I hug Dancer so hard his back cracks. He taps me in panic. I apologize and separate, feeling large as a Telemanus next to him. Outside the garage-turned-makeshift-office, the Sons of Ares warehouse rattles with industry. They brought me in through the side door and had me wait for Dancer among old engines and rusted ailerons.
Dancer pulls back from me and looks up, rusty eyes glittering with tears. Startling to think that I once considered him a handsome man. He’s in his forties; old for a Red. Hair shot with gray. Face creased by age and hardship. His right arm still hangs limp. His foot still drags. And his smile still stretches wide enough, baring uneven, imperfect teeth.
“My boy,” he says, gripping my shoulder with his left hand. It’s stronger than all the rest of him put together. He smells like tobacco. Nails are yellow. “My bloodydamn beautiful little bastard of a boy. You look so bloody grand!” He laughs and laughs again, shaking his head. “There are no words. I’m sorry I couldn’t reach you. Sorry I let Harmony use you like that. There are so many things, Darrow.”
“Stop.” I clap the back of his neck. “We’re brothers. No need for apologies. We’re bound by blood and past. But please, please don’t let it happen again.” He nods. “How is my family, do you know?”
“Alive,” he says. “Still in the mines. I know. I know. But that’s the safest place for them with this war abound. No one wants to blow up Mars’s industry. Register?”
He waves me to a seat. “Don’t know many Golds, but that Sevro’s a nasty little shit. When I delivered his father’s instructions to him out on the Rim, I thought he was going to cut me from gob to pucker.” He lights a burner, winks at me. “Never met anyone like him.”
“He’s loyal as they come,” I say. “Like you.”
“No! I mean he can swear better than any bloodydamn Red.”
“Sevro swears?” I smile. “Guess you get used to it. Though he does like saying ‘bloody’ a hell of a lot now.”
“It’s a fine word. Rolls off the tongue. Done some research.” He puffs up his chest. “Been with us since the first ancestors, you know. The first Golds, the ones with normal eyes and gold uniforms, took most of the early recruits from the poor bastards from the Irish isles after the radiation from London turned the isles into a wasteland. The Golds took the highly skilled migratory workforce and recruited them to be the first Pioneers. Their slang just stuck around, jumbled up a bit. History’s fascinating, isn’t she?”
“Harmony’s been making up her own history,” I say.
“That’s right. I’m dead!” He shakes his head and lights another burner, flicking the other onto the floor. I pick it up and put it in the wastebasket. “She went her own way about a year after you left. We discovered several Senators were going to be vacationing on the Gorgon Sea. So we showed up to bug their villa to see if we couldn’t get any secrets. We didn’t. Just lots of … depraved shit. And that was that, we thought. But not for Harmony. On the last night, she walked in and killed the Senators and their guests. Then she left us.”
“So there was never a lurcher squad that raided your headquarters?”
He shakes his head. “They came because of her. Killed about forty Sons. But she’d already left for Luna. Ares saved us. Came in hard with a mixed pack of Obsidians and Grays. Laid waste to those lurchers, then slipped away before reinforcements came. It’s lucky he killed them all. No way they wouldn’t know he was a Gold after that. Had our first face-to-face that day. Man’s bloodydamn scary.”
“Not the word I’d choose.” Though maybe it’s accurate considering how well he fooled me. “It doesn’t bother you that he’s a Gold?”
“It doesn’t bother him that we’re Reds. Ares would die for the cause, Darrow. Shit. He started it. You know why he did?”
I shake my head.
“It’s his story.” Dancer traces the pitviper bites on his neck. “A man has the right to tell his own story. But his isn’t a happy one. Sad as yours. Sad as mine. Strip a man of what he loves, and what is left? Just hate. Just anger. But he was the first to know there could be something more. He found me. He found you. Who the bloodydamn are we to question him?”
The door opens suddenly. We both turn and Mickey limps in. He looks half dead, thin as a reed, paler than before. Without a word, he hobbles over to me and kisses me full on the mouth, his affection desperate and true. Then he starts weeping like a child. Dancer and I don’t know what to do, so I just wrap my arms around him and let him cry. He whispers “Thank you” to me a dozen times.
