“I know that…inconsistency on my part made you feel you were not enough. I know it bred contempt in you for me. I was selfish, then cowardly, then cruel.” He meets my eyes. “I’m sorry for it, Lys. I am. I’m sorry I couldn’t be the teacher you deserved. That I poisoned you with neglect. Suffocated you with judgment. I know when you looked at me you just wanted me to be happy. But I couldn’t be happy. I’ve…always had trouble with that. Without distractions…well. If I could do it all again, I wouldn’t try to shape you. I’d try to let you shape me into what you needed. I think we’d both have been better off for it.”
I look away.
I did not know how long I was waiting to hear him apologize until this moment. His words slip past the armor I’ve built around my heart. The emotions of childhood rush back. All the loss, the loneliness, the fear and instability. The need for him to be happy, and when he wasn’t, feeling like it was my fault.
I don’t know if I’ll see him again after this. I think of Ajax and the words we never got to speak. I think of Glirastes, and all the nights we could have spent surrounded by his trinkets talking in detail about nothing but how to capture magic.
“In my head, you were a giant,” I say slowly. “But now I’m the age you were when we set off from Luna. I don’t blame you, Cassius. I don’t know how I’d have raised me either.” I sigh. But more won’t come out. Fear and pressure have me too wound in knots.
“But now we get a second chance,” he says. “That is, if you take Diomedes’s offer, Lysander.”
I darken inside. “Ah.”
“We have to talk about it.”
“It’s why you’re really here. Why not? Let’s talk about it.”
“I’ll tell you why I’m really here when we get to that part. You know I care about you. But I’m afraid too, brother. You are surrounded by people who terrify me, Lysander. They don’t know me. What we have here.” He motions between us. “And even if they did, they’d tear me to shreds. Respect the risk, if not the reason.”
“Fair,” I say. “Very fair.”
“Diomedes told me what he’d propose. Asked my opinion. I told him he had the right of it. You are a man of honor. You’d do the right thing. You’d give them Atlas.”
“Honor. It sounds so silly when you say it enough,” I reply. “It can excuse anything. But we only pretend it protects. Yet it is there. A feeling of what is true and what is slippery and false. But you’re right. I do have it. That inclination, maybe more of a desperation, to have honor. But time and again, I’ve found that it’s like opening a vein while swimming with sharks.”
“Am I a shark?”
“No. Sharks don’t have such good hair,” I say. He laughs. My smile fades. “I can’t, Cassius. I can’t accept the offer.”
“You are Lysander au Lune. If you can’t, who can?”
“You don’t understand,” I snap. “At every turn, I try to take the right action.”
My heart is beating fast, but I can’t stop talking.
“I acted like the hero of the Rim, Cassius. But I’m not. I am called Imperator, but I am not. I could be. I really could help people, I think.” I swallow, seeing the truth of my condition. “I…I am just a puppet. That’s all I have ever been. A puppet or a prisoner or a pet. Octavia’s, Atalantia’s. Atlas’s. That meeting…Atlas may already know…my jailers were sniffing. Demetrius…Markus…”
The more I think of Atlas, the harder it becomes to breathe. I feel hot. My hands start to shake. This has never happened before, except once with Octavia. Once was enough for the Pandemonium Chair. It’ll get rid of the shakes. That’s what she said. When I got out of the chair, I was calm. It was a while after the chair before I realized I couldn’t remember my parents. I clench my fists but the shaking won’t stop.
“Atlas is coming back. If he does know…if he suspects anything, he’ll enslave me,” I say. “With chemicals. Pain. He can do that. If I’m lucky, he’ll just kill me and put a doppelgänger in my place. But no, he’ll take his time. He’ll peel me apart one layer at a time. He’ll kill Pytha. Cicero. Exeter. Horatia. Anyone I care about. My Praetorians can’t protect me. The ones who came with me on the Dustmaker, they are sociopaths. They kill hundreds of people and keep a running tally. They make bets about it. They serve him. Not me. They worship him. Call him a patriot. Me? I’m just a spoiled Palatine brat. He’ll skin me in front of them and they’ll just salute.”
His hand grasps my shoulder and I feel the strength in it.
“Then let’s kill him together. You asked me why I came here. Let’s kill that piece of shit.” Tears stream down my cheeks. “I told you I came here to help you. Let’s do it soon as he lands, Lysander. Let’s set you free. Enough shifting shapes. Enough compromises. Finally you can be the man you want to be.”
I jerk when a door hisses open in the distance. Cassius holds me steady. “Lysander?” It’s Pytha’s voice.
“It might not be her,” I say quickly.
Cassius looks at me with so much love I feel the shakes leave me. “In the sitting room,” he calls without even looking back. His hand slides to the razor and his face hardens.
“Is all prime?” Pytha says. He takes his hand off his blade when he sees her reflection in my eyes, but he doesn’t go to her till I give him a nod.
Cassius picks Pytha up and twirls her like a big brother, then pulls her into a hug. In his arms, my captain, once his captain, looks no larger than a child. She pulls back and beams at me. “Thank gods you haven’t killed each other. Did you ask him, Cassius?”
“Only just.”
She bends on a knee and cups my head. “Moonboy, tell me you said yes.”
“You’re not angry with me?” I ask her.
“I just wish you would have told me,” she says. “I could have helped. If I had known…But it doesn’t matter. We can end this now. We can do this, Lysander. Together.”
Anxiety claws at me. Atlas was a tool I needed to set things right, but there are other tools now. “It would have to be Rhone too. If we fail…”
“We won’t,” she says. “The three of us together. How can we?”
84
LYSANDER
Hangar 17B
THE THREE BLACK NIGHTRAPTORS coast in from space. They broadcast no radio signals or light except the red range-finders on the tips of their wings. Even those are turned on only at the last possible moment.
To me, standing in the abandoned hangar flanked by Markus, Drusilla, and four more kill-pool dragoons, the range-finders seem like the eyes of Atlas himself. Nocturnal, omniscient. As the bait in the jaws of my own trap, I have never felt more like prey.
Pytha knew the hangar Atlas would use. It was cut from her systems by someone earlier in the day. Power outage supposedly. It is filled with war machines too damaged to repair and awaiting the attention of Oranges to be harvested for parts.
My razor hangs on my hip. My aegis-cuff on my left vambrace is dormant. I wear a sidearm, which is not too unusual. I wish I could’ve come in my pulseArmor, but Atlas will be suspicious enough to find me waiting for him in the hangar. He told me to meet him in the barracks, where he’d be untouchable. Only bullying Markus and Drusilla with my “intel” got me here where he can finally be killed.