“What do you mean?”
In response, I quote the full fourth understanding:
The supreme good is the wind in the deepmines,
It flows through rock, around people, and over land
The wind is oblivious to these obstacles,
though her path would not be the same in their absence.
When you smell rust on the breeze,
hear the echo of tools in the darkness.
Smile, and be glad
The path is upon you,
and you upon it.
All you must do is walk.
She closes the book. Her eyes remind me of Dancer’s, except unlike his they hold no love for me. “Aurae told me you…understood the book. I was skeptical.”
“And now?”
“Still skeptical, but admittedly impressed by your ability to memorize.”
“Can you afford to be a skeptic? Mars is under siege. Obsidians are at your door. We’re both Reds. We do not have time to be at each other’s throats like this—”
“Red? Me?” She watches me, then says, “I suppose I came from a mine. Like you. Ours floated over Jupiter. I was sorted as a girl. Since I was not chosen to be a breeder, my breasts were cauterized shortly after puberty. I was selected to be a gasfly to gather helium from Jupiter on airlon wings. Red? I have never been Red. Nor Gray nor Gold. I am a human being. You may look at me with the eyes of the masters, but you will not sort me according to their inhuman labels.”
I’m beginning to think maybe I should not have come here. I peer around the chamber. It is familiar. Similar to that of the room the Praetorians beat me in before Trigg and Holiday saved me from Adrius in Attica. The only difference is the vents in the ceiling instead of drains in the floor.
“Is this where you will kill me?”
“No. But this place is significant. This is one of the rooms where the Krypteia murdered the Sons of Ares you betrayed to Romulus. Fortunately for you we are not like the Krypteia. We do not hide our violence in the shadows. You will be tried. You will have the chance to defend yourself. As will the Raa.”
“And when I am found guilty?”
“If you are found guilty, you will be executed.” She hefts the hasta leaning against the wall. It is huge in her hands, and longer than she is tall. Black, it is veined with iridescence. I recognize the metal. She turns it close enough to me that I can read the text etched into the side of the blade. It is the Forbidden Song. “This blade was made by our greatest artificer, Oskanda. She named it Pyrphoros. Fire bearer. Your hands were meant to wield it as you led us to freedom. You will not die by the rope or gas, Darrow of Mars. If you are found guilty, this will be your end.”
“Do you really think Sevro will help you if you kill me?” I ask.
“No. But I fear much has changed since I sent Aurae to find him. We can no longer spend our ships in your war. They are needed here to seize power once Fá has left.”
I almost laugh. “You think they’ll just leave?”
“They are raiders, the Ascomanni. We will outlast them down here. Once they have purged the Golds, we will step into the void. Perhaps then the Rim will finally know just rule. Not that this concerns you.”
“The Republic needs—”
“No.” She stands. “Do not hide behind Mars’s plight. You are not a god, Darrow. You cannot wave your hand and hurl down the enemy. Mars is doomed. The Republic has lost. This does not please me. But I think you deserve this reckoning.” She fishes a holocube from her pocket. “The men and women who risked their lives for you, who died for you, they had no funerals, no public trial, no public execution. They simply disappeared. Disappeared, cast off from every register, every record. Made like they never existed in the first place.”
I know there is nothing I can say, so I say nothing. I nod at the white tattoos on her forearms. She rubs her thumb over the names there. “Proof these people existed. Proof I carry with me everywhere.” She is haughty. Performative in her grief. Yet I can see why Fitchner chose her to helm the Daughters. There is calm charisma and power in her, a certitude wrought from hardship.
“These poor souls believed in Ares. They all believed in Eo. They all believed in you. I believed in you,” she says. “The hope I felt when you led us to victory against Fabii…” She laughs at herself. “Well, I forgot Helldivers are used to plunging headlong into the dark, outracing the debris they leave behind.” She tosses the holocube to me. “We are your debris, Darrow, and we matter. You’re so good at memorizing, learn the names of those you betrayed.”
She heads for the door, then stops and pulls out my neck chain and Pax’s key.
“What is this?” she asks.
“It’s from my son. He made me a bike.”
She tosses it back to me, then slams the door.
In her absence I rage at her intransigence, at Aurae’s betrayal, at this consummate inanity of my own people killing me. I should have struggled when I saw Cheon’s tell, moments before Lyria shouted a warning. I should have ripped my seat from the bolts that fastened it to the deck—I had even chosen that seat because I noticed that rust had corroded the metal. I should have put on the Twilight Helm, killed them all, and stormed the Deep, taken Athena prisoner and had her march me to the ships she stole from the Raa. I should have left these fools to die, and gone home to save my planet.
The rage passes. In its wake, I’m left sick to my stomach. I pick up Pax’s key and put the chain around my neck. Then I pick up the cube Athena left behind. Turning it over and over in my hands, I feel it gaining weight. The mass of guilt has weighed down on my soul for so long that holding it, facing it, is harder than charging through any breach.
I activate the cube. Holograms emerge.
A thousand little horrors grow and infest my cell. They are the interrogations and executions of the Sons of Ares I betrayed. All the things I’ve run from for so many years. But it was not the moments of brutality recorded in the cube that would make me rove the rooms and halls Virginia and I shared whenever I made it home, not really. I could handle the violence, the death. It was the lives I’d cut short that would make me insane with guilt. It’s the unimaginable complexity and love and hope in those lives that I could never understand, never witness, that made me feel as if I had invited an abyss between Virginia and me as we laid in bed. A writhing, black, stinking hole that would always stand between me and my son.
I gave over lowColors like me—like Eo—to Romulus.
Why?
Because I was afraid I could not win if I didn’t. So many died for me so I could lay by my wife, cradle my son, win my war, have my peace.
I watch the executions with dry, sober eyes. Not one of the Reds, Oranges, Browns, or Pinks executed had my training or my teachers or a Mickey to make them into a god of war. Yet not one of them begged or recanted. Some died quiet. Some screamed. But most shouted a name.
I thought it would be Ares’s name that they shouted before death. Or Eo’s name. But no.
It was mine.
60
DARROW
The Weight of Guilt
THE DAUGHTERS OF ARES have assembled for my trial.
I shuffle through the old nickel mine draped in chains. The gold cape a few Black Owls hung around my shoulders in mockery sways. A dozen guards lead me forward. I search for Sevro in the crowd but do not find him or Lyria. My grubby prisoner’s shift itches. It feels familiar, the shift, the chains, the fear. How many different kinds of shackles have I worn over the years?