“A Son of Ares?” Sevro repeats, stepping into the light so Quicksilver can see his face. I stay back. It’s a ludicrous claim.
“That’s better. I thought I recognized your voice. More like your father’s than you probably like. But yes, I’m a Son. The first Son, actually.”
“Well, then slag me blind as a Pinkwhore,” Sevro cries. “This is all just a misunderstanding!” He jumps forward and crouches beside Quicksilver to straighten the man’s robe. “We’ll get you cleaned up. Let you call your men. Sound good?”
“Yes, good, because you’ve managed to muck up something rather…”
Sevro hits the Silver right in his fleshly lips with a jab of his fist. It’s an intimate, familiar bit of violence that makes me flinch. Quicksilver’s head slams back against the chair. The man tries to move away, but Sevro pins him down easily. “Your tricks won’t work here, fat little toad man.”
“It’s not a trick—”
Sevro hits him again. Quicksilver sputters, blood dribbling down his cracked lip. Tries to blink the pain away. Probably seeing spots. Sevro hits him a third time, casually, and I think it was for me, not the tycoon, because Sevro looks back into the darkness where I stand with impudent eyes. As if dangling moral bait in front of me so we can explode into conflict again. His moral creed has always been simple: protect your friends, to hell with everyone else.
Sevro pushes a knife into Quicksilver’s mouth. “I know you think you’re being clever, boyo,” Sevro growls. “Saying you’re a Son. Thinkin’ you’re so smooth. Thinkin’ you can talk your way clear of us dumb brutes. But I’ve played this game with smarter kinds than you. And I’ve learned hard. Keen?” He pulls the knife sideways against Quicksilver’s cheek, causing the man to move his head with the blade. Still, it splits the corner of his mouth just slightly.
“So whatever your garble, you ain’t coming out on top of this, shitbrain. You’re a rat. A collaborator. And it’s time to reap what you’ve sown. So you’re going to tell us how to get out of here. If you’ve got a ship hidden. If you can get us past the navy. Then you’re going to tell us about the Jackal’s plans, his equipment, his infrastructure; then you’re going to give us the gear to equip our army.” Quicksilver’s eyes dart from the knife to Sevro’s face.
“Use your brains, you little savage,” Quicksilver snarls when Sevro takes the knife from his mouth. “Where do you think Fitchner got the money—”
“Don’t say his name.” Sevro points a finger to the man’s face. “Don’t you dare say his name.”
“I knew your father….”
“Then why’d he never mention you? Why does Dancer not know you? Because you’re lying.”
“Why would they know about me?” Quicksilver asks. “You never tie two boats together in a storm.”
The words are a punch to the gut. Fitchner said the exact phrase when explaining why he didn’t tell me about Titus. The Sons lost much of their technical ability when he died. What if there were two bodies to the Sons of Ares body? The lowColors, and the high? Kept apart in case one was compromised? It’s what I would do. He promised me better allies if I went to Luna. Allies that would help make me Sovereign. This could be one of them. One who fled when Fitchner died. Who cut himself off from the contaminated body of the Sons.
“Why was Matteo in your bedroom?” I ask carefully.
Quicksilver stares into the darkness, wondering whose voice addresses him, yet now there’s fear in his eyes, not just anger. “How…how did you know he was in my bedroom?”
“Answer the question,” Sevro says, kicking him.
“Did you hurt him?” Quicksilver asks, enraged. “Did you hurt him?”
“Answer the question,” Sevro repeats, slapping him.
Quicksilver trembles with anger. “He was in my room because he’s my husband. You son of a bitch. He’s one of us! If you hurt him…”
“How long has he been your husband?” I ask.
“Ten years.”
“Where was he six years ago? When he worked with Dancer?”
“He was in Yorkton. He was the man who trained your friend, Sevro. He trained Darrow. The Carver made the body. Matteo sculpted the man.”
“He’s telling the truth.” I step into the light so Quicksilver can see my face. He stares at me in shock.
“Darrow. You’re alive. I…thought…it can’t be.”
I turn to Sevro. “He’s a Son of Ares.”
“Because he got a few facts right?” Sevro snarls. “You’re actually serious.”
