impossible a woman like this could ever want to be held by me, but she puts her head on my chest as I wrap my arms around her and I remember how perfectly we fit together as we hold each other and the stars and minutes pass distantly.
“We should return to the party,” she eventually says to me.
“Why? I have everything I need right here.” I look down at the crown of her golden head and see
the darkness of her roots. I breathe in the full scent of her. If it ends tomorrow or in eighty years, I could breathe her the rest of my life. But I want more. I need more. I tilt her slender jaw up with my hand so that she’s looking at me. I was going to say something important. Something memorable. But I’ve forgotten it in her eyes. That gulf that divided us is still there, filled with questions and recrimination and guilt, but that’s only part of love, part of being human. Everything is cracked, everything is stained except the fragile moments that hang crystalline in time and make life worth living.
The Rubicon Beacons are a sphere of transponders, each as large as two Obsidian, floating in space one million kilometers beyond Earth’s core, encircling the innermost domain of the Sovereign. For
five hundred years, no foreign fleet has passed beyond their borders. Now, two months and three weeks after news of the destruction of the invincible Sword Armada reaches the Core, eight weeks after I proclaimed that we sailed on Mars, seventeen days after the Sovereign’s declaration of martial law in all Society cities, the Red Armada approaches Luna, sailing past the Rubicon Beacons without firing a shot.
Telemanus torchShips race ahead at the vanguard to clear mines and scan for any traps left by Society forces. They’re followed by Orion’s Obsidian-filled heavy destroyers, painted with the all-seeing eyes of the ice spirits, then by the Julii fleet with Victra’s weeping sun adorning the heavy dreadnought, the Pandora, the forces of the Reformers—the daughters-in-law of Lorn au Arcos come for justice and the gold and black ships bearing the lion of Augustus led by the battle-scarred Dejah Thoris. And finally my own vessels led by the greatest ship ever built and stolen, the indomitable white Morning Star painted with a seven-kilometer-long red scythe on her port and starboard sides.
The holes we carved in her with our clawDrills are not mended all through the ship. But the armor
has been replaced along the outer hull. The Pax died to give her to us. And what a prize she is. We ran out of paint on the bottom scythe, so it’s a sloppy crescent moon, the symbol of House Lune. The men think it’s a good omen. An accidental promise to Octavia au Lune that we have her marked.
War has come to the Core.
For three days they’ve known I was coming. We could not cover our entire approach from their sensors, but the chaos around the planet shows how unprepared they are for it. It is a civilization in turmoil. The Ash Lord has arrayed the Scepter Armada, the pride of the Core, around Luna in defensive formation. Caravans of trading vessels from the Rim clutter the Via Appia above the northern Lunar hemisphere, while backlogs of civilian vessels stagger their way back along the Via Flaminia, waiting to pass through inspection on the colossal Flaminius astroDock before their descent into Earth’s atmosphere. But as we cross the Rubicon Beacons and encroach farther into Luna space, the vessels hurl themselves into a frenzy. Many bursting from their ordered queue to race for Venus, others trying to pass the Docks entirely and burn for Earth. They flare as silver and white Society fighters and fast-moving gun frigates shred engines and hulls. Dozens of vessels die to maintain order.
We’re outnumbered, still vastly outgunned, but initiative is on our side, and so is the fear that all civilizations have of barbarian invaders.
The first dance of the Battle of Luna has begun.
“Attention unidentified fleet…” A brittle Copper voice echoes through an open frequency. “This is Luna Defense Command: you are in possession of stolen property and in violation of Societal deep-space boundary regulations. Identify yourself and intentions with all haste.”
“Fire a long range missile at the Citadel,” I say.
“That’s a million kilometers away…,” the gunBlue says. “It’ll be shot down.”
“He bloodywell knows that,” Sevro says. “Follow the order.”
It took a campaign of counterintelligence not just in our transmissions to Sons cells throughout the Core, but among our ships and commanders to bring us here unnoticed. The Jackal will not be in position to help the Sovereign, nor will the Classis Venetum, the 4th Fleet of Venus. Or the Classis Libertas, the 5th Fleet of the inner Belt, which the Sovereign sent to Mars to aid the Jackal. At full burn all the ships will be three weeks away at current orbit. The lie worked. The spies in my ship leaked misinformation about our plans, just as I’d hoped.
That is the peril of a solar empire: all the power in all the worlds means nothing it if is in the wrong place.
Twenty minutes later, my missile is shot down by orbital defense platforms.
“New direct link incoming,” the comBlue says behind me. “It’s got Praetorian tags.”
“Main holo,” I say.
A Gold Praetorian with an aquiline face and gray at the temples of his short-cropped hair materializes in front of me. The image will appear on all bridges and holoscreens in the fleet.
“Darrow of Lykos,” he asks in an impeccably well-bred Luna accent. “Are you in possession of imperium over this war fleet?”
“What need have I of your traditions?” I ask.
“Very well,” the Gold says, maintaining propriety even now. “I am ArchLegate Lucius au Sejanus
of the Praetorian Guard, First Cohort.” I know of Sejanus. He’s an eerie, efficient man. “I am come with a diplomatic envoy to your coordinates,” he says dryly. “I request you stay further aggression and give my shuttle access to your flagship so we might relate the Sovereign and Senate’s intentions in…”
“Denied,” I say.
“I beg your pardon?”
“If any Society ship comes toward my fleet, they will be fired upon. If the Sovereign wishes to speak with me, then let her do it herself. Not through a lackey’s mouth. Tell the hag we’re here for war. Not words.”
—
My ship throbs with activity. Told only three days ago of our true destination, the men are filled with madcap excitement. There’s something immortal to attacking Luna. Win or lose, we’ve forever stained the legacy of Gold. And in the minds of my men, and in the chatter we pick up over the coms from the Core planets and moons, there is real fear in the air. For the first time in centuries, Gold has shown weakness. Breaking the Sword Armada has spread the rebellion faster than my speeches ever
could.
Soldiers salute as they pass me in the hall, making their way to their troop carriers and leechCraft.
The squads are predominantly Red and defected Grays, but I see Green battletechs, Red machinists, and Obsidian scouts and heavy infantry in each capsule as well. I resend the shuttle flight clearance order to the Morning Star’s flight controller with my authorization code. It’s accepted and cleared.
Most days I’d trust the order to stand on its own, but today I want to be sure, so I make my way to the bridge to confirm in person. The Red marine captain responsible for the security of the bridge shouts his men to attention when I enter. More than fifty armored soldiers salute me. The Blues in their pits continue in their operations. Orion’s at the forward observation post where Roque once stood. Meaty hands clasped behind her back. Skin nearly as dark as her black uniform. She turns to me with those large pale eyes and that nasty white smile.
“Reaper, the fleet is nearly ready.”
I greet her warmly and join her in looking out through the glass viewports “How does it look?”
“The Ash Lord is pulled up in defensive array. He seems to think we intend an Iron Rain before moving him off the moon. Sharp assumption. He has no reason to come to us. All the rest of the ships in Core will be headed here. When they get here we’ll be the cockroach pinned between the ground
and the hammer. He’s assumed correctly we’ll rush the engagement.”
“The Ash Lord knows war,” I say.
“That he does.” She glances at her datapad. “What’s this I hear about a flight clearance for a sarpedon-class shuttle from HB Delta?”
I knew she’d notice. And I don’t want to explain myself to her now. Not everyone is as compassionate toward Cassius as I, even with Sevro sparing his life.
“I’m sending an emissary to meet with a group of Senators,” I lie.
“We both know you’re not,” she says. “What’s going on?”
I step closer so no one can overhear us. “If Cassius remains in the fleet while we go to war, someone will try to get past the guards and slit his throat. There’s too much hate for the Bellona for him to stay here.”
“Then hide him in another cell. Don’t release him,” she says. “He’ll just go back to them. Rejoin the war.”
“He won’t.”
She looks behind me to ensure we’re not being overheard. “If the Obsidians find out…”
“This is exactly why I didn’t tell anyone,” I say. “I’m releasing him. You clear that shuttle. You let it go. I need you to promise me.” Her lips make thin, hard line. “Promise me.” She nods and looks back to Luna. As always, I feel she knows more than she lets on.
“I promise. But you be careful, boy. You still owe me a parrot, remember.”
I meet Sevro in the hall outside the high security prisoner lockup. He’s sitting atop the orange cargo crate and its floating gravRig drinking from a flask, left hand rested on the scorcher in his leg holster. The hall’s quieter than it should be given its guests, but it’s in the main hangars and gun stations and engines and armories where my ship pulses with activity. Not here on the prison deck.
“What took you?” Sevro asks. He’s in his black fatigues too, stretching uncomfortably against his new combat vest. His boots click together as his legs dangle.
“Orion was asking questions on the bridge about the flight clearance.”
“Shit. She figure out we were letting the eagle fly?”
“She promised to let it go.”
“She better. And she better keep her trap shut. If Sefi finds out…”
“I know,” I say. “And so does Orion. She won’t tell her.”
“If you say so.” Sevro wrinkles his face and downs the last of his flask as he glances down the hall.
Mustang approaches.
“Guards are redeployed,” she says. “Marine patrols are diverted from hall 13-c. Cassius is clear to
the hangar.”
“Good. You sure about this?” I ask, touching her hand. She nods.
“Not entirely, but that’s life.”
“Sevro? You still prime?”
Sevro hops down from the crate. “Obviously. I’m here, ain’t I?”
Sevro helps me maneuver the gravRig through the brig’s doors. The guard station is deserted.
Food wrappers and tobacco dip cups all that remain of the Sons team who guarded the prisoners.
Sevro follows me from the entrance down into the decagon room of duroglass cells, whistling the tune he made for Pliny.
“If your leg’s a little wet…,” he sings as we stop before Cassius’s cell. Antonia’s cell is across from his. Her face swollen from her beating, she watches us hatefully without moving from her cell’s cot. Sevro knocks on the duroglass separating us from Cassius.
“Wakey wakey, Sir Bellona.”
Cassius wipes his eyes of sleep and sits up from his bed, taking in Sevro and I, but addressing Mustang. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve arrived at Luna,” I say.
“Not Mars?” Cassius asks in surprise. Antonia shifts in her cot behind us, just as startled by the news as Cassius appears to be.
“Not Mars.”
“You’re actually attacking Luna?” Cassius murmurs. “You’re insane. You don’t have the ships. How
do you even plan to get past the shields?”
“Don’t you worry about that, sweetheart,” Sevro says. “We got our ways. But soon hot metal’s gonna be sliding through this ship. And someone’s likely gonna come in here and pop you in the head. Darrow here gets all sad thinkin’ of that. And I don’t like sad Darrow.” Cassius just stares at us like we’re mad. “He still doesn’t get it.”
“When you said you were done with this war, did you mean it?” I ask.
“I don’t understand….”
“It’s pretty bloodydamn simple, Cassius,” Mustang says. “Yes or no?”
“Yes,” Cassius says from his cot. Antonia sits up to watch. “I am. How could I not be? It’s taken everything from me. All for people who only care about themselves.”
“Well?” I ask Sevro.
“Oh, please.” Sevro snorts. “You think that’s going to satisfy me?”
“What game are you playing at?” Cassius asks.
“Ain’t no game, boyo. Darrow wants me to let you out.” Cassius’s eyes widen. “But I needa know
you aren’t gonna come try to kill us. You’re all about honor and blood debts, so I need you to swear an oath so I can sleep soundly.”
“I killed your father….”
“You really should stop reminding me of that.”
“If you stay here, we can’t protect you,” I say. “I believe the worlds still need Cassius au Bellona.
But there’s no place for you here. And there’s no place for you with the Sovereign. If you give me your oath, on your honor that you will leave this war behind you, I’ll give you your freedom.”
Antonia bursts out laughing behind us. “This is hilarious. They’re toying with you, Cassi. Just plucking you like a harp.”
“Be quiet, you poisonous little brat,” Mustang snaps.
Cassius eyes Mustang, judging our proposal. “You agreed to this?”
“It was my idea,” she says. “None of this is your fault, Cassius. I was cruel to you, and I’m sorry for that. I know you wanted revenge on Darrow. On me…”
“Not on you, not ever on you.”
Mustang flinches. “…but I know you’ve seen what revenge brings. I know you’ve seen what Octavia really is. What my brother really is. You’re only guilty of trying to protect your family. You don’t deserve to die here.”
“You really want me to go?” he asks.
“I want you to live,” she says. “And yes. I want you to go, and never come back.”
“But…go where?” he asks.
“Anywhere but here.”
Cassius swallows, searching himself. Not just seeking to understand what he owes honor or duty,
but trying to imagine a world without her. I know the horrible loneliness he feels now even as we give him freedom. Life without love is the worst prison of all. But he licks his lips and nods to Mustang, not to me. “On my father, on Julian, I promise not to raise arms against any of you. If you let me go, I will leave. And I will never come back.”
“You coward.” Antonia punches the glass of her cell. “You gorydamn sniveling little whipped worm…”
I nudge Sevro. “Still your call.”
He tugs the hairs of his little goatee. “Ah hell, you better be right about this, you pricklicks.”
Digging into his pocket he pulls out the a magnetic key card and Cassius’s cell door unlocks with a heavy thunk.
“Then there’s a shuttle waiting for you in the auxiliary hangar on this level,” Mustang says evenly.
“It’s been cleared to fly. But you have to go now.”
“That means now, shithead,” Sevro says.
“They’ll pop you in the back of the head!” Antonia is saying. “You traitor.”
Cassius puts a tentative hand on the cell door, as if he’s afraid he’ll push and find it locked and we’ll laugh at him and all the hope we’ve given him will be ripped away. But he has faith and, steeling his face, he pushes. The cell’s door swings outward. Cassius walks out to join us. He holds out his hands to be cuffed.
“You’re free, man,” Sevro slurs, rapping the orange box heavily with his knuckles, “but you gotta
get in the box so we can wheel you outta here without anyone seeing.”
“Of course.” He pauses and turns back to me to extend a hand. I take it, a strange feeling of kinship rising in me. “Goodbye, Darrow.”
“Good luck, Cassius.”
And for Mustang he pauses, wanting to reach out and wrap his arms around her, but she merely sticks out a hand, cold even now to him. He looks at her hand and shakes his head, not accepting her gesture. “We’ll always have Luna,” he says.
“Goodbye, Cassius.”
“Goodbye.”
He goes to the crate, which Sevro has opened and looks inside. Hesitating there, wanting to say something to Sevro, perhaps thank him one last time. “I don’t know if your father was right. But he was brave.” He extends a hand to Sevro as he did me. “I’m sorry that he’s not here.”
Sevro blinks hard at the hand, wanting to hate it. This does not come easy for him. He’s never been
a gentle soul. But he does his best and he takes the outstretched hand. They shake. But something feels wrong. Cassius won’t let go. His face is cold, eyes unforgiving. His body rotates. So fast I can’t stop him from jerking back on Sevro’s hand, pulling my friend’s smaller body forward toward him just as he swivels his hip, bringing Sevro to his right armpit like they’re dancing, so he can strip Sevro’s pistol from his leg holster. Sevro stumbles, fumbling for the weapon but it is already gone. Cassius shoves him off and stands behind him with the scorcher pressed to his spine. Sevro’s eyes are huge, staring at me in fear. “Darrow…”
“Cassius no!” I shout.
“This is my duty.”
