I’ve never felt fear like this.
Lykos is dark at night. Lights all turned down so the Reds don’t go mad from eternal day. Somewhere, the nightshifts weave silks, mine soil. But here in this wide tunnel, there is no motion, no sound except the murmur of HCs showing old terraforming holos and the hum of distant machines. It is cool here, yet I sweat.
Mustang is silent beside me. She has not spoken since we descended in our gravBoots to the Common’s floor, ghostCloaks making us nearly invisible to the lingering drunks slumped over tables and sleeping soundly on the gallows steps. I hear the tension in her silence and wonder what she thinks.
My heart runs wild in my chest, so loud Mustang has to hear it as we enter Lambda Township, where I grew from boy to man. The place is smaller. The ceiling lower. Rope bridges and pulley systems like children’s toys. The HC that once glowed with Octavia au Lune’s face is an ancient relic, pixels missing. Mustang peers around, cloak deactivated. Her eyes dance from bridge to bridge to home like she’s seeing something wonderful. It didn’t occur to me a Gold would ever find interest in a simple place like this.
I climb the stone steps to the bridge that leads to my old home just like I did as a boy. Only, my limbs are too large now. I forgot I had gravBoots. Mustang doesn’t use hers either. She follows behind and dusts off her hands as she makes the landing where the thin metal door to my old family home has been cut into the wall.
“Darrow,” she says so quietly, “how do you know where you’re going?”
My hands tremble.
“You told me to let you in.” I look down at her.
“I did, but …”
“How far do you want to go?”
I know she feels what’s coming. I wonder how long she’s felt it. The strangeness of me. The odd mannerisms. The distant soul.
She looks at her hands, stained red from the dust of the stone stairs. “All the way.”
I hand her a holoCube. “If you mean that, press play, and come in when you’ve finished watching. If you leave, I understand.”
“Darrow …”
I kiss her one last time, hard. She clutches at my hair, sensing that when we part, something will be different. I find myself pulling back. My hand cups her jaw. Her eyes, closed, begin to flutter open as I step away and turn to the door.
I push it open.
I have to duck to enter. The home is cramped. Quiet. The first floor is the same as I remember. The small metal table has not changed. Nor have the plastic chairs, the small sink, the drying clay dishes, or Mother’s prized teakettle that heats on the stove. A new rug covers the floor. It’s the work of a novice. Different boots sit where Father used to place his at the base of the stairs, where I used to set mine. Wait. Those are mine. But tattered and worn more than they’d been in my day. Were my feet really so small?
Silence guards the house. All sleep except her.
The teakettle hisses as the water reaches a boil. Soon it begins its breathy murmur. Feet scrape over the stone stairs. I almost run out of the room. But terror roots me to the spot as she comes closer. Closer till she’s in the room with me, pausing at that last stair, foot suspended, forgotten. Her eyes find mine. They never leave. Never look at the rest of my Golden form. I panic as she says nothing. A breath. Three. Ten. She doesn’t know me. I’m a killer in her house. I shouldn’t have come here. She doesn’t recognize me. I’m a lost Gold poking his head in out of curiosity. I can leave. Run away now. My mother never has to know what her son has become.
Then she finishes her step and comes toward me. Gliding. It’s been four years. She looks twenty older. Lips thin, skin loose and webbed with lines, hair worked through with sooty gray, hands tough as oak and gnarled as ginger roots. When her right hand reaches for my face, I have to kneel. Her eyes still have not left mine. Now they let out tears. The teakettle screams on the stove. She brings her other hand to my face, but it is unable to open and touch like the other. It remains twisted and clenched, like my heart.
“It’s you,” she says softly, as though I will disappear like a night vision if she says the word too loudly. “It’s you.” Her voice is different, slurred.
“You know me?” I manage desperately.
“How could I not?” Her smile is twisted, left eyelid sluggish. Life has been less kind to her than to me. She’s had a stroke. It breaks me to see her body fail her. To know I wasn’t here for her. To know her heart was broken. “I would know you … anywhere.” She kisses my forehead. “My boy. You’re my Darrow.”
The tears leave warm paths down my cheeks. I let them linger.
“Mother.”
Still on my knees, I throw my arms around her and let the silent tears come. We say nothing for the longest time. Her scent is of grease, rust, and the musty tang of haemanthus. Her lips kiss my hair as they used to. Her hands scratch my back as though she remembers it just as broad as it is now, just as strong.
“I have to take the kettle off,” she says. “Before someone wakes and sees you like …”
“Of course.”
“You have to let go of me.”
“Sorry.” I do, laughing at myself.
“How …?” she asks me, standing there looking at the Sigils on my hands, shaking her head. “How could this be? You … your accent. Everything.”
