Morning Star (Red Rising #3) - Pierce Brown Page 0,5

look to their drivers, their gardeners, the men who power their cities. It beats through the tin-roofed mess halls of the wheat and soybean latfundia that cover the Great Plains of Earth, where Reds use machines to toil under the huge sun to feed mouths of people they will never meet, in places they will never be. It beats even along the spine of the empire, raging through the spiked city moon of Luna, passing by the Sovereign in her glass high refuge to thunder on down snaking electrical wires and drying clothing lines to the Lost City, where a Pink girl makes breakfast after a long night of thankless work. Where a Brown cook leans away from his stove to hear as grease spatters his apron, and a Gray watches from the window of his patrol skiff as a Violet girl smashes the front door of a Post Office and his datapad summons him back to the station for emergency riot protocols.

And it beats inside me, this terrible hope, as I know that the end has begun, and I am finally awake.

“Break the chains,” I roar.

And my people roar back.

“Ragnar,” I say into my com. “Bring it down.”

The Greens cut to a different feed as the fists thump and the cages rattle. And we see a distant shot of the Society’s military spire on Phobos. A goliath of a building with docks and vestibules for weapons. Efficient and ugly as a crab. From it, the Jackal maintains his grip on the moon. There, the Grays and Obsidians will be donning armor under pale lights, rushing through metal halls in tight lines, stocking ammunition belts, and kissing pictures of their loved ones so they can come down to the Hollows and make this heart stop beating. But they will never make it here.

Because, as fists pound even harder into cages, the lights of that military spire go black. All her power turned off by Rollo and his men with the access cards provided by Quicksilver.

We could have bombed the building, but I wanted a triumph of daring, of achievement, not destruction. We need heroes. Not another ash city.

And so, a small squadron of a dozen maintenance skiffs coasts into view. Flat, ugly fliers designed to port Reds and Oranges like Rollo to their construction work on towers. Craggy stingrays covered with barnacles. But it isn’t barnacles that cling to them now. Another camera takes a closer angle, and we can see each skiff is covered with hundreds of men. Reds and Oranges in their clunky EVA suits, almost half the Sons of Ares on Phobos. Boots against the deck, harnesses latched into exterior buckles of the ship. They carry their welding gear and have Quicksilver ’s weapons patched onto their legs with magnetic tape.

Among them, two feet taller than the others, is their general, Ragnar Volarus, in armor freshly painted bone white, a red slingBlade painted on the chest and back.

As the skiffs near the Society military spire, they divide down the length of the building. Sons fire magnetic harpoons to tether the skiffs to the steel. And then they go with practiced ease along the lines, flying at implausible speeds as the little motors on their buckles pull them one by one along toward the building. It’s like watching Reds in the mines. The grace and nimbleness even in the clunky suits dazzle.

More than a thousand welders pour onto the vast building like we did Quicksilver ’s spire, but they’re not playing for stealth and they’re better in null gravity than we were. Magnetic boots clutching metal girders, they skitter across the building, melting through the viewports and entering with extreme prejudice. Dozens are ripped to shreds as Grays inside fire railguns out the glass, but they fire back and pour inward. A ripWing patrol banks in along the outside of the building and rakes two of the skiffs with chain guns. Men turn to mist.

A Son fires a rocket at the ripWing. Fire blooms and vanishes and the ship cracks in half in a gout of purple flame.

The camera follows Ragnar as he breaches a window, enters a hall, and runs full-tilt into a trio of Gold knights, one who I recognize as the cousin of Priam, the man Sevro killed in the Passage and

whose mother owns the deed to Phobos. Ragnar flows through the young knight without stopping.

Swinging both his razors like scissors and ululating the war cry of his people, followed by a pack of heavily armed welders and laborers. I told him I wanted the spire. I didn’t tell him how to take it. He walked off with Rollo, putting an arm around the man.

Now the worlds watch a slave become a hero.

“This moon belongs to you,” Sevro says, roaring to the roiling cage city. “Rise and take it! Rise, men of Mars. Women of Mars, rise! You bloodydamn bastards! Rise!” Men and women are pulling

themselves from their homes. Donning their boots and jackets. Pushing themselves toward us so that thousands clog the air avenues, crawling over the outside of the cages.

The tide has risen. And I feel a deep terror in wondering exactly what it will wash away. “Rape and murder of innocents is punishable by death. This is war, but you are on the side of good. Remember that, you little shitheads! Protect your brothers! Protect your sisters! All residents of sections 1a-4c, you are to take the armory in level 14. Residents of sections 5c-3f are to take the water-purification center on…”

Sevro seizes control of the battle and the Howlers and Sons disperse to organize the mob. It isn’t an army but a battering ram. Many will die. And when they die, more will rise in their place. This is just one of the stack cities of Phobos. The Sons will supply them with weapons, but there won’t be nearly enough to go around. Their sword is the press of flesh. Sevro will lead them, spend them, Victra in

Quicksilver ’s spires will guide them, and the moon will fall to the rebellion.

But I will not be here to see it.

Phobos is in uproar. Detonations shake the moon as Holiday and I run through the halls. Golds and

Silvers evacuate the Needles in their flashing luxury yachts as kilometers beneath, the Hollows swarms with packs of lowColor mobs armed with welding torches, fusion cutters, pipes, blackmarket scorchers, and old-fashioned slug throwers. The mobs are overwhelming the tram systems and passages to gain access to the mid-sector and Needles while the Society military garrison, caught reeling from the attack on their headquarters, rushes to stop the upward migration. The Legions have training and organization on their side. We have numbers and surprise.

Not to mention fury.

No matter how many checkpoints the Grays blockade, how many trams the Grays destroy, the lowColors will seep through the cracks because they made this place, because they have allies among the midColors, thanks to Quicksilver. They open derelict transportation tunnels, hijack cargo ships in the industrial sector, pack them full of men and women, and steer them for the luxury hangars in the Needles, or even toward the public Skyresh Interplanetary Spaceport, where cruise liners and passenger ships are being loaded with evacuees.

I’m remotely jacked into Quicksilver ’s security grid, watching highColors stampede over one another. Carrying luggage and valuables and children. Martian Navy ripWings and fast-moving fighters dart through the towers, shooting down the rebel ships rising from the Hollows toward the Needles. The debris from a destroyed lowColor skif crashes through the vaulted glass and steel ceiling of a Skyresh terminal, killing civilians, and shattering any illusion I might have had that this war would be sanitary.

Ducking away from a mob of lowColors, Holiday and I arrive outside a derelict hangar in the old

freight garages, which haven’t been used since before the time of Augustus. It’s quiet here.

Abandoned. The old pedestrian entrance is welded shut. Radiation signs warn potential scavengers away. But the doors open for us with a deep groan when a modern retinal scanner built into the metal registers my irises, as Quicksilver said it would.

The hangar is a vast rectangle skinned with dust and cobwebs. In the center of the hangar ’s deck sits a silver seventy-meter-long luxury yacht shaped like a sparrow in flight. It’s a custom-built model out of the Venusian Shipyards, ostentatious, fast, and perfect for an obscenely wealthy war refugee.