“Cassius…” Mustang takes a step forward. Outstretched hand trembling. “He saved your life…
Please.”
“On your knees,” Cassius says to us. “On your gorydamn knees.” I feel myself teetering on the edge of a precipice, the darkness spreading out before me. Whispering to have me back. I can’t reach for my razor. Cassius could easily shoot me down before I even pull it. Mustang goes to her knees
and motions me to get down. Numbly, I follow her lead.
“Kill him!” Antonia’s shouting. “Shoot the bastard!”
“Cassius, listen to me…,” I beg.
“I said on your knees,” Cassius repeats to Sevro.
“My knees?” Sevro smiles wickedly. A mad gleam in his eye. “Stupid Gold. You forgot Howler rule number one. Never bow.” He snatches up his razor from his right wrist, tries to spin around. But he’s too slow. Cassius shoots him in the shoulder, jerking him sideways. The combat vest cracks.
Blood sprays onto the metal wall. Sevro stumbles forward, eyes wild.
“For Gold,” Cassius whispers and fires six more shots point-blank into Sevro’s chest.
Blood erupts from Sevro’s chest. Spraying my face. He stumbles. Drops his razor. Collapses to his knees, gasping in shock. I rush to him under the muzzle of Cassius’s smoking weapon. Sevro’s grasping at his chest, confused. Blood dribbles from his mouth. Bubbling out through his vest, staining my hands. He coughs it onto me. He’s desperate to rise. To laugh it off. But nothing’s working. His arms tremble. His breath ragged. Eyes huge, fear wild and deep and primal in him as Antonia cackles in delight from her cell.
“Don’t die,” I say frantically. “Don’t die. Sevro.” He shivers in my arms. “Sevro. Please. Please.
Stay alive. Please. Sevro…” Without a final word, without a plea or a flicker of personality, he goes still, leaking red. Pulse fading away as tears stream down my face and Antonia howls in mockery.
I cry out in horror.
At the bleak evil I feel in the world.
Rocking there on the floor with my best friend.
Overwhelmed by this darkness and the hate and the helplessness.
Cassius stares pitilessly down at me.
“Reap what you sow,” he says.
I rise with a horrible sob. He strikes me in the side of the head with the scorcher. I don’t go down. I take the blow and pull my razor. But he hits me twice more and I fall. He takes my razor from me,
holding it to Mustang’s throat as she tries to rise. He points the gun at my forehead as I look up at him and is about to pull the trigger.
“The Sovereign will want him alive!” Mustang says.
“Yes.” Cassius replies quietly, overcoming his anger. “Yes you’re right. So she can peel him apart till you tell us your battle plans.”
“Cassius, get me out of this damn cell,” Antonia hisses.
Cassius moves Sevro’s body over with his foot and pulls out the passcard to open her door. When
Antonia exits her cell, she does so like a queen. Prisoner slippers making little tracks in Sevro’s fresh blood. She knees Mustang in the face. Mustang goes down. My own vision wavers in and out. Nausea
in my gut from a concussion. Warmth from Sevro’s blood leaking through my shirt along the belly.
Antonia sighs above me. “Ugh. The Goblin’s still leaking everywhere.”
“Guard them and get their datapads,” Cassius orders. “We need a map.”
“Where are you going?”
“Getting manacles.” He tosses her the scorcher.
As he disappears around the corner, Antonia crouches over me, considering. She pushes the gun against my lips. “Open.” She punches my testicles. “Open.” Eyes rolling in pain, I open my mouth.
She shoves the scorcher barrel inside. The alien metal presses against the back of my throat. Teeth scrape along the black steel. I gag. Feel bile coming up. She stares me hatefully in the eyes, crouched over my head, the barrel down my throat as my body convulses, only pulling it out as I vomit on the ground. “Worm.”
She spits on me and takes our datapads and razors, tossing Sevro’s to Cassius when he returns from the guard station. They fit me in a prisoner harness, a metallic muzzle-and-vest combination that interlocks the arms and pins them to my chest so that my fingers are touching the opposite shoulder, and dump me into the container we brought for him, forcing my knees to bend so I fit. I am unable to arrest my fall with my hands, and my head slams on the plastic at the bottom. Then they pile Sevro and Mustang in atop me like garbage and slam shut the crate. Sevro’s blood drips down my face. My
own leaks from the gash on the side of my head. Too dazed to weep or move.
“Darrow…” Mustang murmurs. “Are you all right?”
I don’t answer her.
“You find a map?” I hear Cassius ask Antonia through the crate.
“And a jammer for cameras,” she says. “I’ll push. You range, if you can manage.”
“I can manage. Let’s go.”
The jammer pops and the gravRig moves, taking us along with them. If Sevro and Mustang were not atop me, I could crouch and put my back into the lid, but their weight pins me down in the small container. It’s hot. Smells like sweat. Hard to breathe. I’m helpless in here. Unable to stop them as they use the path I cleared for Cassius. Unable to stop them as they push us across the deserted hangar, up the ramp into the ship and begin preflight checks. “Shuttle S-129, you are clear for departure, stand by for pulseShield deactivation,” the flight officer says over the com from the distant bridge as the engines prime. “You are go for launch.”
Out from the belly of the war ship, my enemies smuggle me away from the comfort of my friends,
the safety of my people, and the might of my army as it prepares for war. I hold my breath, expecting Orion’s voice to come over the com. To ground the ship. For ripWings to shoot her engines out.
None do. Somewhere, my mother will be making tea, wondering where I am, if I am safe. I pray she
cannot feel this pain across the void, this fear that consumes me despite all my vaunted strength and foolish bluster. I’m afraid, despite what I know. Not just for myself, but for Mustang.
I hear Antonia and Cassius speaking beyond the crate. Cassius has broadcast an emergency signal
from the craft. A few moments later, a cold voice crackles over the com.
“ Sarpedon shuttle, this is the LDC assault-runner Kronos; you have transmitted an Olympic distress signal. Please identify yourself.”
“Kronos, this is the Morning Knight. Clearance code 7-8-7-Echo-Alpha-9-1-2-2-7. I have escaped from imprisonment aboard the enemy’s flagship and am requesting escort and docking clearance.
Antonia au Severus-Julii is with me. We have valuable cargo. The enemy is in pursuit.”
There’s a pause.
“Register, code accepted. Hold on the com. The next voice you hear will be the Protean Knight’s.” A moment later Aja’s voice rumbles through the ship, filling me with dread. So she did survive the waste to find her way back home.
“Cassius? You’re alive.”
“For now.”
“What is your cargo?”
“The Reaper, Virginia, and the body of Ares,” Antonia says excitedly.
“The body…I want to see them.”
Boots thud toward my container. The top opens and Cassius hauls Mustang out. Then he hauls me
out and tosses me to the ground before the hologram. Small and dark in the holographic projector,
Aja watches us with otherworldly calm. Antonia keeps Sevro’s gun trained on my head as Cassius pulls up Sevro’s head by his Mohawk to show his face.
“Goryhell, Bellona.” Aja says, excitement entering her voice. “Goryhell. You’ve done it. The Sovereign will want to see you in the citadel.”
“Before I do, I need you to assure me that no harm will come to Virginia.”
“What are you talking about?” Antonia asks, wary how close Cassius stands near her with his razor.
“She’s a traitor.”
“And she’ll be imprisoned,” Cassius says. “Not executed. Not tortured. I need your word, Aja. Or I turn this ship around. Darrow killed your sister. Do you want vengeance or not?”
“You have my word,” Aja says. “No harm will befall her. I am sure Octavia will agree. We need her to settle things with the Rim. We’re sending squadrons to intercept your pursuit. Re-direct to vector 41’13’25, circle the moon and await contact from the Lion of Mars for docking instructions. We can’t clear your ship to land moonside. But ArchGovernor Augustus will be joining the Sovereign in the Citadel within the hour. I don’t think he’ll mind offering you a ride down.”
“The ArchGovernor is here?” Cassius asks, “I don’t see his ships.”
“Of course he’s here,” Aja replies. “He knew Darrow was never going to Mars. His entire fleet is on the far side of Luna, waiting for them to attack my father’s. This is his trap.”
Mustang and I are dragged down the cargo plank of the shuttle by Obsidians in black armor, each nearly as large as Ragnar and wearing the badge of the lion. I try to kick up at them, but they jam two-meter long ionPikes down into my stomach, electrocuting me. My muscles cramp. Electricity screaming through me. They toss me down to the deck, pulling me up by my hair so I’m on my knees
staring down at the body of Sevro. Mercifully his eyes are shut. His mouth pink from smeared blood.
Mustang tries to rise. A muffled thump as an Obsidian hits her in the stomach. Putting her back on her knees, gasping for breath. Cassius has been forced to his knees as well.
Antonia joins Lilath, who stands before us in black armor. A screaming gold skull on either shoulder and another in the center of the breastpiece. Down her sides are human rib-bones embedded in the armor. The first bonerider in all her barbaric finery. The Jackal’s Sevro. Head shaved. Quiet eyes sunken in a small, pinched face that likes little of what it sees in the world. Behind her, tower ten young Peerless Scarred, heads shaved like hers for war. “Scan them,” she orders.
“What the hell is this?” Cassius asks.
“Jackal’s orders.” Lilath watches carefully as the Golds scan me. Cassius suffers the indignity as Lilath continues. “Boss doesn’t want tricks.”
“I have the Sovereign’s warrant,” he says. “We’re to take the Reaper and Virginia to the Citadel.”
“Understood. We received the same orders. Bound there soon.” She motions Cassius to stand as her
men clear them. No bugs or devices or radiation tracking. Cassius dusts his knees off. I remain on mine as Lilath peers at Sevro, who one of the Obsidians has dragged down the ramp. She feels his pulse and smiles. “A fine kill, Bellona.”
One Bonerider, a lofty, striking man with blazing eyes and a statue’s cheekbones makes a little cooing noise. Tattooed fingers with painted nails tap his bottom lip. “How much for Barca’s bones?”
he asks.
“Not for sale,” Cassius replies.
The man flashes an arrogant smile. “Everything’s for sale, my goodman. Ten million credits for a
rib.”
“No.”
“One hundred million. Come now, Bellona…”
“My title, Legate Valii-Rath, is Morning Knight. You may address me as sir or not at all. Ares’s body is property of the state. It’s not mine to sell. But if you ask me about it again, I will have more than words with you, sir.”
“Will you have a rut?” Tactus’s elder brother asks. “Is that what you mean?” I’ve never met the
annoyingly aristocratic creature before, and I’m glad for it. Tactus seems the better of the bunch.
“You gorydamn savage,” Mustang says through bloody teeth.
“Savage?” Tactus’s brother asks. “Such a pretty mouth. That’s not how you should use it.” Cassius
takes a step toward the man. The other Boneriders reach for their blades.
“Tharsus. Shut up.” Lilath tilts her head, listening to a com in her ear as he returns to her side, lifting his nose. “Yes, my liege,” she says into her com. “Barca is dead. I checked.”
Antonia steps forward. “Is that Adrius? Let me speak with him.”
She holds up a hand to the taller woman. “Antonia wants to speak with you.” She pauses. “He says it can wait. Tharsus, Novas, uncuff the Reaper and spread his arms.”
“What about Virginia?” Tharsus asks.
“Touch her, you die,” Cassius says. “That’s all you need to know.” There’s fear behind Cassius’s eyes, even if he doesn’t show it. He never would have brought her here if he could have helped it.
Unlike the Sovereign’s men, the Jackal is liable to do anything at anytime. Aja’s guarantee of safety suddenly feels very frail. Why would the Sovereign send us here?
“No one will touch your prizes,” Lilath says, voice that eerie one note. “Except the Reaper.”
“I’m to deliver him…”
“We know. But my master requires compensation for past grievances. The Sovereign granted him
permission while you were landing. Precautionary measures.” She flashes her datapad. Cassius reads the order and goes a little pale, looking back at me. “Now may we proceed, or do you do care to fuss further?”
Cassius has no choice. He depresses the remote. The metal cuffs locking my hands to my chest open. Tharsus and Novas are there to grab my arms and haul them to the sides, wrapping their whip
form razors around each wrist, pulling taut till my shoulders grind in their sockets.
“You’re going to let them do this?” Mustang snarls at Cassius. “What happened to your honor? It is as false as the rest of you?” He’s about to say something, but she spits at his feet.
Antonia smiles repugnantly, captivated by the sight of me in pain. Lilath takes my razor from Cassius and walks away toward the ripWings that escorted us into the hangar. There, she holds my slingBlade up into one of the smoldering engines.
“Tell me, Reaper, did you piddle my baby brother. Is that why he was so besotted?” Tharsus asks as we wait. His perfumed locks fall over his eyes. He alone has not shaved his head. “Well, you’re not the first to plow that field, if you catch my flow.”
I stare straight ahead.
“Is he right or left handed?” Lilath calls over.
“Right,” Cassius replies.
“Pollox, tourniquet,” Lilath instructs.
I realize what they intend and my blood runs cold. It feels like it’s happening to someone else. Even when the rubber tightens around my right forearm and the needle-pricks of sensation tingle through the tips of my fingers.
Then I hear my enemy.
The clicking of his black boots.
The delicate shift in everyone’s mannerisms.
The fear.
The Boneriders part to watch their master enter out of the mouth of the main hall to the hangar bay, flanked by a dozen more towering Gold bodyguards with shaved heads. Each tall as Victra. Gold
skulls laugh on their collars, on the handles of their razors. Bones rattle on their shoulders, finger joints taken from their enemies. Taken from Lorn, from Fitchner, from my Howlers. These are the killers of my time. Their arrogance drips from them. As they look at me, it isn’t hate I see in their violent eyes, but a fundamental absence of empathy.
I told the Jackal I didn’t hate him. That was a lie. It’s all I feel watching him walk across the deck, the pistol he killed my uncle with hanging on a magnetic strip holster on his thigh. His armor gold.
Roaring with Gold lions. Human ribs implanted along the sides of the torso, each carved with details I cannot make out. Hair combed and parted on the side. His silver stylus in his hand, twirling, twirling.
Antonia takes a step toward him, but stops herself when she sees he’s walking to Sevro and not to her.
“Good. The bones are intact.” After he’s examined Sevro’s bloody body, he stands over his sister.
“Hello, Virginia. Nothing to say?”
“What is there to say?” she asks through gritted teeth. “What words have I for a monster?”
“Hm.” He takes her jaw between his forefingers, causing Cassius’s hand to drift to his razor. Lilath and the Boneriders would cut him to pieces if he even drew it. “It is us against the world,” the Jackal says softly. “Do you remember telling me that?”
“No.”
“We were young. Mother had just died. I couldn’t stop crying. And you said you’d never leave me.
But then Claudius would invite you somewhere. And you’d forget all about me. And I’d stay home in
a big old house and cry, because I knew even then I was alone.” He taps her nose. “These next hours are going to test who you are as a person, sister. I’m excited to see what’s beneath all the bluster.”
He moves on to me, loosening my muzzle. Even on my knees my physicality dwarfs him. Fifty kilograms heavier. Still, his presence is like the sea: strange and vast and dark and full of hidden depths and power. His silence, his roar. I see his father in him now. He tricked me, guessing my play on Luna, and now I’m afraid all I’ve done is going to unravel.
“And here we are again,” he says. I do not reply. “Do you recognize these?”
