The energy blossoms outward from the Stained liquid to the eye, evaporating his body and spreading over the floor like spilled mercury before darkening, slipping back to the origin, sucking men and chairs and bottles toward it like a black hole before detonating with a deep, nightmare roar. I snag the Jackal up by his jacket and fly through the wall, slamming shoulder first as, behind us, glass, wood, metal, eardrums, and men rupture.
My boots fail. We fly across the street and slam into the building opposite, cracking concrete and falling to the ground as the Lost Wee Den shrinks inward like a grape becoming a raisin becoming dust. She exhales a death rattle of fire and ash before sagging to ruin.
Beneath me, the Jackal’s unconscious, his legs badly burned. I vomit as I try to stand, my skeleton creaking like the trunk of a young tree after its first hard winter wind. I stumble up only to fall back to the ground, emptying my stomach a second time. Pain in my skull. Nose dripping blood. Ears trickling with it. Eyeballs throbbing from the explosion. Shoulder dislocated. I gain my knees, wedge my shoulder against the wall and roll the joint back in, quivering out breath as it pops into place. The feeling of needles tickles my fingers. I wipe the sick off my hands and wobble finally to my feet. I pick up the Jackal and squint into the smoke.
I hear nothing but the wailing of stereocilia. Like screaming sparrows in my inner ear, throbbing. I shake away the lights that dance across my vision. Smoke swallows me. People flow past, water around a rock, rushing to help those trapped. They’ll find only death, only ash. Sonic booms puncture the night. The Jackal’s support teams roar down from the city above. And as they land to take him out of this hell, the sparrows in my ears fade, devoured by the crackling of flames and the crying of the wounded.
I stand in front of an abandoned factory, four hundred kilometers from the Citadel, deep in the Old Industrial Sector. Newer factories have been built atop this one, burying it beneath a fresh skin of industry like a deep blackhead. Grime skins the place. Carnivorous moss. Rust-filled water. I’d have thought it a dead end if I didn’t know my quarry so well.
The datapad I took from the Red survived the explosion. I left the Jackal for his support teams and slipped farther down the street, where I stole a Gray police craft. After wiping the datapad’s tracking device, I hacked into the datapad coordinates history.
I knock hard on the locked door to the factory’s main level. Nothing. They must be shitting themselves. So I kneel on the ground, hands behind my head, and wait. After a few minutes, the door creaks open. Darkness inside. Then several figures slip forward. They bind my hands, cover my head with a bag, and push me into the factory.
After taking me down an old hydraulic elevator, they guide me steadily toward the sound of music. Brahms’s Piano Concerto no. 2. Computers hum. Welding torches flare bright enough to glow through the bag’s fabric.
“Here, get off him, you brutes,” snaps a familiar voice.
“Careful, clown,” rumbles some Red.
“Babble at me all you want, you rusty baboon, he’s worth more than ten thousand of you inbred rough—”
“Dalo, get out,” Evey says softly. “Now.”
Boots thud away. “Can I stop pretending now?” I ask.
“By all means,” Mickey says.
I snap the cuffs they used to bind my wrists behind my back, and strip off the bag that covers my head. The concrete and metal laboratory is clean, quiet but for the soothing music. A faint haze floats in the air from Mickey’s water pipe in the corner. I tower over him and Evey. She can’t contain herself.
No longer the seductress Rose from the tavern, she throws herself into me like a little girl greeting a long-lost uncle. Her hands linger on my waist as she eventually pulls back and stares up into my Gold eyes with her pink ones. Despite her giggling, she’s all sensuality and beauty, with willowy arms and a slow, intimate smile that echoes none of the grief killing nearly two hundred people should mark her with. The winged girl has become a carrion bird and she doesn’t seem to have noticed. I wonder if she’d smile so broadly if she had to kill all those people with a knife. How easy we make mass murder.
“I could recognize you anywhere,” she says. “When I saw you at the table … my heart skipped a beat. Especially in that ridiculous Obsidian makeup. Darrow, what’s wrong?”
She yelps when I pick her up by the front of her jacket and shove her against the wall.
“You just killed two hundred people.” I shake my head, sore and heavy with the weight of what’s happened. “How could you, Evey?” I shake her, seeing again the crew of my ship venting into space. Seeing all the dead I’ve left in my path. Feeling Julian’s pulse fade to nothing.
