Sum
@Summmluv
She smiles. She says his name.
Ender Wiggin, my precious.
Love u Valentine
Grego knelt by the stool, leaning on it, and there she stood beside him, looking at them flow away from this cold empty crater of a place where the conflagration began.
‘Grego, you self-righteous son of a bitch, what have you done?’
Reklam
‘Get out of my house,’ said Mother. Miro stood up.
‘You aren’t grieving for him,’ he said. ‘You don’t even know who he was.’
‘Don’t you dare say that to me!’
‘If you loved him you wouldn’t have tried to stop him from going,’ said Miro. His voice wasn’t loud, and his speech was thick and hard to understand. They listened, all of them, in silence. Even Mother, in anguished silence, for his words were terrible. ‘But you don’t love him. You don’t know how to love people. You only know how to own them. And because people will never act just like you want them to, Mother, you’ll always feel betrayed. And because eventually everybody dies, you’ll always feel cheated. But you’re the cheat, Mother. You’re the one who uses our love for you to try to control us.’
This is a moment of victory. Except Jane has snatched the victory away from me so that even as I triumph over her, she triumphs over me. She has stolen my father. He no longer serves the gods in his heart, even as he continues to serve them with his body.
‘I must – purify myself.’
‘Jane,’ said Father. ‘If you hear me. Please forgive me.’
There was no answer from the terminal.
‘May all the gods forgive me,’ said Father. ‘I was weak in the moment when I should have been strong, and so my daughter has innocently done evil in my name.’ He shuddered. ‘I must – purify myself.’
‘Then it’s done,’ murmured Father. ‘They’ll destroy Lusitania, the pequeninos, all those innocent people.’
‘Only if the gods wish it,’ said Qing-jao. She was surprised that Father sounded so morose.
Wang-mu raised her head from Qing-jao’s lap, her face red and wet with weeping. ‘And Jane and Demosthenes will be gone as well,’ she said.
Qing-jao gripped Wang-mu by the shoulder, held her an arm’s length away. ‘Demosthenes is a traitor,’ said Qing-jao. But Wang-mu only looked away from her, turned her gaze up to Han Fei-tzu. Qing-jao also looked to her father. ‘And Jane – Father, you saw what she was, how dangerous.’
‘She tried to save us,’ said Father, ‘and we’ve thanked her by setting in motion her destruction.’
Reklam