth to build hundreds of space-ready ships—passenger ships and warships, whatever her majesty desires. We can match the production of the Mercurial factories and those of the Asteroid Belt." He looked at Mercury for support as he said so, and found it in her gaze even if she remained silent, and it empowered him. "If I put the proposal before my people back on Earth, I have no doubts about the manpower we will be able to achieve—"

"My kingdom will take on this project as well," Nephrite said, "with her majesty's blessing."

Zoisite did not think twice about this addition to his comrade's pledge, because none of the Earth delegation thought that the Queen could refuse. Nonetheless:

"I appreciate the lengths you all would be willing to go to for our cause," she said, "but I am afraid I must refuse. Embroiling the Prince of Earth and his generals directly in a spacemen's war is a step the Moon Kingdom is not prepared to take."

"But, my Queen—" Now it was Jadeite's turn to speak up, and Serenity visibly, however slightly, winced when he addressed her so possessively. "Neptune and Pluto are already lost—"

"Thank you, Master Jadeite, but I do not need to be reminded of my failures—"

"How many more kingdoms must fall, your majesty, before you accept the help we are so openly offering you?"

"We have one factor on our side now that we did not at Neptune and Pluto," said the Queen, but it was not really an answer. "We have time. We were prepared. We have a presence on Titan that we did not have in those other circumstances. If Uranus must be sacrificed for a chance of stopping the rebellion in its tracks, than it is a regrettable necessity."

"And you would let Uranus become a barren system once again?" Artemis said from behind the throne's dais. "Let the cold of space reclaim it?"

"My Queen," said Thoth, "give up on Uranus and the rebels will have been justified."

"Don't," Kunzite shot back, "and you'll lose two planets in one stroke."

Endymion spoke up quickly lest the debate become a personal shouting match between the other two. "Queen Serenity," he said, "is there nothing I can do to convince you to accept Earth's help? My officers and I are desperate to help in any way we can. Would you let all we could offer you go to waste on philosophical pretenses?"

"Yes," said the Queen. "What else can we do when we are battling a philosophical enemy?"

The Princess Serenity looked up at her, uncertainty etched clearly in her face. "Mother. . . . Are you certain that's really for the best?"

A meaningful glance passed between them that Thoth alone was observant enough to pick up on. He said quickly, and quietly close to her ear though the others could still hear his words echo in the chamber: "Your highness, allow me to escort the Prince and his officers from the room so that you might have an opportunity to consider every concern that has been raised here in privacy."

"Thank you." She waved at him slightly in gratitude. Then, to the others: "Prince Endymion, though I am refusing your offer, I do greatly appreciate the intent behind it. I hope you can respect my decision as well, and for the meantime steer your concerns clear of the conflict on Uranus and Saturn. That is not merely a request, Prince; it is an order, which I believe in time you will find is not only in the best interest of our two kingdoms but that of your compatriots in the outer planets as well, and all the citizens of those worlds. If you have ever had faith in our Moon Kingdom, have faith that we will not allow our enemies to succeed in disrupting the balance we have held this system in for thousands of years."

Thoth stepped down to lead the delegation away; but before he could, those beside the Moon Queen could plainly see the displeasure on Jadeite's face, the disappointment on Kunzite and Nephrite's, and hear Zoisite mutter to his Prince, "But she's making the wrong decision—"

Endymion cut him off with a glance.

"Thank you, your majesty," he said with a bow to the Queen, though even that was not without quite a deal of regret. "Please excuse us."

The Queen nodded her head. Though it was clear she held no hard feelings for the young man from Earth, even she was aware how fragile his feelings must have been at such a time, how difficult it was to humble himself before her when she continued to refuse him. Endymion and the Princess Serenity exchanged a glance whose meaning only they knew before the former reluctantly turned and allowed himself to be led out of the throne room by the Queen's advisor.

Something similar passed between Zoisite and Mercury, as he glanced over his shoulder at her on his way out, and the next second it was gone. Should she have said more in his defense, she wondered, even if it was her Queen's logic with which she solidly concurred? Surely there was no place for personal attachments in the decision-making process, but at the same time she knew just how useful the extra ships Zoisite spoke of could prove to be.

"Mother." The Princess Serenity turned to the Moon Queen when the Earthmen had left the room. "Why don't you allow Earth to assist us in this struggle. They could provide us so many resources. And they want to do it. Surely we need all the help we can get."

"And if we admit to that, Princess," said Mercury, "what message do you suppose it will send to our allies in the outer planets, to say nothing of our enemies? If her highness asked the Earth for help, it would mean even her reach is limited, even the Silver Imperium Crystal is not all-powerful. But more than that," she added with a slight sigh, "to ask for Earth's help would be to indebt ourselves to them."

When the Queen did not respond, Serenity glanced between her mother and Mercury. She could not ignore the slight furrow on the former's silver brow, or the solemnity of her gaze that seemed focused on some distant dilemma. "Is that true?"

"The Lady Mercury speaks rightly," Artemis answered for his Queen. Even Venus's downward gaze held little sympathy for the Moon Princess's entreaty. "At this time we cannot afford any action that might be misconstrued as outward displays of favoritism to the Earthmen. That is exactly what the enemy is accusing the Moon Kingdom of doing. We would only be adding fuel to their fire."

"But . . ." Serenity looked wildly between her companions. Surely the conflicted expression on Mercury's face meant that young woman felt the same way she did, or at least understood her. "I know Endymion," she told her mother. "He would never offer to help the Moon only with the promise of receiving something in return. If the solar system is supposed to be as united as you say, then why continue to exclude him when he can save us?"

At last the Queen spoke, her gaze still trained on the doors leading out of the chamber, as if to follow the Earthmen who had been before them so recently. She told her daughter, in such a way that invited no further rebuttals, "I never said I doubted Endymion's sincerity."

Then did that mean there was someone else she distrusted? she left the others to wonder. Artemis no doubt was thinking of the ministers he had confronted in the Middle Kingdom capital, who made no efforts to hide their mistrust of spacemen.

Mercury for her part could not help wondering if the Queen was referring to Zoisite and his comrades, whose offense at being rejected she could at least rationalize. They had both heard the strength of Zoisite's conviction when he told Endymion this was the wrong decision. On the other hand, Mercury had to ask herself, was she merely projecting her own misgivings of late onto the Queen's words? After all, Serenity's only somewhat weary brow continued to give nothing away.

"Our greatest concern right now is for the safety of the outer kingdoms," the Queen continued, rising from her chair. "I will not allow fear and lies to turn this matter into a dispute of one world's place over another. These rebellions must be quashed while they remain isolated, and while it remains well understood: the Moon Kingdom does this for the good of the whole, and not any one world."

She added bitterly, "If only we had been given the same opportunity with Neptune and Pluto."

——

Serenity's orders be damned.

That phrase repeated in Zoisite's mind like a mantra in the months since war first sprouted in the satellite colonies of the outer planets. The progress of the Queen's forces was well reported in the city centers on Earth, though it seemed that even of those who heard it, most continued to believe that, as far as they were concerned, they had more important things to worry themselves with than civil disputes on distant worlds millions of miles away, and to some extent this was true. But anyone who knew the full gravity of the situation was well aware: it was only a matter of time before these disputes made it to the mining worlds; and if the farming worlds also fractured, the peasant class would once again feel the pressure here on Earth.

Zoisite for one was determined not to let that happen. Though the Queen had decided she did not need the help of Earthmen or their technology, doubtless there would come a time when either she would, or Earth would be forced to defend herself. Already her people were spread across the system, her scholars in the cities of Jovian and Saturnian moons, Earthmen by birth if vagrants in spirit. What was Serenity's plan for them?

It was concerns such as those that brought him and Nephrite to the city of Bamiyan in this arid, rocky land of steppes and nomads on the very edge of the Western Tributary Kingdom. Serenity could not limit their domestic airships, nor could she limit their own supplies of iron, or their trade routes or workforce, or ingenuity. If she would not give them space-ready battleships to command, then Zoisite had no problem making them himself.

Nor had he any problem finding the manpower to complete his project. Though the name of his father the sultan might have been forgotten, or never been known in these eastern parts, his and Nephrite's fame as just regional emperors brought men eager for such glorifying work as the task commanded from as far as the South China Sea. Under the watchful faces of giant buddhas, already more than seven centuries old, staring out from the cliffs that rose up around the city—just off the highways old foot caravans had once carved out, now frequented by airships going to and from the Capital in the east—they constructed their dry docks; and the ancient crossroads was revived in no time into a bustling city centered around the new industry.

"You spend almost all your time here now," Kunzite remarked to him on one of his visits. He himself was always on the move these days, between the Capital and the Moon Palace, or between the Moon and some other anxious world. "You don't feel like you're neglecting your duties?"

"Endymion does not need me," Zoisite told him back, in between clarifying orders to technicians charged with putting together a ship's engines. "If he did he would send the word here, and I would not hesitate to heed it. But as it is he has you by his side at all times. I can serve him much better where I am now."

"I'm talking about your kingdom."

That had given Zoisite pause. It had been so long since Kunzite had said those two words—your kingdom—to him, that he was for a moment taken aback, sure his comrade was trying to call him a hypocrite or some such thing. He quickly shook his head. "The Southern Kingdom has been stable for years. The work I do here is what matters for the security of our world. Besides, there are so many here from Siam and Burma, Araby and the like it usually feels like I am home."

He had smiled then, but sometimes he did wonder if he was not stretching his authority thin. Even his word could only stretch so far, and he could not make himself be in two places at once.

Though sometimes he did wish the laws of physics allowed that. Such as now, for example.

"The parcel came from your camp in Bamiyan," Bunbo informed him dutifully from a hundred thousand miles away. One would have to know him to know his concern, his voice and expression gave no trace of it away. "It had your stamp. If I hadn't felt something was wrong when I did, the princess might have eaten some of it, and . . ."

Like he did when he was a child, he trailed off at the unpleasant bit. If she had eaten one of the confections Zoisite was supposed to have sent her, was what he meant to say, the Princess Mercury might now be dead, poisoned by an impostor.

"Thank you, Bunbo," Zoisite said solemnly. "Once again I am indebted to you."

"I didn't do much. It was chance that prevented it—a feeling that was based on no evidence—"

"And yet you saved her life. I should say you did more than enough. How can I ever express my gratitude to you, Bunbo? How many times have you saved my life, and now hers?" It was hard for Zoisite to say those words, at once because they had narrowly dodged a bullet, but also because he had been partly, if unwittingly, to blame for it in the first place. "I know you have been away from Earth for a long time, but in light of this scare, I must ask you to stay in the Moon Palace just a little while longer. For Mercury's sake as well as mine."

"But . . ." Bunbo let out his breath. "Yes, sir. But what I am trying to say is, the nature of the parcel. . . . Sir, for all we were to know it really did come from you. How, in the future—"

"It will not happen again," Zoisite assured him. "I will make sure of that."

"How?"

He hated to admit it, but knowing Bunbo would keep his confidence, "I know who sent it."

The young man's brows knitted on the other end of the line, but even then his master could not completely read his meaning.

"I will take care of this," he repeated. "You can be sure of it." The offender had not harmed him, but the strike had come close enough to his heart to give him quite a bit of pause.

Bunbo lowered his voice, stirring Zoisite from his thoughts. "Do you want to speak to her yourself?"

Over his apprentice's shoulder Zoisite caught a glimpse of Mercury, and she looked as physically shaken by the close call as he felt. The dances that made their hearts swell and the careless professions of love when their romance was new and untroubled by a darker world—suddenly he felt how long ago those times truly were, how much had been changed in just a few short years by a still unknown catalyst dropped into the farthest reaches of the solar system. How much they had been changed by it. He yearned to reach out to her, but knowing he could not physically touch her, and shamed by his unwilling complicity into a lack of any proper words, he told Bunbo no, he was too unsettled to speak, and excused himself.

He stalked the grounds of his office in Bamiyan on a mission. The memory of a face had struck him during his conversation with Bunbo. At first a vague, familiar glimpse, now it had solidified clearly in his mind. A round, white face and a narrow pair of eyes that had no business in this industrial town in the middle of the desert.

Seeing his displeasure, some of his personal attendants and secretaries came rushing forward, eager to help.

He picked the offender out immediately. "How could I have been so blind?" he snorted to himself.

"Sir?" said one of the secretaries.

Zoisite yanked the person standing next to the man forward by the collar and pulled back that person's cap. Long, straight black hair fell freed from underneath it. The Japanese woman who stared back at him from above her Middle Kingdom suit did not flinch at his violence but simply met his gaze calmly, with obedience and patience.

