Morning Star (Red Rising #3) - Pierce Brown Page 0,1

about South Pacifica. I want to know what pranks they pulled on their mother. If they had a dog, a home in the city, the country…

The gravLift wheezes to a halt.

The door light flashes. And the thick metal doors that separate us from a platoon of the Jackal’s elite hiss open. Two glowing stunGrenades zip in and clamp to the walls. Beep. Beep. And Holiday pushes the device’s button. A deep implosion of sound ruptures the elevator ’s quiet as an invisible electromagnetic pulse ripples out from the spherical EMP at our feet. The grenades fizzle dead. Lights go black in the elevator, outside it. And all the Grays waiting beyond the door with their hi-tech pulse weapons, and all the Obsidians in their heavy armor with their electronic joints and helmets and air filtration units, are slapped in the face with the Middle Ages.

But Holiday and Trigg’s antiques still work. They stalk forward out of the elevator into the stone hall, hunched over their weapons like evil gargoyles. It’s slaughter. Two expert marksmen firing short bursts of archaic slugs at point-blank range into squads of defenseless Grays in wide halls.

There is no cover to take. Flashes in the corridor. Gigantic sounds of high-powered rifles. Rattling my teeth. I freeze in the elevator till Holiday shouts at me, and I rush after Trigg, hauling Victra behind me.

Three Obsidians go down as Holiday lobs an antique grenade. Whooomph. A hole opens in the ceiling. Plaster rains. Dust. Chairs and Coppers fall through the hole from the room above, crashing down into the fray. I hyperventilate. A man’s head kicks back. Body spins to the ground. A Gray flees for cover down a stone hall. Holiday shoots her in the spine. She sprawls like a child slipping on ice.

Movement everywhere. An Obsidian charges from the side.

I fire the pistol, aim horrible. The bullets skitter off his armor. Two hundred kilograms of man raises an ionAxe, its battery dead, but edge still keen. He ululates his kind’s throaty war chant and red mist geysers from his helmet. Bullet through the skull-helm’s eye socket. His body pitches forward, slides. Nearly knocks me off my feet. Trigg’s already moving to the next target, driving metal into men as patiently as a craftsman driving nails into wood. No passion there. No art. Just training and physics.

“Reaper, move your ass!” Holiday shouts. She jerks me down a hall away from the chaos as Trigg

follows, hurling a sticky grenade onto the thigh of an unarmored Gold who dodges four of his rifle shots. Whoomph. Bone and meat to mist.

The siblings reload on the run and I just try not to faint or fall. “Right in fifty paces, then up the stairs!” Holiday snaps. “We’ve got seven minutes.”

The halls are eerily quiet. No sirens. No lights. No whir of heated air through the vents. Just the clunk of our boots and distant shouts and the cracking of my joints and the rasping of lungs. We pass a window. Ships, black and dead, fall through the sky. Small fires burn where others have landed.

Trams grind to a halt on magnetic rails. The only lights that still run are from the two most distant peaks. Reinforcements with tech will soon respond, but they won’t know what caused this. Where to

look. With camera systems and biometric scanners dead, Cassius and Aja won’t be able to find us.

That might save our lives.

We run up the stairs. A cramp eats into my right calf and hamstring. I grunt and almost fall. Holiday takes most of my weight. Her powerful neck pressing up against my armpit. Three Grays spot us from behind at the bottom of the long marble stairs. Shoving me aside, she takes two down with her rifle, but the third fires back. Bullets chewing into marble.

“They’ve got gas backups,” Holiday barks. “Gotta move. Gotta move.”

Two more rights, past several lowColors, who stare at me, mouths agape, through marble halls with towering ceilings and Greek statues, past galleries where the Jackal keeps his stolen artifacts and once showed me Hancock’s declaration and the preserved head of the last ruler of the American Empire.

Muscles burning. Side splitting.

“Here!” Holiday finally cries.

We reach a service door in a side hall and push through into cold daylight. The wind swallows me.

Icy teeth ripping through my jumpsuit as the four of us stumble out onto a metal walkway along the side of the Jackal’s fortress. To our right, the stone of the mountain surrenders to the modern metal-and-glass edifice above. It’s a thousand-meter drop to our left. Snow swirls around the mountain’s face. Wind howls. We push forward along the walkway till it circles part of the fortress and links with a paved bridge that extends from the mountain to an abandoned landing platform like a skeletal arm holding out a concrete dinner plate covered in snow.

“Four minutes,” Holiday hollers as she helps me struggle across the bridge toward the landing pad.

At the end, she dumps me onto the ground. I set Victra down beside me. A hard skin of ice makes the concrete slick and smoky gray. Snowdrifts gather around the waist-high concrete wall that fences in the circular landing pad from the thousand-meter drop.

“Got eighty in the long mag, six in the relic,” he calls to his sister. “Then I’m out.”

“Got twelve,” she says, tossing down a small canister. It pops and green smoke swirls into the air.

“Gotta hold the bridge.”

“I’ve got six mines.”

“Plant them.”

He sprints back down the bridge. At the end of it is a set of closed blast doors, much larger than the maintenance path we took from the side. Shivering and snowblind, I pull Victra close to me against that wall to escape the wind. Snowflakes gather atop the black rain gear she wears. Fluttering down like the ash that fell when Cassius, Sevro, and I burned Minerva’s citadel and stole their cook. “We’ll be fine,” I tell her. “We’ll make it.” I peer over the short concrete wall to the city beneath. It’s oddly peaceful. All her sounds, all her troubles silenced by the EMP. I watch a flake of snow larger than the rest drift on the wind and come to rest on my knuckle.

How did I get here? A boy of the mines now a shivering fallen warlord staring down at a darkened city, hoping against everything that he can go home. I close my eyes, wishing I was with my friends, my family.

“Three minutes,” Holiday says behind me. Her gloved hand touches my shoulder protectively as she looks to the sky for our enemies. “Three minutes and we’re out of here. Just three minutes.”

I wish I could believe her, but the snow has stopped falling.

I squint up past Holiday as an iridescent defensive shield ripples into place over the seven peaks of Attica, cutting us off from the clouds and the sky beyond. The shield generator must have been out of the EMP’s blast range. No help will come to us from beyond it.

“Trigg! Get back here!” she shouts as he plants the last mine on the bridge.

A single gunshot shatters the winter morning. Echoing brittle and cold. More follow. Crack. Crack.

Crack. Snow kicks around him. He sprints back as Holiday leans to cover for him, her rifle rocking her shoulder. Straining, I push myself up. My eyes ache as they try to focus in the sun’s light. Concrete explodes in front of me. Shards rip into my face. I duck down, shivering in fear. The Jackal’s men have found their backup weapons.

I peer out again. Through squinting lids, I see Trigg pinned down halfway to us, exchanging gunfire with a squad of Grays carrying gas-powered rifles. They pour out of the fortress’s blast doors, now opened at the opposite end of the bridge. Two go down. Two more step near a proximity

mine and disappear in a cloud of smoke as Trigg shoots it at their feet. Holiday picks another off just as Trigg staggers back into cover, hit with a round in the shoulder. He jams a stimshot into his thigh and pops back up. A bullet slaps into the concrete in front of me, kicks up into Holiday to impact her ribs just under the armpit of her body armor with a meaty thud.

She spins down. Bullets force me to crouch beside her. Concrete rains. She spits blood and there’s a wet, phlegmy echoing to her breath.

“It’s in my lung,” she gasps as she fumbles with a stimshot from her leg pouch. Were the circuits of her armor not fried, meds would inject automatically. But she has to crack open the case and pull a dose manually. I help, pulling free one of the micro-syringes and injecting her in the neck. Her pupils dilate and her breath slows as the narcotic drifts through her blood. Beside me, Victra’s eyes are closed.

The gunfire stops. Carefully, I peek out. The Jackal’s Grays hide behind concrete walls and pylons across the bridge, some sixty meters away. Trigg reloads. The wind is the only sound. Something’s

wrong. I search the sky, fearing the quiet. A Gold is coming. I can feel it in the battle’s pulse.

“Trigg!” I shout till my body shudders. “Run!”

Holiday sees the look on my face. She struggles up, wheezing in pain as Trigg abandons his cover,

boots slipping on the ice-slicked bridge. He falls and gains his feet, scrambling toward us, terrified.

