He Chose Me Twice

The day Emperor Kael Voss arrived in our colony started like every other day. Broken machines. Complaining neighbors. A water shortage that had been two weeks from being solved for the past six months. I stood on a rusted maintenance platform twelve feet up, sleeves shoved to my elbows, staring down at the filtration unit that had again decided to stop working at the exact moment it would cause the most trouble. “Tell me you’re fixing it.” Mr. Doran stood below with his arms crossed, a line of colonists behind him stretching back toward the housing district, all of them holding empty containers. “No,” I said. The crowd groaned. “I’m performing advanced scientific magic.” A few people laughed. Mr. Doran pointed at me like I’d proved something. “That’s why it keeps breaking.” “Exactly. Keeps me employed.” The tension loosened a little. It usually did. Life on Colony Seven wasn’t easy. Nothing worked properly, everything was older than it should be, and the list of things that needed fixing always grew faster than I could fix them. But it was home. And home—even a broken one—was hard to hate. “Lyra!” I turned at the voice. Nora was running toward the platform, dark braid bouncing, nearly tripping over an exposed pipe before she caught herself on a support beam. I climbed down. “What happened?” I asked. She grabbed my arm. “Have you heard?” “Heard what?” “The rumors.” I immediately regretted asking. Nora collected rumors the way the colony collected rust—constantly, enthusiastically, without any particular standard for quality. I started walking. She kept pace. “The Emperor,” she said. “There it is.” “What?” “The rumor.” “This one is real.” “They’re never real.” “Lyra” “Let me guess.” I ticked through options on my fingers. “He’s secretly moving here. He’s buying the colony. He’s adopted a pet space dragon.” Nora stopped walking. “You know what? The dragon one actually sounds more believable.” “Then tell me.” She leaned in, voice dropping as the maintenance platform could hear her. “He’s coming here. To Colony Seven. In person.” I stared at her for a moment. Then I laughed—the kind that comes out before you can stop it, sharp and involuntary. “Sure.” “The announcement came from the governor.” “The governor also promised new infrastructure last year.” “Lyra.” “I’m just saying.” She shook her head. You’ll see.” By midday, everyone was talking about it. At the market. At the transport station. In the narrow corridors between the residential blocks. Wherever I went, his name followed. The Emperor. The Emperor. The Emperor. By evening I was sick of hearing it. Then the sirens started. I was outside when they went off—that long, rising wail that cut through everything and made your stomach clench before your brain caught up with what it meant. Around me, the colony went still. People stepped out of buildings. Children pointed at the sky. I looked up. My first thought was that I was seeing things. Some trick of the light, some malfunction in the overhead arrays. But the shapes were too large for that. Too deliberate. Massive black warships hung above the colony in a line that stretched as far as I could see, blotting out the stars one by one until there was nothing above us but steel and running lights and the slow, certain weight of power. No one moved. No one spoke. Nora’s hand found my arm. The governor’s voice came through the colony speakers—all citizens remain calm, an Imperial delegation has arrived—but the words barely registered. Nothing about the situation felt like something words could address. Then the governor’s voice cut out, and another replaced it. Deep. Unhurried. The kind of voice that didn’t need to be raised to be heard. “This is Emperor Kael Voss.” I felt it in my chest before I understood it—a low, strange pressure, like standing too close to something that could flatten you. Around me, people had stopped looking at the ships and started looking at each other. “I will be arriving shortly.” That was all. The transmission ended. The silence it left behind felt heavier than the one before it. Nora’s grip tightened on my arm. “That was him.” I didn’t answer. My pulse hadn’t settled back down yet. The next morning, Colony Seven didn’t feel like itself anymore. Imperial soldiers appeared at the transit gates, along the perimeter, at checkpoints I’d never seen before. They moved in neat, efficient lines and didn’t answer questions. By noon, the governor had announced a mandatory public gathering in the central square. Mandatory. That word did more to frighten people than the warships had. I stood near the back of the crowd with Nora, close enough to the edge that I could leave if I needed to. Hundreds of colonists packed the square, and the air had that particular quality it gets before a storm—charged, expectant, impossible to breathe normally in. A transport descended from above the colony. Its engines shook the ground. The ramp lowered. Guards came first. Rows of them, perfectly spaced, moving like a single organism. Then they parted, and the man who stepped out between them was— Not what I’d expected. I don’t know what I’d built up in my head over the last twenty-four hours. Something older, maybe. More distant. The kind of figure that belonged in history records and official portraits. Not someone who looked like this. Tall, broad-shouldered, dressed