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  "You never told me this part before," Red said quietly, staring at nothing.

  "We... never really discussed this point... Um," said the violet-eyed Tallest, lowering his head, "you didn't think I was a conspirer or something... did you?"

  "That's an awful thing to ask."

  "I know."

  "Yes. What else could I have thought?" Red sighed. "Quasars... Sut..."

  "But you... you believe me with my story now, don't you?" Purple's voice was defenseless and pleading, desperate for the answer he seeked to hear and terrified of the answer he didn't wish to have uttered.

  "Except when it comes to when you hide food from me, I always believe you, Teir." Red smiled gently.

  Purple's eyes glittered warmly. "Really?"

  "Well... no. Yes. Well, sorta. On this, anyway."

  Dark blood flowed down Sut's face and around her nearly black eyes, which themselves had long run out of tears. A deep gash on the left side of her head was all that remained of the antenna that had once been there.

  Presently she was lying down on her side, panting heavily. This could change at any moment.

  The metal grating under her was hot with the fires from the boiler rooms below them. Through the holes, small drops of blood trickled. They would evaporate before even getting near the fires. In the pain-induced haze, Sut could still almost make out the hiss...

  A voice loomed over her. It wasn't right that a voice loomed. But Sut guessed that after a while, a very loom-happy Tallest could make all sorts of things loom.

  "Where are your compatriots?"

  "I have none," she coughed, blinking the blood out of her eyes.

  "You speak lies," Rarg growled.

  "Lies will not help me here," Sut whispered. She tried to curl up, but the pain was too great to move. "I have... no compatriots... I came alone. I... heard that the... princes were visiting."

  The Tallest sounded baffled. "'Princes'? Speak sense, you loathsome creature!"

  Sut coughed again, more fitfully. There were several gaps in her teeth. "You think you're so... wonderful in... your ignorance... You know of whom... I speak..."

  Rarg leaned forward against the railing in fury. "Why are you here for them?! Were you planning an assassination?"

  "Quasars, you're dense," Sut hissed. "I was... their teacher, for Irk's sake!... If... If I ever wanted to kill them, I'd have had... a million... chances... No, I'd never... want them dead... Oh, Sorun... Teir..."

  "Let her go."

  Rarg snapped around, and Purple froze where he hovered at the base of the stairs. He didn't remember speaking up...

  But in a few instants he saw that Rarg was looking past him, and Purple turned his head around. Red was behind him, covered in his own rust-colored armor, face a mix of terror and anger. Mostly anger.

  "You followed me!" Purple hissed to him.

  "Sorry," Red whispered back, eyes still locked on Rarg.

  "Ah, children," Rarg said, trying his best to sound calm and 'in control', "how nice of you to pay us such a late night visit. I see the armor I had sent to your rooms suits you both quite well."

  Red hovered out from behind Purple and moved forward, still bristling with anger. "Let Sut go!"

  "You demand something of me? Your Tallest?" Rarg asked politely, placing a claw over his maroon chestplate. "You are a young fool, my boy, and you will never grow past it if you persist in such antics. The girl will not be released. She is here for interrogation and execution."

  "She never did anything wrong!"

  "Indeed? Dela --alias Tin, alias Lupen, alias Sut-- is part of the rebel movement headquartered in the southern cities. She is responsible for five accounts of murder of government officials, seventeen accounts of utter destruction of government buildings, twenty-two accounts of partial destruction, fourteen accounts of thievery, eighty-nine accounts of fraud, three accounts of hacking and one account of illegal height enhancement surgery. She has confessed to all of these."

  Purple felt numbed. The person Rarg had described sounded like a monster, but Sut was at worst a fool with good intentions...

  A rebel from the southern cities...

  What Red said next snapped Purple out of his daze. "It's not true!"

  What do you mean, it's not true? Purple thought critically. What reason would the Tallest have to lie? And then, as he watched Red hover there in front of him, shaking in his rage, it struck Purple. It didn't matter to Red whether Sut really was who Rarg said she was or not, because in Red's mind she would always be his schoolteacher.

  He had had to worry whether she was alive for a year and a half, and now having seen her alive again, but in this state...

  They were aware of the whirring of metal above them, and saw the descent of a pair of metal arms. One dipped down lower than the other and clamped its vice-like claw around Sut's arm, pulled her upright, and the other arm descended and grabbed the other. Arms pulled out painfully to either side, Sut was raised up into the air over the grating past the catwalk where the three tall Irkens stood.

  She saw with blurry eyes the shapes below her. Two of them looked familiar.

  "Sut!" Red yelled, beginning to dash forward. Purple grabbed his arm and held him back. "Sut! Sut!"

  "Does she really mean that much to you?" Rarg said tiredly, watching Red's frantic expression. "If you're to be Tallest, my boy, you have to know that reliance makes a person... weak. The Tallest needs no one."

  A panel in the catwalk seperated from the rest and drew up into a pillar, revealing a keypad. Rarg entered a handful of commands.

  "Allow me to eliminate the ties that bind you."

  "NO!" Red shrieked, struggling against Purple's grasp. Purple had had to use both arms to keep Red where he stood, grasping him tightly around his shoulders.

  "Sorun," Purple whispered near Red's antennae, voice shaking, "please stay still. Please be calm. Please don't... Please don't be..."

  A blue line of electricity came down from above and struck Sut, who stiffened in pain and opened her mouth in a soundless scream. Purple saw that the lightning bolt had not hit Sut herself, but her utility pack.

  A few moments later, a soft crackling all that remained of the electric bolt, a small, charred thing fell on to the bloodstained metal grating and split into several pieces. It was a backpod.

