Morning Star (Red Rising #3) - Pierce Brown Page 0,4

dilapidated docking berth of a Sons of Ares safe house deep in industrial sector, he orders the still-unconscious Matteo and Quicksilver to the infirmary to be woken up, Kavax to a cell, and tells Rollo and the Sons to prepare for an assault. The Sons stare at us, dumbstruck. Our Obsidian disguises are obliterated. Particularly mine. The prosthetics on my face have fallen off in the battle. Contacts sucked off in the vacuum. Black hair dye thinned out from sweat. Still got my gloves, though. But these Sons don’t look at a pack of Obsidians now. They’re staring at a cadre of Golds, an Obsidian, a Gray, and at least one ghost.

“The Reaper…,” someone whispers.

“Keep your mouth shut,” Clown snaps. “Not a word to anyone.”

Whatever he says, soon the rumor will spread among them. The Reaper lives. Whatever the effect

it’ll have, it’s not the right time. We may have avoided police pursuit, but such a high-profile kidnapping, not to mention the assassination of two high-level Peerless, will ensure that the full analytical weight of the Jackal’s counterterrorism units is brought to bear on the evidence. Praetorian and Securitas antiterrorism tech squads will already be poring over the footage of the attack. They’ll discover how we gained access to the facility, how we made our escape, and who our likely compatriots were. Every weapon, piece of equipment, ship used will be traced to its source. Society reprisals against lowColors throughout the station will be swift and brutal.

And when they analyze the visual evidence of our little vacuum escape, they’ll see my face and Sevro’s. Then Jackal himself will come, or he’ll send Antonia or Lilath to hunt me down with their Boneriders.

The clock’s ticking.

But that’s supposing the authorities suspect that only Quicksilver was kidnapped. I don’t know why Mustang and Cassius were meeting, but I have to assume the Jackal doesn’t know about it. That’s why I used our jammers. So the security cameras outside of Quicksilver ’s control wouldn’t ID Kavax. If the Jackal saw him here, he’d know something was amiss with his alliance with the Sovereign and Quicksilver. And I want to keep that card in my pocket till I know how best to use it and can speak with Mustang.

But what will the Sovereign think when Cassius calls her to tell her Moira is dead? And what is Mustang’s place here? There are too many questions. Too many things I don’t know. But what haunts

me as we run down metal halls, as my friends go to patch wounds and we pass armories where dozens

of Reds and Browns and Oranges load weapons and buckle armor, is what she said.

“I have the Pax. Orion is alive.”

With her, that could mean a dozen things, and the only one who will know is Kavax. I need to ask

him, but Ragnar ’s already taken him down another hall to the Sons lockup and Sevro’s stopped rattling off orders to others to address me. “Reap, they’re gonna hit us, and hit us hard,” he’s saying.

“You know Legion military procedures better than I do. Get to the datacenter, fastlike. Give me a timetable and their plan of attack. We can’t stop them, but we can buy time.”

“Time for what?” I ask.

“To blow the bombs and find a way out off this rock.” He puts a hand on my arm, just as cognizant

of those Sons watching as I am. “Please. Get moving.” He heads off down the hall with the rest of the Howlers, leaving me alone with Holiday. I turn to her.

“Holiday, you know Legion procedures. Get to the datacenter. Give the Sons the tactical support they need.” She looks back down the hall to where Sevro has turned a corner. “You good with that?” I ask.

“Yes, sir. Where you going?”

I tighten my gloves. “To get answers.”

—

“Virginia told us you were a Red after she left you. That is why we did not come to your Triumph,”

Kavax says up to me. He’s bound to a steel pipe, legs splayed out on the floor. Still in his armor, red-gold beard dark in the low light. He cuts a menacing figure, but I’m surprised by the openness of his face. The lack of hatred. The clarity of excitement as his nostrils flare wide in recounting his tale to Ragnar and me. Sevro told the Sons that no one was to see Kavax. But apparently they don’t think the rules much apply to the Reaper. Good on that. I don’t yet have a plan, but I know Sevro’s isn’t working. I don’t have time to navigate his feelings or struggle with him. The pieces are in motion, and I need information.

“She did not know yet what to do and so took our counsel as she did as a girl,” Kavax continues.

“We were on my ship, the Reynard, having roast mutton in ponzu sauce with Sophocles, though he did not like the sauce, when Agea Command called, saying the Sovereign’s loyalist forces had attacked

the Triumph in Agea. Virginia could not contact you or her father, and so feared a coup and sent Daxo and me from orbit with our knights.

“She stayed in orbit with the ships and finally contacted Roque when Daxo and I were already descending through atmosphere. Roque said the Sovereign had attacked the Triumph and wounded you and her father gravely. He urged her to come to one of his new ships , where he was taking you because the surface was no longer safe.” I remember Roque talking on the shuttle as the Jackal leaned over me, not being able to hear him. We landed on a ship. The Sovereign was there. She never left Mars. She was hiding in Roque’s fleet. Right under my nose. “But Virginia did not rush to your bedside.” He grins jovially. “A fool in love would do so. But Virginia is clever. She saw through Roque’s mendacity. She knew the Sovereign would not simply attack the Triumph. It would be a plan

within a plan. So she sent word to Orion and House Arcos that a coup was under way. That Roque was a conspirator. So when the assassins struck, attempting to kill Orion and the loyal commanders on their bridge, they were ready. There were firefights on bridges. In staterooms. Orion was badly shot in the arm, but she survived and then Roque’s ships opened fire on ours and the fleet fractured….”

All this while Sevro and Ragnar were discovering that Fitchner was dead and the Sons of Ares base

had been destroyed. And I lay paralyzed on the floor of Aja’s shuttle as everything came apart. No.

Not everything.

“She saved the crew’s lives,” I say.

“Yes,” Kavax says. “Your crew is alive. The one you liberated with Sevro. Even many of your Legion, who we organized and managed to evacuate from Mars before the Jackal and Sovereign’s forces took power.”

“Where are my friends imprisoned?” I ask. “On Ganymede? Io?”

“Imprisoned?” Kavax squints at me, then bursts into laughter. “No, lad. No. Not a man or woman

has left their station. The Pax is just as you left it. Orion commands, the rest follow.”

“I don’t understand. She’s letting a Blue command?”

“Do you think Virginia would have let you live in that tunnel when you and Ragnar were on your

knees if she did not believe in your new world?” I shake my head numbly, not knowing the answer.

“She would have killed you on the spot if she thought you were her enemy. But when she sat before

my hearth as a girl beside Pax and my children, what stories did I read them? Did I read them myths of the Greeks? Of strong men gaining glory for their own heads? No. I told them tales of Arthur, of the Nazarene, of Vishnu. Strong heroes who wished only to protect the weak.”

And Mustang has. More than that. She’s proven Eo right. And it wasn’t because of me. It wasn’t because of love. It was because it was the right thing to, and because mighty Kavax was more a father to her than her own ever was. I feel the tears in my eyes.

“You were right, Darrow,” Ragnar says. His hand falls on my shoulder. “The tide rises.”

“Then why are you here today, Kavax?”

“Because we are losing,” he says. “The Moon Lords will not last two months. Virginia knows what

is happening on Mars. The extermination. The savagery of her brother. The Sons are too weak to fight everywhere.” His large eyes show the pain of a man watching his home burn. Mars is as much

their heritage as it is mine. “The cost of war is too great for a certain defeat. So when Quicksilver proposed a peace, we listened.”

“And what are the terms?” I ask.

“Virginia and all her allies would be pardoned by the Sovereign. She would become

ArchGovernor of Mars and Adrius and his faction would be imprisoned for life. And certain reforms

would be made.”

“But the hierarchy would remain.”

“Yes.”

“If this is true, we must speak with her,” Ragnar says eagerly.

