Morning Star (Red Rising #3) - Pierce Brown Page 0,2

our game.” I shake my head. “Now I don’t think I’d last a minute.”

“Because you now know how much there is to lose.”

Ragnar ’s black eyes hold the shadows of a vast history. Nearly forty, he’s a man who was raised in a world of ice and magic, sold to the Gods to buy life for his people, and served as a slave longer than I’ve been alive. How much better does he understand life than I do?

“Do you still miss home? Your sister?” I ask.

“I do. I long for the early snow in the throes of summer, how it stuck to the fur of Sefi’s boots as I carried her on my shoulders to see Níðhǫggr break through the spring ice.”

Níðhǫggr was a dragon who lived under the world tree of the Old Norse societies and spent his days gnawing at the roots of Yggdrasil. Many Obsidian tribes believe he comes up from the deep waters of their sea to break the ice that blocks their harbors and open the veins of the pole for their

spring raiding boats. In honor of him, they send the bodies of their criminals to the deep in a holiday called Ostara, the first day of true spring light.

“I sent friends to the Spires and the Ice to spread your word. To tell my people their gods are false. They are in bondage, and we will soon come to free them. They will know Eo’s song.”

Eo’s song. It seems so fragile and silly now.

“I don’t feel her anymore, Ragnar.” I glance behind us to the Oranges and Reds who spare glances

our direction as they work on the ripWings in the hangar. “I know they think I’m their link to her. But I lost her in the darkness. I used to think she was watching me. I used to talk to her. Now…she’s a stranger.” I hang my head. “So much of this is my fault, Ragnar. If I hadn’t been so proud, I would have seen the signs. Fitchner would be alive. Lorn would be alive.”

“You think you know the strands of fate?” He laughs at my arrogance. “You do not know what would have happened if they lived.”

“I know I can’t be what these people need.”

He frowns. “And how would you know what they need when you are afraid of them? When you

can’t even look upon them?” I don’t know how to answer. He stands abruptly and extends a hand to me. “Come with me.”

—

The hospital was once a cafeteria. Rows of gurneys and makeshift beds now fill it along with coughs and solemn whispers as Red, Pink, and Yellow nurses in yellow scrubs move through the beds checking the patients. The back of the room is a burn ward, separated from the rest of the patients by plastic containment walls. A woman’s screaming on the other side of the plastic, fighting a nurse as he tries to give her an injection. Two other nurses rush to subdue her.

I feel swallowed by the sterile sadness of the place. There’s no gore. No blood dripping on the floor. But this is the aftermath of my escape from Attica. Even with a Carver as good as Mickey, they won’t have the resources to mend these people. The wounded stare up at the stone ceiling wondering what life will be like now. That’s what this feeling is in this room. Trauma. Not of flesh. But lives and dreams interrupted.

I’d retreat from the room, but Ragnar rolls me forward to the edge of a young man’s bed. He watched me as I came in. His hair is short. His face plump and awkward with a prominent under bite.

“What’s what?” I ask, my voice remembering the flavor of the mine.

He shrugs. “Just dancin’ time away, hear?”

“I hear.” I extend a hand. “Darrow…of Lykos.”

“We know.” His hands are so small he can’t even wrap his fingers around mine. He chuckles at the

ridiculousness of it. “Vanno of Karos.”

“Night or day?”

“Dayshift, you pigger. I look like some saggy-faced night digger?”

“Well, you never know these days…”

“True enough. I’m Omicron. Third drillboy, second line.”

“So that was your chaff I’d be dodging deep.”

He grins. “Helldivers, always lookin’ themselves in the eye.” He makes a lewd motion with his hands. “Someone’s gotta teach you to look up.”

We laugh. “How much did it hurt?” he asks, nodding to me. At first I think he’s asking about what

the Jackal did. Then I realize he’s referring to the Sigils on my hands. The ones I’ve tried to cover

with my sweater. I unveil them now. “Manic shit, that.” He flicks it with his finger.

I look around, suddenly aware that it’s not just Vanno watching me. It’s everyone. Even on the far side of the room in the burn unit Reds push themselves up in their beds to look at me. They can’t see the fear inside. They see what they want. I glance at Ragnar, but he’s busy speaking to an injured woman. Holiday. She nods to me. Grief still very much at home on her face for her lost brother. His pistol is on her bedside, his rifle leaning against the wall. The Sons recovered his body during the rescue so he could be buried.

“How much did it hurt?” I repeat. “Well, imagine falling into a clawDrill, Vanno. A centimeter at a time. First goes the skin. Then the flesh. Then bone. Easy stuff.”

Vanno whistles and looks down at his missing legs with a tired, almost bored expression. “Didn’t

even feel this. My suit injected enough hydrophone to knock out one of them.” He nods to Ragnar and draws air through his teeth. “And least I still got my prick.”

“Ask him,” a man beside him urges. “Vanno…”

“Shut up.” Vanno sighs. “Boys have been wonderin’. Did you get to keep it?”

“Keep what?”

“It.” He looks at my groin. “Or did they…you know…make it proportionate?”

“You really want to know?”

“I mean…not for personal reasons. But I’ve got money riding on it.”

“Well.” I lean forward seriously. So do Vanno and his bedmates nearby. “If you really want to know, you should ask your mother.”

Vanno stares at me intensely, then explodes into laughter. His bedmates laugh and spread the joke to the far edges of the room. And in that tiny moment, the mood shifts. The suffocating sterility cut through with amusement and crude jokes. Whispering suddenly seems ridiculous here. It fills me with energy to see the shifting tide and realize it’s because of a single laugh. Instead of retreating from the eyes, from the room, I move away from Ragnar down the lines of cots to mingle more with the injured, to thank them, to ask where they’re from and learn their names. And this is where I thank Jove that I’ve a good memory on me. Forget a man’s name and he’ll forgive you. Remember it, and

he’ll defend you forever.

Most call me sir or Reaper. And I want to correct them and tell them to call me Darrow, but I know the value of respect, of distance between men and leader. Because even though I’m laughing with them, even though they’re helping heal what’s been twisted inside me, they are not my friends. They are not my family. Not yet. Not until we have that luxury. For now, they are my soldiers. And they need me as much as I need them. I’m their Reaper. It took Ragnar to remind me. He favors me with an ungainly grin, so pleased to see me smiling and laughing with the soldiers. I’ve never been a man of joy or a man of war, or an island in a storm. Never an absolute like Lorn. That was what I pretended to be. I am and always have been a man who is made complete by those around him. I feel strength

growing in myself. A strength I haven’t felt in so long. It’s not only that I’m loved. It’s that they believe in me. Not the mask like my soldiers at the Institute. Not the false idol I built in the service of Augustus, but the man beneath. Lykos may be gone. Eo may be silent. Mustang a world away. And the

Sons on the brink of extinction. But I feel my soul trickling back into me as I realize I am finally home.

—

With Ragnar at my side I return to the command room where Sevro and Dancer are hunched over a

blueprint. Theodora’s in the corner exchanging correspondences. They turn as I enter, surprised to

see the smile on my face and to see that I’m now standing. Not on my own, but with Ragnar ’s help. I left the chair in the hospital and had him guide me back to the command room I fled only an hour prior. I feel a new man. And I may not be what I was before the darkness, but perhaps I’m better for it.

