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Holiday tosses me a headset from the cockpit. I wrestle the headset on. “You are now. You don’t agree.”
The bitterness in her tone is acute. “Here are my thoughts. You can’t trust her. Look at her brother. Her father. Greed is in her blood. Of course she would ally with us. It fits her aims.” I watch Mustang as Victra speaks. “She needs us because she’s losing her war. But what happens when we give her what she needs? What happens when we’re in her way? Will you be able to put her down? Will you be able to pull the trigger?”
“Yes.”
—
Victra’s words linger as we pass Phobos’s giant glass spires, cockpit skimming a dozen meters above the panes of the building. Inside roil little worlds of madness. The Rising has reached the Needles in this district of the city. LowColors push inexorably through the halls. Grays and Silvers barricading doors. Pinks standing in a bedroom over a bleeding old Gold and his wife, knives in hand. Three Silver children watching Ares on a wall-sized holo as their parents speak in the library. And at last, a Gold woman in a sky-blue cocktail dress, pearls about her neck, gold hair unbound to her waist. She stands near a window as Sons of Ares spread through the building, levels beneath her penthouse. Engulfed in her own drama, she raises a scorcher to her Golden head. Body stiff in imagined majesty. Her finger tightens around the trigger.
And we’re past. Leaving her life and the chaos behind to join with the flow of yachts and pleasure craft that flee the battle for the safety of the planet. Most of the refugees call Mars home. Their ships, unlike ours, are not equipped for deep space. Now they scatter over the planet’s atmosphere like burning seeds, most plunging straight for the spaceport of Corinth beneath us in the middle of the Thermic Sea. Others skimming over the atmosphere, disregarding designated transit lanes, racing past the Jackal’s hastily erected blockade and the satellite level toward their homes in the opposite hemisphere. RipWings and wasps from the military frigates flash after them, trying to herd them back to the designated avenues. But entitlement and chaos are a poor mix. Mania grips these fleeing Golds.
“The Dido,” Mustang says quietly to herself, eying a glass ship the shape of a sailboat to our starboard. “Drusilla au Ran’s vessel. She taught me how to paint watercolors when I was little.” But my attention is farther out, where ugly dark vessels without the flashing hulls or fanciful lines of the pleasure craft race toward Phobos. It’s more than half the Martian defense fleet. Frigates, torchShips, destroyers. Even two dreadnaughts. I wonder if the Jackal is on one of those bridges. Likely not. It’s probably Lilath who leads the detachment, or some other praetor newly appointed in his regime. Antonia has been dispatched to aid Roque on the Rim. Their ships will be packed with lifelong soldiers. Men and women as hard as we are. Many who fell in my Iron Rain. And they will cut through the mob I’ve summoned inside Phobos like paper. They’ll be furious and confident: the more, the better.
“It’s a trap, isn’t it?” Mustang asks quietly. “You never meant to hold Phobos.”
“Do you know how the Inuit tribes of Earth killed wolves?” I ask. She doesn’t. “Slower and weaker than the wolves, they chiseled knives till they were razor sharp, coated them in blood and stuck them upright in the ice. Then the wolves would come up and lick the blood. And as the wolf licks faster and faster, he’s so ravenous he doesn’t realize until it’s too late that the blood he’s drinking is his own.” I nod to the passing military vessels. “They hate that I was one of them. How many prime soldiers do you think those ships will launch at Phobos to take me, the great abomination for their own glory? Pride will again be the downfall of your Color.”
“You’re trying to get them on the station,” she says, understanding. “Because you don’t need Phobos.”
“Like you said, I’m going to the Valkyrie Spires for an army. Orion and you might still have the remnants of my fleet. But we will need more ships than that. Sevro is waiting in the ventilation system of the hangars. When the assault forces land to take back the military spire and the Needles, they’ll leave their shuttles behind in those hangars. Sevro will descend from his hiding place, hijack the shuttles, and return them home to their ships, packed with all the Sons we have left.”
“And you honestly believe you can control the Obsidian?” she asks.
“Not me. Him.” I nod to Ragnar. “They live in fear of their ‘Gods’ in the Board of Quality Control’s Asgard Station. Golds in suits of armor playing at Odin and Freya. Same way that I lived in fear of the Grays in the Pot. As we were cowed by the Proctors. Ragnar’s going to show them just how mortal their Gods really are.”
“How?”
“We will kill them,” Ragnar says. “I have sent friends ahead, months ago, to spread the truth. We will return to my mother and my sister as heroes, and I will tell them their gods are false with my own tongue. I will show them how to fly. I will give them weapons and this ship will carry them to Asgard and we will conquer it as Darrow conquered Olympus. Then we will free the other tribes and carry them away from this land on Quicksilver’s ships.”
“That’s why you have a gorydamn armory back there,” Mustang says.
“What do you think?” I ask her. “Possible?”
“Insane,” she says, awed by the audacity of it. “Might be possible, though. Only if Ragnar can actually control them.”
“I will not control. I will lead.” He says it with quiet certainty.
Mustang admires the man for a moment. “I believe you will.”
I watch Ragnar as he looks back out the window. What passes behind those dark eyes? This is the first time I’ve felt like he’s not telling me something. He already deceived me by releasing Kavax. What else does he plan?
We listen in tense silence to the radio waves crackle with yacht captains requesting docking clearance on the military frigates instead of continuing down to the planet. Connections are used. Bribe
s offered. Strings pulled. Men weep and beg. These civilians are discovering that their place in the world is smaller than they imagined. They do not matter. In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that’s left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines.
The Peerless Scarred know this cold truth. And they have trained for centuries for this new age of war. Killing in the Passage. Struggling through the deprivation of the Institute so that they might have worth when war comes. Time for Pixies with deep pockets and expensive tastes to appreciate the realities of life: you do not matter unless you can kill.
The bill, as Lorn often said, comes at the end. Now the Pixies pay.
A Gold Praetor’s voice cuts through the speakers of our ship, ordering the refugee ships to redirect toward authorized transit lanes and steer clear the navy warships or they will be fired upon. The Praetor cannot afford unauthorized vessels within one hundred kilometers of her ship. They could carry bombs. Could carry Sons of Ares. Two yachts ignore the warnings and are ripped apart as one of the cruisers fires railguns into their hulls. The Praetor repeats her order. This time it is obeyed. I look over at Mustang and wonder what she thinks of this. Of me. Wishing we could be somewhere quiet where a thousand things didn’t pull at us. Where I ask about her instead of the war.
“Feels like the end of the world,” she says.
“No.” I shake my head. “It is the beginning of a new one. I have to believe that.”
The planetscape below is blue and spackled white as we pretend to follow the designated coordinates along the western hemisphere at the equator. Tiny green islands ringed with tan beaches wink up at us from the indigo waters of the Thermic Sea. Beneath, ships jerk and burn as they hit atmosphere before us. Like phosphorous firecrackers Eo and I played with as children, kicking spasmodically and glowing orange, then blue, as heat friction builds along their shields. Our Blue veers us away, following a series of other ships who depart the general flow of traffic for their own homes.
Soon, Phobos is half a planet away. The continents pass beneath. One by one the other ships descend and we’re left alone on our journey to the uncivilized pole, flying past several dozen Society satellites that monitor the southernmost continent. They too have been hacked into recycling information pulled from three years ago. We’re invisible, for now. Not just to our enemies but to our friends. Mustang leans from her chair, peering up into the cockpit. “What is that?” She gestures to the sensor display. A single dot follows behind us.
