June 15th 2013, 3:20 PM
Victoria turned, paced. She’d tried to make her apartment look reasonable, look dignified, look right and proper and now she was suddenly and horribly reminded of how bare it was. Ilderia had sponsored artists, organizing competitions to see who could make the best paintings and tapestries and prints for her to copy and put up on the walls, gotten everyone tailors and specialist craftsmen so they could look like themselves, and now she was in a plain dignified formal room... She looked at her Ilderia mask on the wall, staring down at her - no, that wasn’t right; she turned it over. She’d tried to make herself look presentable. Her armor was her formal clothing, but maybe a suit or even a dress would have been better... helmet retracted, she knew who she was talking to.
Luminosa knew where she was, she’d sent her the location... Victoria glanced at a clock. Took a drink from her flask, wished it actually were alcohol.
Then she appeared. The Maiden of Light. Arms folded, hovering in midair, looking around the room with moderate appreciation.
Victoria smiled quietly.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” said Luminosa. Looked around curiously. “You know, there aren’t many people who have my private address. It’s been years since I’ve gotten much mail there.”
Something was wrong. Victoria pushed it aside.
“Only three,” said Victoria. “But the plan’s back on. Now the only one between me and the throne is Steelmind.”
Luminosa raised a glowing eyebrow.
Victoria sighed. “Well, yes, and a few Counts. And their Catherine. But -” her voice hesitated, grew brighter, “- I see you and your puppet have been thinning my rivals’ numbers.”
Luminosa’s expression intensified. “I don’t control him. He may have been, once, but he no longer answers to me. Whatever respect my name is worth has disappeared.”
“Excellent. Then I won’t be imposing on you by asking you to sacrifice him? If I take him down, that should - what’s wrong?”
“And why,” said Luminosa, with a serious undercurrent under her bantering tone, “should I let him die? Why should I let anyone die, Ward?”
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Ward -
Victoria raised her helmet. She had no weapons effective against manifested energy constructs on her but if she could, could find something -
“You,” she said, “are not Luminosa.”
“I really don’t see who else I’d be,” Luminosa said, pointing one finger at Victoria in a firing stance. “If I weren’t Luminosa, I wouldn’t be protecting him.”
“Luminosa knows my real name,” said the woman who called herself Victoria Ward. “You are not Luminosa.”
And suddenly the glowing woman laughed. Her posture changed completely, leaning against a neighboring wall uncomfortably close to Victoria, to which she’d teleported. “Fair cop. So was your Luminosa the second, or the third?”
Victoria was silent.
“She couldn’t have been the first. The Titanium Tyrant wouldn’t let someone with matter-to-energy conversion powers stay an enemy of his.” Luminosa made a gun with her fingers, which would’ve been ironic if it hadn’t been terrifying. “So he put a bullet in her brain and subbed one of his reliable people into her projection suit. The question’s just if you suborned her, or pulled a kill-and-replace?”
Victoria moved like a landslide, grabbing Luminosa by the throat and slamming her up against the wall. Sparks ran along the fingers of her right hand.
“What did you do to her?”
“Nothing.”
“I don’t believe you. Now talk, or -”
Luminosa vanished and reappeared behind Victoria. “You really ought to know you can’t hurt me that way,” she said. “Let me tell you a story.”
She shook her head. “I was a looter, nothing more, out looking through the ruins for anything I could sell. The war had just cleared out the third district. It was Steelmind’s robots doing the killing, you’ll recall, and Steelmind might have coordinated them, but they weren’t out for money, so you could find stuff, if you didn’t mind collapsing buildings or dealing with other scavengers. Really valuable stuff, sometimes.”
She shrugged. “I went into one of those big houses, and into a basement, and I found a dead woman. She was wearing a helmet -” Luminosa tapped at her forehead, and her fingers stopped as if they had hit a wall an inch before they touched her ‘skin’. “The one I’m wearing now. A helmet and a suit to go with it, nicely adjustable, and some equipment. Projection equipment, I assumed, like what you use to pilot drones. So I foolishly tried it out. I was willing to risk dying, you see, for power.”
She smiled, sunnily, a smile with real joy in it. “And it worked. I could fly. I was, in fact, Luminosa, the last hero, the lady of light, and to the day I die I will not stop being her. So. To answer your question - I did not kill your friend. I found her body.”
Victoria ground her teeth together, under her helmet.
“But she is dead.”
“Yes, she is.”
“... Where is her body?”
“Ashes in the air.”
Victoria turned away, and Luminosa vanished.
Victoria went through the scans mechanically. Yes, Luminosa was really gone, no, her sensory equipment didn’t say where she was. But she was Ilderia now, and she had to keep going. She had to be queen, and that meant finding Jacobin.
What were her strategies left for finding him? Melissa was managing her bug network…
Melissa, Victoria knew, needed to be told. Damn. She had been hoping not to have to kill her yet.