“It could be a trap,” I say, watching Kavax, knowing the mind at work behind his bluff face. I want to trust him. I want to believe his sense of justice is equal to my love for him, but these are deep waters, and I know friends can lie just as well as enemies. If Mustang isn’t on my side, then this would be the play to make. It would expose me, and there’s no doubt in my mind that however she got on this station, she’s got a nasty escort.

“One thing doesn’t make sense, Kavax. If this is true, why didn’t you make contact with Sevro?”

Kavax blinks up at me.

“We did. Months ago. Didn’t he tell you?”

—

The Howlers are packing up by the time Ragnar and I rejoin them in the ready room. “It’s all shit,”

Sevro’s saying as Victra patches a gash on his back with resFlesh. Acrid smoke hisses up from the cauterizing wound. He throws down his datapad. It skitters into a corner, where Screwface collects it

and brings it back to Sevro. “They’ve grounded everything, including utility flights.”

“It’s all right, boss, we’ll find a way out,” Clown says.

I entered the room quietly, nodding to Sevro that I’d like a word. He ignored me. His plan’s a mess.

We were due to stow ourselves away inside one of the empty helium haulers going back to Mars. We

would have been gone before anyone even knew Quicksilver was kidnapped, and then detonated the

bombs off-station. Now, like Sevro says, it’s all shit.

“We obviously can’t stay here,” Victra says, putting the resFlesh applicator down. “We left enough DNA evidence for a hundred crime scenes back there. And our faces are everywhere. Adrius will send a whole legion for us when they find out we’re here.”

“Or blow Phobos out of the sky,” Holiday mutters. She sits on a crate of medical supplies in the corner, studying maps with Clown on her datapad. Pebble watches them from her place on the table.

Her leg’s compressed with a gelCast, but the bone’s not set. We’ll need a Yellow and a full infirmary to fix what Mustang broke with a single shot. Pebble’s lucky she was wearing scarabSkin. It minimized the burn damage. Still, she’s in pain. Pupils large on a high dose of narcotics. It’s let her inhibitions loose, and I note how obviously the pudgy-faced Gold is watching Clown lean across Holiday to point at the map.

“Helium-3 is Adrius’s lifeblood,” Victra says. “He won’t risk this station.”

“Sevro…” I say. “A moment.”

“Busy right now.” He turns to Rollo. “Is there any other way off this damn rock?”

The Red leans against the med room’s gray wall next to a glossy paper cutout of a Pink model on

one of Venus’s white-sand beaches. “It’s just cargo haulers down here,” he says, silently noting how our Obsidian guises have been discarded. If it startles him how many of us are Gold, he doesn’t let on.

Probably knew from the start. His eyes linger on me the longest. “But they’re all grounded. They got luxury liners and private yachts in the Needles, but you go up there, you folks are caught in a minute.

Two, tops. There’s facial-recognition cameras at every tram door. Retina scanners in the advertisement holos. And even if you got onto one of their ships, you gotta get past the naval pickets.

Ain’t like you can just teleport to safety.”

“That’d be convenient,” Clown mutters.

“We jack a shuttle and run the pickets,” Sevro says. “Done it before.”

“They’ll shoot us down,” I say tensely. It’s pissing me off that he keeps ignoring my attempts to get him to the door.

“Didn’t last time.”

“Last time we had Lysander,” I remind him.

“And now we got Quicksilver.”

“The Jackal will sacrifice Quicksilver to kill us,” I say. “Count on it.”

“Not if we go straight vertical burn to the surface,” Sevro says. “Sons have hidden tunnel entrances.

We will fall from orbit and go straight underground.”

“I will not do that,” Ragnar says. “It is foolhardy. And it abandons these noble men and women to slaughter.”

“I agree with Rags,” Holiday says. She scoots away from Clown and continues looking at her datapad, monitoring police frequencies.

“Say you get off. What happens to us?” Rollo asks. “The Jackal finds out the Reaper and Ares were

here and he’ll tear this station apart piecemeal. Any Son left behind will be dead in a week. Did you think of that?” He makes a disgusted look. “I know who you are. We knew the second Ragnar walked

into the hangar. But I didn’t think Howlers ran. And I didn’t think the Reaper took orders.”

Sevro takes a step toward him. “You got another option, shitface? Or you just gonna run your mouth?”

“Yeah, I got one,” Rollo says. “Stay. Help us take the station.”

The Howlers laugh. “Take the station? With what army?” Clown asks.

“His,” Rollo says, turning to me. “I don’t rightly know how you’re alive, Reaper. But…I was eating noodles by myself at midnight when the Sons leaked your Carving video onto the holoNet. Society cyber police shut down the site in two minutes. But once it was out…could find it on a million sites before I finished my bowl. They couldn’t contain that. And then the Phobos servers crashed. You know why?”

“Securitas’s cyber division pulled the plug,” Victra says. “It’s standard protocol.”

He shakes his head. “Servers crashed because thirty million people were trying to access the holoNet at the same time in the middle of the night. Servers couldn’t handle the traffic. Golds pulled the plug after that. So what I’m sayin’ is if you march down to the Hive and tell the lowColors there you’re alive, we can take this moon.”

“Easy as that?” Victra asks skeptically.

“That’s right. There’s round about twenty-five million lowColors here crawling over one another,

fighting for square meters, protein packages, Syndicate smack, whatever. Reaper shows his mug, all that goes to vapor. All that fighting. All that scrappin’. They want a leader, and if the Reaper of Mars decides to come back from the dead here…you won’t have an army, you’ll have a tide at your heels.

You register? This will change the war.”

He sends chills down my spine. But Victra’s skeptical, and Sevro’s quiet. Hurt.

“Do you know what a squad of Society Legionnaires can do to a mob of rabble?” Victra asks. “The

weapons you’ve seen are geared to taking out men in armor. PulseFists. Razors. When they use coilguns or rattlers on mobs, a single man can fire a thousand rounds a minute. It sounds like paper tearing. Human body doesn’t even know that sound is supposed to be frightening. They can superheat the water in your cellular structure with microwaves. And those are just Gray anti-mob squads. What if they unleash the Obsidian? What if Golds themselves come in their armor? What if they shut off your air? Your water?”

“What if we shut off theirs?” Rollo asks.

I frown. “Can you do that?”

“Give me a reason to.” He looks at Victra, and by the bite in his voice, I know he knows exactly what her last name is. “They might be soldiers, domina. Might be able to put enough metal in my body that I bleed out. But before I was nine, I could strip down a gravBoot and piece it together in under four minutes. Now I’m thirty-eight and I can murder the lot of ’em ten ways till Sunday with a screwdriver and an electrical kit. And I’m sick and tired of not seeing my family. Of being stepped on and charged for oxygen, for water, for living.” He leans forward, eyes glassy. “And there’s twenty-five million of me on the other side of that door.”

Victra rolls her eyes at the bravado. “You’re a welder with delusions of grandeur.”

Rollo steps forward and knocks a set of wrenches off a table. They clatter on the ground, startling Clown and Holiday, who look up from the datapad. Rollo stares up indignantly at Victra. She’s easily a foot taller than him, but he doesn’t break his gaze. “I’m an engineer. Not a welder.”

“Enough!” Sevro snarls. “This isn’t a bloodydamn debate. Quicksilver will get us off this rock. Or I’ll start taking off his fingers. Then blow the bombs….”

“Sevro…” Ragnar says.

“I am Ares!” Sevro snarls. “Not you.” He shoves a finger up into Ragnar ’s chest and then points at

me. “And not you. Finish packing the bloodydamn gear. Now.”

He storms from the room, leaving us in awkward silence.

“I will not abandon these men,” Ragnar says. “They have helped us. They are our people.”