He runs his stylus down the ribs in his armor, coming closer so I can see the details. “My dear father thought a man’s deeds make him. I rather think it’s his enemies. Do you like it?” He steps even closer. One of the ribs shows a helmet with a spiked sunburst. Another rib shows a head in a box.
The Jackal is wearing Fitchner ’s rib cage.
Anger roars out of me and I try to bite his face, bellowing like a wounded animal, startling Mustang. I strain against the men holding me, trembling with rage as the Jackal watches me squirm.
Cassius stares at the ground, avoiding Mustang’s gaze. My voice croaks out of me, hardly my own.
That deeper demon only the Jackal can summon from me. “I’m going to skin you,” I say.
Bored of me, he rolls his eyes and snaps his fingers. “Put the muzzle back on.” Tharsus binds my
mouth. The Jackal opens his arms as if welcoming two long-lost friends to a party. “Cassius!
Antonia!” he says. “Heroes of the hour. My dear…what happened?” He asks when he sees Antonia’s
face. They were lovers during my imprisonment. Sometimes I’d smell her on him as he came to visit
me before the box. Or she’d drag a nail along his neck as she passed. He goes close to her now, taking her jaw in his hand, tilting her head to examine the damage done to her. “Did Darrow do this?”
“My sister,” she corrects, disliking his examination. She mourned her face in our captivity more than she mourned her own mother ’s death. “The bitch will pay. And I’ll have it fixed, don’t worry.”
She pulls her head back from him.
“Stop,” the Jackal says sharply. “Why fixed?”
“It’s disgusting.”
“Disgusting? My dear, scars are what you are. They tell your story.”
“This is Victra’s story, not mine.”
“You’re still beautiful.” He pulls her down gently by her chin and kisses her lips delicately. He doesn’t care for her. Like Mustang said, we’re just sacks of meat to him. But while Antonia’s as wicked a thing as I’ve ever met, she wants to be loved. To be valued. The Jackal knows how to use
that.
“This was Barca’s,” Antonia says, handing the Jackal Sevro’s pistol. The Jackal runs a thumb over
the howling wolves engraved in the hilt.
“Fine work,” he says. He strips his own gun from his magnetic holster and tosses it to a bodyguard before holstering Sevro’s. Of course he takes my friend’s pistol as a trophy.
His datapad flashes and he holds up a hand for silence. “Yes, Imperator?”
The grotesque Ash Lord appears in the air before the Jackal as a disembodied, gigantic head. Dark
Gold eyes peer out from beneath twin thickets of eyebrows. His jowls hang over the high black collar of his uniform. “Augustus, the enemy is under way. TorchShips in front.”
“They’re coming for him,” Cassius says.
“How many?” the Jackal asks.
“More than sixty. Half bearing the red fox.”
“Do you wish me to spring the trap?”
“Not yet. I will assume command of your ships.”
“You know the arrangement.”
The Ash Lord’s wide mouth makes a straight line. “I do. You are to continue to join the Sovereign as planned. Escort the Morning Knight and his package to the Citadel. My daughter will take custody of him there. Go now, for Gold.”
“For Gold.”
The head disappears.
The Jackal glances over to the Obsidians who pulled me down the cargo ramp. “Slaves, attend to
Praetor Licenus on the bridge. You are no longer needed.” The Obsidians leave without question.
When they are gone, he eyes the thirty Boneriders. “The Morning Knight has given us an opportunity to win this war today. The Telemanuses will come for my sister. The Howlers and the Sons of Ares
will come for the Reaper. They will not have them. It is upon our shoulders to deliver them to our Sovereign and her strategists in the Citadel.”
He addresses Antonia and Cassius. “Set aside your little grievances. Today we are Gold. We can bicker when the Rising is ash. Most of you lived the darkness of the caves with me. You watched by my side as this…creature stole what was ours. They will take everything from us. Our homes. Our slaves. Our right to rule. Today we fight to keep what is ours. Today we fight against the dying of our Age.”
They lean into his words, awaiting his orders hungrily. It’s terrifying to see the cult he’s built around himself. He’s taken bits of me, of my speaking pattern, and transposed it onto his own behavior. He continues to evolve.
The Jackal turns from his men as Lilath brings back my slingBlade, red-hot from engine’s heat, and hands it to him hilt first. “Lilath, you’re to stay with the fleet.”
“You’re sure?”
“You’re my insurance plan.”
“Yes, my liege.”
Antonia’s not sure what they’re talking about, and she doesn’t like it one bit. The Jackal twirls my
razor in his hand. And then looking between me and Mustang’s he’s struck by a thought. “How long were you imprisoned by Darrow, Cassius?”
“Four months.”
“Four months. Then I believe you should do the honors.” He flips the red-hot razor to Cassius, who smoothly catches it by its hilt. “Cut off Darrow’s hand.”
“The Sovereign wants him…”
“Alive, yes. And he will be. But she doesn’t want him coming in to her bunker with his sword arm
attached to his body, now does she? We’re to take all his weapons. Neuter the beast and let’s be on our way. Unless…there’s a problem?”
“No problem,” Cassius says. Stepping forward, he lifts high the razor, metal throbbing with heat.
“Is this what you’ve become?” Mustang asks. Cassius suffers her gaze, shame on his face. “Look at
me, Darrow,” Mustang says. “Look at me.”
I will myself to forget the blade. To watch her, taking strength from her. But as the superheated metal cleaves through the skin and bone of my right wrist, I forget her. I scream in pain, looking back where my hand was to see a stump lazily dripping blood through charred capillaries. Smoke from my
burning flesh slithers into the air. And through the agony I can see the Jackal picking my hand up from the ground and holding it in the air. His newest trophy.
“Hic sunt leones,” he says.
“Hic sunt leones,” echo his men.
I think of my uncle as I cradle the charred stump of my right arm, shivering from pain. Is he with my father now? Does he sit with Eo by a woodfire listening to the birds? Do they watch me? Blood weeps through the blackened flesh at my wrist. The pain is blinding. Overtaking my entire body. I’m strapped beside Mustang into a seat in two parallel rows in the back of the military assault craft amidst thirty Boneriders. The overhead light pulses an alien green. The ship shudders from turbulence. Luna is in storm. Huge thunderheads swaddling the cities. Black towers penetrating the murky clouds. All along the rooftops, motes of light dance from the headlamps of Oranges and highReds, my own brethren, who slave under the military yoke, preparing weapons that will fell their Martian kin.
Brighter flood lamps bathe military scenes. Black shapes trimmed with evil red beacons zip and float between towers as squadrons of ripWings patrol the sky and Golds in gravBoots jump between towers kilometers apart, checking on defenses, preparing for the storm above, saying last words to friends, to schoolmates, to lovers.
Passing the Elorian Opera House, I see a line of Golds perched on its highest crenellation, staring up at the sky, their glorious war helms spiked with horns so they look a troupe of gargoyles balanced there, silhouetted by lightning, waiting for hell to rain.
We drive toward the cauldron of clouds that swirls around the highest skyscrapers. Beneath the cloud layer, the interlocked skin of cityscape is quiet. Dark in anticipation of orbital bombardment, except for the veins of flame that bleed across the horizon from riots in Lost City. Flashing emergency vehicles dive toward the blazes. The city has gathered its breath for hours, for days, and, with exhalation bare moments away, her seams strain and her lungs stretch to bursting.
We taxi onto a circular landing pad atop the Sovereign’s spire. There, Aja and a cohort of Praetorians meet us. The Boneriders unload with gravBoots before we land, covering the craft as it settles onto the pad. Cassius comes out, manhandling me along. He drags Sevro with his other hand
like a deer carcass. Antonia shoves Mustang along. The weary winter rain of the city-moon drips down Aja’s dark face. Steam rises from her collar and a brilliant white smile slashes the night.
“Morning Knight, welcome home. The Sovereign awaits.”
—
A kilometer beneath the surface of the moon, the great gravLift known only in military myth as the Dragon Maw stops, hissing open to lead down a dimly lit concrete hall to another door emblazoned
with the pyramid of the Society. There, blue light scans Aja’s irises. The pyramid fractures in half, gears and huge pistons whirring. Technology here older than the Citadel above, ancient, from a time
when Earth stood the only enemy Luna knew, and the great American railguns were the fear of all Luneborn. It’s a testament to the architecture and the discipline of the Praetorians that the great bunker of the Sovereign has not had to change substantially for more than seven hundred years.
I wonder if Fitchner knew its inner workings. Doubtful. Seems a secret Aja would hoard. But I wonder if she even knows all the secrets of this place. Tunnels to the left and right of the narrow hall we pass through are long-ago collapsed, and I can’t help but wonder who once walked through them,
who collapsed them and why.
We pass heavily guarded rooms aglow with holo lights. Synced Blues and Greens lying back in tech beds, IVs hooked into their bodies as data streams through their brains via uplink nodes embedded in their skulls, eyes lost to some distant plane. It’s the central nervous system of the Society.
Octavia can wage a war from here even if the moon falls to ruin around her.
The Obsidians here wear black helmets with draconic shaped skulls and dark purple on their body
armor. Gold letters spelling cohors nihil wind along the short-swords at their sides. Zero Legion. I’ve never heard of them, but I see what they guard: one last door of solid, unadorned metal, the deepest refuge of the Society. It dilates open with a groan and only then, a year and a half since I jumped out the back of her assault shuttle, do I see the silhouette of the Sovereign.
Her patrician voice echoes down the hall. “…Janus, who cares about civilian casualties? Does the
sea ever run out of salt? If they manage an Iron Rain, you shoot them down, whatever the cost. The last thing we desire is for the Obsidian Horde to land here and link with the riots in Lost City….”
The ruler of all I’ve ever fought against stands in a depressed circle at the center of a large gray and black room bathed in blue light from the Praetors and Ash Lord who surround her in holographic form. There’s more than forty in a semicircle, the veterans of her wars. Pitiless creatures watching me enter the room with the dark, smug contentment of cathedral statues, as if they always knew it would come to this. As if they earned this end of mine and didn’t luck into it just as they lucked into their birth.
They know what my capture means. They’ve been broadcasting it nonstop to my fleet. Trying to take our coms with hacking attacks to spread the word among my ships. Spreading it to Earth to quell the uprisings there, pimping the signal to the Core to forestall any more civil unrest. They’ll do the same with my execution. The same with Sevro’s dead body. And maybe Mustang, despite the deal Cassius thinks he’s struck. Look what befalls those who rise against, they will say. Look how even these mighty beasts fall before Gold. Who else can stand against them? No one.
Their grip will tighten.
Their reign will strengthen.
If we lose today, a new generation of Gold will rise with vigor unseen since the fall of Earth. They will see the threat to their people and they will breed creatures like Aja and the Jackal by the thousands. They’ll build new Institutes, expand their military, and throttle my people. That is the future that could be. The one Fitchner feared the most. The one I fear is coming as I watch the Jackal move past me into the room.
“His Obsidians are not trained in extraplanetary warfare,” one of the Praetors is saying.
“You want to tell that to Fabii?” the Sovereign asks. “Or perhaps to his mother? She’s with the other Senators who I had to corral in the Chamber before they could flee like little flies and take their ships with them.”
“Politico cravens…” someone murmurs.
Aside from the glowing holographs, the room is occupied by a small host of martial Golds. More
than I expected. Two Olympic Knights, ten Praetorians, and Lysander. Ten years of age now, he has
grown nearly half a foot since last I saw him. He carries a datapad to take copious notes of his grandmother ’s conversation and smiles to Cassius as we enter, watching me with the wary interest you’d watch a tiger through duroglass. His crystal Gold eyes take in my bindings, Aja, and my missing hand. Mentally tapping the glass with a nail to see just how thick it is.
The two Olympic Knights greet Cassius quietly as we enter, so as not to disturb the Sovereign in
her debriefing, though she’s noted my presence with an emotionless glance. Both knights are heavily armored and ready to defend their Sovereign.
Above the Sovereign, a globular holo dominates the domed ceiling of the room, showing the moon in perfect detail. The Ash Lord’s fleet is spread out like a screen to cover Luna’s darkside, where the Citadel is, like a concave shield. The battle is well under way. But my forces have no way of knowing that the Jackal is just waiting to swing around their flank and hammer them against the Ash Lord’s anvil. If only I could reach Orion, she might find some way to salvage this.
The Jackal quietly takes a seat to the side, patiently watching the Ash Lord give instructions to a sphere of torchShips.
“Cassius, you gorydamn hound,” the Truth Knight says, voice a deep baritone. His eyes narrow and
Asiatic. He’s from Earth, and he’s more compact than us Martians. “Is it really him?”
“Bones and heart. Took him from his flagship,” Cassius says, kicking me to my knees and hauling
back my head by my hair so they can better see my face. He tosses Sevro on the ground and they inspect the kill. The Joy Knight shakes his head. He’s thinner than Cassius and twice again as aristocratic, from an old Venusian family. Met him once at a duel on Mars.
“Augustus too? Don’t you just have all the luck. And Aja bagged the Obsidian. Fear and Love are
going to get Victra and that White Witch….”
“I’d kill to snag Victra,” Truth says, walking around me. “That’d be a dance. Say, didn’t you bed her, Cassius?”
“I never kiss and tell.” Cassius nods to the battle. “How do we fare?”
“Better than Fabii. They’re tenacious. Hard to pin down, keep trying to close so they can use their Obsidian, but the Ash Lord’s keeping them at a distance. The ArchGovernor ’s fleet will be the hammer that wins this. They’re already coming around their flank. See?” The knight looks longingly at the holo. Cassius notices.
“You could always join,” Cassius says. “Order a shuttle.”
“That would take hours,” Truth replies. “We’ve four knights in engagement already. Someone has
to protect Octavia. And my ships are being held in reserve protecting the dayside. If they make landfall, which is doubtful at this point, we’ll need martial men on the ground. We’ll have to wash his face.”
“What?”
“Barca’s face. It’s too bloody. We’ll make the broadcast soon, if we’re not hacked again. Saboteurs were wrecking operations. More of Quicksilver ’s boys. All sorts of tech-head demokratic filth with delusions of grandeur. But we hit one of their dens last night with a lurcher squad.”
“Best way to stop a hacker? Hot metal,” Joy adds.
“The enemy is brave, I’ll give them that,” the Ash Lord is saying in the center of the room, his hologram twice again the width of his adjuncts’. “Cutting off their escape but still they’re standing toe-to-toe.” He’s on a corvette in the back of his fleet, his signal being rerouted through dozens of other ships. The Ash Lord’s fleet moves with beautiful precision, never allowing my ships within fifty kilometers.
Roque cared about casualties. Cared about not destroying the beautiful three-hundred-year-old
ships I’d captured. The Ash Lord has no such restraint. He thuggishly smashes ships to oblivion.
Damn their heritage, damn the lives, damn the expense, he’s a destroyer. Here with his back to the wall he will win at all cost. It aches to see my fleet suffer.
“Report when you have further news,” the Sovereign says. “I want Daxo au Telemanus alive, if possible. All others are expendable, including his father and the Julii.”
“Yes, my liege.” The old killer salutes and disappears. With a tired sigh, the Sovereign turns to look at her Morning Knight and extends her arms as if greeting a long-lost child. “Cassius.” She embraces him after he bows, kissing his forehead with the same familiarity she once had for Mustang. “My heart broke when I heard what happened on the ice. I thought you were slain.”
“Aja was right to think I was. But I’m sorry it took so long for me to return from the dead, my liege. I had unfinished business to attend.”
