Diomedes, Zagria, and Dustwalkers salute along with the crew.
I stare at the grapes on the pommel of Helios’s kitari. That is his daughter’s weapon. But his daughter’s weapon was on the wall of his niche in his office. I glance up at the man. Haunted by that second of intense focus and fear as the Cestus tested his DNA.
What was that? Diomedes did not notice. His eyes are fixed on Helios’s boots. I don’t see anything wrong with them, but I feel something wrong with the moment. Helios dismisses Zagria and activates the command triangle’s shroud. A curtain of darkness surrounds the command triangle, hiding us from the eyes and ears of the greater bridge. I don’t have a weapon. Zagria has mine. I try to get Diomedes’s attention.
“Zagria, remain,” Diomedes says to the kidemónas just before she steps through the shroud. She stops and her Dustwalkers turn back with frowns.
“What is the beauty behind the moon?” Diomedes asks. Another code. Rumi, I believe.
Helios is annoyed. “Diomedes, we already did that dance.”
“What is the beauty behind the moon?” he repeats. Zagria’s hand drifts to the hilt of her hasta. Her Dustwalkers begin a slow encirclement of Helios. Helios is amused.
“The beauty behind the moon is the MoonMaker,” he replies.
Diomedes nods and relaxes. Then, fast as a viper, he steps into Helios, grabs the Cestus, and pulls up Helios’s sleeve.
For a moment I don’t understand what I’m seeing. Helios’s muscular left forearm is buried in the bands of the Cestus up to the elbow. His skin is pale till just past the elbow, then the arm changes. The skin is rough and baked tan by the sun. The muscles are ropier, the bone thinner. A perfect pink line separates the two disparate topographies.
Zagria and the Dustwalkers draw their blades.
It might be Helios’s arm in the Cestus, it might even be Helios’s face smiling at us, but the man now in control of the Dustmaker is not Helios au Lux.
45
LYSANDER
Allfather
DIOMEDES’S FACE IS THE picture of horror, but his kitari is already at the imposter’s throat. Zagria and the others surround them both.
Diomedes whispers, “Remove the Binds or you—”
In several places the plating on the imposter’s armor slides up to reveal honeycomb apertures, from shinguard to pauldron. Something sprays out in all directions, a fine mist. Diomedes jerks backward and screams. So do Zagria and the Dustwalkers.
The imposter steps back from Diomedes’s kitari. I lurch for Zagria to retrieve my razor. I don’t go far. Immense pain stabs through the back of my hand. I turn it to see the skin pierced with dozens of tiny hairlike spines that resemble the glochidia of a cactus. A scream explodes up from my throat. My muscles cramp and my body seizes as the pain spreads.
Diomedes and Zagria fall, twitching and screaming. I stumble and tumble sideways, body landing halfway out of the shroud of darkness that encloses the command triangle.
I’m greeted with the sounds of gunfire.
The greater bridge is a scene of carnage. The companions the imposter brought onto the bridge with him have already finished killing off the bridge Grays and have moved on to the crew, walking around the pits firing down till their barrels glow with heat. They were killing as soon as the shroud went up.
Despite the agony in my muscles, I manage to crawl back into the shroud toward Zagria. The sounds of gunfire disappear. Zagria and Diomedes twitch like fish on a fisherman’s deck. The imposter casually shoots the three downed Dustwalkers in their heads and walks over to Zagria to stomp on her throat until I hear a crunch. He looks down at me with Helios’s face and sighs.
“I didn’t want you to be here. But if you’re going to eat sausage, you should be able to stomach seeing how it’s made.”
He leaves me there and heads for Diomedes.
“Who are you?” Diomedes slurs from the ground.
I brace myself to watch Diomedes’s death as the imposter approaches him. Instead, the imposter draws what looks like a black egg and cracks it over Diomedes’s head. Inky liquid spreads over Diomedes’s head before constricting. He can likely hear or see nothing, but it looks like he can breathe beneath the material.
The imposter then lifts the Cestus. It glows a deep, dark gold and writhes as he assumes direct control of the ship’s main systems.
Ignorant of the attack, the fleet outside continues its contraction. Kalyke draws closer, and closer, and a realization comes over me. If this is not Helios, then Helios’s torchShips have not scouted the moon, and Fá is likely not on Io at all.
The Rim forces are ghost sailing into an ambush.
My vision warps from the pain shrieking through my muscles. Everything takes on a nightmarish aspect. A helmeted Gray in Phoenix armor phases into the shroud, his gun smoking and still red-hot.
“Bridge clear, dominus. Silent alarm cut. We’re ghosts.”
The imposter waves the shroud away. All around us, the imposter’s tiny group of Golds and Grays put the finishing touches on their gory coup. The bridge is no longer under Dominion control. Diomedes’s mouth is locked in a silent scream behind the inky mask that snares his head. His body is no longer moving. He seems completely paralyzed. The pain in my body is excruciating, but I’m not paralyzed. Not totally. I should be immobile, but I can still wiggle my fingers and toes.
“Hardline neutralized,” one of the Golds calls from a defense pit.
“I have the fleet commandment key,” one of the Grays adds. Only she’s not a Gray, because no Gray has hardline ports built into her temples. She’s hooked into a console like a Green. “Implanting the Helminth. Two minutes.”
“That’s fine. We’re early,” the imposter says. “I will apprise Pale Horse.” His voice is still Helios’s but his cadence is not. “It was the way I carried my weight in my limp. Wasn’t it?” he asks Diomedes, though Diomedes cannot hear him. His fingers dance through the air as he sends a tightbeam signal at Kalyke and waits for a reply. “Helios bears it on the outer metatarsal. Should have practiced that more. Sloppy of me.”
A ship answers the tightbeam.
It is not a face that greets us, but a swarm of locusts that coalesce into the likeness of a head.
“Is it done?”
“Stage One complete. Virus on schedule. Initiate Stage Two. Remember, no prisoners.”
“Fiat voluntas tua. Allfather, accept these stains.”
Fiat voluntas tua. Let thy will be done.
The signal dies. I stop trying to wiggle my legs as the imposter turns to look at me to see if I understand. I do.
The eyes are different, the face, the voice, but my unconscious mind knows who the imposter is beyond a shadow of a doubt. It is Atlas au Raa. He’s not hunting Darrow, he’s not on Earth, he’s not pacifying South America. He never was. He had plans, he’d said—plans that could not be derailed. That’s why he urged me to keep my distance from Diomedes. Why Atalantia smirked as she left after my speech in the Colosseum.
He’s working with the Ascomanni. The very people he spent years trying to kill for Octavia. He’s going to destroy the Rim Armada. But why, for what possible gain?
I ask, but I know the answer.
The Rim never paid the bill for their rebellion.