Mustang is gone. I’d hoped she would come in. But I suspect that was too much to ask. Of course it was. Idiot. I remember thinking this would humanize me in her eyes. Thought meeting my mother would make her weep and realize we’re all the same.
The guilt falls fast on me. I handed Mustang the holo of my carving, expecting … expecting what? For her to come inside? For her, the daughter of the ArchGovernor of Mars, to sit on my floor with my mother and me? I’m a coward for coming here. I’m a coward for letting the holo speak for me. I didn’t want to watch her process learning who I really am. I didn’t want to see the betrayal in her eyes. Four years of deception. Four years of lying to the girl who has never been able to trust anyone. Four years and I tell the truth when I’m not even in the bloodydamn room. I’m a coward.
She’s gone.
I check my datapad. The radiation tracker Sevro insisted on sticking her with before she came to see me in the Pot’s observation room says she is three hundred kilometers away and moving fast. Sevro’s ship pursues, awaiting my orders.
Ragnar and Sevro both hail me. I don’t answer their calls. They’ll want me to give the order to shoot her down. I won’t. I can’t. Neither understands.
Without Mustang, what is the point to all this?
I wander from the township, down and down into the old mine, trying to forget the present by finding the past. There, I stand alone listening to the call of the deepmines. Wind wails its way through the earth, mournful in its song. My eyes are closed to the black, heels planted in the loose soil, head looking down the maw of darkness that stretches deep into the bowels of my world. This is how we tested our bravery as youths. Standing, waiting, in the deep hollows our ancestors dug in the times before.
I turn my left arm to see the inside of the forearm where the datapad rests. Hesitating, I hail Mustang’s.
It chimes directly behind me.
I freeze. Then a scorcher battery pack whines as it activates, and warm yellow light blossoms behind me, illuminating a swath of the huge tunnel.
“Hands where I can see them.” Her voice is so cold I hardly recognize it till it echoes back to me from the tunnel walls. Slowly, I raise my hands. “Turn.”
I turn.
Her eyes glow against the lamplight like an owl’s. She’s ten meters away, higher than I, feet planted on the sloping, loose soil. In one hand, she holds a light. In the other, a scorcher. One that’s pointed at my head, finger against the trigger. Her knuckles are all white. Her face is an impassive mask, and behind it, two eyes filled with fathomless sadness.
Sevro was right.
“She’ll shoot you in the head, you bloodydamn fool,” Sevro sneered at me in the shuttle. Sometimes I think he joined my little crusade so he could have an excuse to curse like a Red. Ragnar stayed silent when I told them my plan.
“Then why’d you back me up with your father?” I asked him.
“Because that’s what we do.”
“She has to make her own choice.”
“And she’ll choose you over her race?”
“You did.”
“Oh, come off it. I’m not a bloody queen of the Golds, am I?” He held his hand high. “She’s been up here her whole life. Air is nice and sweet.” He lowered his hand. “I’ve been kickin’ shit since I was born tiny and buttfaced to my lard of a father. Your girl—there isn’t a chip on her shoulder. She may spout pretties when the world isn’t hard. But when facing the masses who would steal her palace, trample her gardens … it’ll be a different girl you see then.”
“You’re a Red,” she says now to me.
“I thought you left.”
“The tracker left.” She flexes her jaw. “Sevro was sneaky. Didn’t even notice him doing it. But you. You’d never tell me something like … this without an insurance policy. I ditched the clothes in the shuttle.”
“Why did you come back?”
“No. No .” She cuts the air with a gesture. “You answer my questions now, Darrow. Is that even your name?”
“My mother named me after her father.”
“And you’re a Red.”
“I was born in the house you stood outside. It was sixteen years before I saw I sky. So yes. I’m a Red.”
“I see.” She hesitates. “And my father killed your wife.”
“Yes. He ordered Eo’s death.”
“When you sang the song to me in the cave … all this was going through your mind? This place, the carving, the plan, was all inside you, all in your memory. This whole other world. This whole other … person .” She shakes her head, not wanting me to answer that. “Then what happened? Eo’s husband was hanged. You were hanged. How did you escape?”
“Do you know why they hanged me?”
She waits for me to explain.
“When a Red is hanged for crimes of treason, the body may not be buried. It is to decay and rot in front of all as a reminder of what comes of dissent.” I jab a thumb at my chest. “I buried my wife, so they hanged me too. Only, my uncle fed me haemanthus oil. It slows the heart to make you appear dead. He cut me down after. Gave me to the Sons.”
