On a journey full of surprises, it seems the Rim has yet one more in store for us. Twelve hours out from Io, we receive a hail from a ship that the Pandora’s scanners cannot see.
It is the Archimedes.
* * *
—
My heart is heavy as I walk toward the ship with Sevro. Each step up the ramp reminds me of a friend I’ve lost. Eo. Thunk. Ragnar. Thunk. Orion. Thunk. Dancer. Thunk. There are less steps to reach the top of the ramp than I have dead friends to list. They all drift away when I enter the ship with Sevro. It is empty and quiet. The inspection teams have come and gone. If Lysander left a trap, it is in human form. Pytha, the former co-pilot of the Archimedes and former captain of the Lightbringer, waits for me in the Pandora’s brig.
Sevro lets me enter alone. I wander. I see Cassius everywhere I go—hunched over its controls in the cockpit pretending not to be nervous, navigating its halls with his too-wide shoulders, giving his toast in the commissary, grinning down at me from the training room as he puts me on the floor again. But when I stand before the door to his room, the only room in the ship I’ve never been inside, I feel his absence. The cold of the ship. And I know I have to face him.
Cassius’s body is stored in the cargo hold. He lies within a funeral torpedo stamped with the sigil of his house. Lysander’s last grace for the man who became his surrogate father, brother, family. Cassius is dressed in his favorite pale blue tunic with the ink stain on the cuff and a storm cloak. His family razor lies spooled on his chest. His face and hands have been cleaned and dressed with preserving oils, but the wounds and contusions and the purple kiss of the rope cannot hide the violent way he met his end. He hardly looks like the same man I knew. My hand trembles as it touches his hair, the only part of him that escaped the brutality of Lysander. His hair is no less golden now that he is dead. A single sob comes out of me, followed by tears and silence. Cassius had a heart like Eo, though it took him longer to find it. I wish he’d found it sooner. I don’t know how long I stand there thinking not of the past but all the life he had yet to live now that he’d become the man I always hoped he would be.
Footsteps bring me back into my body. I hurt all over. I wipe my face and look up to see Sevro. He looks at Cassius with the same annoyance he first looked at him sixteen years ago. “The Blue says he killed Atlas.”
“A poor trade,” I reply.
“Yut. Bloodydamn Bellona. The Man Who Killed Fear. Gods we’re gonna hear that song in all the bars when we’re fat and old. Shit. Is that…” He walks to the far wall and holds up a helmet. “Da’s main helm.” He shoves it on his head. “Fits like a glove. Man. Still stinks like Fitch too.” He turns to me. “I just realized it could be booby-trapped.”
“I had them check the helmet, Sevro.”
“Good. Whew. Ugh, the thought of Lune snooping in my room. Disgusting.” He goes quiet and takes the helmet off. He looks down at it, one of his only mementos of his father, then puts it with Cassius between his feet. He touches Cassius’s leg and grows somber. I don’t know if I’ve ever loved Sevro more than I do in the depths of his silence. We stand quiet for a few minutes before he closes the coffin’s lid.
He nods for me to follow him. “Found something.”
I follow Sevro to Cassius’s room. The door is open. I feel anger toward Sevro for violating Cassius’s sanctum, but then I see the cramped room into which Cassius fit his huge life. On one wall his childhood, filled with moving pictures of Eagle Rest, Julian, his father, his brothers, his sisters, even his mother—all curly-haired and smiling. There are a few swordsmanship badges and mementos whose meaning will never now be known. A purple stone with flecks of gold. A chunk of metal the size of an apple. A carved length of wood. A large knife with an eagle-shaped pommel. On another wall hangs a House Mars pendant, surrounded by printed news clippings of my pack. Not just me, but Sevro, Screwface, Clown, Pebble, Virginia, even Pax. They are all happy moments, and it makes me sad that he couldn’t be there to share them with us. On the third wall are images of Lysander, Pytha, and Cassius through the years. But it’s the holoprojector that makes me stare. A loch floats in the air filled with two shivering boys while a wolflike creature slinks around its edges.
“Looked through his deck to see what the creep liked to wank it to,” Sevro says. He picks up the eagle knife and pockets it. “He’s got hundreds of hours of Institute footage in here. Some people peak too early.” He winces. “Sorry. He’d get that.” He sighs and takes a seat in Cassius’s lone chair and nods to the floor. I take a seat. He plops his hand on my shoulder. “It’s a long trip home. Where should we start?”
“Wherever he left off,” I say. Together, now at the age of many of the Proctors who watched our antics from Olympus, we watch the three boys ride their horses across a moonslit plain. The boys were us once. Drunk on victory, they carried an owl standard and howled like idiots at the moons. We were idiots. Trapped in a world of lies, maybe the howls were the truest things that came out of our mouths. We were all just lonely and in search of a pack.
I’ve already tried a tightbeam to Mars. I don’t know if they received my message. So I take Pax’s key in my hands and send a silent message to Virginia and my boy.
I love you. I am coming home. I have an army. I have an armada. We will win. For Eo, for Ragnar, for Fitchner, for Cassius. For them all.
To Tricia Narwani, my Athena
To Mike Braff, my Virgil
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Of primary importance: I would like to extend my gratitude to my noble hound, Eo. You gave snuggles when I was low, with nary a complaint for all the hikes you sacrificed on the altar of creation. Without you, my sweaters would be dander-free but my heart barren as the moon. You are my Patronus even when you piddle in my bed.
Now, the humans.
In the writing of a book there’s always two camps to thank. The first camp is comprised of the rugged legionnaires who stormed the walls of my writer’s block at my side and the crafty engineers who labor to get this book into your hands.
Thank you to Mike Braff, a best friend, a fearless Samwise, a Virgil who helped guide me through the bramble of my own thoughts to journey’s end. You are a peerless creative collaborator, and I couldn’t have found the heart of this story without you. Thank you to my editor, Tricia Narwani, who—when the fist of deadline tightened around my neck—jumped into the fray like a Valkyrie of old to wheel her editorial scythe and separate the wheat from the chaff. Thank you to Joel Phillips for your cartographic and Lit Escalates brilliance. You’re my brother in crime on this since before these books even hit shelves （and happy bloodydamn birthday）。 And thank you to Hannah Bowman, my agent, who took a chance on a young writer with a weird story to tell.
I owe a great debt to the team at Del Rey, who never once pressured me to rush the work and had faith that time was necessary for this tale to be told properly. Scott Shannon, Keith Clayton, David Moench, Alex Larned, Ayesha Shibli, Jordan Pace, Ada Maduka, Ashleigh Heaton, Tori Henson, Sabrina Shen, Angela McNally, Caroline Cunningham, and Regina Flath, you are all Howlers and have made me feel at home with Del Rey since I was a baby writer with a fledgling goatee. Without your efforts and trust these books would be gathering dust in the corners of my mind.