“All right, but I go with you.”
“Well, I should hope so, dipshit. You’ve got a son to kiss goodbye.” He claps me on the shoulder, hoists up a drum of ripWing ammunition, and shuffles away. I look out at the window and wonder if Mustang has figured out my play. I wish more than anything that she were not the Sovereign. That I could have her with me. But our duties are different, and they’re what we chose for ourselves. I return to stuffing supplies in a rucksack.
“You know what is funny to me?” Victra’s reflection joins mine in the window. Her jade earrings are brilliant in the pale light. “They think you know what you’re doing.”
“You think I don’t?”
She snorts her answer and looks at the Minotaur helm in Pebble’s hands as she passes us.
“There was always a contingency plan to assassinate him,” I say. “This isn’t some ad hoc stupidity. The pieces are aligned.”
“Haven’t you tried to kill him before?”
“A few times, but not personally.” A pulseFist is jammed into the sack.
“I’ve tried three times,” she says to my surprise. “Assassination is probably the only enterprise where private industry is not more efficient.”
“I have a plan,” I say. In goes a backup razor.
“Of course you do.” She pauses. “Darrow. Have you stopped to think what happens if you die?”
“You saw what happened in the Senate, Victra. I’m not the Rising any longer. It’s evolved past me. I am obsolete. And that’s a good thing. Virginia is more important than I am. Hell, Dancer is more important than I am. My purpose is singular—to remove the threats to the Republic. The Ash Lord is irreplaceable. If I kill him, then the Saud and Carthii and the last great houses will destroy each other in the power vacuum.”
“Atalantia will still be alive.”
“Atalantia is not her father,” I say. “She’s more Aja than her father. A soldier. Not a general.” I place four ion detonators in the bag.
“You always did want to be a martyr. Didn’t you?”
“What I want doesn’t matter,” I say curtly. “This is about responsibility. The Republic can’t survive with war always snapping at its heels. This division is because I took too long. I told them to trust me with the war. And I haven’t won it yet. But I can, and I will.”
“Fuck the mob. You don’t owe them anything.”
I smile at her. “I wish I could agree with you.”
“Darrow…” She comes close so no one can overhear her. “Have I ever asked you for anything? Then you’ll know how much I mean this: do not take Sevro with you. As a favor to me. Tell him to stay here.”
“He won’t.”
“He will if you tell him to.”
“No, he won’t.” I pause my packing, look at Victra’s pleading eyes. “We both know I would have to knock him unconscious and leave him here hogtied.” She shrugs her shoulders, suggesting she would be fine with that plan. “I can’t do that to him.”
“But you can take him to Venus? Where he’s likely to die?”
“I can’t manipulate him,” I say. “I won’t. Even if I do, we both know he’ll be right behind me in another, slower ship.”
“Then I’ll put his leg in a bear trap.”
“He’ll just chew it off.”
“True.” She makes a small, judgmental sound and leans forward to kiss me on the lips. She lingers so I smell the bitter flowers of her perfume, and for a moment, so close and quiet, we are in a different world, in a different life. Then she draws back to look at me. The gold of her irises is brilliant even through her narrowed eyelids. “I love you, Darrow. You are the best friend I have. You are godfather to my children. But if you do not bring my husband back to me, I will leave this blasted moon, return to Mars, and you will never see me or my children ever again.”
“I’ll bring him back,” I say. She looks doubtful. “I promise. But you have to promise me something in return—”
“You know I hate politics,” she interrupts, guessing my game. “Those rats hate me. Even Daxo’s little band.” She sighs nonetheless. “But I’ll help the lioness. If she lets me.”
“Thank you,” I say, meaning it more deeply than she probably knows. Three more ammunition cases and a big knife disappear into the rucksack. I cinch the opening closed with finality.
“Yes, yes. You’re lucky you’re so pretty.”