entirely in black, with the kind of face that seemed carved for control. Young, by any reasonable measure—and yet the way he moved made the word meaningless. There was nothing young about the steadiness in him, the absolute absence of hesitation. Around me, people lowered their heads. Some knelt. I didn’t. I watched him instead. His gaze moved across the crowd in slow, measured passes—not the look of someone acknowledging an audience, but something more focused than that. Like he was looking for something specific. I told myself not to be stupid about it. He wasn’t here for me. He was here for the colony, for whatever political calculation had sent warships to a forgotten outpost at the edge of nowhere. In thirty seconds he’d move past, and this would all become something I told people about years from now. His gaze stopped. The thinking stopped with it. He was looking at me. Not past me, not near me. At me, with the same focused certainty he’d used to scan the entire crowd, except now it was pointed at one place and not moving. I held still. Told myself I was misreading it. Someone behind me, someone beside me, anyone— He started walking. The crowd parted ahead of him without being asked, stepping aside instinctively, and the path that opened ran straight toward where I was standing. My heart was loud in my ears. Nora’s nails were going to leave marks. He didn’t slow down. He stopped directly in front of me. The square was silent in a way it hadn’t been before—not the silence of people holding their breath, but the deeper kind, where you realize you’ve forgotten how to. He looked at me for a long moment. His expression gave nothing away. Neither did mine. I was fairly sure of that, because I had the strange, dissociated sensation of watching myself from a step to the left, noticing how still I was, wondering when I’d learned to do that. “Lyra Hart,” he said. My own name, in his voice, felt like a fist closing around something in my chest. “Yes,” I managed. Something moved in his expression—so briefly I couldn’t name it. It was there and gone before I could decide if I’d imagined it. The governor pushed forward from somewhere behind the line of guards. “Your Majesty—” One hand is raised slightly. The governor stopped mid-sentence. The Emperor’s eyes never left mine. Then he spoke. “I have chosen.” A ripple went through the crowd. Chosen what? Chosen who? “Lyra Hart will become my bride.” The words landed wrong—like they were in a language I almost understood, close enough that my brain kept trying to resolve them into something that made sense. Around me, I heard someone drop something. I heard Nora make a sound I’d never heard from her before. I heard the governor’s intake of breath. I heard my own heartbeat. “What?” The word came out before I had any say in it. “You will become my bride,” he repeated. Same tone. Unhurried. As if he’d already moved past the part where I might be surprised. Laughter came up through my chest, involuntary and strange. Not because it was funny. Because the alternative was something I couldn’t name yet, something that was starting at the base of my spine and working upward. “You’ve made a mistake.” “No.” “Yes.” “No.” I shook my head. “You don’t even know me.” Something crossed his face—gone before I could catch it. “I know enough.” It was the worst possible answer, and he’d said it like it was a fact he’d made peace with a long time ago. “I’m not marrying you.” The sound that went through the crowd was almost physical. Somewhere to my left, soldiers shifted their footing. The governor looked like he was calculating whether fainting would be appropriate. Kael studied me. I kept waiting for the anger—for something that made sense, given that nobody refused this man anything, given the ships still hanging above our heads. Instead, he just looked tired. Which was somehow worse. “You don’t understand the situation,” he said. “I understand it fine.” “No.” His voice dropped, quieter than before, losing the quality it had when it was meant for the crowd. “You don’t.” There was something in that—not condescension, but the weight of someone who’d been carrying knowledge longer than he wanted to. I didn’t know why I could hear the difference, but I could. I lifted my chin. “Find someone else.” He stepped closer. Not enough to touch. Just enough that when he spoke, it was only for me. “That isn’t possible.” I watched his face. “Why?” The control cracked—just barely, just at the edges, the way a wall shows stress before it fails. Not enough for the crowd behind me. Enough for the distance between us. What I saw there wasn’t what I expected from the most powerful man in the known galaxy. It wasn’t certainty, or arrogance, or the comfortable entitlement of someone who’d never been refused. It was something raw. Something that had been there for a long time and hadn’t healed properly. “Because,” he said, quiet enough that the words seemed to cost him, “there is no one else.” The square, the ships, the hundreds of watching faces—all of it receded to the edges of my awareness. I stood there looking at him, and the fear I’d felt a moment ago had changed into something I didn’t have a name for yet. Something that understood, without knowing how, that whatever he’d just said was true—and that the truth of it had been breaking him slowly for longer than I could imagine.