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“?’Course you do.”
I turn to her. About to tell her to go with Harnassus, when I see she understands what I mean…what exactly I mean by insurance plan on Orion. Fuck. She sees right through me.
“Where is it?” she asks. “Just in case…”
In case I lie dead on the battlefield, she means.
When I asked Glirastes to build the sync hardware for the Storm Gods, I had him construct a safety valve so that the Blues running it couldn’t decide the fate of the planet without me. I pull the master switch from my coat and brandish it at Rhonna.
“And in armor?” she asks.
“Second thigh box. Right leg.”
And like that, she ensures her place at my side. I’m sorry, brother.
I send a message to the Howlers: “Alexandar, tell Thraxa to reconnoiter Angelia. Do not engage the Fear Knight. I’m on my way.”
“LYSANDER AU LUNE. HOW vital you look, for a ghost.” Atalantia lifts me from my knees to embrace me in her meditation chamber. “Look, Hypatia, our old friend,” she croons. The tamed black vasta serpent that coils about Atalantia’s throat like a necklace eyes me with reptilian indifference. “Go on, my dear, give dear Lysander a kiss.”
I’d forgotten how terrifying it is to feel the cold scales of Venus’s most venomous creature against your lips. As I pull back from the kiss, I watch the snake’s chameleon scales wash pale to match my skin tone, and then darken as it coils back around Atalantia’s neck. “She remembers you!” Atalantia croons.
Her meditation chamber is more pleasant than her jewelry. Unlike Grandmother, Atalantia enjoys a little chaos. Her chamber is a garden with some of the most esoteric vegetation I have ever seen. Under a dome of stars, helix trees with violet leaves wend like DNA strands. Birds sing. And even a monkey or two swings in the trees. Were it not for Mercury turning outside the viewport, I would not know I was on a battleship.
My favorite touch is the carnivorous orchids perched upon babbling cupid fountains. Their tongues reach for me as I look at Atalantia.
Like Ajax, Atalantia has changed in my absence. Now in her late forties, the youngest Grimmus sister is lean and hungry-looking. She looks not a day over twenty-five except in the eyes. But where once reclined the whimsical heartbreaker of the Palatine now stands a soldier.
Gone are the gowns and the jewels and the hair swaying in braids down past her lower back. Gone are the diamond nails and spiced champagne flutes and the halls filled with muscled Pink paramours. The gowns have been replaced by a dramatic black uniform with rows of golden spikes and a death’s-head on each shoulder, and the paramours by a ship full of the intrepid killers from my generation, the ice-eyed veterans of her own, and the remaining legends of the one before.
Atalantia’s hair is fade
d on the sides, in short braids on the top. One could almost mistake her for one of those humorless martial Martians she used to mock.
Seeing her again is like touching a fragment of home. More even than seeing Ajax or Kalindora. She was close with my parents. While I have always feared Atlas, my father’s best friend, I have never feared my mother’s. In many ways, Atalantia was as much a protector to me as Aja was.
We are joined by Ajax, Kalindora, and, via hologram, an endangered species—the Primuses of the remaining houses of the Conquering. They are Carthii, the rich and licentious shipbuilders of Venus; the purity-obsessed Falthe, nomadic after their lands on Earth fell; and Votum, the poetic, yet ultimately practical metal-mining magnates and builders of Mercury, recently evicted, of course.
Absent are the upstart families who have risen through war still deemed petty by this lot. And, most notably, the ancient Saud, the infantry purveyors of Venus. Dido’s family are the chief rivals of the Carthii, Atalantia’s strongest allies. Their absence speaks volumes.
So this is still a den of carnivores. It will prove a difficult audience. At least I am spared from telling Julia au Bellona of Cassius’s fate at the hands of the Rim. She is not here.
“I grieved to hear of your father’s death,” I say to Atalantia according to court protocol. “Long was his toil. Great were his deeds. May he rest unburdened in the Void.”
Beneath heavy lids, her eyes flash like matchheads. They search my face, the room, for more fuel to burn. They fall on my vestments and dance with fire. “Dear child, I do say, your fashion seems to have become rather bleak…”
“Your father—”
“Did I teach you nothing? Sweet Lysander! Idleness is no reason to discount the hoof maintenance of your steed, just as war is no excuse for poor tailoring. We will have to amend your sins at once. It is a matter of self-respect. I have three of the premiere tailors in all Venus aboard. One week with them, and you will look like a king.”
That is a dangerous word in this company.
It is better I say nothing.
She sighs and looks up at the stars. I spare a glance for the giant mural that dominates the far wall. It is the one Octavia commissioned of our family, and our closest allies, the gens Grimmus. Ajax, Atlas, and Aja stare out, but of the dead, nothing can be seen of their faces.
Atalantia has painted them out.
Including mine.
