“You’re going to let them do this?” Mustang snarls at Cassius. “What happened to your honor? It is as false as the rest of you?” He’s about to say something, but she spits at his feet.
Antonia smiles repugnantly, captivated by the sight of me in pain. Lilath takes my razor from Cassius and walks away toward the ripWings that escorted us into the hangar. There, she holds my slingBlade up into one of the smoldering engines.
“Tell me, Reaper, did you piddle my baby brother. Is that why he was so besotted?” Tharsus asks as we wait. His perfumed locks fall over his eyes. He alone has not shaved his head. “Well, you’re not the first to plow that field, if you catch my flow.”
I stare straight ahead.
“Is he right or left handed?” Lilath calls over.
“Right,” Cassius replies.
“Pollox, tourniquet,” Lilath instructs.
I realize what they intend and my blood runs cold. It feels like it’s happening to someone else. Even when the rubber tightens around my right forearm and the needle-pricks of sensation tingle through the tips of my fingers.
Then I hear my enemy.
The clicking of his black boots.
The delicate shift in everyone’s mannerisms.
The fear.
The Boneriders part to watch their master enter out of the mouth of the main hall to the hangar bay, flanked by a dozen more towering Gold bodyguards with shaved heads. Each tall as Victra. Gold skulls laugh on their collars, on the handles of their razors. Bones rattle on their shoulders, finger joints taken from their enemies. Taken from Lorn, from Fitchner, from my Howlers. These are the killers of my time. Their arrogance drips from them. As they look at me, it isn’t hate I see in their violent eyes, but a fundamental absence of empathy.
I told the Jackal I didn’t hate him. That was a lie. It’s all I feel watching him walk across the deck, the pistol he killed my uncle with hanging on a magnetic strip holster on his thigh. His armor gold. Roaring with Gold lions. Human ribs implanted along the sides of the torso, each carved with details I cannot make out. Hair combed and parted on the side. His silver stylus in his hand, twirling, twirling. Antonia takes a step toward him, but stops herself when she sees he’s walking to Sevro and not to her.
“Good. The bones are intact.” After he’s examined Sevro’s bloody body, he stands over his sister. “Hello, Virginia. Nothing to say?”
“What is there to say?” she asks through gritted teeth. “What words have I for a monster?”
“Hm.” He takes her jaw between his forefingers, causing Cassius’s hand to drift to his razor. Lilath and the Boneriders would cut him to pieces if he even drew it. “It is us against the world,” the Jackal says softly. “Do you remember telling me that?”
“No.”
“We were young. Mother had just died. I couldn’t stop crying. And you said you’d never leave me. But then Claudius would invite you somewhere. And you’d forget all about me. And I’d stay home in a big old house and cry, because I knew even then I was alone.” He taps her nose. “These next hours are going to test who you are as a person, sister. I’m excited to see what’s beneath all the bluster.”
He moves on to me, loosening my muzzle. Even on my knees my physicality dwarfs him. Fifty kilograms heavier. Still, his presence is like the sea: strange and vast and dark and full of hidden depths and power. His silence, his roar. I see his father in him now. He tricked me, guessing my play on Luna, and now I’m afraid all I’ve done is going to unravel.
“And here we are again,” he says. I do not reply. “Do you recognize these?”
He runs his stylus down the ribs in his armor, coming closer so I can see the details. “My dear father thought a man’s deeds make him. I rather think it’s his enemies. Do you like it?” He steps even closer. One of the ribs shows a helmet with a spiked sunburst. Another rib shows a head in a box.
The Jackal is wearing Fitchner’s rib cage.
Anger roars out of me and I try to bite his face, bellowing like a wounded animal, startling Mustang. I strain against the men holding me, trembling with rage as the Jackal watches me squirm. Cassius stares at the ground, avoiding Mustang’s gaze. My voice croaks out of me, hardly my own. That deeper demon only the Jackal can summon from me. “I’m going to skin you,” I say.
Bored of me, he rolls his eyes and snaps his fingers. “Put the muzzle back on.” Tharsus binds my mouth. The Jackal opens his arms as if welcoming two long-lost friends to a party. “Cassius! Antonia!” he says. “Heroes of the hour. My dear…what happened?” He asks when he sees Antonia’s face. They were lovers during my imprisonment. Sometimes I’d smell her on him as he came to visit me before the box. Or she’d drag a nail along his neck as she passed. He goes close to her now, taking her jaw in his hand, tilting her head to examine the damage done to her. “Did Darrow do this?”
“My sister,” she corrects, disliking his examination. She mourned her face in our captivity more than she mourned her own mother’s death. “The bitch will pay. And I’ll have it fixed, don’t worry.” She pulls her head back from him.
“Stop,” the Jackal says sharply. “Why fixed?”
“It’s disgusting.”
“Disgusting? My dear, scars are what you are. They tell your story.”
“This is Victra’s story, not mine.”
“You’re still beautiful.” He pulls her down gently by her chin and kisses her lips delicately. He doesn’t care for her. Like Mustang said, we’re just sacks of meat to him. But while Antonia’s as wicked a thing as I’ve ever met, she wants to be loved. To be valued. The Jackal knows how to use that.
“This was Barca’s,” Antonia says, handing the Jackal Sevro’s pistol. The Jackal runs a thumb over the howling wolves engraved in the hilt.
“Fine work,” he says. He strips his own gun from his magnetic holster and tosses it to a bodyguard before holstering Sevro’s. Of course he takes my friend’s pistol as a trophy.
His datapad flashes and he holds up a hand for silence. “Yes, Imperator?”
The grotesque Ash Lord appears in the air before the Jackal as a disembodied, gigantic head. Dark Gold eyes peer out from beneath twin thickets of eyebrows. His jowls hang over the high black collar of his uniform. “Augustus, the enemy is under way. TorchShips in front.”
“They’re coming for him,” Cassius says.
“How many?” the Jackal asks.
“More than sixty. Half bearing the red fox.”
“Do you wish me to spring the trap?”
“Not yet. I will assume command of your ships.”
“You know the arrangement.”
The Ash Lord’s wide mouth makes a straight line. “I do. You are to continue to join the Sovereign as planned. Escort the Morning Knight and his package to the Citadel. My daughter will take custody of him there. Go now, for Gold.”
“For Gold.”
The head disappears.
The Jackal glances over to the Obsidians who pulled me down the cargo ramp. “Slaves, attend to Praetor Licenus on the bridge. You are no longer needed.” The Obsidians leave without question. When they are gone, he eyes the thirty Boneriders. “The Morning Knight has given us an opportunity to win this war today. The Telemanuses will come for my sister. The Howlers and the Sons of Ares will come for the Reaper. They will not have them. It is upon our shoulders to deliver them to our Sovereign and her strategists in the Citadel.”
He addresses Antonia and Cassius. “Set aside your little grievances. Today we are Gold. We can bicker when the Rising is ash. Most of you lived the darkness of the caves with me. You watched by my side as this…creature stole what was ours. They will take everything from us. Our homes. Our slaves. Our right to rule. Today we fight to keep what is ours. Today we fight against the dying of our Age.”
They lean into his words, awaiting his orders hungrily. It’s terrifying to see the cult he’s built around himself. He’s taken bits of me, of my speaking pattern, and transposed it onto his own behavior. He continues to evolve.
The Jackal turns from his men as Lilath brings back my slingBlade, red-hot from engine’s heat, and hands it to him hilt first. “Lilath, you’re to stay with the fleet.”
“You’re sure?”