“So I see,” the Sovereign says, caring little for me. Focusing on Mustang instead. “I do believe you’ve won the war, Cassius. The both of you.” She nods without a smile to the Jackal. “Your ships will make this a short battle.”
“It is our pleasure to serve,” the Jackal replies with a knowing smile.
“Yes,” the Sovereign says in a strange, almost nostalgic way. Her fingers trace the scars on Cassius’s broad neck. “Did they hang you?”
“Oh, they tried. It didn’t quite take.” He grins.
“You remind me of Lorn when he was young.” I know she once said to Virginia that she reminded
her of herself. The affection is more real than the Jackal has for his men, but she’s still a collector.
Still using love and loyalty as a shield to protect herself. The Sovereign gestures to me, wrinkling her nose at the metal muzzle around my face. “Do you know what he’s planning? Anything that will compromise our endgame…”
“From what I glean he’s planning an attack on the Citadel.”
“Cassius, stop….” Mustang snaps. “She doesn’t care about you.”
“And you do?” the Sovereign asks. “We know exactly what you care about, Virginia. And what you’ll do to get it.”
“By air or ground?” the Jackal asks. “The attack.”
“Ground, I believe.”
“Why didn’t you mention this in space?”
“You were more concerned with chopping off Darrow’s hand.”
The Jackal ignores the barb. “How many clawDrills are there on Luna?”
“None working, not even in the abandoned mines,” the Sovereign says. “We made sure of that.”
“If he has a team coming, it’ll be Volarus and Julii,” the Jackal says. “They’re his best weapons and helped him take the MoonBreaker.”
“Volarus is the Obsidian?” the Sovereign asks. “Yes?”
“Queen of the Obsidian,” Mustang says. “You should meet her. You’d remind Sefi of her mother.”
“Queen of the Obsidian…they are united?” the Sovereign asks Cassius warily. “Is that right? My politicos said pan-tribal leadership was impossible.”
“And they were wrong,” Cassius says.
Antonia seizes a moment to stand out in the Sovereign’s eyes. “It’s only the Obsidian in Darrow’s
fold, my liege. An alliance of the southern tribes.”
The Sovereign ignores her. “I don’t like it. We have hundreds of Obsidians in the citadel alone….”
“They’re loyal,” Aja says.
“How do you know?” Cassius asks. “Are any from Mars?”
Octavia looks to Aja for confirmation. “Most,” Aja admits. “Even Zero Legion. Martian Obsidians
are the best.”
“I want them out of the bunker,” Octavia says. “Now.”
One of the Praetorians moves to do her bidding.
“Is she as formidable as her brother?” Aja asks Cassius.
“Worse,” Mustang says from her knees with a laugh. “Far worse and far brighter. She fights with a
pack of warrior women. She has sworn a blood oath to find you, Aja. To drink your blood and use
your skull as her chalice in Valhalla. Sefi is coming. And you cannot stop her.”
Aja and Octavia exchange a wary look. “They would have to land first before making an assault on
the citadel,” Aja says. “It’s impossible.”
“How are they coming?” Cassius asks me. I shake my head and laugh at him behind my muzzle. Aja
kicks the stump of my right hand. I almost black out as I curl around the wound in pain. “How are they coming?” Cassius asks. I don’t reply. He motions to the Joy Knight. “Hold out his other arm.” Joy grabs my left arm and pulls it out. “How are they coming?” he asks not me, but Mustang. “I will cut his other hand off if you do not tell me. Followed by his feet and nose and eyes. How is Volarus coming?”
“You’re going to kill him anyway,” Mustang sneers. “So fuck you.”
“How slowly he dies is up to you,” Cassius says.
“Who said they didn’t already land?” Mustang asks.
“What?”
“They came in the grain ships from Earth, compliments of Quicksilver. Landed hours ago. And they’re pressing for the Citadel now. Ten thousand strong. Didn’t you know?”
“Ten thousand?” Lysander murmurs from his chair to the side of the holopit. His grandmother ’s Dawn Scepter lies on the table before him. A meter long length of gold and iron, it’s tipped with the triangle of the Society and the withered heart of the Obsidian warlord who led the Dark Revolt nearly five hundred years ago. “The Legions are deployed to halt an invasion. The Obsidians will overrun
our defenses before they can return.”
“I will make ready the Praetorians and recall two legions,” Aja says, striding for the door.
“No.” Octavia stands motionless, thinking. “No, Aja, you stay with me.” She turns to the Praetorian captain. “Legatus, go reinforce the surface. Take your platoon. There’s no need for them here. I have my knights. Any ship approaching the Citadel should be fired upon. I don’t care if it claims to carry the Ash Lord himself. Do you understand?”
“It will be done.” Legatus and the remaining Praetorians rush out, leaving the room deserted save
for Cassius, the three Olympic Knights, Antonia, the Jackal, the Sovereign, three Praetorian guards, and us prisoners. Aja presses her palm into a console near the door. The sanctum seals behind the Praetorians. A second, thicker door appears from the walls in a corkscrew, slowly locking us off from the world beyond.
“I’m sorry, Aja,” Octavia says as the woman returns to her side. “I know you want to be with your
men, but we already lost Moira. I couldn’t risk losing you too.”
“I know,” Aja replies, but her disappointment is obvious. “The Praetorians will deal with the Horde.
Shall we attend the other matter?”
Octavia glances over to the Jackal and he gives her the barest of nods. “Severus-Julii, come forward,” Octavia says
Antonia does, surprised to have been singled out. A hopeful smile works its way onto her lips. No doubt she’s to receive a commendation for her efforts today. She clasps both hands behind her back and waits before her Sovereign.
“Tell me, Praetor, you were conscripted to join the Sword Armada as it subjugated the Moon Lords
in June of this year, were you not?”
Antonia frowns. “My liege, I do not understand….”
“It’s a fairly simply question. Answer it to the best of your abilities.”
“I was. I led my family’s ships and the Fifth and Sixth Legions.”
“Under the pro tem command of Roque au Fabii?”
“Yes, my liege.”
“Then tell me, how is it that you are still alive and your Imperator is not?”
“I only barely managed to escape the battle,” Antonia says, seeing the danger in the line of questioning. Her voice modulates accordingly. “It was a…terrible calamity, my liege. With the Howlers hidden in Thebe, Roque…Imperator Fabii, fell into the trap twofold, through no fault of his own. Any would have done the same. I made an effort to rescue his command, to rally our ships. But Darrow had already reached his bridge. And torchShips were burning all around us. We did not know
friend from foe. It’s haunted my dreams, the sounds of the Obsidian Horde pouring through their ships….”
“Liar.” Mustang snorts her derision.
“And so you retreated.”
“At grave cost, yes, my liege. I saved as many ships for the Society as I could. I saved my men, knowing they would be needed for the battle to come. It was all I could do.”
“It was a noble thing, saving so many,” the Sovereign says.
“Thank—”
“At least it would be if it were true.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t believe I have ever stuttered, girl. I do, however, believe you fled the battle, abandoning your post and your Imperator to the enemy.”
“You are calling me a liar, my liege?”
“Obviously,” Mustang says.
“I will not stand aspersions against my honor,” Antonia snaps at Mustang, puffing up her chest. “It is beneath…”
“Oh, be still, child,” the Sovereign says. “You’re in deep waters here, with larger fish than you. You see, others escaped the battle, others who transmitted their battle analytics to us so we would know what happened. So we could assess the calamity and see how Antonia of the Severus-Julii disgraced
her name and lost us the battle, abandoning her Praetor when he called for aid, fleeing for the belt to save her own hide, where she then lost her ships.”
“Fabii lost the battle,” she says vindictively. “Not I.”
“Because his allies abandoned him,” Aja purrs. “He might still have saved his command had you
not thrown his formation to chaos.”
“Fabii made mistakes,” the Sovereign says. “But he was a noble creature and as loyal a servant to
his Color. He was even honorable enough to take his own life, to accept that he had failed and to pay justly for it and ensure he would not be interrogated or bartered. His last act in destroying the rebel docks was the act of a hero. An Iron Gold. But you…you scurrilous craven, you fled like a little girl
who pissed her Whiteday dress. You abandoned him to save yourself. Now you slander him in front of all. In front of his friend.” She gestures protectively to Cassius. “Your men saw the reptile underneath, that is why they turned on you. Why you lost your ships to your better sister.”
“I would see whoever lays these claims against me in the Bleeding Place,” Antonia says, trembling
with anger. “My honor will not be smeared by faceless, jealous creatures. It is sad that they would manufacture evidence to smear my good name. No doubt they have ulterior motives. Perhaps intentions against my company or my holdings or they seek to undermine Gold as a whole. Adrius,
tell the Sovereign how ridiculous this all is.”
But Adrius remains quiet. “Adrius?”
“I’d rather have the loyalty of a dog than that of a coward,” he says. “Lilath was right. You are weak. And that is dangerous.”
Antonia looks about like a drowning woman, feeling the water coming over her head, undertow pulling her down, nothing to grab onto, nothing to save her. Aja swells behind her like a dark wave as Octavia denounces her formally. “Antonia au Severus-Julii, matron of House Julii and Praetor First Class of the Fifth and Sixth Legions, by the power vested in me by the Compact of The Society, I find you guilty of treason and dereliction of duty in a time of war and hereby sentence you to death.”
“You bitch,” Antonia hisses at her, then to the Jackal, “You can’t afford to kill me. Adrius…please.”
But she has no ships anymore. No face. Tears stream out of swollen eyes as she seeks some hope here, some way out. There is none, and when she meets my gaze, she knows what I am thinking. Reap what you sow. This is for Victra, and Lea, and Thistle, and all the others she would sacrifice so she could live. “Please…,” she whimpers.
But there is no mercy here.
Aja grasps Antonia’s neck from behind. She shivers in horror, shrinking to her knees, not even attempting to fight as the huge woman slowly closes her hands and begins to strangle her to death.
Antonia snorts, wriggles, and takes a full minute to die. When she has, Aja completes the execution by snapping her neck with a violent twist and tossing her atop Sevro’s corpse.
“What an odious creature,” the Sovereign says, turning from Antonia’s body. “At least her mother
had spine. Cassius, your shoes are filthy.” Blood crusts the rubber soles of his prison slippers and spatters the green jumpsuit’s legs. “There’s a complex of sleeping quarters through there, a kitchen, showers. Clean yourself. My valet has been attempting to foist a meal on me for hours. I’ll have him serve it here for you. You won’t miss the battle. The Ash Lord has promised it will last another several hours, at the very least. Lysander, will you show him the way?”
“I won’t leave your side, my liege,” Cassius says very nobly. “Not till this is through and these monsters are put down.” The Truth Knight rolls his eyes at the display.
“You’re a good lad,” she says before turning toward me. “Now it’s time we dealt with the Red.”
Aja drags me to the Sovereign’s feet at the center of the holopad. The cold sneer of command is etched deeply into the tyrant’s marble face. Her shoulders are weary though, pressed down by the weight of empire and the shadowy mass of a hundred years of sleepless nights. Her tightly bound hair is shot with deep rivers of gray. Tendrils of blue worm through the corners of her eyes from relapsed cellular rejuvenation therapy. She’s had no peace from me. Kneeling and bleeding though I am, it does my soul good to know I’ve haunted her nights.
“Remove his muzzle,” she tells Aja, who stands behind me, preparing to administer the Sovereign’s
justice. The Truth Knight and the Joy Knight flank Octavia. Cassius stands over Mustang to the side in his prisoner greens among the Praetorians while the Jackal watches from his chair near Lysander, sipping a coffee brought by the valet. I stretch my jaw as the muzzle comes off.
“Imagine a world without the arrogance of the young,” Octavia says to her Fury.
“Imagine a world without the greed of the old,” I reply hoarsely. Aja slams the side of my head with her fist. The world flashes black and I almost keel over.
“Why’d you take off his muzzle if you wanted him to be silent?” Mustang asks.
The Jackal laughs. “A fair point, Octavia!”
Octavia scowls at him. “Because we executed a puppet last time and the worlds know it. This is flesh and blood. The Red who rose. I want them to know it is he who falls. I want them to know that even their best is insignificant.”
“Give him words and he’ll just make another slogan,” the Jackal warns.
“Octavia, do you really think my brother won’t kill you?” Mustang asks. “He won’t rest until you’re dead. Until you’re all dead. Till he takes your scepter and sits on your throne.”
“Of course he wants my throne, who wouldn’t?” the Sovereign says. “What is my charge, Lysander?”
“To defend your throne. To create a union where it is safer for subjects to follow than to fight. That is the role of Sovereign. Be loved by a few, be feared by the many, and always know thyself.”
“Very good, Lysander,” she says sadly.
“The purpose of a Sovereign isn’t to rule. It’s to lead,” I say.
Not even hearing me, she turns to the Joy Knight, who is at the controls of the holodeck preparing her broadcast. “Is it ready?”
“Yes, my liege. Greens have restored the links. It’ll go out live to the Core.”
“Say your goodbyes to the Red… Mustang, ” Aja says, patting Mustang’s head.
“Can’t even do it yourself?” I ask the Jackal. “What a man you are.”
He frowns. “I want to do it, Octavia,” the Jackal says suddenly, rising from his seat and walking out to the holodeck.
“Olympic Knights carry out executive executions,” Aja says. “It’s not your place, ArchGovernor.”
“I don’t remember asking for your permission.” Aja bares her teeth at the insult, but the Sovereign’s hand on her shoulder restrains her tongue.
“Let him do it,” the Sovereign says. Strange, the Sovereign’s deference to the Jackal. It’s out of character, but in keeping with the oddness I’ve felt between them on the day. Why would he be here, I wonder. Not Luna. That’s obvious enough. But why would he come to a place where the Sovereign has absolute power over him? At any moment, she could kill him. He must have something over her,
to buy himself immunity. What is his play here? I sense Mustang trying to divine the same answer as Aja moves away from me. The Joy Knight offers the Jackal a scorcher, but Adrius refuses. Instead, he picks Sevro’s gun from his holster and twirls it around his index finger.
“He’s no Gold,” the Jackal explains. “He doesn’t deserve a razor or a state death. He’ll go like his uncle. In any matter, I very much would like to begin the transition as the hand of justice. Plus, offing Darrow with Sevro’s gun is…more poetic, don’t you think, Octavia?”
“Very well. Is there anything else you would like?” the Sovereign asks tiredly.
“No. You’ve been most accommodating.” The Jackal takes Aja’s place beside me as the Sovereign
transforms before our eyes. The exhaustion burning away from her face as she adopts the serene, matronly visage I remember telling me: “Obedience. Sacrifice. Prosperity,” time and time again from the HC in Lykos. Then, Octavia seemed a goddess so far beyond mortal ken that I would have given
my life to please her, to make her proud of me. Now I’d give my life to end hers.
The Joy Knight nods to the Sovereign. A light glows softly above her, empowering the woman with
the fury and warmth of the sun. It’s just a spotlight. The lamp deepens its glow. The Jackal brushes an errant strand from his fastidiously parted hair and smiles fondly at me.
The broadcast begins.
“Men and Women of the Society,” Octavia says. “This is your Sovereign. Since the dawn of man,
our saga as a species has been one of tribal warfare. It has been one of trial, one of sacrifice, one of daring to defy nature’s natural limits. Then, after years of toiling in the dirt, we rose to the stars. We bound ourselves in duty. We set aside our own wants, our own hungers to embrace the Hierarchy of
Color, not to oppress the many for the glory of the few, as Ares and this…terrorist would have you believe, but to secure the immortality of the human race on principles of order and prosperity. It was an immortality that was assured before this man tried to steal it from us.”
