33
A Dance
I sleep with a dream of the past. My hand curled in the tendrils of her hair. About us the vale lay quiet in slumber. Even the children did not yet stir. The birds rested on knotted limbs in the pinewood nearby, and I heard nothing but her breath and the crackling of the old fire. The bed smelled of her. No scent of flowers or perfume. Just the earthy musk of her skin, of the oils in the hair around my hands, of her hot breath as it warmed my cheek. Her hair was of our planet. It was wild like mine, dirty like mine, red like mine. A bird outside croons loudly. Incessantly. Louder. Louder.
And I wake hearing someone at my door.
Kicking aside sweaty sheets, I sit up on the edge of the mattress. “Visual.” A holo appears of Mustang in the hall. I rise instinctively to let her in, but when I reach the door, I pause. We have our plan. There’s nothing left to discuss at this hour. Nothing from which any good could come.
I watch her on the holo. Shifting foot to foot, something in her hands. If I let her in … it’ll just cost us both in the end. I’ve already hurt Roque. Already killed Quinn and Tactus and Pax. Bringing her close now would be selfish. At the very best, she survives this war and she learns the truth about me. I back away from the door.
“Darrow, stop being an ass and let me in.”
My hand choses for me.
Her hair is wet and loose, her uniform replaced by a black kimono. How fragile she seems next to Ragnar, who lurks in the hall.
“Told you,” she says to Ragnar. To me she says, “Knew you’d be awake. Ragnar here was being stubborn. Said you needed to sleep. And he wouldn’t take the food I brought him.”
“Do you need something?” I ask more coldly than I intended.
Her feet make a show of shuffling nervously. “I’m … afraid of the dark.” She pushes past me. Ragnar watches this, eyes giving nothing away.
“I told you to go to bed, Ragnar.”
He does not move.
“Ragnar, if I’m not safe here, I’m not safe anywhere. Go to bed.”
“I sleep with my eyes open, dominus.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Well, do it in your bunk, Stained. That’s an order,” I say, hating the master’s words as soon as they come from my mouth.
Reluctantly, he nods his head and slips silently down the hall. I watch him go as the door hisses closed. I turn to find Mustang inspecting my suite. It’s more wood and stone than metal, the walls carved and worked with woodland scenes. Strange the efforts these people go to in order to make themselves feel part of history and not a piece of the future.
“Sevro must pissed he’s not the only one lurking behind you anymore.”
“Sevro’s grown up a bit since you last saw him. He even sleeps in beds.”
She laughs at that. “Well Ragnar was so adamant I go away that I thought you might have company.”
“You know I don’t use Pinks.”
“It’s big,” she says of the suite. “Six rooms for little old you. Aren’t you going to offer me something to drink?”
“Would you—”
“No, thank you.” She tells the room’s controls to play music. Mozart. “But you don’t really like music, do you?”
“Not this sort. It’s … stuffy.”
“Stuffy? Mozart was a rebel, a brigand of monolithic genius! A breaker of all that was stuffy.”
I shrug. “Maybe. But then the stuffy people got ahold of him.”
“You’re such a roughneck sometimes. I thought that Pink of yours—Theodora? Thought she would have managed to feed you some culture. So what do you like, then?” She runs her hands along a carving of a wolf leading its pack. “Not that electronic madness the Howlers thump their heads to, I hope. Makes sense that the Greens came up with that … it’s like listening to a robot having a seizure.”
“Have much experience with robots?” I ask as she moves around the Victory Armor in a room off to the side of the entry hall. The Sovereign gave it to the Ash Lord when he burned Rhea. Mustang’s fingers play over the frost-hued metal.
“Father’s Oranges and Greens had a few robots in their engineering labs. Ancient, rusted things that Father had refurbished and put in the museums.” She laughs to herself. “He used to take me there back when I wore dresses and my mother was still alive. Absolutely detested the things. I remember Mother laughing about his paranoia, especially when Adrius tried restarting one of the combat models from Eurasia. Father was convinced that robots would have overthrown man and now rule the Solar System if Earth’s empires had never been destroyed.”
I snort out a laugh.
“What?” she asks.
“I’m just …” I catch my breath. “I’m trying to imagine the great ArchGovernor Augustus having nightmares of robots.” Another bout of laughter seizes me. “Does he suppose they’d want more oil? More vacation time?”
Mustang watches me, amused. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” My laughter gradually subsides. I hold my stomach. “I’m fine.” I can’t stop grinning. “Is he afraid of aliens too?”
“I never asked him.” She taps the armor. “But they’re out there, you know.”
I stare at her. “That’s not in the archives.”
“Oh, no no. I mean we’ve never found any. But the Drake-Roddenberry equation suggests the mathematic probability is N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L. Where R* is the average rate of star formation in our galaxy, where fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets … You’re not even listening anymore.”
“What do you suppose they would think of us?” I ask. “Of man?”
“I suppose they would think we’re beautiful, strange, and inexplicably horrible to one another.” She points down a hall. “Is that the training room?” She flips off her slippers and walks away down a marble hall, casting a look back at me over her shoulder. I follow. Lights come mutedly to life as we pass. She slips ahead faster than I care to follow. I find her moments later in the center of the circular training room. The white mat is soft under my feet. Carvings line the wooden walls. “The House of Grimmus is an old one,” she says, pointing to a frieze of a man in armor. “You can see the Ash Lord’s first ancestor there. Aucus au Grimmus, the first Gold to touch land in the Iron Rain that took the American eastern seaboard after one of Cassius’s ancestors, forget his name, broke through the Atlantic Fleet. Then there is Vitalia au Grimmus, the Great Witch, right there.” She turns to me. “Do you even know the history of the things you try to break?”
