There’s no time to mourn. My force decimated, we must divide still further. My army outside the city hurls itself at impregnable walls, expecting help from the inside. They’ve received none. My Legates will be hailing my signal, wondering if I have died. Such a rumor could lose the battle.
I send Ragnar with the remnants of the Obsidians to open one of the wall’s gates for my Legates who wait for us with thousands of Grays and Obsidians in reserve.
“I give you no Golds,” I tell Ragnar. “Do you understand what that means?”
“I do.”
“This can be a beginning,” I say quietly. I bend, picking a discarded razor from the sucking mud. “It is a man’s duty to choose his own destiny. Choose yours.” I extend the razor to him.
Ragnar looks back to the Obsidians. Their armor is battered from extricating them from the suits. And they’re caked in mud. Smaller than he. Some lithe and quiet. Others huge and shifting foot to foot with eagerness. All with those black eyes and white hair. They arm themselves with weapons taken from the Grays and Obsidian I killed. Hardly enough to go around, and they’ll be little use if they run into Golds.
Ragnar chooses. He extends a hand. Howlers prepare themselves behind me, Thistle still eyeing him evilly. “I choose to follow you,” he says. “And I choose to lead them.”
I place the razor in his hand.
“Darrow!” Thistle gasps. “What are you doing?”
“Shut up,” Sevro snaps.
“He can’t do that!” Thistle stomps forward and tries to rip the razor out of Ragnar’s hand. He doesn’t let go. “Give it up. Slave . Give me the blade.” She pulls her own razor out. “Give me the blade or I’ll cut away the hand that holds it.”
“Then I will cut you down, Thistle,” Sevro sneers.
“Sevro?” Thistle turns back to him, eyes wide. She looks at me, at the other Howlers who stand quiet, unsure of what just happened. “Have you gone mad? It’s not his right. It’s ours. He doesn’t …”
“Deserve it?” Sevro asks. “Who are you to decide that?”
“I’m a Gold!” she shrieks. “Clown, Pebble …”
Pebble remains silent. Clown tilts his head. “Darrow, what is this?”
“It’s my army,” I say. “You remember the Institute. You remember how I bleed for those who follow me. How I do not take the allegiance of slaves. Why now are you surprised by this? Because it is real?”
“It’s a slippery slope, is all.” Clown looks at the war around us. “Even here.”
“You’re right. It is.” I bend and find another razor cast in the mud. I toss this one to another of the Obsidians, a nasty-looking woman half my size. She holds it like it’s a snake, glancing up at me in fear. They are raised believing we are gods. To be given Thor’s hammer … how would I hold it? Sevro walks through the corpses and finds several more. He tosses these to the Obsidians.
“Don’t cut yourselves,” he says.
“I’m counting on you. Go,” I tell them. They disappear, sprinting into the swelling darkness toward the back side of the colossal wall. I turn to the Howlers. “Is there a problem?” They all shake their heads quickly, except Thistle.
“Thistle?” Sevro asks.
Clown nudges her. And grudgingly she shakes her head. “No problem.”
There is. She will not follow me after this. Already I feel my friends turning from me. And they know not even a fraction of the truth. That is a problem for another day.
We must move fast. But we only have one pair of functional gravBoots among us. I give those to Sevro. We try to see if he can lift us like I lifted the Howlers on Olympus, but as we load onto the boots, they sputter and spark. Only able to carry his weight. Damaged somehow in the fighting and the rescue. Bloodydamn .
So it will be on foot. And we cannot be slowed.
I point to the recoilPlate of those lucky enough to have it after the starShell amputations. “Armor off.”
“What?” Thistle sputters.
“Armor. Off. Except scarabSkin.”
“Unarmored against Praetorians?” Thistle howls. “Do you want us all to die?”
“We need to move fast. If the shield goes down before we get to the Citadel, the Sovereign will slip away. If we do not capture her, she will have a chance to regroup. She will join her Ash Lord. She will summon all of the Society, and they will come here with ten times our number to crush us. We’ll win the battle, lose the war.”
“But if we take her …,” Sevro growls, coming to my side.
“We’re talking about the Sovereign,” Clown says. “She’ll have Praetorian Olympic Knights …”
“And?” Sevro asks. “We have us.”
“Six of us.” Clown shrugs sheepishly when we stare at him. “I just thought someone should point it out.”
“We have fifteen kilometers to cover on foot,” I say. They nod. “My pace.” Then they exchange worried looks and start taking off their armor. “If you fall behind, find a place to hide.” One-third Earth grav. Bodies in prime shape. This will still be hard. Especially with my arm savaged by my own razor.
Sevro saddles up to me as the Howlers strip away their armor. I can hear their terror in the clinking of weapons and armor moved by shaking hands, see it in the frenzied way they then rub mud on their faces to blacken their aspects.
