Morning Star (Red Rising #3) - Pierce Brown Page 0,7

your daughters to your ‘gods,’ but you survive. Tell me, Alia. Why? Why live when all you live for is to serve. To watch your family wither away? I’ve watched mine go. Each stolen from me one by one. My world is broken. And so is yours. But if you join your arms with mine, with Darrow as Ragnar wanted…we can make a new world.”

Alia turns back to us, beleaguered. Her steps are slow and measured as she comes before us.

“Which would you fear more, Virginia au Augustus, a god? Or a mortal with the power of a god?”

The question hangs between them, creating a rift words cannot mend. “A god cannot die. So a god has no fear. But mortal men…” She clucks her tongue behind her stained teeth. “How frightened they are that the darkness will come. How horribly they will fight to stay in the light.”

Her corrupt voice chills my blood.

She knows.

Mustang and I realize it at the same terrible moment. Alia knows her gods are mortal. A new fear

bubbles up from the deepest part of me. I’m a fool. We traveled all this distance to pull the wool from her eyes, but she’s already seen the truth. Somehow. Some way. Did the Golds come to her because

she is queen? Did she discover it herself? Before she sold Ragnar? After? It’s no matter. She’s already resigned herself to this world. To the lie.

“There’s another path,” I say desperately, knowing that Alia made her judgment against us before

we ever entered the room. “Ragnar saw it. He saw a world where your people could leave the ice.

Where they could make their own destiny. Join me and that world is possible. I will give you the means to take the power that will let you cross the stars like your ancestors, to walk unseen, to fly among the clouds on boots. You can live in the land of your choosing. Where the wind is warm as flesh and the land is green instead of white. All you need to do is fight with me like your son did.”

“No, little man. You cannot fight the sky. You cannot fight the river or the sea or the mountains.

And you cannot fight the Gods,” Alia says. “So I will do my duty. I will protect my people. I will send you to Asgard in chains. I will let the Gods on high decide your fate. My people will live on. Sefi will inherit my throne. And I will bury my son in the ice from which he was born.”

The sky is the color of blood underneath a dead nail as we fly away from the Spires. This time, we are imprisoned, chained belly down to the back of fetid fur saddles like luggage. My eyes water as the wind of the lower troposphere slashes into them. The griffin beats its wings, muscled shoulders rippling, churning the air. We bank sideways and I see the riders tilting their masked faces up to the sky to see the faint light that is Phobos. Little flashes of white and yellow mar the darkening sky as ships overhead battle. I pray silently for Sevro’s safety, for Victra’s and the Howlers.

Words failed with Alia, as Mustang said they would. And now we are bound for Asgard, a gift for

the gods to secure the future of her people. That is what she told Sefi. And her silent daughter took my chains and, with the help of Alia’s personal guards, dragged me and Mustang and Holiday to the hangar where her Valkyrie waited.

Now, hours later, we pass over a land created by wrathful gods in their youth. Dramatic and brutal, the Antarctic was designed as punishment and a test for the ancestors of the Obsidians who dared rise against the Golds in the two-hundredth year of their reign. A place so savage less than sixty percent of Obsidians reach adulthood, per Board of Quality Control quotas.

That desperate struggle for life robs them of a chance for culture and societal progress, just as the nomadic tribes of the first Dark Ages were so robbed. Farmers make culture. Nomads make war.

Subtle signs of life freckle the bald waste. Roving herds of auroch. Fires on mountain ridges, glittering from the cracks in the great doors of Obsidian cities that are carved into the rock as they gather supplies and huddle behind their walls on the eve of the long dark of winter. We fly for hours. I fall in and out of sleep, body exhausted. Not having closed my eyes since we shared the pasta with Ragnar in our cozy hole in the belly of that dead ship. How has so much changed so quickly?

I wake to the bellow of a horn. Ragnar is dead. It’s the first thought in my head.

I am no stranger waking to grief.

Another horn echoes as Sefi’s riders close their gaps, drifting together into tight formation. We rise amidst a sea of ash-gray clouds. Sefi bent over the reins in front of me. Pushing her griffin hard toward a hulking darkness. We slip free of the clouds to find Asgard hanging in the twilight. It’s a black mountain ripped from the ground by the gods and hung halfway between the Abyss and the ice

world below. Seat of the Aesir. Where Olympus was a bright celebration of the senses, this is a brooding threat to a conquered race.

A set of stone stairs, precarious and seemingly unsupported, rises from the mountains tethering Asgard to the world below. The Way of Stains. The path all young Obsidian must take if they wish to gain the favor of the gods, to bring honor and bounty to their tribes by becoming the servants of

Allmother Death. Bodies litter the Valley of the Fallen beneath. Frozen mounds of men and women in a land where carrion never rots and only the industry of crows can make proper skeletons. It is a lonely walk, and one we must make if the Obsidian are to approach the mountain.

This is what it takes to make an Obsidian afraid. I feel that fear now from Sefi. She has never walked this path. No Stained may stay among the people of the Spires or the other tribes. All are chosen by the Golds for service. Her mother never would have let her take the tests. She needed one daughter to remain as her heir.

Unlike Olympus, Asgard is surrounded by defensive measures. Electronic high-pitched frequency

emitters that would make the griffins’ eardrums bleed two clicks out. A high-charged pulse shield closer in that would hyper-oscillate the molecular structure of any man or creature by boiling the water in our skin and organs. Black magic to the Obsidian. But the sensors are dead today, compliments of Quicksilver and his hackers, and the cameras and drones that monitor our approach

are blind to us, showing instead the footage recorded three years before, just as with the satellites.

There is only one way to seek an audience with the gods, and that is along the Way of Stains through the Shadowmouth Temple.

We set down atop the forbidding mountain peak beneath Asgard where the Way of Stains is tethered

to the earth. A black temple squats over the stairs like a possessive old crone. It’s skin ravaged by time. Face crumbling to the wind.

I’m pulled off the saddle and fall to the ice, legs asleep after the long journey. The Valkyrie wait for me to rise with Mustang’s help. “I think it’s time,” she says. I nod and let the Valkyrie push us after Sefi toward the black temple. Wind pours through the mouths of three hundred and thirty-three stone faces that scream out from the temple’s front façade imprisoned beneath the black rock, wild eyes desperate for release. We enter under the black arch. Snow rolls across the floor.

“Sefi,” I say. The woman turns slowly back to look at me. She’s not cleaned her brother ’s blood from her hair. “May I speak to you? Alone?” The Valkyrie wait for their quiet leader to nod before pulling Mustang and Holiday back. Sefi walks farther into the temple. I follow as best I can in my chains to a small courtyard open to the sky. I shiver at the cold. Sefi watches me there in the weird violet light, waiting patiently for me to speak. It’s the first time it’s occurred to me that she’s as curious of me as I am of her. And it also fills me with confidence. Those small dark eyes are inquisitive. They see the cracks in things. In men, in armor, in lies. Mustang was right about Alia. She would never listen. I suspected it before we entered her throne room, but I had to give it my best. And even if she had listened, Mustang would never trust Alia Snowsparrow to lead the Obsidian in our war. I would have gained an ally and lost another. But Sefi…Sefi is the last hope I have.

“Where do they go?” I ask her now. “Have you ever wondered? The men and women your clan gives to the gods? I don’t think you believe what they tell you. That they are lifted up as warriors. That they are given untold riches in service of the immortals.”

I wait for her to reply. Of course, she does not. If I can’t sway her here, then we’re as good as dead.

But Mustang thinks, as do I, that we have a chance with her. More than we ever did with Alia, at least.