Quicksilver plucked it from his fleet to help us blend in with the migrating upper class. Its rear cargo plank is down, and inside the bird is filled to capacity with black crates stamped with the Sun Industries winged heel. Inside of which are several billion credits’ worth of hi-tech weapons and equipment.

Holiday whistles. “Gotta love deep pockets. The fuel would cost my annual wages. Twice over.”

We cross the hangar to meet Quicksilver ’s pilot. The trim young Blue waits at the bottom of the ramp. She has no eyebrows and her head is bald. Winding blue lines pulse beneath the skin where subdermal synaptic links connect her remotely to the ship. She snaps to attention, eyes wide. Clearly she had no idea who she was transporting until now. “Sir, I am Lieutenant Vesta. I’ll be your pilot today. And I must say, it’s an honor to have you on board.”

There’s three levels to the yacht, the upper and bottom for Gold use. The middle for cooks, servants, and crew. There’s four staterooms, a sauna, and crème leather seats with dainty little chocolates and napkins sitting primly on armrests in the passenger cabin to the far back of the cockpit. I pocket one. And then a couple more.

As Holiday and Vesta prep the ship, I strip off my pulseArmor in the passenger cabin and unpack

winter gear from one of the boxes. I dress in skintight nanofiber weave that’s much like scarabSkin.

But instead of black, it’s mottled white and looks oily except for textured grips on the elbows, gloves, buttocks, and knees. It’s crafted for polar temperatures and water immersion. It’s also a hundred pounds lighter than our pulseArmor, is immune to digital component failures, and has the added benefit of not needing batteries. Much as I enjoy using four hundred million credits’ worth of technology to make me a flying human tank, sometimes warm pants are more valuable. And we’ll always have the pulseArmor if we need it in a pinch.

I’m struck by the silence in the cargo bay and the hangar as I finish lacing my boots. There’s still fifteen minutes left on my datapad’s timer, so I sit on the edge of the ramp, legs dangling off, to wait for Ragnar. I pull the chocolates from my pocket and slowly peel the foil off. Taking half a bite, I let the chocolate sit on my tongue, waiting for it to melt as I always do. And as always, I lose patience and chew it before the bottom half is melted through. Eo would make candy last for days, when we

were lucky enough to have it.

I set my datapad on the ground and watch the helmet cameras of my friends as they wage my war

for Phobos. Their chatter trembles out of the datapad’s speakers, echoing in the vast metal chamber.

Sevro’s in his element, rushing through the central ventilation unit with hundreds of Sons loading themselves into the air ducts. I feel guilty for sitting here watching them, but we each have our parts to play.

The door we entered through opens with a groan and Ragnar and two of the Obsidian Howlers enter the room. Fresh from the battlefield, Ragnar ’s white armor is dented and stained. “Did you play gently with the fools, my goodman?” I call down from the ramp in my thickest highLingo. In reply,

he tosses up to me a curule: a twisted gold scepter of power given to high-ranking military officers.

This one is a tipped with a screaming banshee and a splash of crimson.

“The tower has fallen,” Ragnar says. “Rollo and the Sons finish my work. These are the stains of subGovernor Priscilla au Caan.”

“Well done, my friend,” I say, taking the scepter in my hands. On it is carved the deeds of the Caan family, which owned the two moons of Mars and once followed Bellona to war. Among great warriors and statesmen, there’s a young man I recognize standing by a horse.

“What is wrong?” Ragnar asks.

“Nothing,” I say. “I knew her son is all. Priam. He seemed decent enough.”

“Decent is not enough,” Ragnar says forlornly “Not for their world.”

With a grunt, I bend the curule against my knee and toss it back to him to show my agreement.

“Give it to your sister. Time to go.”

Glancing back at the hangar with a frown, he checks his datapad and files past me into the cargo

hold. I try to wipe the blood from the curule off on my white suit’s leg. It just smears over the oily fabric, giving me a red stripe on my thigh. I close the ramp behind me. Inside, I help Ragnar out of his pulseArmor and let him slip into the winter gear as I join Holiday and Vesta as they initiate preflight launch.

“Remember, we’re refugees. Aim for the largest convoy heading out of here and stick to them.”

Vesta nods. It’s an old hangar. So it has no pulseField. All that separates us from space are five-story-tall steel doors. They rumble as the motors begin to retract them into the ceiling and floor. “Stop!” I say. Vesta sees what caught my attention a second after I do and her hand flashes to the controls, stopping the doors before they part and open the hangar to vacuum.

“I’ll be damned,” Holiday says, peering out the cockpit to a small figure blocking our ship’s path to space. “It’s the lion.”

—

Mustang stands in front of the ship illuminated by our headlights. Her hair washed white by the blinding light. She blinks as Holiday cuts the headlights from the cockpit and I make my way to her through the dim hangar. Her dancing eyes dissect me as I come. They dart from to my Sigil-barren

hands to the scar I’ve kept on my face. What does she see?

Does she see my resolve? My fear?

In her I see so much. The girl I fell in love with in the snow is gone, replaced in the last fifteen months by a woman. A thin, intense leader of vast and enduring strength and alarming intellect. Eyes kinetic, ringed by circles of exhaustion and trapped in a face made pale from long days in sunless lands and metal halls. Everything she is dwells behind her eyes. She has her father ’s mind. Her mother ’s face. And a distant, foreboding sort of intelligence that can give you wings or crush you to the earth.

And just at her hip sits a ghostCloak with a cooling unit.

She has watched us since we arrived.

How did she get inside the hangar?

“ ’Lo, Reaper,” she says playfully as I come to a halt.

“ ’Lo, Mustang.” I search the rest of the hangar. “How did you find me?”

She frowns in confusion. “I thought you wanted me to come. Ragnar told Kavax where I could find

you…” She trails off. “Oh. You didn’t know.”

“No.” I look back up at the ship’s mirror cockpit windows, where Ragnar must be watching me.

The man’s overstepped his bounds. Even as I arranged a war, he went behind my back and endangered

my mission. Now I know exactly how Sevro felt.

“Where have you been?” she asks me.

“With your brother.”

“Then the execution was a ruse meant to make us stop looking.”

There’s so much more to say, so many questions and accusations that could fly between us. But I

didn’t want to see her because I don’t know where to begin. What to say. What to ask for. “I don’t have time for small talk, Mustang. I know you came to Phobos to surrender to the Sovereign. Now why are you here talking to me?”

“Don’t talk down to me,” she says sharply. “I wasn’t surrendering. I was making peace. You’re not

the only one with people to protect. My father ruled Mars for decades. Its people are as much a part of me as they are part of you.”

“You left Mars at the mercy of your brother,” I say.

“I left Mars to save it,” she corrects. “You know everything is a compromise. And you know it’s not Mars you’re angry at me for leaving.”

“I need you to stand aside, Mustang. This is not about us. And I don’t have time to bicker. I’m leaving. So either you move or we open the door and fly through you.”