What did they do to him? Never mind. I know the things the Grays are trained in to get information. He says he told them nothing. Still, I have to discover what the Jackal learned from this. What deductions he’s made from finding Mickey’s lab.
I look over Mickey’s head to see Fitchner standing there, smiling sadly. After a long moment, Mickey pulls back. “I tried to warn you, when you came to us on Luna,” he says apologetically. “Wanted to say to run. But she would have killed me if I said any more. I was afraid you would believe her over me.”
“I would have believed you, Mickey.”
“You would have?” He sniffles. “I knew you’d come for me. I said my darling boy was too kind to forget about Mickey, but she spat on me. Said I was a slaver.” He hangs his head, sniffing and so vulnerable, drained and nearly mad from what must have been done to him in the Jackal’s torture chambers. “She was right. I am. I am wicked. I hurt the girls and boys. I sold them even when I loved them. Of course she was right. Why would you come? Why would you do anything for wicked little Mickey?”
“Because you’re my friend.” I bring his hands to my lips, kissing them gently as he looks up at me with hopeful eyes. “Weird as you are, wicked as you were. I know you want to be better. You want to live for more. We all do. And there’s not a place they could take one of my friends that I would ever abandon them.”
It feels good to speak the truth.
“Thank you, my prince,” he says quietly. He draws himself up after that, strong enough to turn and walk out of the office. Fitchner closes the door.
“Well, that was emotional.”
I nod. This is the man I’d rather be. Not constantly on guard. Not lying through my teeth. I suppose I didn’t even know how much affection I felt for Mickey till now. It’s not because he helped make me. It’s that he’s always loved me so much. Even if it was a strange sort of love, it was real. And I do believe he wants to be a man he thinks I would respect. Just like I want to be a man Eo and Mustang would respect. And that’s the good sort of love.
“We need to talk, Fitchner,” I say. We didn’t have a chance earlier. Sevro came to me with Dancer’s plan—call a meeting, attach the Sons to my ship, let them infiltrate the building. All I did was suggest Sun-hwa as the scapegoat, and let them know Victra was not to be harmed.
“I’ll leave you two to it,” Dancer says, pushing back his metal chair.
“No, I want you to stay,” I say. “I’ve too many secrets from too many people. I won’t have any more between the three of us.”
“Learn to count, shithead,” Sevro says, coming around a rusted engine block. The cheap metal door to the outside slams behind him. Smells like autumn even in Agea’s oil-stained manufacturing district. He hops onto the rusted chassis of an old fighter and sits with his legs dangling. “Hey, look, it’s all pricks for once. Let’s tell sexist jokes.”
Chuckling, I turn to Fitchner. “So you’re Ares.”
“Man comes out of a coma and he’s a genius!” Fitchner barks. He claps his hands, but his eyes stay deadly serious. “Most call me Bronzie. Students call me Proctor. Some call me Rage Knight. The Sovereign calls me traitor. My son calls me shithead.…”
“You are a shithead,” Sevro chimes in.
“… My wife called me Fitchner. But the Golds made me Ares.”
Before now I would not know what that meant. He is Gold. How could the Golds do anything to him? But now I’ve peeked behind the curtain. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were from the start?”
“And put my life in the hands of a teenager’s acting ability?” he cackles. “I think not. If you were found out and they tortured you … bad news. I had alternate plans, other irons in the fire. You just happened to be my favorite. But we mustn’t be biased.”
“Who was your wife?” I ask, already suspecting the answer.
“Full or short story?” he asks.
“Full.”
“I was liaising for a terraforming company on Triton,” he begins gruffly. “I didn’t have a glamorous job like you. No razors. No armor. Just construction management. Contract was leased by a Silver. I was running one of the last Lovelock Engines on their north pole when an eruption from one of that moon’s damn geysers caused an earthquake. Cracked the ice crust. Spilled the whole engine into the subterranean sea. Three thousand souls drowned.