“If you believed in the gods, you would not have sworn yourself to silence when Ragnar ascended.

Others cheered, but you wept. Because you know…don’t you.” I step closer to the woman. She’s just

above my own height. More muscular than Victra. Her pale face is nearly the same shade as her hair.

“You feel the dark truth in your heart. All who leave the ice become slaves.”

Her brow furrows. I try not to lose my momentum.

“Your brother was Stained, a Son of the Spires. He was a titan. And he ascended to serve the gods

but was treated no better than a prized dog. They made him fight in pits, Sefi. They wagered on his life. Your brother, the one who taught you the names of the ice and wind, who was the greatest son of

the Spires in his generation, was another man’s property.”

She looks up at the sky where the stars blink through the black-violet twilight. How many nights has she looked up and wondered what had become of her big brother? How many lies has she told herself

so she can sleep at night? Now to know the horrors he suffered, it makes all those times she looked at the stars so much worse.

“Your mother was the one who sold him,” I say, seizing the opportunity. “She sold your sisters, brothers, your father. Everyone who has ever left has gone to slavery. Like my people. You know what the prophets your brother sent said. I was a slave but I have risen against my masters. Your brother rose with me. Ragnar returned here to bring you with us. To bring your people out of bondage. And he died for it. For you. Do you trust him enough to believe his last words? Do you love him enough?”

She looks back to me, the whites of her eyes red with an anger that seems to have been long dormant. As if she’s known of her mother ’s duplicity for years. I wonder what she’s heard, listening for two and a half decades. I wonder even if her mother has told her the truth. Sefi is to be queen.

Perhaps that is the right of passage. Passing down the knowledge of their true condition. Perhaps Sefi even listened to our audience with Alia. Something in the way she watches me makes me believe this.

“Sefi, if you deliver me to the Golds, their reign continues and your brother will have sacrificed himself for nothing. If the world is as you like it, then do nothing. But if it is broken, if it is unjust, take a chance. Let me show you the secrets your mother has kept from you. Let me show you how mortal your gods are. Let me help you honor your brother.”

She stares at the snow as it drifts across the floor, lost in thought. Then, with a measured nod, she pulls an iron key from her riding cloak and steps toward me.

—

The stairs of the Way of Stains are frigid and gusty, and switch back devilishly into the sky through the clouds. But they are just stairs. We climb them without chains in the guise of Valkyrie—bone riding masks painted blue, riding cloaks, and boots too big for my feet. All loaned to us by three women who stayed behind to guard the griffin at the base of the temple. Sefi leads us, eight other Valkyrie coming behind. My legs shake from exertion by the time we reach the top and see the black glass complex of the Golds that crests the floating mountain. There are eight towers in all, each belonging to one of the gods. They surround the central building, a dark glass pyramid, like wheel spokes, connected by thin bridges twenty meters above the uneven snowy ground. Between us and the

Gold complex is a second temple in the shape of a giant screaming face, this one as large as Castle Mars. In front of the temple lies a little square park, at the center of which stands a gnarled black tree.

Flames smolder along its branches. White blossoms perch amidst the flames, untouched by the fire.

The Valkyrie whisper to each other, fearing the magic at work.

Sefi carefully plucks a blossom from the tree. The flames scorch the edges of her leather gloves,

but she comes away with a small white flower the shape of a teardrop. When touched it expands and

darkens to the color of blood before wilting and turning to ash. I’ve never seen anything like it. Nor do I particularly give a piss about the showmanship. It’s too cold for that. A bloody red footprint blossoms in the snow in front of us. Sefi and her Valkyrie stay deathly still, arms outstretched with fingers crooked in a gesture of defense against evil spirits.

“It’s just blood hidden in the stone,” Mustang says. “It’s not real.”

Still, the Valkyrie are overawed when more footprints begin to appear on the ground, leading us toward the god’s mouth. They look to each other in fear. Even Sefi goes to her knees when we reach

the stairs at the base of the temple’s mouth. We mimic her, pressing our noses to the stone as the throat opens and out waddles a withered old man. Beard white. Eyes violet and milky with age.

“You are mad!” He howls. “Mad as crows to travel the stairs on the eve of winter!” His staff thumps each individual step in his descent. Voice squeezing the lines for all they’re worth. “Bone and frozen blood is all that should remain. Have you come to request a trial of the Stains?”

“No,” I rumble in my best Nagal. To take the trial of the Stains now would do nothing for us. We

would only see the gods when we received the facial tattoos. And surviving a test of the Stained is something even Ragnar thought I was not prepared for. There’s only one other way to bring the gods to me. Bait.

“No?” the Violet says, confused.

“We come to seek an audience with the gods.”

At any moment, one of the Valkyrie could give us up. All it would take is a word. The tension works its way through my shoulders. Only thing that keeps me sane is knowing Mustang’s on board

enough with the plan to be bent on a knee beside me at the top of this damn mountain. That has to mean I’m not totally insane. At least I hope.

“So you are mad!” the Violet says, growing bored of us. “The gods come and go. To the abyss, to the sea down below. But they give no audience to mortal men. For what is time to creatures such as them. Only the Stained are worth their love. Only the Stained can bear the fever of their sight. Only the children of ice and darkest night.”

Well this is bloodydamn annoying.

“A ship of iron and star has fallen from the Abyss,” I say. “It came with a tail of fire. And struck among the peaks near the Valkyrie Spires. Burning across the sky like blood.”

“A ship?” the Violet asks, now utterly interested, as we supposed he would be.

“One of iron and star,” I say.

“How do you know it was no vision?” the Violet asks cleverly.

“We touched the iron with our own hands.”

The Violet is silent, mind sprinting to and fro behind those manic eyes. I’m wagering he knows that their communications systems are down. That his masters will be eager to hear of a fallen ship. The last sight he might have seen was my speech before Quicksilver shut everything down. Now this lowly Violet, this eager actor banished to the wastes to perform a mummer ’s farce for barbaric simpletons has news his masters don’t. He has a prize, and his eyes, when he realizes this, narrow greedily. Now is his time to seize initiative and gain favor in the eyes of the masters.

How sad, the dependability of greed to make men fools.

“Have you evidence?” he asks eagerly. “Any man may say he has seen a ship of the gods fall.”

Hesitating, fearful of the deception I work but disdainful of priests, Sefi produces my razor from her bag. It is wrapped in seal skin. She lays it on the ground in whip form. The Violet smiles, so very pleased. He tries to snatch it from the ground with a rag from his pocket, but Sefi pulls it back with the seal cloth.

“This is for the gods,” I growl. “Not their whelps.”

The priest ushers us through the temple’s mouth, where we wait, kneeling on a black stone antechamber inside the mountain. The stone mouth grinds closed behind us. Flames dance in the center of the room, leaping up in a pillar of fire to the onyx ceiling.

Acolytes wander through the cavernous temple, chanting softly, draped with black sackcloth hoods.

“Children of the Ice,” a divine voice finally whispers from the darkness. A synthesizer, like the ones in our demonHelms, layers the voice so it seems a dozen sewn together. The invisible Gold woman doesn’t even bother to use an accent. Fluent as I in their language, but disdainful of the fact and of the people to which she speaks. “You come with news.”

“I do, Sunborn.”

“Tell us of the ship you saw,” another voice says, this one a man. Less lofty, more playful. “You may look upon my face, little child.” Remaining on our knees, we glance up furtively from the ground to see two armored Golds deactivating their ghostCloaks. They stand close to us in the dark room. The temple flames dance over their metallic god faces. The man wears a cloak. The woman likely didn’t have time to don hers, so eager were they to attend us.

