The Obsidians escort me to new quarters, Fitchner trailing along behind, pacing jovially on the marble floors. When we reach my door, he takes my hand.
“Well played, boyo. Good reading on her—knowing she wants what she can’t have. Gorydamn clever. Warms my heart to finally see you playing the game and winning, you little pisser.” He slugs my shoulder. “Tomorrow, we’ll go to market and buy you servants. Pinks. Blues. Obsidians of your very own. For now … I left you a present.” He gestures into my room where a lithe Pink lies on the bed. “Enjoy.”
“You don’t know me at all. Do you?” He sighs and leans forward.
“This is the hand life has dealt you. It’s not a bad hand. Imagine the things you can do as a personal emissary of the Sovereign. She makes your Governor look like a small-town slumlord. You have your girl. You have opportunity. Embrace your new life.”
The door slams.
A new life, but is it worth the cost? I don’t know what’s happening with the Sons. That’s something I can’t affect. But he expects me to let Roque die? To let Tactus and Victra and Theodora perish to Praetorian death squads?
I walk around my suite, ignoring the Pink. Luna’s night clouds sprawl as far as the eye can see beyond the huge bank of windows that comprises the suite’s north wall. Buildings puncture the clouds like glittering spears.
I am trapped by opulence.
Rain continues to pour. The storms of Luna are enigmatic creatures. For a man of Mars, it is a slow rain. Lethargic. As though the drops tire of their own fall in this low gravity. But the winds that come are gales. There are no cracks in the Citadel’s windows through which the wind can whistle. I miss the moans of my old castle on Mars. Miss the laments of the deepmines. Those moments when the drill cooled and I sat there touching my wedding band through my frysuit, thinking of how soon it would be that I had her lips to mine, her hands on my waist, her body drifting light as dust over my own.
But I cannot think only of the Red girl. When I see the moon, I think of the sun: Mustang burns in my thoughts. If Eo smelled of rust and soil, then the Golden girl is fire and autumn leaves.
Part of me wishes I would remember only Eo. That my mind belonged to her, so I could be like one of those knights of legend. A man so in love with one lost that he closes his heart to all others. But I am not that legend. In so many ways, I’m still a boy, lost and afraid, seeking warmth and love. When I feel dirt, I honor Eo. And when I see fire, I remember the warmth and flicker of the flames across Mustang’s skin as we lay in our chamber of ice and snow.
I examine the empty room, which smells neither of leaves nor soil, but cardamom. The room is too vast for my taste. Too rich. There is ivory on the walls. A sauna. A massage parlor adjacent to a pleasure-Chamber. There’s a commChair, a bed, a small swimming pool. These are my chambers now. I see on a dataFile that I’ve been given a fifty-million-credit stipend to choose my attendants. They left me an additional ten million to populate my harem. This is the price they pay me for betraying my friends. It is not enough.
My eyes now fall on the Pink who lies on my bed. Naked, covered only by a blanket. I threw it on her to mask her form, thinking of poor Evey when I first saw her. But the longer I look at this new girl, the harder it is to remember Evey, to remember Eo or Mustang. That’s what Pinks are for, to help you forget. So effective they even make you forget their own sad plight. When she grows old, she’ll be sold off from the Citadel staff to some high-class brothel. And a few more lines will form and she’ll be sold down the ladder and down the ladder till she has nothing more to give. It happens to men. It happens to women. And, I’m beginning to realize, it happens to Golds.
The Pink asks me to join her. To let her soothe what ails me. I don’t reply. I sit on the edge of the windowsill, my hands kneading my thighs, waiting. I don’t have my razor. Obsidians guard the hall outside. The glass window won’t break by any means I have at my disposal, but I do not worry. I sit watching the storm, feeling another brew inside myself.
With a hiss, the door opens. I turn, a smile already cracking my face.
“Mustang, I—”
Through the door slips a demure male Pink with white hair and eyes that’d break a thousand hearts in Lykos. It breaks mine now. I was wrong.
“Who are you?” I ask.
He sets a small onyx box down on my bed in front of the other Pink.
“Who is it from?” I demand.
“You’ll see, dominus ,” he says. Daintily, he extends a hand to the other Pink, who, confused, takes it and follows him from the room. The door closes. I’m just as confused as the Pink. I rush to the box, opening it, and find a small holoCube. I activate it.
Mustang’s face appears, glowing. “Take cover,” she says.
The power goes out and the door locks by default. The room is plunged into darkness. Lightning lashes through the clouds outside; thunder rumbles. And I hear something. A howling. It is not the wind.
