He has little faith in our Color. I’m losing all mine in him.
I feel a despicable little creature, thinking all this of Cassius. Whatever his motives, I know his love for me is genuine. The nights of listening to music in the rec room of the Archimedes as he falls asleep holding his drink can’t be washed away. Neither can the protective warmth I felt all those times when Pytha and I helped him back to his bunk when he was so drunk he could not even stand but he could murmur Virginia’s name.
“I miss home,” I say in an attempt to find some common ground to ease the tension that’s grown between us these last months, before the Vindabona even.
“Mars?” he asks, and I know he means Luna. And I do miss that place, the libraries, the Esqualine Gardens, the warmth of Aja, the approval of my grandmother, stark and sparse though it was, the love of my parents. But most of all, I miss sitting in the sun, eyes closed, listening to the pachelbel in the trees. That was peace for me. That is where I feel safe.
“But I was thinking of the Archi. I’ve never had to miss her before. Two days on Ceres. Three on Lacrimosa…”
“She’s a good ship,” he says. “I’d give two years’ haul to be under way in the rec room with a tumbler of whiskey right now and a good concerto on the holo.”
“Playing chess?”
“Karachi,” he corrects. “We played chess all last year.”
“More like I taught you to play all last year…”
He rolls his eyes. “He wins five in a row and suddenly he’s Arastoo in the flesh.”
“It was seven, my good man. But I’ll relent and let you play Karachi, even though it’s a game entirely devoid of reason and mathematical skill.”
“It’s called reading people, Castor. Intuition.”
I make a face. “My only condition is we listen to Vivaldi and not Wagner.”
“My goodman, are you trying to kill me? You know I abhor Vivaldi.” He laughs. “Not that it matters. Won’t be able to hear a note over the sound of Pytha whining about immersion games or how it’s not her turn to cook.”
We grin at each other, indulging the fantasy that once seemed so commonplace, but now so nostalgic and impossible.
“Oh, don’t look so maudlin,” he says. “We’ll return to the Archi with Pytha in surly tow. We’ll be sharing a whiskey and burning black matter once this is sorted.” We both know it is a promise he cannot keep.
I see by the melancholy look in his eyes that we are united in understanding that something between us is breaking and neither one of us knows how to stop it. Even if we leave Io behind, we can never go back to the way things were, to the private world we shared.
I have outgrown it. I have even outgrown him.
I’M DEPOSITED IN MY ROOM to change for dinner with the Raa family. The room, like all Ionian rooms, was made with attention to geometrical energy. It is perfectly square, without frivolous comfort and with no furniture except for a thin sleeping mat on a slightly raised platform. A small window looks out onto the heavy darkness of a night nearly a billion kilometers from the sun. I doff my robe and stand naked before the window, pressing my nose to it, appreciating the chill of the rock on my bare skin, and imagine I am floating in the cool waves of Lake Silene. I wonder if the Reaper’s child now climbs the stone stairs there from the shore to Silene Manor and his waiting parents. Do they warm themselves by the fire pit? Sleep in the room I slept in when I was a boy, where all Lunes have slept since the children of Silenius? A deep anger fills me, but I push it into the void.
All is silent in the room.
Not the busy silence of space, where air purifiers hum and engines tremble through the metal. It is the silence of stone and the silence of darkness that stretches into an unseen, unending frozen landscape. A cavernous, alien silence.
Those crewmembers on the Vindabona will be dead by now. It’s the only mercy I know to hope for. How long did they last?
Two lonely lights glide across the plain in the distance, too low to be aircraft. Hoverbikes? Where are those two souls going? What errand do they attend? Are they lovers? Friends? Then a score of lights burns out of the blackness behind them, chasing them across the expanse. I lean forward in excitement as bright orange tongues of flame lick out from the pursuers and the two leading lights vanish in blossoms of white fire.
Two more fall to the coup. It seems it is not as peaceful as Dido would like us to believe. Cassius is right, yet again.
All across the city men will be dying. Silent squads will arrest loyal members of Romulus’s faction. The cells will fill. Guns may rattle. Razors drip with blood. All balanced and gambled on the promise of the evidence Seraphina brought back.
I know coups, and am little impressed by them. They’re more common than weddings in my family. These Rim rustics hold their noses at Golds of the Interior, at my family and the “bitch on Luna.” But they’re little better.
Then I remember Seraphina. How she stood before her father, and the sadness I saw upon her face when she realized his intent. Torn between the love of her people and mother, and the love of her father. What choice would I make?
I see my own father in my mind’s eye and try again in vain to summon my mother. I reach for her, but my fingers rake nothing but shadow, and I feel, in no small way, that her absence is my fault. I did not study her enough. Did not love her enough. And so, she will never hold me in her arms, never kiss me upon the brow. As if she never existed.
My thoughts are interrupted when a jammer activates with a static pop behind me.
I swing around to see a pair of amber eyes staring at me from the shadows of the sitting room. “Jove in hell!” I flick on the glow lights to reveal a woman sitting on my sleeping mat. She watches intently as I scramble to put my robe back on. “Seraphina?” She’s at home now, her prisoner jumpsuit gone, and wears the garb of the Io. A gray wool cloak held together with a charcoal sash. She peers up at me, amused.