"Yasha," he hissed, and now he understood why her name was synonymous with demons in her homeland. "What are you doing in this place?"

"Serving you, my lord, as I have done for nearly ten years." She made a gesture of deference, which in light of the circumstances struck him as mocking.

"Serving me? I take it you figure from the shadows."

A cruel smile tugged at his lips, and she met it with one of reverence. It made him feel ill.

As the crowd that had begun to gather watched, he gripped her shoulder and pulled her to the ground. Yasha fell to her hands and knees hard. She must have felt the sting of the hard floor, but she did not show any fear of him even then. Everything he did she accepted, as though it were some test at the end of which she would be richly rewarded for her patience.

Zoisite looked around at their audience. These men and women who had served him here in Bamiyan, they had never seen him react nearly so violently, but rather knew him as a bastion of patience, and the shock showed on their faces. "Leave us," he told them. He gestured wildly when they simply continued to stare. "Go! Give us some privacy. This woman is a criminal." She deserved whatever happened to her; could they not see that? "I need to speak with her alone."

As they reluctantly filed out, Yasha lifted her head. "My lord, everything I have done has been for you. I have done nothing wrong."

"Nothing wrong?" Zoisite lowered his voice and leaned over her. "You attempted to poison the Princess Mercury using my own name and you still believe you have done nothing wrong?"

"It was a necessary act—"

"She is an innocent, and not only that, the guardian of the planet Mercury! Help me, you say? This is above all the last thing an officer of Earth needs to happen in front of Serenity at a delicate time like this! Not to mention—"

"Your feelings for her? Yes, I am well aware of those."

Her widening, self-satisfied grin angered Zoisite so much he could feel himself shake. To think he had almost lost the woman he loved to this vile creature. "Wipe that smile off your face or I will do it for you!" He grabbed her collar and jerked her away from him, then combed his fingers through his hair as he paced.

Yasha did not miss a beat. "It was for that reason that I had to do it." Her words were more intense than ever now, as though she had a limited time to get them all out. "Don't you see, Master? I couldn't bear to see you hurt on account of that girl! She had to be eliminated, for your sake."

Zoisite spun to face her. "Then you confess. You are the one responsible for this?"

"Yes! And I would do it again if I had to. She had to be taught a lesson that her disloyalty shall not be tolerated."

"God, I was such a fool." Zoisite groaned. "I should have been so much more careful—"

"Forgive me, Master, but, yes, you have been a fool. You have been deceived all this time and it pains me that you did not know it! Are you so blind you cannot see what is right in front of you?"

That gave Zoisite pause. "What are you talking about?"

Yasha smiled, satisfied that her entreaties had made some progress. "That little girl does not love you." She spoke of the Princess Mercury with a distaste that left a foulness in Zoisite's own mouth. "How can she? Her affections lie in quite a different direction."

"That is ludicrous—"

"With someone who is very close to you."

Zoisite opened his mouth to refute her, but for reasons even he did not know he stopped himself. Why did he not say something? He knew she was lying; in her obsession with him, she had made herself delusional over the one woman Zoisite had ever grown close to. It was jealousy, plain and simple; there could be no other explanation. Because there was no one as esteemed in Mercury's heart as he. He was quite sure of that; she had told him herself.

"Look," Yasha tried once again. She dug into her jacket pocket and pulled out a small object that Zoisite had not seen in so many years he had to think twice about whether it had ever belonged to him. It was a ruby brooch bracketed by golden elephants. "See?" She held it up to him as evidence. "Her heart may be fickle but I have remained loyal to you through everything. I was the first, Lord Zoisite. Don't you remember? You entrusted your secrets to me before you ever met that boy, or that spacewoman tramp. Their faith may be hollow, but I would die for you!"

"You should."

The slightest flicker of fear crossed her coal-black eyes then. "Sir?"

In a sudden burst of anger he was only just able to control, Zoisite plucked the ruby from her hand and flung it far across the room. He hoped it shattered against the wall that it hit, like his own restraint was threatening to do. "I ought to kill you for what you've done, you delusional wretch. You dare question my disciple's loyalty to me? My beloved's? No . . . it is you who have betrayed me."

That word struck her more fiercely than the threat of death had. "Betrayed. . . . No. No, my lord. It was for your sa—"

"My sake, yes, so you say." The cruel smile returned to Zoisite's lips, and he at once loathed it and yearned to give into the lust for vengeance that he could feel building just below his surface. God knew, it would have been justified. But stronger yet was his determination not to let his hot emotions get the better of his judgment. "Perhaps for my own sake I shouldn't wait to have you executed. Maybe I should rid myself of you right here myself, once and for all."

"It would be an honor to meet my fate at your hands." But even as she said so, Yasha trembled.

Zoisite relished that small victory, but even that was not enough to satisfy him. He wondered, in a sort of fearful delight, if anything would.

"Guards!" he yelled.

Yasha flinched slightly at the volume of his voice but met his eyes. "You will thank me one day for what I've done."

"I very much doubt it. I only hope that I do not regret my decision now. Lock her up," he told the guards who had come at his call, "alone, and do not let her see daylight. I'll decide what to do with her later."

The guards saluted and lifted the woman up by her arms. She did not resist them, only seemed to look at him as though pleading for him to see the same perverted sense in her actions as she did.

"I never want to see her again," he said more to Yasha than the guards, and waved them on their way.

He went outside, but the cool air of the deepening twilight over the desert did little to quell the ill feeling inside him; and the sounds of laborers finishing up for the night, rather than keep him from dwelling on this mistake he should have prevented, only added to his bitterness.

The Moon was in its first quarter against a darkening turquoise sky. Beneath it, the trails of an airship were stained a rosy orange by the light of the setting sun, already sunk below the cliffs that loomed over the city. From the surface of the Earth, space looked as calm and unchanged as it had ever been, with no sign of the turmoil that lay beyond the orbit of Jupiter.

——

"Then I suppose there is no turning back now. This makes it official," Zoisite said as though to himself as he fingered the new medal on his uniform. "We have reached the point in this war where Serenity is forced to concede she needs our help, only not as Earthmen."

Nephrite raised an eyebrow at him. "Would you rather have it some other way? I thought this was what you wanted."

He wasn't sure how to answer, so he just opened his mouth, then shut it again when Jadeite laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. "If I may add my opinion, I think we should shoulder our new duties with the gravity these times demand. Yes, it would be easy to say we warned the Moon Kingdom the conflict on Uranus and Saturn could not be contained as it was, but that is passed now; and whether their fall could have been prevented or not . . . let historians decide. We are not anything different than what we were a year ago. We still serve Endymion and the Earth Kingdom. But the Jovian system needs our help now, and who is anyone in this new millennium to deny them aid when they need it most?"

Zoisite took a deep breath. That hand squeezing his shoulder briefly before it was gone was a comfort, but only a temporary one. "I know you're right, Jadeite."

The other smiled. "Good. I suppose your technical expertise will come in handy there. I'm going to be joining Kunzite in the effort on Mars. So far it hasn't been affected like Jupiter and the Asteroid Belt, but with rumors already circulating about a faction disloyal to the Queen in the southern hemisphere, I can't risk seeing the planet turn into another Titan."

Zoisite nodded his understanding. He may have only known it the last few years, but that had been ample time for Jadeite to become enamored of his princess's world and the people in it. And, Zoisite suspected, there were many on the red planet who felt the same way about him, Earthman though he was. It was only natural for one in such a position to want to do everything in his power to protect what is precious to him.

The sound of a more delicate pair of shoes clicking on the floor tiles stirred Zoisite from his thoughts, and he looked up to see Mercury hurrying toward him.

She stopped just short of throwing her arms about his neck, as he had witnessed Venus and Jupiter do to his comrades on more than one occasion, and Zoisite could not help feeling wounded over that. The close call with Yasha was still fresh in his mind, no matter how hard he tried to banish it.

Thus the smile on his lips felt fragile and forced when he asked her, "What's this?"

She was dressed as Zoisite had never seen her before, in an armored bodice and a short pleated skirt, long boots and gloves and ribbons that matched the color of her hair and eyes. The gold of a crown winked on her forehead from beneath her hair, reminding him she was a princess in her own right, though there was something about her now of a centurion preparing for battle.

"I heard Serenity was sending you to the Asteroid Belt," she said. "Well, I wanted to tell you myself. I'll be accompanying you there. You and I . . . we'll be fighting side by side."

Nephrite's eyes met his over Mercury's shoulder with a meaningful look, and he turned himself and Jadeite away out of respect for his comrade's privacy. Nonetheless, it was still automatic for Zoisite to take her shoulders and lower his voice. "Princess, I'm not so sure that's a good idea."

"Why not?" Her blue eyes searched him.

"The factories are dangerous. God, the whole area is a mine field."

"And I know how such places work better than almost anyone. Do you forget, Zoisite, that my own planet is a mining world? The disruption of the transportation of precious resources from the asteroids by these insurgent pirates is a problem that is very close to my heart, and I daresay her majesty's navy can benefit from my knowledge." She shrugged off Zoisite's hands—politely, but still uncomfortably. "Besides, I can hold my own in a fight. Just because you've never seen what I can do—"

"I didn't mean to imply that. And believe me, I have the utmost faith in your ability to command a ship through that place. It's only that. . . ."

"I understand if you want to protect me out of some archaic sense of chivalry, but I was raised for just this kind of possibility. I am a guardian of the Princess Serenity and the Moon Kingdom. I am one of her sailor-soldiers. I won't fall easily."

Mercury put her hand to the brooch at her breast, and it made something sink inside of Zoisite. They would be embarking on this campaign together, and yet in that moment he felt like he had already lost her—perhaps never had her to begin with. And he did not know where that feeling sprang from, only that it was total.

It made him reply much colder than he had intended, "I hope not. The Princess cannot afford to lose your service."

Those words had meant many kind things in his mind, but none of them seemed to come across in the delivery; looking back, perhaps he should not have spoken them. They made Mercury start and look up. "And you?"

Suddenly Zoisite's tongue refused to work.

"Just a few months ago you were determined to marry me. You wouldn't give up until I belonged to you."

"I pushed you too hard," Zoisite said, though he did not meet her eyes. "I realize that now. I realize—like you say—your duty is to your Princess, not me. Just like mine is to my Prince."

Mercury let out a breath in frustration. "And that warrants pushing yourself away from me? Not speaking to me these last few months? Can't we find some middle ground?" Mercury paused, pained to say what she had to say next. "I feel like I hardly know you anymore. This isn't the Zoisite I fell in love with—the Zoisite who said he loved me—"

"These are grave times, Mercury. There is so much to think about."

"Which just makes me miss you even more. I'm afraid you've become as cold as your hands."

Silence descended between them at that—perhaps for only a moment, but it seemed to Mercury much longer. When Zoisite spoke again—to her eyes, now, like he used to—it was with a weariness she suspected bordered on impatience, and she could not think of what she had done to deserve it. "Things will be different when this war is over," he said. "I promise you that. Things will change."

"Everything will," she corrected him. "It already has."

——

Once dissent took hold it spread like wildfire through this system. Once the outer planets realized Queen Serenity's omnipotence did not have the reach they had all been raised believing, insecurity invaded like an infection, and despair welled within those who felt themselves abandoned by that not-so-absolute power in their time of greatest need. An alien force was responsible for nurturing these seeds, but I cannot think it planted them. It simply brought them out of hibernation.

I wonder if any of us could have stopped it if we knew. If we had known how big it would be. . . .

If we had known the slopes of Mount Olympus on Mars where we had taken such pleasure would become fields for carrion birds; that the rotting carcasses of men and ships would clog the once calm straits of the Valley of the Mariners. And the scorched earth that soaked up all that blood . . . was it just an illusion that the planet seemed so much redder from space than before?

——

From the bridge of the pride of Serenity's fleet, past the window panes that separated them from the cold vacuum of space, another factory burned across the Asteroid Belt. The explosion opened like a bloom on fast-forward, like a pink peony swallowing up the precious gases inside. The noxious byproducts of the smelters and the oxygen that sustained the colonists—the fires were not particular. Flames faded to golden tendrils that trailed long arms into space as the asteroid slowly turned. From this distance, the destruction was a beautiful ballet tumbling through the void; and it was easy not to think of the bodies of the men who had worked it, burnt and flash-freezing as they floated into space—if any bodies even remained.

Except in the case of Bunbo, who had seen them all before this, and for whom the scene was a nightmare come true.