“You’re alive,” Quicksilver murmurs to himself, trying to wrap his head around what is happening. “How? He killed you.”
“He’s telling the truth,” I repeat.
“Truth?” Sevro moves his mouth like he’s got a cockroach in it. “What does that even bloody mean? How could you possibly know that? You think you can get the truth outta some backroom-dealing shark like this. He’s in bed with half the Peerless Scarred in the Society. He ain’t just their tool. He’s their friend. And he’s playing you like the Jackal did. If he’s a Son, why’d he abandon us? Why’d he not contact us when Pops died?”
“Because your ship was sinking,” Quicksilver says, still staring at me in confusion. “Your cells were compromised. I had no way of knowing how deep the contamination went. I still don’t know how the Jackal discovered you, Darrow. My only contact to the lowColor cells was Fitchner. Just like I was his contact for highColor cells. How could I reach out when I didn’t know if it was Dancer himself who informed on you and made a power play to get rid of Fitchner?”
“Dancer would never do that,” Sevro says with a sneer.
“How would I know that?” Quicksilver says in frustration. “I don’t know the man.” Sevro’s shaking his head, overwhelmed by the absurdity. “I have videos. Conversations between myself and your father.”
“I’m not letting you near a datapad,” Sevro says.
“Test him,” I say. “Make him prove it.”
“I met your mother once, Sevro,” Quicksilver offers quickly. “Her name was Bryn. She was a Red. If I wasn’t a Son, how would I know that?”
“You could know that a dozen ways. Proves piss ’n shit,” Sevro says.
“I have a test,” I say. “If you are a Son, you’ll know it. If you belong to the Jackal, you would have used it. Where is Tinos?”
Quicksilver smiles broadly. “Five hundred kilometers south of the Thermic Sea. Three kilometers beneath the old mining nexus Vengo Station. In an abandoned mining colony, the records of which were wiped from the internal servers of the Society by my hackers. The stalactites were carved hollow using Acharon-19 laser drills from my factories in spiral halls to maintain structural integrity. The Atalian hydrogenerator was built with plans designed by my engineers. Tinos might be the City of Ares, but I designed it. I paid for it. I built it.”
Sevro sways there in stunned silence.
“Your father worked for me, Sevro,” Quicksilver says. “First for the terraforming consortium on Triton, where he met your mother. Then in…less legitimate ways. Back then I was not what I am today. I needed a Gold. A hard-nosed Peerless Scarred, and all the legal protection that gives. One who owed me and was willing to play rough with my competitors. Off the books, you know.”
“You’re saying my father played mercenary. For you?”
“I’m saying he played assassin. I was growing. There was resistance in the marketplace to that growth. So the marketplace had to make room. You think all Silvers play it safe and legal?” He chuckles. “Some, maybe. But business in a crony-capitalist society is the craft of sharks. Stop swimming, the others will take your food and feed on your body. I gave your father money. He hired a team. Worked off-site. Did what I needed him to do. Until I discovered he was using my resources for a side project. The Sons of Ares. ”
He makes a mockery of the words.
“But you didn’t report him?” I ask skeptically.
“Golds treat sedition like cancer. I’d have been cut out too. So I was trapped. But he didn’t want me trapped. He wanted a co-conspirator. Gradually he made his case. And here we are.”
Sevro paces away, trying to make sense of it. “But…we’ve…been dying like flies. And you’ve been up here…humping your Pinks. Fraternizing with the enemy. If you were one of us…”
Quicksilver lifts his nose up, regaining what poise he lost during the beating. “Then I would have done what, Mr. Barca? Do tell. From your extensive experience in subterfuge?”
“You would have fought with us.”
“With what? Hm?” He waits for an answer. None comes. Sevro’s speechless. “I have a private security force of thirty thousand for myself and my companies. But they’re spread from Mercury to Pluto. I don’t own those men. They are Gray contractors. Only a fraction are owned Obsidians. I have the weapons, but I don’t have the muscle to tussle with Peerless Scarred. Are you crazy? I use soft power. Not hard power. That was your father’s purview. Even a minor house could wipe me out in direct conflict.”