“Darrow, darling—” Mickey tries.
“Shut up, Mickey.”
“Yes. All right.”
“Reds. Pinks. LowColors. Your own people. Like they were nothing.” My hands tremble.
“I was following orders, Darrow ,” she says. “Adrius has been investigating us. He had to be taken out.”
So with all his scheming, he’d been noticed. Tears brim in Evey’s eyes. I don’t recoil from them. Who gives a shit about how she feels after what she’s just done? But I release her, letting her slide pathetically down the wall, hoping she might show some glimmer of regret that would make me think those tears are for the people she killed and not for herself, not because she’s scared of me.
“This isn’t how I wanted it to be,” she says, wiping her eyes. “When you saw me again.”
I stare down at her, confused. “What happened to you?”
“She had a different teacher than you,” Mickey says. “I took her wings off and Harmony gave her claws.”
I turn to Mickey. “What the hell is going on?”
“It would take a year to explain.” He crosses his arms and examines me. “But let us first say, you’ve been missed, my darling prince. Second, please do not link my morality to that lost soul. I agree. Evey is a little monster.” He glares past me at Evey as she stands. “Maybe now you’ll see yourself for what you are.” His sneer fades, quick eyes scanning me toe to head. “Third, you look divine, my boy. Absolutely divine.”
His eyes dance over my face. His mouth opens, closes, tripping over itself it has so much to say. Sharp of face, oily of hair, he slides forward like a blade on ice. All angles. Skin wrapped around slender bones. Was he so thin when last I saw him? Or does he simply not have his cosmetics? No. His blinks are slow. Languid. He’s tired. Older. And seemingly beaten down. A queer air of vulnerability in the way his shoulders hunch and his eyes dart around, as if expecting to be hit at any moment.
“I asked you a question, Mickey,” I say.
“I can’t think about the forest! I’m still examining the tree! It’s astounding how your body flourished. Simply astounding, my darling. You’ve actually grown larger. How fare your pain receptors? Did the hair follicles ever grow irritated as I was concerned? What about the muscle contraction; do you find it above the average of your peers? Pupil dilation fast enough? All I heard for months was talk of you on the HC. They could not show the Institute, of course. But there were videos leaked on the holoNet. Such videos—you killing a Peerless Scarred. Taking some strange fortress in the sky, like a champion of old!”
Even they swallow the myths of the Conquerors, the noble champions of old. He grips my shoulder desperately, his hand weaker than I remember. “Tell me about your life. What the Academy is like. Tell me everything. Are you still lovers with that delectable Virginia au Augustus?” He frowns suddenly. “Oh, of course you’re not. She’s with—”
“Mickey.” I grip him. “Calm down.”
He laughs so hard he coughs, turning from me to wipe his eyes. “Just good to see a friendly face. They don’t allow me kind company these days. None at all. Monstrous, really.”
“Shut up, Mickey,” Evey snaps.
His eyes slip to Evey, who now stands far from my reach, fingering the burner holstered on her hip as though it would protect her from me.
“Why are you on Luna? What is going on?” I ask. “Have you joined the Sons?”
“Much has happened,” Mickey murmurs. “I’m not here by—”
“He works for us, now, Darrow,” Evey interrupts coldly. “Whether he likes it or not. We took his little skin den apart. Used the funds he made from selling flesh to buy transport here and equip an army. We’re striking back, Darrow. Finally.”
“One Pink terrorist and a handful of Reds playing with guns,” I say without looking at her. “Is that your army?”
“We drew blood from the Golds today, Darrow. If you don’t respect me, respect that. I killed the son of Mars’s ArchGovernor. What have you done that makes you think you can come here and spit on what we’ve done?”
“You didn’t kill him,” I say.
She looks blankly at me. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
I stare back, angry.
“But how … The bomb …,” she says. “You’re lying.”
“I got him out in time.”
“Why?”
“Because my mission is complicated. I need him. Where is Dancer? Who is in charge here? Mickey—”
“I am,” says another voice from my past, one with an accent like my wife’s, except this voice is poisoned and bitter with anger. I turn to see Harmony at the door. Half her face still blasted with that terrible scar. The other half is cold and cruel, older than I remember.