Crew members stared with mouths and eyes wide open. Neither the fighting on the surface of Mars, nor the violence that still raged on the Jovian moons, even on the remains of Titan like embers among ashes, could so effectively put into these spacemen the true fragility of their existence. In their minds they knew the dead were guilty of treason—treason of the worst kind, against Serenity herself, and with her the Silver Millennium and the sacred order it represented—but in a deeper part of them they felt their most basic kinship with their rebel enemies, and were horrified.

Zoisite was shouting orders to the petrified crew that largely went ignored. Not on purpose; it just took a greater will to tear one's eyes away from the fires today than it did before. This was not what was supposed to happen, he chastised them all. The fires were evidence of their failure in space. True they had been sent by Serenity to bring the rebels to justice, to quell their uprising, but in doing so their enemy was crippling what little infrastructure the Silver Millennium had left, one world at a time. Was this the kind of victory they wanted—was this the price they were willing to pay for it?

Bunbo heard him, but there was little he could do. He was not a soldier, nor an officer. He had no authority, no power here in space. All he could do was dream of tragedies to come, and wait for them to unfold before his eyes.

——

Another trail of vapor streaked across the sky, then yet another, as more meteors fell toward the surface of Mars—toward a horizon of dunes on which the enemy marched slowly forward.

"It's no wonder they're saying in the temples the world is coming to an end," Jadeite said as he watched their progress from where the Queen's forces stood gathered to go out and meet them. "It feels like the sky itself is falling."

Deep underground the earth rocked with a new series of impacts. Kunzite exhaled deeply as he looked up into the midnight blue of the zenith, squinting out the sunlight. "I only wish our comrades in the Asteroid Belt could do something more about these projectiles."

For some time now, the rebels who had taken over mining operations had been sending smaller satellites into the Martian gravity well in an attempt to thwart the Silver Millennium's efforts on the planet's surface, but so far they did as much harm to their own comrades' cause as good.

That very thought must have been on Jadeite's mind as he snorted. "The thunder from their aft will probably make them feel like they've got the gods on their side. Their arrogance can only work to our advantage."

"Careful, Master Jadeite." From the saddle of his nervous mount, the captain of the Mars Palace's guard made a sign in the air before him to ward off evil. "I would appreciate it if you did not jinx my men."

Jadeite smiled a lopsided smile, and tilted his head to gaze down into the pass behind them which opened onto the valley, where the Queen's men and those of the Martian army still loyal to their princess waited concealed behind the rock. The enemy was large in number, but so were they, and they were better equipped.

"None of us expects this to be an easy fight," Kunzite said as though reading his mind, "but we have the strength of Serenity and the Silver Millennium behind us."

And on this world, in these times, that was all that needed to be said.

Though the figures marching across the dried lakebed toward them in the distance were tiny, he squinted and nodded in satisfaction. Then he turned to the Martian captain. "Our enemy is moving just as we hoped they would, and showing no signs of slowing. I think we will have the element of surprise after all. We'll thin their numbers on the plains, but if a retreat into the pass becomes necessary, our guns will finish them off there."

"Very good." The captain turned his horse, and gave down a call to the troops to ready themselves. From down the slope, the calls of officers rallying their regiments around their princess and guardian, or around the Silver Millennium, that its glorious peace should be restored, reached Endymion's men as faint echoes. The captain turned back to them, saying, "Do either of you gentlemen need a ride?"

Kunzite put a hand on Jadeite's shoulder and the younger of the two men smiled abashedly.

The captain lowered the face mask from the brim of his helmet into place. He unsheathed his sword and raised it into the air. A tense silence descended upon the pass until the enemy came within a satisfactory distance; and when that blade came down it erupted all the more suddenly, like water rushing through a broken dam. That was how the soldiers poured out of the pass as well, and the morning sun glinted off their armor like the breakers of waves against the rusty earth—against the dark heads of the enemy forces when the two sides at last engaged.

The captain spurred his mount, and Jadeite swung himself nimbly behind the saddle at the last moment. All down the steep slope the pounding of hooves on the hard-packed sand and gravel mirrored his heartbeat, as each second brought them closer to the fray. He had his sword ready when they entered it—dove into it head-on, knocking spears and swords from hands and aiming for the throat.

Even a Martian horse, even in this gravity, would soon get bogged down in such a melee with two men on its back; and in any case, Jadeite fought better on his own two feet. When he saw his chance he hopped down. There was not a second to stop and catch his breath; immediately from his right someone swung down with a heavy blade. He parried, and in that man's place someone else appeared to occupy Jadeite's sword arm. Unfortunately for them, Jadeite did not go into battle without a sidearm, and he was more than capable of wielding two swords at once. Perhaps it was his lack of a shield that made the enemy so bold as to practically fall on his blades, but he carried all the protection he needed in the tip of his index finger.

Gradually he cut a path through the enemy's ranks, but there was no end to the horde in sight. Nor was there any time to so much as wipe the sweat from his brow that made his hair stick in his eyes. No matter; all it meant was that he would have to pull out all the stops from now on.

There was a great deal of commotion at his left over the ringing of clashing steel, and he looked up just in time to see enemy troops go flying through the air as though from a bomb going off. No one, however, he doubted even one of these zealot rebels, would be foolish enough to plant a bomb in the middle of such close combat. Jadeite's lips widened again in a grin as Kunzite strode out of the center of it. His cold gaze seemed at first to pass right over Jadeite.

"Kunzite!" the other called to him, before another attacker temporarily demanded his attention.

That coaxed a smile from his comrade, and Kunzite hurried to Jadeite's side, repelling one blade after another as he did so as though he were swatting at flies.

"Didn't take you too long to catch up, I see," Jadeite said between breaths.

A moment's reprieve allowed them to exchange a quick bit of banter, leaning shoulder to shoulder to better make themselves heard over the roar of battle. "It wasn't difficult to find a ride," Kunzite shot back. "They don't make horses here like they do on Earth."

"No, they don't." Jadeite snorted. "But unfortunately for our enemy, the same goes for the men."

This army of rebels, which had thus far managed to so successfully oppose the established order practically by their reckless drive alone, was quickly showing how loose what organization they did have behind their desperate tactics really was. In a move that was not well thought out, they seemed to come to the conclusion they would take the two of Endymion's generals down en masse, but that, Jadeite knew, would be their undoing. Kunzite saw it coming and repelled the first wave—not with his longsword but with a wave of his hand and a flash of light that encircled them both like a protective dome.

Of course, not to be outdone, Jadeite was there to greet the next bunch of fools with a rippling wave of heat that scorched their skin and uniforms and made them cover their eyes in agony, drop weapons suddenly too hot to hold.

Kunzite nodded to Jadeite in appreciation over his shoulder, but there was a dangerous glimmer in his pale eyes the purpose behind which was never far from Jadeite's own heart. Despite the death they dealt around them, they could not ignore the spirit of competition that had ruled their training since they were barely out of childhood. It fueled Jadeite into greater action, sending a thrill through his bloodstream. This was the camaraderie, the heightened sense of being part of a brotherhood, of the living, of a part of something greater than oneself that they spoke of in the epic tales of old. Terrible though the purpose, this was what they had been born to do, to defend their Prince and all he stood for with the sword.

And like those epics, it was the odds being so utterly stacked against them that drove that sense of purpose, of the glory its fulfillment would bring. Even should the enemy sound the retreat, even should they drive the Martian army into the hills and themselves to be pulverized on the rocks, they would regroup, re-amass, and attack again some other time. They would keep coming, and crushing them altogether would be like trying to dig a hole in the sand.

But it was precisely the seemingly futile nature of the struggle that made it all the more worth fighting to Jadeite. The struggle of Order against the forces of Chaos was never simple, nor clean, for if it were it would have lost its beauty for him long ago.

——

"We have a line to Master Kunzite on the ground," said a commanding officer from aboard one of the Moon Kingdom's ships orbiting Mars. "Shall I patch him through?"

In the throne room back in the Moon Palace, its occupants leaned forward in tense anticipation. It felt like so long since the last transmission from the forces on Mars, even if it had only been a few Earth days—even if Zoisite had just crossed Mars's orbit himself within the last week.

"By all means, do it at once," Serenity said, settling back in her chair, and the next moment the commander's face was replaced by that of Kunzite.

He was still giving orders over his shoulder when they saw him, to men they could just glimpse moving in and out of picture, whose uniforms were pink with the dust of the southern deserts. Kunzite himself was none the better for wear. His fair face seemed darker than usual, his silver uniform spotted by soot and by blood that was not his own. He did not pay it any attention as he put his hand to his breast and bowed his head in salute to the Queen; in these times, his appearance was the least of the lunar court's concern.

"What news from the Martian front?" she asked him.

"Your highness. . . ." His voice was garbled by static, but he managed nonetheless to make himself heard. "It has been a trying last couple of days, but we have beaten the enemy back to the southern edge of the Plain of the Sun in the east, and your agents are holding them off in Tyrrhena in the west. We have them on the run, but I fear the cities in the southern hemisphere have already fallen to them. It would explain why we have been unable to contact our allies there, why the effort against us by the Martian faction and that in the Asteroid Belt has been so coordinated. They have control of the pole, and its water supply. . . ."

He paused to catch his breath, though there was nothing hurried in his manner of delivery.

"If we had more ships we could cut off their supply routes from space. Your highness, there simply are not enough to effectively cover the Jovian system, the Asteroid Belts, and Martian orbit. Our army has been successful thus far, but we have lost a great many able bodies nonetheless, not to mention the vast stretches of settled land that have been turned to dust by our enemy. We beat them back and still they keep coming in seemingly endless number, without any regard for their losses, like ants."

"I regret to hear that, Master Kunzite," said the Queen, and no one doubted her sincerity even if her manner was cool, "almost as much as I regret to tell you that there is little else I can do. Our forces are stretched thin, yet we cannot leave the Silver Millennium unguarded either."

"I understand, your majesty."

"I intend to send Zoisite back to the Asteroid Belt on the third-quarter moon. . . ." She gestured toward the young man in question, who nodded his recognition to her.

Zoisite would not say so, but the order could not come soon enough. He had been aching to return to battle ever since he was forced to return to the Moon Kingdom—a retreat, as far as he was concerned, that could have been avoided, that did not have to be. He returned his gaze to the screen, and for a split second he was sure that his and Kunzite's eyes met across the vast distance of space—that for a heartbeat the regrets that this war and his own pride had not given him a moment to express were communicated. However, it was just as likely that was a product of Zoisite's imagination.

I swear to you, Kunzite—he longed to say, but his tongue was tied in this throne room—and Jadeite as well, I will cut off the head of this beast in space and you won't have to suffer this lack of progress any further. If you will just be patient with Serenity in the meantime.

"But I cannot spare removing Jupiter and Mercury from the Jovian system. Though I wish with all my heart we were not fighting this battle on two fronts, that is the reality we must accept."

A fresh wave of static tore at Kunzite's response, but it seemed nevertheless to be a solemn acknowledgment.

"Can you repeat the last part?" Serenity said. "Your signal is breaking up."

"I said," Kunzite raised his voice, "Jadeite was able to intercept transmissions from the enemy. He says that they speak often of some 'great master' and a queen that they serve. He wasn't able to get any names except one. A leader of some sort going by the name Danburite. Does that sound familiar?"

Artemis and Luna looked around at the throne room, exchanging glances with those gathered there, but the name seemed to ring no bells for anyone. Serenity simply answered, "I don't recall a Danburite ever being in my service. Could this person be from Earth?"

Zoisite held his tongue against taking offense at her question, but Kunzite did not seem the least bothered. "I highly doubt it. Our enemy's purpose here is strongly against anything to do with Earth. Most of them are spacemen from the outer system, so it would . . ." What he said next was lost, his picture obscured as well, but what made it through when reception returned was: ". . . could determine, they are calling themselves the Dark Agency."

The message was suddenly clear at the end of his sentence, making the last two words ring with a note of ominous finality.

"We will continue to monitor their transmissions over the next few days, after which we plan to—"

Kunzite cut himself off abruptly, and turned his head to someone off camera who was giving him information which those in the throne room could not hear. But they could watch, despite the interference, as his eyes darkened with every passing second, and the muscles of his jaw clenched, and they knew before he said anything that whatever news it was, it was certainly not pleasant.

"Jadeite!" he called over his shoulder. When the man in question hurried to his side, Kunzite yelled something to him even though they were only inches apart. Jadeite nodded, mouthed an affirmative, and rushed out of picture, waving one arm overhead to call for attention before he disappeared from view. It was a moment more before those watching understood the reason why they had not been able to hear the two men's banter; the steady hum that obscured the sound was not a problem with the telecommunication system; it was coming straight through the signal from the surface of Mars itself.