“Fly through me?” she laughs. “You know I didn’t have to come alone. I could have come with my

bodyguards. I could have lain in wait to ambush you. Or reported you to the Sovereign to salvage the peace you ruined. But I didn’t. Can you stop for a single moment to think why?” She takes a step forward. “You said to me in that tunnel that you want a better world. Can’t you see that I listened? That I joined the Moon Lords because I believe in something better?”

“Yet you surrendered.”

“Because I could not watch my brother ’s reign of terror continue. I want peace.”

“This is not the time for peace,” I say.

“Goryhell, you’re thick. I know that. Why do you think I am here? Why do you think I’ve worked

with Orion and kept your soldiers at their stations?”

I examine her. “I honestly don’t know.”

“I’m here because I want to believe in you, Darrow. I want to believe in what you said in that tunnel.

I ran from you because I didn’t want to accept that the only answer was the sword. But the world we live in has conspired to take everything I love away. My mother, my father, my brothers. I will not let it take the friends I have left. I will not let it take you.”

“What are you saying?” I ask.

“I’m saying that I’m not letting you out of my sight. I’m coming with you.”

It’s my turn to laugh. “You don’t even know where I’m going.”

“You’re wearing sealSkin. Ragnar ’s on board. You’ve declared open rebellion. Now you’re leaving in the middle of the largest battle the Rising has ever seen. Really, Darrow. It doesn’t take a genius to deduce that now you’re using this ship to pretend to be a Gold refugee to escape and go to the Valkyrie Spires to beseech Ragnar ’s mother to provide an army.”

Damn. I try not to let my surprise show.

This is why I did not want to involve Mustang. Inviting her into the game is adding another dimension I can’t control. She could destroy my gambit with a single call to her brother, to the Sovereign, telling them where I am going. Everything relies on misdirection. On my enemies thinking I am on Phobos. She knows what I’m thinking. I can’t let her leave this hangar.

“The Telemanuses know as well,” she says, knowing my mind. “But I’m tired of having insurance

plans against you. Tired of playing games. You and I have pushed each other away because of broken trust. Aren’t you tired of that? Of the secrets between us? Of the guilt?”

“You know I am. I laid my secrets bare in the tunnels of Lykos.”

“Then let this be our second chance. For you. For me. For both our people. I want what you want.

And when you and I are aligned, when have we ever lost? Together we can build something, Darrow.”

“You’re suggesting an alliance…” I say quietly.

“Yes.” Her eyes are afire. “The might of House Augustus and Telemanus and Arcos united with the

Rising. With the Reaper. With Orion and all her ships. The Society would tremble.”

“Millions will die in that war,” I say. “You know that. The Peerless Scarred will fight to the last Gold. Can you stomach that? Can you watch that happen?”

“To build we must break,” she says. “I was listening.”

Still, I shake my head. There’s too much to overcome between us, between our people. It would be a qualified victory, on her terms. “How could I ask my men to trust a Gold army? How could I trust you?”

“You can’t. That is why I am coming with you. To prove I believe in your wife’s dream. But you

have to prove something to me. That you are worthy of my trust, in turn. I know you can break. I need to see that you can build. I need to see what you will build. If the blood we will shed is for something.

Prove that, and you have my sword. Fail, and you and I will go our separate ways.” She cocks her head at me. “So what do you say, Helldiver? Do you want to give it one more go?”

I help unbuckle Mustang’s pulseArmor in the cargo hold. “Cold gear is in here.” I gesture to a large plastic box. “Boots in there.”

“Quicksilver gave you the keys to his armory?” she asks, eying the winged heel on the boxes.

“How many fingers did it cost him?”

“None,” I say. “He’s a Son of Ares.”

“What now?”

I grin. Comforting knowing the world isn’t an open book for her. The engines rumble and the ship

rises underneath us. “Get dressed and join us in the cabin.” I leave her behind to change in private. I was more gruff than I intended. But it felt strange smiling in her presence. I find Ragnar leaning back in his chair in the passenger cabin eating chocolates, white boots up on the adjacent armrest. “No offense, but what the hell are you doing?” Holiday asks me. She stands, arms crossed, between the cockpit and the passenger cabin. “Sir.”

“Taking a risk,” I say. “I know it might seem strange to you, Holiday. But I go back with her.”

“She’s the definition of the elite. Worse than Victra. Her father—”

“Killed my wife,” I say. “So if I can stomach it, so can you.” Holiday makes a whistling sound and heads back to the cabin, unhappy with our new ally.

“So the Mustang joined our quest,” Ragnar says.

“She’s getting dressed,” I reply. “You had no right to let Kavax go. Much less tell him where we would be. What if they gave us up, Ragnar? What if they ambushed us? You would never have seen

your home. If they find out we’re there, they’ll never let your people off the surface. They’ll kill them all. Did you think of that?”

He eats another chocolate. “A man thinks he can fly, but he is afraid to jump. A poor friend pushes him from behind.” He looks up at me. “A good friend jumps with.”

“You’ve been reading Stoneside, haven’t you?”

Ragnar nods. “Theodora gave it to me. Lorn au Arcos was a great man.”

“He’d be glad you think so, but take everything with a grain of salt. The biographer took some liberties. Especially in his early life.”

“Lorn would have told you that we need her. Now, in war. And after, in peace. If we do not bring her to our cause, then we will not win until every Gold is dead. That is not why I fight.”

Ragnar rises to greet Mustang as she joins us. The last time they stood eye to eye, she had a gun

pointed at his head. “Ragnar, you’ve been busy since I last saw you. Not a Gold alive doesn’t know

and fear your name. Thank you for releasing Kavax.”

“Family is dear,” Ragnar says. “But I warn you. We go to my lands. You are under my protection. If you play your tricks, if you play your games, that protection is forfeit. And even you will not survive long on the ice without me, daughter of the lion. Do you understand?”

Mustang bows her head respectfully. “I do. And I will repay your faith in me, Ragnar. I promise you that.”

“Enough chatter. Time to buckle up,” Holiday snaps from the cabin. Vesta’s synced with the ship and pushing out of the hangar. We find our seats. There’s twenty to choose from, but Mustang takes the one next to me in the left aisle. Her hand grazes my hip accidentally as she reaches for her seat harness.

Our ship departs the hangar, silently floating forward into the vacuum of the dim subcutaneous industrial world of Phobos. Pipes and loading docks and garbage bays as far as we can see. Closed

off to the stars and the light of the sun. Few ships as lovely as ours have ever flown so far beneath the surface of Phobos. The word LowSector is rendered in white paint over an industrial transport hub where men pour into ships, and the ships trundle up out of this dim world toward the sector gates that the Sons have breached.

Our sleek yacht passes a motley fleet of slow-moving garbage haulers and freighters. Inside, men

and women huddle quietly together in windowless, dirty steel cubes. Sweat drenches their backs. Their hands shake holding unfamiliar instruments: weapons. They pray they can be as brave as they’ve always imagined themselves to be. Then they’ll land in some Gold hangar. The Sons will shout orders. The doors will open and they will meet war.

I pray silently for them, clenching my hands as I stare out the window. I feel Mustang watching me.

Measuring the tides deep within.