“And they”—She holds up the holoCube, her face pale in its glow—“did this to you.”
“I was paler than a Blue. A head shorter than Sevro. Weaker than a Gray. Knew less of the world than a Pink learning arts in the Garden. So they took what was best in me, in my people, and melded it to what was best in yours.”
“But … it’s impossible. The Board of Quality Control has tests,” she says, breaking her cool line of inquiry. “Lie detectors, DNA analysis, background checks.” She laughs in realization. “ That’s why you came from the Family Andromedus—born to Gold parents who fled debt to try to strike it rich asteroid mining.”
“Their ship was lost as they returned after their mines had been bought by Quicksilver.”
“So Sons of Ares destroyed their ship, altered the records, and purchased the mines so they could write your story.”
“Perhaps.” I hadn’t put much thought to how Dancer did it. “My friends are resourceful.”
“How did you even survive the carving?” she mutters. “It’s against physiology. What the Carver did to you … no one could survive that. The Sigils are connected to the central nervous system. And the implant in your frontal lobe can’t be removed without rendering you catatonic.”
“My Carver was a unique talent. He managed to find a way to remove two implants, though another Carver did the second.”
“Two. There’s two of you. Sevro ?” she guesses. “Is that why you’ve always been so close?”
“No. It was Titus.”
“Titus? The butcher? You were in league with him?”
“Never. I didn’t know who he was until after I defeated you. Ares thought we would work together.…”
“But Titus was a monster.”
“The Golds made him that way.”
“And that excuses what he did?”
“Don’t act like you know what he went through,” I snap.
“I know, Darrow. I don’t avert my eyes. I know the policies. I know the conditions your people suffer, but that doesn’t excuse the murders, the rapes, the torture he committed.”
“It’s what we suffer every day. Titus did what he did out of hate. Out of a misguided hope of revenge. In another life, I could have been him.”
Mustang searches my eyes. “And why weren’t you in this life?”
“My wife.” I look up at her. “And you.”
“Don’t say that.” Voice thick with regret. She takes a step back, shaking her head. “You don’t have the right to say that.”
“Why not? You always wondered what ran beneath the surface of me. Know the deep current.”
“Darrow …”
“Titus had pain. But that’s all he had. I had something more. Eo’s dream of a world where our children could be free. But I would have lost it if I never met you.” I take a step forward. “You kept me from becoming a monster. Can’t you see?” I gesture, trying to encompass my desperation. “I was surrounded by the people who had enslaved mine for hundreds of years. I thought all Golds cruel, selfish murderers. I would have caved to revenge. But then you came … and you showed me there was kindness in them. Roque, Sevro, Quinn, Pax, and the Howlers proved it too.”
“Proved what exactly?” she asks.
“That this isn’t about my people against yours. You aren’t Gold. We aren’t Red. We’re people, Mustang. Each of us can change. Each of us can be what we like. For hundreds of years they’ve tried to tell us otherwise. They’ve tried to break us. But they can’t. You are that proof. You are not your father’s daughter. I see the love in you. I see the joy, the kindness, the impatience, the flaws. They’re in me. They were in my wife. They’re in all of us because we are human. Your father would have us forget that. Society would have us live by its rules.”
I take another step toward her.
“You told me I gave you hope that we could live for more after we won the Institute our way. Then you said I turned my back on that idea when I accepted your father’s patronage and went to the Academy. But I never turned my back. Not for one moment.” Another step.
“You’ll destroy my family, Darrow.”
“It is possible.”
“They are my family!” she shouts, face collapsing into grief. “My father hanged your wife. He hanged her. How can you even look at me?” She shudders out a breath. “What do you want, Darrow? Tell me. Do you want me to help you kill them? Do you want me to help you destroy my people?”
“I don’t want that.”
“You don’t know what you want.”
“I don’t want genocide.”
“You do!” she says. “And why not? After what we’ve done to your people. After what my father did to you .” She unbuttons another catch on her jacket as if it will help her breathe through this. The gun shakes in her hand. Finger tenses on the trigger. “How can I live with this? If I don’t pull the trigger, millions will die.”
