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“If you regret you are evil, it is still evil. I’ve killed old men in their beds. Children under the feet of their own horses, mothers who begged me to spare their unborn. All because I was a stupid girl who thought her father looked beautiful in his armor. When he retired, I begged to take his oath to my
Sovereign. He wept that day. I never knew why till after he died.
“I thought his oath gave him purpose. He was too honorable to say it imprisoned him. And the day he found freedom, he saw his daughter enslaved.” She swallows, reliving the horrors she’s done in my family’s name. “I only wanted to be useful.”
I don’t know what to say.
Her voice softens. “?‘Get them while they’re young,’ she told Magnus once. ‘Get them while they’re young, then you’ve got them forever.’ Honor, duty: it’s all a lie. By the time you know better, you’re too dirty to get out. Octavia poisoned me. She made me fear to be alone so much that I believed only the darkness would want me.” Her hand trembles upward to touch my face. “Somehow she didn’t poison you.”
Her fingers feel right against my cheek. Not electric like Atalantia’s, not rank with guilt, but like they’ve been missing all my life. I want them to stay forever. I feel safe here. Her touch is not maternal, nor is it hungry, but at this moment, I realize she does not see me as boy any longer, but as someone who understands the world as she does.
It is already too late.
“You were always good. You still are. They all thought you were dead, but I didn’t. Say what you will of Virginia, she wouldn’t let Darrow kill a boy. Sometimes, when I was in a shuttle and all I could hear were the engines, I would think of you. I would see you off somewhere by the sea. Living a true life, falling in love maybe.” Her fingers leave my face. “When you stepped onto the Annihilo, it broke my heart.”
“Why should me coming home break your heart?” I ask. “This is my family.”
She stares at the door, forgetting me and the sea.
“I have to tell you something. Something that will make you hate me. Something I know will make you do what has to be done. But I’m afraid…”
I take her hand and surprise her by kissing it.
“Nothing you can say will make me hate you.”
She swallows. “Your mother…”
I go cold. “What about my mother?”
“She was a Reformer. Did you know that?”
“No…” Did I? Do I?
“No. Of course you didn’t. She…saw what Octavia was. How her grip was squeezing tighter and tighter till it would choke our world. She thought the burning of Rhea was an abomination. And she saw how slowly her mother was trying to corrupt you. So with Romulus’s father, Revus, and Nero au Augustus, she planned a coup. Lysander, it wasn’t Outriders or terrorists who killed your mother. It was Octavia who gave the order.”
“How do you—”
“Because Atalantia and I planted the bomb on their shuttle.”
I stare at her, unable to comprehend.
“You and Atalantia.”
“Yes.”
“You…were her closest friends.”
“Yes. Though it broke my heart, I did as my Sovereign commanded.”
My hand slips away from hers.
The world shrinks to a very small, very quiet place as memories and all their weight fall upon me. All the times I sat with my grandmother, dined with her, flew with her, tried to impress her, and she sat there, the old crone, pretending she didn’t send my father and my mother smoldering into the sea. All the times Atalantia took me to Heliopolis, held my hand at the opera, squeezed me between her sweating legs…
A dark glass slides over the world.
I will never be the same.
“Why can I not remember my mother’s face?” I ask.
