Father once told me that a Helldiver can never stop. You stop and the drill can jam. The fuel burns too quickly. The quota might be missed. You never stop, just shift drills if the friction gets too hot. Caution comes second. Use your inertia, your momentum. That is why we dance. Transfer movement into more movement. Uncle Narol always told me to stop. He was wrong. Blew so many drill bits because of him.
Then again, Narol lived longer than Father, so maybe he has a point.
My Howlers jump with me out the window and we don’t stop when we dive into the black storm. We freefall, piercing the clouds without the use of our gravBoots. Like black rain screaming toward the ground. I’m first. I feel them behind me. My Howlers. The oxygen is thin at first. I hold my breath. My eyeballs nearly freeze in their sockets. Tears trickle out. My body shivers as the cold wind bites me.
We use our gravBoots now to cut across the Citadel. Skirt among the clouds to keep from sight. Villas beneath. Buildings, gardens, and parks. Barracks and statued plazas. A ripWing cuts through the sky. We slide behind a spire and stick there like spiders till our scanners say he’s passed. I shiver amid my armored friends. Then we float down again. A kilometer from the villa. Weed carries Sevro’s present now. Slung around his back, it weighs him down a bit.
I land on the wall that surrounds the villa and separates it from the other compounds where the other notable families hunker in fear of what the night brings.
It’s warmer now that we’re lower to the ground. Howlers land around me, looking like gargoyles on the wall. Darkness claims the villa’s grounds.
“We’re early?” I wonder. No signs of fighting. But the lights are out.
“Or late,” Sevro says, “if they were murdered in their beds.”
“This is to look like a Bellona massacre. The Sovereign won’t want to be implicated.” But what does that even mean? The Bellona would come with Grays, Obsidians, Golds, and despite all their vaunted honor, they would destroy every last woman and child with any means at their disposal. You do not let your foot off the throat of an enemy and remain powerful, as they have, for hundreds of years.
The killing will be silent, though. The Sovereign may control the Citadel, but chaos would bring unwelcome eyes, unwelcome variables, and it would make her look weak. Better to have the act done. Better to say the Bellona did it and damn what anyone thinks. With the Augustans dead, what is the point in mourning them? That’s how Golds think. But if they are alive having escaped assassination … well, that’s another thing entirely.
“Quinn.” I lean close so I can hear her whisper.
“Visual is too clear. If they have optics, they’ll spot us up on the wall.” She points to the roof. “We can make an incursion there. Sweep down level by level.” I hear the worry in her voice.
“We’ll get Roque,” I say. “Promise.” I pat her arm. “Sevro, how long till we have the shuttle?”
“Mustang is ten out.”
I pop my neck and rub the rain between my fingers. “Per aspera ad astra.”
“Through the thorns to the stars.” Sevro snickers. “You fancy little fart. Omnis vir lupus .” Everyone a wolf. The Howlers flash smiles to one another, and we rip away from the wall.
We land on the roof. Silent and dark. Weed stays on the high wall with Mustang’s present squirming in the bag. Predators, we stalk over clay tiles in through a window on the villa’s seventh level, two at a time. The place is a complex. Dozens of rooms. Seven levels. Fountains running throughout. Baths. Basement. Steam rooms. Their infrared is worthless, then. Too much hot water going through pipes. It’s quiet as a crypt in here.
We creep along, checking the bedrooms, flowing like water around one another as we did at the Institute. Sevro and Thistle ghost ahead, scouting. GravBoots deactivated so the hum can’t be heard. There’s not a soul to be seen. Every room empty, beds unmade, including the ArchGovernor’s. The Augustans are not here. So where are they?
They’ve no military armaments besides some armor and razors and a few pulseFists. The bodyguards were wiped out before they even returned to the villa. Augustus and his entourage couldn’t have climbed the walls. Perhaps they flew away on gravBoots? But they would have been spotted. Shot down. We only slipped in because we’re unexpected.
“Captured?” Sevro asks.
No. For the Praetorians tonight, the only good Augustan is a dead one.
Pop .