I have humility I didn’t have before.

“I’m sorry for how I acted,” I say to my friends. “This has been…overwhelming. I know you’ve done the best you can. Better than anyone could, given the circumstances. You’ve all kept hope alive.

And you saved me. And you saved my family.” I pause, making sure they know how much that means

to me. “I know you didn’t expect me to come back like this. I know you thought I’d come back with

wrath and fire. But I’m not what I was. I’m just not,” I say as Sevro tries to correct me. “I trust you. I trust your plans. I want to help in whatever way I can. But I can’t help you like this.” I hold up my thin arms. “So I need your help with three things.”

“Always so dramatic,” Sevro says. “What are your demands, Princess?”

“First I want to send an emissary to Mustang. I know you think she betrayed me, but I want her to

know I’m alive. Maybe there’s some chance it’ll make a difference. That’s she’ll help us.”

Sevro snorts. “We already gave her the opportunity once. She almost killed you and Rags.”

“But she did not,” Ragnar says. “It is worth the risk, if she will help us. I will go as emissary so she does not doubt our intentions.”

“Like hell,” Sevro says. “You’re one of most wanted men in the System. Gold have shut down all

unauthorized air traffic. And you won’t last two minutes in a space port, even with a mask.”

“We’ll send one of my spies,” Theodora says. “I have one in mind. She’s good, and a hundred kilograms less conspicuous that you, Prince of the Spires. The girl’s in a port city already.”

“Evey?” Dancer asks.

“Just.” Theodora looks my direction. “Evey’s done her best to make amends for the sins of the past.

Even ones that weren’t hers. She’s been very helpful. Dancer, I’ll make the arrangements for travel and cover, if that’s all right with you.”

“It’s all right,” Sevro says quickly, though Theodora waits for Dancer to nod his agreement.

“Thank you,” I say. “I also need you to bring Mickey back to Tinos.”

“Why?” Dancer asks.

“I need him to make me into a weapon again.”

Sevro cackles. “Now we’re talking. Get some man-killing meat on your bones. No more of this anorexic scarecrow shit.”

Dancer shakes his head. “Mickey’s half a thousand clicks away in Varos, working on his little project. He’s needed there. You need calories. Not a Carver. In the state you’re in, it could be dangerous.”

“Reap can handle it. We can get Mickey and his equipment here by Thursday,” Sevro says. “Virany

has been consulting with him anyway about your condition. He’ll be tickled Pink to see you.”

Dancer watches Sevro with strained patience. “And the last request?”

I grimace. “I have a feeling you’re not gonna like this one.”

I find Victra in an isolated room with several Sons guarding the door. She lies with her feet sticking off the edge of a medical cot, watching a holo at the foot of her bed as Society news channels drone on about the valiant Legion attack on a terrorist force that destroyed a dam and flooded the lower Mystos River Valley. The flooding has forced two million Brown farmers out of their homes. Grays

deliver aid packages from the backs of military trucks. Easily could have been Reds who blew up the dam. Or it could have been the Jackal. At this point, who knows?

Victra’s white-gold hair is bound in a tight ponytail. Every limb, even the paralyzed legs, is cuffed to the bed. Not much trust here for her kind. She doesn’t look up at me as the holo story kicks over to a profile on Roque au Fabii, the Poet of Deimos and the newest heartthrob of the gossip circuit.

Searching through his past, conducting interviews with his Senator mother, his teachers before the Institute, showing him as boy on their country estate.

“Roque always found the natural world to be more beautiful than cities,” his mother says for the camera. “It’s the perfect order in nature that he so admired. How it formed effortlessly into a hierarchy. I think that’s why he loved the Society so dearly, even then….”

“That woman would look much better with a gun in her mouth,” Victra mutters, muting the sound.

“She’s probably said his name more in the last month than she did his entire childhood,” I reply.

“Well, politicians never let a popular family member go to waste. What was it Roque once said about Augustus at a party? ‘Oh, how the vultures flock to the mighty, to eat the carcasses left in their wake.’ ” Victra looks at me with her flashing, belligerent eyes. The madness I saw in them earlier has retreated but not vanished entirely. It lingers like mine. “Might as well have been talking about you.”

“That’s fair,” I say.

“Are you leading this little pack of terrorists?”

“I had my chance to lead. I made a mess of it. Sevro is in charge.”

“Sevro.” She leans back. “Really?”

“Is that funny?”

“No. For some reason I’m not surprised at all, actually. Always had a bigger bite than bark. First time I saw him, he was kicking Tactus’s ass.”

I step closer. “I believe I owe you an explanation.”

“Oh, hell. Can’t we skip this part?” she asks. “It’s boring.”

“Skip it?”

She sighs heavily. “Apologies. Recrimination. All the trifling shit people muddle through because

they’re insecure. You don’t owe me an explanation.”

“How do you figure?”

“We all enter a certain social contract by living in this Society of ours. My people oppress your tiny kind. We live off the spoils of your labor. Pretending you don’t exist. And you fight back. Usually very poorly. Personally, I think that’s your right. It’s not good or evil. But it’s fair. I’d applaud a mouse that managed to kill an eagle, wouldn’t you? Good for it.

“It’s absurd and hypocritical for Golds to complain now simply because the Reds finally started fighting well.” She laughs sharply at my surprise. “What, darling? Did you expect me to scream and rant and piss on about honor and betrayal like those walking wounds, Cassius and Roque?”

“A little,” I say. “I would….”

“That’s because you’re more emotional than I am. I’m a Julii. Cold runneth through my veins.” She

rolls her eyes when I try to correct her. “Don’t ask me to be different because you need validation, please. It’s beneath the both of us.”

“You’ve never been as cold as you pretend to be,” I say.

“I’ve existed long before you ever came into my life. What do you really know of me? I am my

mother ’s daughter.”

“You’re more than that.”

“If you say so.”

There’s no artifice to her. No coy manipulation. Mustang’s all smirks and subtle plays. Victra’s a wrecking ball. She softened before the Triumph. Let her guard down. But now it’s back and it’s as alienating as when I first met her. But the longer we speak, the more I see her hair is shot with gray, not just pale Gold. Her cheeks are hollow, her right hand, the one on the opposite side of the cot, clenching the sheets.

“I know why you lied to me, Darrow. And I can respect it. But what I don’t understand is why you

saved me in Attica. Was it pity? A tactic?”

“It’s because you’re my friend,” I say.

“Oh, please.”

“I would rather have died trying to get you out of that cell than let you rot in there. Trigg did die getting you out.”

“Trigg?”

“One of the Grays who were behind me when we came into your cell. The other one is his sister.”

“I didn’t ask to be saved,” she says bitterly, her way of washing her hands of Trigg’s death. She looks away from me now. “You know Antonia thought we were lovers, you and I. She showed me your Carving. She taunted me. As if it would disgust me to see what you are. To see where you came from. To see how I had been lied to.”

“And did it?”

She sneers. “Why would I care what you were? I care about what people do. I care about truth. If

you had told me, I wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. I would have protected you.” I believe her. And I believe the pain in her eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I was afraid.”

