* * *
—
I stumble through the halls smearing blood as I go. I depress Kyber’s whisper beacon. “Kyber, need you.” An Orange mechanic ahead in the hall stares at me and my mutilations in horror. Cassius’s razor is in my chest now, just above the heart where I planted it. The Red fire team rushing down the hall to put out the evidence-destroying blaze in hangar 17B grinds to a halt as they see me dripping my way along.
“Assassins…” I hiss. Blood pulses through the wound in my cheek. The Reds form a human wall around me. Alarms begin to blare. “Get me…to safety.” I stagger and fall. The Reds catch me and carry me. Others form around like legionnaires to escort me to safety. They run with me through the halls, roaring for others to clear a path until Praetorians finally arrive and order them to put me down.
The Reds refuse at first and shout at the Praetorians, demanding to know why they didn’t protect me. I had to embarrass the guard. That was almost as important as burning Atlas’s body beyond recognition. To bind them to me, I had to make the arrogant guard look like fools who failed me, again. The Reds relent only when I whisper to them to hand me over. I raise a hand in thanks as the Praetorians rush me away to safety.
Demetrius storms up and almost blocks the way into the medBay when my Praetorians arrive with me in their arms. He is a totem of terror, but he lets us pass into the bay. Coriolanus, and others of his cabal, form a cordon around us after I’m set on the medical bed.
“What happened?” Demetrius demands.
“Assassins. One dead. May be more. Had help.” Each word is a misery with the wound in my mouth. “Find them, Demetrius. They killed them. They killed Rhone and Atlas. Markus and Drusilla too.”
Death enters Demetrius’s eyes. The suspicion toward me is there, but he’ll investigate first then turn that death on me if I’m to blame. For now, he wants immediate retribution. “Who?”
“The Raa prince…Dustwalkers. Find them. Kill them.”
He storms off with purpose, his cabal pounding after him. I will not see him again, I hope. Kyber comes to my side after the medici have removed Cassius’s razor. I shoo the medici from the room. “You need me, dominus?” she asks.
I pull her close and whisper. “Kyber, my defender. A coup. Surely you have felt it? In the guard?” I feel the lean muscles of her shoulder stiffen. She nods. “It was the cape on Phobos. Rhone poisoned me.” Her eyes go flinty. No doubt thinking of the sniper who prevented her from joining us on the Dustmaker. “He was with the Fear Knight. They were trying to control me. I don’t know if there is anyone I can trust.”
“Me, dominus. I am your whisper.”
“Thank you, Kyber. It will ruin the guard if this comes to light. You have your own circle of trust?”
She nods.
“Demetrius and all in his cohort are to be found dead. Killed by the same Rim assassins who did this to me. Yes?” She nods again. “There are Gorgons hidden in level thirty-one, block C…make them disappear. Arrest Captain Pytha, no harm is to come to her. Will you do this for me, for the guard?”
“Thirteen is your body,” she says. “Demetrius. Slow or quick?”
“Quick, always. When we can.”
She almost smiles at my nobility.
“One more thing, Kyber. I dumped a black bag down the hangar’s waste chute. It will be in the recycling queue on level nineteen. Before anything else, retrieve that bag and hide it in my quarters.”
“Your will be done.” She salutes and slips way.
The medici drift in. “Patch only what you must to preserve my life,” I tell them. “My allies and the crew must see my state. We cannot sanitize the truth any longer.”
85
DARROW
Dusk and Dawn
NIVALNIGHT APPROACHES, AND STILL all I can think about is Cassius up on the Lightbringer with Lysander. A dozen of Gaia’s Dustwalkers lead me across Plutus’s skyway. I watch the Lightbringer as we walk. Its spear shape is distorted. They’ve gotten a shield back on over the city, but it will take years to repair the damage from Fá’s attack.
Beyond the broken battlewalls, Io darkens as it slides into Jupiter’s shadow. Only the Garter glows on. Its artificial suns cast light over the fragile world of orchards, grain fields, and silver mists. Refugee camps fill the distant spaceport and wind through the citrus groves all the way up to the stone folds of the goddess’s robes. I hear the camps also cover the next level of the Garter beneath the surface.
Demeter of Plutus, the great statue that sits to the north of the city embedded in the side of a harnessed volcano, wears a passive expression. The goddess clutches a bundle of grain to her chest in her left arm. Her right arm is held out, the hand open, the palm up. In that palm, she cups a simple circular building of Europan nickel that emits a silvery light. Like moths, the dusky-robed Moon Lords rise from the city or descend from their ships to attend Diomedes’s summit.
All the beauty seems so inconsequential when someone you love is in danger. Stone, states, philosophy, they feel so secondary to the fleeting preciousness of life.
Beneath the statue, in the agricultural offices in the heart of Plutus, the Dustwalkers deposit me in the room of an archGrower and depart, leaving two at the door in reserve. There, in a simple sitting room, Gaia waits with the man of the hour. Diomedes and his grandmother are both dressed in homespun vestments. Gaia’s are brown and gold. Diomedes’s the color of storm, a dragon pin and the lightning bolts of his office the only embellishments. Gaia, curled on a cushion by a window looking over grain fields toward the statue, does not turn as I enter.
The box containing Fá’s head lies on a chair. Pyrphoros lies in Gaia’s lap. I feel possessive of the blade, protective of the Daughters who made it and what they’d think of it lying on the lap of the woman who ran the Krypteia for half her life. To many, especially Athena, Gaia would be considered the architect of the Rim’s subtler form of tyranny.
“Any word from Lysander or Cassius?” I ask Diomedes.
“Not yet.”
My anxiety deepens. I glance at the House of Bounty. “We’re going to be late to your own summit,” I say. “We are still attending…yes?”
Diomedes does not answer.
Gaia nods out the window toward the building in Demeter’s palm. “For five hundred and nineteen years the ekklesia have met in the House of Bounty before every cycle. I remember my mother taking me there when I was a girl. Sitting on the steps listening to the growers bicker about the next harvest, the rotation of the crops, the fertilization of the soil. This is the first time it’ll host a conference of war. Diomedes has told me of the triumvirate he wants to make with Lune.”
“It can be a conference of peace too,” I say. “We could end war in our lifetimes. I assume Diomedes has explained his plans with Lune and me. Will you lend support?”
Gaia turns a little to look at me. Disgust fills her eyes. “No.”
I glance at Diomedes. He already knew this. I’m baffled. “Diomedes gave me his word—”
“Diomedes is a servant of the Dominion. His personal guarantees and honor are subservient to his duties,” she says. “My son Romulus knew this. He lied about your crime to keep us from war, Darrow. He shamed himself for the sake of his Dominion. So too will Diomedes.”