I join the rest of the Howlers on the roof and watch Sevro say goodbye to Victra. She clings to him in a desperate way I’ve never seen. Should I leave him? Could I? I don’t know if I could go the distance without him, but seeing his head clutched to his wife’s chest, I feel the trauma of what I’m doing not just to him, but both our families. It feels like the world is doing this to us. But is it the world, or is it me? The way I am built? A breaker, not a builder after all.
Soon Sevro is with me, wiping his eyes despite the falling rain. I’m about to say something, a feeble attempt at making him stay behind, but he’s already past me. The Howlers follow him. They make a pack in the rain-stricken night, ducking their heads against the wind as they cross the roof toward our waiting ships. Absent are the howls. The jokes and ribbing. The city throbs with light, but my men are quiet and dark. I look out at the writhing cityscape and wonder if the Republic Wardens are already on their way.
—
It is two hours by shuttle to Lake Silene. The hour is late and the house quiet by the time we arrive. My family’s Lionguards salute as we pass across the grounds. I feel their eyes on my back. They will know what I am about, and they’ll notify Mustang. Sevro goes to the room of his children, and I go to Pax’s. I sit for a moment watching him sleep, thinking I should not wake him. The lie I tell myself is that I should protect him and just leave. The fear is that I cannot face him. But I must, or what sort of man am I?
Gently, I touch his shoulder. “Pax.”
He was already awake. “Father?”
“Put your shoes on.” My son dresses and follows me sleepy-eyed from his room to the garage. It smells of rubber and engine oil. I walk to the row of hoverbikes that sit resting on their flipstands. “Which one is yours?” He points to a rickety hunter-green bike as long as a man. Three saber-like manifolds jut out from the front of it. A pale leather seat sits midway along the narrow, wasplike fuselage.
“Your mother lets you ride this?” I ask in mild surprise.
He’s wary of me, of my tone. “Yes, Father.”
I sit on my haunches. “She says you built it yourself.” He nods. “That’s incredible. Will you tell me how?”
“Why?”
“I want to know. It’s not something I can do.”
He grins suddenly and bursts to life with explanations of RPMs and thrust and stabilizers and adapting mismatched components. I sit back on my heels watching him, falling in love with my son all over again. His mind is more curious than mine. More delighted by the nuances of knowledge. An overwhelming desire to protect him rises up in me. If only he could hold this joy for the rest of his life. I wonder if my father thought the same of me before his cause swallowed him up.
“How did you even think to build it?” I ask him.
“I watched the mechanics, and I asked questions. It’s all scrap parts. Dorian au Arcos has a bike. His mother let him ride when he was seven. So I asked Mother if I could get one too, but she said I could if I built it myself. She wouldn’t give me any money, so I had to collect the parts from the scrap garages.”
“In Hyperion?” I ask.
“No!” he laughs. “It’s too expensive there. I could never afford it. Niobe took me to Tycho City. They’ve got lots of racers there at the track. So they cycle through models fast and I was able to get a good deal.”
Mustang was clever in that. How hard it is to teach children that their parents’ money is not their own. I remember how Romulus au Raa raised his children—without servants and holo access until sixteen. Mustang was as taken by the idea of it as I was.
“W
here’d you get the money?” I ask.
“Aunt Victra.”
“She gave it to you?”
He frowns. “No, she lent it to me.”
“Really? Wait. At what interest rate?”
“Sixty percent.”
I burst out laughing. “Well, that’s one way to learn a lesson.” He frowns again. It’s startling how quickly I can affect his confidence. I’m used to soldiers, not children. I set a hand on his shoulder. “How much did you borrow?”
“Five hundred credits.”
“How much do you owe now?”
“Eleven hundred.”
“Never get in debt. That’s the lesson your aunt is teaching you.” He nods sagely. I rise to my feet and trace a hand along the bike’s fuselage. I should leave, but I don’t want to. Not yet.
His eyes are fixed on its fuselage. “I made it for us to share,” he says quietly. He takes the ring of magnetic keys and pulls one off. He hands it to me. I hold the key in my hand and look down at him. I feel like I’ve been punched in the heart.