“But I wager you told Mustang?”

“Yes.”

“Why her and not me? I at least deserve that.”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s because you’re a liar. You said I wasn’t wicked in the hall. But you think it deep down. You never trusted me.”

“No,” I say. “I didn’t. That’s my mistake. And my friends have paid for it with their lives. That…that guilt was my only company in the box he kept me in for the nine months.” By the look in her eyes I know she didn’t know what had been done to me. “But now I’ve been given a second chance at life, I don’t want to waste it. I want to make amends with you. I owe you a life. I owe you justice. And I want you to join us.”

“Join you?” she says with a laugh. “As a Son of Ares?”

“Yes.”

“You’re serious.” She laughs at me. Another defense mechanism. “I’m not really into suicide, darling.”

“The world you know is gone, Victra. Your sister has stolen it from you. Your mother and her friends have been wiped out. Your house is now your enemy. And you’re an outcast from your own

people. That is the problem with this Society. It eats its own. It pits us against one another. You have nowhere to go….”

“Well, you really know how to make a girl feel special.”

“…I want to give you a family that will not stab you in the back. I want to give you a life with meaning. I know you’re a good person, even if you laugh at me for saying it. But I believe in you.

Yet…all that doesn’t matter—what I believe, what I want. What matters is what you want.”

She searches my eyes. “What I want?”

“If you want to leave here, you can. If you want to stay in this bed, you can. Say what you want and it’s yours. I owe you that.”

She thinks for a moment. “I don’t care about your rebellion. I don’t care about your dead wife. Or about finding a family or finding meaning. I want to be able to sleep without them jacking me full of chemicals, Darrow. I want to be able to dream again. I want to forget my mother ’s caved-in head and her vacant eyes and her twitching fingers. I want to forget Adrius laughing. And I want to repay Antonia and Adrius for their hospitality. I want to stand above them and that piece of shit, Roque, as they weep for the end as I gouge out their eyes and pour molten gold into the sockets so they scream and writhe and spread their urine upon the floor and beg forgiveness for ever thinking they could put Victra au Julii in a gorydamn cage.” She smiles ferally. “I want revenge.”`

“Revenge is a hollow end,” I say.

“And I’m a hollow girl now.”

I know she’s not. I know she’s more than that. But I also know better than anyone that wounds aren’t healed in a day. I’m barely stitched together myself, and I have my entire family here. “If that is what you want, that is what I owe you. In three days the Carver who made me into a Gold will be here. He will make us what we were. He’ll mend your spine. Give you your legs back, if you want them.”

She squints at me. “And you trust me, after what trust has cost you?”

I take the magnetic key given to me by the Sons outside and press it to the inside of her cuffs. One by one they unlatch from the bed, freeing her legs, her arms.

“You’re dumber than you look,” she says.

“You might not believe in our rebellion. But I saw Tactus change before his future was robbed from him. I’ve seen Ragnar forget his bonds and reach for what he wants in this world. I’ve seen Sevro become a man. I’ve seen myself change. I truly do believe we choose who we want to be in this life. It isn’t preordained. You taught me loyalty, more than Mustang, more than Roque. And because of that, I believe in you, Victra. As much as I’ve ever believed in anyone.” I hold out my hand. “Be my

family and I will never forsake you. I will never lie to you. I will be your brother as long as you live.”

Startled by the emotion in my voice, the cold woman stares up at me. Those defenses she erected

forgotten now. In another life we might have been a pair. Might have had that fire I feel for Mustang, for Eo. But not in this life.

Victra does not soften. Does not crumble to tears. There’s still rage inside her. Still raw hate and so much betrayal and frustration and loss coiled around her icy heart. But in this moment, she is free of it all. In this moment, she reaches solemnly up to grasp my hand. And I feel the hope flicker in me.

“Welcome to the Sons of Ares.”

“It’s gorydamn infuriating being kept in the dark,” Victra mutters as she helps me rack the weights on the bench press. The sound echoes through the stone gymnasium. It’s bare bones in here. Metal weights. Rubber tires. Ropes. And months of my sweat.

“Don’t they know who you are?” I say, sitting up.

“Oh, shut up. Didn’t you found the Howlers? Don’t you have any say over how they treat us?” She

nudges me off the bench to take my spot, laying her spine on the padded surface and pushing her arms up to grip the barbell. I take a few weights off. But she glares at me and I put them back on as she fixes her grip.

“Technically, no,” I say.

“Oh. But seriously: what’s a girl got to do to get a wolfcloak?” Her powerful arms thrust the bar up off from its rack, moving it up and down as she talks. Nearly three hundred kilos. “I shot a Legate in the head two missions ago. A Legate! I’ve seen your Howlers. Aside from…Ragnar, they’re tiny.

They need…more heavies if they want to…take on Adrius’s Boneriders or the Sovereign’s…

Praetorians.” She grits her teeth as she finishes her last repetition, racking the bar without my help, and standing to point to herself in the mirror. Hers is a powerful, laconic form. Shoulders broad and swaying with a haughty walk. “I’m a perfect physical specimen, on and off my feet. Not using me is an indictment on Sevro’s intelligence.”

I roll my eyes. “It’s probably your lack of self-confidence he’s worried about.”

She throws a towel at me. “You’re as annoying as he is. Swear to Jove if he says one more thing

about my ‘nascent poverty’ I’m going to cut his head off with a gorydamn spoon.” I watch her for a moment, trying not to laugh. “What, you have something to say as well?”

“Not a thing, my goodlady,” I say, holding up my hands. Her eyes linger on them instinctively.

“Squats next?”

The ramshackle gymnasium has been our second home since Mickey Carved us. It was weeks of recovery in his ward as her nerves remembered how to walk and both of us tried to put on weight again under the supervision of Dr. Virany. A gaggle of Reds and a Green watch us from the corner of the gym. Even after two months, the novelty hasn’t worn off seeing how much two chemically and genetically enhanced Peerless Scarred can lift.

Ragnar came in to embarrass us a couple weeks back. Brute didn’t even say a word. Just started piling weights onto a barbell till no more would fit, power-cleaned it, and then gestured for us to do the same. Victra couldn’t even get the weight off the ground. I got as far as my knees. Then we had to listen to the hundred idiots who flocked after him chant his name for an hour. Found out afterward

Uncle Narol had been overseeing bets on how much more Ragnar could lift than I. Even my own uncle bet against me. But it’s a good sign, even if the others don’t think of it this way. Gold can’t win everything.

It was with Mickey and Dr. Virany’s help that Victra and I regained control of our bodies. But regaining our sense in the field has taken just as long. We started with baby steps. Our first mission out together was a supply run with Holiday and a dozen bodyguards, not for the supply run itself, but for me. We didn’t do it with the Howlers. “Gotta work your way up to the A squad, Reap. Make sure

you can keep up,” Sevro said, patting my face. “And Julii has to prove herself.” She slapped his hand when he tried petting her.