We all look at one another. A jamField has just gone up. A big one. We’re inside it. Likely, the whole villa complex is inside it. Something’s about to happen. I glance out the window and see a shadow moving across the garden lawn. Three shadows in the rain. I duck and signal Sevro. Praetorians. GhostCloaks. My heart makes my rib cage rattle.
He moves to the window, about to jump out to try to kill them. I pull him back.
“What the hell are you doing?” I whisper.
He scowls. “I want to kill someone.”
“Not yet, dammit. We’re not an army.”
No one on the seventh level. We go down a circular marble stairwell. Their oiled armor creaks softly, echoing down the cavernous stairwell. We can see the marble of the first level more than a hundred feet beneath, but no movement. The first blood is found on the sixth level, seeping from the steam room. Pull the door open, heart throbbing into my throat, ready to see mutilated Golds. It’s a sadder sight.
More than twenty Pinks, Browns, and Violets thought to hide in this room. The Bellona and Praetorians found them. Killed them. It is a queer sight. Each death so clean. Jab wounds to the skull. Just shows how little chance these poor servants had. The Golds put them down like cattle. I search through them frantically, hoping not to find her. Praying. She’s not here—Theodora must be with the rest of them.
A cold rage fills me. I feel it seep into the Howlers.
We find the first dead Gold at the stairwell down to the fifth floor. An old knight of my house. His death was not pretty. We find another dead man farther on by a gravLift. He fell as if defending the lift while others descended.
Out the window, I glimpse the Augustan lancer who mocked my skills with the razor only a day ago. She rushes from the house to the gardens. A shape coalesces out of the darkness. A Gold Praetorian with purple fringe to his black armor chases her down. Two Bellona Obsidians hem her in, forcing her to turn straight into her pursuer. He kills her with one swing. Nothing to be done. Her death is so fast. One moment she is panting, fearing, running. The next, both parts of her fall to the ground.
“These Praetorians don’t play with their food,” Sevro mutters. Quinn looks at me, her eyes tracing the absence of armor or a helmet. She offers her own. I ignore her.
“Darrow, we didn’t come all this way to watch you die of a blow to the head.”
“Get off it,” I say to her. “Roque will write a thousand gory poems if you get so much as a bump on yours.”
“Keep the helmet, Q,” Sevro begs. “If only because I hate poems.”
I let my borrowed razor slither into my palm and move through the level. At the door of each room, my blood races. I expect to find Roque’s corpse. Expect to see Victra’s mangled body.
Sevro holds up a hand at the fourth-floor stairwell and motions me forward. I slip toward him with Quinn and peer down. Dust rises up the circular stairwell. Beyond it, on the bottom-floor landing, shadows move. But there is no noise. Sevro bends and places a piece of debris on the edge of a banister, gesturing me to watch. The Howlers cluster around, staring at it, and I stiffen. Though there is no sound, the piece of debris rocks slightly.
Vibrations in the building.
Before Sevro and the others can stop me, I jump over the banister and rip down the center of the spiral stairwell with ten times the velocity this moon’s gravity would allow. Pop . I enter the domain of a second jamField, and sounds of war rattle over me. Concussive blasts, yelling, burners hissing out bullets, pulse weapons warbling like demented ghosts. The moment before I land, I tweak my gravBoots, jerking myself to a powerful stop. I slap into the marble and swing my razor around my head in a violent loop. Four Praetorian Grays die. Eight thumps hitting the floor. Their ghostCloaks disintegrate like thin window frost against hot breath.
Bodies, strewn across the halls. Rubble. Fires. Grays and Obsidians chase down Augustan Golds. Six Grays overwhelm two Golds with railRifles, magnetic ammunition screaming into aegises till they overload and warp backward, consuming the Golds’ left arms. Rounds slap into the pulseShields that cover their bodies, overloading the circuitry. The Grays slip forward with practiced precision and shoot the Golds point-blank in their helmeted heads. The best armor in the Solar System crumples inward and the man and woman are gone. The Grays turn in my direction, level their rifles, and my Howlers cascade down around me. Their black aegises throb against the vambraces that cover their left forearms. They block the incoming fire. Sevro slips from formation. Quinn follows. Ghosting, they flicker in and out of sight, moving as twin strands of smoke. Somehow they’re among the Grays, then back by my side before the Grays fall.