“Ares is cracked,” Rollo says to the room. “Off his mind. You need—”

I wheel on the small man, picking him up with one hand and pinning him against the ceiling. “Don’t you say a damn thing about him.” Rollo apologizes, and I set him back on the ground. I make sure all the Howlers are listening. “Everyone stay put. I’ll be right back.”

—

I catch Sevro before he enters Quicksilver ’s cell in a gutted old garage that the Sons use to house generators now. Sevro and the guards turn when they hear me coming. “Don’t trust me alone with him?” he sneers. “Nice.”

“We need to talk.”

“Sure. After he does.” Sevro pushes open the door. Cursing, I follow. The room’s a forlorn shade

of rust. Machines older than some of the gear in Lykos. One rattles behind the thick Silver, coughing out the electricity that powers the lights bathing the man in a circle of light, and blinding him to anything beyond it. Quicksilver sits with his shoulders back in the metal chair in the center of the room. Arms bound behind his back. His turquoise robe is bloody and rumpled. Bulldog eyes patient

and measuring. Wide forehead’s covered in a thick sheen of sweat and grease.

“Who are you?” he hisses in irritation instead of fear. The door slams shut behind us. The man seems rather irritated with his predicament. Not disrespectful or angry, but professionally peeved at the meek measure of our hospitality and the inconvenience we’ve thrust upon him. He’s not able to distinguish our faces due to the light blaring into his eyes. “Syndicate teethmen? Moon Lord dustmakers?” When we say nothing, he swallows. “Adrius, is that you?”

Chills creep down my spine. We say nothing. Only now, as he begins to suspect that we’re the Jackal’s men does Quicksilver seem truly afraid. If we had time, we could use that fear, but we need information fast.

“We need off this rock,” Sevro says gruffly. “You’re gonna make that happen, boyo. Or I pull off

your fingers one by one.”

“Boyo?” Quicksilver murmurs.

“I know you have an escape vessel, contingency—”

“Barca, is that you?” Sevro’s caught off guard “It is you. Damn the stars, boy. You scared the shit out of me. I thought you were the gorydamn Jackal.”

“You have ten seconds to give me something I can use, or I wear your rib cage as a corset,” Sevro

says, thrown by Quicksilver ’s familiarity. It’s not his best threat.

Quicksilver shakes his head. “You need to listen to me, Mr. Barca, and listen well. This is all a misunderstanding. A vast misunderstanding. I know you may not believe it. I know you may think me

mad. But you must hear me. I am on your side. I am one of you, Mr. Barca.”

Sevro frowns. “One of us? What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?” Quicksilver laughs gruffly. “I mean exactly as I say, young man. I, Regulus ag

Sun, chevalier of the Order of Coin, chief executive officer of Sun Industries, am also a founding member of the Sons of Ares.”

“A Son of Ares?” Sevro repeats, stepping into the light so Quicksilver can see his face. I stay back. It’s a ludicrous claim.

“That’s better. I thought I recognized your voice. More like your father ’s than you probably like.

But yes, I’m a Son. The first Son, actually.”

“Well, then slag me blind as a Pinkwhore,” Sevro cries. “This is all just a misunderstanding!” He jumps forward and crouches beside Quicksilver to straighten the man’s robe. “We’ll get you cleaned up. Let you call your men. Sound good?”

“Yes, good, because you’ve managed to muck up something rather…”

Sevro hits the Silver right in his fleshly lips with a jab of his fist. It’s an intimate, familiar bit of violence that makes me flinch. Quicksilver ’s head slams back against the chair. The man tries to move away, but Sevro pins him down easily. “Your tricks won’t work here, fat little toad man.”

“It’s not a trick—”

Sevro hits him again. Quicksilver sputters, blood dribbling down his cracked lip. Tries to blink the pain away. Probably seeing spots. Sevro hits him a third time, casually, and I think it was for me, not the tycoon, because Sevro looks back into the darkness where I stand with impudent eyes. As if dangling moral bait in front of me so we can explode into conflict again. His moral creed has always been simple: protect your friends, to hell with everyone else.

Sevro pushes a knife into Quicksilver ’s mouth. “I know you think you’re being clever, boyo,”

Sevro growls. “Saying you’re a Son. Thinkin’ you’re so smooth. Thinkin’ you can talk your way clear of us dumb brutes. But I’ve played this game with smarter kinds than you. And I’ve learned hard.

Keen?” He pulls the knife sideways against Quicksilver ’s cheek, causing the man to move his head with the blade. Still, it splits the corner of his mouth just slightly.

“So whatever your garble, you ain’t coming out on top of this, shitbrain. You’re a rat. A collaborator. And it’s time to reap what you’ve sown. So you’re going to tell us how to get out of here. If you’ve got a ship hidden. If you can get us past the navy. Then you’re going to tell us about the Jackal’s plans, his equipment, his infrastructure; then you’re going to give us the gear to equip our army.” Quicksilver ’s eyes dart from the knife to Sevro’s face.

“Use your brains, you little savage,” Quicksilver snarls when Sevro takes the knife from his mouth.

“Where do you think Fitchner got the money—”

“Don’t say his name.” Sevro points a finger to the man’s face. “Don’t you dare say his name.”

“I knew your father….”

“Then why’d he never mention you? Why does Dancer not know you? Because you’re lying.”

“Why would they know about me?” Quicksilver asks. “You never tie two boats together in a storm.”

The words are a punch to the gut. Fitchner said the exact phrase when explaining why he didn’t tell me about Titus. The Sons lost much of their technical ability when he died. What if there were two bodies to the Sons of Ares body? The lowColors, and the high? Kept apart in case one was compromised? It’s what I would do. He promised me better allies if I went to Luna. Allies that would help make me Sovereign. This could be one of them. One who fled when Fitchner died. Who cut himself off from the contaminated body of the Sons.

“Why was Matteo in your bedroom?” I ask carefully.

Quicksilver stares into the darkness, wondering whose voice addresses him, yet now there’s fear in his eyes, not just anger. “How…how did you know he was in my bedroom?”

“Answer the question,” Sevro says, kicking him.

“Did you hurt him?” Quicksilver asks, enraged. “Did you hurt him?”

“Answer the question,” Sevro repeats, slapping him.

Quicksilver trembles with anger. “He was in my room because he’s my husband. You son of a bitch.

He’s one of us! If you hurt him…”

“How long has he been your husband?” I ask.

“Ten years.”

“Where was he six years ago? When he worked with Dancer?”

“He was in Yorkton. He was the man who trained your friend, Sevro. He trained Darrow. The Carver made the body. Matteo sculpted the man.”

“He’s telling the truth.” I step into the light so Quicksilver can see my face. He stares at me in shock.

“Darrow. You’re alive. I…thought…it can’t be.”

I turn to Sevro. “He’s a Son of Ares.”

“Because he got a few facts right?” Sevro snarls. “You’re actually serious.”

“You’re alive,” Quicksilver murmurs to himself, trying to wrap his head around what is happening.

“How? He killed you.”

“He’s telling the truth,” I repeat.

“Truth?” Sevro moves his mouth like he’s got a cockroach in it. “What does that even bloody mean? How could you possibly know that? You think you can get the truth outta some backroom-dealing shark like this. He’s in bed with half the Peerless Scarred in the Society. He ain’t just their tool. He’s their friend. And he’s playing you like the Jackal did. If he’s a Son, why’d he abandon us?

Why’d he not contact us when Pops died?”

“Because your ship was sinking,” Quicksilver says, still staring at me in confusion. “Your cells were compromised. I had no way of knowing how deep the contamination went. I still don’t know how the Jackal discovered you, Darrow. My only contact to the lowColor cells was Fitchner. Just like I was his contact for highColor cells. How could I reach out when I didn’t know if it was Dancer himself who informed on you and made a power play to get rid of Fitchner?”