Soon we leave the industrial Stacks behind, trading the dim recesses for the neon advertisements that bathe the space boulevards of the midSector. Manmade canyons of steel to either side. Trams.

Elevators. Apartments. Every screen connected to the web has been slaved by Quicksilver ’s hackers, showing images of Sevro and the Sons overrunning security gates and checkpoints, painting scythes

on walls.

And around us, the city of thirty million churns. Deep space commercial transports racing past little civilian taxis and skippers meant to go between the buildings here. Freighters soar from the Hollows up through the midSector toward the Needles. A flight of ripWings hunts through the streets above us.

I hold my breath. With a flip of a trigger they could shred us. But they don’t. They register our highColor ship ID and hail us over the coms and offer an escort out of the warzone toward a current of yachts and skiffs that blaze quietly away from the moon.

“Stirring speech,” Victra purrs over the ship’s com as I answer the call from Quicksilver ’s tower, her bored voice at odds with the warring world around us. “Clown and Screwface just took Skyresh’s main terminals. Rollo’s men have seized the water cisterns for the midSector. Quicksilver’s networks are broadcasting it all the way to Luna. Scythes popping up everywhere. There’s riots in Agea, Corinth, everywhere on Mars. And we’re hearing the same from Earth and Luna. Municipal buildings are falling. Police stations burning. You’ve woken the rabble.”

“They’ll hit back soon.”

“As you said, darling. We massacred the first responders the Jackal sent. Got a few Boneriders, just as we wanted. No Lilath or Thistle, though.”

“Damn. Worth a shot.”

“Martian Navy is on its way from Deimos. The Legions are coming, and we’re making our final

preparations.”

“Good. Good. Victra, I need you to let Sevro know that we’ve added a member to our expedition.

Mustang’s joined us.”

Silence from her. “Am I on a private line?”

Holiday tosses me a headset from the cockpit. I wrestle the headset on. “You are now. You don’t agree.”

The bitterness in her tone is acute. “Here are my thoughts. You can’t trust her. Look at her brother.

Her father. Greed is in her blood. Of course she would ally with us. It fits her aims.” I watch Mustang as Victra speaks. “She needs us because she’s losing her war. But what happens when we give her what she needs? What happens when we’re in her way? Will you be able to put her down? Will you be able to pull the trigger?”

“Yes.”

—

Victra’s words linger as we pass Phobos’s giant glass spires, cockpit skimming a dozen meters above the panes of the building. Inside roil little worlds of madness. The Rising has reached the Needles in this district of the city. LowColors push inexorably through the halls. Grays and Silvers barricading doors. Pinks standing in a bedroom over a bleeding old Gold and his wife, knives in hand. Three Silver children watching Ares on a wall-sized holo as their parents speak in the library. And at last, a Gold woman in a sky-blue cocktail dress, pearls about her neck, gold hair unbound to her waist. She stands near a window as Sons of Ares spread through the building, levels beneath her penthouse.

Engulfed in her own drama, she raises a scorcher to her Golden head. Body stiff in imagined majesty.

Her finger tightens around the trigger.

And we’re past. Leaving her life and the chaos behind to join with the flow of yachts and pleasure craft that flee the battle for the safety of the planet. Most of the refugees call Mars home. Their ships, unlike ours, are not equipped for deep space. Now they scatter over the planet’s atmosphere like burning seeds, most plunging straight for the spaceport of Corinth beneath us in the middle of the Thermic Sea. Others skimming over the atmosphere, disregarding designated transit lanes, racing past the Jackal’s hastily erected blockade and the satellite level toward their homes in the opposite hemisphere. RipWings and wasps from the military frigates flash after them, trying to herd them back to the designated avenues. But entitlement and chaos are a poor mix. Mania grips these fleeing Golds.

“The Dido, ” Mustang says quietly to herself, eying a glass ship the shape of a sailboat to our starboard. “Drusilla au Ran’s vessel. She taught me how to paint watercolors when I was little.” But my attention is farther out, where ugly dark vessels without the flashing hulls or fanciful lines of the pleasure craft race toward Phobos. It’s more than half the Martian defense fleet. Frigates, torchShips, destroyers. Even two dreadnaughts. I wonder if the Jackal is on one of those bridges. Likely not. It’s probably Lilath who leads the detachment, or some other praetor newly appointed in his regime.

Antonia has been dispatched to aid Roque on the Rim. Their ships will be packed with lifelong soldiers. Men and women as hard as we are. Many who fell in my Iron Rain. And they will cut through the mob I’ve summoned inside Phobos like paper. They’ll be furious and confident: the more, the better.

“It’s a trap, isn’t it?” Mustang asks quietly. “You never meant to hold Phobos.”

“Do you know how the Inuit tribes of Earth killed wolves?” I ask. She doesn’t. “Slower and weaker

than the wolves, they chiseled knives till they were razor sharp, coated them in blood and stuck them upright in the ice. Then the wolves would come up and lick the blood. And as the wolf licks faster and

faster, he’s so ravenous he doesn’t realize until it’s too late that the blood he’s drinking is his own.” I nod to the passing military vessels. “They hate that I was one of them. How many prime soldiers do you think those ships will launch at Phobos to take me, the great abomination for their own glory?

Pride will again be the downfall of your Color.”

“You’re trying to get them on the station,” she says, understanding. “Because you don’t need Phobos.”

“Like you said, I’m going to the Valkyrie Spires for an army. Orion and you might still have the

remnants of my fleet. But we will need more ships than that. Sevro is waiting in the ventilation system of the hangars. When the assault forces land to take back the military spire and the Needles, they’ll leave their shuttles behind in those hangars. Sevro will descend from his hiding place, hijack the shuttles, and return them home to their ships, packed with all the Sons we have left.”

“And you honestly believe you can control the Obsidian?” she asks.

“Not me. Him.” I nod to Ragnar. “They live in fear of their ‘Gods’ in the Board of Quality Control’s Asgard Station. Golds in suits of armor playing at Odin and Freya. Same way that I lived in fear of the Grays in the Pot. As we were cowed by the Proctors. Ragnar ’s going to show them just how mortal their Gods really are.”

“How?”

“We will kill them,” Ragnar says. “I have sent friends ahead, months ago, to spread the truth.

We will return to my mother and my sister as heroes, and I will tell them their gods are false with my own tongue. I will show them how to fly. I will give them weapons and this ship will carry them to Asgard and we will conquer it as Darrow conquered Olympus. Then we will free the other tribes and carry them away from this land on Quicksilver’s ships.”

“That’s why you have a gorydamn armory back there,” Mustang says.

“What do you think?” I ask her. “Possible?”

“Insane,” she says, awed by the audacity of it. “Might be possible, though. Only if Ragnar can actually control them.”

“I will not control. I will lead.” He says it with quiet certainty.

Mustang admires the man for a moment. “I believe you will.”

I watch Ragnar as he looks back out the window. What passes behind those dark eyes? This is the

first time I’ve felt like he’s not telling me something. He already deceived me by releasing Kavax.

What else does he plan?