“You want to show me how it rides?” I ask.
A grin splits his face.
We roar along a narrow path through the trees, curving back and forth, going deeper into the forest till the path spits us out into a hidden cove. Pax drives us out over the lake, the bike hovering a half meter above the water. Near the center of the lake, I tap his shoulder and point to one of the many archipelagoes. We land the bike there and dismount. He joins me in sitting on a log and we look back across the lake to the house where our friends sleep. Earth hangs overhead. The water laps against the log. My son picks at the moss that grows between us.
“You’re leaving again,” he says. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes. I wanted to say goodbye.”
He’s silent for a long moment. “I don’t want you to go.”
“I don’t want to go either. But I have to.”
“Why?”
“I wish I had an easy answer for you, Pax.”
He stares at the reflection of Earth in the water. “Why can’t you send someone else?”
“Some things you have to do yourself.”
“It’s not fair.” He shakes his head and I notice the silent tears streaming down his cheeks. “You just got back.”
“You’re right, it’s not. But one day, you will understand what it means to be responsible for the lives of others.” I try to put an arm around him, but he pushes away.
“It’s not fair. Not to me. Not to Gran. Not to Mother. She needs you here. She won’t say it, but she does. You don’t know what it’s like when you’re gone. You don’t care.”
“Of course I care.”
He crosses his arms. “If you cared, then you would stay.”
I want more than anything to give him what he wants, what he needs. I feel the erosion of my credibility in his eyes. And I wish I could explain how he is right—a father should be there for his son. My father should have been there for me. I hated him for leaving us. For dying on the scaffold in his failed rebellion. “I’ll come back,” I say.
“No.” He shakes his head and looks away. “You won’t.”
As I drive us back over the lake and feel his heart beating against my back, I sense the yawning distance growing between us, the stretching of the years and the passing of time and life we can never have back, and I know there’s one thing I can do to stop it. Stay.
But I won’t. I can’t. And I hate that this is who I have to be. Worse. I hate that this is who I’ve allowed myself to become, but still not enough to change. Not enough to surrender.
The last I see of him is as he goes up the stairs into the house. The heel of his shoe pauses on the last stair, as if he’s going to come back, as if there’s a last thought of love on his tongue. But the shoe disappears into the house and he’s gone and I’m left in the thunderous silence of the garage, wondering what happened to the life I imagined when I first saw him on that beach in my mother’s arms.
I wipe my eyes and put the key in my pocket.
In the hall upstairs, I still hear Sevro speaking to his girls. We were all meant to be here together for a month upon our return. So much is in shambles. I leave Sevro his last moments with his girls and walk back out of the house, across the wooded lawn to the landing pads.
“Were you going to say goodbye?” a voice says from the darkness. I look under the bough of a cypress tree and in the shadows see the moonlit face of my wife. She sits on a stone bench, watching me, her hands folded on her lap, her guards nowhere to be seen. She wears a purple silk jacket with a high collar that’s open to the base of her neck. Circles ring her eyes.
“I was going to call you from orbit,” I say.
“When you were out of my reach.”
I hesitate. “Yes.”
“I see. It is the only way to maintain that I was not complicit in your treason. Reasonable, I suppose.”
I walk toward her and, feeling awkward towering over her, sit on the edge of the stone fountain nearby to face her. Water bubbles out of the half-broken face of a winged cherub, leaking out his eye and ear through a crack.
“It’s not treason,” I say.
“Yes, it is. Euphemisms only go so far. You’re leaving me a mess. Dancer will seek my impeachment.”
“He needs two-thirds of the vote for that. He might get the majority for a peace vote, but never an impeachment.”
“You think they’ll really believe I didn’t know you were leaving? You’re my husband. They think we share everything.” My wife, I’ve often thought, can be two people. One is her, full of life and light and awkward innuendos and snorting laughter and imperfection. The other is the imperious lion. In her face, I feel the shadow of Augustus, my two great enemies, her brother and her father.