The woman plays Freya while the man is dressed as Loki. His metal visage like that of a wolf.

Animals can smell fear. Men can’t. But those who kill enough can feel the vibrations in that particular silence. I feel them now from Sefi. The gods are true, she’s thinking. Ragnar was wrong. We were wrong. But she says nothing.

“It bled fire across the sky,” I murmur, head down. “Making great roars and crashed upon the mountainside.”

“You don’t say,” Loki murmurs. “And is it in one piece, or lots of little itty-bitty pieces, child?”

It is risky saying we saw a ship fall. But I knew no other ruse that would draw the Golds away from their holo screens in the middle of a rebellion, past their security systems and Gray garrison to meet me here. They’re Peerless Scarred, trapped here on the frontier as their world shifts beyond these walls. Once, this post would have been considered glamorous, but now it’s a form of banishment. I

wonder about what crimes or failings brought these Peerless Scarred here to babysit the wastes.

“The bones of the ships litter the mountain, Sunborn,” I explain, looking back at the ground so they do not insist I take away the riding mask that covers my face. The more groveling I do, the less curious I am. “Broken like a fishing boat laid upon mid-stern by a Breaker. Splinters of iron, splinters of men upon the snow.”

I think that’s a metaphor the Obsidians would use. It passes muster.

“Splinters of men?” Loki asks.

“Yes. Men. But with soft faces. Like seal skin in firelight.” Too many metaphors. “But eyes like hot coals.” I can’t stop. How else did Ragnar speak? “Hair like the gold of your face.” The Golds’ metal masks remain impassive, communicating to one another over the coms in their helmets.

“Our priest claims you have a weapon of the gods,” Freya says leadingly. Sefi produces the seal cloth once more, body tense, wondering when I will dispel the magic of the gods as I promised. Her hands tremble. Both Golds move closer, the slight ripple of pulseShields evident. I touch them and I fry. They have no fear. Not here on their mountain. Closer. Closer, you dumb bastards.

“Why did you not take this to the leader of your tribe?” Loki asks.

“Or to your shaman?” Freya adds suspiciously. “The Way of Stains is long and hard. To climb all

this way just to bring this to us…”

“We are wanderers,” Mustang says as Freya bends to look at the blade. “No tribe. No shaman.”

“Are you, little one?” Loki asks above Sefi, voice hardening. “Then why are there blue tattoos of

the Valkyrie on the ankles of that one?” His hand drifts to the razor on his hip.

“She was cast out from her tribe,” I say. “For breaking an oath.”

“Is it marked with a house Sigil?” Loki asks Freya. She reaches for the weapon’s hilt in front of me when Mustang laughs bitterly, drawing her attention.

“On the handle, my goodlady,” Mustang says in Aureate lingo, remaining on her knees as she strips

off her mask and tosses it onto the ground. “You will find a Pegasus in flight. Sigil of the House Andromedus.”

“Augustus?” Loki sputters, knowing Mustang’s face.

I use their surprise and slip forward. By the time they turn back to me I’ve snatched the razor out from under Freya’s hand and activated the toggle so it is the curved question-mark shape that has burned on hillsides, been cut into foreheads, and killed so many of their kind. The same they would have seen on the holoDisplays as I made my speech.

“Reaper…” Freya manages, pulling up her pulseFist. I hack her arm off at the shoulder, then her

head at the jaw before hurling my razor straight into Loki’s chest. The blade slows as it hits his pulseShield, frozen in midair for half a second as the shield resists. Finally the blade slips through.

But it’s slowed and the armor beneath holds. It embeds itself in the pulseArmor plate. Harmless. Until Mustang steps forward and swivel-kicks the hilt of the razor. The blade punches through the armor and impales Loki.

Both gods fall. Freya to her back. Loki to his knees.

“Mask off,” Mustang barks as Loki’s hands wrap around the blade sticking from his chest. She slaps his hands away from his datapad. “No coms.” Holiday strips the razor from the man’s hip as his pulseShield shorts. I take Freya’s razor from her corpse. “Do it.”

Sefi and her Valkyrie stare wide-eyed from their knees at the blood pooling beneath Freya. I remove Freya’s helmet from her head to reveal the mangled face of a middle-aged Peerless Scarred

woman with dark skin and almond-shaped eyes.

“Does this look like a god to you, Sefi?” I ask.

Mustang snorts a dark little laugh when Loki removes his mask. “Darrow. Look who it is. Proctor

Mercury!” The pudgy, cherub-faced Peerless Scarred who endeavored to recruit me into his own house at the Institute before Fitchner stole me away. When last we saw each other five years ago, he tried to duel me in the halls as my Howlers stormed Olympus. I shot him in the chest with a pulseFist.

He smiled all the while. He’s not smiling now as he stares at the metal in his chest. I feel a pang of pity.

“Proctor Mercury,” I say. “You have to be the least lucky Gold I’ve ever met. Two mountains lost to

a Red.”

“Reaper. You have to be shitting me.” He shudders in pain and laughs at his own surprise. “But you’re on Phobos.”

“Negative, my goodman. That’d be my diminutive psychotic accomplice.”

“Gorydammit. Gorydammit.” He looks at the blade in his chest, grunting as he sits on his haunches

and wheezes out breaths. “How…did we not see you…”

“Quicksilver hacked your system,” I say.

“You’re…here for…” His voice trails away as he looks at the Valkyrie rising to gather around the

dead god. Sefi bends over Freya. The pale warrior traces her fingers over the woman’s face as Holiday strips off her armor.

“For them,” I say. “Bloodydamn right I am.”

“Oh, goryhell. Augustus,” our old proctor says turning to Mustang with a bitter laugh. “You can’t

do this…it’s madness. They’re monsters! You can’t let them out! Do you know what will happen?

Don’t open Pandora’s box.”

“If they are monsters, we should ask ourselves who made them that way,” Mustang says in the Obsidian tongue so Sefi can understand. “Now, what are the codes to Asgard’s armory?”

He spits. “You’ll have to ask nicer than that, traitor.”

Mustang is deadly cold. “Treason is a matter of the date, Proctor. Must I ask again? Or must I begin trimming your ears?”

Beside Freya’s body, Sefi dips her finger into the blood and tastes it.

“Just blood,” I say, crouching beside her. “Not ichor. Not divine. Human.”

I hold out Freya’s razor for her to take. She flinches at the idea, but forces herself to wrap her fingers around the hilt, hand trembling, expecting to be struck by lightning or electrocuted like men are who touch pulseShields with bare hands. “This button here retracts the whip. This one controls the shape.”

She cradles the weapon reverently and looks up at me, furious eyes asking which shape she should

conjure. I nod to mine, trying to build kinship with her. And I do. If only in this martial way. Slowly her razor takes the shape of the slingBlade. The skin on my arm prickles as the Valkyrie laugh to one another. Vibrating with excitement, they pull their own axes and long knives and look at me and Mustang.

“There’s five gods left,” Mustang says. “How’d you ladies like to meet them?”

We drag the bodies of seven gods, two dead and five captured, behind us. I wear the armor of Odin.

Sefi the armor of Tyr. Mustang the armor of Freya. All of which we pillaged from the armory on Asgard. Blood smears the stone of the hall. Feet slide and stumble as Sefi jerks one of the living Golds behind us by his hair. Her Valkyrie drag the rest.