She points a long, elegant finger at me.
“This man, once a noble servant of you, of your families, should have been the brightest son of his Color. He was lifted up as a youth. Awarded merits of honor. But he chose vanity. To extend his own ego across the stars. To become a conqueror. He forgot his duty. He forgot the reason for order and has fallen into darkness, dragging the worlds with him.
“But we will not fall into that darkness. No. We will not bend to the forces of evil.” She touches her heart. “We… we are the Society. We are Gold, Silver, Copper, Blue, White, Orange, Green, Violet, Yellow, Gray, Brown, Pink, Obsidian, and Red. The bonds that bind us together are stronger than the forces that pull us apart. For seven hundred years, Gold has shepherded humanity, brought light where there was dark, plenty where there was famine. Today we bring peace where there is war. But to have peace, we must destroy outright this murderer who has brought war to each and every one of our homes.”
She turns to me with a callousness that reminds me of how she watched my duel with Cassius. How she would have let me die then sipped her wine and been about her dinner. I am a speck to her, even now. She’s thinking past this moment. Past the time where my blood cools on the floor and they drag me off to be dissected.
“Darrow of Lykos, by the power entrusted in me by the Compact, I hereby find you guilty of conspiracy to incite acts of terror.” I stare directly into the holoCam’s optic lens, knowing how many countless souls watch me now. How many countless eyes will watch me long after I have gone. “I find you guilty of mass murder upon the citizens of Mars.” I barely listen to her. My heart thunders in my chest. Rattling the fingers of my left hand. Pushing up into my throat. This is it. The end swarming toward me. “I find you guilty of murder.” This moment, this fragment of time is my life in summary.
It is my shout into the void. “And I find you guilty of treason against your Society….”
But I want no shout.
Let that be for Roque. Let that be for the Golds. Give me something more. Something they cannot
understand. Give me the rage of my people. The wrath of all people in bondage. As the Sovereign recites her sentence, as the Jackal waits to deliver it, as Mustang kneels on the ground, as Cassius watches me from among the Praetorians and Knights, waiting, and as Aja sees me look to the tall blond knight, she steps forward in trepidation because she knows something is wrong, I throw my head back and I howl.
I howl for my wife, for my father. For Ragnar and Quinn and Pax and Narol. For all the people I’ve lost. For all they would take.
I howl because I am a Helldiver of Lykos. I am the Reaper of Mars. And I have paid for access to
this bunker with my flesh, all so I could come before Octavia, all so that I might either die with my friends or see our enemies brought to justice.
The Sovereign nods to the Jackal to execute the sentence. He presses the barrel to the back of my
head and he squeezes the trigger. The gun kicks in his hand. Fire spits, scorching my scalp. Deafening sound ringing through my right ear. But I do not fall. No bullet carves through my head. Smoke swirls out of the barrel. And as the Jackal looks down at the gun, he knows.
“No…” He steps away from me, dropping the gun, trying to pull out his razor.
“Octavia…” Aja shouts, lunging forward.
But just then, in that beat of the heart, the Sovereign hears something behind the camera and turns to see a Praetorian guard with his head tilted, his pulseRifle thumping to the floor as a grisly red tongue protrudes from his mouth. Only it’s not a tongue. It’s Cassius’s bloody razor that entered through the back of the Praetorian’s skull and out between his teeth. It disappears back into the mouth. The three guards fall before the Sovereign can say a bloodydamn word. Cassius stands behind the slaughtered
men, his head lowered, his razor red, his left hand holding the remote control to my restraints and Mustang’s.
“Bellona?” is all the Sovereign can say before he presses the button. Mustang’s steel vest unbuckles and falls to the ground. Mine follows suit. She dives for a dead Praetorian’s pulseRifle. Unshackled, I rise, jerking my arms free and pulling the knife hidden inside the metal vest. I lunge toward the Sovereign. Faster than she can blink, I jam the blade through her black jacket into the softness of her lower belly. She gasps. Eyes huge. Inches from mine. I smell the coffee on her breath. Feel the flutter of her eyelashes as I stab her six more times in the gut and on the last, rip the metal up toward her sternum. Hot blood pours over my knuckles and chest as she spills open.
“Octavia!” Aja’s charging me. Makes it halfway before Mustang, firing from her knees, shoots her
in the armored side with the pulseRifle. The blast lifts Aja off her feet, slapping her across the room into the wooden conference table beside Sevro and Antonia’s bodies, nearly crushing Lysander.
Seeing their Sovereign stumbling backward, gut ripped open, the Truth Knight and the Joy Knight both wheel on Cassius, pulling their razors from their hips, their shields thrumming to life.
Unarmored, wearing only his blood-spattered prison greens, Cassius flashes forward, skewering the
surprised Truth Knight through his eye socket up through the roof of his skull.
The Jackal pulls my razor from his hip and slashes at me. I sidestep, coming at him. He swings again, screaming in rage, but I catch his arm and head butt him in the face before sweeping his legs and tackling him to the floor. I take my razor and stake his left arm to the floor so that he has no free hand. He screams. His spit spattering my face. Thrashing at me with his legs. I drop a knee into his forehead and leave him stunned and pinned to the floor.
“Darrow!” Cassius calls to me as he duels the Joy Knight. “Behind!”
Behind me, Aja’s rising from the shattered remains of the table. Eyes wide with rage. I run from her to help Cassius and Mustang, knowing she’d kill me in seconds with my right hand gone. Blood
darkens Cassius’s green jumpsuit. His left leg has been slashed badly by the better-armored Joy Knight, who is using his weight and the pulsing aegis shield on his left arm to overwhelm Cassius.
Mustang grabs two razors from the dead Praetorian and tosses one to me. I catch it on the run with my left hand. Toggle the hilt. Razor leaps to killing length. Cassius takes another slash to the leg and stumbles over a body, going down, blocking the second strike with the pulseFist, ruining the weapon.
The Joy Knight’s back is to me. He feels me coming, but it’s too late. Silently, I jump through the air and swing a huge looping strike down at him from behind, left arm slowing as it meets the throbbing resistance of the pulseShield centimeters from the armor, then jerking as it cleaves into his sky-blue plate and through muscle and bone. Carrying from left shoulder to the right pelvis, parting his body at a diagonal. His body drips to the ground.
Silence in the room as the bodies hit the floor.
Mustang rushes to my side. She sweeps her golden mess of hair back, a fevered grin splitting her
face. I help Cassius up from the ground.
“How was my acting?” he asks, wincing.
“Not quite as good as your swordwork,” I say, looking at the bodies around him. He grins, more
alive in battle than anywhere else. I feel a pang, knowing this is always how it should have been.
Missing the days where we rode together in the highlands pretending we were lords of the earth. I grin back at him, wounded, bleeding, but almost whole for the first time I can remember.
“Will you two save the flirting for later,” Mustang says.
Side by side with her, we turn together to face the deadliest human being in the Solar System. She’s crouched over a terribly wounded Octavia, who has crawled to the edge of the holodeck and pants on her back, holding her stomach together with both hands. Octavia is pale and shivering. Tears stream down Aja’s face and Lysander ’s, who has rushed into the pit to help his grandmother.
“Aja!” the Jackal screams from the floor. “Kill them! Open the door or kill them!” He’s lost his mind. Thrashing about, trying to reach the whip toggle on the razor with his stump. It’s three and a half feet above him and he just can’t quite reach. “Open it!” he says through gnashing teeth.
But to open the door she must reach it. And to reach it, she must go through me and my friends then present her back to us while she enters the code. She’s trapped in here till we’re dead or she is.
“Aja, give us the Sovereign. Her justice is due,” I say, knowing what Aja’s reply to that will be, but minding the holodeck is still active. Still broadcasting as Gold blood wets the floor. Aja does not turn to look at us. Not yet. Her huge hands caress Octavia’s face. She cradles the older woman like a mother holding her own child. “Stay alive,” she tells her. “I will get you out of here. I promise. Just stay alive, Octavia.”
Octavia nods weakly. Lysander touches Aja’s arm. “Hurry. Please.”
“Wear her down,” Mustang whispers. “She’s the one with the ticking clock.”
“Don’t let her pin you in a corner,” I say. “Move laterally like we planned. Cassius, you can still take point?”
“Just try to keep up,” he says.
Aja rises from her crouch to her full height, a brooding mass of muscle and armor, the greatest student of the greatest razormaster the Society has ever known. Face dark, unreadable. The deep blue Protean armor moving subtly with sea dragons. Shoulders nearly as broad as Ragnar ’s. I wish I could have brought Sefi here. A meter and a half of killing silver slithers out before Aja and she takes the winter stance of the Willow Way, sword raised like a torch off to the side, left foot forward, hips sunken, knees slightly bent. Mustang and I slide apart taking the right and left. Cassius, the best swordsman of us now, takes the middle. Aja’s hungry eyes devour our weaknesses. The drag in Cassius’s step, my missing right hand, Mustang’s size, the arrangement of obstacles on the floor. And she attacks.
There are two strategies when fighting multiple opponents. The first is use them against one another. But Cassius and I have always been of one mind in battle, and Mustang is adaptable. So Aja chooses the second option: an all out attack on me before Cassius or Mustang can come to my aid.
She deems me the weakest enemy. And she is right. Her whip cracks toward my face faster than I can bring my blade up. I flinch back, almost losing my eye. Throwing off my center of balance. She’s on me, blade rigid, poking at me in a poetic frenzy of carefully constructed movements to bring my blade out of position across my body, so she can perform Lorn’s maneuver called the Wing Scalp.
Where she tries to lever her blade atop mine to touch the tip to my sword arm’s shoulder and scrape down to the outside of my wrist to peel off the muscle and tendons along the way. I dance back, robbing her the leverage, navigating the corpses behind me as Cassius and Mustang close on Aja.
Cassius is rushed in his approach, and he overextends, like I almost did.
But Aja doesn’t use her razor. She activates her gravBoots in a quick burst and launches back at him, two hundred kilograms of armor and Peerless Scarred propelled by gravBoots crashes into flesh and bones. You can almost hear his skeleton creak. His body wraps around her, forehead smashing against her armored shoulder. He drips off her and she spikes him to the ground. Mustang
rushes her flank to stop her from finishing Cassius off. But Aja was expecting the rush from Mustang and used Cassius to bait her. She slashes Mustang shallowly across the stomach, nearly opening her lower intestine.
I hurl my razor at Aja from behind. She somehow hears or feels it coming and bends sideways as it
passes and sticks into the wall of the holodeck that separates it from the sitting room above. Aja’s leg shoots out at Mustang, impacting her kneecap and jamming it backward. Can’t tell if it dislocates, but Mustang stumbles back, razor outstretched and Aja turns back toward me, because I have no weapon.
“Shit shit shit shit shit,” I hiss, scrambling toward the Praetorians to pick up one of their razors. I gain a pulseRifle and fire blindly behind me. Aja’s pulseShield absorbs the munitions, throbbing crimson as she sprints at me and slashes the weapon from my hand. I escape again, rolling backward, taking a long burning gash on the back of my hamstrings, but gaining a razor as I jump out of the holodeck ring up to the sitting level several feet above. She picks up a pulseFist and shoots it at me. I dive down so she loses her shot. The steel ceiling above me bubbles and drips down. I roll to the side.
Razors keen on the deck bellow. I scramble back to the lip to get back in the fight. Aja’s cutting us to ribbons and all fleeing does is allow her to turn back to Cassius and Mustang. She bears down on him, using his limp and the new wound in his shoulder against him. Mustang attacks from behind before he’s cut down, but Aja bends when Mustang slashes, moving like she’s studied the fight before
it ever happened.
We’re not going to put her down, I realize. This was our fear. Losing my hand was never part of the plan, either. One by one she’s going to kill us.
I have a brief moment of hope when Mustang and Cassius finally pin Aja between them. I jump down to help the assault. The woman pivots and twirls like a willow caught among three tornadoes.
She knows her armor will take our glancing blows but our skin can’t take hers. She goes for shallow cuts, bleeding us out methodically, aiming for the tendons in our knees, arms, like Lorn taught us both. A sage digging the roots.
Her blade cuts deep into my forearm, lacerates my knuckles, taking off a corner of my pinky. I roar anger, but anger isn’t enough. My instincts aren’t enough. We’re too spent, too overwhelmed by the monstrosity of her. Lorn trained her too well. Spinning, she delivers a two-handed thrust up into the right side of my rib cage. My world rocks. She lifts me up with a horrible bellow. My feet dangle half a meter above the deck. Cassius charges her and she flings me off the edge of her blade to parry his attack. I crash to the ground, my chest feeling like it is caving in on itself. Gasp for air, barely able to draw breath. Cassius and Mustang put themselves between Aja and me.
“Do not touch him,” Mustang hisses.
The blade missed my organs, wedging itself between two of the reinforced ribs Mickey gave me,
but I’m bleeding all over myself. Trying to stand, scrambling across the deck. The Jackal watches me from his place on the ground, exhausted from trying to free himself. He’s grinning, despite the horror of bodies all around us, knowing Aja is going to kill me. The Sovereign’s face distant and fading she watches too, propped up against the lip of the holodeck as it rises to the rest of the room, Lysander ’s hands holding her together. Aja looks at her in fear, knowing she has not long to live.
“How could you choose him over us?” Aja shouts in rage to Mustang and Cassius.
“Easily,” Mustang replies.
Cassius pulls the syringe from the holster on his leg and tosses it across the room to me. “Do it before she kills us, man.” I stumble to my feet as Aja tries furiously to get at me, but Cassius and Mustang have strength enough to batter her away. She roars in frustration. The three slipping on blood, my friends not long for this world standing toe-to-toe with her. I make it to the edge of the holodeck, opposite the Sovereign, and climb toward Sevro’s body.
“You cannot run!” Aja shouts. “I will carve your eyes out. There’s nowhere to run, you rusty coward!” But I am not running. I fall to my knees beside Sevro. The front of his chest is a chaos of laboratory blood and torn fabric from the entry wounds of Cassius’s execution. I cut open his shirt with my razor. Six holes stare up at me from the combat vest Cyther made him, bits of Carved flesh looking so real. His face is quiet and peaceful. But peace isn’t in his nature, and we haven’t earned it yet. I pop open the syringe filled with Holiday’s snakebite. Enough to wake the dead. Even those faking eternal sleep from Narol’s wicked cocktail of haemanthus extract. I pull off his vest.
“Wakey, wakey, Goblin,” I say as I lift high the syringe, praying the silent prayer than his heart doesn’t fail, and plunge it straight into my best friend’s chest. His eyes burst open.
“Fuuuuuuuuck.”
Exploding upward out of the coma induced by the haemanthus oil in the flask he was drinking from
before we freed Cassius, he flails past me, gaining his feet, looking around with manic, wild eyes, hands vibrating. Holding his heart, gasping in pain as I did when Trigg and Holiday brought me from my prison. The last thing he saw was my face in the brig, now to wake here, to be thrust into the battle, blood and bodies littering the floor. He stares at me with crazed, bloodshot eyes, pointing at my belly.
“You’re bleeding! Darrow! You’re bleeding!”
“I know.”
“Where is your hand? You’re missing a fucking hand!”
