“Not really. I’m the only one in the garden.”
“I had to ask the Praetorians. Didn’t even know the garden went back this far.”
“Did you have to ask the soldiers, or did you want to?” He bends to look at a brilliant crimson flower shaped like a sword. “It’s good to have a common touch with the men. I eat with mine.”
“Every meal, I hear.”
He points to the flower. “We don’t have these. What are they called?”
I pause. “The Vanquished Foe.”
His eyes darken and he examines it for a few moments before standing in disgust. “A bad name for a mediocre flower in a meagre garden.”
“Compared to your horticulture, it must be.”
He turns on me, stone-faced. “How is your heart? Your friend. I hear his head was returned today. You gave him a sundeath.”
I frown, about to lie. “Hurting. Thank you for asking. You’re the only one here who has.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Ajax was an asshole. No one mourned Tharsus either. I’m not sure even Apollonius has brought him up once.” He says nothing. I nod toward the path, and we begin to walk. “You spoke to your mother about me,” I say. He waits for me to go on. “Thank you. Why did you?”
He considers. “If the Rim and Core refuse to be allies, it seems it is inevitable we will become adversaries. In either case I think it would be preferable to deal with you than Atalantia.”
“Your father and your mentor are both isolationists,” I say.
“Yes.” He nods toward the party. “Our ways are older than yours in the Rim. We have older sayings because of it. Older biases. Helios thinks we can burn the bridge behind us.” He lifts his eyebrows. “The Core will always be more powerful than the Rim. In a war, we could never win, we could only make it not worth your while. In short: You seem to do what you say. I do what I say, always. I think that is important.”
“So do I. I said Mars must fall. I meant it. Tonight I’m going to propose we launch an Iron Rain as soon as possible. I would like to be able to say you and I have agreed to fall in the vanguard. Me with my Praetorians, you with your—”
“Lysander, you are bleeding.” I check my wounds. “Your eyes.”
My fingers come away with blood as I wipe my eyes, and the ocular nerves ache with a dull pain. No. No not now. Not like this. Diomedes is about to call out for help. I stop him.
“Kyber?” I say.
A pause. “Step away, au Raa,” Kyber whispers.
Diomedes jumps when Kyber slips from the shadows. “Kyber, I am poisoned. It’s the Lament. Get Rhone.” Kyber freezes. She knows the Lament. “Kyber.”
“She’s gone,” Diomedes says. “What can I do?”
The pain is growing exponentially worse by the second. I can barely keep my eyes open. Was it the wine Julia poured? The grapes? A flower in the garden? Atalantia. It has to be Atalantia. The pain has spread to my spine. I bend like an old man.
“What can I do?”
The pain is in my legs now and my balls now. It’s like a pressure made of fire. I sit down and try to stay as still as possible. I can barely breathe. The party in the distance is growing blurry. “Keep them together,” I whisper. I can’t hear him reply it hurts so bad. Drills burrow into my temples. I reach for the Mind’s Eye. Octavia said the Mind’s Eye could stop poison from spreading through the body, but I don’t know how to use it that way. I try to feel my body, to slow my heartbeat, but all I sense is agony and loneliness. I know it’s from the Lament, but I cannot shake the abyss opening inside me. It swallows me until I feel nothing but pain and sorrow.
I am alone in a hole. A boy. Sobbing. I want to die. I want to die.
34
VIRGINIA
Remember Earth
“MY SOVEREIGN, STAND BY for a tightbeam with the Archimedes. If the enemy attempts to intercept the beam, we will have limited warning,” my techs inform me. I run my hands through my hair. Sitting in my stateroom in the Dejah Thoris, I feel more nervous than when I stood before Valdir the Unshorn.
“I understand. Cut the beam when you need to. We can’t risk compromising their coordinates.”
My ship waits in the queue down to Mars. The enemy thinks we’re merely being cautious, arranging our capital ships over the descending transports to protect them. In fact, they would laugh if they knew our real intentions. They will when they learn. Our best hope is they laugh themselves to death.
I took a souvenir from Phobos before I left. A menu from a civilian eatery at the spaceport. I don’t know why. Maybe because it felt like the Republic retreating from Phobos was the last moment of a dying age. I wanted a relic for what was and will never be again.
I banish defeat from my mind and browse the menu.
One of the entries makes me smile: Ragnar’s Vast Hunger—an ice cream dessert slathered with fudge, peanut butter, walnuts, cherries, and bananas that is claimed to be so large only the legend himself could eat it in one sitting. If you can match the famed hero’s appetite, the dish is apparently free.
Then my husband’s face appears on the viewscreen above the menu, and I stare at him like he is the first man I’ve ever seen.
It doesn’t feel that long ago that I sat atop my horse looking down at two young men by a loch at the Institute. There was Cassius, as distracting a man as has ever been made, but he was so used to drawing all eyes to him that he needed to be witnessed to spark.
Then there was the other man. The dark one. Not in features, but dark in his energy. There was a man who needed no witnesses to burn. His energy was igneous and parthenogenetic, fire reproduced of itself. At first glance, I knew he was a powerful being with no manners, no airs, no grace, only a direction—one that ran straight through me. It wasn’t love that he awoke in me. It was fear. But that is a part of love.
It took time for me to see the sensitive being hidden behind his iron walls. It takes no time today. I don’t even see what his trials have done to him. Those are details. I see his energy. It is not as dark as I remember. His eyes are soft, yearning, and do all but reach out across the void and embrace me.
“Lo, Mustang.”
His masculine voice stirs up the silt of love, and the part of me that’s been dormant since he left awakens. “Lo, Reaper,” I whisper.
Still, a shield lies between us, held by both parties. Either of us could be a program, an enemy ruse.
“Our boy?” he asks before our prearranged test. I find that touching. He couldn’t wait.
“Alive,” I say.
He looks down, overwhelmed with emotion. “When was he made? Confirm.”
“After your first Rain,” I answer along with a numerical code. “What was waiting for us after our fun? Confirm.”
He gives a code in return and smiles at the memory. “Applause, innuendo, breakfast, bacon, and friends.”
“Applause? You wish.” I force a laugh.
It is Darrow. I feel out of my body. Unable to find the words. “Where are you?”
I sound so young. So fragile.
“With Cassius and Sevro on the Archimedes.”
“Alive. Kavax too. And your mother. And your friends made it home. Char, Screw, Thraxa, Harnassus.”