Though he could not have said then why he did it, Zoisite glanced over his shoulder at Venus, who sat tense at her Princess's side, and found the young woman staring back at him. They both maintained their professionalism, but in those eyes he caught a tremor of dread that mirrored what he felt inside.

"Master Kunzite," Serenity was saying in the meantime, "what is happening over there? Are you under attack?"

"I'm not sure, your highness. There's. . . ." On the other side of the connection, he turned back to the screen and visibly composed himself. "No, your majesty. There is no attack at this time. I have just been informed the enemy's forces are gathering on the hills but that is all they're doing. It's the weather . . . —thing I've never seen before. It's. . . ."

His mouth kept moving but the sound was a wash of hissing static, and black bars flickered across his image, cutting him up. Artemis winced at the noise and Serenity's impatience with the technology's shortcomings began to show, but it was this violent warping of Kunzite's picture in particular that made Zoisite so uneasy to see.

". . . . told us it was the wrong time of year for sandstorms. Besides, it doesn't . . . right. This can't be a normal con— . . ."

Then Kunzite's voice faded out entirely.

It allowed those in the Moon Palace to catch for the first time a faint strain of the method to the madness that was that pervasive hum—to hear what sounded eerily like a voice, speaking low, unintelligible words through the video feed itself, like some sort of mystic's chant heard from a distance. The sheer alienness of it sent a shiver down Zoisite's spine, and the inability of any of those gathered to make sense of this sinister new sound made them thankful when Serenity spoke up again—herself as though with the purpose of banishing it immediately from their consciousness.

"Kunzite. . . . Master Kunzite!" she tried, the desperation beginning to creep into her voice in earnest. He turned back to the screen, picking up a headset as she asked him, "Please tell us what is happening out there!"

"I'm switching to an audio-only channel for better reception," he said moments before the picture went black. His voice reached them much clearer after that; the steady, hissing roar still pervaded the background, but without the same sinister nuances. Now it did sound like a storm, a mere weather phenomenon, full of wind, an electric crackle, and the almost tangible grittiness of gravel.

"Something is interfering with our signal here. Probably the sandstorm—if you can even call it that. To be perfectly honest, I don't know what to call this strange weather we are witnessing here. No one quite does. It appeared from out of the south just moments ago, without any warning, moving fast in our direction. They're saying it's stretched out across the whole horizon. . . . One way or another, this is no ordinary storm. I'm looking out at it now. The clouds, they're . . . they're black, your highness. Deep, dark red from the sand and pitch black above. You can't even see into it—can't make out the enemy's forces. It looks as though they have been swallowed up—"

"Lord Kunzite," someone shouted frantically in the background, "it's still heading this way! It will roll straight over the top of us if we don't do something!"

He tried to calm the man while Serenity asked him, "Are you able to move? Flee to a more sheltered location? The front line can always be reestablished; your lives are the most important thing. If you have the time to escape—"

"No good," came the reply. "It's moving too fast and we are too many. Our camp here is made to withstand the seasonal storms; we can survive the winds if we can gather everyone in time."

"But you said yourself this is no natural storm."

Kunzite was slow in replying. For a long moment, only the frantic bustling about around him made it over the airwaves, so that Zoisite feared for a heartbeat that something had happened to his comrade.

When Kunzite did answer, his manner did little in the way of reassuring them. He answered simply, resolutely: "I will stay on this channel until I'm no longer able, your highness."

His meaning was perfectly clear to those in the throne room, and it was for that reason that it sat well with no one.

Because in other words, he could give no guarantees he and the troops stationed on Mars in its Plain of the Sun would make it through the ordeal. Even an ordinary, seasonal storm in Mars's lower hemisphere, with its sand-laden hurricane-force winds, had the power to strip flesh from the bones of any soul unfortunate enough to be caught in the wilderness unaware.

"I appreciate it," said Serenity. "But what of the troops? Surely they are in need of your leadership at a time like this."

"Jadeite is making sure the word gets out to all the rest, but no one here needs re— . . . are moving to safer. . . ."

Again there was static, so that it took his listeners a moment to understand that the garbled exclamations that finally made it through were not background noise; it was Kunzite himself who was muttering an awe-filled curse on the other side of the line.

"My God, your highness should only be here to see this!" As if with a purpose, the interference died away so that he might explain: "This storm—whatever it is—it's like a black wall, that's the only way I can describe it, like nightfall were a physical body, a tidal wave. . . . Does this thing ever . . . Is this what it's like to look into the dark arm of the galaxy?"

"Master Kunzite, where are you? Are you still above ground?"

"I no longer know what it is I am looking at, your majesty—if there is even a thing we can do to protect ourselves against this. I don't fear the wind, it's only. . . . Well, it's so solid, it's . . . Somehow, perhaps this doesn't make any sense—"

"You should be returning to the safety of the fortress—"

"It is so . . . (dare I use the word?) . . . pure—"

"Kunzite, stop being foolish. I am ordering you to get out of the open!"

He did not reply, but the strange calm that had taken over his last words to them was not easily disregarded by those in the throne room. "What is he— You mean he's still out there! Kunzite, what are you doing?" Princess Venus said to the screen, and it was only what Zoisite wanted to say himself. The Queen, however, ignored her and focused her attentions on the din of panicked cries that reached them from the surface of Mars—the yells to find cover, the defeated sobs, and running through it all, the abrasive rushing of the wind, the crackling of tiny grains of sand slamming against the walls of the fortress. Even without picture, it was all too easy for those listening to feel like they were there themselves, that the gravel that rained down was doing so on the ceiling of the Moon Palace, and they could hardly speak out of terror for their comrades.

"Master Kunzite," Serenity said, "don't forget your promise to me to stay on this line."

Over the sound of heavy breathing and the rushing of bodies they could just make out his voice: "I'm still here, your majesty. But this darkness, this artificial night . . . beating upon us. . . . —annot see anything. It's blotted out the sun and swallows up all the light around us. . . ." He was yelling into the mouthpiece through bursts of clarity, and yet they could hardly hear him. ". . . as pitch. . . . can hardly hear a thing, it . . . like someone screaming into our heads, and we can't see anything, not even our hands in front of us. I'm afraid th— . . . —hit . . . —on't be able to st— . . . No! Stop thi— Cease this—cease this madness at once! Put down your . . . Jadeite! Jadeite, wher— Tell these men . . . stop. We can't risk . . . outbreak in this dark. People will be . . . suf— . . . more casualties. . . . Above all . . . not have panic! Jadei—"

They lost him again, as the signal warped his words into an unintelligible drone, which made speech indistinguishable from scream. Zoisite's heart beat double-time to think that the distorted noise that reached them might just as easily have been the clash of blades, or a cry of agony, or the language of some alien creature—there was simply no way to tell. If just that uncertainty were terrifying, he could only begin to fathom the horror of those trapped in that darkness, while the winds beat down on top of them, what chaos they might be inclined to fall into only too naturally.

If only there were something he could do, but there was not. He could only listen to the transmission coming from that living hell, and imagine the worst.

And then the line went dead.

"Master Kunzite?" Serenity tried again, but to no avail. "Jadeite? . . . Is anyone there?"

The silence stretched on.

"Kunzite!" Venus cried and bolted forward without thinking. She caught herself when she was on her feet, and the war that waged inside her between her sacred duty and the feelings she had tried so hard this entire time to keep hidden was clear in the agony in the lines of her body, the terror in her wide eyes.

Either way she lost, and with that revelation she sank to her knees while the Queen turned her head in shame. The Princess Serenity's hand on Venus's shoulder went largely ignored as the young woman continued to stare at the screen, tears welling in her eyes.

Watching that scene, Zoisite felt for the first time a pang of deep sympathy for, if not outright kinship with the girl. The only jealousy that remained in him now was for her ability to give any sort of voice to the grief she felt. In the silence of the chamber, the sobs she tried very hard to suppress with her cupped hand echoed in his ears, while he, on the other hand, who was losing his comrades and beloved friends, could express nothing, only wallow in the deep numbness of sorrow and disbelief that gripped his entire body and would not allow him to move.

"Try to calm yourself, Venus," the Queen Serenity finally acknowledged her in a whisper. "We have merely lost the signal. We do not know how Master Kunzite and Master Jadeite are faring."

Her logic was, as always, impeccable, but still inside Zoisite knew, just as Venus did, that this was no temporary interruption. He could feel it in his bones, in the finality of the disruption, that the Kunzite and Jadeite he knew were gone; and that he would never hear nor see them again.

A sudden wave of nausea threatened to make him double up right there in Serenity's presence, but he managed to catch himself and the gravity of reality was allowed to sink fully into him: they are gone.

"My Queen." The return of the ship's commander to the screen interrupted the grief of those in the throne room. "I have something you will want to see."

It was a moment before Serenity's apprehension allowed her to answer, "Go ahead."

"Put it on the screen."

The commander nodded to a technician, and a second later his image was replaced by one that those in the Moon Kingdom at first glance had some difficulty making sense of. The reason was that what appeared before them was a sight so unnatural their minds did not know how nor wanted to comprehend it. So when they finally did understand what the picture was telling them, it was with a horror that gripped everyone's breath. Serenity leaned forward in her chair, but only after even she visibly recoiled from the revelation.

The picture was of Mars from orbit, the white tendrils of the ice cap of the southern pole visible on one edge of the orb. Of recognizable features other than that, however, there were few, as a black cloud was covering a good portion of the planet's surface like India ink flung out over the globe, blotting anything and everything beneath it out of sight. And like ink, soaking into a paper's fibers, like some amoebic gargantua its mass was growing—spreading pitch-black fingers that grabbed at more and more of the red planet as though literally consuming it territory by territory. Where it sprang from, no one could say: there was no end to it in sight.

"Commander, what am I looking at?" Serenity breathed.

"I . . . don't know, your highness."

Which was in some sense false. They all knew what it was, in their cells' memory if not in their rational minds. It was darkness incarnate, black matter, a tumor born of the universe or of the human psyche that no light could escape. And Zoisite wondered if Serenity was thinking the same thing: that there was a possibility even the Silver Imperium Crystal's brilliance would not be able to penetrate its totality.

"Master Zoisite," she said, as though reading his thoughts.

He shook himself and bowed his head to her—even if she could not turn her eyes from the screen to look at him herself.

"You say you have constructed on Earth, without my consent, a fleet of ships of enormous firepower. Is that true?"

"Yes, your highness."

In the pause that followed, he expected a chastisement. But instead of the rod, he got the response he had forgotten he had been waiting for.

"Then you have my blessing to send them into space, and wipe every last trace of that thing from this solar system."

IV.Peace

The planet Venus from space was little different from Earth at first glance. Beneath a marbled veil of clouds, dark blue ocean was broken by a few forested continents stretching across the equator and north pole, themselves dotted with the bleak peaks of volcanoes more massive than any back home.

Perhaps it was because of the similarities between the two sister planets that the lights flashing below were to Zoisite like a portentous vision. In the dark they might have been indistinguishable from the lights of the cities, but for the black smoke that rose from them, visible even from his command ship. Under those lights, the fields of Venus burned in a blaze so great he could not even fathom it.

A console chirped near Zoisite, and the one who picked it up said to him, "My lord, a transmission from Sailor Mars's ship."

He glanced out the tall windows automatically, even though he knew she, as well as Mercury, was positioned too far away to be anything bigger than a pinprick of winking light just above the curve of the planet. He waved to the young man, who bent back over the console. "You have information for me, princess?" Zoisite said.

"The recovery mission has returned from the surface of Mars."

Those words made Zoisite's heart pause momentarily in his chest, at once with hope and dread. He could not ignore the exasperation in her tone of voice over the radio, and held his breath.

"It found no survivors." She lowered her voice. "I am sorry, Zoisite."

With her revelation, the last hopes he had been holding on to sank, and he closed his eyes. "So am I. What about bodies?" he asked her.

"Plenty. But not. . . ." She could not even bring herself to say the name of the one she had lost. "Neither of . . . of your Prince's generals was among them."

Zoisite was surprised that he felt no deep agony, no nausea or sense of disorientation at the news. Perhaps they would catch up to him later, in privacy, and in idleness; but at the moment he felt only a spreading numbness and a general sense of indignation, that even after suffering such an unjust death, one in which his comrades had had no chance to defend themselves, there should not even be something left for a proper funeral befitting their sacrifice.

"Thank you, Mars," he said, "for being the bearer of this grave news."

She muttered an affirmative and cut the line.

In silence once again, Zoisite was free to say aloud to himself, "This so-called Dark Agency will not get away with what they've done. For the sake of all who have fallen, we must end this here, on this world, like Queen Serenity wishes. It gives me that much more satisfaction knowing our victory will come from these ships she ordered not be built. But how many would still be alive if we had been allowed to take this fleet into space months ago?"

