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“Prostitutes.”
“Control.”
“He knows about the emissaries?”
“He couldn’t.”
Sevro watches Dancer’s wool toga billow in the wind as he boards his shuttle. “I liked the bastard better in armor.”
“So did I.”
DINNER IS SERVED SHORTLY AFTER Daxo and Mustang arrive from Hyperion with my brother Kieran and niece, Rhonna. We eat at a long wooden table covered with candles and hearty provincial Martian dishes spiced with curry and cardamom. Sevro, swarmed by his daughters, makes faces at them as they eat. But when the air cracks with a sonic boom, he bolts upright, looks at the sky, and runs off into the house, urging his children to stay put. He returns a whole half an hour later arm in arm with his wife, hair a mess, two jacket buttons missing, touching a white napkin to a bloodied, split lip. My old friend Victra, immaculate in a high-collared green jacket threaded with gemstones, beams devilishly across the patio at me. She’s seven months pregnant with their fourth daughter. “Well, if it isn’t the Reaper in the leathery flesh. Apologies, my goodman. I’m dreadfully late.”
Her long legs cover the distance in three strides.
I greet her with a hug. She squeezes my butt hard enough to make me jump. She kisses Mustang on the head and slides into a chair, dominating the table. “Hello, gloomy one,” she says to Electra. She looks at young Pax and Baldur, who’ve been huddled conspiratorially at the far end of the table. Both boys blush furiously. “Will one of you handsome lads pour Aunty Victra some juice? She’s had a hellish day.” They scramble over one another to be the first to grab the pitcher. Baldur wins, and, pleased as a peacock, the quiet Obsidian lad solemnly pours Victra a towering glass. “Damnable mechanics union is on strike again. I’ve got docks full of freight that’s ready to move, but the little bastards got all spiced up by a Vox Populi mouthpiece and took the power couplings out of more than half the ships in my Luna food haulers and hid them.”
“What do they want?” Mustang asks.
“Aside from the moon to starve? Higher wages, better living conditions…the usual tripe. They say it’s too expensive to live on Luna with their wages. Well, there’s plenty of room on Earth!”
“How ungrateful of the unwashed peasants,” my mother says.
“I detect your sarcasm, Deanna, and I’m choosing to ignore it in honor of our recently returned heroes. There will be enough debate later in the week. Anyway, I’m practically a saint. Mother would have sent Grays in to crack their ungrateful skulls. Thank Jove the tinmen still bloody any Vox they see.”
“It’s their right to bargain collectively,” Mustang says, reaching down to wipe a bit of hummus off the face of Sevro’s youngest, Diana. “Written in ink in the New Compact.”
“Yes, of course it is. Unions are the heart of fair labor,” Victra mutters. “It’s the only thing Quicksilver and I agree upon.”
Mustang smiles. “Better. You’re a paragon of the Republic once again.”
“You only just missed Dancer,” Sevro says.
“I thought it reeked of self-righteousness.” Victra goes to sip her juice and jumps in surprise. Baldur still stands at her side, smiling a bit too earnestly. “Oh, you’re still here. Begone, creature.” She kisses her fingers and th
en presses them to Baldur’s cheek, pushing him away. He goes, drifting on air back to my envious son.
Afterwards, as the children go off into the vineyard to play, we retire to the back grotto. My family, those by blood and by choice, surround me. For the first time in over a year, I feel peace settling into me. My wife puts her feet in my lap and instructs me to rub them.
“I think Pax is in love with you, Victra,” Mustang laughs as Daxo pours her a glass of wine. His hands dwarf the bottle. A taller man than I am, he has difficulty sitting in his chair and keeps accidentally kicking my shins under the table. Kieran and his wife, Dio, hold hands on a bench by the fire. When I was younger, I remember thinking how much she looked like Eo. But now, as time passes, the shadow of my wife’s face fades and I see only the woman who is the center of my brother’s being. She lurches forward suddenly, away from a shower of embers as Niobe dumps another log on the flames. Thraxa sits off in the corner, furtively lighting a burner.
“Well, Pax could have worse an idol than his godmother,” Victra says, eyeing her husband, who is picking his teeth with a splinter of wood he’s pried from the outdoor table. She pushes him with her foot. “That’s grotesque. Stop.”
“Sorry.”
“Yet you’re not stopping.”
“Bit of gristle, my love.” He turns like he’s throwing the splinter away, but keeps picking. “Got it,” he says gloomily. Instead of throwing the salvaged gristle to the side, he chews on it and swallows. “Beef.”
“Beef?” Mustang looks back at the table. “We had chicken and lamb.”
Sevro frowns. “Odd. Kieran, when did we last have beef?”
“At the Howler dinner, three days ago.” Noses wrinkle around the table.
Sevro chuckles to himself. “Then it was well aged.”
Daxo shakes his head and continues sketching angels for Diana, who sits on his lap admiring the man’s work. He’s no fool with a razor, but his true art is made with a stylus. Victra looks helplessly at Mustang over her juice, despairing of her husband. “Proof, my dear, that love is blind.”
