She had not forgiven his father. The ring was not her peace offering. It was her weapon. Unbeknownst to his father, she had provided herself her own menu of options, with her own key. The ability to copy any data crystal was simply a misdirection from the true purpose of the ring: the electrical storm. On his finger, the ring served as her own Trojan horse, taken within the defense of his shield, available for use at her whim. But his mother had never used the ring.
They had died in fire, died in a spaceship accident. Of course, there was one way to know for certain. He accessed the observation room's systems, and through them, reached out to the ring. With his mother's key, the menu of options appeared in his mind's eye. She had set the ring, long ago, to record. He realized now that she had wanted him to be able to deduce her key, with sufficient effort.
If something went wrong, if something happened to her, evidence against his father would be within his reach. If instead she was the victor, she could destroy the ring or change the key easily enough. It was typical mage thinking.
He searched the log of recordings, found when they had begun: October 10, 2247, his father's final birthday. He fixed his gaze on Circe, focusing his attention on her bleeding, hate – filled face.
He did not want to look at the ring's recordings, did not want to be pulled back to that time. But he had to know the truth. He would divide his attention between present and past to keep the memories from drawing him in. With a crinkle of paper, out of darkness came light, and his father's face.
He had unwrapped his present. He reached for the ring with one large hand, his shadowed face forced into a smile. Galen scanned quickly ahead. Hushed whispers in front of the bathroom mirror as his father added lapel pins to his jacket and his mother put up her dark hair.
"Elric knows," she said.
"Suspects, perhaps," his father said.
"Strange that your healing didn't completely erase the injury this time. Almost as if you wanted Elric to notice."
"My powers are not infinite. Are you saying that I would purposely make the boy suffer?"
In the mirror's image, his father's jaw clenched.
"I say only that the wound is noticeable. What can Elric do, though, with only suspicions?"
"Once his suspicions are roused," she said in a carefully modulated voice, "he will investigate."
"Tonight, while we are gone, Elric will question the boy. Though the boy will maintain his silence, Elric's suspicions will not be soothed. He will search for more evidence, and he will find it. He will report back to the Circle that the mage couple he has been assigned to watch has finally done what everyone said they would: They have turned on each other.
"We will be disciplined, our influence diminished. For myself, it will be no tragedy. Perhaps a mild rebuke. But you will be reprimanded, disgraced, for what you did to the boy. They will take your apprentice away from you, and give him over to me. The corporation, also, I suspect, will be left to me."
"It was an accident."
"If you had the control of the worst chrysalis-stage apprentice, you could have stopped from hurting the boy. If you wanted to. But you didn't. You brutalize him."
"I'm a much better teacher than you would be. I teach him discipline, obedience. Of course you undermine my authority at every turn, manipulating him to your own ends, smothering him with your false love."
Galen scanned ahead.
His father came out into the living room, and there stood Elric, looking healthy and fit. Elric's sharp gaze studied something out of the ring's range of vision, his lips pressed into a thin, grim line. Then the ring turned, revealing the object of Elric's scrutiny: a boy standing at attention, brown hair cut bristle-short, plain black robe perfectly pressed, a patch of burned skin on one hand.
The boy betrayed only the slightest hint of a flinch as his father leaned in for an embrace. Farther on, Galen found the massive spaceship, its elegant interior, curtained compartments lined with long windows at which to observe the midnight lights. The argument they'd begun in the bathroom continued as the ship rose up, sped into the evanescent red streaks.
His mother's fingers curled inward as she grew angrier and angrier. His father's face, reflected in the window, was a ghostly silhouette seething with red. A female attendant entered, asked if they could lower their voices.
His mother turned to her, gave an amiable reply.
When the attendant left, she turned on his father and bit out a sharp rebuke, raising a spidery hand. The scouring ball appeared behind her; she did not see it. With a rush it swooped down over her unshielded body, stretching to envelop her, and then, rather than dissolving after a quick, single pass, remained around her, encasing her in its undulating red blanket.
His father had discovered the same principle Razeel used in her cylinders of darkness. The energy would eat inward, consuming skin, muscle, tissue, bone. Swathed in red, her shaking hand slowly extended, and her thin fingers turned in a precise movement.
The ring's image jerked as his father convulsed with the massive electric shock. His breaths ascended into short, harsh gasps. The red swells rippling over her, his mother threw herself at the glass again, again, desperate to be free. Fireballs boiled into the air, shot wildly toward her. It was his father's final attack. But the fireballs missed their target, splashing instead across tablecloth and curtains, shooting sparks from the overhead lights, catching the returning attendant in the face.
As more and more streaked outward, the fireballs blasted through tattered curtains into neighboring compartments, spreading their brilliant fury farther and farther through the ship. The red blanket vanished from about his mother, revealing a body slick with blood.
She looked toward his father and gave a single, satisfied laugh, then dropped to the floor, alarm lights flashing over her. With a final jerking spasm, his father fell beside her. Flames covered them.
Galen broke contact with the ring, became aware again of Circe – her raw, blood-streaked face looking far too much like his mother's.
Energy drove endlessly through him. He had thought his parents' deaths an accident, another example of the random violence that erupted all around him. He had thought the universe cold and heartless for taking them away. The universe, however, was not to blame. The blame fell to his parents themselves, for their lack of control. They had surrendered to chaos, had killed each other and everyone else on that ship.
Each made his own choice. They had chosen destruction.
They are a part of who you are,
Elric had said. Just as they had been drawn to chaos, he was drawn to chaos.
He carried not only the programming of the Shadows within him, but the DNA of his parents, their own personal programming of destruction. He too had a choice. He too had chosen to kill. On Thenothk, he had hoped that he and Elizar would kill each other.
Why are you a techno-mage?