He looked up to see that the eyes of his crew had turned to him, as though these muttered thoughts were a speech worth carving into their memories for the later generations. Zoisite did not think so highly of what were his simple feelings, but he understood their reasons: this crew was from Earth. The ships they manned were made by the hands of Earthmen, on Earth soil. And they carried the heaviest fire power that had been wielded by any vessel as far back as even the Queen herself could remember.

Enough to destroy worlds, she had said in a sort of fearful, reluctant admiration. Sending her navy out with his ships would be condemning what remained of the Dark Agency to a swift death, but in his mind it was long overdue in coming. "For Master Jadeite," Zoisite said, looking around at them for the support he knew he would receive. "And Master Kunzite. You all loved them as you love me. Well, this was not their war, but they gave their lives for it. For the dream of the Silver Millennium, that it might reign a thousand long years."

He shook his head. "Do not let their sacrifice be in vain."

As crew members saluted, a new voice crackled over the radio: "Lord General Zoisite, we are all locked onto the rebel targets, waiting for your command. There is just one concern, sir."

"Yes? What is it?"

"Are you certain the guns on these vessels will not cause significant damage to the planet surrounding our targets? It isn't that I doubt our accuracy—nor your and the Lord General Nephrite's genius—it is only . . . Well, these weapons are untried in actual combat—"

"They will work exactly as I have told you." Though even Zoisite had to admit, if he were honest with himself, that his official predictions for the impacts of the blasts themselves had been vague. Serenity had not been so specific in her orders, and he felt no need to second-guess her when the means of settling this war in one coordinated attack had been placed in his hands. "Just hold your position and wait for my signal. We cannot fire upon the surface until the Princess Venus and her cargo are confirmed safe."

"And what if the Dark Agency tries to attack these ships?"

Zoisite put his hand on his hip as he looked out the tall windows at the ships in formation. His pride for his creation battled with his knowledge of their one flaw: that their size and power made them harder to maneuver in an actual battle. But whether the enemy could even put up a coordinated effort in orbit with their operations in the outer solar system crushed, their access to ships and raw materials severed, was quite another question.

Then again, if that sinister weather phenomenon witnessed on Mars were repeated on Venus. . . . Zoisite shuddered to think of it, and so pushed it from his mind.

When he said nothing, the other repeated, "Sir?"

Zoisite shook himself back to the present predicament. "Hold your position," he repeated. "It is paramount that we maintain our positions at all costs. We may only have one shot. Let us make sure we get it right the first time."

If they had a single chance of saving this planet from the spreading darkness to which so many had fallen, they could not risk destroying it in the process.

——

"Hurry," Artemis urged her. "We don't know how much more time Jupiter and the others can give us."

Venus nodded, too intent on the task at hand to reply, as she strode quickly across the inner chambers of her palace. While her companion kept an eye and ear out for signs of the encroaching battle, pacing nervously like a caged cat, she went as quickly as she could through the various measures that kept the holy sword, the counterpart of the Imperium Crystal that had been entrusted to her world, safe behind otherwise impenetrable doors.

At last the final of those door rolled away, inviting the two of them into a narrow, cylindrical, gold-lined chamber at the center of which the heavy sword stood point-downward into a diadem on the floor. Despite its weight and the solid bulk of the ancient blade, Venus withdrew it in one long pull. "Good," she said with a huff as she made to wrap it quickly and strap it to her back for transport. "Now we can return the sword to the Princess in the Moon Kingdom."

"But we must hurry," Artemis repeated.

"Do you hear something?" She tried to follow his gaze, which seemed to pierce the very walls.

"No. . . . But I don't like the sound of this silence." He turned to her finally. "Are you all right to carry it?"

It was more a rhetorical question than anything, for they could not very well have entrusted the sword to him. However, surprisingly, it did not feel like the burden she had expected on Venus's back. "I'm fine," she told him.

He led her back out into the throne room, then down the corridor that would take them most quickly to the rest of their party. The golden halls with their polished volcanic stone sparkled still in the sunlight that slanted through openings in the eaves, and the warm, tropical wind was causing wind chimes to jingle; but now it all lacked the same carefree beauty it had had in their idyllic days. Now the sunlight was veiled by smoke rising from the fields below, and that sound carried in it only a sense of urgency, to make with the sword safely to the ships before it was too late.

They crossed a courtyard and almost made it to the stairs when, seemingly out of nowhere, enemy troops appeared bearing halberds and swords, blocking their progress. The two slid to a halt and turned around, hoping for another exit route. There was none. All that remained open to them was the way they had come, as the growing crowd of the enemy who called itself the Dark Agency filled the fringes of the room, boxing the two of them in—and standing between them and their comrades outside. The sword came down off Venus's back, and the cloth fell from its blade as she brandished it before herself and Artemis.

"Let us pass," she tried, though somehow she knew it was in vain. "It is not my wish to use this blade on you, but if you force my hand, I will—"

"You will do what, princess?" a voice rang out clearly from among the crowd. "If you're going to do anything, I think you should be giving it to us. Our master will put it to great use."

The crowd parted and the owner of the voice stepped forward; and Venus and Artemis could see he was a young man, looking no older than fourteen by Earthmen's standards, though his trappings were undeniably Venusian. The insignia of the Venusian army still graced his uniform, blasphemously. "Is he Danburite?" Artemis whispered behind Venus. "Our enemy's leader is this kid?"

At their shocked look, the boy in question spread his hands—as though in surrender before the holy blade, but Venus knew better. "What's the matter, princess?" he said. "Don't you recognize me?"

"I know who you are," she said. "You're Danburite, leader of the faction that calls itself the Dark Agency. I know you have declared Serenity and the Silver Millennium your enemy. You have committed treason and would be punished by death."

"Only because she betrayed us first," he said as though it were an unpleasant disclaimer that must be gotten out of the way. He shook his head. "But don't avoid the question, princess. And don't tell me you've forgotten my face. All the good times we shared in this palace? Before the Earthmen came—before they sullied our paradise on this world . . . and you, my Princess Vee."

Suddenly her eyes flashed with disbelieving recognition, and the name fell from the recesses of her memory: "Adonis?"

Artemis looked at her. "You know this boy?"

"He was a nobleman's son in my court—much younger than I, but we were playmates as children." Danburite—the boy who used to be Adonis—smiled in satisfaction. At that Venus strengthened her resolve, and her grip on the sword. "But no more. The circumstances of our relationship have changed."

"Yes, they have," he agreed, "on account of Serenity—whom you continue to blindly serve—"

"Enough of this treasonous talk, Adonis. No . . . Danburite," she corrected herself. "You are not the boy I knew."

"I have grown up, seen the light. But I am the same at heart."

That was one thing Venus would not believe. She could sense it rising off him like a smell, could hear how his soul had been perverted in the inflection of his voice. She could not know if he was capable of hearing reason in such a state, but she said anyway: "What evil has Serenity done you that you would reward her with this destruction and bloodshed? These are your own people you slaughter, in your own streets! Hasn't she given you enough? Haven't you prospered under the Silver Millennium? She has not wronged you personally."

"Hasn't she?" Danburite looked around at his companions as he spoke, like an actor to his chorus. "Isn't it she who imposed the will of Earthmen on our planet, who forced us to accommodate their bigotry, their greed and exploitation? Isn't it she who broke the promise that had existed between our two kingdoms, to be brethren to one another, sister worlds, all for the sake of some prince from some lowly, up-and-coming planet because he happens to be in love with her daughter?" His eyes narrowed with an intense darkness as he turned back to Venus and lowered his voice. "Tell me, princess, is that the kind of woman you want leading this solar system?"

"Yes." Venus did not have to think before answering. "And what will you do, Danburite? Secede from the Silver Millennium? Do you think you can survive without Serenity's help? Do you think she will let you get away with this?"

Pain blossomed deep inside her, but she persisted.

"Do you think I will let you?"

Danburite's gaze faltered, but only for a split second. "It doesn't matter." He said to the crowd, "We will wrest the reigns of this planet from her iron grip if it costs us our lives. We will march on the Moon Palace if need be! That is the price of freedom, and we have all decided it is worth it. We were not raised to bear the yoke of Earth masters!" he said to cries of agreement. "We were not raised to walk on our knees, bow our heads!"

"And you are so convinced that is what has become of you here?" said Artemis.

"If not now then it certainly will be!"

"Your great master has shown you that."

Venus spoke the words with derision, and the boy matched it, with an eerie note of reverence that sent a shiver down her spine: "She has promised much glory to come for those who serve her righteous way. She rewards us for conviction, for our loyalty, with power like even you could not imagine." He extended her his hand, unafraid of the blade with its poison tip. "Join me, Venus. Let's lead this system into a new era like we used to dream of doing, when we played make-believe in this palace as children: together. You won't have to choose your duty over your desires. You don't have to be handmaiden to a spoiled princess, serving her most frivolous whims; you can be a queen in your own right."

Venus did not answer right away. But it was not, as Danburite believed, because there was anything in his offer worth considering.

The corner of his lips turned up in a snarl he tried hard to suppress. "Is it really your loyalty that is keeping you, or something else? Your memory of Kunzite perhaps?"

Her gaze snapped to him at the mention of that name. For all she knew, he had been there on Mars that fateful day—or if not, had led the push that had ended Kunzite's life. "I'll never give an inch to your 'great master'," she growled. The holy sword was poised to strike him down.

But at the slightest tension of her muscles, a hundred arms were raised against her and Artemis, and arrows trained on them. Danburite did not even flinch; he was confident in his army's capacity to strike her down before she got more than a single blow off him. But unfortunately for Danburite, one blow was all she needed.

There was a commotion behind the mob before it could come to that, however. Danburite spun and Venus and Artemis looked up, just before a group of men were thrown through the air into the center of the room. Electricity crackled in the air in their wake, and a smile of relief returned to Venus's face.

"What—" Danburite started, but a clash of swords from another end cut him off. His men fell or backed away, taken off their guard by this sudden intrusion.

Meanwhile Jupiter strode into the room, and Venus thought she was never so happy to see her comrade. "Venus," she said, "we've come to get you and Artemis out—"

"Stop them!" Danburite ordered at the same time.

The soldiers of the Dark Agency rounded on Jupiter before she could react. Venus called out to her, but even as she did so Jupiter's attackers were smashed against columns and the far walls of the room by some invisible force. Jupiter looked back over her shoulder in gratitude, and Venus saw to her relief the tall, gangly figure of Gesen. He had only to extend a hand toward the enemy, fingers clenched halfway like a claw, and those in his sights went flying backwards, or found their own weapons taken from their hands and used against them.

Seeing that, Danburite grabbed Venus's elbow and made to wrest the sword from her grasp, but Artemis made quick work of him, and the next moment the boy was struggling to free himself from the arms that pinned his own behind his back. Venus was secretly glad that Artemis had done it too; even after all that he had changed, she was still loath to harm the boy she had grown up with.

Jupiter was at her side in seconds, with a hand on her elbow to steady Venus and the cloth that had fallen from the sword in the other. "Let's hurry," she said. "The ships are eager to take off. . . ."

That was to say nothing of the small band who had come with her, who were looking more and more ragged with each passing moment. Nephrite was holding his own, his sword flashing from one corner like lightning, as was Gesen, but the mob seemed without end.

Venus nodded her head. The sword secured once again, she had a hand free to remove the chain whip from around her waist. She glanced over her shoulder. "Artemis?"

"Bloody alien!" Danburite muttered and sank his teeth into the arm that encircled his throat.

Artemis yowled and shoved the boy away, who staggered away to the safety of his comrades.

With Jupiter leading the way and Artemis guarding her back, and Nephrite and Gesen at their limits, Venus had no other choice but to make haste and flee. But she glanced back at Danburite instinctively as she did so, perhaps hoping to find some vestige of Adonis under the boy's sinister facade that might convince her there was something in him that was still worth saving.

However, as he shouted orders for his army to follow them and not let them leave this planet, she was dismayed to discover that she could find nothing—even more so because that did nothing to assuage the guilt of losing another loved one to their enemy's dark shadow.

——

Silence descended upon Thoth so completely in the computer room at the Venusian pole that for a moment he was unable to believe the sight before him was real.

Astarte, one of the Venusian princess's closest advisors and one of the few remaining of their race, looked up at the sound of his footsteps. Below her lay a body he recognized as belonging to his sister Hathor. Her dark red hair spread about her head like a fan of blood, but otherwise there was no sign of what had befallen her only seconds before his arrival but the clanging of the dagger against the floor when it fell from Astarte's hand.