“Dancer would never do that,” Sevro says with a sneer.

“How would I know that?” Quicksilver says in frustration. “I don’t know the man.” Sevro’s shaking

his head, overwhelmed by the absurdity. “I have videos. Conversations between myself and your father.”

“I’m not letting you near a datapad,” Sevro says.

“Test him,” I say. “Make him prove it.”

“I met your mother once, Sevro,” Quicksilver offers quickly. “Her name was Bryn. She was a Red.

If I wasn’t a Son, how would I know that?”

“You could know that a dozen ways. Proves piss ’n shit,” Sevro says.

“I have a test,” I say. “If you are a Son, you’ll know it. If you belong to the Jackal, you would have used it. Where is Tinos?”

Quicksilver smiles broadly. “Five hundred kilometers south of the Thermic Sea. Three kilometers

beneath the old mining nexus Vengo Station. In an abandoned mining colony, the records of which were wiped from the internal servers of the Society by my hackers. The stalactites were carved hollow using Acharon-19 laser drills from my factories in spiral halls to maintain structural integrity. The Atalian hydrogenerator was built with plans designed by my engineers. Tinos might be the City of Ares, but I designed it. I paid for it. I built it.”

Sevro sways there in stunned silence.

“Your father worked for me, Sevro,” Quicksilver says. “First for the terraforming consortium on

Triton, where he met your mother. Then in…less legitimate ways. Back then I was not what I am today. I needed a Gold. A hard-nosed Peerless Scarred, and all the legal protection that gives. One who owed me and was willing to play rough with my competitors. Off the books, you know.”

“You’re saying my father played mercenary. For you?”

“I’m saying he played assassin. I was growing. There was resistance in the marketplace to that growth. So the marketplace had to make room. You think all Silvers play it safe and legal?” He chuckles. “Some, maybe. But business in a crony-capitalist society is the craft of sharks. Stop swimming, the others will take your food and feed on your body. I gave your father money. He hired a team. Worked off-site. Did what I needed him to do. Until I discovered he was using my resources for a side project. The Sons of Ares. ”

He makes a mockery of the words.

“But you didn’t report him?” I ask skeptically.

“Golds treat sedition like cancer. I’d have been cut out too. So I was trapped. But he didn’t want me trapped. He wanted a co-conspirator. Gradually he made his case. And here we are.”

Sevro paces away, trying to make sense of it. “But…we’ve…been dying like flies. And you’ve been

up here…humping your Pinks. Fraternizing with the enemy. If you were one of us…”

Quicksilver lifts his nose up, regaining what poise he lost during the beating. “Then I would have done what, Mr. Barca? Do tell. From your extensive experience in subterfuge?”

“You would have fought with us.”

“With what? Hm?” He waits for an answer. None comes. Sevro’s speechless. “I have a private security force of thirty thousand for myself and my companies. But they’re spread from Mercury to

Pluto. I don’t own those men. They are Gray contractors. Only a fraction are owned Obsidians. I have the weapons, but I don’t have the muscle to tussle with Peerless Scarred. Are you crazy? I use soft power. Not hard power. That was your father ’s purview. Even a minor house could wipe me out in direct conflict.”

“You have the largest software company in the Solar System,” Sevro says. “That means hackers.

You have munitions plants. Military tech development. You could have spied for us on the Jackal.

Given us weapons. You could have done a thousand things.”

“May I be blunt?”

I grimace. “If ever there was a time…”

Quicksilver leans back to peer down his humped nose at Sevro. “I’ve been a Son of Ares for more

than twenty years. That requires patience. A long-eyed view. You’ve been one for less than a year. And

look what’s happened. You, Mr. Barca, are a bad investment.”

“A bad…investment?”

It sounds ridiculous coming from a man chained to a metal chair with blood dribbling down his lips. But something in Quicksilver ’s eyes sells his point. This isn’t a victim. It’s a titan of a different plane. Master of his own domain. Equal, it seems, to Fitchner ’s own breed of genius. And more vast a character, more nuanced than I would have expected. But I reserve any affection for the man. He’s survived by lying for twenty years. Everything is an act. Probably even this.

Who is the real man beneath this bulldog face?

What drives him? What does he want?

“I watched. I waited to see what you would do,” he explains to Sevro. “To see if you were cut like your father. But then they executed Darrow”—he looks up at me, still confused on that note—“or pretended to, and you acted like a boy. You began a war you couldn’t win, with insufficient infrastructure, materiel, systems of coordination, supply lines. You released propaganda in the form of Darrow’s Carving to the worlds, to the mines, hoping for…what? A glorious rise of the proletariat?” He scoffs. “I thought you understood war.

“For all his faults, your father was a visionary. He promised me something better. And what has his son given us instead? Ethnic cleansing. Nuclear war. Beheadings. Pogroms. Whole cities shredded by fractious groups of Red rebels and Gold reprisals. Disunity. In other words, chaos. And chaos, Mr.

Barca, is not what I invested in. It’s bad for business, and what’s bad for business is bad for Man.”

Sevro swallows slowly, feeling the weight of the words.

“I did what I had to,” he says, sounding so small. “What no one else would.”

“Did you?” Quicksilver leans forward nastily. “Or did you do what you wanted to do? Because your feelings were hurt? Because you wanted to lash out?”

Sevro’s eyes are glassy. His silence wounding me. I want to defend him, but he needs to hear this.

“You think I haven’t been fighting, but I have,” Quicksilver continues. “The Sovereign’s opinion of the Jackal seems to have soured of late.”

“Why?” I ask.

“I couldn’t guess before, but now I’d bet anything it’s because you escaped the Jackal’s prisons. In any case, I saw an opportunity. I brought Virginia au Augustus and the Sovereign’s representatives here to broker a peace that would give Virginia the ArchGovernorship of Mars and would remove the

Jackal from power and put him in prison for life. It’s not the end I wanted. But if what we’re seeing on the Jackal’s Mars is any indication, he is the single greatest threat to the worlds and our long-term goals.”

“And yet you helped him consolidate power in the first place,” I say.

Quicksilver sighs. “At the time, I thought him less of a threat than his father. I was wrong. And so were you. He needs to be removed.”

The Jackal’s been betrayed by two allies, then.

“But your plans for an alliance are slagged now.”

“Indeed. But I don’t mourn the opportunity lost. You’re alive, Darrow, and that means this rebellion is alive. It means Fitchner ’s dream, your wife’s dream, is not yet gone from this world.”

“Why?” Sevro asks. “Why the bloodyhell would you want war? You’re the richest man in the system. You’re not an anarchist.”

“No. I am not an anarchist, a communist, a fascist, a plutocrat, or even a demokrat, for that matter.

My boys, don’t believe what they tell you in school. Government is never the solution, but it is almost

always the problem. I’m a capitalist. And I believe in effort and progress and the ingenuity of our species. The continuing evolution and advancement of our kind based on fair competition. Fact of the matter is, Gold does not want man to continue to evolve. Since the conquering, they have routinely stifled advancement to maintain their heaven. They’ve wrapped themselves in myth. Filled their grand oceans with monsters to hunt. Cultivated private Mirkwoods and Olympuses of their very own. They

have suits of armor to make them flying gods. And they preserve that ridiculous fairy tale by keeping mankind frozen in time. Curbing invention, curiosity, social mobility. Change threatens that.

“Look where we are. In space. Above a planet we shaped. Yet we live in a Society modeled after the musings of Bronze Age pedophiles. Tossing around mythology like that bullshit wasn’t made up around a campfire by an Attican farmer depressed that his life was nasty, brutish, and short.