Another flash of lightning and he appears, floating in the bitter storm like the ugliest angel ever shit out of heaven. A wolfpelt hangs from his shoulders, whips in the wind. His black metal helmet is that of a wolfshead, and he’s armed to the bloody teeth.
Sevro has come, and he’s brought friends.
Lightning again and this time it illuminates his slash of a smile and the eight floating killers behind him. Nine Howlers in all. Small, cruel little devils waiting in the darkness, silhouetted by the crackling of the storm’s electricity. Long-legged Quinn is there too.
I duck into the sauna as Sevro touches the glass with a pulseFist after setting up a jamField to absorb the sound. The glass ruptures inward. The distorted sound of the storm follows them as they thump down onto the carpeted marble floor. Wind whips at my bedsheets and tapestries. One by one they kneel—pudgy Pebble, cruel Harpy, spindly, open-faced Clown, and all the others.
“Friends. Get up!” I bellow. “You’re already short enough.”
They laugh and rise. Pebble and Clown rush forward and weld shut my metal door with plasma torches.
Water drips from Sevro’s hook nose as he nods toward me, his helmet absorbed into his armor. Hair buzzed in the shape of dragons. Quiet, and so full of derision, he hefts a huge, heavy bag in his other hand. And when he walks, he moves with disdain for this low gravity. As though it were a thing for weaklings and fools.
“ Lord Reaper. You look like a Pixie ponce in this lady-den.” Sevro sweeps into a theatrical bow after he places the bag at my feet. “Perhaps that’s why Mustang believed you were in dire need of your gorydamn pack.”
“She brought you back from the Rim?”
“All of us,” Quinn says. “We’ve been here several weeks on standby. She needed men she knew wouldn’t be loyal to the Sovereign.”
An insurance policy. I can’t believe I ever doubted her.
In no world would Mustang help kill her father. I realized during my conversation with the Sovereign that it had to be why she’s here in the first place—to infiltrate the Sovereign’s family like I infiltrated the Golds. As she entered the Sovereign’s suite, I remembered how before the duel she mentioned having her own plans. Now it finally clicks into place. They were both playing their own games, but I helped reveal the Sovereign’s hand.
The Sovereign wasn’t worried about me knowing anything, else why play the game? But as soon as Mustang entered the room, the paradigm altered. She should have concluded the game then and there. But her pride got the better of her.
As for Mustang, I knew she was with me as soon as she took the gold horse ring I gave her from her pocket and slipped it onto her finger. My heart leaped in that moment, and I knew she’d find our way out of this.
“Sevro.” I smile and clasp his hand. “Our ArchGovernor is—”
“I know. Mustang briefed us.”
“Come here, you tall devil.” Quinn steps past the others and slips her thin arm around my waist and kisses my cheek. She smells like home. I have missed these people. The wind howls as it passes through our jamField. Sevro’s bionic eye glitters unnaturally. Quinn has brought me gravBoots, ebony in color. I slip them on.
“Mustang might have brought us from the Rim. But we didn’t come for her. We didn’t come for Augustus. We came for you, Reaper,” Sevro snarls. Quinn frowns as Sevro spits on the pretty carpet. “We saw what you did to Cassius. And we want what you’re trying to make.”
“And that is?” I ask, more than a little confused.
“What poor killers always want. War,” he growls. “And all its spoils.”
“What of your father? He has a high place now.”
“Fitchner is a shiteater,” he sneers. “He’s made his bed. Let him sleep in it while we burn the house down.”
“Well, if you want war, if you want spoils, we better move. The ArchGovernor’s the one with an army.”
Quinn nods. “And Roque’s down there. And Tactus.”
“Tactus,” Sevro mutters, though I know the sneer on his face is for Roque. He watches Quinn, eyes sad for the smallest moment, before adjusting his armor.
“So what’s the plan?” I ask, and take the razor Pebble offers me.
Sevro and Quinn look at each other and laugh. “Mustang’s fetching a ship. She said you’d figure out the rest,” Quinn says.
Just then the door behind me shudders and glows with a dilating pupil of red-hot metal, and I notice something. The bag that Sevro threw down. It moves.
Sevro smiles at me. I know that smile.
“Sevro?”
“Reaper.”
“What did you do?”
“Mustang brought us a package. Let’s just say”—Quinn grins at my shoulder—“it’s not their cook.”
I unzip the bag and gawk.
“Are you mad?” I ask him.
He just howls.