Elric had asked.
He had dreamed of becoming a healer. He had hoped to undo some of the damage that the universe seemed determined to inflict. He had wanted, he now realized, to make up for any wrong he had done, causing his parents to fight. After their deaths, though, all that had become secondary to a much more pressing goal: to hide from the truth. He had not wanted to remember them as they were, or to live with the fact that he had come from them.
In the shelter of Elric's tutelage, he had found an escape from the violence and chaos. He had buried the past, created a regimented, orderly spell language, a safe haven for himself. Yet in pursuing that goal, he had forfeited the others. His rigid spell language limited his abilities, frustrated all his attempts to heal.
Kell had told him, long ago.
You have hidden so well that any more you might have been is lost. You have become these regimented paths, and the places to which they lead.
And those paths of thought, that spell language, led to destruction. Because that was the truth hidden inside him. Was that what Elric had wanted him to remember?
I tell you because I do not believe you can become a complete person until you reclaim this piece of your self.
Galen didn't see how this could help him become whole. He arose from violence, and he generated violence.
You have overcome much.
But he had not overcome it at all. He was consumed by it.
We choose to live in knowledge, not ignorance.
So he hid from himself no longer. He now knew why he was as he was. As for why he was a techno-mage, his old reasons no longer made sense. He could not heal; he could not undo damage; he could not make up for wrongs. He could do no good at all. Perhaps, though, those had never been his real goals – or at least not all of them. For there was a greater truth from which he hid. While he had loved his parents – in some way he could barely understand – and while he had mourned them, he knew that a part of him had been relieved at their passing.
Part of him, perhaps, had even wished for them to die. Had wished to kill them. To stop them from ever fighting again. That desire, he feared, had been the dark, secret heart of his dream to become a techno-mage.
He had told himself he wanted to heal, when in truth, he wanted only to kill. Although his original targets had prematurely destroyed themselves, he had found new targets, and new reasons for pursuing them.
He must stop Elizar and Razeel from using his spell, must end whatever plans they had for rebuilding their order. And he must kill Morden, so no more mages would be tempted to leave the hiding place.
If his destruction had any positive purpose, it was to stop the mages from doing any more damage. Of them all, of course, he had done the greatest damage. Finally he understood why. Before he'd received the slightest bit of Shadow tech, he had been drawn to violence, and with the tech, his ability to kill had been perfected.
Elric had said he wasn't a monster, but Elric didn't know how hard he had to work, every single moment, to retain control. The brilliant heat of destruction wanted to pour out of him, and he wanted it to pour out of him.
He was who he was. Before him, Circe lay with eyes closed, her skin a purple streaked with crusted red. Though her bleeding had stopped, her rasping breath had grown more congested, more labored.
Gowen had lain Galen's coat on her, and he remained bent over her, healing her. The coat had come from Elric, and Galen found his gaze turning toward that blackened figure, who lay half-exposed in his tattered robe, his ruined body looking cold and abandoned.
Circe had tortured him, had killed him, and now here she was, receiving healing from Gowen. Galen wanted to crush her. The equation was so simple, only a single term. She had to pay for what she'd done.
A warm rush of well-being was spreading through him already, in anticipation of casting the spell, and he realized, as he visualized his mind as a blank screen, prepared to impose the equation upon it, that if he cast the spell, he would never be able to stop. He wanted so much to strike back at something, anything, everything.
With a start he realized he'd lost his exercises – he didn't know when. He began a new exercise, another, another, recoiling from those thoughts, withdrawing from those feelings. Doing three at once allowed him to think of little else; he must concentrate to continue them all without error.
His attention narrowed, the walls of the exercises rising up around him, blocking out the past, blocking out the many things of which he must not think if he was to retain control. The walls pressed in on him, holding him together, pushing him forward down the narrow tunnel of his thoughts. He must leave this place.
The Circle refused to let him go, for fear of the device the Shadows had secreted within him, their power over him. He had planned to destroy it, yet he knew that if he did, it would kill him.
Suddenly it struck him what the Circle required. If the Circle had their own power over him, then they would have nothing to fear. They must implant in him their own device, which would carry out their desires. He would become a Trojan horse to send against their enemies. Then the Circle would let him go, and he could fulfill his purpose.
He had been trapped in his thinking, focusing all his energy on trying to take control from the Shadows. But there was another, much simpler way to gain his freedom.
Galen realized Blaylock stood over Circe. Blaylock's thin, severe figure seemed to exist at a great distance, as if Galen peered through a telescope at some remote land. Gowen was speaking.
"I've been able to repair some of the damage to her heart and lungs. More extensive healing will take much longer, if it is even possible."
He glanced at Galen.
"She remains near death."
"If you stop your ministrations, can she survive for a short time?"
"Perhaps thirty minutes, an hour."
"That is sufficient. The others are beginning to wake from Circe's sleeping potion. See to them."
Gowen bowed his head once again over Circe, apparently giving the organelles some final instruction. Then he withdrew his crystal, climbed to his feet.
"Galen has questioned her."
He looked again to Galen, his lips turned in dismay.
"Then I will discuss it with Galen. You are needed elsewhere."
Gowen bowed, departed.
Blaylock's sharp gaze turned to Galen. He stood, carefully maintaining the three mind-focusing exercises. His body felt strange, disconnected. He quickly summarized what Circe had told him.
"When she spoke of the mages' connection to the Shadows, I tried to silence her, but she would not stop. I'm not sure how much Gowen heard."
"I will speak with him."
Blaylock's eyes shifted to take in something across the room, and despite his stern, dour expression, Galen sensed he was shaken.
"We have sustained a grievous loss. Elric was truly the wisest of us all."
Galen would not think of him now.
"Do you need help with her confederates?"