“They’ve been with you from the beginning, Darrow.” Sevro looks around the stormy park, at the distant Citadel and blaze of passing ships. “We’re already half the number that took you from Luna. You might have replaced Pax with Ragnar, but you can’t replace them. Or me.”
“I thought you were with me.”
“I’m your conscience. I follow your ass everywhere. So don’t be a shithead.”
“Registers. On me!” I shout.
Armor shed, we set off silently. Only our razors and scarabSkin with us. Wearing rubber-soled undershoes instead of gravBoots. We go along the river, leaving the wall behind. Sprinting through acres of grassy parks and woods that separate the wall from the city as mechanized war rages in the distance. Ships roar past, making the tree branches shudder and leaves fall. Ground trams flicker far to our right, shuttling soldiers to the front. Explosions plume in the distance. Clouds consume the sky beyond the great shield that overlaps the city. Explosions flash inside the clouds.
Mustang will be nearing the shield generators now, if she’s alive.
It is a ragged pace, covering fifteen kilometers at a sprint. My side stabs with pain. Muscles hunger for oxygen. And my right arm aches from the bloody bullet wound in my bicep and the lacerations that bleed along forearm and wrist. I took half a pack of stims, so I can use the arm. The pain doesn’t blind. It focuses. Keeps me from thinking of the dead.
When we reach the edge of the woods, we do not stop to rest, but sprint onto the commercial district’s paved streets, cutting through buildings that tower over a kilometer up into the sky. We run through deserted lowDistricts, the bazaar where winding corridors lead us through rough streets and graffiti-stained walls. The occasional Brown or Pink or Red will scuttle out of our way or peer at us through windows, from alleys. Even here, in the center of their reign, I see the graffiti of Eo’s death. Her hair is ablaze like the wounded fighters that streak across the sky beyond Agea’s transparent shields. Someone pukes behind me. They don’t stop. The reek of bile travels with us.
Sevro flies back to us and lands beside me. “Platoon of Grays ahead. Go south one block, then cut back to avoid.” Then he’s gone again. We follow his instructions.
Suddenly there’s movement in the sky and we slow to a jog to watch. Pebble takes the opportunity to collapse onto the pavement, chest heaving. High above, but still beneath the shield, a horde of shuttles ferry soldiers from the smaller engagement on the southern wall, where Lorn fights, toward the northern wall where Ragnar and his Obsidians have gone. Dozens of shuttles full of reserves depart their dock in the hangars and ports that lace the seven-kilometer-high rock walls of the Valles Marineris to the east and west. Most of the barracks are there, as are the factories where highReds slave away making armaments and commercial consumer goods. We hide from the craft. Something has happened at the north wall. We take off again. Pebble moans. Thistle gets her up, keeps her in gear.
Sevro rejoins us minutes later, left arm hanging limp at his side. I eye it. He ignores my concern. “Ragnar opened the gorydamn gates.” His face splits into a smile. “Twelve of them in the wall’s face. Our boys are pouring in. And …” He stands there grinning.
“And what?”
“And Ragnar killed the Wind Knight and almost cut down Cassius.”
“An Olympic?” Clown gasps.
“Cut him down in front of the entire army. The Obsidians in the army are going absolutely manic.”
Then Sevro is off and we push on. A squad of Gray policemen waylay us. We take cover as their gunfire pocks the sidewalks, and then divert to an alleyway to avoid them.
Four kilometers until we reach our destination.
Coughing and gasping, we stumble into the exterior of the Citadel’s grounds. We hide in the trees there like some ragged pack of castaway demons. Through the thin copse of woods and past a high wall, the Citadel stands, a network of spires. Not golden, but white laced with red and still decorated with the lion statues of Augustus, though Bellona blue-and-silver banners flap in the breeze overtop a lion weathervane. Their silver eagle seems so proud till Sevro waves down to us from the weathervane and cuts one of the banners free. They didn’t expect anyone to penetrate this far.
Aside from its beauty, the Citadel is also a fortress. One I don’t want to tangle with. We’d go room to room and, assuming it is not completely empty of soldiers, be overwhelmed, pinned to its expensive red oak walls and killed on its marble floors. It is not shielded, but a network of bunkers lie far beneath it. I was worried that is where the Sovereign would be kept. If she stayed there, this would turn into a siege. It would be days before we dig her out, if we could at all. So I give her a path of escape. It all falls on Mustang’s shoulders: the shield must go down at the proper time. Flush her out.
A decorative wall, one that’d usually be nothing more than a hopskip in gravBoots, bars us from the silent Citadel grounds. All around us is park. Trees. Fountains. White squares where Golds and Silvers would have afternoon tea, now empty. So silent here at the eye of the storm. Sevro flies down to join me.
“Can you lift us over the wall?” I ask.