“They fished me out of the sea and I spent the next months recovering in the arctic hospital. I was in the highColor wing. We had the good food. Better showers. Newer beds. But the lowColors had the window that looked at the northern lights. And she had the bed beside that window.”
He looks up at Sevro. “She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. And she was pretty to look at too. She lost a leg in the accident. And they weren’t going to give her a new one. They could. It’s simple bionics. Not cost-effective, said the Coppers. Shittiest Color ever made, I swear on—”
Sevro clears his throat. “We know.”
Fitchner throws a piece of trash at Sevro and continues. “When I left, I took her with me. I’d saved up money enough to leave Triton. Couldn’t live in the Core. Too expensive. So I chose Mars. We lived just outside New Thebes for a year. We wanted a child more than anything. But our DNA wasn’t compatible. So we went to a Carver to see if we couldn’t make some magic. We did. Cost me almost everything I owned, but nine months later, this little Goblin squirmed out.”
Sevro waves from his perch as he examines the trash to see if it isn’t edible.
“Two years later, the Board of Quality Control busted the Carver for some work he did on some Obsidian gladiator and he ratted us out, fastlike, for a reduced sentence. They came to our home when I was away with Sevro. Found my wife, took her in for questioning. Their doctors saw her fallopian tubes had been modified so that she would be compatible to sire a Gold child. Then they disposed of her. Says so right in the records: ‘disposed.’ Gassed her with achlys-9, put her in an oven, pumped her ash into the sea. They didn’t even give her a name, just a number. Not because she was a thief or a murderer or had violated any man’s or woman’s rights, but because she was a Red who dared love a Gold. My selfish love killed her.
“It wasn’t like your wife, Darrow. I didn’t watch mine die. I didn’t see Golds come into my world and ruin it. Instead I felt the coldness of the system swallow the only thing I lived for. A Copper pressing buttons, filling out a spreadsheet. A Brown twisting a knob to release gas. They killed my wife. But they won’t ever think so. She’s not a memory in their mind. She’s a statistic. It’s as if she never existed. Some ghost I loved but no one else ever saw. That’s what Society does—spread the blame so there is no villain, so it’s futile to even begin to find a villain, to find justice. It’s just machinery. Processes. And it rumbles on, inexorable till a whole generation rises that will throw themselves on the gears.”
“What was her name?”
“Her name? Why does it matter?” he asks warily.
“Because I want to remember her.”
“Bryn,” Sevro says from above. “My mother’s name was Bryn. She was twenty-two when they killed her.” Only a year older than I am now.
“Bryn,” I repeat the word and see Fitchner rock slightly on his feet. A shortness of breath.
“So you’re half Red,” I say to Sevro.
Sevro nods. “Found out couple days ago. Weird as shit, righto?”
“Weird as shit. You’ll make a good Ruster.”
“I like to think I’m an endangered species.”
Dancer rolls a match through his fingers. “We all are.”
“You knew about Titus,” I say to Fitchner.
“But Dancer didn’t. Don’t blame him for that. I thought you’d be brothers at the Institute. A natural affection for your own race. But he went dark, and there was no way to reel him in. I met with him—jammer, ghostCloak—like I met with you. But his mind broke under the strain. I didn’t want to see you break.”
“I did break.” I look over at Sevro, Dancer. “I just had friends to piece me back together. Why didn’t you tell Titus and me about each other?”
“Then his mistakes would have been yours and yours would have been his. In a storm, you don’t tie two boats together. They’ll drag each other down.” He clears his throat.
“I always knew a Gold couldn’t lead this rebellion. It has to be from the bottom up, boyo. Red is about family. More than any other Color, it is about love amid all the horror of our world. If Red rises, they have a chance to bind the worlds together. MidColors won’t. Pinks, Browns, can’t. Obsidians have failed before. And if they succeeded alone, they’d break the worlds instead of freeing them.”
“So what’s the plan?” I ask. “I squabbed up your position next to the Sovereign.”
