Harnassus blanches. “Darrow…you can’t.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“Look at us. Look at yourself. We’re hanging on by a thread.”
“But we’re hanging on,” I say. I glance at Char. “Only half dead.”
Char is done. “My gifts belong to the Republic. I will not squander them on another one of your suicide missions, Darrow.” He gets up, lights a burner, and walks out.
I glare daggers at his back. Least he got his food.
Thraxa may not like Char’s lack of tact, but she agrees. “Darrow, whatever luck we had, we spent getting off Mercury. With Orion dead, it has to be you who leads the fleet. Our priority must be to get you home.”
Only Screwface has not spoken. His rancor at Sevro has been replaced by a look of abject sadness. Whatever complaints he had, he loves his friend. Still he shakes his head at me, begging me not to consider it.
I look at the rest of them. I saw enough hunger strikes in the mines to know how they’re broken. Magistrate Podginus would pretend to agree to the terms. He’d descend with food. Roast chickens, fresh bread, hunks of steak glistening with fat. Then he’d find a technicality. He’d hem. He’d haw. He’d sigh. And he’d renege on the deal. It’d only take a day or two for the first strikers to cross the line. People can endure anything except false summits. False summits are where they break. My friends broke the second Cassius waltzed in with that helium.
My heart is often iron, but it melts for the broken.
They will try a peaceful mutiny. I can smell it in the air. They love me, but they will restrain me. I can’t let it go like it did with Wulfgar. So I feign a surrender.
“I’m tired. Give me the night to think it over. Is that fair?” I ask.
“Of course,” Harnassus says, relieved. “You know how much Sevro means to all of us.”
Screwface nods and wipes his eyes. Thraxa squeezes my shoulder with her metal hand.
I return to staring at Sevro as my friends leave. His expression is frozen at the very moment he realized he was being sold at auction. The very moment he realized he’d become a piece of meat.
I massage my aching left arm, hating my frailty.
“Are you prime?” Cassius asks. I turn. I was so focused I did not realize he and Aurae had remained behind. He leans against the wall beside the door observing me from the shadows. Aurae’s eyes are still closed, her face far off and pensive. I don’t answer and turn back to Sevro, thinking.
“There’s a cure for that,” he says and produces a bottle from his pack. He pours a generous helping for himself, tosses it back, and pours another. “Why didn’t you tell me about Alexandar and Rhonna?”
“Didn’t seem relevant,” I reply. “Do you need something?”
After a moment, he clears his throat. “Before all this. When Olympia was a beacon and my father’s star was on the rise, he had time to spend on me. So he decided to take me for my first hunt—”
“Cassius, I’m glad you’re here. Truly. But I’m not interested in lessons right now.”
“I seem to remember teaching you one of your very first,” he replies.
I turn around. “I beg your pardon?”
“Left you in the mud with a hole in your gut…” He pours some liquor into another cup and pushes it across the table to me. I drink the liquor down. “Because I’m a duelist, and you never have been. Not really.”
“How’s the arm? You know. The one I chopped off at the gala,” I say.
He smiles. “You see, on my first hunt I had so many expectations. A thirty-six-point ivory stag had wandered onto our estate.” I sigh and let him get on with it. “In the stalk, I imagined how it would fall to me. I would look at the stag, and it would look at me, and I would feel something transcendent, a mutual agreement for a great chase. The stag would flee, fast and wily. I would pursue. I’d release my arrow on the run. It would catch the stag mid-leap, true and in the heart. And I would feel exultant because I had met the stag on equal footing and given it the splendid, noble death it deserved. And for his part, the stag would feel at least some measure of satisfaction in being felled by a predator equal to his own majesty.
“Instead, I ambushed it at a watering hole. I misjudged the wind and the shot was ruinous. My stag bolted into the woods, maimed but not yet dying. We tracked it and found it eight hours later dragging itself across volcanic rocks. It had gotten three kilometers over them. You could see the bones of its ribs where the skin had flayed off. I’ll never forget my father’s face.”
Aurae’s eyes open, disliking the tale. Cassius doesn’t notice. Her eyes shift to me and pierce right through me, studying.
“Point is, you think you have the Minotaur’s respect. You believe that respect entitles you to certain privileges. That stag had my respect. I still slit its throat and nailed its head to my wall. Apollonius might dream of a great duel, but your head is his ticket back into Gold favor. He’ll take it however he can.”
“Six years in Deepgrave will change a man,” I reply. “The experience is the point for Apollonius, not the result. I’m a cherished peer. That stag was not your peer. Anyway, doesn’t matter. I’m destined for Mars.” He nods along, patronizing. “I’m destined for Mars, Cassius.”
“You should be, but you’re not,” he says.
“You’ve been gone ten years. You don’t know me like you think you do.”
He eyes Sevro. “Some things never change. You’re going to try and sneak off when everyone’s sleeping. After Mercury you don’t want to spend any more lives. Darrow, I know guilt better than most people. I know you’re afraid to go home. But I won’t let you go get yourself killed, not even for Sevro.”
“Let me?” I ask.
He smiles. The room grows chilly. “Kavax told me to bring you home. Virginia is waiting for her Imperator…and her husband.”
I bristle at that. “You said you came back to—”
“Fight in your war. Yes. Die in a suicide mission? No.”
“Who says it’s a suicide mission?” Aurae asks. Her voice sounds as if it comes from an oracle’s cave. She’s not looked away from me since she opened her eyes. “Tell him your reasons, Darrow.”
Cassius spares her a quizzical look. “Do you know something I don’t?” he asks.
“Tell him your reasons, Darrow,” she says again. “If you have more than one.”
I do, I realize. Far more than one. They make up the current that’s drawing me this way. Part of me feels the urge to fight that current, fight Aurae’s smug look and the words of The Path to the Vale. But it’s hard to hold on to petulance when you’re wasting away.
“I have five. One: it’s Sevro, and I owe him. Two: those dockyards are the heart of the Gold war industry, and if I can’t save Sevro I can at least slag them up and buy Mars time. Three: when I appear there, I’ll draw all eyes to Venus. It’ll clear a path home for the rest of you. Four: the Minotaur respects me more than he respects his fellow Golds. Odd as it sounds, I might be able to turn him. Five. The Republic needs a spark. I would rather go home, Cassius. Trust me on that. But”—