Morning Star Page 6

  There’s silence from my enemies.

  The sight I must make—a tottering, withered form, dragging my friends, sunken eyes, face like that of a starving old demon, bearded and ridiculous—is pitiful. Twenty meters behind me, the two Olympic Knights stand imperious on the bridge where it meets the landing pad, flanked by more than fifty Grays and Obsidians who have come from the citadel doors behind him. Aja’s silver razor drips blood. But it’s not her weapon. It’s Lorn’s, the one she took from his corpse. My toes throb inside my wet slippers.

  Their men seem so tiny against the face of the vast mountain fortress. Their metal guns so petty and simple. I look to the right, off the bridge. Kilometers away, a flight of soldiers rises from a distant mountain peak where the EMP did not reach. They bank toward us through a low cloud layer. A ripWing follows.

  “Darrow,” Cassius calls to me as he walks forward with Aja off the bridge onto the pad. “You cannot escape.” He watches me, eyes unreadable. “The shield is up. Sky blocked. No ships can come from beyond to retrieve you.” He looks to the green smoke swirling from the canister on the landing pad into the winter air. “Accept your fate.”

  The wind howls between us, carrying flakes of snow stripped from the mountain.

  “Dissection?” I ask. “Is that what you think I deserve?”

  “You’re a terrorist. What rights you had, you’ve given up.”

  “Rights?” I snarl over Victra and Holiday. “To pull my wife’s feet? To watch my father die?” I try to spit, but it sticks to my lips. “What gives you the right to take them?”

  “There’s no debate here. You are a terrorist, and you must be brought to justice.”

  “Then why are you talking with me, you bloodydamn hypocrite?”

  “Because honor still matters. Honor is what echoes.” His father’s words. But they are as empty on his lips as they feel in my ears. This war has taken everything from him. I see in his eyes how broken he is. How terribly hard he is trying to be his father’s son. If he could, he would choose to be back by the campfire we made in the highlands of the Institute. He would return to the days of glory when life was simple, when friends seemed true. But wishing for the past doesn’t clean the blood from either of our hands.

  I listen to the groaning wind from the valley. My heels reach the end of the landing pad. There’s nothing but air behind me. Air and the shifting topography of a dark city on the valley floor two thousand meters below.

  “He’s going to jump,” Aja says quietly to Cassius. “We need the body.”

  “Darrow…don’t,” Cassius says, but his eyes are telling me to jump, telling me to take this way out instead of surrendering, instead of going to Luna to be peeled apart. This is the noble way. He’s putting his cape over me again.

  I hate him for it.

  “You think you’re honorable?” I hiss. “You think you’re good? Who is left that you love? Who do you fight for?” Anger creeps into my words. “You are alone, Cassius. But I am not. Not when I faced your brother in the Passage. Not when I hid among you. Not when I lay in darkness. Not even now.” I grip Holiday’s unconscious body as hard as I can, looping my fingers inside the straps of her body armor. Clutch Victra’s hand. My heels scrape the concrete’s edge. “Listen to the wind, Cassius. Listen to the bloodydamn wind.”

  The two knights tilt their heads. And still they do not understand the strange groaning sound that drifts up from the valley floor, because how would a son and daughter of Gold ever know the sound of a clawDrill gnawing through rock? How would they guess that my people would come not from the sky, but from the heart of our planet?

  “Goodbye, Cassius,” I say. “Expect me.” And I push off the ledge with both legs, flinging myself backward into open air, dragging Holiday and Victra into thin air.

  We fall toward a molten eye in the center of the snow-covered city. There, among rows of manufacturing plants, buildings shiver and tip as the ground swells upward. Pipes crack and spin into the air. Steam hisses through ruptured asphalt. Gas explosions ripple out in a corona, threading lines of fire through streets that buckle and heave, as if Mars itself were stretching six stories high to give birth to some ancient leviathan. And then, when the ground and city can stretch no more, a clawDrill erupts out into the winter air—a titanic metal hand with molten fingers that steam and grasp and then vanish as the clawDrill sinks back into Mars, pulling half a city block with it.

  We’re falling too fast.

  Jumped too soon. I lose my grip on Victra.

