“That was never a choice!” Aja calls. “You know this better than anyone. You are with us or you are against us, Lorn.”
“Aja. No. I have no part in this! None!”
“The strong always have a part,” I mutter.
“I will not have my hand forced.” He cuts me with an angry stare. “I have no quarrel with either of you. I am a man of peace now.”
“Then why is your blade out?” Aja smiles. “Do what you know. Come down and speak, teacher. We should not shout! Isn’t that what you said when I used to raise my voice in anger?” She eyes the griffin that now growls beside us. It’s larger than four horses. I wonder what those talons would do against their armor.
“Her ships are lost,” I whisper to Lorn. “What would Octavia have her do?”
“Kill us. For spite.”
I lower my voice. “Then you have no choice.”
“So it would seem.”
Aja watches me kneel to the ground and gather dirt in my hand. She has studied me. She knows what this must mean. And she must wonder what plan I have. Why I’ve come alone. If I really set an ambush in the sky, wouldn’t I set one below? I’m about to shout something to her when another figure steps through the gate to join Aja. He’s rangy. Darker skin than mine. A smirk on his bored, patrician face. Tactus. All in Praetorian armor. He slinks forward, a shadow of purple and black, eyeing the sky apprehensively before beaming me a lopsided smile.
“Speaking of traitors,” I shout. “Hello, Tactus. Pretty armor.”
“Reaper, my goodman!” Tactus bellows, and throws up the crux. “Where’s Sevro?” He leans in to tell Aja something. Aja straightens and looks again to the trees around. Her men condense in defensive formation. Tactus warns them of my tricks. They know something is awry. Their aegis shields activate, glittering over arms.
Lorn closes his eyes and lets his left hand into the air, feeling the whipping of the storm’s wind. “Leave Aja to me. You’ll have better luck against the Stained.”
“No. They’re all mine. Sevro, rise.”
The Howlers emerge from the sea beyond the castle. Water drips from them as they fly silently over the hundred-meter-high walls, armor glistening like black beetle shells. A golden lion has been painted on each breastplate. The gold winks as lightning flashes. They land silently around us.
“My stormsons,” I say to Lorn. Twenty new recruits have come from the families of the Howlers and the Telemanus ranks. Sevro held tryouts. I hear it was a bloody bit of fun. Snakes, alcohol and mushrooms were involved. That’s all they let me know.
“Goblin! Why are you always hiding?” Tactus calls. His voice is all jest, but he looks to the sky anxiously again. “Least it’s better than a horse’s belly this time.”
Sevro pulls out his skinning knife, the one he used to take scalps with Harpy years ago. It’s a curved customer. He taps it on his groin and points to Tactus. His eyes flick to Aja.
“You killed a Howler, Aja,” he says. “Wrong play.”
As I expected, the appearance of the Howlers reassures Aja and Tactus. This makes sense to them: I had soldiers hidden. Now I do not. A battle to the death. Honor. Pride. One force against another. The Obsidian Praetorians begin to keen their terrible throat song. All those men want is the glorious end. To join their relatives in the laughing halls of Valhalla with their blades in hand. They step forward on Aja’s command. The deadliest men and women in the Solar System, a Stained amongst them.
And I take a page from Evey’s book.
Ensuring Aja is clear, I detonate the landmine spikes I dropped on the ground as Lorn and I strolled into this forest. Only Tactus is quick enough. He grabs Aja from behind and jerks her back, hard—so hard in the lowGrav that both of them tumble in through the door just as the first explosion rips the salt air.
The explosions are tiered. First comes a concussion that disables pulseShields and scatters the Praetorians into the air. Then comes a gravPit, which pulls them back toward the source of the explosion like a vacuum collecting flies; and then comes the third—pure kinetics to destroy armor and bone and flesh, blowing the warriors outward, into the air, scattering their pieces in the low gravity like breath scatters the seeds of a dandelion. Limbs float gently down. Blood beads and spatters the ground. The explosion breaks the bubble roof overhead and rain again drifts down on the garden to extinguish the fires and thin the blood that leaks into the two dozen bomb craters. Only three Praetorians survived. They’re in poor shape.