More weapon fire slams into our formation, nearly taking my naked head off. I duck behind my armored fellows. Terror pumps through me. A Gray pops into the hall and fires a microShot at us. Thirty tiny bombs spread out like a swarm of hornets. Thistle and Rotback blast the swarm apart with their pulseFists. A sheet of blue fire billows through the hall. A second swarm of bombs howls after the first. Quinn shunts off the power to her gravFist and shoots at the swarm of bombs just before they hit. They reverse course, back the way they came, where they slap into the Gray squad and detonate.
We won’t last in here. Nothing will, I decide, when three Bellona Obsidians lope into view, Karnus au Bellona following at their heels. Some of my friends will die on this level if we fight all who come against us. There’s a better way. A smarter way.
“Sevro, make a hole!” I shout, pointing seven stories above us, up the center gap in the stairwell. He shoots his pulseFist upward and chunks of stone rain down around us, suspended by Quinn’s gravFist. Sevro shoots again and water rains down through the hole, swirling in the gravity bubble Quinn created. I stand and yell, “On me!”
We ascend out of the chaos before the Praetorians fall on us. I come to a halt two hundred meters above the villa. Wind whips. I had no plan when I dove down to the first level. I thought only of my friends. Now I know the Howlers and I will be killed if we fight. I let my razor curl placidly around my arm. I instruct the Howlers to do the same and I roar into the darkness.
“AJA!” The Howlers close around me, nervous as we float exposed above the villa. The storm sends sheets of rain down on us. “AJA!”
A horde of Praetorians disengage their ghostCloaks near the hot springs and lagoon, where the infrared is thrown into chaos by the heat of the water. Two Praetorians rocket up from the garden, cutting through pine trees, one a Stained. He flies closer, leveling his ionFist at my head.
“Get that thing out of my gorydamn face, you Stained whelp. Don’t you recognize your betters?” A Praetorian Gold joins him. I don’t recognize the woman. Her serpent helm recoils into her purple-black armor, sleeker than the Obsidians’. Face sharp and ruthless as an axe-head.
“ Varga , heel,” she snaps. The Stained lowers his weapon. His helmet slides into his own Praetorian armor, and I discover Varga is a she. An Obsidian a head shorter than I, with a tribal tattoo consuming her pale face. White hair flutters behind her. More scars on her face than I have on my entire body.
“Ebony dog,” Sevro snaps. “I’ll shoot her if she snarls again.”
“Were you the squad in the stairwell?” The Gold glances over us, unsure of what to make of me or my Howlers. “You killed my Grays.”
“Don’t weep over Grays,” I say. “They raised their hands against me.”
“Why are you here?” She wipes the rain from her face. “The Sovereign confined you to your room for the night. Are you responsible for the power outage?”
“My business is the Sovereign’s.” She can’t afford not to believe me.
She pauses a beat and I realize she has optics in her eyes. She checks a database. “Liar.”
The Stained’s weapon comes back up.
“You know who I am, Praetorian,” I say with as much authority as I can muster. “You also know I’m not on your list to kill. I have immunity.”
“Revoked.”
“So take me to Aja.”
“Aja isn’t here.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
Her optics flicker in her irises as she receives a digital command. “Follow me.”
We land on white stones and follow the Praetorian through the trees toward the lagoon where the hot springs terminate.
“What are you doing?” Sevro whispers in my ear, eyeing Varga. He flips the woman the crux with his middle finger wrapped around the index.
“I’m using your leverage.”
Aja stands in the garden, flanked by Bellona—two Gold, the rest Obsidian. Only the one Stained, Varga. The lagoon breathes tendrils of steam around the Protean Knight’s shoulders. She watches the water impassively, like a child watching a campfire, waiting for a log to burn.
“Darrow?” Aja purrs without looking at me. “You’re not in your room.” She sizes up the Howlers. Recognizes them. “And you killed my men. Fitchner was wrong about you.”