We listen in tense silence to the radio waves crackle with yacht captains requesting docking clearance on the military frigates instead of continuing down to the planet. Connections are used.

Bribes offered. Strings pulled. Men weep and beg. These civilians are discovering that their place in the world is smaller than they imagined. They do not matter. In war, men lose what makes them great.

Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that’s left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no

use in war except to feed the machines.

The Peerless Scarred know this cold truth. And they have trained for centuries for this new age of war. Killing in the Passage. Struggling through the deprivation of the Institute so that they might have worth when war comes. Time for Pixies with deep pockets and expensive tastes to appreciate the realities of life: you do not matter unless you can kill.

The bill, as Lorn often said, comes at the end. Now the Pixies pay.

A Gold Praetor ’s voice cuts through the speakers of our ship, ordering the refugee ships to redirect toward authorized transit lanes and steer clear the navy warships or they will be fired upon. The

Praetor cannot afford unauthorized vessels within one hundred kilometers of her ship. They could carry bombs. Could carry Sons of Ares. Two yachts ignore the warnings and are ripped apart as one

of the cruisers fires railguns into their hulls. The Praetor repeats her order. This time it is obeyed. I look over at Mustang and wonder what she thinks of this. Of me. Wishing we could be somewhere quiet where a thousand things didn’t pull at us. Where I ask about her instead of the war.

“Feels like the end of the world,” she says.

“No.” I shake my head. “It is the beginning of a new one. I have to believe that.”

The planetscape below is blue and spackled white as we pretend to follow the designated coordinates along the western hemisphere at the equator. Tiny green islands ringed with tan beaches wink up at us from the indigo waters of the Thermic Sea. Beneath, ships jerk and burn as they hit atmosphere before us. Like phosphorous firecrackers Eo and I played with as children, kicking spasmodically and glowing orange, then blue, as heat friction builds along their shields. Our Blue veers us away, following a series of other ships who depart the general flow of traffic for their own homes.

Soon, Phobos is half a planet away. The continents pass beneath. One by one the other ships descend and we’re left alone on our journey to the uncivilized pole, flying past several dozen Society satellites that monitor the southernmost continent. They too have been hacked into recycling information pulled from three years ago. We’re invisible, for now. Not just to our enemies but to our friends. Mustang leans from her chair, peering up into the cockpit. “What is that?” She gestures to the sensor display. A single dot follows behind us.

“Another refugee ship from Phobos,” the pilot answers. “Civilian vessel. No weapons.” But it’s closing fast. Trailing behind us by two hundred kilometers.

“If it’s a civilian vessel, why did it just appear on our sensors?” Mustang asks.

“It could have sensor shielding. Dampeners,” Holiday says warily.

The ship closes to forty kilometers. Something is wrong here. “Civilian vessels don’t have that sort of acceleration,” Mustang says.

“Dive,” I say. “Get us through the atmosphere now. Holiday on the gun.”

The Blue slips into defense protocols, increasing our speed, strengthening our rear shields. We hit atmosphere. My teeth rattle together. The ship’s electronic voice suggests passengers find their seats.

Holiday stumbles up, rushing past us to the tailgun. Then a warning siren trills as the ship behind us morphs on the radar display, sharp contours of hidden weapons blossoming from its formerly smooth hull. It follows us into atmosphere, and it fires.

Our pilot twists her thin hands in the gel controls. My stomach lurches. Hypersonic depleted uranium shells scar the canvas of clouds and icy terrain, superheating as they streak past. The ship jerks as we hit atmosphere ourselves. Our pilot continues to juke, twitching her fingers in the electric gel, face placid and lost in her dance with the pursuing craft. Her eyes distant from her body. A single droplet of sweat beading on her right temple and trickling down her jaw. Then a gray blur rips into the cockpit and she explodes in a shower of meat. Spattering the viewports and my face with blood.

The uranium shell takes off the top half of her body, then rips through the floor. A second shell the size of a child’s head screams through the ship between Mustang and me. Punching a hole in the floor and ceiling. Wind shrieks. Emergency masks fall into our laps. Warning sirens warble as pressure rushes from our ship, whipping our hair. I see the blackness of the ocean through the hole in the floor.

Stars through the hole in the ceiling as our oxygen leaks out. The pursuing ship continues to fire into our dying ship. I huddle in terror with my hands over my head, teeth locked together, everything human in me screaming.

Laughter evil and inhuman rumbles so loud I think it’s coming from the buffeting wind. But it comes from Ragnar, his head tilted back as he laughs to his gods. “Odin knows we are coming to kill him. Even false Gods do not die easily!” He throws himself from his seat and runs down the hall, laughing insanely, not listening as I shout for him to sit down. Shells whisper past him. “I am coming, Odin! I am coming for you!”

Mustang dons her emergency mask and pushes the release on her safety webbing before I can gather my thoughts. The ship bucks, slamming her into the ceiling and the floor hard enough to crack the skull of any but an Aureate. Blood spills over her forehead from a gash at her hairline and she clutches to the floor, waiting till the ship rolls again to angle herself so that she can use gravity to fall into the co-pilot chair. She lands awkwardly against the armrests but manages to drag herself into the seat and buckle in. More warning lights pulse on the blood-drenched console. I look back down the

hall to see if Ragnar and Holiday are alive only to see a trio of shells savage the room behind us. My teeth clatter in my skull. Gut vibrating with the champagne flutes in the cabinet to my left. I can’t do anything but hold on as Mustang tries to arrest our fall through orbit. The seat’s gel webbing tightens against my rib cage. I feel the g-forces crushing me. Time seems to slow as the world beneath swells.

We’re through the clouds. On the sensor I see something small zip away from our ship and collide

into the one trailing. Light flares behind us. Snow and mountains and ice floes dilate till they’re all I can see through the broken cockpit window. Wind howls, shatteringly cold against my face. “Brace for impact,” Mustang shouts over it. “In five…”

We plummet toward a sheaf of ice floating in the middle of the sea. On the horizon, a bloody ribbon of red ties the twilight sky to the ragged coastline of volcanic rock. A giant man stands atop the rock. Black and huge against the red light. I blink, wondering if my mind is playing tricks on me.

If I’m seeing Fitchner before my death. The man’s mouth is an open dark chasm into which no light

escapes.

“Darrow, tuck in!” Mustang shouts. I lower my head between my knees, wrap my arms around it.

“Three…two…one.”

Our ship punches into the ice.

All is dark and cold as we sink into the sea. Water ’s rushed in through the mangled back of the ship and gurgles through the dozen gaping holes in the cockpit. We’re already beneath the waves, the last air bubbling out into the darkness. The crash webbing synched tight around my body upon impact, expanding to protect my bones. But now it’s killing me, dragging me down with the ship. The water is freezing needles against my face. SealSkin protects my body, though, so I cut through the webbing with my razor. Pressure building in my ears as I search frantically for Mustang.

She’s alive and already working on escape. A light in her hand carves through the darkness of the

flooded cockpit. Her razor ’s out. Cutting through her webbing like I did. I push myself through the flooded cabin toward her. The back of the ship is missing. Three levels of vessel torn off and floating elsewhere in the darkness with Ragnar and Holiday inside. My neck’s locked up from whiplash. I suck at the oxygen from the mask that covers my nose and mouth.