“Harmony,” I say mildly. The years have done nothing to warm us to each other. “It’s good to see you. I need to debrief. There’s so much to say.” I can’t even think where to begin. Then I notice the glance she gives Evey. “Harmony, where is Dancer?”
“Dancer is dead, Darrow.”
Later, Harmony sits with me in front of Mickey’s desk in an office of cheap, angular furniture and jars filled with hybrid organs floating in preservative gas. Mickey sits behind the desk, fidgeting with that old platonic puzzlecube of his. He sees me looking at it and he winks. He’s gotten better. Evey leans against a barrel of chemicals. I sit, utterly lost. Dancer had a plan for me. He had a plan for all this. He’s not supposed to be dead. He can’t be.
“It was Dancer’s last wish for Mickey to carve us a new army. One that will rival the Golds in speed and strength. We’ve taken our greatest men and women and put them to the carving. They cannot survive a Gold procedure like the one you endured, but some manage to brave this new program.” She waves out the glass where a hundred coffinlike tubes splay across the floor. Inside each, Reds of a new breed. “Soon we’ll have a hundred soldiers who can cut Gold deeper than any before.”
As if a hundred would be enough to fight the Gold war machine. My Howlers and I could likely shred any unit these terrorists put together. And we’re not even the deadliest Golds.
She gestures with a new arm, having lost the one of flesh and bone to an Obsidian, when raiding an armory for weapons. It’s a limb of metal now. Fluid and strong, with illegal blackmarket sockets for weaponry. Good workmanship, but nothing compared with Mickey’s carving. Of course she’d never let him work on her.
“So Mickey is a prisoner?” I ask.
“Slave, more like,” Mickey grunts with a small smile. “They don’t even give me wine.”
“Shut up, Mickey,” Evey snaps.
“Evey.” Harmony fixes the young woman with a tolerant stare before regarding Mickey. “Remember what we talked about, eh? Mind your tongue.”
Mickey flinches, eyes darting down to her left hand. There is an empty holster on her belt. Something Mickey is scared of. Harmony is behaving for me.
“You afraid he’s going to say how you beat him?”
She shrugs, dismissing my judgment. “Mickey sold girls and boys. Can’t enslave a slaver. Far as I see it, he’s bloodydamn lucky not to have a bullet in his brain. Could hire a Carver to give him horns and wings and a tail so he’d look like the monster he is. But I haven’t. Have I, Mickey?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, domina .”
The word makes me recoil in disgust.
“Dancer always respected him,” I say. “I respect him, despite all his … eccentricities.”
“He bought people. Sold them,” Evey says.
“We’ve all sinned,” I say. “Especially you, now.”
“Told you he’d be bloodydamn holier than thou. Acting like he doesn’t compromise his morality day in, day out. Finding excuses for wicked bastards like our Mickey here.” Harmony smirks to Evey, sharing a private joke. “That sort of attitude is all fine up there, Darrow. But you’ll learn we don’t compromise here anymore. That’s the past.”
“Then Dancer is truly dead.”
“Dancer was a good man.” She’s silent for too short a moment for it to count as respectful. “But good men tend to die first. Half a year back, he hired a Gray mercenary team to hit a communications hub so we could steal data. I said we should kill them once the job was done. Dancer said … what was it again?… ‘We aren’t devils.’ But after the Gray captain collected his pay, he pissed off to the local Society Police headquarters and offered them Dancer’s location. Bloodydamn lurcher squad put Dancer and two hundred Sons in the dirt in two minutes. Never again. If they kill one of us, we kill a hundred of them. And we don’t trust Grays. We don’t pay Violets. They’ve lived off our toil for ages. We only trust Reds.”
Evey shifts uncomfortably.
“There was another Red at the Institute,” I say after a moment. “Titus. Was he one of yours?” I glance toward Mickey.
“Don’t look at me,” Mickey says.
“How did you know Titus was a Red?” Harmony asks quickly. “Did he tell you?”
“He … let it slip. Small mannerisms. No one else noticed.”
“Then you found each other?” she asks, not smiling, but sighing free a weight she’s long carried. “He was a good lad. I’m sure you became friends?”