We returned to the Spires on a shuttle stolen from Asgard, which we slipped through silently, using Loki’s codes to access the armory and drape ourselves in the panoply of war before seeking the remaining gods out. Two we found in Asgard’s mainframe leading a team of Greens attempting to purge Quicksilver ’s hackers from their system. Sefi with her new razor claimed the arm of one and beat the other unconscious, terrifying the Greens, two of which held up fists to me as silent acknowledgment of their sympathy for the Rising. With their help, we locked the others in a storage room as the two Green sympathizers connected me directly with Quicksilver ’s operations room.

We didn’t reach Quicksilver himself, but Victra relayed news that Sevro’s gamble worked. A little

more than a third of the Martian defense fleet is under control of the Sons of Ares and Quicksilver ’s Blues. Thousands of the Society’s best troops are trapped on Phobos, but the Jackal is hitting back hard, taking personal command of the remaining ships and recalling forces from the Kuiper Belt to

reinforce his depleted fleet.

The rest of the Golds we located through the station’s biometric sensor map in the lower levels.

One practicing with her razor in the training rooms. She saw my face and dropped her blade in surrender. Reputation is a fine thing sometimes. The remaining two Golds we found in the monitoring bays, shifting back and forth between the cameras. They’d only just discovered that the footage was archival from three years before.

Now, all our Gold captives wear magnetic handcuffs and are tied together by long pieces of rope

from Sefi’s griffin, all gagged, all glancing around at the Spires like we’ve dragged them into the mouth of hell itself.

Obsidians of the Spires flock to us in the halls. Rushing from the deeper levels to see the strange sight. Most would only have seen their gods from a distance, as flashes of gold streaking over the spring snow at mach three. Now we come among them, our pulseShields distorting the air, our shuttle’s pulse cannons melting open the huge iron doors which closed off the griffin hangar from the cold. The doors melt inward like the door on the Pax melted when Ragnar offered me Stains.

This is not how I intended to bring the Obsidians into my fold. I wanted to use words, to come humbly, in seal skin, not armor, putting myself at the mercy of the Obsidians to show Alia that I valued her people’s worth. Valued their judgment, and was willing to put myself in peril for them. I

wanted to do as I preached. But even Ragnar knew that was a fool’s errand. And now I don’t have time for intransigence or superstition. If Alia will not follow me to war, I’ll drag her to it, kicking, screaming, like Lorn before her. For Obsidian to hear, I must speak in the only language they understand.

Might.

Sefi fires her pulseFist past my head at the doors leading to her mother ’s sanctuary. The ancient iron buckles. Bent and twisted hinges screaming. We flow past an army of prostrate giants who clutter the cavernous halls to either side. So much strength made frail by superstition. Once, when they were stronger, they tried to cross the seas. Built mighty knarrs to carry explorers across the oceans to seek out new lands. The Carved monsters the Golds sowed in the oceans destroyed each boat, or the Golds themselves melted them from the sea. The last boat sailed more than two hundred years ago.

We come upon Alia as she sits in council with her famed seven and seventy warchiefs. They turn to

us now amidst large, smoking braziers. Huge warriors, with white hair to the waists, arms bare, iron buckles on waists, huge axes on backs. Black eyes and rings studded with precious metals glitter in the low light. But they’re too stunned by the sight of the three-hundred-year-old iron doors suddenly glowing orange and melting away to speak or kneel. I draw up before them, still dragging the corpses of the Golds behind me. Mustang and Sefi hurl their captured Golds forward, kicking out their legs.

They sprawl on the ground and stumble to their feet, attempting beyond all reason to maintain some dignity here surrounded by giant savages in the smoky room.

“Are these gods?” I roar through my helmet.

No one answers. Alia moves slowly through the parting warlords.

“Am I a god?” I snarl, this time removing my helmet. Mustang and Sefi remove theirs. Alia sees

her daughter in the armor of her gods and she flinches back. Fear whispers over her lips. She stops near the five bound and gagged Golds as they finally find their feet. They stand over two meters tall.

But, even bent and old as Alia is, she’s a head taller than I. She stares down at the men and women who were once her gods before looking up at her last daughter. “Child, what have you done?”

Sefi says nothing. But the razor on her arm slithers, drawing the eyes of every Obsidian. One of their greatest daughters carries the weapon of the gods.

“Queen of the Valkyrie,” I say as if we had never met. “My name is Darrow of Lykos. Blood brother of Ragnar Volarus. I am the warlord of the Rising, which rages against the false Golden gods.

You have all seen the fires that rage around the moon. Those are caused by my army. Beyond this land in the abyss, a war rages between slaves and masters. I came here with the greatest son of the Spires to bring the truth to your people.” I wave to the Golds, who stare at me with the hatred of an entire race.

“They struck him down before he could tell you that you are slaves. The prophets he sent told it true.

Your gods are false.”

“Liar!” someone screams. A shaman with crooked knees and a bent spine. He babbles something else but Sefi cuts him off.

“Liar?” Mustang hisses. “I have stood upon Asgard. I have seen where your immortals sleep.

Where your immortals rut and eat and shit.” She twists the pulseFist in her hand. “This is not magic.”

She activates her gravBoots, floating in the air. The Obsidians stare at her in wonder. “This is not magic. This is a tool.”

Alia sees what I have done. What I have shown her daughter and what I have now brought her people whether she wants it or not. We’re the same cruel kind. I told myself I would be better than this.

I failed that promise. But noble vanity can shine another day. This is war. And victory is the only nobility. I think that is what Mustang was looking for here with Obsidians. She was more afraid that I would allow my own idealism to let something loose that I could not control. But now she sees the

compromise I’m willing to make. The strength I’m willing to exert. That’s what she wants in an ally as much as she wants a builder. Someone wise enough to adapt.

And Alia? She sees how her people look at me. How they look at my blade, still stained with the

blood of the gods, as though it were some holy relic. And she also knows I could have made her complicit in the Golds’ crime. Could have accused her before her people. But instead I offer her a chance to pretend she is just learning this for the first time.

Lamentably, my friend’s mother does not take the offer. She steps toward Sefi. “I carried you, birthed you, nursed you, and this is my reward? Treason? Blasphemy? You are no Valkyrie.” She looks at her people. “These are lies. Free our gods from the usurpers. Kill blasphemers. Kill them all!”

But before the first warchief can even draw their blade, Sefi steps forward, lifts the razor I gave her, and decapitates her mother. Alia’s head falls to the floor, eyes still open. The woman’s huge body remains standing. Slowly it tips backward and thuds to the ground. Sefi stands over the fallen queen and spits on the corpse. Turning back to her people, she speaks for the first time in twenty-five years.

“She knew.”

Her voice is deep and dangerous. Hardly rising above the level of a whisper. Yet it owns the room

as surely as if she roared. Then tall Sefi turns away from the Golds, walks back through the gaggle of warchiefs to the griffin throne where her mother ’s fabled warchest has sat unopened for ten years.

There, she bends and takes the lock in her hands and roars gutturally, like a beast, as she pulls at the rusted iron till her fingers bleed and the iron crumbles apart. She throws the old lock to the ground and rips open the chest, pulling free the old black scarabSkin her mother used to conquer the White Coast. Pulling free the red scale cloak of the dragon her mother slew in her youth. And hoisting high her great, black, double-headed axe of war called Throgmir. The rippling gleam of duroSteel catches in the light. She stalks back to the Golds, dragging the axe on the ground behind her.

She motions to Holiday, who removes the gags from the mouths of the Golds.

“Are you a god?” Sefi asks, her tone so different from her brother ’s. Direct and cold as a winter storm.