Too late. Behind him, Aja au Grimmus rips out of the fortress’s door, past the Grays, past the Obsidians who lurk in the shadows. She’s in her black formal jacket. Her long legs reel Trigg in now.

It’s one of the saddest sights I’ve ever seen.

I fire my pistol. Holiday unloads her rifle. We hit nothing but air. Aja sidesteps, twists, and, when Trigg is ten paces from us, spears him through the torso with her razor. Metal glistens wetly from his sternum. Shock widens his eyes. His mouth makes a quiet gasp. And he screams as he’s hauled into the air. Pried upward by Aja’s razor like a twitching pond frog on the end of a makeshift spear.

“Trigg…” Holiday whispers.

I stumble forward, toward Aja, pulling my razor, but Holiday jerks me back behind the wall as bullets from the distant Grays rip into the concrete around us. Her blood melts the snow under her.

“Don’t be stupid,” she snarls, dragging me to the ground with the last of her strength. “We can’t help him.”

“He’s your brother!”

“He’s not the mission. You are.”

“Darrow!” Aja calls from the bridge. Holiday peers out where Aja stands with her brother, her face bloodless and quiet. The knight holds Trigg up on the end of her razor with one hand. Trigg wriggles on the blade. Sliding down it toward her grip. “My goodman, the time for hiding behind others is over. Come out.”

“Don’t,” Holiday murmurs.

“Come out,” Aja says. And she tosses Trigg off her blade over the side of the bridge. He falls two hundred meters before his body splits against a granite ledge below.

Holiday makes a sick choking sound. She brings up her empty rifle and pulls the trigger a dozen

times in Aja’s direction. Aja ducks before realizing Holiday’s weapon is empty. I pull Holiday down as a sniper ’s bullet aimed at her chest slams into her gun, shattering it and kicking it from her grip, mangling a finger. We sit shivering, backs to concrete, Victra between us.

“I’m sorry,” I manage. She doesn’t hear me. Her hands shake worse than mine. No tears in her distant eyes. No color in her lined face.

“They’ll come,” she says after a hollow moment. Her eyes following the green smoke. “They have

to.” Blood leaks through her clothing and out the corner of her mouth before freezing halfway down her neck. She grips her boot knife and tries to rise, but her body is done. Breaths wet and thick, smelling like copper. “They’ll come.”

“What is the plan?” I ask her. Her eyes close. I shake her. “How will they come?”

She nods to the edge of the landing pad. “Listen.”

“Darrow!” Cassius’s voice calls over the wind. He’s joined Aja. “Darrow of Lykos, come out!” His

rich voice is unfit for this moment. Too regal and high and untouched by the sadness that swallows us.

I wipe the tears from my eyes. “You must decide what you are in the end, Darrow. Will you come out like a man? Or must we dig you out like a rat from a cave?”

The anger tightens my chest, but I don’t want to stand. Once I would have, when I wore the armor

of Gold and thought I would tower over Eo’s killer and reveal my true self as his cities burned and their Color fell. But that armor is gone. That mask of the Reaper gnawed away by doubt and darkness.

I am just a boy, and I shiver and cower and hide from my enemy because I know the price of failure, and I am so very afraid.

But I will not let them take me. I will not be their victim, and I will not let Victra fall into their hands again.

“Slag this,” I say. I grab Holiday’s collar and Victra’s hand and, eyes flashing with the strain, blinded by the sun on the snow, face numb, I drag them with all my strength from our hiding place

across the landing pad to the far edge where the wind roars.

There’s silence from my enemies.

The sight I must make—a tottering, withered form, dragging my friends, sunken eyes, face like that of a starving old demon, bearded and ridiculous—is pitiful. Twenty meters behind me, the two Olympic Knights stand imperious on the bridge where it meets the landing pad, flanked by more than fifty Grays and Obsidians who have come from the citadel doors behind him. Aja’s silver razor drips blood. But it’s not her weapon. It’s Lorn’s, the one she took from his corpse. My toes throb inside my wet slippers.

Their men seem so tiny against the face of the vast mountain fortress. Their metal guns so petty and simple. I look to the right, off the bridge. Kilometers away, a flight of soldiers rises from a distant mountain peak where the EMP did not reach. They bank toward us through a low cloud layer. A ripWing follows.

“Darrow,” Cassius calls to me as he walks forward with Aja off the bridge onto the pad. “You cannot escape.” He watches me, eyes unreadable. “The shield is up. Sky blocked. No ships can come

from beyond to retrieve you.” He looks to the green smoke swirling from the canister on the landing pad into the winter air. “Accept your fate.”

The wind howls between us, carrying flakes of snow stripped from the mountain.

“Dissection?” I ask. “Is that what you think I deserve?”

“You’re a terrorist. What rights you had, you’ve given up.”

“Rights?” I snarl over Victra and Holiday. “To pull my wife’s feet? To watch my father die?” I try to spit, but it sticks to my lips. “What gives you the right to take them?”

“There’s no debate here. You are a terrorist, and you must be brought to justice.”

“Then why are you talking with me, you bloodydamn hypocrite?”

“Because honor still matters. Honor is what echoes. ” His father ’s words. But they are as empty on his lips as they feel in my ears. This war has taken everything from him. I see in his eyes how broken he is. How terribly hard he is trying to be his father ’s son. If he could, he would choose to be back by the campfire we made in the highlands of the Institute. He would return to the days of glory when life was simple, when friends seemed true. But wishing for the past doesn’t clean the blood from either of our hands.

I listen to the groaning wind from the valley. My heels reach the end of the landing pad. There’s nothing but air behind me. Air and the shifting topography of a dark city on the valley floor two thousand meters below.

“He’s going to jump,” Aja says quietly to Cassius. “We need the body.”

“Darrow…don’t,” Cassius says, but his eyes are telling me to jump, telling me to take this way out instead of surrendering, instead of going to Luna to be peeled apart. This is the noble way. He’s putting his cape over me again.

I hate him for it.

“You think you’re honorable?” I hiss. “You think you’re good? Who is left that you love? Who do

you fight for?” Anger creeps into my words. “You are alone, Cassius. But I am not. Not when I faced your brother in the Passage. Not when I hid among you. Not when I lay in darkness. Not even now.” I grip Holiday’s unconscious body as hard as I can, looping my fingers inside the straps of her body armor. Clutch Victra’s hand. My heels scrape the concrete’s edge. “Listen to the wind, Cassius. Listen to the bloodydamn wind.”

The two knights tilt their heads. And still they do not understand the strange groaning sound that drifts up from the valley floor, because how would a son and daughter of Gold ever know the sound

of a clawDrill gnawing through rock? How would they guess that my people would come not from

the sky, but from the heart of our planet?

“Goodbye, Cassius,” I say. “Expect me.” And I push off the ledge with both legs, flinging myself backward into open air, dragging Holiday and Victra into thin air.

We fall toward a molten eye in the center of the snow-covered city. There, among rows of manufacturing plants, buildings shiver and tip as the ground swells upward. Pipes crack and spin into the air. Steam hisses through ruptured asphalt. Gas explosions ripple out in a corona, threading lines of fire through streets that buckle and heave, as if Mars itself were stretching six stories high to give birth to some ancient leviathan. And then, when the ground and city can stretch no more, a clawDrill erupts out into the winter air—a titanic metal hand with molten fingers that steam and grasp and then vanish as the clawDrill sinks back into Mars, pulling half a city block with it.

We’re falling too fast.

Jumped too soon. I lose my grip on Victra.

Ground rushing up to us.

Then the air cracks with a sonic boom.

Then another. And another, till a whole chorus resounds out from the darkness of the clawDrill-carved tunnel as it gives birth to a small army. Two, twenty, fifty armored shapes in gravBoots scream up out of the tunnel toward us. To my left, my right. Painted blood-red, pouring pulsefire skyward behind us. My hair stands on end and I smell ozone. Superheated munitions ripple blue from friction as they tear through air molecules. Miniguns mounted on shoulders vomit death.

Amidst the rising Sons of Ares, a crimson, armored man with the spiked helmet of his father zips

forward and catches Victra seconds before she impacts on the roof of a skyscraper. The howling of

wolves babbles from his helmet’s speakers. It’s Ares himself. My best friend in all the worlds has not forgotten me. He has come with his legion of empire breakers and terrorists and renegades: the Howlers. A dozen metal men and women with black wolfcloaks kicking in the wind fly behind him.