Ten supply runs, two sabotage missions, and three assassinations later Sevro was finally convinced that Holiday, Victra, and I were ready to run with the B squad: the Pitvipers, led by my own Uncle Narol—who has become a bit of a cult hero to the Reds here. Ragnar ’s a godlike creature. But my uncle is just a rough old man who drinks too much, smokes too much, and is uncommonly good at

war. His Pitvipers are a motley collection of hardasses specializing in sabotage and thievery, about half are ex Helldivers, the rest are a spattering of other useful lowColors. We’ve completed three missions with them, destroying a barracks and several Legion communications installations, but I can’t shake the feeling we’re a snake eating our own tail. Every bombing is twisted by the Society media. Every pinprick of damage we do seems only to bring more Legions from Agea to the mines

or the smaller cities of Mars.

I feel hunted.

Worse, I feel like a terrorist. I’ve only ever felt this way once before, and that was with a bomb on my chest walking into the gala on Luna.

Dancer and Theodora have been pressing Sevro to reach out to more allies. Trying to bridge the

gap between the Sons and other factions. Reluctantly, Sevro agreed. So earlier this week, the Pitvipers and I were dispatched from the tunnels to the northern continent of Arabia Terra, where the Red Legion had carved themselves a stronghold in the port city of Ismenia. It was Dancer ’s hope I could bring them into the fold in a way Sevro hadn’t been able to, maybe pull them away from Harmony’s

influence. But instead of finding allies, we found a mass grave. A gray, bombed-out city shelled from orbit. I can still see that pale bloated mass of bodies writhing on the coastline. Crabs skittering over the corpses, making meals of the dead, as a lone ribbon of smoke twirled and twirled up to the stars, the old soundless echo of war.

I’m haunted by the sight, but Victra seems to have moved past it as she plows through her workout.

She’s pushed it to that vast vault in the back of her mind where she compresses and locks away all the evil she’s seen, all the pain she’s felt. I wish I were more like her. I wish I felt less and was less afraid.

But as I recall that ribbon of smoke, all I can think is that it presages something worse. As if the Universe is showing us a glimpse of the end we’re rushing toward.

It’s late night and the mirrors have fogged with condensation when we’re done with our workout.

We wash up in the showers, talking over the plastic dividers. “Take it as a sign of progress,” I say. “At least she’s speaking to you.”

“No. Your mother hates me. She’ll always hate me. Not a damn thing I can do about it.”

“Well, you could try being more polite.”

“I’m perfectly polite,” Victra says in offense, turning off her shower and exiting the stall. Eyes closed against the water, I finish shampooing my hair, expecting her to say more. She doesn’t, so I finish rinsing the shampoo out and exit the stall when I’m done. I feel something’s amiss the moment before I see Victra naked on the floor, hands and legs hogtied behind her back. A hood over her head.

Something moves behind me. I whirl around just in time to see a half dozen ghostCloaks slipping

through the steam. Then someone inhumanly strong slams into me from behind, wrapping their arms around mine, pinning them to my sides. I feel their breath on my neck. Terror screams through me.

The Jackal’s found us. He’s snuck in. How? “Golds!” I shout. “Golds!” I’m slick from the shower. The floor is slippery. I use it to my advantage, wriggling against my attacker ’s arms like an eel and lashing back with my head in his face. There’s a grunt. I twist again, feet slip. I fall. Smacking my knee on the concrete floor. Scramble to my feet. Feel two attackers rushing me from the left. Cloaked.

I duck under one, putting my shoulder into his knees. He catapults over my head and smashes through the plastic barriers that divide the shower behind me. I grab the other by the throat, blocking a punch, and throw him into the ceiling. Another slams into me from the side, prying at my leg with his hands to take my balance. I go with it, jumping in the air, twisting my body in a Kravat move that steals his center of gravity and puts us both on the ground, his head between my thighs. All I need do is twist and his neck breaks. But two more sets of hands are on me, thumping me in the face, more are on my legs. GhostCloaks rippling in the vapor. I’m screaming and thrashing and spitting, but there are too many, and they’re nasty, punching the tendons behind my knees so I can’t kick and the nerves in my shoulders so my arms feel heavy as lead. They shove a hood over my head and bind my hands behind

my back. I lay there motionless, terrified, panting.

“Get them on their knees,” an electronic voice growls. “On their bloodydamn knees.” Bloodydamn?

Ah, shit. As I realize who it is, I let them lift me up to my knees. Hood is removed. The lights are out.

Several dozen candles have been set on the shower floor, throwing shadows about the room. Victra’s to my left, eyes furious. Blood coming from her now-crooked nose. Holiday has appeared to my right. Fully clothed but similarly bound, she is carried in by two black-clad figures and forced down on her knees. A big grin splits her face.

Standing around us in the bathroom steam are ten demons with black-painted faces staring out from

beneath the mouths of the wolf pelts that hang from their heads to their mid-thighs. Two lean against the wall, in pain from my rabid defense. Beneath the pelt of a bear, Ragnar towers beside Sevro. The Howlers have come for new recruits and they look bloody terrifying.

“Greetings, you ugly little bastards,” Sevro growls, removing the voice synthesizer. He stalks forward through the shadows to stand before us. “It has come to my attention that you are abnormally devious, savage, and generally malicious creatures gifted in the arts of murder, mayhem, and chaos.

If I am mistaken, do say so now.”

“Sevro, you scared the shit out of us,” Victra says. “The hell is your problem?”

“Do not profane this moment,” Ragnar says menacingly.

Victra spits. “You broke my nose, you oaf!”

“Technically, I did,” Sevro says. He jerks his head to a lean Howler with Red Sigils on his hands.

“Sleepy helped.”

“You little dwarf…”

“You were squirming, love,” Pebble says from somewhere among the Howlers. I can’t tell which

she is. Voice resounding off the walls.

“And if you keep talking we’ll just gag you and tickle you,” Clown says sinisterly. “So…shhhh.”

Victra shakes her head but keeps her mouth shut. I’m trying not to laugh at the solemnity of the moment. Sevro continues, pacing back and forth before us.

“You have been watched, and now you are wanted. If you accept our invitation to join our brotherhood, you must take an oath to be always faithful to your brothers and sisters. To never lie, never betray those under the cloak. All your sins, all your scars, all your enemies now belong to us.

Our burden to share. Your loves, your family will become your second loves, your second family.

We are your first. If you cannot abide this, if you cannot conscience this bond, say so now and you

may leave.”

He waits. Not even Victra says a word.

“Good. Now, as per the rules set forth in our sacred text…” He holds up a little black book with dog-eared pages and a white howling wolfhead on the front. “…You must be purged of your former

oaths and prove your worth before you can take our vows.” He holds up his hands. “So let the Purge begin.”

The Howlers pitch back their heads and howl like maniacs. What comes next is a blur of kaleidoscopic oddities. Music thumps from somewhere. We’re kept on our knees. Hands tied. The Howlers rush forward. Bottles are brought to our lips and we chug as they chant around some weird

looping melody that Sevro leads with bawdy aplomb. Ragnar roars with satisfaction when I finish the bottle they bring me. I almost puke then and there. The liquor burns, scouring my esophagus and belly. Victra’s coughing behind me. Holiday just chugs on and the Howlers cheer as she finishes her bottle. We waver there as they surround Victra, chanting as she gasps and tries to finish the liquor. It splashes over her face. She coughs.

