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“Cassius saved my life. I owed him a debt.” I do not say that I was afraid my godfather would blame me for the Fall of Luna and my part in it. “But with his death, that debt is gone.”
“Noble platitudes,” Dido says, eyes wary. “But Lunes have ever had silver tongues. I imagine you would have me free you?” I nod. “Many of my allies cry for your head. I would hate to disappoint them.”
“I have committed no crimes.”
“You are the residue of tyrants and genocides,” Seraphina snaps. “You are a Lune.”
“So you judge me by the faults of my ancestors? I thought better of you.”
“Interesting.” Dido examines me with a Venusian eye, wondering if I’m more valuable dead or alive. “But as it is, the decision is not mine.”
I frown. “Then whose is it?”
“Tomorrow’s trial will be a sham,” Dido says. “I’ve spoken to Helios, who will conduct the trial. He agrees, there is no evidence my husband knew about the recording. His containment of Seraphina’s return can be excused by saying he was trying to protect the peace and his daughter from harsh judgment. There was no treason. But the docks were destroyed on his watch. He will be impeached only for negligence in wartime for not investigating the Reaper’s duplicity. But then he will be freed and we will be on our course to war. As Rome had two consuls, we will have two Sovereigns. Husband and wife. Equals. He will have no choice but to lead at the front with me. So the fate of your life, Lysander au Lune, heir of empire, is not for me to decide alone. Together my husband and I will decide if you live or if you die.”
When Dido is through with me, Seraphina escorts me back to my cell. There is little conversation between us. But when she goes to close the door, I block it with my foot. “Did your mother send you to my cell?” I ask. “I want the truth.”
She stares back belligerently. “Since when has truth mattered to a Lune?”
OVER THE COM CHANNEL, Gorgo gives the address of a restaurant and tells me to meet him there tonight. I manage to keep the nervousness from my voice, but my hand trembles when I hang up the com. It’s a one-way ticket I’m buying. My only hope is that when I call in the cavalry, they come fast and hard. Otherwise the Sovereign’s pardon will be for one.
I know Volga will use it better than I could anyway.
Holiday tries to get me to go to a government facility to wait out the mean hours till the meeting, but I finally convince her that it’s better for the Syndicate to see me street-side during the day before miraculously showing up at the restaurant. She says goodbye without a smile and departs not back into the terminal, but through a maintenance door that leads under the docking platform. Lyria pauses at the door and turns back to me with my Omnivore in hand. “You’re probably going to need this,” she says. Holiday unlocked the trigger lock before she left.
“Sure you don’t?” I ask.
“No.” She frowns. “I didn’t make a deal like you. Don’t think they let you keep weapons in Deepgrave.”
“That’s why you never do anything for free,” I say glibly.
“I’ll keep that in mind.” She turns to go.
“Rabbit.” She turns to look back at me, and for a moment I wonder if I see hatred pass through her eyes. Did she say all that about Trigg just to get me to agree? She did. She was the honey to Holiday’s vinegar. There’s no forgiveness in her. Just exhaustion and anger at me and the world.
“What?” she asks.
The fleeting notion of apologizing vanishes. “Bit of advice. Get as far away from them as you can, as fast as you can. Or they’ll just chew you up and spit you out.”
“If I wanted advice, you’d be the last person I’d ask.” With that, she leaves.
I arrive via taxi at the restaurant, a glitzy joint on upper west Promenade, and have to wait for an hour before Gorgo arrives. Nervously pushing aside my drink, I follow him from the restaurant to a flier where several slick thorns in dusters search me for weapons and, as I said they would, look for tracking devices. They take my pistol. When they’ve decided I’m clean, they put a distortion hood over my head that’s set to submerge my senses in an arid, desert world.
Digital tumbleweed rolls across the cracked ground in front of me. In the distance, hungry wolves howl as my body jostles in the back of the flier as she ascends into the flow of traffic. Time distorts inside the hood as well. I can’t tell if it’s been an hour or four when I feel the ship’s landing thrusters kick in and the gentle bump as she sets down. They unload me as I see wolves approach across the false desert, hunting my digital presence. I’m pushed along till I’m guided onto a couch and at last the hood comes off, just before the wolves pounce.
I face an immense ant colony that stretches the length of a wall, all the way up to the ten-meter-high ceiling. Acid-yellow ants the size of my pinky toil behind the glass. They swarm in a mound of legs and teeth over some carcass above the surface of the colony and make a line to carry the food from the top desert level down into the belly of their labyrinth, past storage rooms, barns for aphids, egg hatcheries and nurseries filled with squirming larvae. In the center of the colony, an obese queen the size of a small cat with a swollen, purple abdomen excretes transparent eggs that are ferried away in the mouths of workers with bla
ck mandibles.
A nauseating cocktail of curiosity and revulsion grows in me. Gorgo lounges on a couch across from mine, his huge body out of place in the finely decorated room. He lights a burner. His datapad sits on the table, Omnivore next to it. “?’Lo, Gorgo. What’s with the ants?”
“Duke says they soothe him,” he says, watching me through the smoke.
“Got another one of those?” I gesture to the burner.
He hesitates and then proffers me a pack of White Dwarfs. I reach across the glass table and take one. He tosses me a lighter. I light the burner and lean back to admire the place. It’s a trophy room. A rare diamond stolen a year after the Fall sits on a glass desk by the window as a paperweight. A war helmet with the crescent moon of House Lune hangs six meters up on the wall. A hundred other priceless treasures litter the room. Not one is nailed down or secured beneath glass, as if to say No man would dare take me. The arrogance is magnificent and balanced by menace. On a table sits the Duke’s bonesaw.
“Did he steal all this?” I ask. In admiring the room, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no way I can get across the table to my gun or his datapad before Gorgo kills me. He could crush my skull without breaking a sweat. He also has that weird locomotion they seem to breed into black ops Obsidians. He was probably a berserker, or maybe even a Stained. I’ve never seen one in the flesh.
