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She checks the hydraulics in the knees. “Keep your fortune. Every scar I have earned has led me here. This war is my destiny.” She turns. “Cheer up, gahja. The courage of a soldier is heightened by her knowledge of her profession.” She looks me up and down. “Go do your duty.”
I suspected it before, but I feel it now as I see the excitement on her face as she turns back to the war machine.
She didn’t betray her father because she loves her mother. There was another, hidden reason, which was the source of the guilt I saw in her eyes as she watched Romulus walk to his death. It is the source of the anger she feels toward him, toward me. Anger that should be for herself, because deep down she knows that it wasn’t loyalty to the Rim or her mother that incited her to ferry evidence of Darrow’s crimes against the Rim back to the council.
It was her hunger for war.
Now, after weeks of starvation, she is about to be fed.
THE FEAR KNIGHT IS a sadist.
Unlike the vain Golds of the Core, he appreciates guerrilla warfare and its effect on armies. Though I met him only once in my days of service
to Nero, I saw enough in him to know he put no stock in glory. When I squeezed his hand, eager to impress my strength on what then would have been a superior of stratospheric heights, he let his go limp. It embarrassed me. Little did I know then that the wan, plain-dressed man would someday skin, melt, castrate, rape, blind, and mutilate my legionnaires by the thousands.
Atlas’s reputation was meager before the start of the Solar War. He was known primarily for three things: His patronage of the Great Library of Delphi. His inglorious position as a ward of the Sovereign. And his abrupt disappearance, one that was clarified when he returned after the fall of Earth from nearly a decade of banishment fighting threats at the edge of the system.
Born after the failed First Moon Lord’s Rebellion, he was raised on Io with his more famous brother, Romulus. When he turned ten, his parents said their farewells and sent him to Luna to live in the court of the Sovereign as yet another noble hostage to ensure the Rim’s obedience.
Amongst the Core Golds he was privileged and educated, yet derided for being the spawn of a traitor. It was there he met Atalantia, and there that Octavia made him an extension of her will, turning him against his traitor family and planting the seeds that would make him into the man behind the Pale Mask. Of all my enemies, I loathe him the most.
We stand before his newest forest of corpses.
Bodies hang impaled on vertical poles. There are more than two hundred. Each with the Fear brand on their bare chests—a fleshy wound in the shape of a child’s face ringed with hair of serpents.
A grisly promenade strewn with Republic flags leads through the impaled bodies to Angelia. The white fabric of the flags is tattered and fouled with boot prints and blood. It will be booby-trapped.
I look at the bodies, at their faces. This is why I left Luna. Those glossy peacocks in the Senate read our reports. But the further you are away from it, the more war reads like arithmetic, and past that it reads like fiction, past that it’s just an annoying video on your info stream. How could they possibly imagine the anguish on the faces of the dead? How could the mob in the street demanding handouts ever know on a sensory level that when a human rots, it isn’t just the skin that stinks, but the intestines, the stomach, the liver?
How could they know that weird tremble of the soul when you realize there is no civilization? There’s just a lock on a box. And inside the box is this. Virginia wanted me to reason with the senators. What common language would we speak, I wonder, when they have not seen inside the box and I am its lock?
It drives me fucking mad that they refuse to understand how sick and dogged and obsessed with our destruction our enemies are. Yet they live in a fantasy built on the bodies of my friends.
The chatter of the carrion birds serrates the air, along with the cries of the dying. Of the impaled soldiers, many still live, writhing like worms on a hook. Our four Obsidians stare up at the bodies and make a sign to their gods.
The horror reaches deepest into the heart of Alexandar and pulls him forward. “Arcos, heels down,” I bark.
He stops but turns to me, face ghostly vacant. “They are still alive…”
“And they’re all booby-trapped,” I say, though he knows it. Rhonna swallows as she watches Alexandar blink at the result of his error. Fall asleep in the Ladon, you wake up to this.
I walk up to him. “We all carry weight. I need you to carry this. Can you?”
The eyes of his grandfather blink back at me as the impaled cry for help. “Yes, sir.”
“Goodman.”
I turn back to the Howlers. They stand in a ragged line. Colloway brings the Necromancer in for fire support. “It’s theatrics. He’s buying time to distract us from his objective,” I tell them. “We can’t help them. Go to air. Packs of three. Use your thermals and sensors to scan for traps. Walk fast but soft. And for Jove’s sake keep your chrome in. I need your eyes.”
I designate the teams to search potential targets. Dust billows as nearly two score of Howlers jolt upward over their writhing comrades to disperse through the city.
I wait behind with Thraxa and Felix. I raise my voice so the impaled can hear me.
“How many of you saw Gorgons around your feet? Raise your right hand.” A sea of right hands. Some lie and keep theirs down. Could be a false positive. Atlas might have booby-trapped none of them. Or all of them. “You may be booby-trapped,” I say. “Medships are on the way. Hold out for them, and soon it’ll be six weeks of pretty medici and ice frizeé. We’ll be back.”
I cast a dour look to Thraxa and Felix and we lift off for the city’s communications center. I shoot a hole in the bronze dome with my pulseFist, scan, and drop through to the marble floor.
As sunlight washes in through the open door, we see them. Bodies strewn on the floor. Ripped apart and chewed up. Heads caved in with all manner of improvised weapons. Bodies chewed upon as if by animals. Atlas didn’t do this. They butchered one another. The features of the dead are mottled and monstrously warped by some pathogen.