“Is that your best, daughter of the Sun?” Ragnar bellows. “Drink!”

Ragnar roars with delight when she finally finishes the swill, coughing and muttering curses.

“Bring forth the snakes and the cockroaches!” he shouts.

They chant like priests as Pebble wobbles forward with a bucket. They push us together so we surround the bucket and in the wavering light can see the bottom of it wriggling with life. Thick, shiny cockroaches with hairy legs and wings crawl around a pitviper. I reel back, terrified and drunk as our binds are cut. Holiday’s already reached inside and grabs the snake; she slams it on the floor till it dies.

Victra just stares at the Gray. “What the…”

“Finish the bucket or get the box,” Sevro says.

“What does that even mean?”

“Finish the bucket or get the box! Finish the bucket or get the box!” they chant. Holiday takes a bite of the dead snake, tearing into it with her teeth.

“Yes!” Ragnar bellows. “She has the soul of a Howler. Yes!”

I’m so drunk I can barely see. I reach into the bucket, shivering as I feel the cockroaches crawl over my hand. I snatch one up and jam it into my mouth. It’s still moving. I force my jaw to chew. I’m almost crying. Victra is gagging at the sight of me. I swallow it down and grab her hand and force it into the bucket. She makes a sudden lurching movement, and I’m too slow to realize what it means.

Her vomit splashes onto my shoulder. At the smell of it, I can’t hold my own in. Holiday chews on.

Ragnar shouts her praises.

By the time we finish the bucket, we’re a huddled pathetic mass of drunk, bug- and guts-covered filth. Sevro’s saying something in front of us. Keeps swaying back and forth. Maybe that’s me. Is he talking? Someone shakes my shoulder from behind. Was I asleep? “This is our sacred text,” my little friend is saying. “You will study this sacred text. Soon you will know this sacred text inside and out.

But today, you need know only Howler Rule One.”

“Never bow,” Ragnar says.

“Never bow,” the rest echo and Clown steps forward with three wolfcloaks. Like the fur of the wolves at the Institute, these pelts modulate to their environment and take on a dark hue in the candlelit room. He holds one out for Victra. They free her bonds and she tries to stand, but can’t. Pebble reaches to help her up, but Victra ignores the hand. Tries again and tilts down to a knee. Then Sevro kneels beside her and extends a hand. Looking at it through sweat-soaked hair, Victra snorts out a

laugh as she realizes what this is about. She takes his hand, and only with his help can she walk steadily enough to take her cloak. Sevro takes it from Clown and drapes it around her bare shoulders.

Their eyes meet and linger for a moment before they move to the side so Holiday can be helped up by Pebble to gain her cloak. Ragnar helps me, draping mine over my shoulders.

“Welcome, brother and sisters, to the Howlers.”

Together, the Howlers pitch back their heads and let loose a mighty howl. I join them, and find to my surprise that Victra does as well. Hurling her head back in the darkness without reservations. Then suddenly the lights flare on. The howls die as we look around in confusion. Dancer trudges into the showers with Uncle Narol.

“The bloodyhell is this?” Narol asks, eying the cockroaches and the remains of the snake and the

bottles. The Howlers look at the ludicrousness of one another awkwardly.

“We’re performing a secret occult ritual,” Sevro says. “And you are interrupting, subordinate.”

“Right,” Narol says, nodding, a little disturbed. “Sorry, sir.”

“One of our Pinks stole a datapad from a Bonerider in Agea,” Dancer says to Sevro, not amused by

the display. “We found out who he is.”

“No shit?” Sevro says. “Was I right?”

“Who?” I ask, drunkenly. “Who are you talking about?”

“The Jackal’s silent partner,” Dancer says. “It’s Quicksilver. You were right, Sevro. Our agents say he’s at his corporate headquarters on Phobos, but he won’t be for long. He’s bound for Luna in two days. We won’t be able to touch him there.”

“So Operation Black Market is a go,” Sevro says.

“It’s a go,” Dancer admits reluctantly.

Sevro pumps his fist in the air. “Hell, yeah. You heard the man, Howlers. Get scrubbed. Get sober.

Get fed. We’ve got a Silver to kidnap and an economy to crash.” He looks at me with a wild grin on his face. “It’s gonna be a hell of a day. A hell of a day.”

P hobos means fear. In myth, he was the offspring of Aphrodite and Ares, the child of love and war.

It’s a fitting name for the larger of Mars’s moons.

Formed long before the age of man, when a meteorite struck father Mars and flung debris into orbit, the oblong moon floated like a cast-off corpse, dead and abandoned for a billion years. Now it is the Hive teeming with the parasitic life that pumps blood into the veins of the Gold empire. Swarms of tiny, fat-bodied cargo ships rise from Mars’s surface to funnel into the two huge gray docks that encircle the moon. There, they transfer the bounty of Mars to the kilometer-long cosmosHaulers that will bear the treasure along the great Julii-Agos trade routes to the Rim or, more likely, to the Core, where hungry Luna waits to be fed.

The barren rock of Phobos has been carved hollow by man and wreathed with metal. With a radius

of only twelve kilometers at its widest, the moon is ringed by two huge dockyards, which run perpendicular to each other. They’re dark metal with white glyphs and blinking red lights for docking ships. They slither with the movement of magnetic trams and cargo vessels. Beneath the dockyards,

and at times rising around them in the form of spiked towers, is the Hive—a jigsaw city formed not by neoclassical Gold ideals, but by raw economics without the confines of gravity. Six centuries’

worth of buildings perforate Phobos. It is the largest pincushion man has ever built. And the disparity of wealth between the inhabitants of the Needles, the tips of the buildings, and the Hollow inside the moon’s rock, borders on hilarious.

“Looks larger when you’re not on the bridge of a torchShip,” Victra drawls from behind me.

“Being disenfranchised is so damn tedious.”

I feel her pain. The last time I saw Phobos was before the Lion’s Rain. Then I had an armada at my back, Mustang and the Jackal at my side, and thousands of Peerless Scarred at my command. Enough

firepower to make a planet tremble. Now I’m skulking in the shadows in a rickety cargo hauler so old it doesn’t even have an artificial gravity generator, accompanied only by Victra, a crew of three Sons gas haulers, and a small team of Howlers in the cargo bay. And this time I’m taking orders, not giving them. My tongue plays over the suicide tooth they put in my back right molar after the Howler initiation. All the Howlers have them now. Better than being taken alive, Sevro said. I have to agree with him. Still. Feels strange.

In the aftermath of my escape, the Jackal initiated an immediate moratorium on all flights leaving Mars for orbit. He suspected the Sons would make a desperate bid to get me off planet. Fortunately, Sevro isn’t a fool. If he had been, I’d likely be in the Jackal’s hands. Ultimately, not even the ArchGovernor of Mars could ground all commerce for long, and so his moratorium was short-lived.

But the shock waves it sent through the market were staggering. Billions of credits lost every minute

the helium-3 did not flow. Sevro found it rather inspiring.

“How much of it does Quicksilver own?” I ask.