“You will burn, mortal,” the man says. “If you do not release us, Aesir will come from the sky and rain fire upon your land. This you know. We will wipe your seed from the worlds. We will melt the

ice. We are the mighty. We are the Peerless Scarred. And this millennium belongs to…”

Sefi slays him there with one giant swing, cleaving him nearly in twain. Blood sprays my face. I do not flinch. I knew what would happen if I brought them here. I also know there’s no way I could keep them as prisoners. The Golds built this myth, but now it must die. Mustang moves closer to me, her sign that she accepts this. But her eyes are fixed on the Golds. She will remember this slaughter for the rest of her life. It is her duty and mine to make it mean something.

Part of me mourns the death of these Golds. Even as they die, they make these other taller mortals still seem so much lesser. They stand straight, proud. They do not quake in their last moment in this smoky room so far from their estates where they rode horses as children and learned the poetry of

Keats and the wonder of Beethoven and Volmer. A middle-aged Gold woman looks back at Mustang.

“You let them do this to us? I fought for your father. I met you when you were a girl. And I fell in his Rain,” she glares at me and begins to recite with a loud clear voice the Aeschylus poem the Peerless Scarred use at times as a battle cry:

Up and lead the dance of Fate!

Lift the song that mortals hate…

Tell what rights are ours on earth,

Over all of human birth

Swift of foot to avenge are we!

He whose hands are clean and pure.

Naught our wrath to dread hath he.

One by one they fall to Sefi’s axe. Until only the woman is left, her head held high, her words ringing clear. She looks me in the eye, as sure of her right as I am of mine. “Sacrifice. Obedience.

Prosperity.” Sefi’s axe sweeps through the air and the last god of Asgard flops to the stone floor.

Over her body towers the blood-spattered Princess of the Valkyrie, terrible and ancient with her justice. She bends and removes the tongue of the female Gold with a crooked knife. Mustang shifts beside me in discomfort.

Sefi smiles, noticing Mustang’s unease, and walks away from us to her dead mother. She takes the

woman’s crown and ascends the steps to the throne, bloody axe in one hand, glass crown in the other, and sits inside the rib cage of the griffin where she crowns herself.

“Children of the Spires, the Reaper has called us to join him in his war against false gods. Do the Valkyrie answer?”

In reply, her Valkyrie raise their blue-feathered axes high above their heads to drone out the Obsidian chant of death. Even the warchiefs of fallen Alia join. It seems the ocean itself crashes through the stone hallways of the Spires, and I feel the drums of war beating inside, chilling my blood.

“Then ride, Hjelda, Tharul, Veni, and Hroga. Ride Faldir and Wrona and Bolga to the tribes of the

Blood Coast, to the Bleaking Moor, the Shattered Spine and the Witch Pass. Ride to kin and enemy alike and tell them Sefi speaks. Tell them Ragnar ’s prophets told true. Asgard has fallen. The gods are dead. The old oaths have been broken. And tell all who will hear: the Valkyrie ride to war.”

As the world swirls around us and the ecstasy of war fills the air, Mustang and I look at one another with darkened eyes and wonder just what we have unleashed.

For seven days after the death of Ragnar, I travel across the ice with Sefi, speaking to the male tribes of the Broken Spine, to the Blooded Braves of the North Coast, to women who wear the horns of rams and stand watch over the Witch Pass. Flying in gravBoots beside the Valkyrie, we come bringing the news of the fall of Asgard.

It is…dramatic.

Sefi and a score of her Valkyrie have begun training with Holiday and me to learn to use the gravBoots and pulse weapons. They’re clumsy at first. One flew into the side of a mountain at mach 2.

But when thirty land with their headdresses kicking in the wind, the left of their faces painted with the blue handprint of Sefi the Quiet and the right with the slingBlade of the Reaper, folks tend to listen.

We take the lion’s share of Obsidian leaders to the conquered mountain and let them walk the halls where their gods ate and slept, and show them the cold, preserved corpses of the slain Golds. In seeing their gods slain, most, even those who knew tacitly of their true condition as slaves, accepted our olive branch. Those who did not, who denounced us, were overcome by their own people. Two

warchiefs hurled themselves from the mountain in shame. Another opened her veins with a dagger and bleeds out on the floor of the green houses.

And one, a particularly psychotic little woman, watched with great malevolence as we took her to

the mountain’s datahub where three Greens informed her of a planned coup against her rule, showing her video of the conspiracy. We loaned her a razor, a flight back home, and two days later she added twenty thousand warriors to my cause.

Sometimes I encounter Ragnar ’s legend. It has spread among the tribes. They call him the Speaker.

The one who came with truth, who brought the prophets and sacrificed his life for his people. But with my friend’s legend grows my own. My slingBlade’s symbol burns across mountainsides to greet

me and the Valkyrie when we fly to meet with new tribes. They call me the Morning Star. That star by which griffin-riders and travelers navigate the wastes in the dark months of winter. The last star that disappears when daylight returns in the spring.

It is my legend that begins to bind them. Not their sense of kinship with one another. These clans have warred for generations. But I have no sordid history here. Unlike Sefi or the other great Obsidian warlords, I am their untouched field of snow. Their blank slate on which they can project whatever disparate dreams they have. As Mustang says, I am something new, and in this old world steeped in legends, ancestors, and what came before, something new is something very special.

Yet despite our progress with gathering the clans, the difficulty we face is massive. Not only must we keep the fractious Obsidians from killing one another in honor duels, but many of the clans have

accepted my invitation for relocation. Hundreds of thousands of them must be brought from their homes in the Antarctic to the tunnels of the Reds so they are beyond the reach of Gold bombardment, which will come when the Golds discover what has transpired here. All this while keeping the Jackal dumb and blind to our maneuvers. From Asgard, Mustang has led the counterintelligence efforts, with the help of Quicksilver ’s hackers to mask our presence and project reports consistent with those filed in previous weeks to the Board of Quality Control HQ in Agea.

With no way to move them without someone noticing, Mustang, a Gold aristocrat, has conceived

the most audacious plan in the history of the Sons of Ares. One massive troop movement, utilizing

thousands of shuttles and freighters from Quicksilver ’s mercantile fleet and the Sons of Ares navy to move the population of the pole in twelve hours. A thousand ships skimming over the Southern Sea,

burning helium to set down on the ice before Obsidian cities and lower their ramps to the hundreds and thousands of giants swaddled in fur and iron who will fill their hulls with the old, the sick, the warriors, the children, and the fetid stink of animals. Then, under the cover of the Sons of Ares ships, the population will be dispersed underground and many of the warriors to our military ships in orbit.

I do not think I know another person in the worlds who can organize it as fast as she does.

—

On the eighth day after the fall of Asgard, I depart with Sefi, Mustang, Holiday, and Cassius to join Sevro in overseeing the final preparations for the migration. The Valkyrie bring Ragnar with us on the flight, wrapping his frozen body in rough cloth and clutching him close in terror as our ship cruises just beneath the speed of sound five meters from the surface of the ocean. They watch in awe as we enter the tunnels of Mars through one of the many Sons’ subterranean access points. This one an old mining colony in a southern mountain range. Sons lookouts in heavy winter jackets and balaclavas salute with their fists in the air as we pass into the tunnel.

Half a day of subterranean flying later, we arrive at Tinos. It is a hub of ship activity. Hundreds cluttering the stalactite docks, taxiing through the air. And it seems the whole city watches our shuttle as it passes through the traffic to land in its stalactite hangar, knowing it bears not just me and our new Obsidian allies, but the broken Shield of Tinos. Their weeping faces blur past. Already rumors swirl through the refugees. The Obsidians are coming. Not just to fight, but to live in Tinos. To eat their food. To share their already-crowded streets. Dancer says the place is a powder keg about to erupt. I can’t say I disagree.

