AllFreeNovel
Share Us
ime, sir,” the Yellow says to me as she injects me with antivenom. “It’s prime. The pain will subside in a minute. Swelling should start to go down now. Sadly, the color will remain.” She looks up at Sevro’s hologram. “I’ll…um…wait outside…in case you need me.”
“Told you,” Rhonna says from the door.
“Slag off.” When my hands have almost returned to their normal size and feeling has returned to my feet, I stagger up and turn off the hologram. A hidden needle pricks my finger. Shit.
“Badass-class DNA detected,” a sexy voice says. Nothing leaps at me from the darkness. “Profile match for: Darrow of Lykos. Best Friend. Also known as: Reaper, Boss, Howler One, Apex Asshole, Brother, Mustang’s Bitch. Second-class clearance granted. Welcome. I apologize for warning shots. Master has been notified of your skulking. Stickyfinger traps deactivated. Help yourself to a glass of scotch, Best Friend. Take in some music, Reaper. Admire the trophies from the decimated enemies of the noble Howlers, Boss. Enjoy the extensive pornography library, Howler One. Relax in the sauna, Apex Asshole. It has no traps. But above all else, steal nothing, and enjoy your stay in…”
“Sevro’s Palace,” Sevro’s voice adds very seriously.
“Second class?” I ask.
“Yes. Master says you know why.”
I look back to Rhonna at the door. “Nope,” Rhonna says, and bugs out. Screwface makes a motion of standing guard and ducks into the hall. “Pixie,” I mutter, and shut the door.
The suite is large, comprised of half a dozen rooms filled with his prizes. I’ve avoided this place since arriving on Mercury. To be here is to be reminded of how we parted. The place is too much like my friend. Mugs of evaporated whiskey sit in ranks atop banners of fallen warlords he’s trampled. Candy wrappers fill the eyeholes of solid gold skulls taken from Magnus’s floating palace in Africa. The scepter I gave Adrius in Attica sits on the couch for Sevro to use as a back-scratcher. Only one place is spared the chaos strewn throughout the suite.
My wife once told me a man’s soul can be seen in the room he keeps the cleanest. I asked her what room is my soul. She tapped my razor.
Sevro’s soul is his armory, but for a different reason.
One wall is for use. Three suits of Sevro’s wolf armor hang central on the longest wall, surrounded by a shrine of knives. Tickler, his favorite, is missing. Replacement razors gleam with oil. Several from the gens Falthe are there, as is the Minotaur’s with its horned pommel. I gave it to Sevro as a gift when his youngest was born. He always coveted it, especially after Sefi won Aja’s off him in a game of “who gets the most kills.” PulseFists and more esoteric weapons fill the rest of the shelves.
One wall is for memories. One of Ragnar’s razors. Weed’s old pipe. Quinn’s Howler cloak. The bloody cape Octavia au Lune wore the day I killed her. Highest on the wall, in a place of honor, is the slingBlade I used at the Institute. I look at it for a long time before I take it down. It is far heavier than my razor and far smaller than I remember. I swing it till it makes a swish swish. I laughed at him when I saw it there the first time, laughed even harder when I found out how much trouble he went through to track it down. But I think I skipped past the part that mattered—how much the blade meant to him. With his father always away, always secretive and frightened to show his love, that blade gave Sevro something to follow. Something to dedicate his life to. Until he found something else.
The last wall is for his family. Holos of his girls float above coin-sized projectors, so that it seems like a hundred reveries fill the shelves. They’ve danced here in the darkness without anyone to see them for months. There are little bracelets and tokens, ink footprints and palm paintings. An emerald cape Victra gave to him when we sailed for Earth. A golden unicorn figurine. And in the center of it all: his father’s blood-red Ares armor with its spiked crescent helmet.
The bench where he would dress for battle faces this wall.
The armor looks so odd surrounded by the domesticity. But it is easy for me to forget that Sevro’s life was always war, because his father waged it instead of raising him.