Victra pulls herself beside me in the null gravity. Her jagged hair floats around her head like a white crown. It’s been bleached and her eyes have been blackened with contacts. Easier for Obsidians to move about the rougher ends of the Moon than it would be without the disguise, and being one of the largest Howlers, she hardly could pass for any other Color.

“Hard to guess,” she says. “Silver ownership is a tricky thing, in the end. The man has so many dummy corporations and off-grid bank accounts I doubt even the Sovereign knows how large his portfolio is.”

“Or who is in it. If the rumors of him owning Golds are true…”

“They are.” Victra shrugs, which tips her backward. “He’s got his fingers everywhere. One of the

only men too rich to kill, according to Mother.”

“Is he richer than she was? Than you are?”

“Were,” she corrects, shakes her head. “He knew better than that.” There’s a pause. “But maybe.”

My eyes seek the Silver winged-heel icon that is stamped on the greatest of Phobos’s towers, a three-kilometer-long double helix of steel and glass tipped with a silver crescent. How many Gold eyes look on it with jealousy? How many more must he own or bribe to protect him from all the rest?

Perhaps just one. Crucial to the Jackal’s rise was his silent partner. A man who helped him secretly gain control of the media and telecommunications industries. For the longest time I thought that partner was Victra or her mother and he closed the loop in the garden. But it seems the Jackal’s greatest ally is alive and prospering. For now.

“Thirty million people,” I whisper. “Incredible.”

I can feel her eyes on me. “You don’t agree with Sevro’s plan, do you?”

My thumb picks at a wad of pink gum stuck to the rusted bulkhead. Kidnapping Quicksilver will get

us intel and access to vast weapons factories, but Sevro’s play against the economy is more concerning. “Sevro kept the Sons alive. I didn’t. So I’ll follow his lead.”

“Mhm.” She eyes me skeptically. “I wonder when you started believing grit and vision were the same thing.”

“Oy, shitheads” —Sevro squawks over the com unit in my ear— “if you’re done sightseeing or humping or whatever the hell you’re doin’, it’s time to tuck in.”

—

Half an hour later, Victra and I huddle together with the Howlers in one of the helium-3 containers stacked in the back of our transport. We can feel the ship reverberate beyond the container as it links its magnetic coupling to the docks’ ringed surface. Beyond the ship’s hull, Oranges will be floating in mechanized suits, waiting to steer the weightless cargo containers onto magnetic trams that will in turn take them to the cosmosHaulers awaiting the journey to Jupiter. There they will resupply Roque’s fleet in his war effort against Mustang and the Moon Lords.

But before the containers are transported, Copper and Gray inspectors will come to examine them.

They’ll be bribed by our Blues into counting forty-nine containers instead of fifty. Then an Orange bribed by our contact will lose the container we’re in, a common practice for the smuggling of illegal drugs or untaxed goods. He’ll deposit it in a lower-level berth for machine parts, whereupon our Sons contact will meet us and escort us to our safe house. At least, that’s the plan. But for now we wait.

Eventually gravity returns, signaling we’re in the hangar. Our container settles on the floor with a thud. We steady ourselves against helium-3 drums. Voices drift beyond the metal walls of the container. The hauler beeps as it decouples from us and returns out the pulseField to space. Then silence. I don’t like it. My hand twists around the leather grip of my razor inside my jacket sleeve. I take a step forward toward the door. Victra follows. Sevro grabs my shoulder. “We wait for the contact.”

“We don’t even know the man,” I say.

“Dancer vouched for him.” He snaps his fingers at me to return to my place. “We wait.”

I notice the others listening, so I nod and shut my mouth. It’s ten minutes later that we hear a solitary pair of feet click against the deck outside. The lock thuds back on the container doors, and dim light seeps in as they part to reveal a clean-cut, goateed Red with a toothpick in his mouth. Half a head shorter than Sevro, he clicks his eyes over each of us in turn. One eyebrow climbing upward when he sees Ragnar. The other follows when he looks down the muzzle of Sevro’s scorcher.

Somehow he doesn’t step back. Man’s got a spine in him.

“What can never die?” Sevro growls in his best Obsidian accent.

“The fungus under Ares’s sack.” The man smiles and glances over his shoulder. “Mind lowerin’ the

nasty? We gotta move, now. Borrowed this dock from the Syndicate. ’Cept they don’t really know about it, so unless you wanna tangle with some professional uglies, we gotta box the jabber and waddle on.” He claps his hands. “ ‘Now’ means now.”

—

Our contact goes by the name of Rollo. Stringy and wry, with sparkling, bright eyes and an easy way with the women, even though he brings up his wife, the most beautiful woman who has apparently ever walked the surface of Mars, at least twice a minute. He also hasn’t seen her in eight years. He’s spent that time on the Hive as a welder on the space towers. Not technically a slave like the Reds in the mines, he and his are contract labor. Wage slaves who work fourteen-hour days, six days a week, suspended between the megalithic towers that puncture the Hive, welding metal and praying they never suffer a workplace injury. Get an injury, you can’t earn. Can’t earn, you don’t eat.

“Mighty full of himself,” I overhear Sevro saying under his breath to Victra in the middle of the

pack as Rollo leads on.

“I rather like his goatee,” Victra says.

“The Blues call this place the Hive,” Rollo’s saying as we head toward a graffiti-smeared tram in a derelict maintenance level. Smells like grease, rust, and old piss. Homeless vagrants festoon the floors of the shadowy metal halls. Twitching bundles of blankets and rags that Rollo sidesteps without looking, though his hand never leaves the worn plastic hilt of his scorcher. “Might be to them. They got schools, homes here. Little airhead communes, sects, to be technic, where they learn to fly and sync up with the computers. But let me learn you what this place really is: just a grinder. Men come in.

Towers go up.” He nods his head at the ground. “Meat goes out.”

The only signs of life from the vagrants on the floor are little gouts of breath that plume up from their lumpy rags like steam from the cracks in a lava field. I shiver beneath my gray jacket and adjust the bag of gear over my shoulder. It’s freezing on this level. Old insulation, probably. Pebble blows a cloud of steam through her nostrils as she pushes one of our gear carts, looking sadly left and right at the vagrants. Less empathetic, Victra guides the cart from the front, nudging a vagrant out of the way with her boot. The man hisses and looks up at her, and up, and up, till he sees all 2.1 meters of annoyed killer. He skitters to the side, breathing through his teeth. Neither Ragnar nor Rollo seems to

notice the cold.

Sons of Ares wait for us on the run-down tram platform and inside the tram itself. Most are Red,

but there’s a good amount of Oranges and a Green and Blue in the mix. They cradle a motley collection of old scorchers and strafe the other hallways that lead to the platform with edgy eyes that can’t help but jump our direction and wonder just who the hell we are. I’m thankful more than ever for the Obsidian contacts and prosthetics.

“Expecting trouble?” Sevro asks, eying the weapons in the Sons’ hands.