The largest of them in pure white armor with blue handprints covering the chest and arms. His black cloak is stained with a red stripe down the middle. For a moment I think it’s Pax come back from the dead for me. But when the man catches me and Holiday, I see the glyphs drawn in the blue paint of the handprints. Glyphs from the south pole of Mars. It is Ragnar Volarus, prince of the Valkyrie Spires.

He tosses Holiday to another Howler and pushes me behind him so I can wrap my arms around his

neck, digging my fingers into the rivets of his armor. Then he banks through the smoking valley city toward the tunnel, shouting to me: “Hold fast, little brother.”

And he dives. Sevro to the left, clutching Victra, Howlers all around, their gravBoots screaming as we plummet into the darkness of the tunnel’s mouth. The enemy pursues. The sounds are horrible.

Screaming of wind. Rupture of rock as pulsefire rips into the walls behind us and weapons warble.

My jaw rattles against Ragnar ’s metal shoulder. His gravBoots vibrate at full burn. Bolts from the

armor dig into my ribs. The battery pack above his tailbone slams into my groin as we weave and dart through pitch black. I’m riding a metal shark deeper and deeper into the belly of an angry sea. My ears pop. Wind whistles. A pebble slams into my forehead. Blood streams down my face, stinging my

eyes. The only light the glowing of boots and the flash of weapons.

The skin of my right shoulder flares with pain. Pulsefire from our pursuers misses me by inches.

Still, my skin bubbles and smokes, lighting my jumpsuit’s sleeve on fire. The wind kills the flames.

But the pulsefire rips past again and boils into the Son’s gravBoots just ahead of me, melting the man’s legs into a single chunk of molten metal. He jerks in the air, slamming into the ceiling, where his body crumples. Helmet ripping off and spinning straight toward me.

—

Red light throbs through my eyelids. There’s smoke in the air. Meaty. Stings the back of the throat. Fat tissue charred and crispy. Chest hot with pain. A swamp of screams and howls and cries for mother all around. And something else. The sound of bumblebees in my ears. Someone’s above me. See them in

the red light as I open my eyes. Screaming into my face. Pressing a mask to my mouth. A damp wolfcloak dangles from a metal shoulder, tickling my neck. Other hands touch mine. The world vibrates, tilts.

“Starboard! Starboard!” someone screams in the distance, as if underwater.

We’re on a ship. I’m surrounded by dying men. Burned, twisted husks of armor. Smaller men atop

them, bent like vultures, saws glowing in their hands as they peel the armor away, trying to free those dying of their burns inside. But the armor ’s melted tight. A hand touches mine. A boy lying beside me.

Eyes wide. Armor blackened. The skin of his cheeks is young and smooth beneath the soot and blood.

His mouth not yet creased by smiles. His breaths come shorter, quicker. He mouths my name.

And he’s gone.

I’m alone, far away from the horror, standing weightless and clean on a road that smells of moss and earth. My feet touch the ground, but I cannot feel it underfoot. To either side stretches the grass of wind-beaten moors. The sky flashes with lightning. My hands are without Sigils and drift along the cobbled wall that meanders on ahead to either side. When did I start walking? Somewhere in the distance, wood smoke rises. I follow the road, but I feel I have no choice. A voice calls to me from beyond a hill.

Oh tomb, O marriage chamber, hollowed out

house that will watch forever, where I go.

To my own people, who are mostly there;

Persephone has taken them to her.

Last of them all, ill-fated past the rest,

shall I descend, before my course is run.

Still when I get there I may hope to find

I come as a dear friend to my dear father

To you, my mother, and my brother too.

All three of you have known my hand in death

I wash your bodies…

It is my uncle’s voice. Is this the Vale? Is this the road I walk before death? It can’t be. In the Vale there is no pain, but my body aches. My legs sting. Still I hear his voice ahead of me, drawing me through the mist. The man who taught me to dance after my father died, who guarded me and sent me

to Ares. Who died himself in a mineshaft and dwells now in the Vale.

I thought it would be Eo who greeted me. Or my father. Not Narol.

“Keep reading,” another voice whispers. “Dr. Virany said he can hear us. He just has to find his way back.” Even as I walk, I feel a bed under me. The air around cold and crisp in my lungs. The sheets soft and clean. The muscles in my legs twitch. Feels like little bees are stinging them. And with each sting, the dream world fades and I slide back into my body.

“Well, if we’re gonna read to the squabber, might as well be something Red. Not this poncy Violet

shit.”

“Dancer said this was one of his favorites.”

My eyes open. I’m in a bed. White sheets, IVs going into my arms. Under the sheets, I touch the ant-

sized nodes that have been stuck to my legs to channel electrical current through my muscles to combat atrophy. The room’s a cave. Scientific equipment, machines, and terraria litter it.

It was Uncle Narol I heard in the dream after all. But he’s not in the Vale. He’s alive. He sits at my bedside, squinting down at one of Mickey’s old books. He’s grizzled and wiry, even for a Red.

Callused hands trying to be gentle with the frail paper pages. He’s bald now, and deeply sunburned on his forearms and the back of his neck. Still looks like he was cobbled together out of cracked old leather. He’ll be forty-one now. Looks older. More savage. A brooding danger to him, lent teeth by the railgun in his thigh holster. A slingBlade has been sewn onto his black military jacket above a Society logo that’s been peeled off and inverted. Red at the top. Gold the foundation.

The man’s been at war.

Beside him sits my mother. A bent, fragile woman since her stroke. How many times did I imagine

the Jackal standing over her, pliers in hand? She’s been safe the whole time. Her crooked fingers weave needle and thread through tattered socks, patching the holes. They don’t move like they used to.

Age and infirmity have slowed her. Her broken body is not what she is on the inside. There she stands tall as any Gold, broad as any Obsidian.

Watching her sit there breathing quietly, intent on her task, I want to protect her more than anything else in the world. I want to heal her. Give her all she never had. I love her so much, I don’t know what to say. What to do that can ever show her how much she means to me. “Mother…” I whisper.

They look up. Narol frozen in his chair. My mother setting a hand on his and rising slowly to my

bedside. Her steps slow, wary. “Hello, child.”

She stands above me, overwhelming me with the love in her eyes. My hand is almost larger than

her head, but I gently touch her face as if to prove to myself she is real. I trace the crow’s-feet from her eyes to the gray hair at her temples. As a boy, I did not like her as much as I liked father. She would hit me at times. She would weep alone and pretend nothing was wrong. And now all I want is to listen to her hum as she cooks. All I want are those still nights where we had peace and I was a child.

I want the time back.

“I’m sorry…,” I find myself saying. “I’m so sorry…”

She kisses my forehead and rocks her head against mine. She smells like rust and sweat and oil.

Like home. She tells me I am her son. There is nothing to apologize for. I am safe. I am loved. The family is here. Kieran, Leanna, their children. Waiting to see me. I sob uncontrollably, sharing all the pain my solitude forced me to hoard. The tears a deeper language than my tongue can afford. I’m exhausted by the time she kisses me again on the head and pulls back. Narol comes to her side and puts a hand on my arm. “Narol…”

“Hello, you little bastard,” he says roughly. “Still your father ’s son, eh?”

“I thought you were dead,” I say.

“Nah. Death chewed on me a bit. Then spat my bloody ass back out. Said there was killing that needed doin’ and some wild blood of mine that needed savin’.” He grins down at me. That old scar on his lips joined by two new ones.

“We’ve been waiting for you to wake up,” Mother says. “It’s been two days since they brought you

back in the shuttle.”

I can still taste the smoke from burned flesh in the back of my throat.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“Tinos. The city of Ares.”

“Tinos…,” I whisper. I sit up quickly. “Sevro…Ragnar…”

“They’re alive,” Narol grunts, pushing me back down. “Don’t rip out your tubes and resFlesh.

Took Dr. Virany hours to thread you up after that bloody mess of an escape. Boneriders were supposed to be in EMP radius. They weren’t. They ripped us to pieces in the tunnels. Ragnar ’s the only reason you’re living.”

“You were there?”