“The Golds claim to the Obsidians that they are gods. They are not. Gods create. If the Golds are

anything, they are vampire kings. Parasites drinking from our jugular. I want a Society free of this fascist pyramid. I want to unchain the free market of wealth and ideas. Why should men toil in the mines when we can build robots to toil for us? Why should we ever have stopped in this Solar System? We deserve more than what we’ve been given. But first, Gold must fall and the Sovereign and the Jackal must die. And I believe you are the sign I’ve been waiting for, Mr. Andromedus.”

He nods at my gloved hands. “I paid for your Sigils. I paid for your bones, your eyes, your flesh.

You are my friend’s brainchild. My husband’s student. The sum of the Sons of Ares. So my empire is at your disposal. My hackers. My security teams. My transports. My companies. All yours. With no reservations. No strings. No insurance policy.” He looks at Sevro. “Gentlemen. In other words, I’m all in.”

“Quite nice.” Sevro applauds, mocking Quicksilver. “Darrow, he’s just trying to buy you so he can

escape.”

“Maybe,” I say. “But we can’t blow the bombs anymore.”

“Bombs?” Quicksilver asks. “What are you talking about?”

“We planted explosives in the refineries and the shipping docks,” I say.

“That’s your plan?” Quicksilver looks back and forth at us as if we’re mad. “You can’t do that. Do you have any idea what that would do?”

“An economic collapse,” I say. “Symptoms including a devaluation of stock assets, a freeze of commercial bank lending, a run on local banks, eventual stagflation. And a breakdown of social order. Show us some respect when you talk to us. We’re not dilettantes or boys. And it was our plan.”

“Was?” Sevro asks, stepping back from me. “So now you’re letting him dictate what we do.”

“Things have changed, Sevro. We need to reassess. We’ve new assets.”

My friend stares at me as if he doesn’t recognize my face. “New assets? Him?”

“Not just him. Orion,” I say. “You never told me Mustang contacted you.”

“Because you would have let her manipulate you,” he says without apology. “Like you did before.

Like you’re letting him now.” He considers me, pointing a finger as he thinks he figures it out.

“You’re afraid. Aren’t you? Afraid of pulling the trigger. Afraid of making a mistake. We finally have a chance to make Gold bleed and you wanna reassess. You wanna take time to look at our options.”

He pulls the detonator from his pocket. “This is war. We don’t have time. We can take the bastard with us, but we can’t miss this chance.”

“Stop acting like a terrorist,” I snarl. “We’re better than that.”

I stare down at him, furious in the moment. He should be my simplest, strongest friendship. But because of loss, everything is twisted between us. Even with him there’s so many layers to the pain. So many levels of fear and recrimination and guilt for both of us. They once called Sevro my shadow.

He’s not any longer. And I think I’ve been bitter at him these last hours because they’re proof of that.

He’s his own man with his own tides. Just as I think he’s been bitter with me because I didn’t come back as the Reaper. I came back a man he didn’t recognize. And now that I’m trying to be the force he wanted, the force that’s making decisions, he doubts me because he senses weakness and that’s always made him afraid.

“Sevro, give me the detonator,” I say coldly.

“Naw.” He opens the detonator ’s priming shield, revealing the red thumb toggle inside the protective casing. If he presses down, one thousand kilograms of high-yield explosives will detonate across Phobos. It won’t destroy the moon, but it’ll demolish the moon’s economic infrastructure.

Helium will not flow for months. Years. And all the fears of Quicksilver will be realized. Society will suffer, but so will we.

“Sevro…”

“You got my father killed,” he says. “You got Quinn and Pax and Weed and Harpy and Lea killed

because you thought you were smarter than everyone else. Because you didn’t kill the Jackal when you could. Because you didn’t kill Cassius when you could. But unlike you, I don’t flinch.”

Sevro’s thumb twitches for the detonation switch. But before he presses down, I activate a jamfield with the jammer on my belt, blocking the signal from leaving the room. “You son of a bitch,” he snarls, rushing for the door to get beyond the field.

I reach for him. He spins under my hands. My jammer ’s not a strong one, so he doesn’t need to get far away from me. He bowls into the hallway, I scramble after.

“Sevro, stop!” I say as I push into the hallway. He’s already ten meters down the hall, running at full speed to get clear of my jamming field so his signal can go out. He’s quicker than I am in these small hallways. He’s going to escape. I pull my pulseFist out, aim it over his head, and fire it, but my aim is off and it nearly takes off his head. His Mohawk sizzles smoke. He stops dead in his tracks and wheels back on me, face feral.

“Sevro…I didn’t mean…”

With a howl of rage he charges me. Caught off guard, I stumble back from the manic man. He closes in a flurry. I block his first punch, but an uppercut smashes into my jaw, slamming my teeth together. Rocking me back. My teeth close on a corner of my tongue. I taste blood and almost fall. If Mickey hadn’t made bones proper, Sevro might’ve shattered my jaw. Instead, he curses, gripping his fist in pain.

I move with the uppercut and lash out with my left leg, kicking him so hard in the ribs that his whole body carries sideways into the wall, denting the metal bulkhead. I throw a straight jab with my right fist. He ducks under and my punch lands on duroSteel. Pain rattles up my arm. I grunt. He flies into me under the left elbow I swing at his head, ratcheting strikes into my stomach, aiming for my balls. I twist back, manage to grab one of his arms and swing him around as hard as I can. He slams face-first into the wall, spilling to the ground.

“Where is it?” I search his body for the detonator. “Sevro…”

He scissor-kicks my legs. Tangling them. Dropping me to the ground so we’re grappling instead of

trading punches. He’s the better wrestler. And it’s all I can do to keep him from choking me out from behind as his legs form a triangle, heels locked in front of my face, legs pressing in on both sides of my neck. I lift him off the ground, but I can’t dislodge him. He’s dangling upside down behind me, spine to my spine, heels still in my face, trying to elbow my balls through my legs from behind. I can’t reach for him. I can’t breathe. So I grab his calves on my neck and spin my body. He slams into the metal. Once. Twice. Then he finally lets go, scrambling off. I’m on him in a flash, throwing a tight series of kravat elbows into his face. He catches my chin with the crown of his head accidentally.

“Dumb…son of a bitch…” I mutter, stumbling back. He’s gripping his own head in pain.

“Stupid lanky ass…”

He aims a kick at my midsection. I take the blow, catching the leg with my left arm, and exchange it for a haymaker right that crashes into his skull with all my weight behind it. He goes down hard, like I’m a hammer driving a nail into the floor. He tries to rise, but I push him down with a boot. He lies under it, heaving breaths. I’m dizzy and panting. Body hating me for what I’m doing to it.

“Are you done?” I ask him. He nods. I pull back my boot and extend a hand to help him up. He rolls to his back and reaches for it, then lurches up with his left boot heel straight into my groin. I fall and dry-heave beside him. Crippling nausea swells from my lower back into my balls and my stomach.

Beside me, he’s panting like a dog. At first I think he’s laughing, but when I look up I’m shocked to see tears in his eyes. He lies on his back. Huge sobs make his rib cage shudder. He turns away, tries to hide from me to stop the tears from coming, but it makes it worse.

“Sevro…”

I sit up, feeling ripped apart by the sight of him. I don’t hold him, but I put a hand on his head. And he surprises me by not flinching away, but instead crawling up to put his head on my knee. I put my other hand on his shoulder. In time the sobs slow and he blows the snot from his nose. But he doesn’t move. It’s like the moment after a lightning storm. The air kinetic and vibrating. After several minutes, he clears his throat and pushes himself up to sit with his legs folded under him in the center of the hall. His eyes are puffy, ashamed. He plays with his hands, the tattoos and Mohawk making him look like something pulled from a deranged children’s book.

“You tell anyone I cried, I’ll find a dead fish, put it in a sock, hide it in your room, and let it putrefy.”

“Fair enough.”