“Grays been sweeping down here last couple months. Not hollow-ass tinpots from the local precinct, but knotty bastards. Legionnaires. Even some Thirteenth mixed in with Tenth and Fifth.” He lowers his voice. “We had a nasty month, where they shred us up real bloodydamn bad. Took our headquarters in the Hollows, stuck Syndicate toughs on us too. Paid to hunt their own. Most of us had to go to ground, hiding in secondary safe houses. Main body of Sons have been helping the Red rebels on the station, obviously, but our special ops hasn’t flexed muscle till today. We didn’t wanna take chances. Ya know? Ares said you lot got important business….”

“Ares is wise,” Sevro says dismissively.

“And a drama queen,” Victra adds.

At the door to the tram, Ragnar hesitates, eyes lingering on an antiterrorism poster pasted onto a concrete support column in the tram’s waiting area. “See something, say something,” it reads, showing a pale Red with evil crimson eyes and the stereotypical tattered dress of a miner skulking near a door that says “restricted access.” Can’t see the rest. It’s covered in rebel graffiti. But then I realize Ragnar ’s not looking at the poster, but at the man I didn’t even notice who’s crumpled on the ground beneath it. His hood’s up. Left leg is an ancient mech replacement. A crusted brown bandage covers half his face. There’s a puff. The release of pressurized gas. And the man leans back from us, shivering, and smiling with perfectly black teeth. A plastic stim cartridge clatters to the floor. Tar dust.

“Why do you not help these people?” Ragnar asks.

“Help them with what?” Rollo asks. He sees the empathy on Ragnar ’s face and doesn’t really know

how to answer. “Brother, we barely got enough for flesh and kin. No good sharing with that lot, ya know?”

“But that one is Red. They are your family…”

Rollo frowns at the bare truth.

“Save the pity, Ragnar,” Victra says. “That’s Syndicate crank he’s puffing. Most of them would slit your throat for an afternoon high. They’re empty flesh.”

“Empty what?” I say, turning back to her.

She’s caught off guard by the sharpness of my tone, but she’s loath to back off. So she doubles down instinctively. “Empty flesh, darling,” she repeats. “Part of being human is having dignity. They don’t. They carved it out themselves. That was their choice, not Golds’. Even if it’s easy to blame them for everything. So why should they deserve my pity?”

“Because not everyone is you. Or had your birth.”

She doesn’t reply. Rollo clears his throat, skeptical now about our disguises. “Lady’s right about the slit-your-throat part. Most of ’em were imported laborers. Like me. Not counting the wife, I’ve got plus three in New Thebes that I send money back to, but I can’t go home till my contract’s up. Got four years left. These slags have given up on tryin’ to get back.”

“Four years?” Victra asks dubiously. “You said you were already here eight.”

“Gotta pay for my transit.”

She stares at him quizzically.

“Company doesn’t cover it. Shoulda read the fine print. Sure, it was my choice to come up here.”

He nods to the vagrants. “Was theirs too. But when the only other choice is starving.” He shrugs as if we all know the answer. “These slags just got unlucky on the job. Lost legs. Arms. Company doesn’t cover prosthetics, least not decent ones….”

“What about Carvers?” I ask.

He scoffs. “And who the hell do you know that can afford flesh work?”

I didn’t even think of the cost. Reminds me of how distant I am from so many of the people I claim to fight for. Here’s a Red, one of my own more or less, and I don’t even know what type of food is popular in his culture.

“What company do you work for?” Victra asks.

“Why, Julii Industries, of course.”

—

I watch the metal jungle pass outside the dirty duroglass window as the tram pulls away from the station. Victra sits down next to me, a troubled look on her face. But I’m a world away from her, my friends. Lost in memory. I’ve been to the Hive before with ArchGovernor Augustus and Mustang. He

brought the lancers to meet with Society economic ministers to discuss modernizing the moon’s infrastructure. After the meetings she and I snuck away to the moon’s famous aquarium. I’d rented it out at absurd cost and arranged a meal and wine to be served to us in front of the orca tank. Mustang always liked natural creatures more than Carved ones.

I’ve traded fifty-year-old wines and Pink valets for a grimmer world with rusting bones and rebel

thugs. This is the real world. Not the dream the Golds live in. Today I feel the silent screams of a civilization that has been stepped on for hundreds of years.

Our path skirts around the edges of the Hollows, the center of the moon where the latticework of

cage slum apartments festers without gravity. To go there would be to risk falling into the middle of the Syndicate street war against the Sons of Ares. And to go any higher into the midColor levels would be to risk Society marines and their security infrastructure of cameras and holoScanners.

Instead, we pass through the hinterlands of maintenance levels between the Hollows and the Needles, where Reds and Oranges keep the moon running. Our tram, driven by a Sons sympathizer,

speeds through its stops. The faces of waiting workers blur together as we pass. A pastiche of eyes.

But faces all gray. Not the color of metal, but the color of old ash in a campfire. Ash faces. Ash clothes. Ash lives.

But as the tunnel swallows our tram, color erupts around us. Graffiti and years of rage bleeding out from the ribbed and cracking walls of its once gray throat. Profanity in fifteen dialects. Golds ripped open in a dozen dark ways. And to the right of a crude sketch of a reaper ’s scythe decapitating Octavia au Lune is an image of Eo hanging from the gallows in digital paint, hair aflame, “Break the Chains ” written diagonally. It’s a single glowing flower among the weeds of hate. A knot forms in my throat.

Half an hour after we set out, our tram grinds to a halt outside a deserted lowColor industrial hub where thousands of workers should diverge from their early-morning commute from the Stacks to attend their functions. But now it’s still as a cemetery. Trash litters the metal floors. HoloCans still flash with the Society’s news programs. A cup sits on a table in a café, steam still rising off the top of the beverage. The Sons have cleared the way only a few minutes before. Shows the extent of their influence here.

When we leave, life will return to the place. But after we plant the bombs we’ve brought with us?

After we destroy the manufacturing, won’t all the men and women we intend to help be just as unemployed as those poor creatures in the tram station? If work is their reason for being, what happens when we take it away? I’d voice my concerns to Sevro, but he’s a driven arrow. As dogmatic as I once was. And to question him aloud seems a betrayal of our friendship. He’s always trusted me blindly. So am I the worse friend for having doubts in him?

We pass through several gravLifts into a garage for garbage disposal haulers, also owned by Julii

Industries. I catch Victra wiping dirt off the family crest on one of the doors. The speared sun is worn and faded. The few dozen Red and Orange workers of the facility pretend not to notice our group as we file into one of the hauler bays. Inside, at the base of two huge haulers, we find a small army of Sons of Ares. More than six hundred.

They’re not soldiers. Not like us. Most are men, but there’s a scattering of women, mostly younger Reds and Oranges forced to migrate here for work to feed Mars-side families. Their weapons are shoddy. Some stand. Other are seated, turning from conversations to see our pack of Obsidian killers stalking across the metal deck, carrying bags of gear and pushing two mysterious carts. A small sadness grows in me. Whatever they do, wherever they go, their lives will be stained by this day. If it were my duty to address them, I’d warn them the burden they’re taking on, the evil they’ll be letting into their lives. I’d say it’s nicer to hear about glorious victories in war than to witness them. Than to feel the weird unreality of lying in bed every morning knowing you’ve killed a man, knowing a friend is gone.