“You’re hard to manipulate, Darrow, so I’ll just cut to it. Augustus is going to adopt you. You’re not surprised.…”
“It would make sense. He wants to tie my fate to his family. Probably make me marry Mustang. It’ll fracture my alliance with the Jackal if I become an heir, though.”
“Does the Jackal care about that?” Sevro asks. “Seems like he’s abandoned hope of ever gaining approval. Bloody bastard’s building his own empire.”
“I’ll have to see,” I say.
Fitchner continues. “Dispose of the Jackal or make him part of the plan, it doesn’t matter. Augustus will adopt you as his heir. And he will use you as a Praetor in his armada. And if you defeat the Sovereign, he won’t settle for being King of Mars. He’ll want to be Sovereign himself. Help him be. And a year into his reign, Sevro will kill him and pin it on a rival, maybe the Jackal.…”
My turn to rock on my feet.
“You want me to inherit the empire,” I guess. “The entire Society.”
I gawk at him. At Dancer. How can they look so serious?
“Yes,” Fitchner says. “After he dies, all will look to the strongest. Be the strongest. Win the game of succession and you can be Sovereign just as you were Primus. Just as you are Praetor. It’s all games. Except this time we’re helping you cheat. We will feed you information, guard you against assassination attempts. With me on your side, you will have a spy network even the Jackal and Sovereign cannot rival. We will bribe who we need to bribe and kill who we need to kill.”
I sit reflectively looking at my hands. “I thought the lies were nearly over. I want to declare what I am. I want to declare war.”
“We can’t yet. You know that.”
I do, but I don’t want to leave these people. “I won’t be in the dark again. We will communicate. We will plan. No more gray areas. Do you understand? I can’t be alone like before.”
“Say yes, Fitchner,” Sevro says. “Or I’m not going either.”
“We’ll communicate every day, if you need. I can’t come with you. There’s a ghost war being fought that I have to manage. But in my stead, I’ll send some of my best agents. You’ll have a cabal you can trust. Spies. Assassins. Courtesans. Hackers. All with perfect covers. All willing to die to break the chains. You are no longer alone.”
Relief fills me. But there’s something I know I can’t do. “I have to go back.”
“Yes. They’ll be wondering where you are,” Fitchner agrees.
“No.” I say. “I have to go home.”
“Home?” Dancer asks. “To Lykos?”
“Why?” Fitchner asks. “What’s left for you there?”
“ My family . It’s been four years. I need to see them before this begins.” I look each man in the eyes, each so scarred and so wounded in his own way. “You have to understand that. Things are about to break apart in ways we can’t predict. We pretend we know what we’re doing, pushing these Golds to war. Planning our own. Like we can control it, but we can’t. We’re just mortals opening Pandora’s box. And before everything turns upside down, I need to remember what I’m fighting for. I need to know it’s worth it.”
“You want their blessing,” Dancer says. “Her blessing.” He knows my heart better than Fitchner. If I’m to let Augustus adopt me, then I must go home first.
“You can’t tell them what you are. They won’t understand.” Fitchner steps forward, suddenly cautious of my temper. “You know that.”
“How much easier would this have all been if you and I had conspired the whole way through?” I say. “Lies breed lies. We have to trust.” I look at Sevro. “I’m taking her to Lykos.”
“Her?” Dancer asks.
“Mustang,” Sevro murmurs.
“No,” Fitchner almost yells. “Absolutely not. No. It’s not worth the risk. You’re set up now. She’s in love with you! Don’t lose that leverage because of a guilty conscience.”
“And what if I love her too?”
“Shit,” Fitchner curses. “Shit. Shit. Shit. You’re serious? I thought this was part of your gorydamn game. Shit. Boyo, you’ll ruin everything. Gorydamn idiot. Shit.”
“This is everything,” I say. “She loves me. I won’t use her anymore. I won’t leverage her. If I can’t trust her, Gold can’t change, and Titus and Harmony were right. Hell, the Society is right. You and I know that it’s not about our Color; it’s about our hearts. Now let’s put that to the test.”
“And if you’re wrong? If she rejects you for them?”
I don’t have an answer.
Sevro hops down from his perch. “Then I put a bullet in her head.”