“Who do you think lead the drillteam that punched up into Attica? It was Lykos blood, Lambda and

Omicron.”

“And what about Victra?”

“Easy, boy.” He sets his hand on my chest to stop me from trying to get up again. “She’s with the

doc. Same for the Gray. They’re alive. Getting patched.”

“You need to check me, Narol. Tell the doctors to check me for radiation trackers. For implants.

They might have let me go on purpose, to find Tinos….I need to see Sevro.”

“Oy! I said easy,” Narol says sharply. “We checked you. Two implants were in you. But both fried

in the EMP. You weren’t tracked. And Ares ain’t here. He’s still out with the Howlers. Came back just to deliver the wounded and scarf down grub.” There were almost a dozen wolfcloaks. So he’s recruited. Thistle betrayed us, but Vixus mentioned Pebble and Clown. Wonder if Screwface is with them too.

“Ares is always on the move,” mother says.

“Lots to do. Only one Ares,” Narol replies defensively. “They’re still out looking for survivors.

They’ll be back soon. By morning, luck holds.” My mother shoots him a harsh look and he shuts up.

I lean back in the bed, overwhelmed by speaking to them. By seeing them. I can barely form sentences. So much to say. So much unfamiliar emotion running through me. All I end up doing is sitting there, breathing fast. My mother ’s love fills the room, but still I feel the darkness moving beyond this moment. Pressing in on this family I thought I lost and now fear I cannot protect. My enemies are too great. Too many. And I too weak. I shake my head, running my thumb over her knuckles.

“I thought I would never see you again.”

“Yet here you are.” Somehow she makes it sound cold. So like my mother to be the one with dry

eyes when both the men can barely speak. I always wondered how I survived the Institute. It damn well wasn’t because of my father. He was a gentle man. Mother is the spine in me. The iron. And I clutch her hand as if such a simple gesture could say all that.

A light knock comes at the door. Dancer pokes his head in. Devilishly handsome as ever, he’s one

of the only Reds alive who makes old age look good. I can hear his foot dragging slightly behind him in the hall. Both my mother and uncle nod to him in deference. Narol steps aside respectfully as he approaches my bedside, but my mother stays put. “This Helldiver ’s not done yet, it would seem.”

Dancer grips my hand. “But you gave us a hell of a scare.”

“It’s bloodydamn good to see you, Dancer.”

“And you, boy. And you.”

“Thank you. For taking care of them.” I nod to my mother and uncle. “For helping Sevro…”

“It’s what family is for,” he says. “How are you?”

“My chest hurts. And everything else.”

He laughs lightly. “It should. Virany says that crank the Nakamuras gave you almost killed you. You had a heart attack.”

“Dancer, how did the Jackal know? Every day I’ve wondered. Picked it apart. The clues I left him.

Did I give myself up?”

“It wasn’t you,” Dancer says. “It was Harmony.”

“Harmony…” I whisper. “She wouldn’t…she hates Gold.” But even as I say it, I know how reckless

her hate is. How vengeful she must have felt after I did not detonate the bomb she gave me to kill the Sovereign and the others on Luna.

“She thinks we’ve sold out the rebellion,” Dancer says. “That we’re compromising too much. She

told the Jackal who you were.”

“He knew when I was in his office. When I gave him the gift…”

He nods tiredly. “Your presence proved her claims. So the Jackal let us rescue her and the others.

We brought her back to base, and an hour before his kill squads came, she disappeared.”

“Fitchner is dead because of her. He gave her a purpose…I understand how she could betray me,

but him? Ares?”

“She found out he was a Gold. Then she gave him up. Must have given the Jackal the base’s coordinates.” Ares was her hero. Her god. After her children died in the mines he gave her a reason to live, a reason to fight. And then she discovered he was the enemy, and she got him killed. It crushes me to think that’s why he died.

Dancer surveys me quietly. It’s clear I’m not what he expected. Mother and Narol watch him almost

as carefully as they watch me, deducing the same.

“I know I’m not what I was,” I say slowly.

“No, boy. You’ve been through hell. It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

He exchanges a look with my mother. “You’re sure?”

“He needs to know. Tell him,” she says. Narol nods too.

Dancer hesitates still. He looks for a chair. Narol rushes to pull one out for him and set it near the bed. Dancer nods his thanks and then leans over me, making a steeple of his fingers. “Darrow, you’ve gone too long with people hiding things from you. So I want to be very transparent from here forward. Until five days ago, we thought you were dead.”

“I was close enough.”

“No. No, I mean we stopped looking for you nine months ago.”

My mother ’s hand tightens on mine.

“Three months after you were captured, the Golds executed you on the HC for treason. They dragged a boy identical to you out to the steps of the citadel in Agea and read off your crimes.

Pretending you were still a Gold. We tried to free you. But it was a trap. We lost thousands of men.”

His eyes drift over my lips, my hair. “He had your eyes, your scars, your bloodydamn face. And we

had to watch as the Jackal cut off your head and destroyed your obelisk on Mars Field.”

I stare at them, not fully comprehending.

“We grieved for you, child,” Mother says, voice thin. “The whole clan, city. I led the Fading Dirge myself and we buried your boots in the deeptunnels beyond Tinos.”

Narol crosses his arms, trying to seal himself off from the memory. “He was just like you. Same

walk. Same face. Thought I had watched you die again.”

“It was likely a fleshMask or they Carved someone, or digital effects,” Dancer explains. “Doesn’t

matter now. The Jackal killed you as an Aureate. Not as a Red. Would have been foolish for them to reveal your identity. Would have handed us a tool. So instead you died just another Gold who thought he could be king. A warning.”

The Jackal promised he would hurt those I love. And now I see how deeply he has. My mother ’s

façade has broken. All the grief she’s kept inside thickens behind her eyes as she stares down at me.

Guilt straining her face.

“I gave up on you,” she says softly, voice cracking. “I gave up.”

“It’s not your fault,” I say. “You couldn’t have known.”

“Sevro did,” she says.

“He never stopped looking for you,” Dancer explains. “I thought he was mad. He said you weren’t

dead. That he could feel it. That he would know. I even asked him to give up the helm to someone else.

He was too reckless searching for you.”

“But the bastard found you,” Narol says.

“Aye,” Dancer replies. “He did. I was wrong in it. I should have believed in you. Believed in him.”

“How did you find me?”

“Theodora designed an operation.”

“She’s here?”

“Working for us in intelligence. Woman’s got contacts. Some of her informants in a Pearl Club caught word that the Olympic Knights were taking a package from Attica back to Luna for the Sovereign. Sevro believed you were that package, and he put a huge portion of our reserve resources behind this attack, burned two of our deep assets…”

As he speaks, I watch my mother stare distantly at a crackling lightbulb in the ceiling. What is this like for her? For a mother to see her child broken by other men? To see the pain written in scars on his skin, spoken in silences, in far-off looks. How many mothers have prayed to see their sons, their daughters return from war only to realize the war has kept them, the world has poisoned them, and

they’ll never be the same?

For nine months, Mother has grieved for me. Now she’s drowning in guilt for giving up and desperation in hearing the war swallow me again, knowing she’s helpless to stop it. In the past years, I’ve trampled over so many to get what I think I want. If this is my last chance at life, I want to do it right. I need to.

“…But now the real problem isn’t materiel, it’s manpower we need….”

“Dancer…stop,” I say.

“Stop?” He frowns in confusion, glancing at Narol. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. But I’ll talk with you in the morning about this.”

“The morning? Darrow, the world is shifting under your feet. We’ve lost control over the other Red factions. The Sons will not last the year. I have to give you a debriefing. We need you back….”

“Dancer, I am alive,” I say, thinking of all the questions I want to ask, about the war, my friends, how I was undone, about Mustang. But that can wait. “Do you even know how lucky I am? To be able

to see you all again in this world? I haven’t seen my brother or my sister in years. So tomorrow I’ll listen to your debriefing. Tomorrow the war can have me again. But tonight I belong to my family.”

—

I hear the children before we reach the door. I feel a guest in someone else’s dream. Unfit for the world of children. But I’ve little say in the matter as Mother pushes my wheelchair forward into a cramped dormitory cluttered with metal bunks, children, the smell of shampoo, and noise. Five of the children of my blood, fresh from the showers by the looks of their hair and the little sandals on the floor, are scrumming on one of the bunks, two taller nine-year-olds holding an alliance against two six-year-olds and a tiny little cherub of a girl who keeps head-butting the biggest boy in the leg. He

hasn’t yet noticed her. The sixth child in the room I remember from when I visited Mother in Lykos.