“Things are almost outta juice,” he grumbles. “Let’s try.” We hug one another and he lifts me into the air, wincing and favoring his left arm. The boots sputter and shiver out sparks. Twice we dip down. Then we’re atop the wall. I set down and Sevro dips down again to pick up the next Howler. Moments later, his head appears at the top of the wall for a moment, then vanishes as his gravBoots spark and whine. With one last mechanical pop, the boots give out and Sevro and the Howler fall the ten meters to the ground.
A great boom thunders from across the city. Smoke rises distantly.
Mustang did it.
Above, the translucent shield that separated this world from the world of ships fails. It wobbles and, distorting the fires in the city and the lightning above like a corrupted mirror, shatters into prismatic mist. Or one-eighth of it shatters; a flood of pent-up water falls down on that section of the city in great gray sheets.
“It didn’t work!” Pebble cries from the other side of the wall.
But it did. One by one, the nexuses that cast the shield overload. It’s a chain reaction as great sheets of water from the storm finally fall on Agea. Roque, if he’s winning, will launch the reinforcements. The city is as good as taken. And even now, the Sovereign will be extracted from the bunkers by her bodyguards to make an escape from the lost planet. But the shuttle pads are still two kilometers on the other side of the Citadel grounds. This was all supposed to be different. I should be in my armor, a hundred Obsidians behind me, a dozen of my best Golds. Instead, I lead a pack of my friends into a meatgrinder. I need to change the paradigm, but I won’t risk them. I glance down the wall at Sevro, who immediately recognizes the look in my eyes.
“No, Darrow,” he says. “Think of your mission!” He’s begging me, jumping and clawing at the wall as I turn away. “Don’t do it, Darrow. Wait! They’ll kill you!”
I drop over the other side of the wall into the Citadel’s gardens.
Some men have threads of life so strong that they fray and snap those around them. Enough friends have paid for my war. This one’s on me.
“DARROW!” he screams, horrible, desperate. “STOP!”
I run faster than I have in all my life. The Sovereign will not escape me. I did all this to catch her. Take her, break the Society. Take her, and the stage is set. We will rise. We can win. I jump rows of shrubbery, sprint around fountains, tear through rosebushes. Blood leaks down my arm. I do not feel my body. I fly over the earth. SlingBlade in hand.
There .
I round a corner of the Citadel. Past a garden of roses lies a courtyard of white scored black by the engines of personal yachts. Four lonely ships sit in a landing zone that can hold a hundred. All the shuttles are black with a giant gold crescent on their broad chassis, but the thickest of them, one with larger engines and a reinforced hull, is the Sovereign’s. The others are decoys, nearly as thick, nearly as armored. In the air, they are indistinguishable.
I’ve been seen on sensors, no doubt. Gray lurchers are coming for me. Obsidian bodyguards have been loosed from some hidden barracks to kill me. They’ll only catch me if I stop. And even as I examine the landing pad, I do not break my stride. Oranges bustle around the black shuttles, prepping them to launch. I’m not too late. But the door from the Citadel is far closer than I to the ship.
They come out in a rush. I don’t see her. Just purple capes swirling in the rain and wind. They duck their heads into the gale, look upward at the sky where Iron Rain entry trails glow behind the storm, making the dark clouds look like steel heating slowly in the forge. My Titans come.
The Praetorians hurry, running up a long ramp into the shuttle’s belly with the Sovereign. I catch her face as she ducks into the ship’s belly. I see Aja among her entourage. And Karnus. And Fitchner, that ugly, traitorous son of a bitch. I run faster. Legs numb with exhaustion. Lungs aching. All I am, I put into this moment. My life in the mines, the hours suffering with Harmony, the horrors at the Institute. All the love I’ve earned and lost and still wish to live for, I let burn in me.
Half the entourage waits on the pavement, left behind to watch the ship as its lights glow and its engines prime. The decoys mimic its motions. A Bellona Gold turns as I near. His eyes flash wide and I slash him at the run as he lets out a half scream. More turn—women, men, warriors, Politicos, Golds and Silvers I recognize from my days at Augustus’s side.
Their realization of my presence comes in waves. The enemy is supposed to be at the gates, not among them, so they flinch in seeing me. And when they gather their wits, I’m already past their armored hands. I dodge a Gray’s outstretched grip, snag a small munitions pouch from his waist. I lash backward, hitting flesh.
Shouts. Fumbling for razors. Bullets, pulse blasts, snap past my head. The shuttle’s ramp retracts as it begins to rise.
I scream and jump with all the might I’ve ever had. The hand of my injured right arm grips the ramp’s edge. My eyes bug from my head with the strain and pain in my fingers. The ship continues to rise. The roar of the engines fills me, rattling my heart against my ribs. The ramp continues to close. I grunt desperately and jerk myself upward, awkward at the odd angle, but possible in the low gravity. I roll forward into the bay and onto my knees and pant, slingBlade against the floor. The sound of the engines slips away as the door shuts and pressurizes. All I hear is my ragged breath and the rumble of the deadly shuttle as it makes its escape.
I look up.