“He never discovered me. Did you carve him, Mickey?”
With Harmony’s blessing, he answers. “No, darling. You were my first. My only.” He winks. “I consulted on his carving. But an associate of mine did his procedure based on the successes you and I pioneered.”
“Dancer found you,” Harmony says. “I found Titus. Though his name was Arlus when we pulled him from Thebos mines. He didn’t care about keeping it.”
It’s fitting that Harmony would find Titus. Birds of a feather.
“What happened to him?” she asks. “We know he died.”
What happened to him? I let a Gold put him in the bloody ground.
I look stonily at the three of them, thankful they cannot read my thoughts. They know nothing. I can barely conceive of what they must think of me. They’ve such small perspectives on what I’ve done, on what I’ve become. I thought there was a plan, a long, large reason for all my toil. But there was nothing. I know that now. Even Dancer was just waiting to see what happened. Hoping.
I expected to be welcomed back with open arms. I expected an army waiting. A grand plan. For Ares to take off his infamous helm and dazzle me with his brilliance and prove all my faith warranted. Hell, all I wanted was to find them again so I would not feel alone. But I feel more alone than ever sitting here in a concrete room with these three pale people on rickety plastic chairs.
“A Gold named Cassius au Bellona killed him,” I say.
“Was it a good death?”
“By now, you should know there’s no such thing.”
“Cassius. The same one you have a bloodfeud with. Is that why?” Evey asks eagerly. “Is that why the Bellona want to kill you?”
I run a hand through my hair. “No. I killed Cassius’s brother. It’s one of the reasons they hate me.”
“Blood for blood,” Evey murmurs like she knows what the hell she’s talking about.
“We hit them hard today, Darrow. Twelve blasts across Luna and Mars. Dancer and Titus have been avenged,” Harmony says. “And we’ll hit them harder in the days to come. This cell is just one of many.”
She waves her hand at the desk and scenes rise as the holoDisplay comes to life. Violet news anchors drone on about the carnage.
“Am I supposed to be impressed?” I ask. “You’re as bad as them. You know that, yes? Never mind the strategy of it. Never mind you’re taunting a sleeping dragon. Evey herself killed over a hundred lowColors just hours ago.”
“There weren’t Reds,” Harmony says, and then adds, in an amazingly insincere afterthought, “or Pinks.”
“Yes, there were!”
“Then their sacrifice will be remembered,” Harmony says solemnly.
“Vox clamantis in deserto,” I exclaim.
Mickey sits quiet, but he allows himself a small smile.
“Trying to impress us with your Gold fancy talk?” Harmony asks.
“He feels like a voice crying out in the desert. Shouting all in vain,” Mickey explains. “It’s simple Latin.”
“So you know what’s what,” Harmony says. “Become a Gold and suddenly you have all the answers.”
“Wasn’t that the point of me becoming a Gold? So we could see how they think?”
“No. It was to position you to strike at their jugular.” She balls her fist and strikes the palm of her metal hand in emphasis. “Don’t act like you were born better than I. Remember, I know what you are inside. Just a scared boy who tried to kill himself when he was too weak to save his wife from hanging.”
I sit speechless.
“Harmony, he’s just trying to help,” Evey says softly. “I know it must be hard, Darrow. You’ve spent years with them. But we have to hurt them. See, that’s all they understand. Pain. Pain is how they control us.”
She continues slowly.
“The first day I served a Gold was the greatest pleasure I felt in all my life. I can’t explain it to you. It was like meeting God. Now I know that it wasn’t pleasure I felt. It was the absence of pain.
“That is how they train Pinks to live a life of slavery, Darrow. They raise us in the Gardens with implants in our bodies that fill our lives with pain. They call the device Cupid’s Kiss—the burn along the spine, the ache in the head. It never stops. Not even when you close your eyes. Not when you cry. It only stops when you obey. They take the Kiss away eventually. When we’re twelve. But … you can’t know what it’s like, the fear that it’ll come back, Darrow.”
Evey plays with her nails. “Gold needs to feel pain. They need to fear it. And they need to learn they may not hurt us without consequences. That’s what Harmony means.”