The little girl who couldn’t sleep. One of Kieran’s. She watches the other children over her glossy book of fables from another bunk and is the first to notice me.

“Pa,” she calls back, eyes wide. “Pa…”

Kieran bursts up from his game of dice with Leanna when he sees me. Leanna’s slower behind him.

“Darrow,” he says, rushing to me and stopping just before my wheelchair. He’s bearded now too. In

his mid-twenties. No slump to his shoulders like there used to be. His eyes radiate a goodness that I used to think made him a little foolish, now it just seems wildly brave. Remembering himself, he waves his children forward. “Reagan, Iro, children. Come meet my little brother. Come meet your uncle.”

The children line up awkwardly around him. A baby laughs from the back of the room and a young

mother rises from her bunk where she was breastfeeding the child. “Eo?” I whisper. The woman’s a

vision of the past. Small, face the shape of a heart. Her hair a thick, tangled mess. The sort that frizzes on humid days, like Eo’s did. But this is not Eo. Her eyes are smaller, her nose elfin. More delicacy here than fire. And this is a woman, not a girl like my wife was. Twenty years old now, by my count.

They all stare at me strangely.

Wondering if I am mad.

Except Dio, Eo’s sister, whose face splits with a smile.

“I’m sorry, Dio,” I say quickly. “You look…just like her.”

She doesn’t allow it to be awkward, hushing my apologies. Saying it’s the kindest thing I could have said. “And who’s that, then?” I ask of the baby she holds. The little girl’s hair is absurd. Rust red and bound together by a hair tie so it sticks straight up on top of her head in a little antenna. She watches me excitedly with her dark red eyes.

“This little thing?” Dio asks, coming closer to my chair. “Oh, this is someone I’ve been wanting to introduce to you since Deanna told us you were alive.” She looks lovingly to my brother. I feel a pang of jealousy. “This is our first. Would you like to hold her?”

“Hold her?” I say. “No…I’m…”

The girl’s pudgy little hands reach for me, and Dio pushes the girl into my lap before I can recoil.

The girl clings to my sweater, grunting as she turns and wriggles around till she’s seated according to her liking on my leg. She claps her hands together and laughs. Completely unaware of what I am. Of why my hands are so scarred. Delighted by the size of them and the Gold Sigils, she grabs my thumb and tries to bite it with her gums.

Her world is alien to the horrors I know. All the child sees is love. Her skin is pale and soft against mine. She’s made of clouds and I of stone. Her eyes large and bright like her mother ’s. Her demeanor and thin lips like Kieran’s. Were this another life, she might have been my child with Eo. My wife would have laughed to think it would be my brother and her sister together in the end and not us. We were a little storm that couldn’t last. But maybe Dio and Kieran will.

—

Long after the lights have dimmed throughout the complex to ease the burdens on the generators, I sit with my uncle and brother around the table in the back of the room, listening to Kieran tell me his new duties learning from Oranges how to service ripWings and shuttles. Dio went to bed long ago,

but she left me the baby, who now sleeps in my arms, shifting here and there as her dreams take her wherever they may.

“It’s really not that wretched here,” Kieran is saying. “Better than the stacks below. We have food.

Water showers. No more flushes! There’s a lake above us, they say. Bloodydamn dazzling stuff, the showers. Children love it.” He watches his children in the low light. Two to a bed, shifting quietly as they sleep. “What’s hard is not knowing what’ll be for them. Will they ever mine? Work in the webbery? I always thought they would. That I was passing something down, a mission, a craft. You

hear?” I nod. “I guess I wanted my sons to be helldivers. Like you. Like Pa. But…” He shrugs.

“There’s nothin’ to that now that you got eyes,” Uncle Narol says. “It’s a hollow life when you know you’re being stepped on.”

“Aye,” Kieran replies. “Die by thirty, so those folk can live to a hundred. It ain’t bloodydamn right.

I just want my children to have more than this, brother.” He stares at me intensely and I remember how my mother asked me what comes after revolution. What world are we making? It was what Mustang asked. Something Eo never considered. “They have to have more than this. And I love Ares

as much as anyone. I owe him my life. The lives of my children. But…” He shakes his head, wanting

to say more but feeling the weight of Narol’s eyes on him.

“Go on,” I say.

“I don’t know if he knows what comes next. That’s why I’m glad you’re back, little brother. I know you’ve got a plan. I know you can save us.”

He says it with so much faith, so much trust.

“Of course I’ve a plan,” I say, because I know it’s what he needs to hear. But as my brother contentedly refills his mug, my uncle catches my eye and I know he sees through the lie and we both feel the darkness pressing in.

It’s early morning as I sip coffee and eat a bowl of grain cereal my mother fetched me from the commissary. I’m not yet ready for crowds. Kieran and Leanna have already gone to work, so I sit with Dio and Mother as the children dress for school. It’s a good sign. You know a people have given up when they stop teaching their children. I finish my coffee. Mother pours me more.

“You took an entire pot?” I ask.

“The chef insisted. Tried to give me two.”

I sip from the cup. “It’s almost like the real thing.”

“It is the real thing,” Dio says. “There’s this pirate who sends us hijacked goods. Coffee’s from Earth, I think. Jamaca, they said.”

I don’t correct her.

“Oy!” a voice screams in the hallways. My mother jumps at the sound. “Reaper! Reaper! Come out

and play-e-ay!” There’s a crash in the hall and the sound of stomping boots.

“Remember, Deanna told us to knock,” says a thunderous voice.

“You are so annoying. Fine.” A polite knock comes at the door. “Tidings! It’s Uncle Sevro and the

Moderately Friendly Giant.”

My mother motions to one of my excited nieces. “Ella, do us kind.” Ella darts forward to open the

door for Sevro. He bursts through, scooping her up. She shrieks with joy. He’s in his undersuit, a black sweat-wicking fabric that soldiers wear under pulse armor. Sweat rings stain the armpits. His eyes dance as he sees me, and he tosses Ella roughly onto a bed and charges toward me, arms outstretched. A weird laugh escapes his chest, hatchet face split with a jagged grin. His hair a dirty, sweat-soaked Mohawk.

“Sevro, careful!” my mother says.

“Reap!” He slams into me, spinning my chair sideways, clacking my teeth together, as he half lifts me out of the chair, stronger than he was, smelling of tobacco and engine fuel and sweat. He half laughs, half cries like an excited dog into my chest. “I knew you were alive. I bloodydamn knew it.

Pixie bitches can’t fool me.” Pulling back, he looks down at me with a rickshaw grin. “You bloodydamn bastard.”

“Language!” my mother snaps.

I wince. “My ribs.”

“Oh, shit, sorry brotherman.” He lets me sink back into the chair, and kneels so we’re eye to eye. “I said it once. Now I’ll say it twice. If there’s two things in this world that can’t be killed, it’s the fungus

under my sack and the Reaper of bloodydamn Mars. Haha!”

“Sevro!”

“Sorry, Deanna. Sorry.”

I pull back from him. “Sevro. You smell…terrible.”

“I haven’t showered in five days,” he brags, grabbing his groin. “It’s a Sevro soup in here, boyo.”

He puts his hands on his hips. “You know, you look…erm…” He glances at my mother and tames his

tongue. “Bloody terrible.”

A shadow falls over the room as a man enters and blocks the overhead light near the door. The children cluster joyously around Ragnar so he can barely walk.

“Hello, Reaper,” he says over their shouts.

I greet Ragnar with a smile. His face is as impassive as ever. Tattooed and pale, callused from the wind of his arctic home, like the hide of a rhinoceros. His white beard is braided into four strands, and the hair on his head shaved except for a tail of white that is braided with red ribbons. The children are asking him if he’s brought them presents.

“Sevro.” I lean forward. “Your eyes…”

He leans in close. “Do you like ’em?” Buried in that squinting, sharp-angled face, his eyes are no longer that dirty shade of Gold, but are now as red as Martian soil. He pulls back his lids so I can better see. They’re not contacts. And the right is no longer bionic.

“Bloodydamn. Did you get Carved?”