“Do all Martians have such dreadful hearing?”
Her eyes rove as I pull tight my robe. She wears rubber-soled slippers and two heavy rings—on her left middle finger a dragon eating a lightning bolt, on her right a simple iron Institute ring of House Diana’s stag’s antlers. I should have guessed she’d be a hunter.
“Are all Moonies as rude as you?” I look at the door, and know it made no sound, and, more impressively, neither did she. Must have come through the walls, then. A secret door. “Are you lost?”
She frowns. “Lost?”
“Well, you do seem to be in my room.”
“Your room?” Her sudden laugh is surprisingly girlish. Then the drawl comes back. “You are in my city, gahja. On my moon. There are cameras in the stone. What does it matter that I watch you through the camera or here? This is more honest, no?”
“Well, it is entirely eerie either way,” I say with a smile. “Most inhospitable.”
“If I remember correctly, you are a watcher too. I saw you looking at me on the table….”
“You were injured,” I say. “I was checking your—”
“Tits?”
“Your wound. The one on your—”
“Breasts.”
“Stomach. You’re clearly still insensate. Took a knock on the head, turned a bit mad. Or do your kind all talk like gutterborns?”
“I have manners,” she says with a smile. “The dust is a hard teacher.” She hurls a package at my face as she stands. I barely catch it. “Clothing. Yours was soiled from the journey.”
“Charitable of you.” I open the package to don the clothes. “Our pilot,” I say. “You said she’s alive and well. I want to see her.”
“No.”
“No negotiation? Very well.” I thumb the clothing she brought. She doesn’t turn away or leave. “Do you mind?”
“Mind?”
“Yes, I’d like to change now.”
She cocks her head in challenge. “I have seen naked men before.”
Unlike her own, mine was a solitary upbringing. “A Sovere
ign is an island,” my grandmother would say.
“It’s just carbon. Are you ashamed of your body?” she asks. “Or perhaps you are embarrassed you do not know how to use it?”
“So that’s why you sent the Pinks. So you could watch?” I find myself unusually pleased by the revelation. “Why so curious?”
Her brow wrinkles. “Were you injured? Is that why you turned them away? Does your manhood not work?”
“That…is absolutely none of your concern. Thank you for your interest, however. It works just fine.”
“I am sorry,” she says. “I did not mean to offend.”
“Well, you’re quite accomplished at it. Compliments to whoever taught you.”
“Would you be at ease if I were naked again too?” Even under the folds of her loose tunic, I see the subtle rise of her breasts, the length of her muscled legs, and…
I cough and shake my head. She waits patiently till I have a small, annoying epiphany. “Do you always toy with your guests?”
“Sometimes.” She smirks. “You do look a little like a toy. All that hair and those dandy little limbs.”
“Dandy?”
“Dandy. And your nose has only been broken recently. Are your eyes real?” She leans in. “You didn’t have them carved like a Corish Pixie, did you?” I don’t dignify the question with an answer.
“You’re not going to leave, are you?”
“Why would I? Everyone is busy preparing for supper. I am bored. You are entertaining.”
“Very well then.” I drop my robe to the floor, intending to embarrass her. She doesn’t look away. She scrutinizes.
“You have more scars than most Pixies,” she says after a moment.
“Because I am not a Pixie.”
She surprises me with a laugh and counts my scars till she finds one curious. It is a long, thin scar, like a necklace around my neck. “Who gave you this one?” Her pale fingers brush against the scar, and impossibly I hear the howling of the wind outside my window. And in the darkness there and in my mind, he lurks, the Reaper’s beast, the demon of my childhood. Instinctively, I put my robe back on and sit on the ground. She looks suddenly apologetic.
“A man gave it to me when I was young,” I say, chastising myself for losing control of the memory. Some demons never leave. Grandmother wanted to laser the scar off. I convinced her to let me keep it.
She joins me on the floor. “A lover?”
“No.”
“Did you kill him for it? For hurting you?”
I shake my head.
“Why not?”
“Like I said, I was young. He was not.”
“Did you find him and kill him later? You are a man now.”
“No.”
“Why not? If he hurt you and remains alive, then he is your master. That is why I slayed the Obsidian warchief who beat me on the Vindabona.”
“It’s in the past. The past doesn’t define me.” I repeat Cassius’s words like they were my own. How many times did he tell me this? How many times have I failed to believe him?
“Stupid gahja.” She taps my forehead. “Nothing is past. Everything that was, is. That scar is a story of your subjugation. Slay the man who gave you that, and it becomes the story of your liberation.”
“Did your father teach you that?” I say, angry that she would preach to me.
Her eyes turn cold and flinty, sensing the accusation.
I’m suddenly achingly aware of the difference between us. She might be the child of a Sovereign like me, but she is a soldier. She was raised in gladiatorial academies amongst sinewy killers on a moon that breaks down your DNA if you step outside without at least three centimeters of high-grade radiation shielding. She has a scar from the Io Institute. There is none more brutal. The students don’t kill as much as Martians or rape as much as Venusians, but the games can last for years in temperatures that freeze your blood before it drips from a wound.