"Astarte. . . ." In his shock he could barely manage a whisper, but it carried like a gunshot under the tall ceiling. "What have you done?"

She looked up at him from beneath tight, lapis lazuli ringlets with a look in her eyes he had never seen before. They were wild and determined, but even their bearer seemed to know not what for. They were the eyes of a mad woman, a dangerous woman—a woman he did not recognize. Suddenly Thoth was aware how distant he was from the battle waging just outside this insulated building. Yet he held his ground, if for nothing else than that he was sure the answer to this entire war was within this room. With Astarte.

He turned his gaze momentarily to Hathor—long enough to confirm what he already knew within him. She was dead.

"She was like my sister as well," Astarte said by way of explanation. She stroked the dead woman's cheek fondly. "But she tried to stop me."

"You had to do it."

At his threatening tone, she raised her voice. "She had a choice, and she made her decision. We all must make it sooner or later, before this war can end." Her gaze flickered to the sword at his side. "Are you going to take your revenge?"

Thoth's eyes narrowed briefly in grief, but there was nothing he could do to change what was already done.

"I did it for us, Thoth," Astarte said when he did not respond. "For our people."

"What are you talking about?"

"The Earthmen. If we do not stand up to them, Thoth, then we are as good as slaves! Tell me this world has not changed in the last five years," she said when he shook his head dismissively. "We have lost our place in this system. Now even Serenity kowtows to their whims. How many more years will it take before they are ruling our every move, with her blessing? There aren't many of us left! You know that—"

"You're speaking nonsense—"

"Am I? Have you not felt the change for yourself?"

He snarled. "You would start this war, slaughter a million innocents, because you fear losing your spot at the top of the cosmic heap?"

"Oh no! It's about so much more than that." Hunched over Hathor's body, her heavy mane falling before her face, there was something of a lioness in Astarte's stare, in her crouch—something of a cornered lioness in a hunt, desperate and already seeing with the clarity of death. "I have seen the truth, what the Earthmen would do to us. Already they are plotting to bring down Serenity, and though it is blasphemous to say so, a part of me wonders why they should not. She makes us worship her as a living goddess, and we have done so out of fear for so long—fear of the absolute power that crystal of hers is supposed to grant her. But it has all been hollow pageantry, Thoth. She is worse than a tyrant: she is weak and her powers impotent—"

"You're delusional, Astarte."

"Am I really? I have found a new master who can appreciate our place in this system. She has shown me the way things really are, and promised me great power—greater than anything Serenity could offer us. How could I refuse her? Yet she left me the presence of mind to take these matters into my own hands. I can end her reign once and for all, before she tears this system apart like all the others. . . ."

A chill ran down Thoth's back hearing Astarte speak that way, and he repeated in dread, "'She'?"

It did not sound like she meant Serenity anymore.

"Metallia."

Thoth had no time to dwell on that name that inexplicably gave him such fear. A warning horn sounded and the panels that monitored the computers' functions lit up like a sinister rainbow. He rushed toward them. "What have you done?"

"You can't stop it." Astarte followed him with her eyes. "No one can, not even myself. I made sure of that, in case she changed my mind for me."

In a moment the situation was clear to Thoth. "You've sabotaged the planet's computers?"

The self-destruct procedure had already been started and he lacked the authority to stop it. Judging by Astarte's intensity, he doubted there was anything anyone could do now. And the implications of that were dire indeed. The tubes that served this control room went deep—down into the planet's very crust, wired into the very heart of the mountain. A self-destruct program with fingers this deep into the Venusian infrastructure would not merely cripple the planet. It would make it uninhabitable. The volcanic explosions it triggered would take out the main urban centers scattered across the globe. Within a few days, the gas would make the planet uninhabitable. The rich jungles would burn, crops wither. People would suffocate—if there were any remaining. Eventually Venus would revert to the volatile, ash-veiled world it had not been since the system was settled millennia ago.

All of spacemen's glorious struggle against the elements would have been for naught, and chaos would have won—not by chance, but by human force of will.

"When the very last of these stations has gone," Astarte said, "they will crack this planet in half. She will never have this world, and neither will the Earthmen." The flash in her eyes softened, but only slightly. "I am sorry, Thoth, that I had to take you with me."

He watched the countdown end. For a moment he was almost able to believe all of this was a terrible dream, when the deep silence that followed suspended time inside the computer room. Until the ground rumbled, and then the entire mountain around them, building toward a climax he had no power to stop. That knowledge put him in a state of calm he had never known he would experience at the moment before his death. Strangely, he had no fear for himself, only for those he had no time to warn.

——

They had just made it back to the ships when it happened.

The ground shook violently beneath their feet as if it were a behemoth suddenly rousing from sleep. It threw Venus off balance under the weight of the holy sword and she tripped just feet from the ship's ramp. She closed her eyes as the ground came up to meet her fast; Danburite's army was so close on their heels there was not even a second to lose.

When she opened them, however, it was the utter silence of the battlefield that surprised her. The rumble of the earth was deafening and unceasing.

Artemis was shouting something in her ear as he helped her up. Her knees stung and doubtless bled but Venus hardly noticed. On her feet once again, looking back the way they had come, Venus froze in shock at the sight that met her.

The twisted peak of Mount Maat was on fire—but not with the burning jungles that clothed its slopes. The peak itself was split open. It billowed thick, black clouds of smoke that rose up into the already polluted sky in one massive and grotesque pillar. Lava flashed in golden fountains that spilled over the rock face, winding down toward the valley where her palace lay—and where they were still fighting back the Dark Agency.

The Queen's fighters rushed by her into the safety of the ship as the first roar like a million cracks of thunder reached them, splitting the air and their eardrums. Somehow she managed to hear Jupiter yelling to her over it: "Come on! We've got to get on board! We've got to lift off now!" And somehow her legs remembered how to work and took her up the ramp between the shielding arms of Nephrite and her comrade.

Once safely inside the ship's hold she collapsed, breathing hard, her legs aching and bruised and her arms gripping the holy sword as though it were her lifeline. In fact, she was its, and she was prepared to lay down her life to protect it, but even that sacrifice would mean nothing if their ship did not escape from his cataclysm. As it rose into the air as fast as it was able, she felt the downward pull of gravity tugging at her insides.

Yet she could still feel the shaking all around her—in the rumble of the ship's engines, in her bones. The planet, her planet, was tearing itself apart, screaming as cracks opened up in the earth, gushing molten rock and fire. It beat on her brain, like the pumice bombs that thunked against the side of the spacecraft.

"We aren't going to make it!" she yelled to Jupiter over the din, even though her comrade was crouched just beside her. It wasn't fear that made Venus say that. It was a simple fact. If they did not somehow gain a considerable amount more of speed and altitude, and fast, they would be pulverized.

Jupiter looked over her shoulder at Nephrite, but it was Gesen who nodded back. He strode over to the panel that controlled the ramp and lowered it.

Jupiter jumped to her feet. "What are you doing?"

"The only thing I can," he called back. Locking the ramp at a narrow angle and bracing himself well, he leaned out to meet the inferno that roiled beneath them, obscuring the face of the planet Venus. The heat of it rushed into the ship, but Gesen faced it bravely; and, concentrating all his power, he extended a hand toward the fire and smoke with palm outward as though he could politely ask it to stop and let them go.

At the same time, a ball of fire from one of the exploding mountains was rapidly rising to meet them. Venus stared, unable to look away, and waited for it to engulf the ship and all its passengers. But instead, at the last moment, it stopped a precious few yards from them, and doubled back upon itself. There was silence from above as well as the pumice bombs were deflected without hitting the hull. The ship's passengers finally remembered to breathe.

And the inferno continued to build around them.

Gesen's hand shook. He grabbed its wrist with his other hand, but he knew it would not keep him from being overwhelmed. Never had he had to use his telekinesis on a force so great, so all-consuming, or so unpredictable. He was practically battling an entire planet—a planet which was doing its best to swallow them up. "I can't keep this up much longer!" he called back over his shoulder. "Some help would be nice!"

"Take my power."

Jupiter was at his side before the words were all out, wrapping one arm about his waist. Nephrite's arm went about his shoulders the next moment, and the two exchanged glances and a nod.

As her planet screamed and the ship groaned around them, Venus prayed.

——

Crew members exclaimed in alarm and rose from their seats to better see out the ship's windows the eruptions of fire and smoke blossoming all over the surface of Venus. Frantic calls confirmed in short order that none of the ships had fired prematurely, and neither could the two princesses stationed on the other side of the world believe what they were seeing. "Someone must have rigged the volcanoes to explode," Mercury said over the radio. "The system keeping this planet stable has been in place for several millennia. It wouldn't happen all on its own, let alone all at once."

"The Dark Agency?" Mars asked her.

"I don't know."

"But they will be destroyed in it," Zoisite said to himself, "one way or another." Whoever or whatever had caused the planet to so suddenly, and so completely, become this volatile, it looked from orbit like the residents of fiery Hell had finally grown tired of the underground, and were breaking their own way through the surface—like the planet Venus were experiencing the violence of its birth all over again, without any regard for the hundreds of thousands of souls who still remained on it. It was at once beautiful and terrifying—a glimpse into the solar system's beginning and its end that, either way, felt like a blasphemy to witness.

"Mars . . ." Mercury gasped, "Venus and Jupiter are still down there!"

Zoisite started. Nephrite!

"Get me Master Nephrite's channel." Zoisite strode over to the communications console, and the technician, seeing his determination, did so right away. "Nephrite," Zoisite spoke toward the speaker when he was given the all-clear, "Nephrite, if you can hear me, answer me. This is Zoisite. It's urgent. Tell me, is your party all right?"

Please answer, he prayed to a god he had long given up; please be alive.

Below his position, the Sappho Islands cracked their tips one after another, twinkling against the sea like topazes spilled from a necklace. Farther to the west, and up north inside the hazy curve of the globe, plumes of lava rose miles into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, nothing except static continued to answer Zoisite's call.

He tried again, nudging the technician out of the way to work the machine himself. "Nephrite!" He could no longer help the panic rising into his voice. "Where in God's name are you? Answer me! Tell me you're still with us!"

"We're still here!" the reply finally came.

He recognized the voice as that of Sailor Venus—tremulous with a fear she had never allowed him to see nor hear before. Zoisite held his breath. "And Nephrite?"

"He's all right. He and Jupiter are here safe with me. Our ship has just entered the stratosphere and is on its way to rendezvous with you in space." She added with relief, "The holy blade will be returned to Princess Serenity intact."

Zoisite could not care a lick about some ancient relic, however, as he braced himself against the console in gratitude. His comrade—the man who was like a brother to him—and their allies were safe, they had escaped this horrible inferno, and that was all that mattered to him. Mars and Mercury's jubilant voices reaching him across the airwaves told a similar story.

"Master Zoisite," Venus said out of the blue after she had reassured them.

He roused himself and answered, "I'm still here, princess."

When she spoke again it was with a seriousness that was not like her, even after all the disagreements between the two of them in the past. She had been gravely wounded by this battle, that voice said, not physically but deep in her soul, by sins that could not be forgiven.

"If you still have the Dark Agency's bases in your fleet's sights, then give them the order to fire."

"But, ma'am," said the same commander who had questioned their prudence earlier, "with the planet in this condition already, we cannot be responsible for what our weaponry will do! We never accounted for a disaster of this magnitude in our calculations—"

"Just do as I say," Zoisite cut him off. "And do not make Sailor Venus repeat herself." He understood now precisely what she meant, and just how terrible a decision it was for her to make.

"Yes," came Mercury's solemn agreement. "Queen Serenity ordered us to finish the Dark Agency and their master on his world before it could spread to any others. Though it's unfortunate it should come to this, the eruptions have afforded us an opportunity to do just that. It is likely the planet will be made inhospitable in the process, and many more will lose their lives, but if it can prevent the deaths of millions more. . . ."

Her difficulty in saying such things that her nature was so against believing was obvious, so Zoisite finished for her: "The mechanisms are already in place to slowly choke the life from the planet. What we deal it is a merciful blow—a blow that will also seal the demise of the Dark Agency."

There were no further objections, just a dozen loyal commanders waiting for the order from Zoisite's ship and those of the sailor-soldiers. Sailor Venus was silent, but her silence spoke plenty for Zoisite. What he could not do right for Kunzite, he would at least do right for her.

"All ships, fire main cannons!" he said, and the upper atmosphere around the planet Venus was awash with a light that felt as brilliant as the sun—a light so bright even the dark beast writhing beneath could not blot it out, could not escape its blinding glare.