“It was Scipio au Bellona who defeated the Atlantic Fleet.”
“Was it?” she asks.
“I’ve studied the history,” I say. “Just as well as you.
“But you stand apart from it, don’t you?” She paces around me. “You always have. Like you’re an outsider looking in. It was growing up away from all this on your parents asteroid mine that did the trick, wasn’t it? That’s why you can ask a question like ‘What would aliens think of us?’”
“You’re just as much an outsider as I am. I’ve read your dissertations.”
“You have?” She’s surprised.
“Believe it or not, I can read too.” I shake my head. “It’s like everyone forgets I only missed one question on the Institute’s slangsmarts test.”
“Ew. You missed a question?” She wrinkles her nose as she picks a practice razor from a bench. “I suppose that’s why you weren’t in Minerva.”
“How did Pax manage to get picked by House Minerva, by the way? I’ve always wondered … he wasn’t exactly a scholar.”
“How did Roque end up in Mars?” she replies with a shrug. “Each of us have hidden depths. Now, Pax wasn’t as bright as Daxo is, but wisdom is found in the heart not the head. Pax taught me that.” She smiles distantly. “The one grace my father gave me after my mother died was letting me visit the Telemanus estate. He kept Adrius and me apart to make assassination of his heirs more difficult. I was lucky to be near them. Though if I hadn’t been, maybe Pax wouldn’t have been quite so loyal. Maybe he wouldn’t have asked to be in Minerva. Maybe he’d be alive. Sorry …” Shaking away the sadness, she looks back to me with a tight smile. “What did you think of my dissertations?”
“Which one?”
“Surprise me.”
“‘The Insects of Specialization.’” Snap. A practice razor slaps into my arm, stinging the flesh. I yelp in surprise. “What the hell?”
Mustang stands there looking innocent, swishing the practice blade back and forth. “I was making sure you were paying attention.”
“Paying attention? I was answering your question!”
She shrugs. “All right. Perhaps I just wanted to hit you.” She lashes at me again.
I dodge. “Why?”
“No reason in particular.” She swings. I dodge. “But they say even a fool learns something once it hits him.”
“Don’t quote …” She slashes, I twist aside. “… Homer … to me.”
“Why is that dissertation your favorite?” she asks coolly, swinging at me again. The practice razor has no edge, but it is as hard as a wooden cane. I leave my feet, twisting sideways out of the way like a Lykos tumbler.
“Because …” I dodge another.
“When you’re on your heels, you’re a liar. On your toes, you spit truth.” She swings again. “Now spit.” She hits my kneecap. I roll away, trying to reach the other practice razors, but she keeps me from them with a flurry of swings. “Spit!”
“I liked it …” I jump backward. “… because you said ‘Specialization makes us limited, simple insects; a fact … from … which Gold is not immune.’”
She stops attacking and stares accusatorially, and I realize I’ve fallen into a trap.
“If you agree with that, then why do you insist on making yourself only a warrior?”
“It’s what I am.”
“It’s what you are?” she laughs. “You who trust Victra. A Julii. You who trusted Tactus. You who let an Orange give strategic recommendations. You who gives command of your ship to a Docker and keeps an entourage of bronzies?” She wags a finger at me. “Don’t be a hypocrite now, Darrow au Andromedus. If you’re going to tell everyone else they can choose their destiny, then you damn well better do the same.”
She’s too smart to lie to. That’s why I’m so ill at ease around her when she asks me questions, when she probes things I can’t explain. There’s no explainable motivation to so many of my actions if I am really an Andromedus who grew up in my Gold parents asteroid mining colony. My history is hollow to her. My drive confusing … if I was born a Gold. This must all look like ambition, like bloodlust. And without Eo, it would be.
“That look,” Mustang says, taking a step back from me. “Where do you go when you look at me like that?” The color slips from her face, retreating into her as her smile slackens. “Is it Victra?”
“Victra?” I almost laugh. “No.”
“Then her. The girl you lost.”
I say nothing.
She’s never pried. She’s never asked about Eo, not when we shared time together after the Institute when I was a rising lancer. Not when we rode horses at her family’s estate or walked through the gardens or dove in the coral reefs. I thought she must have forgotten I whispered the name of another girl as I lay with her in the Institute’s snows. How stupid of me. How could she forget? How could it not linger there inside her, forcing her to wonder, as she lay with her head on my chest listening to my heart beat, if it didn’t belong to another girl, a dead girl.
“Silence isn’t the right answer right now, Darrow.” After a moment, she leaves me alone in the room. Sounds from her feet fade. The Mozart disappears.
I chase after her, reaching her before she finds the door to the hall. I grab her wrist. She flings me off.
“Stop it!”
I reel back, startled.
“Why do you do this?” she asks. “Why do you pull me back if you’re just going to push me away?” Her fists ball like she wants to strike me. “It’s not fair. Do you understand that? I’m not like you … I can’t just … I can’t just shut off like you do.”
“I don’t shut off.”
“You shut me off. After that speech about Victra … about the importance of friends …” She snaps her fingers in front of my face. “You can still cut me away like that. You care and then you don’t. Maybe that’s why he likes you so much.”
“He?”
“My father.”
“He doesn’t like me.”
“How could he not? You are him.”
I back away from her and find rest on the edge of the bed. “I’m not like your father.”
“I know,” she says, releasing some of her anger. “That’s not fair to you. But you will become him if you follow this path alone.” She puts her hand on the door controls. “So ask me to stay.”
How can I let her? If she gives me her heart, I’ll break it. My lie is too great to build a love upon. When she discovers what I am, she will reject me. Even if she could survive that, I would not. I look at my hands as if the answer is there.
“Darrow. Ask me to stay.”
When I look up, she is gone.