“By the best in the business. Do you like ’em?”

“They’re bloodydamn marvelous. Fit you like a glove.”

He punches his hands together. “Glad you said that. Cuz they’re yours.”

I blanch. “What?”

“They’re yours.”

“My what?”

“Your eyes!”

“My eyes…”

“Did yon Friendly Giant drop you on your head in the rescue? Mickey had your eyes in a cryobox

at his joint in Yorkton—creepy place, by the by—when we raided it for supplies to bring back to Tinos to help the Rising. I figured you weren’t usin’ ’em, so…” He shrugs awkwardly. “So I asked if he’d put ’em in. You know. Bring us closer together. Something to remember you by. That’s not so

weird, right?”

“I told him it was odd,” Ragnar says. One of the girls is climbing his leg.

“Do you want the eyes back?” Sevro asks, suddenly worried. “I can give them back.”

“No!” I say. “It’s just I forgot how crazy you are.”

“Oh.” He laughs and slaps my shoulder. “Good. I thought it was something serious. So I’m prime

keeping them?”

“Finders keepers,” I say with a shrug.

“Deanna of Lykos, may we borrow your son for martial matters?” Ragnar asks my mother. “He has much to do. Many things to know.”

“Only if you return him in one piece. And you take some coffee with you. And bring these socks to

the laundry.” My mother pushes a bag of freshly patched socks into Ragnar ’s arms.

“As you wish.”

“What about the presents?” one of my nephews asks. “Didn’t you bring any?”

“I’ve got a present for you…” Sevro says.

“Sevro, no!” Dio and my mother shout.

“What?” He pulls out a bag. “It’s just candy this time.”

—

“…and that’s when Ragnar tripped over Pebble and fell out the back of the transport,” Sevro cackles.

“Like a dumbass.” He’s eating a candy bar over my head as he pushes my wheelchair recklessly through the stone corridor. He sprints fast again and hops on the back to coast till we swerve into the wall. I wince in pain. “So Ragnar falls straight into the sea. Thing was at full chop, man. Waves the size of torchships. So I dive in too, thinking he needs my help, just in time for this huge…I dunno what the hell you’d call it. Some Carved beasty…”

“Demon,” Ragnar says from behind. I hadn’t noticed him following. “It was a sea demon from the third level of Hel.”

“Sure.” Sevro guides me around a corner, clipping the wall hard enough to make me bite my tongue, and sending a cluster of Sons pilots scattering. They stare after me as we trundle on. “This sea”—he looks back at Ragnar—“demon apparently thinks Ragnar is a tasty-looking morsel, so he gobbles him up almost as soon as he hits the water. So I see this, and I’m laughing my ass off with Screwface, as one would because it’s bloodydamn hilarious, and you know how Screwface loves a good joke. But then the beasty dives. So I follow. And I’m chasing it, shooting my pulseFist at a bloodydamn sea”—he looks at Ragnar again—“demon as it swims to the bottom of the damn Thermic Sea. Pressure’s building. My suit’s wheezing. And I think I’m about to die, when suddenly Ragnar cuts his way out of the scaly bitch.” He leans close. “But guess where he came out? Come on. Guess.

Guess!”

“Sevro, did he come out the sea demon’s rectum?” I ask.

Sevro squeals with laughter. “He did! Right out the ass. Shot like a turd—” My chair rolls to a stop.

His voice cut short, followed by a thump and sliding sound. My wheelchair rolls forward again. I look back and see Ragnar pushing it innocently along. Sevro isn’t in the hallway behind us. I frown, wondering where he went, till he bursts out of a side passage.

“You! Troll!” Sevro shouts. “I’m a terrorist warlord! Stop throwing me. You made me drop my candy!” Sevro looks at the floor of the hallway. “Wait. Where is it? Dammit, Ragnar. Where is my peanut bar? You know how many people I had to kill to get that. Six! Six!” Ragnar chews quietly above me, and though I’m probably mistaken, I think I see him smile.

“Ragnar, have you been brushing your teeth? They look splendid.”

“Thank you,” he preens as much as a man eight feet tall can preen past a mouthful of peanut butter bar. “The wizard removed my old ones. They pained me greatly. These are new. Are they not fine?”

“Mickey, the wizard,” I confirm.

“Indeed. He also taught me to read before he left Tinos.” Ragnar proves this by reading every single sign and warning we pass in the hall till we enter the hangar bay some ten minutes later. Sevro follows behind, still complaining about his lost candy. The hangar is cramped by Society standards, but is still nearly thirty meters high and sixty wide. It’s been cut into the rock by laser drills. The floor is stone, blasted black from engines. Several dilapidated shuttles sit in berths beside three shining new ripWings. Reds directed by two Oranges service the ships and stare at me as we wheel past. I feel an outsider here.

A motley group of soldiers ambles away from a battered shuttle. Some are still in armor with their

wolfcloaks hanging from their shoulders. Others are stripped down to their undersuits or go bare-chested.

“Boss!” Pebble cries from under Clown’s arm. She’s as plump as ever, and she grins at me, hauling

Clown along to move faster. His puffy hair is matted with sweat, and he leans on the shorter girl. Both their faces are bright when they approach, as if I were exactly as they remembered. Pebble shoves Clown off her shoulder to give me a hug. Clown, for his part, gives a ludicrous bow.

“Howlers reporting for duty, Primus,” he says. “Sorry about the kerfuffle.”

“Shit got prickly,” Pebble explains before I can speak.

“Exceedingly prickly. Something different about you, Reaper.” Clown puts his hands on his hips.

“You look…slender. Did you trim your hair? Don’t tell me. It’s the beard…terribly slimming.”

“Kind of you to notice,” I say. “And to stay, considering everything.”

“What, you mean you lying to us for five years?”

“Yes, that,” I say.

“Well…” Clown says, about to light into me. Pebble thumps his shoulder.

“Of course we’d stay, Reaper!” she says sweetly. “This our family…”

“But we have demands….” Clown continues, wagging a finger. “If you desire our full services.

But…for now, we must be off. I fear I have shrapnel in my ass. So I beg your leave. Come, Pebble. To the surgeons.”

“Bye, boss!” Pebble says. “Glad you’re not dead!”

“Squad dinner at eight!” Sevro calls after them. “Don’t be late. Shrapnel in your ass is not an excuse, Clown.”

“Yes, sir!”

Sevro turns to me with a grin. “Sods didn’t even bat an eye when I told them you were a ruster.

Came with me and Rags to fetch your family right off. Was wicked telling them what was what, though. This way.”

As we pass the ship Pebble and Clown exited, I see up the ramp into its belly. Two young boys work inside, blasting the floors with hoses. The water runs brownish red down the ramp onto the hangar deck, flowing not into a drain, but down a narrow trough toward the edge of the hangar, where it disappears over the edge.

“Some dads leave ships or villas for their sons. Asshat Ares left me this wretched hive of angst and peasantry.”

“Bloodydamn,” I whisper as I realize what exactly I’m looking at.

Beyond the hangar is an inverted forest of stalactites. It glitters in the artificial subterranean dawn.

Not only from the water that dribbles along their slick gray surfaces, but from the lights of docks, barracks, and sensor arrays that give teeth to Ares’s great bastion. Supply ships flit between the multiple docks.

“We’re in a stalactite.” I laugh in wonder. But then I look down at the horror beneath and the weight on my shoulders doubles. A hundred meters below our stalactite sprawls a refugee camp. Once it was an underground city carved into the stone of Mars. The streets are so deep between the buildings, they’re more like miniature canyons. And the city spills over the floor of the colossal cave to the far walls kilometers away, where more honeycombed homes have been built. Streets switchback up the sandstone. But over that a new roofless city has spawned. One of refugees. Muddled skin and fabrics and hair all writhing like some weird, fleshy sea. They sleep on rooftops. In the streets. On the switchback stairs. I see makeshift metal symbols for Gamma, Omicron, Upsilon. All the twelve clans that they divide my people into.

I’m stunned by the sight. “How many are there?”

“Shit if I know. At least twenty mines. Lykos was small compared to some of the ones near the larger H-3 deposits.”

“Four hundred sixty-five thousand. According to the logs,” Ragnar says.

“Only half a million?” I whisper.

“Seems like a hell of a lot more, right?”