Mustang and I communicate silently, using the signals of Gray lurcher squads. The human instinct

is to flee the crash as fast as possible, but training reminds us to count our breaths. To think clinically.

There are supplies here we might need. Mustang searches in the cockpit for the standard emergency

kit while I search for my equipment bag. It’s missing, along with the rest of the gear in the cargo hold that we were bringing the Obsidians to seize Asgard. Mustang joins me, carrying a plastic emergency box the size of her torso, which she pulled from a cabinet behind the pilot’s chair.

Taking a last breath, we leave the oxygen behind.

We swim to the edge of the torn hull, where the ship ends and the ocean begins. It is an abyss.

Mustang turns off her light as I tie our belts together with a length of the crash webbing I took from my seat. Designed to keep the Obsidians trapped in their icy continent, the Carved creatures here are man-eaters. I’ve seen pictures of the things. Translucent and fanged. Eyes bulging. Skin pale, worming with blue veins. Light and heat attract them. To swim in open water with a flashlight would draw things from the deeper levels. Even Ragnar wouldn’t dare.

Unable to see farther than a hand’s breadth in front of us, we push away from the yacht’s corpse in the black water. Fighting for every agonizing meter. I can’t see Mustang beside me. We’re sluggish in the cold water, limbs burning as they claw darkness; but my mind is locked and certain. We will not die in this ocean. We will not drown. I repeat it over and over, hating the water.

Mustang kicks my foot, disrupting our rhythm. I try to match it again. Where is the surface?

There’s no sun to greet us, to tell us we’re near. It’s wildly disorienting. Mustang kicks my leg again.

Only this time I feel the ripple of the water beneath as something large and fast and cold swims in the depths below.

I slash down blindly with my razor, hitting nothing. Impossible to fight back the panic. I’m swinging at the darkness of the two kilometers of ocean that stretches beneath me and pumping my

legs so desperately that I swim into the ice crust atop the water almost knocking myself out. I feel Mustang’s hand on my back. Steadying me. The ice is dull gray skin that stretches above us. I stab my razor up into it. Hear Mustang doing the same beside me. It’s too thick to push clear of. I grip her shoulder and draw a circle to signal my plan. I turn so my back is against hers. Together, nearly blind and out of oxygen, we cut a circle in the ice. I keep going until I feel the ice give slightly. It’s too heavy to push up without traction. Too buoyant to pull down with just our arms. So I swim to the side so Mustang can savage the cylinder we’ve cut with her razor. Mincing the ice enough to push the emergency box through first. She follows and extends a hand to aid me. I slash blindly back down at the darkness and follow her up.

We collapse headfirst onto the rock-hard surface of the ice.

Wind rattles over our shaking bodies.

We’re on the edge of an ice shelf between a savage coastline and the beginning of a cold, black sea.

The sky throbs deep metallic blue, the South Pole locked in two months of twilight as it transitions to winter. The mountainous coastline dark and twisted, maybe three kilometers off, ice stretching all the way, punctured by icebergs. Wreckage burns on the coast’s mountains. Wind rushes in off the open water ahead of a coming storm, whipping the waves into calamity so salt and spray hiss over the ice like sand buffeting through the desert.

Water geysers into the air fifty meters closer inland as someone fires a pulseFist from underneath the ice. Numb and frozen, we rush toward Holiday as she pulls herself free, Mustang trailing behind with the emergency box.

“Where is Ragnar?” I shout. Holiday looks up at me, face twisted and pale. Blood pools from her

leg. A piece of shrapnel sticking through her thigh. Her sealSkin has kept her from the worst of the cold, but she didn’t have time to don her suit’s hood or gloves. She tightens a tourniquet around her leg, looking back into the hole.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“You don’t know?” I rip free my razor and stumble for the hole. Holiday scrambles in front of me.

“Something is down there! Ragnar pulled it off of me.”

“I’m going down,” I say.

“What?” Holiday snaps. “It’s pitch-black. You’ll never find him.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You’ll die,” she says.

“I won’t let him go.”

“Darrow, stop.” She throws down the pulseFist and pulls Trigg’s pistol from her leg holster and shoots it in front of my foot. “Stop.”

“What are you doing?” I shout over the wind.

“I will shoot your leg out before I let you kill yourself. That’s what you’re doing if you go down there.”

“You’d let him die.”

“He’s not my mission.” Her eyes are hard. Unsentimental and clinical. So different from the way I

fight. I know she’ll pull the trigger to save my life. I’m about to lunge at her when Mustang flashes past to my left. Too fast for me to say anything or for Holiday to threaten her as she dives into the hole, a razor in her right hand, and in her left, a flare blazing bright.

I rush to the hole. Water laps peaceably at the edge. The ice is too thick to see Mustang beneath the surface as she swims, but the flare glows gently through the meter of dirty ice, blue and wandering toward the land. I follow it. Holiday tries to drag herself after. I shout at her to stay and get the medkit for herself.

I follow Mustang’s light. Razor skimming over the ice, tracing the light underneath for several minutes, till at last the light stops. It’s not enough time for her to run out of breath, but it doesn’t move for ten seconds. And then it begins to fade. Ice and water darkening as the light sinks into the sea. I have to get her out. I slam my razor into the ice, carving a chunk free. I roar as I jam my fingers into the cracks and lift it up, hurling it backward over my head to reveal water churning with pale bodies and blood. Mustang bursts to the surface, crying in pain. Ragnar ’s beside her, blue and still, pinned under her left arm as her right hacks at something pale in the water.

I stab my razor into the ice behind me and hold on to the hilt. Mustang reaches for my hand and I

haul her out. Then we pull Ragnar out with a roar of effort. Mustang claws onto the ice, falling down with Ragnar. But she’s not alone. A maggot white creature the size of a small man has latched itself to her back. It’s shaped like a snail in full sprint, except its back is tough, hairy translucent flesh mottled with dozens of shrieking little mouths rimmed with needle teeth that gnaw into her back. It’s eating her alive. A second creature the size of a large dog is stuck on Ragnar ’s back.

“Get it off!” Mustang snarls, slashing wildly with her razor. “Get it off of me!” The creature is stronger than it should be and crawls back toward the hole in the ice, trying to drag her back to its home. A gunshot echoes and the creature jerks as a slug from Holiday’s bullet hits it square in the side. Black blood pulses out. The creature shrieks and slows enough for me to rush to Mustang and

scalp the thing from her back with my razor. I kick it to the side, where it spasms as it dies. I cut Ragnar ’s beast in half, skinning it off his back, and hurl it to the side.

“There’s more down there. And something bigger,” Mustang says, struggling to her feet. Her face

tightens as she sees Ragnar. I rush to him. He’s not breathing.

“Watch the hole,” I tell Mustang.

