“One day they’ll say it about our high collars,” I say, touching mine.
He eyes the scotch in my hand. “This a social occasion?”
“Not exactly.” I lead him into the lounge. He’s slow and loud in the forty kilogram prisoner boots they’ve sealed his feet inside, but is still more at home in the room than I am. I pour him a scotch as he sits on the couch, still expecting some sort of trap. He raises his eyebrows at the glass.
“Really, Darrow? Poison isn’t your style.”
“It’s a cache of Lagavulin. Lorn’s gift to Roque after the Siege of Mars.”
Cassius grunts. “I never was fond of irony. Whisky, on the other hand…we never had a quarrel we couldn’t solve.” He looks through the whisky. “Fine stuff.”
“Reminds me of my father,” I say, listening to the soft hum of the air vents above. “Not that the stuff he drank was good for anything more than cleaning gears and killing brain cells.”
“How old were you when he died?” Cassius asks.
“About six, I reckon.”
“Six.” He tilts his glass thoughtfully. “My father wasn’t a solitary drinker. But sometimes I’d find him on his favorite bench. Near this eerie path on the spine of the Mons. He’d have a whisky like this.” Cassius chews the inside of his cheek. “Those were my favorite moments with him. No one else around. Just eagles coasting in the distance. He’d tell me what sort of trees were on the hillside. He loved trees. He’d ramble on about what grew where and why and what birds liked to roost there. Especially in winter. Something about how they looked in the cold. I never really listened to him. Wish I had.”
He takes a drink. He’ll find the spirit in the glass. The peat, the grapefruit on the tongue, the stone of Scotland. I can never taste anything but the smoke. “Is that Castle Mars?” Cassius asks, nodding to the hologram above Roque’s console. “By Jove. It looks so small.”
“Not even the size of the engines on a torchShip,” I say.
“Boggles the mind, the exponential expectations of life.”
I laugh. “I used to think Grays were tall.”
“Well…” He smiles mischievously. “If your metric is Sevro…” He chuckles before growing serious. “I wanted to say thank you…for inviting me to the funeral. That was…surprisingly decent of you.”
“You’d have done the same.”
“Hmm.” He’s not sure of that. “This was Roque’s console?”
“Yeah. I was going through his vids. He’s rewatched most of these dozens of times. Not the strategies or the battles against other houses. But the quieter bits. You know.”
“Have you watched them?” he asks.
“I wanted to wait for you.”
He’s struck by that, and suspicious of my hospitality.
So I press play and we fall back into the boys we were in the Institute. It’s awkward at first, but soon the whisky dispels that and the laughs come easier, the silences stretch deeper. We watch the nights when our tribe cooked lamb in the northern gulch. When we scouted the highlands, listening to Quinn’s stories by the campfire. “We kissed that night,” Cassius says when Quinn finishes a story about her grandmother’s fourth attempt to build a house in a mountain valley a hundred kilometers from civilization without an architect.
“She was climbing into her sleeping roll. I told her I heard a noise. We investigated. When she found out I was just throwing rocks into the dark to get her alone, she knew what I wanted. That smile.” He laughs. “Those legs. The kind meant to be wrapped around someone, you know what I mean?” He laughs. “But the lady did protest. Put her hand in my face, shoved me away.”
“Well, she wasn’t an easy one,” I say.
“No. But she did wake me up near morning to give me a kiss or two. On her terms, of course.”
“And that is the first time throwing stones has ever worked on a woman.”
“You’d be surprised.”
There’s moments I never knew existed. Roque and Cassius try to catch fish together only for Quinn to push Cassius in from behind. He takes a deep drink beside me now as his younger self splashes in the water and tries to pull Quinn in. We watch private moments where Roque fell in love with Lea, where they scouted the highlands in the dark. Their hands brushing innocently together as they stop for water. Fitchner surveying them from a copse of trees, taking notes on his datapad. We watch the first time they sleep snuggled under the same blankets in the gate’s keep, and as Roque takes her off to the highlands to steal his first kiss only to hear boots on rocks and see Antonia and Vixus emerge from the mist, eyes glowing with optics.