I nod. “Why are they here?”

“Had to give them shelter. Poor bastards all come from mines the Jackal has purged. Pumping achlys-9 into the vents if he even suspects a Sons presence. It’s an invisible genocide.”

A chill passes through me. “The Liquidation Protocol. Board of Quality Control’s last measure for

compromised mines. How do you keep this all a secret? Jammers?”

“Yeah. And we’re more than two clicks underground. Pop altered the topographical maps in the Society’s database. To the Golds, this is bedrock that was depleted of helium-3 more than three hundred years ago. Clever enough, for now.”

“And how do you feed everyone?”

“We don’t. I mean, we try, but there haven’t been rats in Tinos for a month. People are sleeping toe to nose. We’ve started moving refugees into the stalactites. But disease is already ripping through the people. Don’t have enough meds. And I can’t risk my Sons getting sick. Without them. We don’t have teeth. We’re just a sick cow waiting to be slaughtered.”

“And they rioted,” Ragnar says.

“Rioted?”

“Yeah, almost forgot about that. Had to cut rations by half. They were already so small. Those ungrateful shitheads down there didn’t like that much.”

“Many lost their lives before I descended.”

“The Shield of Tinos,” Sevro says. “He’s more popular than I am, that’s for damn sure. They don’t

blame him for shit rations. But I’m more popular than Dancer, because I have a badass helmet and he’s in charge of the nitty-gritty shit I can’t do. People are so stupid. Man breaks his back for them and they think he’s a dull-wit pennypincher. Least the Sons love him—and your uncle.”

“It’s like we’ve fallen back a thousand years,” I say hopelessly.

“Pretty much, except for the generators. There’s a river that runs underneath the stone. So there’s water, sanitation, power, sometimes. And…there’s lecherous shit too. Crime. Murders. Rapes. Theft.

We have to keep the Gammas slags separate from everyone else. Some Omicrons hanged this little Gamma kid last week and carved the Gold Sigil into his chest, ripped the Red Sigils out of his arms.

They said he was a loyalist, a goldy. He was fourteen.”

I feel sick. “We keep the lights bright. Even at night.”

“Yeah. Turn them off, it gets…otherworldy downstairs.” Sevro looks tired as he stares down at the

city. My friend knows how to fight, but this is another battle entirely.

I stare down at the city, unable to find the words I need to say. I feel like a prisoner who spent his whole life digging through the wall, only to break through and find he’s dug into another cell. Except there will always be another cell. And another. And another. These people are not living. They’re all just trying to postpone the end.

“This is not what Eo wanted,” I say.

“Yeah…well.” Sevro shrugs. “Dreaming’s easy. War isn’t.” He chews on his lip thoughtfully. “You

see Cassius at all?”

“Twice, at the end. Why?”

“Oh, nothing.” He turns to me, eyes glittering. “It’s just that he’s the one who put Pops down.”

“Our Society is at war…” Dancer tells me in the Sons of Ares command room. The facility is domed,

skinned in rock and illuminated by pale bluish lights above, and a corona of computer terminals that glow around a central holographic display. He stands to the side of the display drenched in the blue light of Mars’s Thermic Sea. With us is Ragnar, several older Sons I don’t recognize, and Theodora, who greeted me with the graceful kiss on the lips popular in Luna’s highColor circles. Elegant even in black utility pants, she has an air of authority in the room. Like my Howlers, she was not invited by Augustus to the garden after the Triumph. Not important enough, thank Jove. Sevro sent Pebble to get her out of the Citadel as soon as it all went down. She’s been with the Sons ever since, helping Dancer ’s propaganda and intelligence wings.

“…Not just the Rising against Gold forces here and our other cells across the System. But among Gold itself. After they killed Arcos and Augustus, as well as their staunchest supporters at your Triumph, Roque and the Jackal made a coordinated play to seize the navy in orbit. They feared Virginia or the Telemanuses would rally the ships of the Golds murdered in the garden. Virginia did, not just with her father ’s own ships, but with those of Arcos, under the command of three of his daughters-in-law. It came to battle around Deimos. And Roque’s fleet, even outnumbered, crushed Mustang’s and sent them into flight.”

“She’s alive, then,” I say, knowing they’re wary of how I’d react to knowing the information.

“Yeah,” Sevro says, watching me carefully, as do the rest. “Far as we know, she’s alive.” Ragnar seems about to say something, but Sevro cuts him off. “Dancer, show him Jupiter.”

My eyes linger on Ragnar as Dancer waves his hand and the holographic display warps to show the

great marbled gas giant of Jupiter. Surrounding it are the sixty-three smaller asteroidlike satellites and the four great moons of Jupiter—Europa, Io, Ganymede, and Calisto.

“The purge instituted by the Jackal and Sovereign was an impressive operation that spanned not just the thirty assassinations of the garden, but over three hundred other assassinations across the Solar System. Most carried out by Olympic Knights or Praetorians. It was proposed and designed by the Jackal to eliminate the Sovereign’s key enemies on Mars, but also Luna and throughout the Society. It worked well, very well. But one grand mistake was made. In the garden, they killed Revus au Raa and his nine-year-old granddaughter.”

“The ArchGovernor of Io,” I say. “Sending a message to the Moon Lords?”

“Yes, but it backfired. A week after the Triumph, the children of the Moon Lords whom the Sovereign keeps on Luna as wards to ransom their parents’ loyalty escaped. Two days after that, the heirs of Raa stole the entirety of Classis Saturnus. The whole Eighth fleet garrison in its dock at

Calisto with the help of the Cordovans of Ganymede.

“The Raas declared Io’s independence for the Moons of Jupiter, their new alliance with Virginia au Augustus and the heirs of Arcos, and their war on the Sovereign.”

“A Second Moon Rebellion. Sixty years after the burning of Rhea,” I say with a slow smile, thinking of Mustang at the head of an entire planetary system. Even if she left me, even if there’s that hollowness in the pit of my stomach when I think of her, this is good news for us. We’re not the Sovereign’s sole enemy. “Did Uranus and Saturn join? Neptune surely did.”

“All did.”

“All? Then there’s hope….” I say.

“Yeah, you’d think. Right?” Sevro mutters.

Dancer explains. “The Moon Lords also made a mistake. They expected the Sovereign would find

herself mired on Mars and would be plagued with lowColor insurrection in the Core. So they assumed she would not be able to send a fleet of sufficient size six hundred million kilometers to quash their rebellion for at least three years.”

“And they were dead wrong,” Sevro mutters. “The idiots. Got caught with their panties down.”

“How long did it take for her to send a fleet?” I ask. “Six months?”

“Sixty-three days.”

“That’s impossible, the logistics on fuel alone…” My voice trails away as I remember the Ash Lord was on the way to reinforce House Bellona in orbit around Mars before we took the planet. He

was weeks away then. He must have continued out to the Rim, following Mustang the entire way.

“You should know better than anyone the efficiency of the Society Navy. They’re a war machine,”

Dancer says. “Logistics and systems of operation are perfect. The longer the Rim had to prepare, the harder it would have been for the Sovereign to wage a campaign. The Sovereign knew that. So the whole Sword Armada deployed straightaway to Jupiter orbit, and they’ve been there for nearly ten months.”

“Roque did a nasty,” Sevro says. “Snuck ahead of the main fleet and jacked that moonBreaker old

Nero tried to steal last year.”

“He stole a moonBreaker.”

“Yeah. I know. He’s named it the Colossus and chosen it as his flagship. The ponce. It’s a nasty piece of hardware. Makes the Pax look tiny by comparison.”

The holo above shows the Sovereign’s fleet coming upon Jupiter, where the moonBreaker waits to

welcome them. The days and weeks and months of war speed past.

“The scope of it…is manic,” Sevro says. “Each fleet twice again as large as the coalition you summoned to pound the Bellona…” He says more, but I’m lost watching the months of war speed past, realizing how the worlds kept turning without me.

“Octavia wouldn’t have used the Ash Lord,” I say distantly. “If he even went past the asteroid belt, there would be no reconciliation. The Rim would never surrender. So who leads them? Aja?”

“Roque au Buttsucking Fabii,” Sevro sneers.

“He leads the entire fleet?” I ask in surprise.

