“How can you be done, eh? You’re trapped. You bloodywell can’t go home to Lykos, can you? One way out. Buckle tight and stay the course.”
Her words strike hard. I can’t go back. The loneliness in that is inexpressible. Where is my home? Where will I go even if this all ends with Gold falling to ashes?
“You won’t meet Ares. Even I’ve never even seen his face, Helldiver.”
“You haven’t? You’ve worked for him almost as long as Dancer. Years. How can you of all people trust him?”
“Because he put the first gun in my hand. He wore his helmet and pushed a mark IV scorcher with a full ion clip into my palm.”
“Is Ares a man?” I ask.
“Who cares?” She pulls up a holoDisplay. The electrons swirl in the air, coalescing into a series of maps. I recognize the topography. Mars. Venus. Luna, I think. Dozens of red dots blink throughout blueprints of cities, dockyards, and a dozen other vital organs. Bombs, I realize. Harmony looks tiredly at the map. “This is Ares’s plan. Four hundred bombings. Six hundred assaults on weapons depots, government facilities, electric companies, communications grids. It is the sum of the Sons of Ares. Years of planning. Years of scraping up resources.”
I had no idea we could carry out such action. I stare at the map in awe.
“The bombings today were meant to provoke a response. Get them all hot and bothered. We want them mobilizing. If they mobilize, they condense. Easiest to burn pitvipers when they are packed tight.”
“When will this take place?”
“Three nights from now.”
“Three nights,” I repeat. “At the conclusion of the Summit. He can’t want me to do th—”
“He does. Three nights from now, the Summit finishes up nice with a gala. Wine, Pinks, silks, whatever the hell you Goldbrows do. All the bloodydamn Governors, all the Senators, Praetors, Imperators, Judiciars from across the Society will be here. A Solar System of monsters brought by the power of the Sovereign to one place. It’ll be ten more years before we see this. There’s no way for the Sons to get in, but you can go where we can’t. You can strike the blow that we cannot.”
I feel the words coming like a train down a tunnel.
“When they have all gathered nice and tightlike. When the Sovereign stands to give her speech, you kill the Goldbrow bastards with a radium bomb we hide on you. Mickey and a crew of gizmos built the tech. Once we see the bomb has detonated via the dataRecorder we’ll plant on you, we unleash hell across the system. Burn them out.”
This is the sum of all I’ve done?
“There has to be another way.”
“There were always two plans, Helldiver. This, and you. Ares and Dancer said you were our hope, our chance at another path. They boasted like boys that you could destroy Gold from inside. But you failed, like I said you would. You’re gonna claim blood is on Evey’s hands. Well, it’s on yours too.”
“You don’t even know the blood I have on my hands, Harmony. I’m not some bloodydamn saint. But Evey’s attack was a crime.”
“The only crime is if we lose.”
I shatter. “There’s more at play here than you understand. We cannot face Gold. No matter the blow we strike, they will eradicate us like this.” I snap my fingers.
“So you won’t do it.”
“No, I won’t do it, Harmony.”
“Then the war begins without your help,” she says. “We had two Sons ready to try to enter the gala. They are not Gold, so bets are higher they’ll get caught and cut to ribbons in a Praetorian torture cell before completing their mission. Means the leaders of Gold will live on, and our tiny chances of winning this shitstorm shrink, because you don’t trust Ares.”
“Slag this. Ares should have told me this himself if he wanted my help!”
“How? He is on Mars preparing the revolution. There is no way to communicate. They monitor everything. How could he contact you without exposing your cover?” She leans forward, lower teeth exposed ferally. “Tell me, Darrow. Do you even know how much they’ve stolen from you?”
It’s something in her tone. “What do you mean?”
“Here’s what I mean.” She jams a series of orders into the holoCube and an image appears of Lykos mines. My blood goes cold. “The recording of Eo’s death, the one we pirated and broadcast …”
My heart thuds in my throat.
“It wasn’t complete.” She presses play and the room around us becomes the mine. We’re a part of the three-dimensional holo. It’s the raw footage, not the stuff on the newsreels, not the stuff I’ve seen a hundred times. It shows the hanging without a soundtrack.
I hear my own cries of pain as the Grays beat the boy I used to be. Weeping in the crowd. The awkward silence of unedited footage. My mother hangs her head and Uncle Narol spits in the dust. Kieran, my brother, covers his children’s eyes. Feet shuffle. Dio, Eo’s sister, stumbles up the metal scaffold. Shoes scraping over rust. Sobbing. Then Dio leans toward my wife. Eo stands small, so pale and thin, little more than the smoke of the burning girl I remember. Her lips move. Again, I don’t hear it, just as I didn’t hear it that day. Suddenly Dio sobs uncontrollably and clings to Eo. What was said?
“Use the equipment. That’s what it’s there for, eh?”
I’ve wondered it a thousand times but never had access to this footage. I never knew how I’d find it without raising suspicion. And the thought scared me, as it scares me now—what was I not strong enough to hear? What could Dio bear that I could not?
In the news footage that was pirated, they don’t even show Dio. But here, with the raw footage, I can rewind. I do so. I can amplify the sound. I do so. I watch it happen again: My mother hangs her head. Narol spits. Kieran covers the children’s eyes. Feet shuffle. Dio goes up the scaffold. All the sound is magnified. I sort out the white noise with the controls, and I hear what my wife said to Dio.
“In our bedroom, there is a crib I made. Hide it before Darrow returns.”
“A crib …,” Dio murmurs.
“He must never know. It would break him.”
“Don’t say it, Eo. Don’t.”
“I am with child.”