“I know!”
“Bloodydamn.” His eyes dart around, seeing the Jackal pinned and Octavia on the ground, Aja beating Cassius and Mustang back. “It worked! It fucking worked! We’ve got to help the Goldbrows,
shithead. Get up! Get up!” He hauls me to my feet and shoves my razor back into my hand, rushing into the holopit, howling the hideous battle cry we made as children among the frozen pines. “I’m going to kill you, Aja! I’m going to kill you in your face!”
“It’s Barca!” the Jackal screams from the ground. “Barca’s alive!”
On the run, Sevro scoops up a pulseFist from a dead Praetorian and tramples over the Jackal’s body, stomping on his face as he grabs the razor that pins the young ArchGovernor to the ground without stopping. He flies into Aja, firing with the pulseFist. Insane with the drugs and the victory he can smell.
The pulse blasts ripple over Aja’s shield, spreading crimson around her silhouette, impairing her
vision enough to finally let Cassius slip his razor through her guard. Still, she twists as it comes so it only takes her in the shoulder, but then Sevro is on her, stabbing her twice in the small of her back.
She grunts in pain, backing away. I join the fray as Aja gains separation, stumbling back from us. But on the ground behind her, she leaves something few humans have seen: a thin ribbon of blood. It coats Sevro’s razor. He wipes it from the tip of the blade and smears it between his fingers.
“Hahaha. Well look at that. You do bleed. Let’s see how much more ya got in there.” He hunches like an animal, stalking toward her as Mustang, Cassius, and I pin her between us, making a square around the greatest living Olympic Knight, like a wolfpack come upon a great panther of the forest.
Shrinking before it as it charges, striking at its hindquarters, slashing its flanks. Bleeding it out. We’re a prison of four. Sevro swishes his razor through the air, howling rabidly.
“Shut up!” Aja says, lashing out at him. But Sevro dances back and Cassius and I dart forward, stabbing at her. She parries Cassius’s thrust at her neck and his two successive moves, but not in time
to counter me. I feign a thrust at her abdomen and slash her shin instead, raking through the metal.
Metal sparks and blood coats my blade. Mustang stabs her calf. I dart back as she wheels on me, making her overextend so Sevro can strike again. He does, furiously slashing the Achilles tendon on her right leg. She grunts and stumbles before lashing at him. He dances back.
“You’re gonna die,” he says with an evil little hiss. “You’re gonna die.”
“Shut up!”
“That one’s for Quinn,” he hisses as Cassius cuts through the tendons of her left knee. “This one’s for Ragnar.” I impale her right thigh with an underhanded thrust. “This one’s for Mars.” Mustang takes her arm off at the elbow. Aja looks down at the appendage on the ground, as if wondering if it belongs to her.
But she’s given no respite. Sevro tosses aside his pulseFist, picks the Truth Knight’s razor from the ground and jumps in the air to bring both his swords down into her chest, hanging there, a foot off the ground. Their faces inches from one another, noses nearly touching as Aja sinks to her knees, setting Sevro back on his feet.
“Omnis vir lupus.”
He kisses her nose and jerks his razors out of her chest, letting them slither back into whips around his forearms. Arms outstretched, he backs away from the dying Protean Knight, greatest of her age as she pulses her last blood onto the cold floor. Still on her knees Aja’s eyes drift hopelessly to the Sovereign, the woman who became mother to her sisters, who raised her, loved her as truly as any
who rules the Solar System can love, and now dies along with her.
“I’m sorry…my liege.” Aja wheezes wet breaths.
“Never be,” Octavia manages from her place on the ground. “You burned bright, my Fury. Time itself…will remember you.”
“Nah, prolly not,” Sevro says pitilessly. “Nighty, night, Grimmus.”
He lops off her head and kicks her in the chest. Her body teeters back and collapses to the floor, where he jumps atop it on all fours and howls. A deep moan escapes the Sovereign’s mouth at the hideous sight. She shuts her eyes, leaking tears as we make our way to her and Lysander. Cassius and I limping together, his arm around my shoulders to take pressure off the leg he drags behind him.
Mustang follows us. Sevro secures the Jackal by sitting on his chest and juggling a razor over his head.
Soaked in his grandmother ’s blood, Lysander grabs Octavia’s razor from the ground and bars our
way. “I won’t let you kill her.”
“Lysander…don’t,” Octavia says. “It’s too late.”
The boy’s eyes are swollen with tears. The razor trembles in his hands. Cassius steps forward and
extends a hand. “Drop the weapon, Lysander. I don’t want to kill you.” Mustang and I exchange a glance. One Octavia notices, and must make her soul shiver. Lysander knows he cannot fight us. His sense overcomes his grief and he drops the razor, stepping back to watch us hollowly.
Octavia’s eyes are distant and dark, already halfway to that other world where even she does not reign. I thought there’d be spite in the end from her, or begging like Vixus or Antonia. But there’s nothing weak in her even now. It’s sadness and love lost that come in the end. She did not create the hierarchy, but she was its keeper in her time. And for that, she must be held accountable.
“Why?” Octavia asks Cassius, shaking from sorrow. “Why?”
“Because you lied,” he says.
Wordlessly Cassius pulls the small holocube, a thumb-sized triangular prism, from his ammunition
belt and sets it in her bloody hands. Images dance across its surfaces before floating into the air above
the Sovereign’s hands. The scene of Cassius’s family dying plays, bathing her in blue light. Shadows move through a hall, becoming men in scarabSkin. They cut down his aunt in a hallway and the men
move through and appear a moment later dragging children, which they kill with the razors and boots. More bodies are dragged and piled up, then lit on fire so there would be no survivors. More than forty children and non-scarred family members died that night. They thought they could heap the sin upon the shoulders of a fallen man. But it was the Jackal’s work. He finished the war between the Bellona and the Augustuses, and the Sovereign’s cooperation and silence was his price for my Triumph.
“You ask me why?” Cassius’s voice is barely above a whisper. “It is because you are without honor.
I swore an oath as an Olympic Knight to honor the Compact, to bring justice to the Society of Man.
You swore the same, Octavia. But you forgot what that meant. Everyone has. That is why this world is broken. Maybe the next one can be better.”
“This world is the best we can afford,” Octavia whispers.
“Do you really believe that?” Mustang asks.
“With all my heart.”
“Then I pity you,” Mustang says.
And so does Cassius. “My heart was my brother. And I no longer believe in a world that says he
was too weak to deserve life. He would have believed in this. In the hope for something new.” Cassius looks over at me. “For Julian, I can believe that too.”
Cassius hands me the two other holocubes from his pouch. The first is the murder of my friends at
my Triumph. The second is for the Rim; when they see this recording, they will know I have a struck a blow for them. Politics never rests. I set the two holocubes in the Sovereign’s hands to join the first.
Rhea glows before her. A blue and white moon, gorgeous beside its brothers Iapetus and Titan as they orbit giant Saturn. Then over the moon’s north pole, tiny slivers which you’d hardly notice flicker several innocent times, and mushrooms of fire bloom upon the surface of the blue and white planet.
As the nuclear fire blazes in the Sovereign’s eyes, Mustang moves aside so I can crouch before the dying woman, speaking softly so she will know that justice, not vengeance, has found her in the end.
“My people have a legend of a being who stands astride the road leading to the world after. He will judge the wicked from the good. His name is the Reaper. I am not him. I’m just a man. But soon you will meet him. Soon he will judge you for all the sins you hold.”
“Sins?” Octavia shakes her head, looking back to the three holos dancing in her hands, these drops in her ocean of sins. “These are sacrifices. What it takes to rule,” she says, her hands closing around them. “I own them as I own my triumphs. You will see. You will be the same, Conqueror.”
“No. I will not.”
“In the absence of a sun, there can be only darkness.” She shudders, cold now. I fight off the urge to put something over her. She knows what’s being left behind. When she dies, the succession struggle will begin. It’ll tear Gold apart. “Someone…someone must rule, or a thousand years from now, children will ask, ‘Who broke the worlds? Who put the light out,’ and their parents will say it was you.” But I already know this. I knew this when I asked Sevro if he knew how this would end. I will not replace tyranny with chaos. There must be order, even if it is a compromise. But I don’t tell her that.
She swallows painfully, a struggle to even breathe. “Listen to me. You must stop him. You must…stop Adrius…”
Those are the last words of Octavia au Lune. And as they fade, the fire of Rhea cools in her eyes
and life leaves a cold pupil surrounded by gold, staring into infinite dark. I close her eyes for her.
Chilled by her passing, by her words, her fear.
The Sovereign of the Society, who has ruled for sixty years, is dead.
And I feel nothing but dread, because the Jackal has begun to laugh.
His laughter rattles through the room. His face pale under the glow of the holo of the moon and the fleets pummeling one another in the darkness. Mustang has turned off the holodeck’s broadcast and is already analyzing the Sovereign’s data center as Cassius moves toward Lysander and I rise above Octavia’s body. My body burns from wounds.
“What did she mean, stop him?” Cassius asks me.
“I don’t know.”
“Lysander?”
The boy’s too traumatized by the horror around him to speak.
“Video went out to the ships and the planets,” Mustang says. “People are seeing Octavia’s death.
Communiqué boards are flooding. They don’t know who is in control. We have to move now before
they marshal behind someone.”
Cassius and I approach the Jackal. “What did you do?” Sevro’s asking. He shakes the small man.
“What was she talking about?”
“Get your dog off me,” the Jackal says from under Sevro’s knees. I pull Sevro back. He paces around the Jackal, still vibrating with adrenaline.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“There’s no point in talking with him,” Mustang says.
“No point? Why do you think the Sovereign let me in her presence,” the Jackal asks from the ground. He comes up to a knee, holding his wounded hand to his chest. “Why she did not fear the gun on my hip, unless there was a greater threat keeping her in line?”
He looks up at me from under disheveled hair. His eyes calm despite the butchering we’ve done.
“I remember the feeling of being under the ground, Darrow,” he says slowly. “The cold stone under my hands. My Pluto housemembers around me, hunched in the darkness. The steam on their breaths, looking to me. I remember how afraid I was of failing. Of how long I had prepared, how little my father thought of me. All my life weighed in those few moments. All of it slipping away.
We’d run from our castle, fleeing Vulcan. They came so fast. They were going to enslave us. The last of our housemembers were still running through the tunnel by the time I rigged the mines to blow, but so were Vulcan. I could hear my father ’s voice. Hear him telling me how he was not surprised I failed so quickly. It was a week before we killed a girl and ate her legs to survive. She begged us not to.
Begged us to choose someone else. But I learned then in that moment if no one sacrifices, then no one survives.”
Cold fear wells in me, beginning in the deep hollow of my stomach and spreading upward.
“Mustang…”
“They’re here,” she says, horrified.
“What’s happening? What’s here?” Sevro hisses.
“Darrow…” Cassius whispers.
“The nukes aren’t on Mars,” I say. “They’re on Luna.”
The Jackal’s smile stretches. Slowly, he gains his feet and not one of us dares touch him. It all falls into place. The tension between him and the Sovereign. The subtle threats. His boldness in coming here into the Sovereign’s place of power. His ability to mock Aja without consequence.
“Oh, shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. ” Sevro pulls his Mohawk. “Shit.”
“I never wanted to nuke Mars,” the Jackal says. “I was born on Mars. It is my birthright, the prize from which all things flow. Her helium is the blood of the empire. But this moon, this skeleton orb is, like Octavia, a treacherous old crone sucking at the marrow of the Society, crowing about what was instead of what can be. And Octavia let me ransom it. Just as you will, because you are weak and you did not learn what you should have at the Institute. To win, you must sacrifice.”
“Mustang, can you find the bombs?” I ask. “Mustang!”
She’s been struck dumb. “No. He would have masked the radiation signatures. Even if we could, we
couldn’t deactivate them….” She reaches for the com to call our fleet.
“If you make the call, then I detonate a bomb every minute,” the Jackal says, tapping his ear where a little com has been implanted. Lilath must be listening. She must have the trigger. That’s what he meant. She’s his insurance. “Would I really tell you my plan if you could do anything about it?” He straightens his hair and wipes blood from his armor. “The bombs were installed weeks ago. The Syndicate smuggled the devices across the moon for me. Enough to create nuclear winter. A second
Rhea, if you will. When they were in place, I told Octavia what I had done and I told her my terms. She would carry on as Sovereign until the Rising was put down, which…has taken a surprising twist…
obviously. And afterward, on the day of victory, she would convene the Senate, abdicate the Morning Throne and name me her successor. In return, I would not destroy Luna.”
“That’s why Octavia has the Senate rounded up,” Mustang says in disgust. “So you could be Sovereign?”
“Yes.”
I stand back from him, feeling the weight of the fight on my shoulders, the weakness in my body
from the strain, the loss of blood, now this…this evil. This selfishness, it’s overwhelming.
“You’re bloodydamn mad,” Sevro says.
“He’s not,” Mustang says. “I could forgive him if he were mad. Adrius, there are three billion people on this moon. You don’t want to be that man.”
“They don’t care for me. So why should I care for them?” he asks. “This is all a game. And I have
won.”
“Where are the bombs?” Mustang asks, taking a threatening step toward him.
“Uh-uh,” he says, scolding her. “Touch a hair on my head, Lilath detonates a bomb.” Mustang’s beside herself.
“These are people,” she says. “You have the power to give three billion people their lives, Adrius.
That is power beyond anything anyone should ever want. You have the chance to be better than Father.
Better than Octavia…”
“You condescending little bitch,” he says with a small laugh of disbelief. “You really think you can still manipulate me. This one is on you. Lilath, detonate the bomb on the southern Mare Serenitatis.”
We all look to the hologram of the moon above our heads, hoping beyond hope that somehow he’s bluffing. That somehow the transmission won’t go through. But a little red dot glows on the cool hologram, blossoming outward, a small almost insignificant little animation that envelops ten kilometers of city. Mustang rushes to the computer. “It’s a nuclear event,” she whispers. “There’s more than five million people in that district.”
“Were,” the Jackal says.
“You freak…” Sevro shrieks, rushing the Jackal. Cassius gets in his path, knocking him back. “Get
out of my way!”
“Sevro, calm down.”
“Careful, Goblin! There’s hundreds more,” the Jackal says.
Sevro’s overwhelmed, clutching his chest where his heart must be wrenching from the drugs.
“Darrow, what do we do?”
“You obey,” the Jackal says.
I force myself to ask: “What do you want?”
“What do I want?” He wraps a bit of cloth around his bleeding arm, using his teeth. “I want you to be what you always wanted, Darrow. I want you to be like your wife. A martyr. Kill yourself. Here. In front of my sister. In return, three billion souls live. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? To be a hero? You die, and I will be crowned Sovereign. There will be peace.”
“No,” Mustang says.
“Lilath, detonate another bomb. Mare Anguis, this time.”
Another red blossom erupts on the display. Nuclear fire ends the lives of millions. “Stop!” Mustang says. “Please. Adrius.”
“You just killed six million people,” Cassius says, not comprehending.
“They’ll think it’s us,” Sevro sneers.
The Jackal agrees. “Each bomb looks like part of an invasion. This is your legacy, Darrow. Think
of the children burning now. Think of their mothers screaming. How many you can save by simply
pulling a trigger.”