“If you pull it, you accept that billions should live as slaves. Imagine all those unborn. If it is not me, someone else will rise. Ten years from now. Fifty. A thousand. We will break the chains, no matter the cost. You cannot stop us. We are the tide. All you can do is pray it is not someone like Titus who rises in my place.”
She levels the scorcher at my right eyeball.
“Pull the trigger, and you die.” Ragnar speaks like the darkness itself.
“Ragnar, no!” I snap. I can’t even see him in the shadows of the tunnel. “Stop! Do not hurt her.” He must not have pursued the tracking signal as I told him to. How long has he listened?
“Stay back.” Mustang shuffles sideways so her back is to the wall. “Does he know too? Do you know what he is, Ragnar?”
“The Reaper trusts me.”
Mustang tosses her light on the ground and pulls free her razor.
“He isn’t here to kill you, Mustang.”
“What else does a Stained do?”
I hold my hands up. “Ragnar isn’t going to do anything. Are you, Ragnar?”
No answer. I swallow hard. Everything is unwinding. “Ragnar, listen to me.…”
“You must not die, Reaper. You are too important for the People. Lady Augustus, you have ten breaths left.”
“Ragnar, please!” I beg. “Trust me. Please.”
Nine .
“I trusted you at the river, my brother. You are not always right. That is the cost of mortality.” The voice comes from above. Somewhere near the ceiling of the mine this time. He’s not wrong. He put his trust in me during our siege of Agea, and I led them into a trap. Luck preserved me.
Laughing bitterly, Mustang coils her muscles to strike. “See, Darrow? You start this war, it’ll be beasts like him who finish it and take their revenge.”
Seven .
“This isn’t about revenge!” I try to calm myself. “It’s about justice. It’s about love against an empire built on greed, on cruelty. Remember the Institute. We freed those we were meant to take as slaves. We put our trust in them. That is the lesson. Trust .”
Five .
“Darrow,” she pleads. “How can you be so foolish?”
Her mind is made up.
Four .
“It never foolish to hope.” I strip off my razor, my datapad, and toss them to the ground as I go to my knees. “But if you can’t change, no one can. So shoot me dead and let the worlds be as they may.”
Three .
“You think too much of me, Darrow.”
“Two.”
“Let’s skip the foreplay, Ragnar.” Mustang twirls her razor. Its horrible hum fills the tunnel. “Come at me, dog, and show Darrow what your kind lives for.”
The silence stretches long.
“One,” Mustang growls, stomping out her own lamp. No light, no color but darkness. The silence is deeper than the tunnel. It meanders through the heart of Mars, stretching forever, echoing to places only the lost have ever been.
Ragnar shatters it with his voice.
“I live for my sisters.”
There is no scorcher flash. No scream of the razor. No movement. Just the echoing of the words down and down with the fragments of silence.
“I live for my brother.”
A light blossoms from Ragnar. He steps forward like some wayward pilgrim, white light glowing along the knuckles of his armor. I see no weapons. Mustang tenses, confused.
“I am and always have been son to the people of the Valkyrie Spires. Born free to Alia Snowsparrow on the wild pole of Mars, north of the Dragon’s Spine, south of the Fallen City.”
He walks past Mustang, arms at his side.
“Forty-four scars have I earned for Gold since the slavers of the Weeping Sun came from the stars to take my family to the Chain Islands. Seven scars from others of my kind when they placed me in the nagoge, where I was trained.”
He kneels at my side.
“One from my mother. Five from the talons of the monster who guards Witch Pass. Six from the woman who taught me to love. One from my first master. Fifteen from men and beasts I fought in an arena for the pleasure of the Ash Lord and his guests. Nine I earned for the Reaper.”
The ground sighs under the weight of his knees.
“For Gold, I have buried three sisters. One brother. Two fathers.” He pauses in sadness. “But … for them I have never earned a scar.”
Through his armor’s pale light, his black eyes burn like witch-flames.
“Now, I live for more.”
Ragnar closes his eyes, putting himself at the mercy of a Gold. Having faith like I have faith. Like Eo had faith in me. Like Sevro, and Dancer and all the rest.
My eyes meet Mustang’s, perhaps for the last time, and I imagine I feel the same as did my ancestors, the first pioneers to Mars, as they looked back across the darkness to Earth. In her I had a home. I had love. And then I poisoned her to me. I know this was always destined to be our end. But still I hope like a desperate child.
“What do you live for?” I ask.