“I know, right? After the Siege of Mars and the Battle of Deimos, he’s a bloodydamn godchild to

the Core. Regular Iron Gold pulled from annals past. Never mind you snuck in under his nose. Or he was a joke at the Institute. He’s good at three things. Whining, stabbing people in the back, and destroying fleets.”

“They call him the Poet of Deimos,” Ragnar says. “He is undefeated in battle. Even against

Mustang and her titans. He is very dangerous.”

“Fleet warfare is not her game,” I say. Mustang can fight. But she’s always been more a political creature. She binds people together. But raw tactics? That’s Roque’s province.

The warlord in me mourns having been kept away for so long. For having missed such a spectacle

as that of the Second Moon Rebellion. Sixty-seven moons, most militarized, four with populations more than one hundred million. Fleet battles. Orbital bombardments. Asteroid hopping assault maneuvers with armies in mech suits. It would have been my playground. But the man in me knows if

I hadn’t been in the box, this room would be missing people.

I realize I’m internalizing too much. I force myself to communicate.

“We’re running out of time. Aren’t we?”

Dancer nods. “Last week, Roque took Calisto. Only Ganymede and Io hold strong. If the Moon Lords capitulate then that navy and the Legions with it return here to aid the Jackal against us. We will be the sole focus of the united military might of the Society, and they will eradicate us.”

That was why Fitchner hated bombs. They bring the eyes, wake the giant.

“So what about Mars? What about our war? Hell, what is our war?”

“It’s a bloodydamn mess is what it is,” Sevro says. “It spilled over into open war about eight months ago. The Sons have stayed tight. Don’t know where Orion is. Dead, we reckon. The Pax and your ships are gone. And now we’ve got paramilitary armies that aren’t Sons-affiliated rising up in the north, massacring civilians and in turn getting wiped out by Legion airborne units. Then there’s mass strikes and protests in dozens of cities. The prisons are overflowing with political prisoners, so they’re relocating them to these makeshift camps where we know for a fact that they are pullin’ mass executions.”

Dancer pulls up some of the holos, so I see blurry images of what look like large prisons in the

desert and forest. They zoom in on lowColors disembarking transports at gunpoint and filing into the concrete structures. It switches to a view of rubble-strewn streets. Men with masks and Red armbands firing over the smoking remains of city trams. A Gold lands among them. The image cuts out.

“We been hitting them hard as we can,” Sevro says. “Gotten some hardcore business done. Stole a

dozen ships, two destroyers. Demolished the Thermic Command Center…”

“And now they’re rebuilding it,” Dancer says.

“Then we’ll destroy it again,” Sevro snaps.

“When we can’t even hold a city?”

“These Reds are not warriors.” Ragnar interrupts the two. “They can fly ships. Shoot guns. Lay bombs. Fight Grays. But when a Gold arrives, they melt away.”

A deep silence follows his words. The Sons of Ares are guerilla fighters. Saboteurs. Spies. But in this war, Lorn’s words haunt me. “How do sheep kill a lion? By drowning him in blood.”

“Every civilian death on Mars is blamed on us,” Theodora says eventually. “We kill two in a bombing of a munitions manufacturing plant, they say we killed a thousand. Every strike or demonstration, Society agents infiltrate the crowd masquerading as demonstrators to shoot at Gray officers or detonate suicide vests. Those images are dispersed to the media circus. And when the cameras are off, Grays break into homes and make sympathizers disappear. MidColors. LowColor.

Doesn’t matter. They contain the dissent. In the north, like Sevro said, it’s open rebellion.”

“A faction called Red Legion is massacring every highColor they find,” Dancer says darkly. “Old

friend of ours has joined their leadership. Harmony.”

“Fitting.”

“She’s poisoned them against us. They won’t take our orders, and we’ve stopped sending them

weapons. We’re losing our moral high ground.”

“The man with voice and violence controls the world,” I murmur.

“Arcos?” Theodora asks. I nod. “If only he were here.”

“I’m not sure he’d help us.”

“Lamentably, it seems as if voice doesn’t exist without violence,” the Pink says. She folds a leg over the other. “The greatest weapon a rebellion has is its spiritus. The spirit of change. That little seed that finds a hope in the mind and flourishes and spreads. But the ability to plant that idea, and even the idea itself has been taken from us. The message stolen. We are voiceless.”

When she speaks, the others listen. Not to humor her like Golds would, but as if her position was

nearly equal to Dancer ’s.

“None of this makes any sense,” I say. “What sparked open war? The Jackal didn’t publicize killing Fitchner. He would have wanted it quiet as he purged the Sons. What was the catalyst? And also, you say we’re voiceless. But Fitchner had a communication network that could broadcast to the mines, to anywhere. He pushed Eo’s death to the masses. Made her the face of the Rising. Did the Jackal take it out?” I look around at their concerned faces. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“You didn’t tell him already?” Sevro asks. “The hell were you doing when I was gone, picking your asses?”

“Darrow wanted to be with his family,” Dancer says sharply. He turns to me with a sigh. “Much of

our digital network was destroyed during the Jackal’s purges in the month after Ares was killed and you were captured. Sevro was able to warn us before the Jackal’s men hit our base in Agea. We went to ground, saved materiel, but lost massive amounts of manpower. Thousands of Sons. Trained operators. The next three months we spent trying to find you. We hijacked a transport going to Luna, but you weren’t on it. We searched the prisons. Issued bribes. But you’d disappeared, like you never existed. And then the Jackal executed you on the steps of the citadel in Agea.”

“I know all this.”

“Well, what you don’t know is what Sevro did next.”

I look to my friend. “What did you do?”

“What I had to.” He takes control of the hologram and wipes Jupiter away, replacing it with me.

Sixteen years old. Scrawny and pale and naked on a table as Mickey stands over me with his buzzsaw.

A chill trickles down my spine. But it’s not even my spine. Not really. It belongs to these people. To the revolution. I feel…used as I realize what he’s done.

“You released it.”

“Damn right,” Sevro says nastily, and I feel all their eyes settling on me, now understanding why

my blade is painted on the roofs of Tinos’s refugees. They all know I was once a Red. They know one of their own conquered Mars in an Iron Rain.

I started the war.

“I released your Carving to every mine. To every holoSite. To every millimeter of this bloodydamn Society. The Golds thought they could kill you off. That they could beat you and make

your death mean nothing. I’ll be damned if I’d let that happen.” He thumps his hand on a table.

“Damned if I’d let you disappear facelessly into the machine like my mother. There’s not a Red on Mars that doesn’t know your name, Reap. Not a single person in the digital world who doesn’t know

that a Red rose to become a prince of the Golds, to conquer Mars. I made you a myth. And now that

you’re back from the dead, you’re not just a martyr. You’re the bloodydamn messiah the Reds have

been waiting for their entire lives.”

I sit with my legs dangling off the edge of the hangar, watching the city beneath teem with life. The clamor of a thousand hushed voices rises to me like a sea of leaves brushing together. The refugees know I’m alive. SlingBlades have been painted on walls. On roofs. The desperate silent cry of a lost people. For six years I’ve wanted to be back among them. But looking down, seeing their plight, remembering Kieran’s words, I feel myself drowning in their hope.

They expect too much.

They don’t understand that we can’t win this war. Ares even knew we could never go toe-to-toe with Gold. So how am I supposed to lift them up? To show them the way?

I’m afraid, not just that I can’t give them what they want. But that by releasing the truth, Sevro’s burned the boat behind us. There’s no going back for us.

So what does that mean for my family? For my friends and these people? I felt so overwhelmed by

these questions, by Sevro’s use of my Carving, that I stormed out without a word. It was petulant.

Behind me, Ragnar moves past my wheelchair and slides down next to me. Legs dangling off the

edge like mine. His boots comically large. The breeze of a passing shuttle catches the ribbons in his beard. He says nothing, at ease with the silence. It makes me feel safe knowing he’s here. Knowing he’s with me. Like I thought I would feel near Sevro. But he’s changed. Too much weight in that helm of Ares.

“When I was a boy, we always wanted to know who the bravest of us was,” I say. “We’d sneak out

of our homes at night and go down into the deeptunnels and stand with our backs to the darkness. You could hear the pitvipers if you were quiet. But you could never tell how close they were. Most boys would break and run after a minute, maybe five. I always stood the longest. Till Eo found out about