After I saw how Lorn’s sons were consumed by his vocation, and theirs continue to be consumed, I tried to separate war and family, like Fitchner. I thought they were two worlds that should never meet. Sevro knew what I did not. What it is like to be raised by a warlord, by a distracted man. And he knew that our world is one where everything collides. He didn’t close his mind to his family before battle, because he knew they did not make him weaker, they made him stronger than he was by himself. I feel the key underneath my jacket.
Even though I will never be able to agree with his decision to return to Luna instead of Mercury, I understand it. He even said it to me, though I did not want to hear it at the time. He would not make the same mistakes as his father. If I ever see him again, I will ask that he forgive me asking him to make that impossible choice. And if I see my boy again, if I see my wife, I will not close myself off to them. I will be the father and husband they deserve.
I AM ONE OF THE TORTURED.
The Gorgons, a handsome Gold woman with a pert nose and a gecko of a Gray, pour alcohol over my burn on the first day. Just getting acquainted, they say as I scream. They inject something into my neck, and time does indeed slow down. The agony sustains itself for what feels like a week. Then it is gone, and the pain of my burn is omnipotent once more.
The Gorgons ask about the Bellona blade they found on me, about my name, but if I give it to them, then what will they do with it? The Fear Knight is away, so it seems. Would they contact the Annihilo? Would Ajax intercept it and send a killsquad here to finish what he started and Seneca left incomplete?
I need the Fear Knight to return. I need his direct authority.
My stomach feels inside out it’s so hungry. My hair has begun to fall out from radiation sickness. Soon all of us are bald. All of us are nauseous. Our bodies are naturally resistant to radiation, but with it floating in continuously from the Ladon, our DNA unwinds bit by bit. Soon the symptoms will worsen, the Elysian Knights and I talk intermittently as the days ebb and flow. I look for some sign of insanity in them to explain their allegiance to Darrow and the betrayal of their own Color, but I detect none except for the zealotry in Alexandar and Drusilla. The rest seem only to be here because House Arcos, their patron, joined years ago. Drusilla speaks of the Dream of Persephone. Of helping the people, as if all lowColors were paupers and slaves before the Rising.
It’s a laugh. I’ve met Reds and Browns happier than most Golds I know, and all of them with better lives than the Grays who fed our military machine. But Grays never broke under the hardship. Of all the Colors, they’ve remained the most loyal to the Society.
Some time in the morning, on what may be my fourth day with them, Ignacius and Drusilla are taken away. Ignacius is returned first, sheet white and holding three stumps where there used to be fingers. When Drusilla returns, she says nothing as she sobs into the stone.
Any belief that I am a plant amongst the Arcosians disappears. The torture binds me to their pack, as I supposed it would. Conversation becomes scarce. Slowly, Alexandar draws in on himself, becoming dour and hopeless. It is all Drusilla can do to keep him drinking water and eating their gruel.
My scheme begins to seem so foolish. There is nothing to be gained out of the misunderstanding that brought me here. I will die here, or I will risk telling my captors who I am, and wait at their mercy for my enemies to decide my fate.
I’ve resolved to tell them when I am strung up on the chains for the fifth time. The time-dilation drug is too much to bear, and even the Mind’s Eye cannot spare me from its rigors. But Pert and Gecko, as I’ve taken to calling my torturers, disappear once I’m hoisted up. The cavern is dim and unadorned. Stalactites drip water into a shallow pool. Beside that is a chest full of torture devices. I hear footsteps behind me. A man breathing. “Can you walk?” he asks,
his accent more Lunese than Ionian. I nod. A magkey unlatches the lock on my manacles. “Follow me.”
I follow the man out of the cavern to a main tunnel. To the left, past the prisoners’ cavern, come the faint sounds of laughter and cooking. He leads me right into deeper tunnels until we come to a small cavern.