“Do not let her escape.” Roque’s voice sears my ears. He watches my holofeed from the ships above.
My Howlers have not yet moved.
Lorn’s furious with me, saying something about honor.
“What?” I sneer. “You think I fight fair?”
“Darrow …,” Sevro hisses as I wait. “Darrow …”
“Hold.”
“She’s getting away!” Roque’s voice frightens me. It drips with spite I didn’t know he had. “Darrow!”
I growl at him to pay attention to his part of the battle.
“Darrow …,” Sevro begs. “Long enough.”
Lorn watches, perhaps beginning to understand.
I snap my fingers. “Hunt.”
The Howlers surge forward like loosed wolves to finish what the bomb started. They dispatch the remaining Praetorians. Sevro shouts Tactus’s name amidst the howling as they tear into the castle searching for him and Aja.
“Darrow, what are you playing at?” Roque asks me over the com. I let the holo of his face appear in the corner of my helmet’s HUD display. His jaw muscles flicker. “If Quinn’s killer escapes …”
“Lock that up,” I tell Roque as I see reports of one of our torchShips taking massive damage. He’s distracted. “Men are dying up there. Focus on your own job.” I shut off the link.
Harpy’s image appears on my display. “Seahorse is under.”
“Good. And Tactus?”
“No sign.”
“Copy.” I close the connection.
“Aja spooked into he sea. But no sign of Tactus,” Sevro says to me several minutes later as the Howlers scour the inside of the castle, going room to room. “He’s hiding. Unless he’s teleported.” He spits at that bit of science fiction. “Ask the geezer where they are.”
A dark worry slithers into my brain. I turn to Lorn. “What would Lune have them do if they could not kill you and me? If she thought someone expendable, what would she order them to do?”
He stands there for a moment in the rain. Then his face goes pale. “The children …” Arcos pushes past me, running through the bomb’s carnage to the shattered glass door. “They’re going to kill my grandchildren!” he shouts back.
“Where are the children?” I ask Sevro.
“What children? We found none.”
Cursing, I chase Arcos.
“I hid them,” he says over his shoulder to me as he sprints down the castle’s hall. He’s fast for an old man, but the gravity slows us till we start using our hands on the walls and ceiling, using gravBoots to take the long halls. We launch around corner after corner. And when he touches the head of a stone griffin and a steel wall falls away to reveal a hidden passage, I smell blood. Two corpses lie on the other side of the passage. One Gray, one Obsidian. I push past Arcos and fly ahead. I pull myself down a series of stairs using handholds in the ceiling till I find myself before two doors. I open one. Just a storeroom. I open another and let my razor slither into hand.
“Tactus,” I say slowly.
His back is to me. Three bodies lie around him, their blood making a pool about his shoes. His razor coils in his hand, hardening as he stands with his head lowered in a room of children and women. Blood slithers down the mercurial blade. He killed two men and a woman. Obsidians.
When I came, Arcos hid the children from me here, some Gold, some Silver, some Pink and Brown. Tactus could kill half of them with a lazy swing of his razor before we reach them.
“Tactus, remember your brothers,
” I say to him, looking at the children.
“My brothers are shits.” He laughs coarsely, voice sounding strange. “Said I should get out of your shadow. Mother calls me the Mighty Servant. Did you know that?”
Children sob in the corner. One buries her face in her mother’s lap. The women are not armed. These are not warriors like Victra and Mustang. A Brown nursemaid covers a Gold child’s eyes. I hear Arcos in the tunnel behind me.
“Lune’s orders are wrong,” I say to Tactus.
“She asked me if I could fill your place, Reaper,” Tactus says quietly. “Said she didn’t think I could. Said I was so long in your shadow that she didn’t know if I would ever be more than an echo of you. I told her I could do anything you could do.”
“Tactus, she is evil.”
“Is she?” He spits blood on the ground, still not facing me. “They say the same thing about you. They wonder who you think you are to do what you do. To challenge the men and women you challenge. They wonder what right you have.”
“We all have a right to challenge. That’s the point.”