V.Kunzite

Only a select few of the Queen's most trusted accompanied her to meet the ship that had just arrived at the palace, fresh from its recovery mission to the devastated surface of Mars. No one else was to know of its presence there, nor of the precious cargo it carried, for she feared if word got out it might have disastrous effects on the already fragile morale of her people.

The solemn faces of its crew spread a deep numbness through her limbs, but her mind was focused as ever.

Two crystalline, capsule-like caskets were carried down the ship's ramp by uniformed attendants, and before the Queen they stopped for her inspection. Serenity bent her head and looked through the glass lids at each one in turn. The body of Sailor Uranus lay in one, Sailor Neptune's in the other. Princesses of the outer planets, guardians of the outer solar system, they were no less stately, no less mysterious in death than they had been in life.

"We found them huddled together amid the ashes," the captain of the ship told the Queen and her train gravely.

Serenity nodded her gratitude, while Pluto stepped forward for one last meeting with her fallen comrades. Her footsteps alone made a sound on the pavement; in her battle attire, which matched those of the two young women laid in the caskets, her long hair flowing around her without a veil to hide it, she had an intense grace in her bearing.

"They protected their bodies with the last of their energy," she said. Her dark, long-boned hand caressed one of the caskets fondly and briefly, as though through her touch the young women's last moments might be recorded into memory in her own mind. "Just as they were trained to do." It was harder still to tear her eyes away. "They were loyal to her majesty to the very end."

"And the talismans?" Serenity asked.

Luna looked up from the caskets to her. Her expression was unreadable, but Serenity could not help a pang of guilt. Do not look at me like that, she thought. It is not out of my heart that I ask that, but out of duty. I am not really so cold as that, am I?

"They are safe," the captain answered her, and as he did so he waved for another officer to come forward. The three women's attention was drawn immediately to the chest he carried. "As per your orders, your majesty, we kept them far from her. . . ."

His voice dropped in something like fear before he trailed off and looked warily over his shoulder, where down the ramp another passenger was disembarking. The passenger was a young woman no younger than Serenity's own daughter but far more frail of body. Even in the weaker gravity of the Moon she seemed constantly on the verge of collapsing under her own negligible weight. Bobbed, shoulder-length ebony hair framed a face as white as bone, and she still wore her royal robes, a gauzy black gown that floated about her like a burnt funereal shroud.

She looked about herself with large, dark-rimmed eyes as though uncertain of where she was and how she had come to be here—and perhaps, Serenity mused, she truthfully was. The last few months had been too much to take in for a girl of her disposition—a girl who barely understood why her appearance cast the square into such a dreadful and tense quiet. To these Moonmen, there could be no clearer omen of death than the Princess Saturn, stirred from her fortress of silence on Mimas and placed on their doorstep in this supposed time of peace.

"Very good." Serenity's voice broke the ominous silence and allayed her men's fears. She raised a hand magnanimously, forcing a smile on her lips. "I will see to it they are all well taken care of. Then I must urge you all to relax and partake of our hospitality, Captain. You have all just returned from a very long and very trying mission. Now is the time we must give thanks for our victory over the forces of darkness."

And count our losses, her heart was screaming to add. But that was the particular, and lonely, burden of the Moon Queen.

——

Eat, drink, and be merry, Queen Serenity had said. Rest your weary body and your weary soul and give thanks for what you still have, what so many were sacrificed to protect. Dance, and be thankful you are still alive.

Remember your comrades who gave their lives so that life might go on in the solar system—with reverence, but also with vigor. The darkness was defeated; light had prevailed, and its heavy price would not easily be forgotten. This was a new beginning for the Silver Millennium, but it could not afford to be cowed by the monumental, seemingly impossible tasks ahead. The solar system had been sparse of life once before, but the power of the Silver Imperium Crystal civilized it, and so it would once again, in time. Until then, all who remained were urged to partake of the greatness that had survived, and which would ultimately triumph. It was the glorious future they celebrated, and not the sorrows of the recent past.

It made Zoisite sick. Physically as well as mentally so; the Queen's urging toward merry-making in such a time as this nauseated him so that it was all he could do to abstain silently in his quarters. He did not care for her justifications. The Queen herself did not participate in these revelries she proclaimed to be so necessary—she probably could stomach them even less—so in that way was she not a hypocrite? Did the knowledge of how many she had sent to their deaths keep her awake like he was kept awake by his beloved comrades' last moments, by his foreseeable failures in the outer system that could have prevented them? By the memory of the planet Venus's innards boiling to its surface with the help of his own invention?

And how the planet itself had seemed to writhe in agony beneath him like a living thing. . . . Had she foreseen that in that holy tower of hers?

Maybe it was traitorous of him to think it now, but he could never quite quell the feeling of late that Endymion and his comrades had been somehow deceived. And he wondered if he could in fact believe Serenity's profession that she had simply—gravely—underestimated the pervasiveness of the dark power that had invaded the solar system and the hearts of its men and women. Could such a creature as she truly have been ignorant of its true nature?

On the other hand, it was hardly in the Queen's nature to willfully sacrifice her own people. Zoisite preferred to believe that above all he was a rational man, and the evidence would not allow him to think she could do such a thing. The other explanation, however, that all that had happened did so on account of failure, was no better comfort. If anything, it was worse.

Forgive me, Kunzite, Jadeite—Zoisite thought as he pressed his face into the pillow of a sofa, squeezing his eyes closed against tears that never came. If I had not been so trusting, so obedient—if I had followed my own instincts and opposed Serenity's decisions when we still had a chance to win on Mars and Jupiter—if I had just gone with you two. . . .

If he had done anything different, maybe they would still be here.

Eventually some sort of sleep must have come over Zoisite—he could not tell for how long in the lunar night—because something made him wake with a start.

He sat up on the sofa and looked around himself, but as far as he could see he was alone in the room. The curtains through which the balcony lay billowed in a light breeze, and beyond that the stars of deep twilight twinkled without any glass to obscure them: there had never been any need to fear assassins of thieves here.

Zoisite rose and silently went to check the balcony anyway. He hardly reached the threshold when he experienced an inexplicable feeling that someone was watching his movements from the shadows at his back.

He froze . . . then promptly told himself he was being a child. There was nothing there to fear. To prove his point he said, "Bunbo, what are you doing sneaking around this time of night?"

"Bunbo?" a disembodied voice repeated. It startled Zoisite, who had not actually expected an answer of any sort. "What, Zoisite, have you forgotten me already?"

That voice was intimately familiar to him, yet his rational mind told him there was no way he should be hearing it. That person was dead. He said simply, unwilling to delude himself with false hope: "Show yourself."

A shadowy figure of a man uncrossed his arms and legs, pushed himself away from the far wall, and walked toward Zoisite. Zoisite recognized the man's gait already, but he waited until a bar of Earthlight confirmed the man's identity before he allowed himself to believe it.

"Kunzite?" Zoisite breathed. He backed up a step instinctively, and his legs felt suddenly weak. "But I must be dreaming. . . ."

The next moment his feet were carrying him forward. But Kunzite recoiled before they could meet, his voice stopping Zoisite in his tracks. "Don't touch me!" It pained him to say it, however, so he said gentler, noting Zoisite's confusion, "Even if just to confirm it really is me. You'll just have to trust me, until I can collect myself. I've come a long way, flying for days in a rickety ship without sleep or food to reach you—"

"Of course." Zoisite nodded. "Sit down, then. Please. You must be exhausted."

Kunzite smiled. And to Zoisite he did look something like a dead man, as pale as a phantom in the wan light. There was no trace of the blood and dirt and soot that had marred his uniform and his face in his last transmission—nothing to dull the platinum luster of his attire and his hair and skin. He was radiant as moonlight itself—like a dream. He murmured, "God, but I'm glad to see you again," and he took the words right out of Zoisite's mouth.

Zoisite knelt down by his comrade's knee as Kunzite took a seat on the sofa, and the tears that had never quite made it to the surface before gathered within him again. "They told me you were dead," he all but whispered, afraid that if he spoke up this spell might be broken.

"Is that what you heard? As you can see it isn't true."

"But on Mars . . . Your last transmission—"

"I apologize, then," Kunzite said gently, "for leading you to think that I had perished in that mess."

"We couldn't help it, though. We were too busy fighting for our lives at the time."

Zoisite started and looked in the direction of the new voice, to see Jadeite standing in the doorway against the billowing curtains. At least, he recognized the voice as belonging to Jadeite, though the figure who peered into the room was backlit by the starlit sky and therefore Zoisite was unable to clearly make out his features—anything but an indistinct smile when he added, "Fear is a very powerful weapon, Zoisite. It can make people lose the civilization in themselves."

Zoisite looked back to Kunzite. "You both made it? But . . . I don't understand. How could this happen? The sandstorm tore everything apart. They said there were no bodies to even be found."

"Ah, but it wasn't a sandstorm," Jadeite said. "It wasn't any ordinary weather phenomenon. You saw it, didn't you? Like a huge black cloud, a shadow, swallowing up the entire world—"

"We were engulfed," Kunzite said. "But in the darkness we were saved from annihilation."

Jadeite glanced at him. "She saved us, though we had given up on her."

"'She'?" Zoisite echoed.

The other raised an eyebrow. "Beryl."

He said it like Zoisite should have known.

Zoisite started. "Beryl?" He felt like a parrot, miming everything they said, but he just could not bring himself to believe it. "The same Beryl who served Prince Endymion with us on Earth? No. . . ." He shook his head. There simply was no evidence. "I don't see how she could . . . She was lost on Neptune months ago. What you're saying, it . . . It can't possibly be true. . . . Can it?"

Jadeite spread his hands. "And yet here we are, all on account of her grace. She would not let her brethren fall to the enemy, even if we had not been quite so faithful to her in the past."

"But what was Beryl doing on Mars?"

Jadeite simply chuckled.

"Zoisite," Kunzite said solemnly, grabbing his attention once again. "When we were lost in that storm, and could not even see our hands in front of our faces, and when our troops gave up hope and fell upon one another in that darkness, it was Beryl who sheltered us from the chaos. She made sure nothing harmed us, because she knew how deep our love is for our master, for Endymion. She would not allow us to perish like so many others did on those plains—"

"If you had only seen what happened to the slain, Zoisite. The mutilated corpses, just littering the fields, just left out there in their own blood to be picked at by the crows. There was no rhyme or reason to the death, no dignity."

"The war made a monster of everyone. Soldiers turned on the men standing next to them, their own comrades, for no other reason than that there was no way one could know if that man on his right was going to kill him first." Kunzite slowly shook his head, and in the pale light his silver eyes were penetrating. "I envy you your campaigns in space, Zoisite, that you were never forced to dirty your hands in actual combat. It was a waking nightmare that consumed us."

Zoisite narrowed his eyes. "Yet you two alone made it out?"

At the nervousness in his tone, Jadeite stepped into the room and bent down beside his friend; and the wicked gleam in his searching eyes—so inescapably intimate, so intense and full of wonder—made Zoisite's heart, for a moment, leap.

"Not exactly. It's just like Kunzite said. The darkness took us, and in its fold we were saved."

Zoisite could only stare at him in horror as the meaning behind this revelation slowly sank in. Meanwhile, Kunzite's breath warmed his ear. "We almost died that day on Mars—and would have had Beryl not intervened on our behalf. Inside the darkness our wounds were healed and we were reborn. There we were given a chance to set right all of the Silver Millennium's failures, to start over. We were made a proposal we could not refuse."

Zoisite's eyes snapped back to him, and with a tenderness that made the young king's heart ache and his senses reel, Kunzite brushed a loose lock of hair back from his brow and behind his ear, his fingers gracing Zoisite's temple as lightly as a feather. How long it had been since Kunzite last touched him like that. . . .

"We came back here," he said, "because we could not leave you—and Nephrite and our Prince—without offering you the same opportunity that was afforded us."

"Shall we show him?" Jadeite said.

Kunzite's eyes left Zoisite's for a brief moment, in which they focused on Jadeite with a meaningful glance; and then Zoisite found his hand being taken and enfolded by those of his younger comrade, who brushed his lips across Zoisite's knuckles before slowly pulling him to his feet. He was still too much in shock to protest such an outward display of affection; and there was something too mesmerizing in Jadeite's stare and his slight smile to speak.

"Come with me," Jadeite said. His voice was dreamy, his tone lyrical, like he were reciting a poem. "I want you to see what wonderful things we have seen. You won't know how you ever truly existed in this world until the moment you genuinely feel it moving inside of you, throughout every inch of you."

"Inside of me?"

"This magnificent life force."