What have I done but read and run all my life? I suddenly feel indicted by my own banter. Like I’m a dog barking at a wolf who knows very well that I’m not from the wild, but lets me bark because it entertains.
“Apologies,” I say carefully.
“Forgiven,” she replies. “Yes, my father taught me that scars are why our ancestors were able to shape the worlds. As Golds, we were born as perfect as man can be. It is our duty to embrace the scars our choices give us, to embrace and remember our mistakes, else we live believing our own myth.” She smiles to herself. “He says a man who believes his own myth is like a drunk thinking he can dance barefoot on a razor’s edge.” The smile disappears as she perhaps remembers her father’s face when he was led away by her brother. And I see clear as day the true war that rages inside the girl. It softens me to her, because it feels a reflection of the same war inside of me. I fight back the urge to touch her hand.
“You think me wicked,” she says quietly, her eyes fixed on the window. “Betraying my own father…”
Why does she care? “Families are…complicated.”
“Yes. They are.”
A silence grows between us, and in it we share an understanding that goes beyond words.
“You are strange,” she says finally. “Your friend is a killer. But you, you are gentle.”
“I’m not gentle.”
I’m suddenly conscious of how close she is. How aware of her body I am. The space between us vibrates and trembles with something raw, newly woken and terrifying to me. I feel the heat in her breath, the cold petals of her pale lips, and the lonely fire in her dark eyes that would pull me into her and consume me. I would let it, and that frightens me more than her family. More even than the death that awaits me if she learns my family name.
She feels the same tension between us, and breaks it by turning away. “Marius says you are spies. That it was not by chance that you found me.”
“You don’t seem to put much trust in what Marius thinks.”
“He is a reptile, but not a fool.”
“I care more about what you think.”
She considers. “Anything gentle that lives long, hides its stinger well.” She turns to the wall to make her exit.
“Why did you take my razor?” I say, feeling a sudden flash of anger at her. “All those people died because I couldn’t get them out.”
“I know,” she says quietly. “But that is the horror the Slave King has made.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“I did it for the greater good. You will understand.”
“Your mother doesn’t know you’re here, does she?” I ask her, nodding to the jammer on her belt. “Why did you really come?”
She hesitates as if she doesn’t even know.
“You saved my life. I…wanted to see if yours was worth saving.”
“And?”
“I have not decided.” She looks at me with strange pity. “You play with things you don’t understand.”
“Your mother made me a guest. I’m protected by old law.”
“My mother is not my father.” She pauses. “Give her what she wants. For your own sake.”
“What does she want?” I ask, but the wall has already parted, and Seraphina has slipped into its shadows. Cassius was right.
We are not guests here. We are prey.
I FINISH MY MORNING LAPS in the pool on the fourth deck of the Nessus in the early morning. The swimming is part of the physical therapy to recover from the razor through the arm I suffered in the fight with the Republic Wardens. My body is a history of aches and pains. Not even in my mid-thirties, I’ve already had three cartilage replacement surgeries for my knees alone.
The swimming makes the arm ache like hell, but also helps displace the feeling of claustrophobia that has crept in during our second week in deep space in our push toward Society territory. That and razor training with Alexandar help keep my mind from my family.
After dressing in my stateroom, I find Sevro in his quarters. He’s lying on his bed watching a video of
Electra when she was a baby. The little girl floats in the air above him, silent and dour even as an infant, as Victra dresses her in a high-collared vest. Sophocles’s tail swishes in the air, blocking the camera’s view. I hear Kavax laugh in the background. It’s been two weeks without communication to the outside world. It’s eating at Sevro.
“You still not out of bed?” I ask. “Lazy bastard.”
He squints over at me, eyes still swollen with sleep. “What’s the rush?”
“Apollonius. We agreed to talk to him this morning.”
“Oh, that.” He looks one last time at his daughter and turns off the holopad. “Sure we can’t keep him on ice a few weeks longer?”
“I wish. We’ll be in Gold territory in five days. Time to see if he’s on board.”
“And if he’s not?”
“Then you get to space him. And we burn for Mercury.”
Pebble finds us in the hall on our way to the chute down to the fourth deck. She looks tense. “We have a problem.”
We find Colloway hovering over a holoDisplay in the sensor room on the second deck. Clown stands behind him with his arms crossed, foot nervously tapping. “What’s going on?” I ask.
“Tell him what you told me,” Pebble says.
Colloway rubs his temples. For as much sleep as the man gets lazing around on the recreation room’s couch and playing immersion games, he looks exhausted. “So, you know this ship has an internal monitoring system that detects our thermal signatures.”
“Sure.”
He brings up the blueprint of the ship. Human-shaped figures glow red amongst the decks. I see Winkle’s cool signature on the bridge, Thraxa’s hot signature as she trains endlessly in the gymnasium. Sevro chuckles and points to two thermal signatures side by side in one of the staterooms. “Looks like someone’s going to Bone City. Who is that?”