And I thought the Golds were broken. We’re all just wounded souls stumbling about in the dark, desperately trying to stitch ourselves together, hoping to fill the holes they ripped in us. Eo kept me from this end. Without her, I’d be like them. Lost.
“It’s not about hurting them, Evey,” I say. “It’s about beating them, Eo taught me that, Dancer too. We’re swinging at the apples when we should be digging at the roots. What will bombing them do? What will assassination accomplish? We need to undermine their Society as a whole, erode their way of life, not this.”
“You’ve lost sight of your mission, Darrow,” Harmony says.
“You say that to me?” I ask. “How could you possibly understand what I’ve seen?”
“Exactly. What you’ve seen. Dine with the masters and forget the slaves. You can afford to live a life of theories. What about what I’ve seen? We’re down in the shit. We’re dying. And what are you doing? Philosophizing. Living the plush life. Bedding Pinks. I had to listen as Dancer died. I had to hear the bloodydamn screams rattle over the coms as the lurchers came to kill. And I could do nothing to save them. If you had lived through that, you would know fire can only be fought with fire.”
I know where these words lead. They gave me a hole in my gut. Put me weeping in the mud, Cassius standing over me. That is how this will end.
“You may have lost all you love, Harmony. I’m sorry for that. But my family is still in a mine. They will not suffer because you are angry. My wife’s dream was about a better world. Not a bloodier one.” I stand. “Now, I want to talk to Ares.”
Silence lies heavy upon the room.
“Give us a moment.” Harmony looks at Mickey and Evey. She watches Mickey stand reluctantly. He pauses, as if to say something to me, but, feeling Harmony’s eyes on him, thinks better of it.
“Good luck, my darling,” he says simply, patting my shoulder.
“Let me stay,” Evey says, drawing close to Harmony. “I can help with him.”
Harmony touches her hip. “Ares wouldn’t allow it.”
“After what I did today … don’t you trust me? I’m not like the rest.”
“I trust you, as much as any Red. But this is something I can’t share with you.” She kisses Evey softly on the lips. “Go.”
Evey pauses at the door, looking back at me. “We’re not your enemies, Darrow. You have to know that.”
The door clicks shut behind her and we’re left alone in Mickey’s office.
“Does she know?” I ask.
“Know what?”
“That you sent her on a suicide mission.”
“No. She’s not like us. She trusts.”
“And you’d sacrifice her?”
“I’d sacrifice any of us to kill a Peerless Scarred. All we get are worthless Pixies and Bronzies. I want the real tyrants.”
“You’re using her worse than Mickey ever did.”
“She has a choice,” Harmony mutters.
“Does she?”
“Enough.” Harmony sits and gestures for me to do the same. “Dancer may be dead, but Ares has a plan for you.”
“No. No. I’m done listening to his plans through others. I’ve sacrificed three years of my life for him. I want to see his face.”
“Impossible.”
“Then I’m done.”
“How can you be done, eh? You’re trapped. You bloodywell can’t go home to Lykos, can you? One way out. Buckle tight and stay the course.”
Her words strike hard. I can’t go back. The loneliness in that is inexpressible. Where is my home? Where will I go even if this all ends with Gold falling to ashes?
“You won’t meet Ares. Even I’ve never even seen his face, Helldiver.”
“You haven’t? You’ve worked for him almost as long as Dancer. Years. How can you of all people trust him?”
“Because he put the first gun in my hand. He wore his helmet and pushed a mark IV scorcher with a full ion clip into my palm.”
“Is Ares a man?” I ask.
“Who cares?” She pulls up a holoDisplay The electrons swirl in the air, coalescing into a series of maps. I recognize the topography. Mars. Venus. Luna, I think. Dozens of red dots blink throughout blueprints of cities, dockyards, and a dozen other vital organs. Bombs, I realize. Harmony looks tiredly at the map. “This is Ares’s plan. Four hundred bombings. Six hundred assaults on weapons depots, government facilities, electric companies, communications grids. It is the sum of the Sons of Ares. Years of planning. Years of scraping up resources.”
I had no idea we could carry out such action. I stare at the map in awe.
“The bombings today were meant to provoke a response. Get them all hot and bothered. We want them mobilizing. If they mobilize, they condense. Easiest to burn pitvipers when they are packed tight.”
“When will this take place?”