“You’re leaving tonight with the Howlers?” she asks.
“Holiday already told you?”
“Where are you going?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“To Mars?” I say nothing. “To Orion on Venus?” Again, I do not answer. “The Vox Populi think you’re going to storm the Senate with the Seventh.”
“I don’t want a civil war.”
She looks toward the landing pads. I reach for her hand. She pulls it back.
“What is the point of this—marriage—if there’s no faith between us?” she asks. “No trust? I know you love me. I know you love our son. But love isn’t enough. You can’t hide things from me just because I’ll disagree with you. This war isn’t your burden to bear alone. It is shared by all of us.” She looks over at me. “But maybe you think you’re meant to die. Maybe you think you’re supposed to follow her.”
I feel sudden pain for my wife.
“This isn’t about Eo.”
“No, it’s about you praying for storms, believing that when they come they’ll bring you peace.” She shakes her head, on the verge of tears. “I already lost my mother, my father, and my brothers. I will not bury you.” She snorts. “And if you die out there, I won’t even get to do that. You’ll disappear, like you never existed. Claimed by space or our enemies. And Pax will grow up without a father. It’s like you want me to shut myself off to you. Is that what you want?”
“If I don’t end this, how many more will die?” I ask.
Her face hardens and she pulls back from me, standing.
“And how many will die if you do leave. The Republic is cracking. If you reject its authority, it will shatter. The laws that you mock have protected demokracy for ten years. Ten. Without civil war. Without assassination and coups. But if you spit on those laws, you tell the worlds that the laws themselves do not matter. Stay here with me. With your son. Together we can change Dancer’s mind or stop him. We can finish this the right way.”
“There’s only one way to finish this.”
“Your way.” I say nothing. Her lips make a thin line. “No. We tried your way. Now let’s try mine.” She touches the datapad on her wrist. “Wulfgar. Bring the Wardens.”
From the distant sky comes a mournful sound that most would mistake for the wind. But I know the noise military gravBoots make on full thrust. I burst to my feet. “Mustang…”
“I’m sorry, Darrow. You made this choice. If you will not listen to your wife, you will obey your Sovereign.”
I pull up my com. “Sevro, we have to go! Now! Wardens inbound.”
He does not answer. The com is jammed.
I push past my wife and sprint toward the landing pad. The roar of gravBoots fills the air above me now, rattling through the pine needles. High-intensity light shines down on me. I feel an intense burning on my neck as someone in the air opens up with a beam weapon.
“Halt!” an amplified voice calls from the air. “In the name of the Republic, halt!” I tear across the grass, almost to the landing pad. There’s a concussion in the air behind me. I whip my razor off my arm just in time and tense my body. The birdcage hits me like an Obsidian punch in the spine. I slam to the ground as the fiberwire constricts around me. Before it pins my arms to my side, I activate my razor. The blade severs the net and I scramble to my feet as ten Republic Wardens slam down onto the turf in front of me in full armor. Five Colors are represented. Their sky-blue capes droop in the humidity of the summer night. Wulfgar lets his helmet slither back into his armor. His white hair flows over his shoulders.
“ ’Lo, Wulfgar,” I say, gaining my feet.
“Darrow.”
“Out for a midnight stroll?”
He smiles. “The night air soothes the spirit.” My eyes rove the knights as they move forward. Wisely, they keep their distance and stay in an arc instead of encircling. There are Obsidians and Golds in their ranks. I mark them first, but I’m wariest of Wulfgar. There’s a pained look on his face. They came prepared, wearing new-model pulseArmor and carrying nonlethal weapons except the razors on their forearms. I’m keenly aware of the thinness of my leather jacket, the nakedness of my bare hands and exposed head. Wulfgar looks at the razor in my hand. “Perhaps we could walk together, Morning Star? Your spirit could use soothing.”
“My spirit’s light as a kite,” I say. “Seems everyone else is the problem.”