“The point. Was there a point?” he asks. “I was never told. You took me for granted. Never telling me anything.” Just as I’m doing with Roque. “Always whispering with others. Dismissing me like I’m a fool. You’re just like her …”
“Your mother?”
He says nothing. Arcos edges in beside me. I put a hand out to stop him.
“Would you kill them, if Augustus told you to?” Tactus asks me, turning slightly.
“No,” I say. “I’d rather die.”
“I didn’t think so. She was right. I am the Mighty Servant.”
I open my hands to him. “I don’t know what I’m to do now, Tactus.”
“That’s a first.” He laughs bitterly, voice slurring slightly.
“Hardly. I didn’t know what to do when I whipped you,” I say. “At the Institute. I didn’t want to lose you from my army because of your talents. But I couldn’t not punish you.”
“Talents. Talents. Talents. Then that’s the difference between us,” Tactus’s voice thickens further. “Because if it had been my army, I would have killed your arrogant ass.” He turns more and I see the hints of the ruin the bomb’s made of his face.
“You know what happens if you kill any of them?”
He nods to me, then to the Rage Knight, as if saying it’ll be either one or the other that does him. “I’m not sorry I took Lysander, you know.”
“I don’t think you’re ever sorry for much.”
“Not sorry.” He chuckles and dips a toe in the blood surrounding him. “But I think I shouldn’t have done it. I was testing you at the Institute. But … I wanted to see what you’d do. If you were worth following.”
“Was I?”
“You know that answer.”
“Am I still?”
He nods. “Always,” saying it so pathetically that it feels like my heart has been pulled into my throat. He’s a traitor, a liar, a cheat. Yet I see a friend. I want to fix him and make him whole. What am I doing? I have to put him down. But I’ve done that before with Titus. That cycle erodes us. Death begets death begets death, and ever more.
“What if I let you live?” I ask suddenly, drawing a confused, frantic glance from Tactus. Of course he doesn’t understand forgiveness. “What if I let you come back?”
“What?”
“What if I forgave you?”
“You’re lying.” He turns more and I see the full measure of what the bomb did to him. His nose is crooked, broken. The rest looks like a cherry stripped of its skin. My friend …
“I’m not lying.” I did not put my faith in Tactus once, and I lost him. Now I will. I’ll take the same leap I ask him to take. I step forward. “I know there’s good in you. I saw your face when those children were killed at the gala. You’re not a monster. Come back to me. You would be one of my lieutenants again, Tactus. I would give you a legion to lead when we take Mars. You’ll carry one of my standards. But you can’t wear that ugly armor.”
“It is uncomfortable,” he wheezes with a slight smile. “But Sevro, Roque, Victra …”
“They miss you,” I lie. “Drop your razor and come back to my army. I promise you will be safe.” The razor dips in his hand. One of the children spares a smile at his younger siblings, a hopeful smile. “Just leave the children alone, and all is forgiven.”
I mean it. Deep in my heart, I mean it.
“We all make mistakes,” he says.
“We all make mistakes. Just come back. I won’t hurt you.” I drop my own razor. “Neither will Arcos.” I stare at Arcos till he nods his weathered head in complicity.
“I want to come home,” Tactus murmurs quietly, pain in his voice. “I want to come home.”
“Then come home.”
Tactus’s razor clatters to the floor and he falls to a knee in front of me. He’s rasping from pain. Relief floods the room. The children start crying again from the tortuous shift from death to life. The caretakers hug their charges, their tears making lines on their faces. I go forward to Tactus and motion him upward to clasp my arm. He wraps me in a frantic hug and sobs into me. Body shaking, bloody features painting my armor.
“I’m sorry,” he says a dozen times. He’s weeping hard into my shoulder, clasping tight. His face is such a ruin. And I hug him. Exhaustion fills me. His sadness is like a weight that nearly drives me to tears. Yet I’m buoyed by the strange feelings of having him back, standing with me, gripping me. It is a humbling thing knowing someone cannot live without you, knowing that though they’ve betrayed you, they wish for nothing but absolution. And as he clenches my back, I wrap my arms around his armor and try not to cry myself. Even the cruel feel pain. And even the cruel can change. I hope this changes him. He could do so much, if only he would learn.