The disposition of the Sons of Ares is dour. They gather in silence as my ship’s landing ramp unfurls. I go first down the ramp. Sevro waits beside Dancer and Mickey. He slams me into a hug. The beginnings of a goatee mark his stoic face. He holds his shoulders as square as he can, as if those bony things alone could hold up the hopes of the thousands of Sons of Ares who fill the docking bay to see the Shield of Tinos brought back to his adopted home.

“Where is he?” Sevro asks thickly.

I look back to my shuttle as Sefi and her Valkyrie carry Ragnar down the ramp. The Howlers are

the first to greet them. Clown saying a respectful word to Sefi as Sevro steps past me to stand before the Valkyrie.

“Welcome to Tinos,” he says to the Valkyrie in Nagal. “I am Sevro au Barca, blood brother to Ragnar Volarus. These are his other brothers and sisters.” He motions to the Howlers, all of whom

wear their wolfcloaks. Sevro produces Ragnar ’s bear cloak. “He wore this to battle. With your permission, I’d like him to wear it now.”

“You were brother to Ragnar. You are brother to me,” Sefi says. She clicks her tongue and her

Valkyrie pass stewardship of her brother ’s body to Sevro. Mustang glances my way. Sefi’s generosity strikes me as a promising sign. If she were a covetous creature, she would have kept his body in her lands and given him an Obsidian funeral pyre before burying his ashes in the ice. Instead, she told me she knows where his true home lies: with those who fought beside him, who helped him come back to

his people.

Mustang moves closer beside me as the Howlers drape Ragnar ’s cloak over his body and carry him through the crowd. The Sons part for them. Hands reach to touch Ragnar. “Look,” Mustang says,

nodding to the thin black ribbons that the Sons have tied into their beards and hair. Her hand finds my smallest finger. A small squeeze sends me back to the woods where she saved me. Making me feel warm even as we watch Sevro leave the hangar with Ragnar ’s body. “Go.” She nudges me his direction. “Dancer and I have a conference scheduled with Quicksilver and Victra.”

“She needs a guard,” I tell Dancer. “Sons you trust.”

“I’ll be fine,” Mustang says, rolling her eyes. “I survived the Obsidians.”

“She’ll have the Pitvipers,” Dancer says, examining Mustang without the kindness I’m used to seeing in his eyes. Ragnar ’s death has taken the spirit out of him today. He seems older as he waves Narol over and nods to the shuttle. “The Bellona on board?”

“Holiday’s got him in the passenger cabin. His neck’s still torn up so he’ll need Virany to take a look at him. Be discreet about it. Give him a private room.”

“Private? Place is crammed, Darrow. Captains don’t even get private rooms.”

“He’s got intel. You want him shot before he can give it to us?” I ask.

“Is that why you kept him alive?” Dancer looks at Mustang skeptically, as if she’s already compromising my decisions. Little does he know she’d have let Cassius die more readily than I ever would. Dancer sighs when I don’t relent. “He’ll be safe. On my word.”

“Find me later,” Mustang says as I depart.

—

I find Sevro slumped over Ragnar in Mickey’s laboratory. It’s a thing to hear of a friend’s death, it’s another to see the shadow of what they’ve left behind. I hated the sight of my father ’s old workgloves after he died. Mother was too practical to throw them away. Said we couldn’t afford to. So I did it myself one day and she boxed my ears and made me bring them back.

The scent of death is growing stronger from Ragnar.

The cold preserved him in his native land, but Tinos has been suffering power outages and refrigeration units play second zither to the water purifiers and air reclamation systems in the city beneath. Soon Mickey will embalm him and make preparations for the burial Ragnar asked for.

I sit in silence for half an hour, waiting for Sevro to speak. I don’t want to be here. Don’t want to see Ragnar dead. Don’t want to linger in the sadness. Yet I stay for Sevro.

My armpits stink. I’m tired. The scanty tray of food Dio brought me is untouched except the biscuit I chew numbly and think how ridiculous Ragnar looks on the table. He’s too big for it, feet hanging off the edge.

Despite the smell, Ragnar is peaceful in death. Ribbons red as winter berries nestled in the white of his beard. Two razors rest in his hands, which are folded across his bare chest. The tattoos are darker in death, covering his arms, his chest and neck. The matching skull he gave me and Sevro seems so

sad. Telling its story even though the man who wears it is dead. Everything is more vivid except the wound. It’s innocuous and thin as a snake’s smile along his side. The holes Aja made in his stomach

seem so small. How could such little things take so large a soul from this world?

I wish he were here.

The people need him more than ever.

Sevro’s eyes are glassy as his fingers glide over the tattoos on Ragnar ’s white face. “He wanted to go to Venus, you know,” he murmurs, voice soft as a child’s. Softer than I’ve ever heard it before. “I showed him one of the holoVids of a catamaran there. Second he put the goggles on I’d never seen

anyone smile like that. Like he’d found heaven and realized he didn’t have to die to go there. He’d sneak in and borrow my holo gear in the middle of the night till one day I just gave him the damn thing. Things are four hundred credits, max. Know what he did to repay me?” I don’t. Sevro holds up his right hand to show me his skull tattoo. “He made me his brother.” He gives Ragnar a slow, affectionate punch to the jaw. “But the big fat idiot had to run at Aja instead of away from her.”

The Valkyrie still scour the wastes in vain for signs of the Olympic Knight. Her trail goes deeper into the crevasse before it is covered by the frozen black blood of some creature. I hope something found her and took her to its cave in the ice to finish her slowly. But I doubt it. A woman like that doesn’t just fade. Whatever Aja’s fate, if she’s alive she’ll find a way to contact the Sovereign or the Jackal.

“It was my fault,” I say. “My shit plan to take Aja out.”

“She killed Quinn. Helped kill my father,” Sevro mutters. “Killed dozens of us when you were locked up. Wasn’t your bad. You’d have lost me too if I were there. Even Rags couldn’t have kept me from having a go at her.” Sevro rolls his knuckles along the edge of the table, leaving little white creases in the skin. “Always trying to protect us.”

“The Shield of Tinos,” I say.

“The Shield of Tinos,” he echoes, voice catching. “He loved the name.”

“I know.”

“I think he’d always thought himself a blade before he met us. We let him be what he wanted. A protector.” He wipes his eyes and backs away from Ragnar. “Anyway. The little princeling is alive.”

I nod. “We brought him on the shuttle.”

“Pity. Two millimeters.” He pinches his fingers together, illustrating how narrowly Mustang’s arrow missed Cassius’s jugular. After Sefi dispatched riders to the tribes, I took her and many of her warlords to Asgard aboard the shuttle to see the fortress there. I brought Cassius along as well and Asgard’s Yellows saved his life. “Why are you keeping him alive, Darrow? If you think he’s going to thank you for your generosity, you’ve got another thing coming.”

“I couldn’t just let him die.”

“He killed my father.”

“I know.”

“Give me a reason.”

“Maybe I think the world would be a better place with him in it,” I say tentatively. “So many people have used him, lied to him, betrayed him. All that’s defined him. It’s not fair. I want him to have a chance to decide for himself what kind of person he wants to be.”

“None of us get to be what we want to be,” Sevro mutters. “Least not for long.”

“Isn’t that why we fight? Isn’t that what you just said about Ragnar? He was made a blade but we

gave him a chance to be a shield. Cassius deserves that same chance.”

“Shithead.” He rolls his eyes. “Just ’cause you’re right doesn’t mean you’re right. Anyway, eagles are hated as much as the lions. Someone here’s still going to try to pop him. And your girl too.”