“I have something you’ll want,” I say sharply. “But call off your dogs.”
“They tried to escape before we came, even with their gravBoots confiscated. Foolish attempt. They tried to contact the Julii, but they’ve been bought.”
“Victra?” I ask. She betrayed us.
“Alive. With the rest. She’ll be spared thanks to her mother’s cooperation. Two Augustan ships made an effort to run our blockade in orbit. We shot them down. The Augustans are like cornered badgers.”
“Lions,” I remind her.
She flicks blood off her razor. “Not quite.”
“Are any still alive?” I keep the panic from my voice and glance back at the villa.
“The prizes are.”
I breathe a sigh of relief.
She lets her razor slither into her hand. It goes rigid and she turns my way. Slitted pupils drink in the light. “Your friends are in the lagoon. They hid there because our infrared is blinded by the pool’s heat. A desperate last attempt. The air filtration systems on their helmets will have short-circuited from the EMP. So all they’ll have is the air in their helmets. Not much of it either. They won’t last fifteen minutes. Those who don’t have helmets … perhaps six minutes. Soon they’ll bob up, like apples.” She smiles pleasantly. “I’m saving them for Karnus; he is inside finishing up the diversions. He’s a pleasure to watch, isn’t he?”
Hot rain clatters on our armor. The only sound.
“Why are you here, Andromedus, and not in your room?” Aja plays with her razor, slicing raindrops in half. “The Sovereign was very clear.”
“I have something you’ll want,” I repeat.
“What I want is for Octavia to be obeyed. Fly back to your room, boy, and take a nice shower and fondle the Rose we left in your bed. Drain your anger or whatever this is into her. And leave your oath whole. Do not raise a finger against me. You have killed Grays only. That is easily forgotten, yes? Return, and she will think this only a flight of youth. Stay, and I will add your corpse and those of your Bronzie friends to the heap.”
The Howlers bristle behind me.
“As you killed the servants?” I ask heatedly. “Like goats for slaughter.”
Aja turns back to the pool. “It’s time you left, Reaper.”
“You’re disgusting.” I step closer to her. “All this power, and this is how you use it? Killing families in the middle of the gorydamn night. Base fact is, you’re a disgrace. I hope you remember the pain you brought others when I stand over your corpse.”
She turns on me in all her fury. Razor snapping out. Eyes gleaming. But she can’t touch me. Not now. Not this night.
“Darrow,” Sevro calls with a sudden, odd pleasantness to his voice.
“Yes, Sevro?”
“All that talk about remembering . Aren’t you forgetting something right now?”
“I think he is,” Quinn agrees. “Our wise …”
“… but forgetful Reaper ,” finishes Clown in a very frivolous fashion.
“Hmmm. Apologies, Aja. I forgot what I even came here to tell you.” I stand there looking flummoxed.
Quinn sighs. “The bag.”
“Oh, yes! Thank you for reminding me, Sevro!” I cry theatrically. Aja doesn’t know what the hell to make of this sudden banter. “Tell Weed to get down here.”
Sevro speaks into his com and a moment later Weed disengages his ghostCloak and flies from the wall a kilometer distant. We watch him approach. Pebble whistles a merry tune, earning a scowl from Harpy and a chuckle from Sevro, who picks it up as well. The Praetorians think they are insane. Wolfpelts hanging from their backs. Black, custom armor. Wolf helmets. And no one over two meters except for Quinn and me. It’s like a Violet traveling circus.
“What are you playing at?” Aja demands.
“Has no one ever bartered with you?” I ask, surprised. “More’s the pity.”
Weed lands in front of me and hands me the bag Sevro gave me as a present. Aja asks what is in the bag.
“Order your men in the villa to stop the killing, and I will tell you.”
“I don’t negotiate with boys,” Aja says.
I nudge the bag lightly with my boot, showing Aja that whatever is inside is alive. She frowns and perhaps she begins to understand what it is. She speaks in her com for her men to stand down. “What’s in the gorydamn bag?”