  Sut hung forward, limp, blanked-out eyes staring at nothing. The claws released her and she, too, fell to the floor.

  "SUT!" Red screamed, tears in his eyes.

  There are all sorts of stories about the empathetic links between twins, and if any of them were genuinely true for mammals, they weren't for the Irkens. Sorun and Teir had acted as one unit a lot because their genetic coding had encouraged personalities that ended up being remarkably similar. They could tell each other's feelings only by the other's actions, and that's the same for any pair of people that are familiar with each other, and nothing supernatural.

  But now, Purple was hit with all the anger and terror and sorrow that his brethren was experiencing, and he knew how much agony Red was in for this one little person. In that moment he resolved that, by Irk, he would end Red's suffering.

  He hovered out ahead of Red, who no longer struggled against his grasp. Purple glared at the Tallest Rarg, the lord of their world, the reason for their existence. The reason for both his and Red's existence. The original cause of every pain and hardship they had ever had to undergo, and now the murderer of a very important person.

  The gun was out of Purple's utility pack and in his hand before he realized it. Ignoring its weight, the violet-eyed Irken swung it up and into a direct line with Rarg's head.

  What followed would have been a dead silence, except for the million tons of machinery clanking around all around them. But for the three Irkens, there was a stillness. Each of them hesitated to breathe.

  Finally, Rarg hissed, "Put it down, boy."

  Purple's eyes narrowed. "No."

  "You have no concept of what you're doing, Purple. Your very action is enough to convict you of treason." Purple found it incredibly vexing how the Tallest managed to stay so calm. He was a raging monster on the televised appearances. Tallests had to be. "Put. The gun. Down."

  "How could you do that to Sut?!" Purple raged, shaking. He brought up his other hand to keep the gun steady.

  "Why are you so concerned? She's a rebel, from the southern cities. She became your nurse by deception. Her compatriots had dark plans for you both. I am thinking of your best interests!"

  "Oh, you're just asking for it now! Everyone's been telling us about what's in our best interests since we were born, and you know what? They're all a bunch of shit-for-brains retards with their own interests in mind! And especially you! We're your heirs, for Irk's sake! So shut up!"

  "Teir..." Red said quietly, edging near him.

  "You can shut up too!" snapped Purple, glancing quickly at the other boy and then back at Rarg. Still speaking to Red, he said, "I'm doing this because you don't have the nerve to!"

  Rarg was beginning to lose his temper. (Finally, Purple thought.) "You won't kill me. You don't have anything to gain from it, and I know you're not the selfless sort to do this just to put Red on the throne."

  "This has nothing to do with anyone being Tallest!" Purple shrieked. "You murderer, you damn murderer! You make me sick!" He pulled hard on the trigger.

  A Tallest doesn't survive countless assassination attempts without becoming very good at dodging laser fire. It's a standard weapon for murder, a gun. Rarg was ducking off to his right even before Purple pulled the trigger, because he could see the build-up of the tension reaching breaking point.

  With time-acquired skill and speed, Rarg crossed the distance between them, bent low, and swung up with an arm to grasp both of Purple's hands, as the other went around the violet-eyed Irken's neck. He wrested the gun free with little effort, holding it with ease, and pressed it against Purple's head, finger ready at the trigger.

  Purple blinked. Very carefully.

  "You fool of a boy," Rarg snarled. "You're an insult to your species."

  Hearing the laser gun charge near his head, Purple shut his eyes tight.

  There was a shot. Purple whimpered.

  Rarg's grip on the gun lessened. It fell out of his hand with a clatter. Slowly, he lost the grip around Purple's neck as well. His anti-grav belt no longer functioning, Rarg collapsed to the floor.

  It took a lot longer for Purple's brain to catch up. He stared ahead blankly, and when Red had hovered over and begun shaking Purple's shoulders, Purple was numb to the sensation. The brain's logic went that Rarg had fired the gun and that he should be dead.

  "Purple! Teir! Oh, quasars, Teir! Snap out of it!"

  The voice seemed very far away.

  "You're not hurt, are you? I thought I only fired at Rarg. Are you hurt? Teir, speak to me!"

  What happens to an Irken when he's dead? Purple wondered, staring dazedly at the worried face in front of him, not quite registering it. No one ever told us what happens. If anything happens. What happens now?

  The door at the top of the stairs opened, admitting blindingly white light. Purple turned his head slowly to look at it. His lips began to form words a part of him said were forbidden to say.

  A dark shape became outlined against the light. Its stance was fierce, and even its curled antennae managed to look very vexed.

  "Who goes down there?" Dirn demanded. "Stop where you are, put your weapons down and leave your hands where we can see them!"

  "No weapons," said Red, as weakly as he could manage. Had to make it sound pathetic. He quickly slipped both his and Purple's guns into the subspace compartment of his backpod, as subtly as was possible. Red's mind was working on overdrive. A plan was needed, and he didn't have Purple to help refine the details. "Please come down. It's... it's terrible."

  "What's happened?"

  "Rebels. Rebels came. There was one of them here and they came to rescue her, but... but she was already dead. And... And they've killed..."

  With each word Red spoke, Dirn's footsteps down the stairs became louder and more frequent. She was running across the metal grating of the walkway as Red faltered with the last words of his sentence. There Dirn stopped, milky purple eyes wide. Her mouth opened in horror.

  "His Tallest tried to fend them off, but they were too quick. We were nearly killed ourselves, but after the emperor went down they began to retreat." It was the most flagrant lie Red had ever told in his life and, he knew in some weird way, the worst he would ever, ever tell. Nothing could surpass this. And if Red was ever found to be lying...

  Dirn seemed to be using every ounce of strength not to fall to her knees. "Everything just keeps going wrong..." she whispered.