In so many ways, he is the embodiment of his race. And so if Tactus can change, Gold can change. They must be broken, but then they must be given a chance. I think that’s what Eo would have wanted in the end.
When at last his sobs are done and we part, he stands at my side, loyal as a puppy, looking to me subtly for signs of affection. His hands tremble from the pain of his wounds, yet he watches in silence with Arcos and me as the children, high and low alike, file upward out of the hidden bunker with their caretakers. Pebble comes down to giddily tell us Roque is wrapping up the space engagement. Seeing Tactus’s wounds, she pales. I tell her to fetch a Yellow.
Soon Lorn, Tactus, and I are left alone in the basement.
Lorn looks over to us. “Now that the children are gone, consequences.” His hands flash faster than a hummingbird’s wings. An ionDagger appears, lurches forward four times into Tactus’s armpit, where the armor is the weakest. I rush to stop Lorn, but it’s already done. He twists like he’s wringing a towel, severing the artery, an old man killing a young one. Tactus’s ruined face wrenches with pain; and he gasps, as though he knew justice would finally find him in the end.
Lorn leaves. And I hold my friend as he dies, his eyes fading to some distant place, where perhaps he’ll find that peace Roque always wished for him.
30
Gathering Storm
“How long till we reach the rendezvous?” I ask Orion on the command deck. Except for our attendants, we are alone in front of the viewports of the Pax, watching my ships cross through space. The newest additions to our fledgling armada are painted white and carry Lorn’s angry-faced purple griffin. With them fly the black and blue and silver warships captured from Kellan au Bellona above Europa. Oranges and Reds crawl over the exteriors of the metal monsters, mending the holes made by leechCraft and preparing them for the siege of Mars.
“Three days till Hildas Station. The other ships will have beaten us there, dominus.”
Kavax and Daxo approach from behind. I turn to them and gesture out the repaired windows to the ten ships of Kellan au Bellona.
“Thank you for the presents,” I say.
“Your plan
, your spoils,” Kavax declares.
“With us taking a percentage, naturally,” Daxo adds, smooth as ever, raising his swirling golden eyebrows. “Fifty percent finder’s fee.” I glance at him with amusement. “Well, thirty percent, because Pax liked you.”
“Ten percent!” Kavax booms.
I cock my head. “You’re a poor negotiator, Praetor.”
He shrugs amiably and points in joy to jelly beans on the ground. He tosses Sophocles at them, encouraging him to vanquish them all.
“Twenty.” Daxo splays his hands, his movements always seeming to belong to a thinner, more bookish man. “That is fair, no? We lost a hundred and sixty house Grays and thirteen Obsidians.”
“Then thirty percent to compensate you. For friends.”
“Three ships! What a haggle!” Kavax proclaims. “What a haggle. Sometimes a man needs a good haggle.” He claps me on the back, making the joints crack again. “If only we had caught Aja. That’d be a spoil to divide!”
“She fled into the sea, unfortunately.” I gesture to Ragnar, who stands at the edge of the bridge. “Heard he did well.” Pale and tall, he continues looking at me from behind his beard and runic tattoos, appearing as devoid of emotions as Kavax and Daxo are full of them.
“The leader of his boarding party got killed. So did the lieutenants. Lots of heads smashed. They ran into some of Kellan’s friends,” Kavax says dourly as he rummages through his pockets for his impatient fox, who clawed at his leg for more jelly beans. “I don’t have any more, my little prince.” He smiles up at me hopefully. “Do you have any jelly beans?”
“No. Sorry.”
“Ragnar there took command. Did himself well,” Daxo says.
“Took command?” I ask.
Kavax explains. “There was a kill squad of Peerless. Half a dozen Bellona blade dancers, real noble boys, carved up all our Golds and most of the Obsidians. The Stained there collected the surviving Grays and a few Obsidians and managed to get the ship.”
“Any of these blade dancers survive?”
“No.”
Ragnar looks at the ground again, as if expecting a reprimand.