My massive friend looks so childish there on the ice. I start CPR. He’s missing his left boot. The sock’s halfway off. Foot jerks against the ice as I pump his chest. Holiday stumbles to us. Pupils huge from painkillers. Her leg’s bound with resFlesh from the medkit. She collapses to the ice beside Ragnar. Tugs his sock back on his foot like it matters.

“Come back,” I hear myself saying. Spit freezing against my lips. Eyelids crusty with tears I didn’t even know I was shedding. “Come back. Your work isn’t finished.” The Howler tattoo is dark against

his paling skin. The protection runes like tears on his white face. “Your people need you,” I say.

Holiday holds his hand. Both of hers not equal to the size of the massive six-fingered paw.

“Do you want them to win?” Holiday asks. “Wake up, Ragnar. Wake up.”

He jerks beneath my hands. Chest twitching as his heart kicks. Water bubbles out of his mouth.

Arms scrabbling at the ice in confusion as he coughs for air. He sucks it down. Huge chest heaving as he stares up at the sky. His scarred lips curl back into a mocking smile. “Not yet, Allmother. Not yet.”

—

“We’re fucked,” Holiday says as we look over the meager supplies Mustang managed to scavenge from our vessel. We shake together in a ravine, finding momentary respite from the wind. It’s not much. We huddle around the paltry heat of two thermal flares after having humped it across the ice shelf as eighty-kilometer winds shredded us with cold teeth. The storm darkens over the water behind us. Ragnar watches it with wary eyes as the rest of us sort through the supplies. There’s a GPS

transponder, several protein bars, two flashlights, dehydrated food, a thermal stove, and a thermal blanket large enough for one of us. We’ve wrapped it around Holiday, since her suit’s the most compromised. There’s also a flare gun, a resFlesh applicator, and a thumb-sized digital survival guide.

“She’s right,” Mustang says. “We have to get out of here or we’re dead.”

Our boxes of weapons are gone. Our armor and gravBoots and supplies sunken to the bottom of

the sea. All that would have let the Obsidians destroy their Gods. All that would have let us contact our friends in orbit. The satellites are blind. No one is watching. No one except the men who shot us from the sky. The lone blessing is that they crashed as well. We saw their fire deeper in the mountains as we stumbled across the ice shelf. But if they survived, if they have gear, they will hunt us, and all we have to protect ourselves is four razors, a rifle, and a pulseFist with a drained charge. Our sealSkin is sliced and damaged. But dehydration will claim us long before the cold does. Black rock and ice span the horizon. Yet if we eat the ice, our core temperatures will lower and the cold will take us.

“We have to find real shelter.” Mustang blows into her gloved hands, shivering. “Last I saw of the charts in the cockpit, we’re two hundred kilometers from the spires.”

“Might as well be a thousand,” Holiday says gruffly. She chews her cracked bottom lip, still staring at the supplies as if they’ll breed.

Ragnar watches us discuss wearily. He knows this land. He knows we can’t survive here. And though he will not say it, he knows that he will watch us die one by one, and there will not be a thing he can do to stop it. Holiday will die first. Then Mustang. Her sealSkin is torn where the beast bit her and water leaked in. Then I will go, and he will survive. How arrogant must we have sounded, thinking we could descend and free the Obsidians in one night.

“Aren’t nomads here?” Holiday asks Ragnar. “We always heard stories about marooned

legionnaires….”

“They are not stories,” Ragnar says. “The clans seldom venture to the ice after autumn has fled. This is the season of the Eaters.”

“You didn’t mention them,” I say.

“I thought we would fly past their lands. I am sorry.”

“What are Eaters?” Holiday asks. “My Antarctic anthropology ain’t for shit.”

“Eaters of men,” Ragnar says. “Shamed castouts from the clans.”

“Bloodyhell.”

“Darrow, there must be a way to contact your men for extraction,” Mustang says, determined to find a way out.

“There isn’t. Asgard’s jamming array makes this whole continent static. The only tech for a thousand kilometers is there. Unless the other ship has something.”

“Who are they?” Ragnar asks.

“Don’t know. Can’t be the Jackal,” I say. “If he knew who we were then he would have sent his fleet after us, not just one black-ops ship.”

“It’s Cassius,” Mustang says. “I assume he came in a disguised ship, like I did. He’s supposed to be on Luna. It was one of the positives of negotiating here. They get caught going behind my brother ’s back, it’s as bad for them as for me. Worse.”

“How’d he know which ship was ours?” I ask.

Mustang shrugs. “Must have sniffed out the diversion. Maybe he followed us from the Hollows. I

don’t know. He’s not stupid. He did catch you in the Rain as well, going under the wall.”

“Or someone told him,” Holiday says, eying Mustang darkly.

“Why would I tell him when I’m on the gorydamn ship?” Mustang says.

“Well, let’s hope it’s Cassius,” I say. “If it is, then they won’t just hop on gravBoots and fly to Asgard for help, because then they’ll have to explain to the Jackal why they were on Phobos to begin with. How’d it go down, anyway?” I ask. “It looked like a missile signature from the back of our ship.

But we don’t have missiles.”

“The boxes did,” Ragnar says. “I fired a sarissa out the back of the cargo bay from a shoulder launcher.”

“You shot a missile at them while we were falling?” Mustang asks incredulously.

“Yes. And I attempted to gather gravBoots. I failed.”

“I think you did just fine,” Mustang says with a sudden laugh. It infects the rest of us, even Holiday.

Ragnar doesn’t understand the humor. My cheer fades quickly though as Holiday coughs and cinches

her hood tighter.

I watch the black clouds over the sea. “How long till that storm hits, Ragnar?”

“Perhaps two hours. It moves with speed.”

“It’ll get to negative sixty,” Mustang says. “We won’t survive. Not with our gear like this.” The wind howls through our ravine and the bleak mountainside around us.

“Then there’s only one option,” I say. “We sack up and push across the mountains, find the downed

ship. If it is Cassius in there, he’ll have at least a full squad of Thirteenth legion black ops with him.”

“That’s not a good thing,” Mustang says warily. “Those Grays are better trained for winter combat

than we are.”

“Better than you,” Holiday says, pulling back her sealSkin so Mustang can read the Thirteenth legion tattoo on her neck. “Not me.”

“You’re a dragoon?” Mustang asks, unable to hide the surprise.

“Was. Point is: PFR—Praetorian field regulations—mandate survival gear in long-range mission transport enough to last each squad a month in any conditions. They’ll have water, food, heat, and gravBoots.”

“What if they survived the crash?” Mustang says, eying Holiday’s injured leg and our paltry weapons supply.

“Then they will not survive us,” Ragnar says.

“And we’re better off hitting them when they’re still piecing themselves together,” I say. “We go now, fast as we can, and we might get there before the storm lands. It’s our only chance.”

Ragnar and Holiday join me, the Obsidian gathering the gear as the Gray checks her rifle’s ammunition. But Mustang’s hesitant. There’s something else she hasn’t told us. “What is it?” I demand.

“It’s Cassius,” she says slowly. “I don’t know for certain. What if he’s not alone? What if Aja is with him?”

