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“Then stop dawdling,” Karnus growls. “Do it.”
“Shh,” she whispers as I try to speak, tracing a knife over my lips, pushing it into my mouth till the brittle metal clacks against my teeth. “That’s a good little bitch.”
Roughly, she saws off my hair.
“Nice and quiet. Good Reaper. Good.”
Blood stings my eyes as Karnus shoves Cagney off my chest, grabs me and hoists me off the ground with his left hand. He flexes his right arm, cursing about his ruined bicep. He can’t pull it back to swing a punch, so instead he grins toothily at me and head-butts me once in the chest just at the sternum. My world rocks. There’s a crackle. The sound of twigs over a fire. I wheeze out bubbling, inhuman sounds. Karnus head-butts me again and tosses my aching body to the ground.
I feel warmth splash over me and the smell of piss claw into my nostrils. They laugh and Karnus breathes into my ear.
“Mother bid me to tell you: a pauper can never be a prince. Every time you look in the mirror, remember what we did to you. Remember you breathe because we let you. Remember your heart will one day be on our table. Rise so high, in mud you lie.”
4
Fallen
I stand before my master, but he does not care.
The office walls are of paneled wood, and on the floor lies an ancient rug his iron ancestor took from a palace of Earth after the fall of the Indian Empire, one of the last great nations to stand against Gold. What dread those natural-born humans must have felt to see the Conquerors falling from the sky. Man perfected, but bringing chains instead of hope.
I stand in front of Augustus’s desk, a bare thing of wood and iron, just before the seven-hundred-year-old bloodstain where the final Indian emperor had his head parted from his body by a sleek Gold killer.
Idly, Nero au Augustus strokes the lion that lies beside his desk. They look like twin statues. Behind them is space. A viewport peers into the blackness, where the ships of the Scepter Armada lie like giant golems in terrible slumber. We pass them on the last leg of our three-week voyage from Mars.
Augustus peers at his desk as a stream of data runs over the wood.
It seems so long ago that he took me on a tour of Mars to show me our domains—from the latfundias where highReds toil over crops to the great polar reaches where Obsidians live in medieval isolation. He favored me then, bringing me close, teaching me the things his father taught him. I was his favorite, second only to Leto. Now he is a stranger, and I, an embarrassment.
It’s been two months since the day Karnus beat me at the Academy. Though my hair has grown back and my broken bones have mended, my reputation has not. And because of that, my tenure in ArchGovernor Augustus’s employ is tenuous, at best. My enemies grow by the day. But these new ones prefer whispers to razors.
More and more do I believe the Sons of Ares chose the wrong man. I am not made for the cold war of politics. Not made for subtlety. Hell, I’d hide a boy in the gut of a horse any day, but I wouldn’t know how to bribe someone properly if my life depended on it.
A gentle, warm voice made for half-truths drifts through the ArchGovernor’s office. “Three refineries. Two nightclubs. And two Gray police outposts. All bombed since we left Mars. Seven attacks, my liege. Fifty-nine Gold fatalities.”
Pliny. Slender as a salamander, with skin as smooth as a Pink’s. The Politico is no Peerless Scarred, never even went to the Institute. His glittering eyes peer out from eyelashes that would put peacock plumage to shame. Muted lipstick coats thin lips. His hair is coiled and scented. His body thin, but muscular in a pleasing but utterly fascile way beneath a too-tight embroidered silk tunic. A child could beat the living hell out of this beautiful kitten of a man. Yet he’s ended families with a rumor here, a joke there. His power is a different breed. Where I am kinetic energy, he is potential.
I’ve heard he’s also responsible for ruining my reputation. Tactus even hinted that Pliny might have put Karnus up to the violence in the garden, or at the very least, arranged a holoCam to record my proud moment.
Beside Pliny stands the fourth man in the room, Leto. He’s a bright lancer ten years my senior with braided hair and a half-moon grin. He’s also a poet with the razor, a younger Lorn au Arcos, according to some. It’s likely he’ll inherit Augustus’s estate instead of the ArchGovernor’s blood heirs—Mustang and the Jackal. I rather like the man.
“The Sons of Ares grow too bold,” Augustus mutters.
“Yes, my liege.” Pliny squints. “If it is indeed they who perpetrate the acts.”
“What other ant bites us?”
“None, that we know of. But there are spiders, ticks, rats in the worlds. The bombings are crude for Ares, indiscriminate, uncharacteristically violent. Discontiguous from the pattern of technological sabotage and propaganda in his profile. Ares is not capricious, so I struggle believing these acts originate from him.”
Augustus frowns. “Then what do you suggest?”
“Perhaps there is another terrorist group, my liege. With eighteen billion souls on the census, I hardly think one man has a monopoly on terrorism. Perhaps even a criminal syndicate. I’ve been creating a database I can share.…”
Pliny is right. The terror attacks that have plagued Mars and other planets make little sense. Dancer spoke of justice, not revenge. These attacks are petty and gruesome—the bombing of barracks, fashion outlets, bazaars, highColor coffee shops and restaurants. Ares would never condone them. They draw too many eyes for too little result, daring the Golds to act, to crush the Sons.
I’ve sent messages to Dancer via the holoBox. Nothing. Just silence. Could he be dead? Or has Ares abandoned me for this
new strategy of bombing?