My friends look at me, but I’m in a distant place, listening to the moan of the wind through the tunnels of Lykos. Smelling the dew on the gears in the early morning. Knowing Eo will be waiting
for me when I come home. Like she waits for me now at the end of the cobbled road, as Narol does,
as Pax and Ragnar and Quinn and, I hope, Roque, Lorn, Tactus and the rest of them do. It would not be the end to die. It would be the beginning of something new. I have to believe that. But my death would leave the Jackal here in this world. It would leave him with power over those I love, over all I’ve fought for. I always thought I would die before the end. I trudged on knowing I was doomed. But my friends have breathed love into me, breathed my faith back into my bones. They’ve made me want to
live. They’ve made me want to build. Mustang looks at me, her eyes glassy, and I know she wants me to choose life, but she will not choose for me.
“Darrow? What is your answer?”
“No.” I punch him in the throat. He croaks. Unable to breathe. I knock him down and jump atop him, pinning his arms to the ground with my knees so his head is between my legs. I jam my hand into his mouth. His eyes go wild. Legs kicking. His teeth cut my knuckles, drawing blood.
The last time I pinned him down, I took the wrong weapon. What are hands to a creature like him?
All his evil, all his lies, are spun with the tongue. So I grab it with my helldiver hand, pinning it between forefinger and thumb like the fleshy little baby pitviper it is. “This is always how the story would end, Adrius,” I say down to him. “Not with your screams. Not with your rage. But with your
silence.”
And with a great pull, I rip out the tongue of the Jackal.
He screams beneath me. Blood bubbling from the mutilated stump at the back of his throat.
Splashing over his lips. He thrashes. I shove off him and stand in dark rage, holding the bloody instrument of my enemy as he wails on the ground, feeling the hatred rolling through me and seeing the stunned eyes of my friends. I leave the com in his ear so Lilath can hear him wailing and I stalk to the holocontrols and hail Victra’s ship. Her face appears, eyes widening at the sight of my face.
“Darrow…you’re alive…” she manages. “Sevro…The nukes…”
“You need to destroy the Lion of Mars, ” I say. “Lilath is detonating the bombs on the surface.
There’s hundreds more hidden in the cities. Kill that ship!”
“It’s at the center of their formation,” she protests. “We’ll destroy our fleet trying to get to it. It will take hours if we even manage.”
“Can we jam their signal?” Mustang asks.
“No.”
“EMPs?” Sevro asks, coming up behind me. Victra’s face brightens at the sight of him, before she
shakes her head.
“They have shielding,” she says.
“Use the EMPs on the bombs to short-circuit their radio transmitters,” I say. “Fire an Iron Rain and drop EMPs on the city till they’re out.”
“And plunge three billion people into the Middle Ages?” Cassius asks.
“We’ll be slaughtered,” Victra says. “We can’t drop a Rain. We’ll lose our army. And Gold will just keep the moon.”
Another bomb detonates. This one nearer the southern pole. And then a fourth at the equator. We know the consequences to each one. “Lilath doesn’t know exactly what’s happened to Adrius,” Cassius says quickly. “How loyal is she? Will she detonate all of them?”
“Not when he’s still whimpering,” I say. Least that’s my hope.
“Excuse me,” a small voice says. We turn to see Lysander standing behind us. We forgot about him
in the mayhem. His eyes are shot red from tears. Sevro raises a pulseFist to shoot him. Cassius knocks it aside.
“Call my godfather,” Lysander says bravely. “Call the Ash Lord. He will see reason.”
“Oh, like hell…” Sevro says.
“We just killed the Sovereign and his daughter,” I say. “The Ash Lord…”
“Destroyed Rhea,” Lysander interrupts. “Yes. And it haunts him. Call him and he will help you. My
grandmother would have wanted him to. Luna is our home.”
“He’s right,” Mustang says, pushing me from the console. “Darrow, move.” She’s in that locked zone of concentration. Unable to relate her own thoughts as she starts opening direct com channels to the Gold Praetors in the fleet. The towering men and women appear around us like silvery ghosts, standing among the corpses they watched us make. Last to appear is the Ash Lord. His face stricken with rage. His daughter and master both dead by our hands.
“Bellona, Augustus,” he growls, seeing Lysander among us. “Is it not enough…”
“Godfather, we have no time for recrimination,” Lysander says.
“Lysander…”
“Please listen to them. Our world depends on it.”
Mustang steps forward and raises her voice. “Praetors of the fleet, Ash Lord. The Sovereign is
dead. The nuclear blasts you see destroying your home are not Red weapons. They come from your own arsenal which was stolen by my brother. His Praetor, Lilath, is overseeing the detonation of more than four hundred nuclear warheads from the bridge of The Lion of Mars. They will continue until Lilath is dead. My fellow Aureate, embrace change or embrace oblivion. The choice is yours.”
“You are a traitor….” one of the Praetors hisses.
Lysander walks off the holopad to the table where he sat earlier. He picks up his grandmother ’s scepter and returns as the Praetors are issuing threats to Mustang.
“She is no traitor,” Lysander says, handing her the scepter. The blood of his grandmother staining his hands. “She is our conqueror.”
T he Lion of Mars dies an ignoble death, fired upon from all sides by loyalist and rebel alike.
Watching Luna crackle with nuclear explosions did more to kill the bloodlust between the two navies than any peace or truce ever did. Few men truly like seeing beauty burn. But burn it does. Before the Lion is put to rest, more than twelve bombs detonate, carving new cities of fire and ash among those of steel and concrete. The moon is in turmoil.
As is the Gold Armada. With news of the Sovereign’s death and the detonation of the bombs, the
Society shudders beneath our feet. Wealthy Praetors are taking their personal ships and fracturing away, heading home to Venus, Mercury, or Mars. They do not stand together, because they do not know where to stand.
For sixty years Octavia has ruled. For most living, she is the only Sovereign they have ever known.
Our civilization teeters on the brink. Electrical grids are down across the moon. Riots and panic spread as we prepare to leave the Sovereign’s sanctum. There is an escape ship, but there is no escaping what we’ve done. We’ve carved the heart out of the Society. If we leave, what takes its place?
We knew we could never win Luna by force of arms. But that was never the goal. Just as it was not
Ragnar ’s desire to fight until all Golds perished. He knew Mustang was the key. She always has been.
That’s why he risked our lives to let Kavax go. Now Mustang stands beneath the holo of the wounded moon, hearing the silent screams of the city as keenly as I. I step close to her.
“Are you ready?” I ask.
“What?” She shakes her head. “How could he do this?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But we can fix it.”
“How? This moon will be pandemonium,” she says. “Tens of millions dead. The devastation…”
“And we can rebuild it, together.”
The words flood her with hope, as if she’s only just remembered where we are. What we’ve done.
That we’re together, alive. She blinks quickly and smiles at me. Then she looks at my arm, where my right hand used to be and touches my stomach where Aja stabbed me. “How are you still standing?”
“Because we’re not yet done.”
Battered and bloody, we join Cassius, Lysander, and Sevro before the door leading out of the Sovereign’s inner sanctum as Cassius types in the Olympic code to open the doors. He pauses to sniff the air. “What’s that smell?”
“Smells like a sewer,” I say.
Sevro stares intensely at the razors he’s taken from Aja, including the one belonging to Lorn. “I think it smells like victory.”
“Did you shit your pants?” Cassius squints at him. “You did.”
“Sevro…” Mustang says.
“It’s an involuntary muscle reaction when you’re fake executed and swallow massive amounts of haemanthus oil,” Sevro snaps. “You think I would do that on purpose?”
Cassius and I look at each other.
I shrug. “Well, maybe.”
“Yeah, actually.”
He flips us the crux and makes a face, twisting his lips till it looks like he’s going to explode.
“What’s happening?” I ask. “Are you…still…”
“No!” He throws his water bottle at me. “You stuck a needle full of adrenaline into my chest, asshole. I’m having a heart attack.” He swats our hands as we try to help him. “I’m good. I’m good.”
He wheezes for a moment before straightening with a grimace.
“Are you sure you’re prime?” Mustang asks.
“Left arm’s numb. Probably need a Yellow.”
We snort laughs. We look like walking corpses. Only thing keeping me up are the stim packs we
found on the Praetorians. Cassius hobbles like an old man, but he’s kept Lysander close to him, vetoing Sevro’s offers to end the Lune bloodline here and now by drawing his razor. “The boy is under my protection,” Cassius sneered. And now he walks with us as a sign of our legitimacy.
“I love you all,” I say as the door begins to groan open. I adjust the unconscious Jackal, who I carry on my shoulder as a prize. “No matter what happens.”
“Even Cassius?” Sevro asks.
“Especially me, today,” Cassius says.
“Stay close,” Mustang says to us, clutching the scepter tight.
The first great door parts. Mustang squeezes my hand. Sevro vibrates with fear. Then the second rumbles and dilates open to reveal a hall filled with Praetorians, their weapons drawn and pointed into the mouth of the bunker. Mustang steps forward bearing two symbols of power, one in each hand.
“Praetorians, you serve the Sovereign. The Sovereign is dead. A new star rises.”
She continues walking toward them, refusing to break her step when she nears their line of bristling metal. I think a young Gold with furious eyes might pull the trigger. But his old captain puts a hand on the man’s weapon, lowering it.
And they break for her. Parting and lowering their weapons one by one. They back away to let her
pass. Their helmets slithering back into their armor. I’ve never seen a woman so glorious and powerful as she is now. She is the calm eye of the storm and we follow in her wake. Riding the Dragon Maw lift up in silence. More than four dozen of the Praetorians have come with us.
We find the Citadel in chaos. Servants ransacking rooms, guards leaving their posts in two and threes, worried for their families or their friends. The Obsidians we said were coming are still in orbit. Sefi is with the ships. We only created the ruse to draw men from the room. But it seems word has spread. The Sovereign is dead. The Obsidians are coming.
Amidst the chaos there is only one leader. And as we move through the Citadel’s black marbled halls, past towering Gold statues and departments of state, soldiers gather behind us, their boots stampeding over the marble halls to flock to Mustang, the one symbol of purpose and power left in
the building. She lifts both her symbols of power high in the air, and those who first raise weapons against us see them and me and Cassius and the swelling mass of soldiers behind us and realize they’re fighting the tide. They join us, or they run. Some take shots at us, or rush forward in small
bands to halt our progress, but they’re cut down before they get within ten meters of Mustang.
By the time we come before the great ivory-white doors to the Senate Chambers, behind which Senators have been sequestered inside by Praetorians, an army of hundreds is at our backs. And only a thin line of Praetorians bars our way to the Senate Chamber. Twenty in number.
An elegant Gold Knight steps forward, leader of the men guarding the chamber. He eyes the hundred behind us, seeing the purple adherents Mustang has gathered, the Obsidians, the Grays, me.
And he makes a decision. He salutes Mustang sharply.
“My brother has thirty men in the Citadel,” Mustang says. “The Boneriders. Find them and arrest
them, Captain. If they resist, kill them.”
“Yes, Lady Augustus.” He snaps his fingers and departs with a fist of soldiers. The two Obsidians
guarding the doors push them open for us and Mustang strides into the Senate Chamber.
The room is vast. A tiered funnel of white marble. At the bottom center is a podium from which the Sovereign presides over the ten levels of the chamber. We enter on the north side, causing a disruption. Hundreds of beady Politico eyes turn their entitled focus toward us. They will have watched the broadcast. Seen Octavia die. Seen the bombs wrecking their moon. And somewhere in the
room, Roque’s mother will stand up from her seat on her marble bench and crane her neck to watch
our bloody band stomping down the white marble stairs to the bottom center of the great chamber, passing Senators to our right and left, bringing silence with us instead of shouts or protests. Lysander trails behind Cassius.
You can hear the rasping panicked breath of the Senate Majority Speaker as his Pink attendants help his withered form down from the podium where he was presiding over something of great importance. They were holding an election. Here, now, in the middle of chaos. And now they look like children who’ve been caught with their hands in the biscuit jar. Of course they would never suspect that the Praetorians guarding them would support rebels. Or that we could walk from the Sovereign’s bunker unimpeded. But they’ve created a Society of fear. Where men and women must attach themselves to a rising star to survive. That’s all this is. That simple human directive that allows for this coup to work. The old power is dead. See how they flock to the new.
Mustang takes the podium with the rest of us flanking her. I toss the Jackal to the ground so the Senate can see what has become of him. He’s unconscious and pale from blood loss. Mustang looks at me. This is a moment she never wanted. But she accepts it as her burden just as I have accepted mine as Reaper. I see how it troubles her. How she will need me as I’ve needed her. But I could never stand where she stands or hold what she holds. Not without destroying everyone in this room. They would
never accept it. If I am the bridge to the lowColors, she’s the bridge to the high. Only together can we bind these people. Only together can we bring peace.
“Senators of the Society,” Mustang proclaims, “I stand before you, Virginia au Augustus. Daughter
of Nero au Augustus of the Lion House of Mars. You may know me. Sixty years ago Octavia au Lune
stood before you with the head of a tyrant, her father, and laid her claim on the post of Sovereign to this Society.”
Her keen eyes scour the room.
“I stand before you now with the head of a tyrant.” She lifts her left hand to show the head of Octavia. One of the two objects which granted us passage here. Gold respects only one thing. And to change, they must be tamed by that one thing. “The Old Age has brought nuclear holocaust to the heart of the Society. Millions burned for Octavia’s greed. Millions burn now for my brother ’s. We must save ourselves from ourselves before the inheritance of humanity is ash. Today I declare the beginning of a new age.” She looks at me. “With new allies. New ways. I have the Rising at my back.
A navy made of great Golden Houses which holds the Obsidian Horde in orbit. You have a choice
before you.” She tosses the head on the stone podium and raises her other hand. In it is the Dawn Scepter, bestowing upon the bearer the right to rule Society. “Bend. Or break.”
A silence fills the chamber. So vast I feel it might swallow us all into itself and begin the war anew.
No Gold will be the first to bend. I could make them. But better I bend for them. I fall to my knee before Mustang. Looking up into her eyes, I put my stump over my heart and feel myself swept away
by the impossible joy of the moment. “Hail, Sovereign,” I say. Then Cassius falls to his knee. And Sevro. Then Lysander au Lune and the Praetorians, and then one by one the Senators fall to their knees till all but fifty kneel and break the silence together, shouting with a single riotous voice: “Hail, Sovereign. Hail, Sovereign!”
—
A week after Mustang’s ascension, I stand beside her to watch her brother hang. But for Valii-Rath and some ten men, the Jackal’s Boneriders have been found and executed. Now their leader walks past me through the crowded Luna square. His hair is feathery and combed. His prisoner jumpsuit lime green.
The lowColors around us watch in silence. A light dusting of snow falls from a thin skin of gray clouds. I’m nauseous from my radiation medication. But I came for her as she came for me to watch
Roque buried. She’s quiet and serene beside me. Face pale as the marble beneath our feet. The Telemanuses stand beside her, watching impassively as the Jackal climbs the stairs of the metal scaffold to where the White hangwoman waits.
The woman reads the sentence. Jeers are shouted from the crowd. A bottle shatters at the Jackal’s
feet. A stone splits his forehead. But he does not blink or buckle. He stands proud and vain as they loop the noose around his neck. I wish this would bring Pax back to us. That Quinn and Roque and Eo could live again, but this man has carved his mark in the world. The Jackal of Mars will never be forgotten.