I open it up and pull out the heir to the Morning Throne like he’s a freshly caught rabbit. Lysander’s hands and feet are bound gently, and a silk scarf has been tied over his mouth to keep him from making noise. I untie it.
“Hello, Aja,” he says.
Aja lunges at him. I pull him backward. “Ah! Ah!” I hold my razor to the boy’s neck, letting it curl around, just as the affectionate Oracle wrapped itself around my wrist.
Aja freezes. Her Praetorians watch quietly—black helmets and purple capes making them shadows. The few Bellona take steps forward. Aja motions them back. “Next person that moves, I cut them down. How did they get you, Lysander? Your guards—”
“It was Mustang,” he says. “Came to say hello. Cut open my window and gave me to the Howlers.”
“Have you been hurt?”
“Your turn to speak is at an end, Aja,” I interrupt. “You will let my Housemembers rise from the pool. You will let them board the shuttle I have inbound. You will tell the ripWings and fighters in the sky and space above Luna to let us pass. Or I will have my Howlers kill the boy.”
“You promised to protect the Sovereign,” Aja whispers. “And you do … this ? He is a boy. He is helpless.”
“It’s part of the game,” Lysander says very seriously. “You play it too, Aja. We’re all on the board.”
“You see, he’s less helpless than the servants you slaughtered tonight,” Quinn replies. “Less than those your father burned on Rhea. But he’s one of yours. So of course you care.”
“You would kill a family to ensure the safety of your Sovereign,” I say coldly. “I would kill a child to ensure the safety of my friends. Speak again, and I take his left hand.”
She knows I would kill the boy.
I know I would not. I’m not Karnus. Not Evey or Harmony, despite what I’d have these Golds think. So even if they called my bluff, I would balk. Anyway, the moment I kill him, they kill everyone I know. The murder would be in vain.
This is exactly why I build my reputation as a killer, to leverage in situations like these. If they knew my heart, they’d kill my friends one by one. This is a gamble.
I gamble on pride of two sorts. The first pride is that the Sovereign will not let me kill her only grandson, whom she trained from childhood to take her place when the time comes. The second sort of pride is that deep down, she will believe it no great loss if Augustus and his family escape today. She has the will and the means to hunt us to the ends of the System. Why call my bluff and risk having her grandson die? I know this because of how she killed her father—not outright, but only when she had the support of all his former followers, only when they asked her to rise up against the tall tyrant and rule in his stead.
A woman like her has patience. If the Sovereign told me to do my worst, if she shouted to kill the boy and suffer the consequences, that would be foolhardy. A blunt, brutish demonstration of power, as if saying ‘Take my grandson, you cannot hurt me .’ No, instead she will feign weakness, let me have this victory, and then bring eternal ruin on me and mine. Fair enough. We’ll play that game another day.
A ship roars overhead. A stork—built to deploy men in starShells to drop points, but slower than molasses sliding uphill. The bay doors open two hundred meters up, as I instructed. So long as we have the boy, the ship’s speed doesn’t matter a lick. Of course Mustang planned that.
“We’re going to fetch our people now, Aja. Let your men know they’re to do nothing to impede us.”
Aja just stares at me, watching like a taunted panther in a zoo, eyes silent, horrible, as if willing the bars between us to disappear.
“Sevro, Thistle, check the villa. See if anyone managed to survive.” They shoot away. “Quinn, guard the boy. The rest of you, get the ArchGovernor and his retinue out of the pool.
“You’ll want to call off the ripWings,” I say to Aja. They blink in the darkness kilometers above. “Too much noise and this whole thing will turn into a nightmare for all of us. The Sovereign massacring a house … but the house escapes! What a dastardly testament to her hunger, her impotence. What a debacle that might cause.” I smirk at her. “Why, I fear some houses might rally around the offended house. Some may fear they too will be snuffed out like candles in the night. What would happen to the poor Pax Solaris then?”
Quinn stays with me, fingers twitching toward her weapons as Aja obeys my commands. I keep my hand on the boy as the other Howlers splash into the water and emerge with members of House Augustus clinging to them, soaked and gasping for air—some in formal wear, some in armor, most without helmets. They were sharing oxygen, it seems.