  Ground rushing up to us.

  Then the air cracks with a sonic boom.

  Then another. And another, till a whole chorus resounds out from the darkness of the clawDrill-carved tunnel as it gives birth to a small army. Two, twenty, fifty armored shapes in gravBoots scream up out of the tunnel toward us. To my left, my right. Painted blood-red, pouring pulsefire skyward behind us. My hair stands on end and I smell ozone. Superheated munitions ripple blue from friction as they tear through air molecules. Miniguns mounted on shoulders vomit death.

  Amidst the rising Sons of Ares, a crimson, armored man with the spiked helmet of his father zips forward and catches Victra seconds before she impacts on the roof of a skyscraper. The howling of wolves babbles from his helmet’s speakers. It’s Ares himself. My best friend in all the worlds has not forgotten me. He has come with his legion of empire breakers and terrorists and renegades: the Howlers. A dozen metal men and women with black wolfcloaks kicking in the wind fly behind him. The largest of them in pure white armor with blue handprints covering the chest and arms. His black cloak is stained with a red stripe down the middle. For a moment I think it’s Pax come back from the dead for me. But when the man catches me and Holiday, I see the glyphs drawn in the blue paint of the handprints. Glyphs from the south pole of Mars. It is Ragnar Volarus, prince of the Valkyrie Spires. He tosses Holiday to another Howler and pushes me behind him so I can wrap my arms around his neck, digging my fingers into the rivets of his armor. Then he banks through the smoking valley city toward the tunnel, shouting to me: “Hold fast, little brother.”

  And he dives. Sevro to the left, clutching Victra, Howlers all around, their gravBoots screaming as we plummet into the darkness of the tunnel’s mouth. The enemy pursues. The sounds are horrible. Screaming of wind. Rupture of rock as pulsefire rips into the walls behind us and weapons warble. My jaw rattles against Ragnar’s metal shoulder. His gravBoots vibrate at full burn. Bolts from the armor dig into my ribs. The battery pack above his tailbone slams into my groin as we weave and dart through pitch black. I’m riding a metal shark deeper and deeper into the belly of an angry sea. My ears pop. Wind whistles. A pebble slams into my forehead. Blood streams down my face, stinging my eyes. The only light the glowing of boots and the flash of weapons.

  The skin of my right shoulder flares with pain. Pulsefire from our pursuers misses me by inches. Still, my skin bubbles and smokes, lighting my jumpsuit’s sleeve on fire. The wind kills the flames. But the pulsefire rips past again and boils into the Son’s gravBoots just ahead of me, melting the man’s legs into a single chunk of molten metal. He jerks in the air, slamming into the ceiling, where his body crumples. Helmet ripping off and spinning straight toward me.

  —

  Red light throbs through my eyelids. There’s smoke in the air. Meaty. Stings the back of the throat. Fat tissue charred and crispy. Chest hot with pain. A swamp of screams and howls and cries for mother all around. And something else. The sound of bumblebees in my ears. Someone’s above me. See them in the red light as I open my eyes. Screaming into my face. Pressing a mask to my mouth. A damp wolfcloak dangles from a metal shoulder, tickling my neck. Other hands touch mine. The world vibrates, tilts.

  “Starboard! Starboard!” someone screams in the distance, as if underwater.

  We’re on a ship. I’m surrounded by dying men. Burned, twisted husks of armor. Smaller men atop them, bent like vultures, saws glowing in their hands as they peel the armor away, trying to free
those dying of their burns inside. But the armor’s melted tight. A hand touches mine. A boy lying beside me. Eyes wide. Armor blackened. The skin of his cheeks is young and smooth beneath the soot and blood. His mouth not yet creased by smiles. His breaths come shorter, quicker. He mouths my name.

  And he’s gone.

  I’m alone, far away from the horror, standing weightless and clean on a road that smells of moss and earth. My feet touch the ground, but I cannot feel it underfoot. To either side stretches the grass of wind-beaten moors. The sky flashes with lightning. My hands are without Sigils and drift along the cobbled wall that meanders on ahead to either side. When did I start walking? Somewhere in the distance, wood smoke rises. I follow the road, but I feel I have no choice. A voice calls to me from beyond a hill.

