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“I wonder why you provoke me still when your reputation is shattered. Your bank accounts emptied.” I shift in my seat. “Oh, yes. You didn’t know? Pliny is thorough when he cuts a man’s hamstrings. He emptied all your funds. So really there’s very little to you. But here you sit, at the bottom of a moon. Alone. With me, with mine. Throwing insults.”
“These are yours?” I ask, glancing at the lowColors around us. “I would have thought they’d disgust you.”
“Who said you have to like your children?” the Jackal asks pleasantly. “They are a product of our Golden loins.” He gnaws on the chicken leg, cracking the bone with his teeth before discarding it. “Do you know what I have been doing with my time?”
“Wanking off in the bushes?”
“Alas, no. My defeat at your hands set me back. I’m not afraid to say it. You hurt me and my plans. My sister also wounded me. Gagging me? Binding me naked and throwing me at your feet? That stung, especially when all the grand lords and ladies of our fine Peerless caste got a chuckle at my expense.”
“We both know you don’t feel pain, Adrius.”
“Oh, call me the Jackal. Hearing ‘Adrius’ from your lips is like hearing a cat bark.” He shivers, but leans delightedly forward in his seat when a Brown woman with thick arms and tattoos webbing her pale, pockmarked skin slips from the kitchens carrying three steaming bowls. She sets them before us. “Thank you!” he says, taking two for himself.
I eye the bowl suspiciously.
“I’m not a poisoner,” he says. “I could poison my father any time I want, but I don’t. Do you know why?”
“Because you’ve not gotten what you need out of him.”
“And that is?”
“His approval.”
The Jackal watches me through the steam of his bowl. “Quite. I have been offered a great deal of apprenticeships. They offer it to my father’s name, not me. They despise me because I ate students. But it’s such hypocrisy. What else was I to do? We’re told to win, and I did my best. And then they criticize. Act noble, as though they didn’t commit murder themselves. Madness.”
He shakes his head with a little sigh. “Yes, I could have gone to study war at the Academy like you. I could have studied politics at the Politico School on Luna. I might have been a decent Judiciar if I could stomach Venus. But I will rise without their hypocrisy. Without their schools.”
“I’ve heard the rumors. Any true?”
“Most.” He pulls more noodles out of the bowl, spreading red pepper sauce over them. “I am a businessman now, Darrow. I buy things. I own things. I create. Of course I’m seen as a money-grubbing Silver by those pretentious Peerless jackasses. But I am not one of the fading lords of twentieth-century Europe. I understand there is power in being practical, in owning things. People. Ideas. Infrastructure. So much more important than money. So much more insidious than”—he makes a funny motion with his hand—“spaceships and razors. Tell me, does a ship matter if you can’t supply and transport the food to feed its crew?”
“You own this place, don’t you?” I ask.
“In a manner.” He smiles with too much teeth. “I feel I must be blunt with you. We were nearly eighteen when we left the Institute. We are now twenty. I have been two years in exile, and now I wish to return home.”
“To socialize with Peerless jackasses?” I laugh. “If you have been paying attention at all, you’ll know I don’t have your father’s ear.”
“Paying attention …” He shares a glance with Victra and leans forward. “Reaper. I am the attention. Do you know how much of the communications industry I have acquired?”
“No.”
“Good. That means I’m doing it properly. I’ve acquired more than twenty percent. With my silent partner, I own nearly thirty. You’re wondering why? Certainly families like Victra’s do not consider themselves dirtied by business. After all, the Julii have partaken in trade for centuries. But media is different for us. Slimy. Leave that to Quicksilver and his ilk. So why would someone with my lineage dirty his hands with it? Well, I want you to imagine media as a pipeline to a city in the desert.” He waves around. “Our metaphorical desert. I can only provide thirty percent of the content of what comes through that pipeline, but I can affect one hundred percent of it. My water contaminates the rest. That is the nature of media. Do I want this city in the desert to hallucinate? Do I want its inhabitants to writhe in pain? Do I want them to rise up?” He sets his chopsticks down. “It all starts with what I want.”
“And what do you want?” I ask.
“Your head,” he says.
Our eyes meet like two iron rods colliding, sending stinging reverberations through the body. A palpable discomfort even being near him, much less meeting those dead gold orbs. He’s so young. My age, but there’s a childishness to him, a curiosity despite the ancient cast of his eyes, that makes him feel like a perversity. It’s not that I feel cruelty and evil radiating from his eyes. It’s the feeling that crept over me when Mustang told me how, as a boy, he killed a baby lion because he wanted to see its insides to understand how it worked.
“You have a weird sense of humor.”
“I know. But I’m so glad you get my jokes. So many prickly Peerless these days. Duels! Honor! Blood! All because they’re bored. There’s no one left to fight. So gorydamn tedious.”
“I believe you were making a point.”
“Ah, yes.” The Jackal runs his hand through his slicked-back hair, like I’ve seen his father do. “I brought you here because Pliny is an enemy of mine. He’s made my life very difficult. Even penetrated my harem. Do you know how many spies of his I’ve had to kill? I went through so many servants. I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me,” he says quickly.
“I was on the verge of it.”