“You have the largest software company in the Solar System,” Sevro says. “That means hackers. You have munitions plants. Military tech development. You could have spied for us on the Jackal. Given us weapons. You could have done a thousand things.”
“May I be blunt?”
I grimace. “If ever there was a time…”
Quicksilver leans back to peer down his humped nose at Sevro. “I’ve been a Son of Ares for more than twenty years. That requires patience. A long-eyed view. You’ve been one for less than a year. And look what’s happened. You, Mr. Barca, are a bad investment.”
“A bad…investment?”
It sounds ridiculous coming from a man chained to a metal chair with blood dribbling down his lips. But something in Quicksilver’s eyes sells his point. This isn’t a victim. It’s a titan of a different plane. Master of his own domain. Equal, it seems, to Fitchner’s own breed of genius. And more vast a character, more nuanced than I would have expected. But I reserve any affection for the man. He’s survived by lying for twenty years. Everything is an act. Probably even this.
Who is the real man beneath this bulldog face?
What drives him? What does he want?
“I watched. I waited to see what you would do,” he explains to Sevro. “To see if you were cut like your father. But then they executed Darrow”—he looks up at me, still confused on that note—“or pretended to, and you acted like a boy. You began a war you couldn’t win, with insufficient infrastructure, materiel, systems of coordination, supply lines. You released propaganda in the form of Darrow’s Carving to the worlds, to the mines, hoping for…what? A glorious rise of the proletariat?” He scoffs. “I thought you understood war.
“For all his faults, your father was a visionary. He promised me something better. And what has his son given us instead? Ethnic cleansing. Nuclear war. Beheadings. Pogroms. Whole cities shredded by fractious groups of Red rebels and Gold reprisals. Disunity. In other words, chaos. And chaos, Mr. Barca, is not what I invested in. It’s bad for business, and what’s bad for business is bad for Man.”
Sevro swallows slowly, feeling the weight of the words.
“I did what I had to,” he says, sounding so small. “What no one else would.”
“Did you?” Quicksilver leans forward nastily. “Or did you do what you wanted to do? Because your feelings were hurt? Because you wanted to lash out?”
Sevro’s eyes are glassy. His silence wounding me. I want to defend him, but he needs to hear this.
“You think I haven’t been fighting, but I have,” Quicksilver continues. “The Sovereign’s opinion of the Jackal seems to have soured of late.”
“Why?” I ask.
“I couldn’t guess before, but now I’d bet anything it’s because you escaped the Jackal’s prisons. In any case, I saw an opportunity. I brought Virginia au Augustus and the Sovereign’s representatives here to broker a peace that would give Virginia the ArchGovernorship of Mars and would remove the Jackal from power and put him in prison for life. It’s not the end I wanted. But if what we’re seeing on the Jackal’s Mars is any indication, he is the single greatest threat to the worlds and our long-term goals.”
“And yet you helped him consolidate power in the first place,” I say.
Quicksilver sighs. “At the time, I thought him less of a threat than his father. I was wrong. And so were you. He needs to be removed.”
The Jackal’s been betrayed by two allies, then.
“But your plans for an alliance are slagged now.”
“Indeed. But I don’t mourn the opportunity lost. You’re alive, Darrow, and that means this rebellion is alive. It means Fitchner’s dream, your wife’s dream, is not yet gone from this world.”
“Why?” Sevro asks. “Why the bloodyhell would you want war? You’re the richest man in the system. You’re not an anarchist.”
“No. I am not an anarchist, a communist, a fascist, a plutocrat, or even a demokrat, for that matter. My boys, don’t believe what they tell you in school. Government is never the solution, but it is almost always the problem. I’m a capitalist. And I believe in effort and progress and the ingenuity of our species. The continuing evolution and advancement of our kind based on fair competition. Fact of the matter is, Gold does not want man to continue to evolve. Since the conquering, they have routinely stifled advancement to maintain their heaven. They’ve wrapped themselves in myth. Filled their grand oceans with monsters to hunt. Cultivated private Mirkwoods and Olympuses of their very own. They have suits of armor to make them flying gods. And they preserve that ridiculous fairy tale by keeping mankind frozen in time. Curbing invention, curiosity, social mobility. Change threatens that.