  Oh tomb, O marriage chamber, hollowed out

  house that will watch forever, where I go.

  To my own people, who are mostly there;

  Persephone has taken them to her.

  Last of them all, ill-fated past the rest,

  shall I descend, before my course is run.

  Still when I get there I may hope to find

  I come as a dear friend to my dear father

  To you, my mother, and my brother too.

  All three of you have known my hand in death

  I wash your bodies…

  It is my uncle’s voice. Is this the Vale? Is this the road I walk before death? It can’t be. In the Vale there is no pain, but my body aches. My legs sting. Still I hear his voice ahead of me, drawing me through the mist. The man who taught me to dance after my father died, who guarded me and sent me to Ares. Who died himself in a mineshaft and dwells now in the Vale.

  I thought it would be Eo who greeted me. Or my father. Not Narol.

  “Keep reading,” another voice whispers. “Dr. Virany said he can hear us. He just has to find his way back.” Even as I walk, I feel a bed under me. The air around cold and crisp in my lungs. The sheets soft and clean. The muscles in my legs twitch. Feels like little bees are stinging them. And with each sting, the dream world fades and I slide back into my body.

  “Well, if we’re gonna read to the squabber, might as well be something Red. Not this poncy Violet shit.”

  “Dancer said this was one of his favorites.”

  My eyes open. I’m in a bed. White sheets, IVs going into my arms. Under the sheets, I touch the ant-sized nodes that have been stuck to my legs to channel electrical current through my muscles to combat atrophy. The room’s a cave. Scientific equipment, machines, and terraria litter it.

  It was Uncle Narol I heard in the dream after all. But he’s not in the Vale. He’s alive. He sits at my bedside, squinting down at one of Mickey’s old books. He’s grizzled and wiry, even for a Red. Callused hands trying to be gentle with the frail paper pages. He’s bald now, and deeply sunburned on his forearms and the back of his neck. Still looks like he was cobbled together out of cracked old leather. He’ll be forty-one now. Looks older. More savage. A brooding danger to him, lent teeth by the railgun in his thigh holster. A slingBlade has been sewn onto his black military jacket above a Society logo that’s been peeled off and inverted. Red at the top. Gold the foundation.

  The man’s been at war.

  Beside him sits my mother. A bent, fragile woman since her stroke. How many times did I imagine the Jackal standing over her, pliers in hand? She’s been safe the whole time. Her crooked fingers weave needle and thread through tattered socks, patching the holes. They don’t move like they used to. Age and infirmity have slowed her. Her broken body is not what she is on the inside. There she stands tall as any Gold, broad as any Obsidian.

  Watching her sit there breathing quietly, intent on her task, I want to protect her more than anything else in the world. I want to heal her. Give her all she never had. I love her so much, I don’t know what to say. What to do that can ever show her how much she means to me. “Mother…” I whisper.

  They look up. Narol frozen in his chair. My mother setting a hand on his and rising slowly to my bedside. Her steps slow, wary. “Hello, child.”

  She stands above me, overwhelming me with the love in her eyes. My hand is almost larger than her head, but I gently touch her face as if to prove to myself she is real. I trace the crow’s-feet from her eyes to the gray hair at her temples. As a boy, I did not like her as much as I liked father. She would hit me at times. She would weep alone and pretend nothing was wrong. And now all I want is to listen to her hum as she cooks. All I want are those still nights where we had peace and I was a child.

  I want the time back.

  “I’m sorry…,” I find myself saying. “I’m so sorry…”

  She kisses my forehead and rocks her head against mine. She smells like rust and sweat and oil. Like home. She tells me I am her son. There is nothing to apologize for. I am safe. I am loved. The family is here. Kieran, Leanna, their children. Waiting to see me. I sob uncontrollably, sharing all the pain my solitude forced me to hoard. The tears a deeper language than my tongue can afford. I’m exhausted by the time she kisses me again on the head and pulls back. Narol comes to her side and puts a hand on my arm. “Narol…”

  “Hello, you little bastard,” he says roughly. “Still your father’s son, eh?”

  “I thought you were dead,” I say.