The storm falls as we climb along a rocky arm of the mountain. Soon we can see nothing beyond our

party. Steel-gray snow gnaws into us. Blotting out the sky, the ice, the mountains inland. We duck our heads, squinting through the sealSkin balaclavas. Boots scrape the ice underfoot. Wind roars loud as a waterfall. I hunch against it, putting one boot after the other, connected with Mustang and Holiday by rope in the Obsidian way so we don’t lose one another in the blizzard. Ragnar scouts ahead. How he finds his way is beyond me.

He returns now, loping over the rocks with ease. He signals for us to follow.

Easier said than done. Our world is small and furious. Mountains lurk in the white. Their hulking

shoulders the only shelter from the wind. We scramble over bitter black rock that slices at our gloves while the wind tries to hurl us down gulches and bottomless crevasses. The exertion keeps us alive.

Neither Holiday nor Mustang slow, and after more than an hour of dreadful travel, Ragnar guides us into a mountain pass and the storm breathes. Beneath us, impaled upon a ridgeline, is the ship that shot us from the sky.

I feel a pang of sympathy for her. Sharklike lines and flared starburst tail indicate she was once a long, sleek racing vessel of the famed Ganymede shipyards. Painted proud and bold in crimson and

silver by loving hands. Now she’s a cracked, blackened corpse impaled upside down on a stark ridgeline. Cassius, or whoever was inside, had a nasty time of it. The rear third of the ship sheaved off half a kilometer downhill from the main body. Both parts look deserted. Holiday scans the wreck with her rifle’s scope. No sign of life or movement outside.

“Something seems off,” Mustang says, crouched beside me. Her father ’s visage watches me from

the razor on her arm.

“The wind is against us,” Ragnar says. “I smell nothing.” His black eyes scan the peaks of the mountains around us, going rock to rock, looking for danger.

“We can’t risk getting pinned down by rifles,” I say, feeling the wind pick up again behind us. “We need to close the distance fastlike. Holiday, you lay cover.” Holiday digs a small trench in the snow and covers herself with the thermal blanket. We cover that with snow so only her rifle’s peeking out.

Then Ragnar slips down the slope to investigate the rear half of the ship as Mustang and I press for the main wreck.

Mustang and I slink low over rocks, covered by the renewed vigor of the storm, unable to see the

ship till we’re within fifteen meters. We close the rest of the distance on our bellies and find a jagged hole in the aft where the back half of the fuselage was shredded by Ragnar ’s missile. Part of me expected a camp of warColors and Golds preparing to hunt us down. Instead, the ship’s an epileptic

corpse, power flickering on and off. Inside, the ship is hollow and cavernous and almost too dark to see when the lights crackle off. Something drips in the darkness as we work our way toward the middle of the craft. I smell the blood before I see it. In the passenger compartment, nearly a dozen Grays lie dead, smashed into the floor above us by the rocks that speared the ship as it landed.

Mustang kneels next to the body of a mangled Gray to examine his clothing.

“Darrow.” She pulls back his collar and points to a tattoo. The digital ink still moves even though the flesh is dead. Legio XIII. So it is Cassius’s escort. I manipulate the toggle on my razor, moving my thumb in the shape of the new desired design. I press down. The razor slithers in my hand, abandoning its slingBlade look for a shorter, broader blade so I can stab more easily in the cramped environs.

There’s no sign of any life as we move forward, let alone Cassius. Just the wind moaning through

the bones of the vessel. A strange feeling of vertigo walking along the ceiling and looking up at the floor. Seats and belt buckles hanging down like intestines. The ship convulses back to life, illuminating a sea of broken datapads and dishes and gum packages underfoot. Sewage leaks from a

crack in the metal wall. The ship dies again. Mustang taps my arm and points out a shattered bulkhead window to what looks like drag marks in the snow. Smeared blood black in the dim light. She signs to me. Bear? I nod. A razorback must have found the wreckage and begun feasting on the corpses of the diplomatic mission. I shudder, thinking of noble Cassius suffering that fate.

A grisly sucking sound makes its way to us from farther on in the ship. We press forward, feeling

the dread of the scene before we enter the forward passenger cabin. The Institute taught us the sound of teeth on raw meat. But still, this is a horrifying sight, even for me. Golds hang upside down from the ceiling, imprisoned in their crash webbing, legs pinned by bent paneling. Beneath them hunch five nightmares. Their fur is grim and matted, once white but now clumped with dried blood and filth.

They gnaw on the bodies of the dead. Their heads are those of massive bears. But the eyes that peer through the eye sockets of those heads are black and cold with intelligence. Standing not on four legs but two, the largest of the pack turns toward us. The ship lights throb back on. Pale muscled arms, slick with seal grease to ward off the cold, dark with blood from skinning the dead Golds, move from under the bear pelts.

The Obsidian is taller than I am. A crooked iron blade sewn into his hand. Human bones strung together with dried tendon as a breastplate. Hot breath billows from under the snout of the ursine skull he wears as a helmet. Slow and measured, the deep ululation of an evil war chant blossoms from between his blackened teeth. They’ve seen our eyes and one screams something unintelligible.

The ship wheezes and the lights go out.

The first cannibal vaults toward us through the cluttered hall, the rest behind him. Shadows in the darkness. My pale razor lashes forward and hews through his iron knife, through his breastplate and clavicle straight into his heart. I twist aside so he doesn’t crash into me. His momentum takes him past me into Mustang, who sidesteps him and cuts his head clean off. His body spills to the ground past her, twitching.

An audible grunt, and a spear with a jagged iron end flies from one of the other cannibals. I duck under it and punch upward with my left hand, deflecting it into the ceiling, just over Mustang’s head.

Then the Obsidian behind slams into me as I rise. As large as I am. Stronger. More creature than man.

Overwhelming me with the frenzy of a lost mind, he pins me to the wall and snaps at me with blackened, sharp-filed teeth. The lights of the ship flash illuminating the sores around his mouth. My arms are pinned to my sides. He bites at my nose. I turn my face just before he rips it off. Instead, his teeth sink into the meat at the base of my lower jaw. I scream in pain. Blood flows down my neck. He chomps down again, pulling at my face. Eating me alive as the lights go out. His right hand tries to

work a knife through the sealSkin to slide it between my ribs and into my heart. The fabric holds.

Then the cannibal goes slack, twitching, and his body falls to the ground, spinal cord severed by

Mustang from behind.

A black missile blurs past my face and slams into Mustang. Knocking her off her feet. The fletching of an arrow sticks from her left shoulder. She grunts, scrambling on the ground. I lunge away from her, toward the three remaining Obsidian. One’s nocking another arrow, the second hefts a huge axe, the third holds a huge curved horn, which the cannibal brings through the bearhelm to its mouth.

Then a terrible howl comes from outside the ship.

The lights go out.

The darkness ripples with a fourth shape. Shadowy forms lashing at one another. Metal cutting flesh. And when the lights come back on, Ragnar stands holding the head of one Obsidian as he pulls his razor out of the chest of the second. The third, bow cut in half, pulls a knife, stabbing wildly at Ragnar. He hacks her arm off. Still she rolls away, mad, immune to pain. He stalks after her and rips