“I was carved. Uncle Narol saved me. I can explain.”
She shakes her head, trembling so slightly she must think I can’t see it. The kettle shrieks louder. “Take a seat.” She turns her back to me and takes the kettle off the stove. She sets out another mug. One from the high shelf. I remember it was my father’s. Dust covers the molded clay. She pauses, saying nothing as she cradles it close, slipping into a moment not meant for me, where she remembers those mornings when they would ready for the day together. With a long breath, she drops the loose-leaf tea into the pot and pours hot water after. “Would you like anything else? We have those biscuits you liked.”
“No, thank you.”
“And I took my portion from the feast tonight. It’s delicate Gold food. Did you do that?”
“I’m not a Gold.”
“There are beans too. Fresh from Leora’s garden. You remember her?”
I spare a look at my datapad. Mustang is gone, heading back to the ship after she watched the holoCube. I feared this. I read a message from Sevro. “Stop her?” he asks. Two choices. Let Sevro and Ragnar catch her, and contain her till I can speak with her. Or trust her to make her own decisions. But if I trust her, she could leave, tell her father what I am, and it could all end. Yet she may just need time. I’ve given her so much to digest. If Ragnar and Sevro capture her prematurely, it may set her against me. Or they may act on their own and kill her.
Cursing silently, I type a quick reply.
“I remember everyone,” I say to my mother, looking back up. “I’m still me.”
She pauses at that, still facing the stove. When she turns, a lopsided smile crosses her stroke-ravaged face. Her hand fumbles one of the mugs, but swiftly she recovers.
“Got something against the chairs?” she asks sharply, noticing I saw the clumsiness of her hand.
“Other way around, I’m afraid … I hold up the chair. It’s better suited for a Gold child than a Peerless Scarred who stands just over seven feet and weighs as much as any three Reds put together. She chuckles that dark chuckle of hers, the one that, as a child, always made me think she’d done something particularly sinister. Gracefully, she folds her legs and sits on the ground. I follow, feeling gangly and clumsy here. She sets the steaming cups between us.
“You don’t seem terribly surprised to see me,” I say.
“You talk funny now.” She pauses so long I wonder if she’ll continue. “Narol told me you were alive. Failed to say you’d gone and dipped yourself Gold, though.” She sips her tea. “I bet you’ve got questions.”
I laugh. “I thought you’d have more.”
“I would. But I know my son.” She eyes my Sigils. “I’m more patient. Go on now.”
“Narol … is he …?”
“Dead? Aye. He’s dead.”
The breath goes out of me.
“How long?”
“Two years ago.” She chuckles. “Fell down a mineshaft with Loran. Never found the bodies.”
“Why the hell are you laughing?”
“Your father’s brother was always the black sheep of the bunch.” She sips her tea. It’s still too hot for me. “Suppose it makes sense he’d be as hard to kill as a cockroach. So I’ll believe he’s dead when I see him in the Vale. Shifty bugger.” She speaks slowly, like most Reds. The lisp from the stroke is faint, but always there. “I think he left this place and took Loran with him.” The way she says it makes me know she understands there’s more beyond the mines. Perhaps she doesn’t know the whole truth, but she knows a part. Maybe my uncle and cousin aren’t dead. Maybe they left to be with the Sons.
“What of Kieran? Leanna? Dio?”
“Your sister is remarried. Lives with her husband in Gamma Township in the house of his family.”
“Gamma?” I sneer. “You let her—” I stop as soon as I see the fresh twist in my mother’s mouth. I might wear the trappings of a Gold, but I better shut the hell up about her daughter.
“She’s got two girls that look more like you than her or any Gamma I’ve ever seen. And Kieran’s well.” She smiles to herself. “You’d be right proud of him. Not the sniveling child you might remember squabbing up his chores and talking in his sleep. Man of the house. HeadTalk for the crew after Narol slipped down. Diona, his wife, died in childbirth, though. He took another a few months back.”
My poor brother.
“And what of Dio? Eo’s parents?”
“Her father is dead. Killed himself not long after you tried the same.”
My head sags. “So many deaths.”
She touches my knee. “It’s the way of it.”
“Doesn’t make it right.”
“It was a hard time after you and Eo left us. But Dio’s well. Fact, she’s upstairs.”
“Upstairs? What do you … Did she marry Kieran?”
“Aye. And she’s pregnant. I’m hoping for a girl, but with my luck it’ll be a boy who wants to dodge pitvipers and steam burns his whole life. If he’s got the choice, that is.”
“What do you mean?”
“Things are tough. Changed. Mine isn’t giving the way it ought. Some of the men are whispering this corner of the world is all used up. And it makes them start fearing—what happens to the miners when there’s nothing left to mine? They’re hoping the terraforming will catch on before we run through our helium deposits.”