  “Nah. Death chewed on me a bit. Then spat my bloody ass back out. Said there was killing that needed doin’ and some wild blood of mine that needed savin’.” He grins down at me. That old scar on his lips joined by two new ones.

  “We’ve been waiting for you to wake up,” Mother says. “It’s been two days since they brought you back in the shuttle.”

  I can still taste the smoke from burned flesh in the back of my throat.

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  “Tinos. The city of Ares.”

  “Tinos…,” I whisper. I sit up quickly. “Sevro…Ragnar…”

  “They’re alive,” Narol grunts, pushing me back down. “Don’t rip out your tubes and resFlesh. Took Dr. Virany hours to thread you up after that bloody mess of an escape. Boneriders were supposed to be in EMP radius. They weren’t. They ripped us to pieces in the tunnels. Ragnar’s the only reason you’re living.”

  “You were there?”

  “Who do you think lead the drillteam that punched up into Attica? It was Lykos blood, Lambda and Omicron.”

  “And what about Victra?”

  “Easy, boy.” He sets his hand on my chest to stop me from trying to get up again. “She’s with the doc. Same for the Gray. They’re alive. Getting patched.”

  “You need to check me, Narol. Tell the doctors to check me for radiation trackers. For implants. They might have let me go on purpose, to find Tinos….I need to see Sevro.”

  “Oy! I said easy,” Narol says sharply. “We checked you. Two implants were in you. But both fried in the EMP. You weren’t tracked. And Ares ain’t here. He’s still out with the Howlers. Came back just to deliver the wounded and scarf down grub.” There were almost a dozen wolfcloaks. So he’s recruited. Thistle betrayed us, but Vixus mentioned Pebble and Clown. Wonder if Screwface is with them too.

  “Ares is always on the move,” mother says.

  “Lots to do. Only one Ares,” Narol replies defensively. “They’re still out looking for survivors. They’ll be back soon. By morning, luck holds.” My mother shoots him a harsh look and he shuts up.

  I lean back in the bed, overwhelmed by speaking to them. By seeing them. I can barely form sentences. So much to say. So much unfamiliar emotion running through me. All I end up doing is sitting there, breathing fast. My mother’s love fills the room, but still I feel the darkness moving beyond this moment. Pressing in on this family I thought I lost and now fear I cannot protect. My enemies are too great. Too many. And I too weak. I shake my head, running my thumb over her knuckles.

  “I thought I would never see you again.”

  “Yet here you are.” Somehow she makes it sound cold. So like my mother
to be the one with dry eyes when both the men can barely speak. I always wondered how I survived the Institute. It damn well wasn’t because of my father. He was a gentle man. Mother is the spine in me. The iron. And I clutch her hand as if such a simple gesture could say all that.

  A light knock comes at the door. Dancer pokes his head in. Devilishly handsome as ever, he’s one of the only Reds alive who makes old age look good. I can hear his foot dragging slightly behind him in the hall. Both my mother and uncle nod to him in deference. Narol steps aside respectfully as he approaches my bedside, but my mother stays put. “This Helldiver’s not done yet, it would seem.” Dancer grips my hand. “But you gave us a hell of a scare.”

  “It’s bloodydamn good to see you, Dancer.”

  “And you, boy. And you.”

  “Thank you. For taking care of them.” I nod to my mother and uncle. “For helping Sevro…”

  “It’s what family is for,” he says. “How are you?”

  “My chest hurts. And everything else.”

  He laughs lightly. “It should. Virany says that crank the Nakamuras gave you almost killed you. You had a heart attack.”

  “Dancer, how did the Jackal know? Every day I’ve wondered. Picked it apart. The clues I left him. Did I give myself up?”

  “It wasn’t you,” Dancer says. “It was Harmony.”

  “Harmony…” I whisper. “She wouldn’t…she hates Gold.” But even as I say it, I know how reckless her hate is. How vengeful she must have felt after I did not detonate the bomb she gave me to kill the Sovereign and the others on Luna.

  “She thinks we’ve sold out the rebellion,” Dancer says. “That we’re compromising too much. She told the Jackal who you were.”

  “He knew when I was in his office. When I gave him the gift…”