“And they experimented on how to transmit this illness more quickly on those other planets,” Ariadne added. “I showed Cato the files, and we came up with a theory.” She nodded at him, encouraging.

“If the ichor were ground up and pressurized into a gas, the endospores would cover large areas very quickly. It’d kill a lot of people very fast.” Though Cato’s voice remained steady, Nyx caught the flicker of anger in his features. He was at the part of his deprogramming where he found it difficult to hide his emotions. The Oracle wasn’t there to numb them, wasn’t there to run the code that told him this was all for the glory of Tholos. The haze of coded loyalty was gone.

Get used to it, soldier, Nyx thought. Having choices wasn’t easy.

“Great,” Clo muttered.

“Oh, it gets worse,” Cato said. “Ariadne and I think—think—that the version of ichor the Tholosians experimented with in the labs can be spread by close contact rather than a one-off illness caught through the lungs. They’re engineering a godsdamn plague.”

Eris made some soft noise. “So, if Damocles wanted to conquer an Evoli planet . . .”

“They’d be fucked. He’d have it within hours.”

Nyx swore softly. There were a million Evoli on Laguna, and more would be arriving for that truce ceremony—thousands of Tholosian citizens among them. All they had to do was release a gas and watch the chaos.

And if it got back to the Karis Galaxy—and the Evoli home planet, Eve—Damocles would end up killing them within weeks. Every Evoli eradicated. Their planets empty and ripe for the taking. The Tholosians’ food problems solved and a new galaxy to claim for their own.

Just another Tholosian conquest.

Clo looked ill. She squeezed Rhea’s hand. “But there will be Tholosians there, too, won’t there? Would it spread to them just the same? Even Damocles?”

Rhea lowered her lashes. “The first thing Damocles would have done is to develop an antidote for himself and the most important people there. Avern, maybe he even invited some higher ups to Laguna as a tidy way to assassinate them. As for the others?” She sighed. “He would have weighed his options, called them sacrifices to build a better Empire. The God of Death takes before He gives.”

Nyx recalled her games of zatrikion with Damocles. Nothing mattered to him more than power and winning. The lives of any Tholosian citizens caught in the balance would be worth the price. After all, the God of Death did not discriminate. Evoli or Tholosian, souls were souls. They all weighed the same.