“Nothing will happen to you. I promise I will protect this mine. No matter what.”
“How?”
“I just will.”
“My turn.” She eyes me over her tea. “Where you been, child?”
“I … I don’t even know where to start.”
“With Eo’s death, I think.”
I flinch. My mother was always blunt. Made Kieran cry his way through his childhood. But that bluntness makes calluses out of blisters. So I owe her a reply in kind. I tell her everything, starting with the moments after Eo’s death and ending with the promise I made to the ArchGovernor.
Our tea is long gone when I finish.
“That’s quite a tale,” she says.
“Tale? It’s the truth.”
“They won’t believe you, the rest of them.”
“You do, though?”
“I’m your mother.” She takes my hand and runs her crooked fingers over the Sigils that run from the back of my hands up my forearms, smirking when she reaches the metal wings embedded on the outside of my forearms. “I never liked Eo,” she says quietly.
I twist my head up to look at her.
“Not for you. She could be manipulative. She kept some things from you.…”
“I know about the child,” I say. “I know what she told Dio on the scaffold.”
Mother scoots closer to me, her hands grasping mine and bringing my knuckles to her lips. She never gave much comfort. She’s awkward at it now. But I don’t mind. Father loved her for the same reason I do. Everything she does, she means. There’s no falseness to her. No deception. So when she tells me she loves me, I know she means it with every part of her.
“Eo was not a cruel girl, you know that,” she says, pushing back so she can look into my eyes. “She loved you with everything she had. And I loved her for it. But I always feared she’d make you fight her battles. And I always feared how much she loved to fight.”
That’s not quite the Eo I remember. But I don’t find fault with my mother’s words. I can’t. All eyes see their own way.
“But in the end, Mother, Eo was right about this. About Gold.”
“I’m your mother. I don’t care about what’s right. I care about you, child.”
“Someone has to fix all this,” I say. “Someone has to break the chains.”
“And that someone is you?”
Why is she doubting me? “Yes. It is. I’m not being foolish. I can lead us out of here. Out of slavery.”
“To where? To the surface?” She speaks of it familiarly, as if she’s known the truth of Mars for years, not minutes. Perhaps she has. “Where we will do what? All we know is the mines. All we know is how to dig, how to harvest silk. If what you say is true and there are hundreds of millions of Reds on Mars, how will there be enough homes for us up there? How will there be enough work? Most won’t leave the mines, even if they know. You’ll see. They’ll just stay miners. And their children will be miners. And their children’s children, except the nobility will be lost. Do you think about these things?”
“Of course I do.”
“And do you have an answer?”
“No.”
“Men.” She rubs her right temple. “Your father was one to jump without looking.” Her expression tells me what she thinks of that. “Helldivers all think they provide for the clans. No. The women do.” She gestures around. “Everything you see, made by a woman. But you know how to shape the world, don’t you? Know how it should be.”
“No. I don’t,” I say. “I’m not the one with the answers.” Mustang is. Eo was. Mother is. “No one man or woman has all the answers. A thousand, a million bright minds will be needed to answer what you’ve asked me. That’s the point of this. What I can do, what I am good at is tearing down the men and women who would keep those minds shackled. That’s why I’m here. It’s why I exist.”
“You’ve changed,” she says.
“I know.” I pick dust from the floor and rub it between my palms. The dust looks strange on these hands. “Do you think … Is it possible to love two people?”
Before she can answer, feet pad down the stairs.
My mother turns to look.
“Grandma?” a small voice says sleepily. “Grandma, Dunlow isn’t in bed.”
A small child stands on the stairs, nightshirt scraping the floor. One of Kieran’s. She’s three, maybe four. Born just after I left. Her face is heart-shaped. Red hair thick and rusty as my wife’s. Mother looks back to me, worried how she will explain my presence. But I activated my ghostCloak as soon as I heard the noise.
“Oh, he probably snuck out to cause trouble,” my mother says.
I squeeze her hand before sliding back from the room toward the door. My time here is at an end, yet I linger. The little girl gingerly steps down the stairs, one foot after another, rubbing sleep from her eyes.
“Who were you talking to?”
“I was praying, child.”
“Praying for what?”
“For the soul of a man who loves you very much.” Mother touches her nose with a finger.
“Papa?”
“No. Your uncle.”
“Uncle Darrow? But he’s dead.”
Mother picks the girl up in her arms. “The dead can always hear us, my love. Why else do you think we sing? We want them to know that even though they are gone, we can still find joy.” Cradling my niece, she turns to look at me as she takes the first step up the stairs. “That’s all they’d want for us.”