The detonator lies off to the side. Close enough so we can both reach for it. Neither of us do. “I hate this,” he says weakly. “People like that.” He glances up at me. “I don’t want him to be a Son. I don’t want to be like Quicksilver.”

“You aren’t.”

He doesn’t believe that. “At the Institute, I’d wake up in the morning. And I think I was still in my dreams. Then I’d feel the cold. And I’d slowly start remembering where I was, and there’s dirt and blood under my nails. And all I want to do was go back to sleep. To be warm. But I knew I had to get up and face a world that didn’t give a shit.” He grimaces. “That’s how I feel every morning now. I’m afraid all the time. I don’t want to lose anyone. I don’t want to let them down.”

“You haven’t,” I say. “If anything, I let you down.” He tries to interrupt me. “You were right. We both know it. It’s my fault your father ’s dead. It’s my fault that whole night happened.”

“Was still a shit thing of me to say.” He raps his knuckles on the ground. “I’m always saying shit things.”

“I’m glad you said it.”

“Why?”

“Because we’ve both forgotten we didn’t get here on our own. You and I should be able to say anything to each other. That’s how this works. It’s how we work. We don’t walk on eggshells. We talk to each other. Even if we say shit that’s hard to hear.” I see how alone he feels. How much weight he carried. It’s how I felt when Cassius stabbed me and left me for dead at the Institute. He needs to share the weight. I don’t know how else to tell him that. This stubbornness, this intransigence, looks insane from the outside, but inside he felt just as I did when Roque questioned me.

“Do you know why I helped you at the Institute when you and Cassius were gonna drown in that loch?” he asks. “It’s cause of how they look at you. It wasn’t like I thought you were a good primus.

You were as smart as a bag of wet farts. But I saw them. Pebble. Clown. Quinn….Roque.” He almost trips over that last name. “I’d watch you at your fires in the gulches when Titus was in the castle. Saw you teach Lea how to cut a goat’s throat even when she was afraid to do it. I wanted to do that too. To join.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He shrugs. “Was afraid you wouldn’t want me.”

“They look at you that way now,” I say. “Don’t you see that?”

He snorts. “Nah, they don’t. The whole time, I tried to be you. Tried to be Pops. Didn’t work. I could tell everyone just wished it was me that the Jackal captured. Not you.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“It is,” he says intensely, leaning forward. “You’re better than I am. I saw you. When you looked down at Tinos. Saw your eyes. The love in them. The urge to protect those people. I tried feeling it.

But every time I looked down at the refugees, I just hated them. For being weak. For hurting each other. For being stupid and not knowing what we’ve gone through to help them.” He swallows and picks at the cuticles of his stubby fingers. “I know it’s nasty, but it’s what it is.”

He seems so vulnerable here in this hall, the rage taken out of us from the fight. He’s not looking for a lecture. Leadership has worn him down, alienated him from even his Howlers. Right now he’s

looking to feel like he’s not like Quicksilver or the Jackal or any of the Golds we fight against. He’s mistakenly assumed I’m something better than he is. And part of that is my fault.

“I hate them too,” I say.

He shakes his head. “Don’t…”

“I do. At least, I hate that they remind me of what I was, or could have been. Shit, I was a little idiot.

You would have hated me. I was comfortable and arrogant and selfish on my knees. I liked being blind to everything because I was in love. And I thought for some reason that living for love was the most valiant thing in all the worlds. Even made Eo into something in my head that she wasn’t.

Romanticized her and the life we had—probably because I saw my father die for some cause. And I

saw all he left behind, so I tried to cling to the life he abandoned.”

I trace the lines on my palm.

“It makes me feel small to think I started doing all this for her. She was everything to me, but I was just a piece of her life. When the Jackal had me, that’s all I could think about. That I wasn’t enough.

That our child wasn’t enough. Part of me hates her for that. She didn’t know all this would happen, wasn’t even aware that the worlds had been terraformed. All she could have known was that she was

making a point to the couple thousand people in Lykos. And was that worth dying for? Was that worth killing a child for?”

I gesture down the hall. “Now all these people think she was divine or something. A perfect martyr.

But she was just a girl. And she was brave, but she was stupid and selfish and selfless and romantic; but she died before she could ever be more. Think how much she could have done with her life.

Maybe we could have done this together.” I laugh bitterly and lean my head against the wall. “I think the shittiest part about getting old is now we’re smart enough to see the cracks in everything.”

“We’re twenty-three, dipshit.”

“Well, I feel eighty.”

“You look it.” I flip him the crux, earning a smile. “Do you…” He almost doesn’t finish the thought. “Do you think she watches you? From the Vale? Does your father?”

I’m about to say I don’t know when I catch the intentness of his gaze. He’s not asking about my family as much as he’s asking about his own, maybe even Quinn, who he always loved but never had

the courage to tell. With all his savagery it’s hard to remember just how vulnerable he is. He’s adrift.

Alienated from Red and Gold. No home. No family. No view of a world after war. Right now I’d say

anything to make him feel like he’s loved.

“Yes. I believe she watches me,” I say with more confidence than I feel. “And my father. And yours too.”

“So they have beer in the Vale.”

“Don’t be sacrilegious,” I say, kicking his foot. “Only whiskey. Streams of it as far as the eye can see.”

His laughter stitches more of me together. Bit by bit, I feel like my friends are coming back to me.

Or maybe I’m coming back to them. Suppose it’s the same thing, really. I always told Victra to let people in. I could never take my own advice because I knew one day I’d have to betray them, that the foundation of our friendship was a lie. Now I’m with people who know who I am, and I’m afraid to

let them in because I’m afraid of losing them, disappointing them. But it’s this bond that Sevro and I share that makes us stronger than we were before. It’s what we have that the Jackal doesn’t.

“Do you know what happens after this?” I ask. “If we kill Octavia, the Jackal? If we somehow win?”

“No,” Sevro says.

“That right there is a problem. I don’t have the answer. I won’t pretend to. But I won’t let Augustus be right. I won’t bring chaos into this world without at least a plan for something better. For that we need allies like Quicksilver. We need to stop playing terrorist. And we need a real army.”

Sevro picks the detonator back up and breaks it in two. “What are your orders, Reap?”

Sevro and I stalk back into the ready room where the Howlers are packed and prepared to depart the station. Rollo and a dozen of his people watch us tensely from their side of the room. They know they’re about to be abandoned. Quicksilver follows behind me, restraints left behind in his cell. He’s agreed to our plan, with a few adjustments. “Well, look at this….” Victra says, seeing our bruises and bloody knuckles. “You two finally talked.” She looks to Ragnar. “See?”

“Shit’s sorted,” Sevro says.

“And the rich man?” Ragnar asks curiously. “He wears no manacles.”

“That’s because he’s a Son of Ares, Rags,” Sevro says. “Didn’t you know?”

“Quicksilver ’s a Son?” Victra explodes into laughter. “And I’m secretly a Helldiver.” She looks back and forth at our faces. “Wait…you’re serious. Do you have proof?”

“I’m sorry to hear of your mother, Victra,” Quicksilver says hoarsely. “But it is a pleasure to see you walking, truly. I’ve been with the Sons for over twenty years. I have hundreds of hours of conversations with Fitchner to prove it.”

“He’s a Son,” Sevro says. “Can we move on?”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Victra shakes her head. “Mother was right about you. Always said you had

secrets. I thought it was something sexual. That you liked horses or something.” Sevro shifts uncomfortably.

“So you find us a way off this rock, rich man?” Holiday asks Quicksilver.

“Not quite,” he says. “Darrow…”

“We’re not leaving,” I announce. Rollo and his men stir in the corner. The Howlers exchange confused looks.

“Maybe you wanna tell us what’s going on?” Screwface asks gruffly. “Let’s start with who’s in charge. Is it you?”