Augustus holds on to Harpy’s back. The Jackal holds on to Clown’s arm. Pliny hangs on to his feet. Where are my friends?
The Howlers deposit the survivors into the bay of the hovering stork high above and return to fetch the rest. Victra is the next they bring out. She’s helmetless and wounded on her neck. But she clings to her razor as though it were the thing carrying her aloft. Her eyes strafe the gathered Praetorians wrathfully, and when they find me, they spark against mine like bits of flint. Her anger falls away for a moment and I see a smile of joy, then it’s gone and she shouts.
“I will remember you all with great joy!” She laughs madly. “Starting with you, Aja au Grimmus. I will make a coat of your hide.”
She disappears into the belly of the craft overhead. Roque is the next one borne aloft. Theodora is with him. I say a quiet prayer of thanks. Quinn touches my shoulder and gives him a wave. His thin face bursts into a smile at the sight of her. He doesn’t even notice me. Then he’s gone too, landing in the back of the ship. Thistle soon joins us from the manor, helping along several survivors, including the Telemanuses and Tactus, who bleeds from a dozen holes in his gold armor. He put up a nasty fight.
“Darrow?” he cries. “You mad bastard!” He sees the Sovereign’s son and cackles gleefully. “Oh, that’s ripe. That’s ripe. I owe you a drink, my goodman.…” His voice fades away as he slips higher in the sky, though he managed to throw his fingers into the crux and wave them in Aja’s direction.
“Tactus,” Lysander whispers. “He’s taller than in holos.”
“That’s the last of them,” Sevro says to me.
“Tell your master we of Mars do not bow so easily,” I say to Aja.
The rain beats down between us. Dripping over her dark face, so her eerie eyes blaze in the night. She breaks the silence I imposed on her.
“That is what the Governor of Rhea said when my Ash Lord came to put down his rebellion.” Her voice does not sound like her own. It’s as though someone speaks through her. “He looked at the thin man I sent with the armada and he laughed and asked why he should bow to me, the bitch patricide of a dead tyrant.”
The Sovereign is speaking in Aja’s ear, through her com, with Aja repeating the words. My blood runs cold.
“The Governor of Rhea sat upon his Ice Throne in his famed Glass Palace and asked one of my servants, ‘Who are you to breathe fear into a man such as I? I who have descended from the family that carved heaven from a place where once there was nothing but a hell of ice and stone. Who are you to make me bow?’ Then he struck the Ash Lord here under the eye with his scepter. ‘Go home to Luna. Go home to the Core. The Outer Reach is for creatures of sterner spines.’ The Governor of Rhea did not bow. Now his moon is ash. His family is ash. He is ash. So run, Darrow au Andromedus. Run home to Mars, for my legions will follow you to the ends of this universe.”
“I hope so,” I say.
“You have one bargaining chip,” the Sovereign, through Aja, reminds me. “My grandson is your safe passage. If he dies, I wipe your ship from the sky. Spend him wisely.”
Why is she telling me something I already know?
“It’s time to go, Darrow.” Quinn leans into my shoulder. She sets a hand on my low back, as if to remind me I am not alone. I nod to her. She covers my retreat as I rise upward with the boy, razor slithering around his neck.
Quinn eyes the Praetorians warily and rises to follow. I have one bargaining chip.
What did the Sovereign mean by that? Was she reminding me that I could spend it only once? Only kill Lysander if my back was to the wall? Then I see why as Aja looks at Quinn rising from the ground as a cat looks at a mouse.
“Aja, no!” Lysander yells.
“Quinn!” I shout.
In a flash, Aja lunges forward, quicker than any cat ever born. She grabs Quinn’s hair. Frantically, Quinn brings her razor around to fend the giant woman off. But she’s too slow. Aja slams her head into the ground with her left hand. Punches her temple. Armored fist on bone. Four times before I can even blink. Quinn’s legs kick and twitch and she curls inward like a dying spider, contorting from seizures. Aja backs away, watching me with a smile.