“Guess they know you too,” Cassius mutters.
“What’s this then?” Thraxa calls. “Slinking off in the dead of night?”
“I have a little errand to run,” I say. “Didn’t want you all to worry.”
“Errand’s canceled,” she says.
Harnassus looks tired. Thraxa looks angry. Screwface looks at his boots.
I take my time searching the eyes of the men and women behind them. My welding team is here, as are the infantry and aviators and engineers. Their skin was made leather by the sun on Mercury, then the fat scraped away by privation on this base so that it hangs from their bones as if two sizes too big. They’re here because they love me, but I see the anger in their eyes. It’s an anger that’s always been reserved for the enemy.
I feel a million kilometers away already as I address them. “Brothers, sisters. You have put your faith in me too many times to count. I have let you down. But I did not survive Mercury to slink home. I survived to continue the fight. Even if you cannot see it, there is an opportunity here to wound the Gold war effort, to help Mars. I do not ask you to wait for me. I ask only that you meet me on the Lion Steps with a mug of swill at the ready. Gods know I’ll need it.”
Thraxa doesn’t understand. “Darrow, the Ecliptic Guard has gathered. The Red legions muster. Do you not want to lead the defense of Mars?”
“More than anything,” I say. “But I believe this is the path. I have the right ship. I have the right plan. I will go to the dockyards, and I will find a way.”
“And if you don’t?” she says.
“Then I’ll find a different way. Please let me pass.”
“You’re a fool.” She draws her razor and surprises me by pushing it into my hands. “Take Bad Lass. If you die, die with a blade in your hands.”
“It’s been in your family for centuries,” I murmur. Bad Lass is a silver blade embellished with foxes and trees. Her father, Kavax, gave it to her when she graduated from the Institute. It belonged to his mother.
“Then if it ends up on the Minotaur’s trophy wall, I’ll find you in the Vale and beat you to drippings.” She slams me into a hug. “So don’t die.”
I thank her and turn to Harnassus. “What do I tell Virginia?” he asks.
I knew the answer before he asked. “Tell her I listened. Tell her I endured. When I give you the signal from the dockyards, sprint for Mars. Tell Char?”
He nods.
Screwface has his pistol drawn. It shakes in his hand. I approach him and clasp him behind the neck. “I’ll come with,” he says. “You need someone you can trust.”
“Mars needs you too,” I say. “You’ve been gone long enough. Your Sovereign knows your sacrifice, Screw. When you look into her eyes, you’ll realize you’ve been seen this whole time. Serve Virginia as you’ve served me. Protect her. Protect Mars. I will return.” I kiss him on the forehead and tear myself away.
I build up steam as I reach the troops. They don’t look like they’re going to move. I know it appears as if I’ve broken and parted from sense. I can’t explain how I feel. All I can do is keep walking. Finally, the ten years of respect I earned from them makes them part. I walk through them until I reach the pedestrian umbilical to the Archimedes. There a lone Red with dark skin and narrow eyes bars my path. His crooked lantern jaw is set in an anger I know far too well, his ham fists balled at his sides. He glares up with rage three times too big.
I go around that one.
At the umbilical, I turn back to my men as Cassius and Aurae disappear inside. I look back at my friends, my soldiers with whom I’ve suffered so much, and raise my fist. “Hail libertas!”
Only my echo answers.
5
LYSANDER
Games
SHRILL WHISTLES PIPE FROM a shimmering mirage as the wild sunbloods gallop out of the desert. The surviving youths of Mercury’s ruling elite pursue the white horses, herding them in a ritual stampede toward the storm gates of Heliopolis. The horses pour through the triumphal arch erected to honor my victory over the Rising and into the streets of the city itself.
The horrific burn scar Darrow’s boot left on my face itches like mad. Truly it’d be easier to be rid of the thing, but a scar from Darrow is a point of honor and a good reminder of what he’s done to our Society whenever I look in the mirror and see the wrinkled, shiny horror that makes my eyelid droop. I resist scratching it. There are eyes on me. From my place atop the triumphal arch with Glirastes and Rhone to either side, I nod to a Blue. With a warble from the gravity engines the arch rises. We follow the horses as they press deeper into the city, their hooves rattling the surface of the Via Triumphia.
Behind barricades, the morning crowd is already drunk on spiced-clove wine from Keryx and cactus brandy from Polybos. Despite the herculean efforts of our sanitation divisions, radiation from the atomics used in the Battle of the Ladon still infests the continent. The radiation has made many of the citizens grow bald. In defiance of this pestilence of baldness, they boast wigs of eccentric length and color. And they remember well that it was Atalantia who sowed this radiation, not Darrow.
In the eyes of Mercury, Darrow and Atalantia are equally loathed, but I am beloved. Pouring money into a planet will do that. They chant my name. Behind me, my Praetorians stare down at them like a row of militarized falcons. My whisper, Kyber, crouches to the left. My last line of personal defense, the discreet Lunese Gray follows me everywhere. Today she plays a Copper. Her sensitive jaguar-mod eyes rove the rooftops from behind chrome goggles.
“They love you like children love their father,” Glirastes says. Wind whips my cape behind me and tugs at Glirastes’s brilliant orange robes.
Rhone grimaces. “If only love wasn’t so…expensive. And if only all those voices belonged to soldiers.”
“These people are the heart of the Society,” Glirastes calls over the wind and the clamor. He shields his eyes from the sun to look south of the city to the spaceport. There the Lightbringer, beset by swarms of construction skiffs, looms like a mountain. “It’s the thump of military boots and the buzz of welders that is the music of insolvency!”
“Better to be impoverished and strong than impoverished and popular,” Rhone replies. Though he cuts a fine figure in his purple and silver parade uniform, Rhone is no parade soldier. A veteran’s veteran, he’s fought on thirteen spheres and wears the evidence in the phalera on his chest and the scars on his face. He is no blunt object. A violent intellectual, he was Aja’s favorite Gray, and he is now the clever engine of my growing military machine. “Mobs may seem strong as the sea, but give me a starShell, and a Moses I will be.”
Glirastes sharpens a retort.
“If you can’t get along, silence is preferable,” I snap, annoyed at their mutual and growing enmity. “You’re both heroes of the people, so wave your gory hands and lobby me later.” I wave to the people below. Block by block the crowd grows denser and more drunk. Sunburnt women in wigs shout down from rooftops. Children climb their fathers’ shoulders to wave the flag of their favorite racing team. The gold and white of Team Hermes dominates the main boulevards as the sunbloods flow south, past the bazaar, through the partially restored Water Gardens, where the stampede completes a circuit and then turns gradually toward the Hippodrome, our destination.