They took Lea and when Roque fought, threw him off a cliff. He broke his arm and was swept down the river. By the time he returned, after three days of walking, I was supposedly dead by the Jackal’s hand. Roque mourned for me and visited the cairn I built atop Lea only to find that wolves dug in and had stolen the body. He wept there by himself. Cassius grows somber witnessing this, reminding me of the distress on his face when he returned with Sevro to discover what had happened to Lea and Roque. And perhaps feeling guilty for ever allying himself with Antonia.
There’s more videos, more little truths I discover. But the one viewed the most according to the holodeck was the time Cassius said he’d found two new brothers and offered us places as lancers to House Bellona. He looked so hopeful then. So happy to be alive. We all did, even I, despite what I felt inside. My betrayal feels all the more monstrous watching it from afar.
I refill Cassius’s tumbler. He’s quiet under the glow of the hologram. Roque’s riding his dappled gray mare away from us, looking pensively down at his reins. “We killed him,” he says after a moment. “It was our war.”
“Was it?” I ask. “We didn’t make this world. And we’re not even fighting for ourselves. Neither was Roque. He was fighting for Octavia. For a Society that won’t even notice his sacrifice. They’ll play politics with his death. Blame him. He died for them and he’ll just be a punch line.” Cassius feels the disgust I intended. That’s his greatest fear. That no one will care that he goes. This noble idea of honor, of a good death…that was for the old world. Not this one.
“How long do you think this goes on?” He asks pensively. “This war.”
“Between us or everyone?”
“Us.”
“Till one heart beats no more. Isn’t that what you said?”
“You remembered.” He grunts. “And everyone?”
“Until there are no Colors.”
He laughs. “Well, good. You’ve aimed low.”
I watch him tilt the liquor around in his glass. “If Augustus did not put me with Julian, what do you think would have happened?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Say it does.”
“I don’t know,” he says sharply. He downs his whisky and pours himself another, surprisingly agile in in his cuffs. He considers the glass in irritation. “You and I aren’t like Roque or Virginia. We’re not nuanced creatures. All you have is thunder. All I have, lightning. Remember that dumb shit we used to say when we would paint our faces and ride about like idiots? It’s the deepspine truth. We can only obey what we are. Without a storm, you and I? We’re just men. But give us this. Give us conflict…how we rattle and roar.” He mocks his own grandiloquence, a dark irony staining his smile.
“You really think that’s true?” I ask. “That we’re stuck being one thing or another.”
“You don’t?”
“Victra says that about herself.” I shrug. “I’m betting a hell of a lot that she’s not. That we’re not.” Cassius leans forward and pours me a drink this time. “You know, Lorn always talked about being trapped by himself, by the choice he made, till it felt like he wasn’t living his own life. Like something was behind him beating him on, something to the sides winnowing his path. In the end, all his love, all his kindness, family, it didn’t matter. He died as he lived.”
Cassius sees more than just the doubt in my own theory. He knows
I could talk about Mustang, or Sevro, or Victra changing. Being different, but he sees the undercurrent because in many ways his thread in life is the most like my own. “You think you’re going to die,” he says.
“As Lorn used to say, the bill comes at the end. And the end is on its way.”
He watches me gently, his whisky forgotten, the intimacy deeper than I intended. I’ve touched a part of his own mind. Maybe he too has felt like he’s marching toward his own burial. “I never thought about the weight on you,” he says carefully. “All that time among us. Years. You couldn’t talk to anyone, could you?”
“No. Too risky. Kind of a conversation killer. Hello, I’m a Red spy.”
He doesn’t laugh. “You still can’t. And that’s what kills you. You’re among your own people and you feel a stranger.”
“There it is,” I say, raising a glass. I hesitate, wondering how much to confide in him. Then whisky talks for me. “It’s hard to talk to anyone. Everyone is so fragile. Sevro with his father, with the weight of a people he hardly knows. Victra thinks she’s wicked and keeps pretending like she just wants revenge. Like she’s full of poison. They think I know the path here. That I’ve had a vision of the future because of my wife. But I don’t feel her like I used to. And Mustang—” I stop awkwardly.