“Look where we are. In space. Above a planet we shaped. Yet we live in a Society modeled after the musings of Bronze Age pedophiles. Tossing around mythology like that bullshit wasn’t made up around a campfire by an Attican farmer depressed that his life was nasty, brutish, and short.
“The Golds claim to the Obsidians that they are gods. They are not. Gods create. If the Golds are anything, they are vampire kings. Parasites drinking from our jugular. I want a Society free of this fascist pyramid. I want to unchain the free market of wealth and ideas. Why should men toil in the mines when we can build robots to toil for us? Why should we ever have stopped in this Solar System? We deserve more than what we’ve been given. But first, Gold must fall and the Sovereign and the Jackal must die. And I believe you are the sign I’ve been waiting for, Mr. Andromedus.”
He nods at my gloved hands. “I paid for your Sigils. I paid for your bones, your eyes, your flesh. You are my friend’s brainchild. My husband’s student. The sum of the Sons of Ares. So my empire is at your disposal. My hackers. My security teams. My transports. My companies. All yours. With no reservations. No strings. No insurance policy.” He looks at Sevro. “Gentlemen. In other words, I’m all in.”
“Quite nice.” Sevro applauds, mocking Quicksilver. “Darrow, he’s just trying to buy you so he can escape.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But we can’t blow the bombs anymore.”
“Bombs?” Quicksilver asks. “What are you talking about?”
“We planted explosives in the refineries and the shipping docks,” I say.
“That’s your plan?” Quicksilver looks back and forth at us as if we’re mad. “You can’t do that. Do you have any idea what that would do?”
“An economic collapse,” I say. “Symptoms including a devaluation of stock assets, a freeze of commercial bank lending, a run on local banks, eventual stagflation. And a breakdown of social order. Show us some respect when you talk to us. We’re not dilettantes or boys. And it was our plan.”
“Was?” Sevro asks, stepping back from me. “So now you’re letting him dictate what we do.”
“Things have changed, Sevro. We need to reassess. We’ve new assets.”
My friend stares at me as if he doesn’t recognize my face. “New assets? Him?”
“Not just him. Orion,” I say. “You never told me Mustang contacted you.”
“Because you would have let her manipulate you,” he says without apology. “Like you did before. Like you’re letting him now.” He considers me, pointing a finger as he thinks he figures it out. “You’re afraid. Aren’t you? Afraid of pulling the trigger. Afraid of making a mistake. We finally have a chance to make Gold bleed and you wanna reassess. You wanna take time to look at our options.” He pulls the detonator from his pocket. “This is war. We don’t have time. We can take the bastard with us, but we can’t miss this chance.”
“Stop acting like a terrorist,” I snarl. “We’re better than that.”
I stare down at him, furious in the moment. He should be my simplest, strongest friendship. But because of loss, everything is twisted between us. Even with him there’s so many layers to the pain. So many levels of fear and recrimination and guilt for both of us. They once called Sevro my shadow. He’s not any longer. And I think I’ve been bitter at him these last hours because they’re proof of that. He’s his own man with his own tides. Just as I think he’s been bitter with me because I didn’t come back as the Reaper. I came back a man he didn’t recognize. And now that I’m trying to be the force he wanted, the force that’s making decisions, he doubts me because he senses weakness and that’s always made him afraid.
“Sevro, give me the detonator,” I say coldly.
“Naw.” He opens the detonator’s priming shield, revealing the red thumb toggle inside the protective casing. If he presses down, one thousand kilograms of high-yield explosives will detonate across Phobos. It won’t destroy the moon, but it’ll demolish the moon’s economic infrastructure. Helium will not flow for months. Years. And all the fears of Quicksilver will be realized. Society will suffer, but so will we.
“Sevro…”
“You got my father killed,” he says. “You got Quinn and Pax and Weed and Harpy and Lea killed because you thought you were smarter than everyone else. Because you didn’t kill the Jackal when you could. Because you didn’t kill Cassius when you could. But unlike you, I don’t flinch.”