Each name is a joy to him. “I’m days out from home at full torch. We can see Phobos on our scopes. How bad is it?”
“You’re not running full torch, are you?” I ask.
“No. We’ve come this far…but we can if we need to. Virginia, how bad is it? All we can see are debris. Did they make landfall on the planet?”
“No. No landfall.”
“Did we lose Phobos?”
“Yes. We’ve only just completed the evacuation.”
His frown is like one you’d see on a statue outside a military academy, a commander surveying the enemy formation and thinking, thinking. “But there’s no energy wash. No shooting.”
I was so angry at his departure I’d nearly forgotten how comforting he is as a confidant. No judgment, no bullshit, just boundless competency. Some people shirk problems. Some fumble them or pull at them like Gordian knots. Darrow asks questions, finds the nerve center, and then drives a spear into it. His only true strategic fault is that very same unwavering aggression.
I don’t soften the truth.
“I surrendered the moon to Lune in exchange for a peaceful transfer.”
“When?”
“Five days ago. It took time.”
“If only we hadn’t taken the ecliptic plane back to Mars…” He sags his head.
The comment is so flagrantly vain it makes me furious at him. It breaks the spell his appearance cast over me. He’d what? Wave his hands and send a plague of boils on the enemy, a wave of floods to wash them out of the sectors?
But I pause before I rebuke him. Just by his tone of voice, I can tell he is not the man who left. He is older, his trials etched into his features. His crow’s feet and forehead lines are now deep grooves. He is thinner, weary, and concealing at least five injuries. He’s encountered radiation, and his hair has only started growing back. He has a beard, a terrible, hairy beard. But the change I sense runs deeper than the physical. His restless anxiety is not gone, but it is muffled by a solemn maturity. Nothing grants wisdom like loss.
“Do you think I made a mistake?” I ask.
He considers. “I honestly won’t know until I better understand the tactical situation. I will need a full report from your Praetors when I get back.”
The more I look at him, the more my doubts compound. “Darrow, they know you’re out there. They know you’re in a cloaked ship. Lysander lived on the Archimedes for ten years. The closer you come home, the more their patrols will tighten. They’re on their telescopes. They may not sense you. But your ship isn’t invisible. They will catch you.”
“Then come get me,” he says as if it was so easy. “Sally out with the fleet. Victra could run the op easy enough.”
I sigh at my inability to describe the battle and violence I’ve witnessed. Finally I feel like he must have felt for so many years. Words will never do justice to the menace we survived. The intensity of emotions or the cost of seeing so much destruction. So many things have happened I don’t even see the purpose in relating—Apollonius, the shit tube, the Nucleus, Valdir.
“Darrow, we can’t. We have to ground our ships.” He flinches. “It is not the glamorous strategy, but it is my strategy. They almost destroyed our navy. Half our fleet is gone, and we don’t have the repair yards anymore.” Even if we did, I realize I wouldn’t send them. How do I tell him it’s not just the difficulty of getting through the enemy fleet that stays my hand? He doesn’t understand the level of faith people have in his return. They believe that it will be enough that he just arrives back on the planet. But I remember the sea of faces outside Lykos. The way they spoke the other names after Deanna, but had to shout his. They shout his name to invoke his power.
Mars needs its savior back.
But I look at Darrow and I don’t see a savior. I see an exhausted, bearded survivor stumbling home without the ships or the men to turn the tide. He gets back, then what? He’s trapped inside the Gold siege like the rest of us? The tactical risk is just not worth the strategic reward, or cost. We need him on the outside.
Pax’s words in the snow come back to haunt me.
Quicksilver will listen to only one man. And he’s here looking at me.
“No,” Darrow murmurs. He’s read my expression. “Virginia. I am only four days away.”
“Darrow.” I take a breath. It hurts so much to say what I need to say. “Darrow. I want nothing more than for you to be home. For us to face this together. To see you and Pax in the same room. But, you can’t come home. Not yet.” The words are like a bullet. Once they’ve left the barrel of my mouth, I cannot take them back. Nor would I. They are true.
He falls silent. I fear facing down the tidal wave of emotion that he’ll release. I fear he’ll just ignore me. Just do what his passions tell him. Eventually he asks, “Why not?”
“You’ve been out of this war for over half a year. There isn’t time to catch you up. I can send a packet to do that—especially with your Obsidians, Sefi, so much has happened. You have to trust me to know what Mars needs, because the longer we debate, the greater the chance they’ll find you. If they find you, they will catch you. Kill you. That would break Mars. That would break me. I couldn’t take that. Not after all this.”
“I didn’t come all this way just to sail past you,” he growls.
“Did you come all this way to die?”
“Virginia—”
“To hold my hand as I die? That’s what will happen. Darrow. My love. If you’ve ever trusted me, trust me now. The enemy wants you to return. They want us all in one place so they can exterminate us. If you come here, all you can do is wait for them to attack. If you are out there, you can work on the problem. You can build strength. Then when the time is right, you can combine it with ours. With our ships inside the planetary shields, Mars will be a fortress, wreathed with death and teeth. We will hold the planet. We will stave off defeat. I will not let Mars fall. But it’s up to you to find us a path to victory.”
He wants to say I let Phobos fall. I can feel it. Or maybe I believe I feel it because I hold as much faith in him as all the others do. That in my place he somehow would have conjured a terrible miracle and sent the enemy into flight.
He does not reply.
“Darrow, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. The hardest thing—” My voice breaks. I fight back the tears. “Every morning you are my first thought. Maybe news has come as I slept. Maybe you’ve just landed in Agea…” I can’t keep the strain from my voice. “But we need you out there, beyond their siege line until you can return at the head of an armada.”
“There is no armada.”
“What if there were?”
He ignores that and looks at me with so much pain I nearly recant all I’ve said. To travel so far only to be turned away now, not by a scorned god or a twist of fate, but by his wife.
“There has to be another way.”
“If there were, do you think I would ask this of you?”
His eyes fall to his hands, as if they were to blame for the distance and years between us. “You told me not to go. When I left Luna. I should have listened. I just…wanted to end it all.”