The White moves for the lever, snow gathering on Adrius’s hair. Mustang swallows. And the trapdoor opens. On Mars there’s not much gravity, so you have to pull the feet to break the neck. They let the loved ones do it. On Luna there’s even less. But no one comes forward from the crowd as the White extends the invitation. Not a soul lifts a finger as the Jackal’s legs kick and his face purples.
There’s a stillness in me watching the sight. As if I’m a million kilometers away. I cannot feel for him.
Not now. Not after all he’s done. But I know Mustang does. I know this tears her apart. So I lightly squeeze her hand and guide her forward. She moves across the snow in a daze to grip her twin brother ’s feet. Looking up at him as if this were a dream. She whispers something and, lowering her head, she pulls down, showing him he was loved, even at the end.
In the weeks following the bombing of Luna and the ascension of Mustang, the world has changed.
Millions lost their lives, but for the first time there is hope. In the aftermath of her speech to the Senate, dozens of Gold ships defected, joining the forces of Orion and Victra. The Ash Lord did his best to rally his navy, but with Luna burning, his fleet fracturing, and Mustang as Sovereign, it was all he could do to keep his own ships from falling into enemy hands. He retreated to Mercury with the
core of his forces.
In his absence, Mustang has secured the cooperation of much of the military, particularly the Gray Legions and Obsidian slave-knights. She has used this political muscle to take the first steps to dismantling the Color Hierarchy and the Gold grip on military power. The Senate has been disbanded.
The Board of Quality Control has been dissolved. Thousands face charges of crimes against humanity. Justice will not be so quick as it was with the Jackal, or so clean, but we will do the best we can.
I thought I might be able to rest after Octavia was dead, but we are not without enemies. Romulus
and the Moon Lords remain on the Rim. The Ash Lord aims to rally Mercury and Venus. Gold warlords have begun carving out claims. And Luna itself is a disaster. Overrun by riots and shortages of food and spreading radiation. She will survive, but I doubt she will ever look the same, no matter how much Quicksilver promises to rebuild the city to even greater heights.
My own body is in recovery. Mickey and Virany reattached my hand, which I retrieved from the Jackal’s shuttle that set down on Luna. It will be months before I can write again, much less use a blade. Though I hope I have less cause for that in the coming days.
In my youth, I thought I would destroy the Society. Dismantle its customs. Shatter the chains and something new and beautiful would simply grow from the ashes. That’s not how the world works.
This compromised victory is the best mankind could hope for. Change will come slower than Dancer
or the Sons want, but it will come without the price of anarchy.
So we hope.
Under the supervision of Holiday, Sefi has set off to Mars to begin the slow process of freeing the rest of her people, visiting the poles with medicine instead of weapons. I remember how dark her eyes seemed when she looked at one of the Jackal’s nuclear craters in person. For now, she’s embraced the legacy of her brother, and plans to settle on warmer land set aside for her people on Mars. Though she wishes to keep her people from the alien cities, I think she knows deep down that she will not be able to control them. The Obsidians will leave their prisons. They will grow curious, spread, and assimilate. Their world will never be the same. Nor will that of my people. Soon I will return to Mars
to help Dancer lead the migration of Reds to the surface. Many will stay and continue the lives they know. But for others, there will be a chance for life under the sky.
I said farewell to Cassius the day before last as he departed Luna. Mustang wanted him to stay and help us shape a new, fairer system of justice. But he’s had enough of politics. “You don’t have to go,”
I told him as I stood with him on the landing pad.
“There’s nothing for me here but memories,” he said. “I’ve been living my life too long for others.
I want to see what else is out there. You can’t fault me for that.”
“And the boy?” I asked, nodding to Lysander, who moved into the ship carrying a satchel of belongings. “Sevro thinks it’s a mistake to let him live. What were his words? ‘It’s like leaving a pitviper egg under your seat. Sooner or later it’s gonna hatch.’ ”
“And what do you think?”
“I think it’s a different world. So we should act like it. He’s got Lorn’s blood in his veins as much as he’s got Octavia’s. Not that blood makes a difference anymore.”
My tall friend smiled fondly at me. “He reminds me of Julian. He’s a good soul, despite everything.
I’ll raise him right. Away from all this.” He extended a hand, not to shake mine, but to give me the ring he took from my finger the night Lorn and Fitchner died. I closed his hand back around it.
“That belongs to Julian,” I said.
He nodded softly. “Thank you…brother.” And there, on a citadel landing platform in what was once
the heart of Gold power, Cassius au Bellona and I shake hands and say farewell, almost six years to the day since we first met.
—
Weeks later, I watch the waves lap at the shore as a gull careens overhead. Whitecaps mark the dark water that lashes the northern beach’s sea stacks. Mustang and I set our little two-person flier down on the east-northeast coast of the Pacific Rim, at the edge of a rain forest on a great peninsula. Moss grows on the rocks, on the trees. The air is crisp. Just cold enough to see your breath. It is my first time on Earth, but I feel like my spirit has come home. “Eo would have loved it here, wouldn’t she?”
Mustang asks me. She wears a black coat with the collar pulled up around her neck. Her new Praetorian bodyguards sit in the rocks a half kilometer off.
“Yes,” I say. “She would have.” A place like this is the beating heart of our songs. Not a warm beach or a tropical paradise. This wild land is full of mystery. It holds its secrets covetously behind arms of fog and veils of pine needles. Its pleasures, like its secrets, must be earned. It reminds me of my dreams of the Vale. The smoke from the fire we made of driftwood rises diagonally across the horizon.
“Do you think it will last?” Mustang asks me, watching the water from our place in the sand. “The
peace.”
“It would be the first time,” I say.
She grimaces and leans into me, closing her eyes. “At least we have this.”
I smile, reminded of Cassius as an eagle skims low over the water before rising up through the mist and disappearing in the trees that jut from the top of a sea stack. “Have I passed your test?”
“My test?” she asks.
“Ever since you blocked my ship from leaving Phobos, you’ve been testing me. I thought I passed
on the ice, but it didn’t stop there.”
“You noticed,” she says with a mischievous little grin. It fades and she brushes hair from her eyes.
“I’m sorry that I couldn’t just follow you. I needed to see if you could build. I needed to see if my people could live in your world.”
“No, I understand that,” I say. “But there’s more to it. Something changed when you saw my mother.
My brother. Something opened up in you.”
She nods, eyes still on the water. “There’s something I have to tell you.” I look over at her. “You lied to me for nearly six years. Since the moment we met. In the Lykos tunnel you broke what we had.
That trust. That feeling of closeness we built. Piecing that together takes time. I needed to see if we could find what we lost. I needed to see if I could trust you.”
“You know you can.”
“I do, now,” she says. “But…”
I frown. “Mustang, you’re shaking.”
“Just let me finish. I didn’t want to lie to you. But I didn’t know how you would react. What you would do. I needed you to make the choice to be more than a killer not just for me, but for someone else too.” She looks past me to the blue sky where a ship coasts lazily down. I hold my hand up against the autumn sun to watch it approach.
“Are we expecting company?” I ask warily.
“Of a sort.” She stands. I join her. And she goes to her tiptoes to kiss me. It is a gentle, long kiss that makes me forget the sand under our boots, the smell of pine and salt in the breeze. Her nose is cold against mine. Her cheeks ruddy. All the sadness, all the hurt in the past making this moment all the sweeter. If pain is the weight of being, love is the purpose. “I want you to know that I love you. More than anything.” She backs away from me, pulling me along. “Almost.”
The ship skims over the evergreen forest and sets down on the beach. Its wings fold backward like
a settling pigeon. Sand and salt spray kicked up by its engines. Mustang’s fingers twine through mine as we trudge through the sand. The ramp unfurls. Sophocles sprints out onto the beach, running toward a group of seagulls. Behind him comes the voice of Kavax and the sweet sound of a child laughing. My feet falter. I look over at Mustang in confusion. She pulls me on, a nervous smile on her face. Kavax exits the ship with Dancer. Victra and Sevro come with, waving over to me before looking expectantly back up the ramp.
I used to think the life strands of my friends frayed around me, because mine was too strong. Now I realize that when we are wound together, we make something unbreakable. Something that lasts long
after this life ends. My friends have filled the hollow carved in me by my wife’s death. They’ve made me whole again. My mother joins them now on the ramp, walking with Kieran to set foot on Earth for the first time. She smiles like I did when she smells the salt. The wind kicks her gray hair. Her eyes are glassy and full of the joy my father always wanted for her. And in her arms she carries a laughing child with golden hair.
“Mustang?” I ask. My voice trembling. “Who is that?”
“Darrow…” Mustang smiles over at me. “That is our son. His name is Pax.”
Pax was born nine months after the Lion’s Rain, as I lay in the Jackal’s stone table. Fearing that our enemies would seek the boy out if they knew of his existence, Mustang kept her pregnancy a secret on the Dejah Thoris until she was able to give birth. Then, leaving the child to be guarded by Kavax’s wife in the asteroid belt, she returned to war.
That peace she intended to make with the Sovereign was not just for her and her people, but for her son. She wanted a world without war for him. I can’t hate her for that. For keeping this secret from me. She was afraid. Not just that she could not trust me, but that I was not prepared to be the father my son deserves. That was her test, all this time. She almost told me in Tinos, but after conferring with my mother, she decided against it. Mother knew if I realized I had a son, I would not be able to do what needed to be done.
My people needed a sword, not a father.
But now, for the first time in my life, I can be both.
This war is not over. The sacrifices we made to take Luna will haunt our new world. I know that.
But I am no longer alone in the dark. When I first stepped through the gates of the Institute, I wore the weight of the world on my shoulders. It crushed me. Broke me, but my friends have pieced me together. Now they each carry a part of Eo’s dream. Together we can make a world fit for my son.
For the generations to come.
I can be a builder, not just a destroyer. Eo and Fitchner saw that when I could not. They believed in me. So whether they wait for me in the Vale or not, I feel them in my heart, I hear their echo beating across the worlds. I see them in my son, and, when he is old enough, I will take him on my knee and his mother and I will tell him of the rage of Ares, the strength of Ragnar, the honor of Cassius, the love of Sevro, the loyalty of Victra, and the dream of Eo, the girl who inspired me to live for more.
To sister, who taught me to listen
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I was afraid to write Morning Star.
For months I delayed that first sentence. I sketched ship schematics, wrote songs for Reds and Golds, histories of the families and the planets and the moons that make up the savage little world I’d stumbled onto in my room above my parents’ garage almost five years ago.
I wasn’t afraid because I didn’t know where I was going. I was afraid because I knew exactly how
the story would end. I just didn’t think I was skillful enough to take you there.
Sound familiar?
So I put myself in seclusion. I packed my bags, my hiking boots, and left my apartment in Los Angeles for my family’s cabin on the wind-ripped coast of the Pacific Northwest.
I thought isolation would help the process, that somehow I would find my muse in the quiet and the fog of the coast. I could write sunup to sundown. I could walk among the evergreens. Channel the spirits of mythmakers past. It worked for Red Rising. It worked for Golden Son. But it didn’t work for Morning Star.
In my isolation, I felt shuttered, trapped by Darrow, trapped by the thousand paths he could follow and the congestion in my own brain. I wrote the initial chapters in that mental space. I suppose it helped their formation, giving Darrow a weird, sad mania behind his eyes. But I couldn’t see beyond his rescue from Attica.
It wasn’t until I returned from the cabin that the story began to find its voice and I began to understand that Darrow wasn’t the focus anymore. It was the people around him. It was his family, his friends, his loves, the voices that swarm and hearts that beat in tune with his own.
How could I ever expect to write something like that in isolation? Without the coffee powwows with Tamara Fernandez (the wisest person I know without white hair), the early dawn breakfasts with Josh Crook where we conspire to take over the world, the Hollywood Bowl concerts with Madison
Ainley, the hours of debate about Roman military warfare with Max Carver, the ice cream crusades
with Jarrett Llewelyn, the Battlestar nerdouts with Callie Young, and the maniacal plotting with Dennis
“the Menace” Stratton?
Friends are the pulse of life. Mine are wild and vast and full of dreams and absurdity. Without them, I’d be a shade, and this book would be hollow between the covers. Thank you to each and every one
of them, named and unnamed, for sharing this wonderful life with me.
Every upstart needs a wise wizard to guide his path and show him the proverbial ropes. I count myself lucky to have a titan of my youth become a mentor in my twenties. Terry Brooks, thank you
for all the words of encouragement and advice. You’re the man.
Thank you to the Phillips Clan for always giving me a second home where I could dream aloud.
And Joel in particular for sitting on that couch with me five years ago and wildly planning to make maps for a book that hadn’t yet been written. You’re a wonder and a brother in all but name. Thank you to my other brohirim: Aaron for making me write, and Nathan for always liking what I write, even when you shouldn’t.
Thank you also to my agent, Hannah Bowman, who found Red Rising amidst the slush. Havis Dawson for guiding the novels into more than twenty-eight different languages. Tim Gerard Reynolds for giving me chills with his audiobook narration. My foreign publishers for their tireless
efforts in trying to translate Bloodydamn or ripWing or anything Sevro says into Korean or Italian or whatever the local tongue.
Thank you to the peerless team at Del Rey for believing in Red Rising from the moment it first passed across your desks. I could not ask for a better House. Scott Shannon, Tricia Narwani, Keith Clayton, Joe Scalora, David Moench, you’ve got the hearts of Hufflepuffs and the courage of Gryffindors as far as I’m concerned.
Thank you to my family for always suspecting that my strangeness was a quality and not a liability.
For making me explore forests and fields instead of the channels on the tube. My father for teaching me the grace of power unused, and mother for teaching me the joy of power used well. My sister for her tireless efforts on behalf of the Sons of Ares fan page, and for understanding me better than anyone else.
The most profound thanks must go to my editor, Mike “au Telemanus” Braff. If he didn’t fully understand the extent of my neurosis before this book, he sure as hell does now. Few authors are as lucky as I am to have an editor like Mike. He’s humble, patient, and diligent, even when I’m not. That this book was brought to you only a year after Golden Son is a miracle of his making. I doff my cap to you, my goodman.
And to each and every reader, thank you. Your passion and excitement have allowed me to live my
life on my own terms, and for that I am ever grateful and humbled. Your creativity, humor, and support come through in every message, tweet, and comment. Getting to meet you and hear your stories at conventions and signings is one of the perks of being an author. Thank you, Howlers, for all that you do. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to howl together soon.
Once I thought that writing this book would be impossible. It was a skyscraper, massive and complete and unbearably far off. It taunted me from the horizon. But do we ever look at such buildings and assume they sprung up overnight? No. We’ve seen the traffic congestion that attends them. The skeleton of beams and girders. The swarm of builders and the rattle of cranes…
Everything grand is made from a series of ugly little moments. Everything worthwhile by hours of
self-doubt and days of drudgery. All the works by people you and I admire sit atop a foundation of failures.
So whatever your project, whatever your struggle, whatever your dream, keep toiling, because the
world needs your skyscraper.
Per aspera, ad astra!
—Pierce Brown
BY PIERCE BROWN
Red Rising
Golden Son
Morning Star
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PIERCE BROWN is the New York Times bestselling author of Red Rising, Golden Son, and Morning Star. While trying to make it as a writer, Brown worked as a manager of social media at a start-up tech company, toiled as a peon on the Disney lot at ABC Studios, did his
time as an NBC page, and gave sleep deprivation a new meaning during his stint as an aide
on a U.S. Senate campaign. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is at work on his next novel.
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