“Three nights from now.”
“Three nights,” I repeat. “At the conclusion of the Summit. He can’t want me to do th—”
“He does. Three nights from now, the Summit finishes up nice with a gala. Wine, Pinks, silks, whatever the hell you Goldbrows do. All the bloodydamn Governors, all the Senators, Praetors, Imperators, Judiciars from across the Society will be here. A Solar System of monsters brought by the power of the Sovereign to one place. It’ll be ten more years before we see this. There’s no way for the Sons to get in, but you can go where we can’t. You can strike the blow that we cannot.”
I feel the words coming like a train down a tunnel.
“When they have all gathered nice and tightlike. When the Sovereign stands to give her speech, you kill the Goldbrow bastards with a radium bomb we hide on you. Mickey and a crew of gizmos built the tech. Once we see the bomb has detonated via the dataRecorder we’ll plant on you, we unleash hell across the system. Burn them out.”
This is the sum of all I’ve done?
“There has to be another way.”
“There were always two plans, Helldiver. This, and you. Ares and Dancer said you were our hope, our chance at another path. They boasted like boys that you could destroy Gold from inside. But you failed, like I said you would. You’re gonna claim blood is on Evey’s hands. Well, it’s on yours too.”
“You don’t even know the blood I have on my hands, Harmony. I’m not some bloodydamn saint. But Evey’s attack was a crime.”
“The only crime is if we lose.”
I shatter. “There’s more at play here than you understand. We cannot face Gold. No matter the blow we strike, they will eradicate us like this.” I snap my fingers.
“So you won’t do it.”
“No, I won’t do it, Harmony.”
“Then the war begins without your help,” she says. “We had two Sons ready to try to enter the gala. They are not Gold, so bets are higher they’ll get caught and cut to ribbons in a Praetorian torture cell before completing their mission. Means the leaders of Gold will live on, and our tiny chances of winning this shitstorm shrink, because you don’t trust Ares.”
“Slag this. Ares should have told me this himself if he wanted my help!”
“How? He is on Mars preparing the revolution. There is no way to communicate. They monitor everything. How could he contact you without exposing your cover?” She leans forward, lower teeth exposed ferally. “Tell me, Darrow. Do you even know how much they’ve stolen from you?”
It’s something in her tone. “What do you mean?”
“Here’s what I mean.” She jams a series of orders into the holoCube and an image appears of Lykos mines. My blood goes cold. “The recording of Eo’s death, the one we pirated and broadcast …”
My heart thuds in my throat.
“It wasn’t complete.” She presses play and the room around us becomes the mine. We’re a part of the three-dimensional holo. It’s the raw footage, not the stuff on the newsreels, not the stuff I’ve seen a hundred times. It shows the hanging without a soundtrack.
I hear my own cries of pain as the Grays beat the boy I used to be. Weeping in the crowd. The awkward silence of unedited footage. My mother hangs her head and Uncle Narol spits in the dust. Kieran, my brother, covers his children’s eyes. Feet shuffle. Dio, Eo’s sister, stumbles up the metal scaffold. Shoes scraping over rust. Sobbing. Then Dio leans toward my wife. Eo stands small, so pale and thin, little more than the smoke of the burning girl I remember. Her lips move. Again, I don’t hear it, just as I didn’t hear it that day. Suddenly Dio sobs uncontrollably and clings to Eo. What was said?
“Use the equipment. That’s what it’s there for, eh?”
I’ve wondered it a thousand times but never had access to this footage. I never knew how I’d find it without raising suspicion. And the thought scared me, as it scares me now—what was I not strong enough to hear? What could Dio bear that I could not?
In the news footage that was pirated, they don’t even show Dio. But here, with the raw footage, I can rewind. I do so. I can amplify the sound. I do so. I watch it happen again: My mother hangs her head. Narol spits. Kieran covers the children’s eyes. Feet shuffle. Dio goes up the scaffold. All the sound is magnified. I sort out the white noise with the controls, and I hear what my wife said to Dio.
“In our bedroom, there is a crib I made. Hide it before Darrow returns.”
“A crib …,” Dio murmurs.
“He must never know. It would break him.”
“Don’t say it, Eo. Don’t.”
“I am with child.”