“Go on. What about her? Come on, man. You killed my brothers. I killed Fitchner. It’s already awkward.”
I grimace at the weirdness of this little moment.
“She’s always watching me,” I say. “Judging. Like she’s keeping a tally of my worth. Whether I’m fit.”
“For what?”
“For her? For this? I don’t know. I felt like I proved myself on the ice, but it hasn’t gone away.” I shrug. “It’s the same for you, isn’t it? Serving at the Sovereign’s pleasure when Aja killed Quinn. Your mother’s…expectations. Sitting here with the man who took two brothers from you.”
“You can have Karnus.”
“He must have been a treat at home.”
“He was actually fond of me as a child,” Cassius says. “I know. Hard to believe, but he was my champion. Included me in sports. Took me on trips. Taught me about girls, in his way. He was not so kind to Julian, though.”
“I have an older brother. His name’s Kieran.”
“Is he alive?”
“He’s a mechanic with the Sons. Got four kids.”
“Wait. You’re an uncle?” Cassius says in surprise.
“Several times over. Kieran married Eo’s sister.”
“Did he? I was an uncle once. I was good at that.” His eyes go distant, smile fading, and I know the suspicions that rest heavy on his soul. “I’m tired of this war, Darrow.”
“So am I. And If I could bring Julian back to you, I would. But this war is for him, or men like him. The decent. It’s for the quiet and gentle who know how the world should be, but can’t shout louder than the bastards.”
“Aren’t you afraid you’re going to break everything and not be able to put it back together?” he asks sincerely.
“Yes,” I say, understanding myself better than I have for a long time. “That’s why I have Mustang.”
He stares at me for a long, odd moment before shaking his head and chuckling at himself or me. “I wish it was easier to hate you.”
“There’s a toast if I ever heard one.” I raise my glass and he his, and we drink in silence. But before he parts with me that night, I give him a holocube to watch in his cell. I apologize in advance for its contents, but it’s something he needs to see. The irony is not lost on him. He’ll watch it later in his cell, and he will weep and feel lonelier still, but the truth is never easy.
Hours after Cassius has left me, I’m woken from a restless dream by Sevro. He calls my datapad with an urgent message. Victra has engaged Antonia in the Belt. She requests reinforcements, and Sevro’s already got his gear and has Holiday mustering a strike team.
Mustang, the Howlers and I hitch a ride on the remaining Telemanus torchShip, the fastest left in the fleet. Sefi tried to come along, eager for more combat, but even after the victory at Io my fleet rides on a razor’s edge. Her leadership is needed to keep the Obsidians in line. She’s a peacemaker, and the punch line of Sevro’s favorite new joke: what do you say when a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall woman walks into a room with a battle axe and tongues on a hook? Absolutely nothing.
Personally, I’m more worried that only a handful of strong personalities bind this alliance together. If I lose one, the whole thing might crumble.
We go full burn, straining the ships to reach Victra, but an hour before we arrive at her coordinates amidst a thicket of sensor-disrupting asteroids, we receive a brief encoded message that is patented Julii: Bitch captured. Kavax free. Victory mine.
We shuttle over from the lean Telemanus torchShip toward Victra’s waiting fleet. Sevro picks nervously at his pant leg. Victra’s won a great victory. She set out in pursuit with twenty strike craft. Now she possesses nearly fifty black ships—fast, nimble, expensive craft. Just the sort you’d expect of a trading family. None of the hulking behemoths the Augustuses and Bellona favor. All the black ships bear the weeping spear-pierced sun of the Julii family.
Victra waits for us on the deck of her mother’s old flagship, the Pandora. She’s splendid and proud in a black uniform with the Julii sun upon her right breast, a fiery orange line burning down the black pants, gold buttons sparkling. She’s found her old earrings. Jade hangs from her ears. Her smile is broad and enigmatic.
“My goodmen, welcome aboard the Pandora.”