But I say nothing. My place now is beside Ragnar and Victra, behind Sevro as he spits out his gum

and stalks forward, giving me a wink and an elbow in the side, to stand in front of the small army. His army. He’s tiny for an Obsidian male, but still scarred and tattooed and terrifying to this company of small-handed garbage men and hunched tower welders. He tilts his head forward, eyes smoldering behind his black contacts. Wolf tattoos looking evil against his pale skin in the industrial light.

“Greetings, grease monkeys.” His voice rumbles, low and predatory. “You might be wondering why Ares has sent a pack of hardcore nasties like us to this tin shithole.” The Sons look to one another nervously. “We aren’t here to cuddle. We aren’t here to inspire you or give long-ass speeches like the bloodydamn Sovereign.” He snaps his fingers. Pebble and Clown wheel the carts forward and unlatch the tops. The hinges squeal open to reveal mining explosives. “We’re here to blow shit up.”

He throws open his arms and cackles. “Any questions?”

I float in the back of the trash collector with the Howlers. It’s dark. The night vision of my optics shows the garbage that orbits us in shadowy green. Banana peels. Toy packaging. Coffee grounds.

Victra makes a gagging sound over the com as toilet paper sticks to her face. Her mask is a demonHelm. Like mine, it’s pupil black and shaped subtly like a screaming demon face. Fitchner managed to steal them from Luna’s armories for the Sons more than a year back. With them, we can

see most spectrums, amplify sound, track one another ’s coordinates, access maps, and communicate

silently. My friends around me are in all black. We wear no mechanized armor, only thin scarabSkin over our bodies that will stop knives and occasional projectiles. We have no gravBoots or pulseArmor. Nothing that will slow us, cause noise, or trip sensors. We wear oxygen tanks with air enough for forty minutes. I finish adjusting Ragnar ’s harness and look to my datapad. The two Reds crewing the old trash collector are giving us a countdown. When it reaches one, Sevro says, “Tuck your sacks and pop your cloaks.”

I activate my ghostCloak and the world warps, distorted by the cloak. It’s like looking through refracted, dirty water, and I already feel the battery pack heating up against my tailbone. The cloak’s good for short bursts. But it burns up small batteries like the ones we pack and needs time to cool and recharge. I grope for Sevro and Victra’s hands, managing to grasp them in time. The rest partner up as well. I don’t remember feeling so frightened before the Iron Rain. Was I braver then? Maybe just more naïve.

“Hold tight. We’re in for some chop,” Sevro says. “Popping top in three…two…” I tighten my grip on his hand. “…one.”

The collector ’s door retracts silently, bathing us in the amber light of a holoDisplay screen on a nearby skyscraper. There’s a burst of air and my world spins as the trash collector ejects its load of garbage from the back of its hold. We’re like seed chaff thrown into the city. Spinning with debris through a kaleidoscope world of towers and advertisements. Hundreds of ships funneling along avenues. All a flashing, liquid blur. We continue to spin head over heel to mask our signatures.

Over the com, I hear the grousing of a Blue traffic controller, annoyed at the spilled trash. Soon there’s a company Copper on the line threatening to fire the incompetent drivers. But it’s what I don’t hear that makes me smile. The police channels drone on their usual slant, reporting a Syndicate airjacking in the Hive, a grisly murder in the ancient art museum near the Park Plaza, a datacenter robbery in the Banking Cluster. They haven’t seen us amidst the debris.

We slow our spin gradually using small thrusters in our helmets. Bursts of air bring us to a steady drift. Silent in the vacuum. We’re on target. Along with the rest of the trash, we’re about to impact on the side of a steel tower. Has to be a clean landing. Victra curses as we drift closer, closer. My fingers

tremble. Don’t bounce. Don’t bounce.

“Release,” Sevro orders.

I pull my hands from his and Victra’s, and the three of us impact jarringly against the steel. The trash around us bounds off the metal, cartwheeling backward at odd angles. Sevro and Victra stick, compliments of the magnets in their gloves, but a piece of debris impacting in front of me bounces off the steel and hits me in the thigh, altering my trajectory. Tipping me sideways, hands windmilling for a grip, which causes me to spin.

My feet hit first and I bounce backward toward space, cursing.

“Sevro!” I shout.

“Victra. Get him. ”

A hand grabs my foot, jerking me to a halt. I look down and see a warped invisible form grasping

my leg. Victra. Carefully, she pulls my weightless body back to the wall so I can clamp my own magnets onto the steel. Spots race across my vision. The city is all around us. It’s dreadful in its silence, in its colors, in its inhuman metal landscape. It feels more like an ancient alien artifact than a place for humans.

“Slow it down.” Victra’s voice crackles in my helmet. “Darrow. You’re hyperventilating. Breathe with me. In. Out. In…” I force my lungs to breathe in sync with her. The spots soon fade. I open my eyes, face inches from the steel.

“You shit your suit or something?” Sevro asks.

“I’m good,” I say. “A little rusty.”

“Ugh. Pun intended, I’m sure.” Ragnar and the rest of the Howlers land thirty meters beneath us on the wall. Pebble waves up to me. “Got three hundred meters to go. Let’s climb, you pixies.”

Lights glow behind the glass of Quicksilver ’s double-helix towers. Connecting the double helixes

are nearly two hundred levels of offices. I can make out shapes moving inside at computer terminals.

I zoom in with my optics to watch the stock traders sitting in their offices, their assistants moving to and fro, analysts signaling furiously on holographic trading boards that communicate with the markets on Luna. Silvers, all. They remind me of industrious bees.

“Makes me miss the boys,” Victra says. Takes me a moment to realize she’s not talking about the Silvers. The last time she and I tried this tactic, Tactus and Roque were with us. We infiltrated Karnus’s flagship from vacuum as he refueled at an asteroid base during the Academy’s mock war.

We cut through his hull with aims of kidnapping him to eliminate his team. But it was a trap and I narrowly escaped with the help of my friends, a broken arm my only reward for the gambit.

It takes us five minutes to climb from our landing place to the peak of the tower, where it becomes a large crescent. We don’t go hand over hand, so climbing isn’t the true term. The magnets in our gloves have fluctuating positive and negative currents that allow us to roll up the side of the tower like we have wheels in our palms. The toughest part of the ascent, or descent, or whatever you’d call it in the null grav, is the crescent slope at the extreme height or end of the tower. We have to cling to a narrow metal support beam that extends out among a ceiling of glass, much like the stem of a leaf.

Beneath our bellies and through the glass lies Quicksilver ’s famous museum. And above us, just over the peak of Quicksilver ’s tower, hangs Mars.

My planet seems larger than space. Larger than anything ever could be. A world of billions of souls, of designer oceans, mountains, and more irrigable acres of dry land than Earth ever had. It’s night on this side of the world. And you could never know that millions of kilometers of tunnels wind through the bones of the planet, that even as its surface glows with the lights of the Thousand Cities of Mars, there is a pulse unseen, a tide that is rising. But now it looks peaceful. War a distant, impossible

thing. I wonder what a poet would say in this moment. What Roque would whisper into the air.

Something about the calm before the storm. Or a heartbeat among the deep. But then there’s a flash. It