“Howler One,” Sevro says, punching my shoulder.

“Howler Two,” I say, patting his in turn.

“Prime?” Sevro asks. The Howlers nod in concert.

“First order of business, policy change,” I say. “Who has pliers?” I look around until Holiday pulls hers from her bomb kit and tosses them to me. I open my mouth and stick the pliers to the back right molar where the achlys-9 suicide tooth was implanted. With a grunt I tear it out and set the tooth on the table. “I’ve been captured before. I will not be captured again. So this is worthless to me. I don’t plan on dying, but if I do, I die with my friends. Not in a cell. Not on a podium. With you.” I hand the

pliers to Sevro. He jerks out his own back tooth. Spitting the blood on the table.

“I die with my friends.”

Ragnar does not wait for the pliers. He pulls out his back tooth with his bare fingers, eyes wide with delight as he sets the huge bloody thing on the table. “I die with my friends.” One by one, they pass around the pliers, pulling out their teeth and tossing them down. Quicksilver watches all the while, staring at us like we’re a pack of mad hooligans, no doubt wondering about what he’s gotten himself into. But I need my men to lose this heavy mantle they wear. With that poison in their skulls, they felt the death sentences had already been read, and they were just waiting for the hangman to come knocking. Slag that. Death’ll have to earn its bounty. I want them to believe in this. In each other. In the idea that we might actually win and live.

For the first time, I do.

—

After I’ve detailed my instructions to my men and they depart to execute the orders, I return with Sevro to the Sons of Ares control room and ask for them to prepare a direct link. “To the Citadel in Agea, please.” The Sons of Ares turn to look at me to see if they’ve misheard. “On the double, friends. We don’t have all day.”

I stand in front of the holo camera with Sevro. “Think they already know we’re here?”

“Probably not quite yet,” I reply.

“Think he’s going to piss himself?”

“Let’s hope. Remember, nothing about Mustang and Cassius being here. We’re keeping that one in

the pocket.”

The direct holoLink goes through and the face of a wan young Copper administrator looks sleepily

back at us. “Citadel General Com,” she drones, “how may I direct your…” She blinks suddenly at our images on the display. Wipes sleep from her eyes. And loses all faculty of speech.

“I would like to speak with the ArchGovernor,” I say.

“And…may I say who is…calling?”

“It’s the bloodydamn Reaper of Mars,” Sevro barks.

“One moment, please.”

The Copper ’s face is replaced by the pyramid of the Society. Terribly predictable Vivaldi plays as we wait. Sevro taps his fingers on his leg and murmurs his little tune under his breath. “If your heart beats like a drum, and your legs a little wet, it’s because the Reaper’s come to collect a little debt.”

Several minutes later, the Jackal’s pale face appears before us. He wears a jacket with a high white collar, and his hair is parted on the side. He does not leer at us. If anything, he looks amused as he continues to eat his breakfast. “The Reaper and Ares,” he says in a low drawl, mocking his own courtesy. He wipes his mouth on a napkin. “You departed so quickly last time I didn’t have time to say farewell. I must say, you’re looking positively radiant, Darrow. Is Victra with you?”

“Adrius,” I say flatly. “As you’re no doubt aware, there has been an explosion at Sun Industries, and your silent partner, Quicksilver, has gone missing. I know it’s a mess of jurisdiction, and the evidence won’t be sorted for hours, maybe days. So I wanted to call and clarify the situation. We, the Sons of Ares, have kidnapped Quicksilver.”

He sets his spoon down to sip from his white coffee cup.

“I see. To what end?”

“We will be holding him for ransom until you release all political prisoners illegally detained in

your jails and all lowColors concentrated in internment camps. Additionally, you are to take responsibility for the murder of your father. Publicly.”

“Is that all?” the Jackal asks, not displaying a flicker of emotion, though I know he’s wondering how we discovered Quicksilver was his ally.

“You also have to personally kiss my pimply ass,” Sevro says.

“Lovely.” The Jackal looks off the screen to someone. “My agents tell me a flight moratorium was

instituted ten minutes after the attack on Sun Industries and the vessel which fled the scene disappeared into the Hollows. Am I to assume then that you’re still on Phobos?”

I pause as if caught off guard. “If you do not comply, Quicksilver ’s life is forfeit.”

“Lamentably, I do not negotiate with terrorists. Especially ones who may be recording my conversation to broadcast it for political gain.” The Jackal sips his coffee again. “I listened to your proposal, now listen to mine. Run. Now. While you can. But know, wherever you go, wherever you

hide, you cannot protect your friends. I’m going to kill them all and put you back in the darkness with their severed heads for company. There is no way out, Darrow. This I promise you.”

He kills the signal.

“Think he’ll send the Boneriders before the legions?” Sevro asks.

“Let’s hope. Time to get moving.”

—

The Hollows is a city of cages. Row upon row. Column upon column of rusty metal homes linked together in the null gravity as far as the eye can see here in the heart of Phobos. Each cage a life in miniature. Clothing floats on hooks. Little portable thermal press-grills sizzle with the foods of a hundred different regions of Mars. Paper pictures cling to iron cage walls by bits of tape, showing distant lakes, mountains, and families gathered together. Everything here is dull and gray. The metal of the cages. The limp clothing. Even the tired and wasted faces of the Oranges and Reds who are trapped here, thousands of kilometers from home. Sparks of color dance up from the datapads and holoVisor that glow through the city, bits of dream scattered on twisted scrap metal. Men and women sit penitent over their little displays, watching their little programs, forgetting where they are in favor of where they’d wish to be. Many have taped paper or blankets over the sides of their walls to give them some semblance of privacy from their neighbors. But it’s the scent and the sound you cannot escape. The throaty unceasing rattle of cage doors slamming shut. Locks clicking. Men laughing and coughing. Generators humming. Public holoCans yapping and barking the dog language of

distraction. All stirred and boiled together to make a thick soup of noise and shadowy light.

Rollo once lived in negative south end of the city. Now it is deep Syndicate territory. The Sons were chased out more than two months ago. I fly along the lines of plastic rope that weave through the cage canyons, passing dockworkers and tower laborers who climb back to their little cage homes. They jerk their heads toward the throaty thrum of my new gravBoots. It’s an alien sound to them. One heard only over the holoVids or experiential virtual realities low world Greens hawk for fifty credits a minute. Most will never have seen a Peerless Scarred in the flesh. Much less one in full armor. I’m a terrifying spectacle.

It was seven hours ago that my lieutenants and I clustered together in the Sons of Ares ready room and I told them and Dancer back in Tinos my plan. Six hours since I learned of Kavax’s escape from our detention cell—someone let him out. Five hours since Victra delivered Quicksilver and Matteo back to their tower, where Quicksilver has spent the remainder of the night activating his own cells and contacts in the Blue Hives, making preparation for this moment. Four hours since Quicksilver

joined his security teams with Sons of Ares and gave them access to his armories and his weapons depots, and we received word that two Augustus destroyers were inbound from the orbital docks.

Three hours since Ragnar and Rollo took a thousand Sons of Ares to the garbage hangars on level

43C to prepare their skiffs. Two hours since one of Quicksilver ’s private yachts was prepped for launch. One hour since the Society destroyers deployed four troop transports to dock at the Skyresh Interplanetary Spaceport and the new coat of blood-red paint on my armor dried and I donned it to march to war.

All is ready.

Now I carve a wake of silence into the heart of the Hollows. My bone-white razor is on my arm. At

my side flies Sevro, wearing the huge spiked helmet of Ares with pride. He brought it along, but the rest of his armor is borrowed from Quicksilver. It’s cutting-edge tech. Better even than the suits we wore for Augustus. Holiday follows behind along with a hundred Sons of Ares.