“She’s got the Pitvipers with her. And she’s not my girl.”

“Whatever you say.” He collapses into one of Mickey’s stolen leather chairs and rubs a hand along

his Mohawk’s ridge. “Wish she’d taken the Telemanuses with her. If she had, you’d have slagged Aja hard.” He closes his eyes and leans his head back. “Oh, hey,” he remembers suddenly, “I got you some ships.”

“I saw that. Thank you,” I say.

“Finally.” He snorts a laugh. “A sign we’re making a difference. Twenty torchships, ten frigates, four destroyers, a dreadnought. You should have seen it, Reap. Martian Navy pumped Phobos full of

Legionaries, emptied their ships and we just stole their assault shuttles, flew them back with the right codes, and landed them in their hangars. My squad didn’t even fire a shot. Quicksilver ’s boys even hacked the PA systems in the navy ships. They all heard your speech. It was mutiny almost before we got on board, Reds, Oranges, Blues, even Grays. It won’t work again, the PA system bit. Golds will learn to cut themselves off the network so we can’t hack in, but it got ’em hard this week. When we unite with the Pax and Orion’s other ships we’ll have a real force to slag the Pixies.”

It’s moments like this that I know I’m not alone. Damn the world, so long as I have my mangy little guardian angel. If only I was so good at guarding him as he is at guarding me. Once again he’s done all I could ask and more. As I marshaled the Obsidians, he ripped a gaping hole in the Jackal’s defense fleet. Crippled a fourth of them. Forced the rest to retreat toward the outer moon of Deimos to regroup with the Jackal’s reserves and await additional reinforcements from Ceres and the Can.

For a brief hour, he held naval supremacy over all of Mars’s southern hemisphere. The Goblin King. Then he was forced to retreat to hunker close into Phobos, where his men eliminated the trapped loyalist marines by using Rollo’s squads to cut off their air and vent them into space. I’m under no delusion. The Jackal won’t let us have the moon. He might not care about its people, but he can’t destroy the station’s helium refineries. So another assault will come soon. It won’t affect my war effort, but the Jackal will get tied down fighting the populace that we’ve woken. It’ll drain his resources without trapping me. Worst possible situation for him.

“What are you thinking?” I ask Sevro.

His eyes are lost in the ceiling. “I’m wondering how long till it’s us on the slab. And wondering why it’s gotta be us on the line. You see vids and hear stories and you think of the regular people. The ones who got a chance at life on Ganymede or Earth or Luna. Can’t help but be jealous.”

“You don’t think you’ve gotten a chance to live?” I ask.

“Not proper,” he says.

“What’s proper?” I ask.

He crosses his arms like he’s a kid in a fort looking down at the real world and wondering why it

can’t be as magical as he is. “I dunno. Something far away from being a Peerless Scarred. Maybe a

Pixie or even a happy midColor. I just want something to look at and say, that’s safe, that’s mine, and no one is going to try and take it. A house. Kids.”

“Kids?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I never thought of it till Pops died. Till they took you.”

“Till Victra you mean…,” I say with a wink. “Nice goatee by the way.”

“Shut up,” he says.

“Have you two—” He cuts me off, changing the subject.

“But it’d be nice to just be Sevro. To have Pops. To have known my mother.” He laughs at himself,

harder than he should. “Sometimes I think about going back to the beginning and wondering what would have happened if Pops had known the Board was coming. If he’d escaped with my mother, with

me.”

I nod. “I always think about how life would have been like if Eo never died. The children I would

have had. What I would have named them.” I smile distantly. “I would have grown old. Watched Eo grow old. And I would have loved her more with each new scar, with each new year even as she learned to despise our small life. I would have said farewell to my mother, maybe my brother, sister.

And if I was lucky, one day when Eo’s hair turned gray, before it began to fall out and she began to cough, I would hear the shift of rocks over my head on the drill and that would be it. She would have sent me to the incinerators and sprinkled my ashes, then our children would have done the same. And the clans would say we were happy and good and raised bloodydamn fine children. And when those

children died, our memory would fade, and when their children died, it would be swept away like the dust we become, down and away to the long tunnels. It would have been a small life,” I say with a shrug, “but I would have liked it. And every day I ask myself if I was given the chance to go back, to be blind, to have all that back, would I?”

“And what’s the answer?”

“All this time I thought this was for Eo. I drove straight on like an arrow because I had that one perfect idea in my head. She wanted this. I loved her. So I’ll make her dream real. But that’s bullshit. I was living half a bloodydamn life. Making an idol out a woman, making her a martyr, something instead of someone. Pretending she was perfect.” I run my hand through my greasy hair. “She wouldn’t have wanted that. And when I looked out at the Hollows, I just knew, I mean I guess I realized as I was talking that justice isn’t about fixing the past, it’s about fixing the future. We’re not fighting for the dead. We’re fighting for the living. And for those who aren’t yet born. For a chance to have children. That’s what has to come after this, otherwise what’s the point?”

Sevro sits silently thinking over what I’ve said.

“You and I keep looking for light in the darkness, expecting it to appear. But it already has.” I touch his shoulder. “We’re it, boyo. Broken and cracked and stupid as we are, we’re the light, and we’re spreading.”

I run into Victra in the hall as I leave Sevro with Ragnar. It’s late. Past midnight and she’s only just arrived to help coordinate the final preparations between Quicksilver ’s security, the Sons, and our new navy, which I’ve given her command of until we’re reunited with Orion. It’s another decision that peeves Dancer. He’s frightened I’m bestowing too much power on Golds who might have ulterior motives. Mustang’s presence could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

“How’s he doing?” Victra asks regarding Sevro.

“Better,” I say. “But he’ll be glad to see you.”

She smiles at that, despite herself, and I think she actually blushes. It’s a new look for her. “Where are you going?” she asks.

“To make sure Mustang and Dancer haven’t torn each other ’s heads off yet.”

“Noble. But too late.”

“What happened? Is everything prime?”

“That’s relative, I suppose. Dancer ’s in the warroom ranting about Gold superiority complexes, arrogance, etc. Never heard him curse so much. I didn’t stay long, and he didn’t say much. You know he’s not that sweet on me.”

“And you’re not that sweet on Mustang,” I say.

“I’ve nothing against the girl. She reminds me of home. Especially considering the new allies you’ve brought us. I just think she’s a duplicitous little filly. That’s all. But it’s the best horses that’ll buck you right off. Don’t you think?”

I laugh. “Not sure if that was innuendo or not.”

“It was.”

“Do you know where she is?”

Victra makes a sad little face. “Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t know everything, darling.” She moves past me to join Sevro, patting my head as she goes. “But I’d check the commissary on level

three if I were you.”

“Where are you going?” I ask.

She smiles mischievously. “Mind your own business.”

—

I find Mustang in the commissary hunched over a metal bottle with Uncle Narol, Kavax, and Daxo. A

dozen members of the Pitvipers lounge at the other tables, smoking burners and eavesdropping

intently to Mustang, who sits with her boots up on the table, using Daxo as a backrest, as she tells a story about the Institute to the other two occupants of the table. I couldn’t see them when I first entered, due to the bulk of the Telemanuses but my brother and mother sit listening to the tale.

“…And so of course I shout for Pax.”

“That’s my son,” Kavax reminds my mother.

“…and he comes on over the hill leading a column of my housemembers. Darrow and Cassius feel

the ground shaking and go screaming into the loch where they clung together for hours, shivering and turning blue.”