Jadeite's touch, the energy flowing through his limbs and his soft, white gloves, was like a warm wave pulsing through Zoisite's skin, through his bloodstream—like wine in his veins—seductive and impossible to refuse. Yet he managed to ask, "Where are you taking me, Jadeite? Just what are you planning to do with me?" After all, the doors that Jadeite seemed to be guiding him toward only led to Zoisite's bed chamber.

When he pushed them open, however, the reason for his boyish smirk became somewhat clearer.

The space beyond was not a bed chamber at all, let alone any sort of space Zoisite recognized. No cold Earthlight penetrated this place like it did the rest of his quarters, but rather the dark inside seemed to pulse with a warmer, more organic, phosphorescent light. Jadeite continued to pull him further into it, and Zoisite obeyed without thinking, looking around himself as though in a trance, searching for anything that might orient him and explain how this could be his room.

Across stone floors polished to glassy smoothness he strode slowly and in awe. It was warm wherever they were yet a chill ran down Zoisite's spine. Through the darkness he could see magnificent pillars stretching toward an indistinct ceiling; and though they were stark and monolithic, the same featureless charcoal color as the floor, they seemed nonetheless to writhe nebulously in the shadows with some sinister form of life—to tremble with some low-frequency heartbeat that Zoisite began to feel in his chest the longer he tried to make sense of his surroundings.

"What is this place?" he breathed, and was surprised by how quickly his words were swallowed up in the cavernous space.

It was Kunzite who answered him, his footfalls echoing at Zoisite's back, while Jadeite continued to relish his reaction.

"This," he said, "is Queen Beryl's kingdom. Her Dark Kingdom."

Jadeite dropped his hand, and with that Zoisite turned around. "Queen Beryl's . . . ? Kunzite, what is this nonsense about Beryl being a queen? Where in God's good name are we?"

"Inside the proverbial belly of the beast. The Darkness that engulfed us all on Mars without any regard for what side we fought on—it is a sentient thing that came to this system to end our strifes once and for all. It chose Beryl on Neptune as the instrument of its plan of peace, and spared her from the ensuing violence that destroyed Triton."

Kunzite spoke of the Darkness with such reverence—the same black shadow that had caused Zoisite to know a fear he had never experienced before that, a fear of something even worse than death—that made the young man tremble before his friend. Had Kunzite gone mad—was this really him at all? How could he speak of that horrific thing with such love—like it were a god to be worshiped?

"I saw it die," Zoisite told him, and his voice shook. "That Darkness you speak of. . . ." This was nonsense, speaking of it like a living thing, and yet he could not help himself. A living thing was what it had felt like. "I killed it with my own hand, with my ships, on Venus. . . ." How could he be inside of it? "I saw it die!"

"What you witnessed on Venus was but a close call," Jadeite said. "The planet's eruptions and the fire from space nearly overwhelmed our Great Master, but she managed to escape into the sun."

"Great master. . . ." Zoisite echoed. His legs felt weak.

"Did we not tell you?" Kunzite said. "We serve a new master now. Oh, we are still and always will be faithful to Endymion," he elaborated at Zoisite's horrified expression, "but we must consider whom it is Endymion's duty to serve. Serenity is weak. She could not defend this system from the fear and hatred in men's hearts, and the destruction that wrought. The Silver Imperium Crystal is the law in this system no longer. I wonder if it ever truly was.

"But we have met one who is—whose power is eternal and encompasses all systems. We have pledged our lives to her, and in return she has given us great power like we never could have achieved on our own. Under the Moon Kingdom's control." He shook his head slightly, and smiled at some private thought, his eyes brilliant as they met Zoisite's through the darkness. "It is a power we can use to take back our world, Zoisite—even depose Serenity if we so wished, and who would say that this system would not be better off for it after all she has cost us?"

"You wouldn't disagree, I'm sure," Jadeite said. "If she had listened to your arguments earlier, you and I both know fewer lives would have been lost in the war. Surely the damage done would not have been nearly as severe."

Zoisite could not answer. Nor did he exactly have to. His comrades knew his heart well enough to know that was precisely how he felt about the Silver Millennium's failures. But coming from them in this strange, ecstatic state that was so unlike both of them, the logic sounded twisted, perverted.

"You don't have to answer," Jadeite said eventually. "You know we're right—"

"But none of that matters now!" The words forced themselves from deep within Zoisite, from a primal place within him that needed desperately to deny what they were telling him. "The war is over! This so-called Dark Kingdom. . . ." Now it clicked. "Its Dark Agency. . . . It was our enemy and we defeated it! All of that is history now!"

Jadeite grinned. "Haven't you been listening? Do you honestly think we would deceive you, Zoisite?"

"She is merely in hibernation," Kunzite said matter-of-factly, "our Master. But do not fear. She will regain her strength in time. In the meanwhile, we must remain vigilant. Serenity would try to destroy her if she knew the Darkness was vulnerable."

He extended a hand before him in invitation, and the sudden motion caused his short cape to wave in the still air. "Now, if you please," he said, leading the way down the corridor, "follow me. Queen Beryl is eager to meet with you again."

The two led the way, but Zoisite staggered, and felt vaguely ill. This was all too surreal. His relief over his comrades' return from the dead had faded all too quickly into a disgust all the more bitter because he could not believe the men he loved so dearly were saying such unnatural things—speaking treason so openly, so . . . proudly. Did they not realize that they were serving the very enemy that had been dead-set against their existence? Perhaps they had no choice, he tried to convince himself. After all, what kind of being was it really that he had fought on Venus, to flee his ship's measly firepower for the protection of the roiling, nuclear furnace of the sun?

Just what was this master his comrades professed to serve?

It was when he swore the walls around him whispered his own name that Zoisite started out of his stare. He turned to retreat through the doors whence they had come and to the safety of his quarters' familiar sitting room, but the doors were gone. He could not find them. He ran wildly through the dark, aware that he was leaving Kunzite and Jadeite behind, but he had to find a way out of this place whether it was with or without them. He searched for anything that looked familiar, but all looked the same to him: alien. He had to be dreaming. This was a nightmare. There was no other plausible explanation for this place that defied the laws of time and space that he knew like the back of his hand; because there was no way they could have come this far already—there was no way they could have traveled here from his quarters simply by stepping over a threshold!

Yet some strange sense of logic that pervaded dreams told him that if he could just find the door through which they had come, he might wake to find this all a terrible nightmare, a delusion—a mere product of his grief, spurred by flashbacks from the final battle of the war, and he would find himself back in the Moon Palace mourning his fallen comrades all over again.

Somehow, now, even that agony was preferable to this.

At last he found himself face-to-face with a magnificent set of doors that he did not recognize. They towered over him like two giant monoliths, storeys high and black as night—no doubt as heavy as solid iron, and yet when he pushed them open they swung inward easily, with only the creaking of their jambs to indicate their massive weight.

Zoisite stumbled inward, his heart hammering painfully in his chest and his breath short; but the relief he felt was very short-lived indeed, for he had gone from the proverbial frying pan to the fire.

He got one glimpse of the chamber before him and froze.

Across the wide floor and lit by the flickering fires of tripods, there rose a tall staircase that stretched up toward an unknowable height like the stairs of a ziggurat reaching toward heaven, culminating in an empty altar. Behind it was nothing but a black void deeper than the void of deep space. It was this complete and utter absence of light that made Zoisite's breath freeze in his lungs.

A lone figure kneeled at the top of this pyramid, though it could not have been the only form of life in the room. As though alerted to his presence by that continuous murmuring from out of the walls, the figure rose from its submissive position. Then it turned, and even from his distance Zoisite recognized the shape of a tall, stately and voluptuous woman, as flowing in outline as a goddess from a Hindu frieze, as solid and straight as a caryatid in her tight gown. Long, dark red hair rippled like liquid fire over her shoulders, over the heavy jewelry that gripped her brow and throat like bony claws. As she stood facing him on that pinnacle, it was as though Kali herself were looming over him in judgment—that cruel mistress of divine mercy, whose emaciated and immolated body was bedecked with the skeletal remains of her victims.

But in contrast this living goddess had plenty of life yet in her rounded face and breasts and hips—in her full, blood-red lips and dark eyes. Caught in an intimate moment of self-subjugation, her exposed fair skin was slightly flushed; and at once Zoisite was stricken by the overwhelming urge to both adore and destroy this woman, she roused such a nameless fear in him he could not categorize.

Because he knew that he knew her, yet at the same time he did not recognize her at all.

He backed away, thinking that somehow if he escaped now she might forget having seen him, but he collided with something solid before he could get very far.

Zoisite gasped as Kunzite's arms wrapped around his chest and waist, holding Zoisite to him. He was caught. Yet through his panic and terror, the sensation of being against Kunzite once again made the younger man's mind reel. The press of Kunzite's hips against his backside, his breath still warm against Zoisite's ear and the side of his neck, held a strange seductive power that they simply should not have had under the circumstances. But there was also something dark in his energy that seeped into Zoisite osmotically, like a cold chill, that demanded he not give in so easily.

He shivered. A pathetic sound halfway between a moan and a whimper escaped him, echoing in the chamber, and he heard Jadeite laugh at him for it. As Zoisite's eyes focused on him, he struggled in Kunzite's grip, despite the latter's murmured entreaty to "Relax. We are all old friends here. No one wants to harm you."

By the severe look in the woman's eyes, however, as she picked up her staff and took the first step down the pyramid toward him, Zoisite had difficulty believing that.

"Forgive us, my Queen," Jadeite said to her, placing a hand over his chest and lowering his eyes in supplication. "I know we are not to disturb this holiest of chambers, but he did not know any better. He has not yet been initiated into Metallia's life force."

"Metallia. . . ." Zoisite breathed the name. "Is that what you call this . . . Is that who you serve now?"

Ignoring the derision in his voice, Jadeite followed his gaze to the woman descending the stairs. "It is," he said, and as he did so he smiled. "But she is too great to look upon directly. Only Queen Beryl has been allowed that honor. She is the conduit. She alone brings some sense to the whispers."

Queen Beryl. . . . So Zoisite's instincts had not been mistaken. The woman slowly approaching him who aroused in him such terror, she was the same one with whom they had exchanged witty banter and practice blows years ago in the Middle Kingdom.

But she had changed. What precisely, Zoisite could not but wonder with dread, had happened to her to make her this way?

"Let me go!" he hissed, then yelled at Kunzite, whose breath only grew heavier in his ear. "What's wrong with you all?"

"Wrong?" Jadeite said. The gently mocking smile that Zoisite had grown to love now looked alien on his face, under those eyes that glowed with such an unfamiliar light. "There is nothing wrong with us, Zoisite. We have seen the truth—our eyes have been opened—and if you only knew what a gloriously powerful existence we have been living in these past weeks. . . ."

He trailed off, closing his eyes in ecstatic memory as he stepped gradually closer to Zoisite. When he opened them again they were full of a fire that pierced Zoisite like an arrow. "We want to share it with you."

Kunzite's voice rumbled in his ear, in his blood. "If you had salvation in the palm of your hand, you would not keep it to yourself either. You should feel what we are feeling right now."

"We want to save you from our old life and all its lies. Will you let us do that, Zoisite?"

As Jadeite spoke, the din that seemed to pulse from the very walls of the structure, that resonated in Zoisite's mind itself, swelled in tandem with his heartbeat and quickening breaths until it became a deafening drone. Jadeite reached out and caressed his jaw with one white-gloved hand. The softness of it prickled Zoisite's skin where it touched, and not unpleasantly. It made his vision swim; he lost his sense of what was up and what was down. It felt like his head would split from the pressure building within it around that drone, but he bit down on his lower lip to hold back a grunt of pain. You must not give them anything, he told himself, though a part of him already knew he was in a losing battle. Perhaps he was weak for it, but he could not fight his friends.

Zoisite tried once again to free himself from Kunzite's grasp. He dug his heels into the unyielding floor and twisted his body until his muscles strained; and still the other held him tighter, spreading his hands flat against Zoisite's chest, fingertips pressing into flesh with bruising force. Jadeite's joined his a second later, smotheringly hot and heavy, and together they subdued him as Beryl moved ever closer. They could not be his real comrades, Zoisite tried in vain to convince himself. The real Kunzite and Jadeite would never betray him like this.

Still there was a heart-breakingly minute amount of sympathy in Kunzite's words as he murmured into Zoisite's ear beneath the cacophony beating on his brain, "Please stop struggling. It won't hurt so much if you don't fight it."

Those words, and Beryl's blood-red lips, were the last things he remembered before he heard his own scream echoed back to him from the chamber walls. Then everything went black, like a heavy curtain falling over his mind.


End of Part Seven