The Sons are awkward on their gravBoots. Some carry razors. Others pulseFists. But, per my orders, not one wears a helmet as we fly. I wanted these lowColors of the stacks witnessing our treason, so that they feel emboldened by Reds and Oranges and Obsidians wearing the armor of the

masters.

The faces are a blur. A hundred thousand peering from the homes in every direction. Pale and confused, most under the age of forty. Reds and Oranges brought here with false promises just like Rollo, with families down on Mars, just like Rollo.

Neighbors point in my direction. I see my name on their lips. Somewhere, the Syndicate watchmen

will be dialing their superiors, relaying the news to the police or the Securitas antiterrorism apparatus that the Reaper lives and he is on Phobos.

I bait the beasts.

As I coast into the central hub of the city, I say a silent prayer, willing Eo to give me strength.

There, like some pulsing electronic idol fenced in by metal bramble, a holographic display casts Society comedy programing one hundred meters long, fifty meters broad. It bathes the circle of cages around it in sickly neon light. Speakers laugh on cue. Blue light plays over my armor. Locks jingle as they’re undone and cages are pushed open so their inhabitants can sit on the edge and dangle their legs off to watch me without looking through the cage bars.

Quicksilver ’s Greens focus their helmet cameras on me. The Sons array around, eyes smoldering

out at the lowColors, my honor guard. Their red hair floating like a hundred angry torch flames.

Holiday and Ares flank me to either side. Floating two hundred meters in the air. Surrounded by cages. Silence gripping the city except the laugh track of the comedy. It’s sick and weird as it cackles out of the speakers. I nod to Quicksilver ’s Greens, and they cut the noise and somewhere in his tower, the hacker teams he’s assembled hijack every broadcast on the moon and issue commands to secondary datahubs on Earth, Luna, the asteroid belt, Mercury, the moons of Jupiter, so my message will burn across the blackness of space, taking over the data web that links mankind. Quicksilver is proving his allegiance with this broadcast, using the network he helped the Jackal build. This is not like Eo’s death. A viral video you have to dig for in the dark spaces of the holoNet. This is a grand roar across the Society, broadcasting on ten billion holos to eighteen billion people.

They gave these screens to us as chains. Today, we make them hammers.

Karnus au Bellona had his faults. But he was right when he said that all we have in this life is our shout into the wind. He shouted his own name, and I learned the folly in that. But before I begin the war that will claim me one way or another, I will make my shout. And it will be something far greater than my own name. Far greater than a roar of family pride. It is the dream I’ve carried and shepherded since I was sixteen.

Eo appears beneath me on the hologram, replacing the comedy.

A ghostly giant of the girl I knew. Her face is quiet and pale and angrier than in my dreams. Hair dull and stringy. Clothing drab and ragged. But her eyes burn out from her gray surroundings, bright as the blood on her mangled back as she looks up from the metal whipping box. Her mouth barely

seems to open. Just a sliver of space between her lips, but her song bleeds from her, voice thin and fragile as a spring dream.

My son, my son

Remember the chains

When gold ruled with iron reins

We roared and roared

And twisted and screamed

For ours, a vale

Of better dreams

She echoes across the metal city louder than she echoed in that far-off lost city of stone. Her light flickering across the pale faces watching from their cages. These Oranges and Reds who never knew

her in life, but hear her in death. They’re silent and sad as she is walked to the gallows. I hear my vain cries. See myself sagging against Gray hands. Feel I’m there again. The hard-packed dirt on my knees as the world falls out from under me. Augustus speaks with Pliny and Leto as frayed hemp loops around Eo’s neck. Hatred radiates from the faces in the Stacks. I could no more stop Eo’s death then than I can stop it now. It’s as if it always has been. My wife falls. I flinch, hearing the rustling of her clothing. The creaking of the rope. And I look down at the hologram, forcing myself to watch as the boy I was stumbles forward to wrap his hands with their Red Sigils around her kicking legs. I watch him kiss her ankle and pull her feet with all his feeble strength. Her haemanthus falls, and I speak.

“I would have lived in peace. But my enemies brought me war. My name is Darrow of Lykos. You

know my story. It is but an echo of your own. They came to my home and killed my wife, not for singing a song but for daring to question their reign. For daring to have a voice. For centuries millions beneath the soil of Mars have been fed lies from cradle to grave. That lie has been revealed to them. Now they’ve entered the world you know, and they suffer as you do.

“Man was born free, but from the ocean shores to the crater cities of Mercury to the ice waste of

Pluto down to the mines of Mars, he is in chains. Chains made of duty, hunger, fear. Chains hammered to our necks by a race that we lifted up. A race that we empowered. Not to rule, not to reign, but to lead us from a world torn by war and greed. Instead, they have led us into darkness. They have used the systems of order and prosperity for their own gain. They expect your obedience, ignore your sacrifice, and hoard the prosperity that your hands create. To hold tight to their reign, they forbid our dreams. Saying a person is only as good as the Colors of their eyes, of their Sigils.”

I remove my gloves and clench my right fist in the air as Eo did before she died. But unlike Eo, my hands bear no Sigils. Removed by Mickey when I was Carved in Tinos. I am the first soul in hundreds of years to walk without them. The silence in the Hollows gives way to sounds of shock, fear.

“But now I stand before you, a man unbound. I stand before you, my brothers and sisters, to ask you to join me. To throw yourselves on the machines of industry. To unite behind the Sons of Ares.

Take back your cities, your prosperity. Dare to dream of better worlds than these. Slavery is not peace. Freedom is peace. And until we have that, it is our duty to make war. This is no license for savagery or genocide. If a man rapes, you kill him on the spot. If a man murders civilians, high or low, you kill him on the spot. This is war, but you are on the side of good and that carries a heavy

burden. We rise not for hate, not for vengeance, but for justice. For your children. For their future.

“I speak now to Gold, to the Aureate who rule. I have walked your halls, broken your schools, eaten at your tables, and suffered your gallows. You tried to kill me. You could not. I know your power. I know your pride. And I have seen how you will fall. For seven hundred years, you have ruled over the dominion of man, and this is all you have given us. It is not enough.

“Today, I declare your rule to be at its end. Your cities are not your cities. Your vessels are not your vessels. Your planets are not your planets. They were built by us. And they belong to us, the common trust of man. Now we take them back. Never mind the darkness you spread, never mind the night you

summon, we will rage against it. We will howl and fight till our last breath, not just in the mines of Mars, but on the shores of Venus, on the dunes of Io’s sulfur seas, in the glacial valleys of Pluto. We will fight in the towers of Ganymede and the ghettos of Luna and the storm-stricken oceans of Europa. And if we fall, others will take our place, because we are the tide. And we are rising.”

Then Sevro slams his fist against his chest. Once, twice, thumping it rhythmically. It is echoed by the two hundred Sons of Ares. Their fists pounding their chests. By the Howlers.

In the steel mesh of the cages men and women thump their fists into the walls till it sounds like the heartbeat rising through the bowels of this vampire moon; up through the Hives of Blues, where they sit drinking coffee and studying gravitational mathematics under the warm lights of their intellectual communes; through the Gray barracks in each precinct; among the Silvers at their trading desks; the Golds in their mansions and yachts.

Out through the black ink that separates our little bubbles of life before careening down into the halls of the Jackal’s lonely hold on Attica, where he sits in his winter throne, surrounded by a sea of bent necks. There our sound rattles in his ears. There he hears my wife’s heart beat on. And he cannot stop it as it goes down and down into the mines of Mars, playing on the screens as Reds beat on their tables and the Copper magistrates watch in swelling fear as the miners look hatefully up through the duroglass that keeps them imprisoned.

Her heart beats mutinously through the bustling oceanside promenades of the archipelagos of Venus as sailboats float proudly in the harbor and shopping bags hang in frightened hands and Golds