“Blue!” Kavax says with a huge childish laugh that makes the Sons eavesdropping unable to keep

their composure. Even if he’s a Gold, it’s difficult not to like Kavax au Telemanus. “Blue as blueberries, Sophocles. Isn’t that right? Give him another, Deanna.” My mother rolls a jelly bean across the table to Sophocles, who waits eagerly beside the bottle to gobble it up.

“What’s going on here?” I ask. Eying the bottle my brother ’s refilling the Golds’ mugs with.

“We’re getting stories from the lass,” Narol says gruffly through a cloud of burner smoke. “Have a dram.” Mustang wrinkles her nose at the smoke.

“Such an awful habit, Narol,” she says.

Kieran looks pointedly at our mother. “I’ve been telling both of them that for years.”

“Hello, Darrow,” Daxo says, standing to clasp my arm. “Pleasure to see you without a razor in your hand this time.” He pokes me in the shoulder with a longer finger.

“Daxo. Sorry about all that. I think I owe you a bit of a debt for taking care of my people.”

“Orion did most of the minding there,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. He returns gracefully to his seat. My brother ’s captivated by the man and the angels tattooed on his head. And how could he not be? Daxo’s twice his weight, immaculate, and more well-mannered than even a Rose like Matteo, who

I hear is recovering well on one of Quicksilver ’s ships, and is delighted to know I’m alive.

“What happened with Dancer?” I ask Mustang.

Her cheeks are flushed and she laughs at the question. “Well, I don’t think he very much likes me.

But don’t worry, he’ll come around.”

“Are you drunk?” I ask with a laugh.

“A little. Catch up.” She swivels her legs down and puts her feet on the ground to clear a space on the bench beside her. “I was just getting to the part where you wrestled Pax in the mud.” My mother watches me quietly, a little smile on her lips as she knows the panic that must be going through me right now. Too shocked at seeing two halves of my life collide without my supervision, I sit down uneasily and listen to Mustang finish the story. With all that’s transpired, I’d forgotten the charm of this woman. Her easy, light nature. How she draws others in by making them feel important, by saying their names and letting them feel seen. She holds my uncle and brother in a spell, one reinforced by the Telemanus’ admiration for her. I try not to blush when my mother catches me admiring Mustang.

“But enough of the Institute,” Mustang says after she’s explained in detail how Pax and I dueled in front of her castle. “Deanna, you promised me a story about Darrow as a boy.”

“How about the gas pocket one,” Narol says. “If only Loran was here…”

“No not that one,” Kieran says. “What about…”

“I have one,” mother says, cutting off the men. She begins slow, words sluggish through the lisp.

“When Darrow was small, maybe three or four, his father gave him an old watch his father had given him. This brass thing, with a wheel instead of digital numbers. Do you remember it?” I nod. “It was beautiful. Your favorite possession. And years later, after his father had died, Kieran here got sick with a cough. Meds were always in short ration in the mines. So you’d have to get them from Gamma

or Gray, but each has a price. I didn’t know how I was going to pay, and then Darrow comes home one day with the medicine, won’t say how he got it. But several weeks later I saw one of the Grays checking the time with that old watch.”

I look at my hands, but I feel Mustang’s eyes on me.

“I think it’s time for bed,” mother says. Narol and Kieran protest until she clears her throat and stands. She kisses me on the head, lingering longer than she usually would. Then she touches Mustang’s shoulder and limps from the room with my brother ’s help. Narol’s men go with them.

“She’s quite a woman,” Kavax says. “And she loves you very much.”

“I’m glad you met like this,” I say to him, then to Mustang, “Especially you.”

“How’s that?” she asks.

“Without me trying to control it. Like last time.”

“Yes, I would say that was quite the disaster,” Daxo says.

“This feels right,” I say.

“I agree. It does.” Mustang smiles. “I wish I could introduce you to mine. You would have liked her better than my father.”

I return the smile, wondering what this is between us. Dreading the idea of having to define it.

There’s an easiness that comes with being around her. But I’m afraid to ask her what she’s thinking.

Afraid to broach the subject for fear of shattering this little illusion of peace. Kavax awkwardly clears his throat, dissolving the moment.

“So the meeting with Dancer didn’t go well?” I ask.

“I fear not,” Daxo says. “The resentment he harbors runs deep. Theodora was more forthcoming,

but Dancer was…intransigent. Militantly so.”

“He’s a cypher,” Mustang clarifies, taking another drink and wincing at the quality of proof.

“Hoarding information from us. Wouldn’t share anything I didn’t already know.”

“I doubt you were very forthcoming yourself.”

She grimaces. “No, but I’m used to making others compensate for me. He’s smart. And that means

it’s going to be difficult to convince him that I want our alliance to work.”

“So you do.”

“Thanks to your family, yes,” she says. “You want to build a world for them. For your mother, for

Kieran’s children. I understand that. When…I chose to negotiate with the Sovereign I was trying to do the same thing. Protecting those I love.” The Telemanuses share a glance. Her finger traces dents in the table. “I couldn’t see a world without war unless we capitulated.” Her eyes find my Sigil-barren hands, searching the naked flesh there as if it held the secret to all our futures. Maybe it does. “But I can see one now.”

“You really mean that?” I ask. “All of you?”

“Family is all that matters,” Kavax says. “And you are family.” Daxo sets an elegant hand on my shoulder. Even Sophocles seems to understand the gravity of the moment, resting his chin on my foot beneath the table. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes.” I nod gratefully “I am.”

With a tight smile, Mustang pulls a piece of paper from her pocket and slides it to me. “That’s Orion’s com frequency. I don’t know where they are. Probably in the belt. I gave them a simple directive: cause chaos. From what I’ve heard from Gold chatter, they’re doing just that. We’ll need her and her ships if we’re going take down Octavia.”

“Thank you,” I say to them all. “I didn’t think we’d ever have a second chance.”

“Nor did we,” Daxo replies. “Let me be blunt with you, Darrow: there is a matter of concern. It’s your plan. Your design to use clawDrills to allow the Obsidians to invade key cities around Mars…we think it is a mistake.”

“Really?” I ask. “Why? We need to wrest the Jackal’s centers of power away, gain traction with the populace.”

“Father and I do not have the same faith in the Obsidians you seem to have,” Daxo says carefully.

“Your intentions will matter little if you let them loose on the populace of Mars.”

“Barbarians,” Kavax says. “They are barbarians.”

“Ragnar ’s sister…”

“Is not Ragnar,” Daxo replies. “She’s a stranger. And after hearing what she did to the Gold prisoners…we can’t in good conscience join our forces to a plan that would unleash the Obsidians on the cities of Mars. The Arcos women won’t either.”

“I see.”

“And there’s another reason we think the plan flawed,” Mustang says. “It doesn’t deal properly with my brother. Give my brother credit. He’s smarter than you. Smarter than me.” Even Kavax does not

contest this. “Look what he’s done. If he knows how to play the game, if he knows the variables, he’ll sit in a corner for days running through the possible moves, countermoves, externalities, and outcomes. That’s his idea of fun. Before Claudius’s death and before we were sent to live in different homes, he’d stay inside, rain or shine, and piece together puzzles, create mazes on paper and beg me over and over again to try and find the center when I came back from riding with Father or fishing with Claudius and Pax. And when I did find the center, he would laugh and say what a clever sister he had. I never thought much of it until I saw him afterward one day alone in his room when he thought no one was watching. Shrieking and hitting himself in the face, punishing himself for losing to me.

“The next time he asked me to find the center of a maze I pretended I couldn’t, but he wasn’t fooled.

It was like he knew I’d seen him in his room. Not the introverted, but pleasant frail boy everyone else saw. The real him.” She gathers her breath, shrugging away the thought. “He made me finish the