Beside her stands Kavax, injured yet again, with a cast on his right arm and resFlesh coating the right side of his face. The daughters who raced ahead to find him flank him now and laugh as Kavax bellows a hello to Mustang. She tries to maintain propriety as she rushes to him and tosses her arms around his neck. She kisses him once on his bald head.
“Mustang,” he says happily. He pushes her back and lowers his head. “Apologies. Deepest apologies. I cannot stop being captured.”
“Just a damsel in distress,” Sevro says.
“It seems the case,” Kavax replies.
“Just promise me this is the last time, Kavax,” Mustang says. He does. “And you’re injured again!”
“A scratch! Just a scratch, my liege. Don’t you know I’ve magic in my veins?”
“I have someone who has been dying to see you,” Mustang says, looking back up the ramp. She whistles and inside the shuttle Pebble lets Sophocles go. Claws clatter behind me, then under me as he races through Sevro’s legs, almost knocking my friend down, to jump onto Kavax’s chest. Kavax kisses the fox with open mouth. Victra cringes.
“Thought you were in trouble,” Sevro grunts up at her.
“I told you I had it under control,” she says. “How far behind is the rest of the fleet, Darrow?”
“Two days.”
Mustang looks around. “Where’s Daxo?”
“Daxo is dealing with rats on the upper decks. Still some hardcore Peerless left. It’s been a bitch digging them out,” Victra says.
“There’s barely any wreckage…” I say. “How did you do this?”
“How? I am the true heir of House Julii,” Victra says proudly. “According to mother’s will and according to birth. Antonia’s ships—legally my ships—were run by stool pigeons, paid allies. They contacted me, thought the whole fleet was right behind my little harrying party. They begged me to spare them from the big bad Reaper…”
“And where are your sister’s men now?” I ask.
“I executed three and destroyed their ships as an example to the rest. The disloyal Praetors which I could capture are rotting in cells. My loyalists and mother’s friends have taken command.”
“And will they follow us?” Sevro asks gruffly.
“They follow me,” she says.
“That’s not the same thing,” I say.
“Obviously. They’re my ships.” She’s one step closer to taking back her
mother’s empire. But the rest can only be done in peace. Still, it gives her an eerie independence. Just like Roque had when he gained ships after the Lion’s Rain. It will test her loyalty, a fact Sevro does not seem entirely comfortable with. Mustang and I frown at one another.
“Property is a funny thing these days,” Sevro says. “Tends to have opinions.” Victra bristles at the challenge.
Mustang inserts herself. “I think Sevro means to say: now that you have your revenge, do you still intend to come with us to the Core?”
“I don’t have my revenge,” Victra says. “Antonia still breathes.”
“And when she does not?” Mustang asks.
Victra shrugs. “I’m not good with commitment.”
Sevro’s mood sours even more.
—
Dozens of prisoners fill the ward’s cells. Most Gold. Some Blue and Gray. All high ranking and loyal to Antonia. A canyon of enemies who glare out at me from the bars. I walk alone down the hall, enjoying the feeling of so many Golds knowing I’m their captor.
I find Antonia in the second to last cell. She sits against the bars of the cell that separates her from the adjacent one. Aside from a bruised cheek, she’s as beautiful as ever. Mouth sensual, eyes smoldering behind thick eyelashes as she broods under the brig’s pale lights. Her willowy legs are folded under her, black-nailed hands picking at a blister on her big toe.
“I thought I heard the Reaper swing,” she says with a seductive little smile. Her eyes drift slowly up the length of me, eating every centimeter up. “You’ve been downing your protein, haven’t you, darling? All big again. Don’t fret. I’ll always remember you as a weeping little worm.”
“You’re the only Boneriders left alive in the fleet,” I say looking at the cell adjacent hers. “I want to know what the Jackal’s planning. I want to know his troop positions, his supply routes, his garrison strengths. I want to know what information he has on the Sons of Ares. I want to know what his plans are with the Sovereign. Are they colluding? Is there tension? Is he making a move against her? I want to know how to beat him. And most of all, I want to know where the bloodydamn nuclear weapons are. If you give me this, you live. If you do not, you die. Am I clear?”