“We obviously can’t stay here,” Victra says, putting the resFlesh applicator down. “We left enough DNA evidence for a hundred crime scenes back there. And our faces are everywhere. Adrius will send a whole legion for us when they find out we’re here.”
“Or blow Phobos out of the sky,” Holiday mutters. She sits on a crate of medical supplies in the corner, studying maps with Clown on her datapad. Pebble watches them from her place on the table. Her leg’s compressed with a gelCast, but the bone’s not set. We’ll need a Yellow and a full infirmary to fix what Mustang broke with a single shot. Pebble’s lucky she was wearing scarabSkin. It minimized the burn damage. Still, she’s in pain. Pupils large on a high dose of narcotics. It’s let her inhibitions loose, and I note how obviously the pudgy-faced Gold is watching Clown lean across Holiday to point at the map.
“Helium-3 is Adrius’s lifeblood,” Victra says. “He won’t risk this station.”
“Sevro…” I say. “A moment.”
“Busy right now.” He turns to Rollo. “Is there any other way off this damn rock?”
The Red leans against the med room’s gray wall next to a glossy paper cutout of a Pink model on one of Venus’s white-sand beaches. “It’s just cargo haulers down here,” he says, silently noting how our Obsidian guises have been discarded. If it startles him how many of us are Gold, he doesn’t let on. Probably knew from the start. His eyes linger on me the longest. “But they’re all grounded. They got luxury liners and private yachts in the Needles, but you go up there, you folks are caught in a minute. Two, tops. There’s facial-recognition cameras at every tram door. Retina scanners in the advertisement holos. And even if you got onto one of their ships, you gotta get past the naval pickets. Ain’t like you can just teleport to safety.”
“That’d be convenient,” Clown mutters.
“We jack a shuttle and run the pickets,” Sevro says. “Done it before.”
“They’ll shoot us down,” I say tensely. It’s pissing me off that he keeps ignoring my attempts to get him to the door.
“Didn’t last time.”
“Last time we had Lysander,” I remind him.
“And now we got Quicksilver.”
“The Jackal will sacrifice Quicksilver to kill us,” I say. “Count on it.”
“Not if we go straight vertical burn to the surface,” Sevro says. “Sons have hidden tunnel entrances. We will fall from orbit and go straight underground.”
“I will not do that,” Ragnar says. “It is foolhardy. And it abandons these noble men and women to slaughter.”
“I agree with Rags,” Holiday says. She scoots away from Clown and continues looking at her datapad, monitoring police frequencies.
“Say you get off. What happens to us?” Rollo asks. “The Jackal finds out the Reaper and Ares were here and he’ll tear this station apart piecemeal. Any Son left behind will be dead in a week. Did you think of that?” He makes a disgusted look. “I know who you are. We knew the second Ragnar walked into the hangar. But I didn’t think Howlers ran. And I didn’t think the Reaper took orders.”
Sevro takes a step toward him. “You got another option, shitface? Or you just gonna run your mouth?”
“Yeah, I got one,” Rollo says. “Stay. Help us take the station.”
The Howlers laugh. “Take the station? With what army?” Clown asks.
“His,” Rollo says, turning to me. “I don’t rightly know how you’re alive, Reaper. But…I was eating noodles by myself at midnight when the Sons leaked your Carving video onto the holoNet. Society cyber police shut down the site in two minutes. But once it was out…could find it on a million sites before I finished my bowl. They couldn’t contain that. And then the Phobos servers crashed. You know why?”
“Securitas’s cyber division pulled the plug,” Victra says. “It’s standard protocol.”
He shakes his head. “Servers crashed because thirty million people were trying to access the holoNet at the same time in the middle of the night. Servers couldn’t handle the traffic. Golds pulled the plug after that. So what I’m sayin’ is if you march down to the Hive and tell the lowColors there you’re alive, we can take this moon.”
“Easy as that?” Victra asks skeptically.
“That’s right. There’s round about twenty-five million lowColors here crawling over one another, fighting for square meters, protein packages, Syndicate smack, whatever. Reaper shows his mug, all that goes to vapor. All that fighting. All that scrappin’. They want a leader, and if the Reaper of Mars decides to come back from the dead here…you won’t have an army, you’ll have a tide at your heels. You register? This will change the war.”
He sends chills down my spine. But Victra’s skeptical, and Sevro’s quiet. Hurt.
“Do you know what a squad of Society Legionnaires can do to a mob of rabble?” Victra asks. “The weapons you’ve seen are geared to taking out men in armor. PulseFists. Razors. When they use coilguns or rattlers on mobs, a single man can fire a thousand rounds a minute. It sounds like paper tearing. Human body doesn’t even know that sound is supposed to be frightening. They can superheat the water in your cellular structure with microwaves. And those are just Gray anti-mob squads. What if they unleash the Obsidian? What if Golds themselves come in their armor? What if they shut off your air? Your water?”
“What if we shut off theirs?” Rollo asks.
I frown. “Can you do that?”
“Give me a reason to.” He looks at Victra, and by the bite in his voice, I know he knows exactly what her last name is. “They might be soldiers, domina. Might be able to put enough metal in my body that I bleed out. But before I was nine, I could strip down a gravBoot and piece it together in under four minutes. Now I’m thirty-eight and I can murder the lot of ’em ten ways till Sunday with a screwdriver and an electrical kit. And I’m sick and tired of not seeing my family. Of being stepped on and charged for oxygen, for water, for living.” He leans forward, eyes glassy. “And there’s twenty-five million of me on the other side of that door.”
Victra rolls her eyes at the bravado. “You’re a welder with delusions of grandeur.”
Rollo steps forward and knocks a set of wrenches off a table. They clatter on the ground, startling Clown and Holiday, who look up from the datapad. Rollo stares up indignantly at Victra. She’s easily a foot taller than him, but he doesn’t break his gaze. “I’m an engineer. Not a welder.”
“Enough!” Sevro snarls. “This isn’t a bloodydamn debate. Quicksilver will get us off this rock. Or I’ll start taking off his fingers. Then blow the bombs….”
“Sevro…” Ragnar says.
“I am Ares!” Sevro snarls. “Not you.” He shoves a finger up into Ragnar’s chest and then points at me. “And not you. Finish packing the bloodydamn gear. Now.”
He storms from the room, leaving us in awkward silence.
“I will not abandon these men,” Ragnar says. “They have helped us. They are our people.”
“Ares is cracked,” Rollo says to the room. “Off his mind. You need—”
I wheel on the small man, picking him up with one hand and pinning him against the ceiling. “Don’t you say a damn thing about him.” Rollo apologizes, and I set him back on the ground. I make sure all the Howlers are listening. “Everyone stay put. I’ll be right back.”
—
I catch Sevro before he enters Quicksilver’s cell in a gutted old garage that the Sons use to house generators now. Sevro and the guards turn when they hear me coming. “Don’t trust me alone with him?” he sneers. “Nice.”
“We need to talk.”
“Sure. After he does.” Sevro pushes open the door. Cursing, I follow. The room’s a forlorn shade of rust. Machines older than some of the gear in Lykos. One rattles behind the thick Silver, coughing out the electricity that powers the lights bathing the man in a circle of light, and blinding him to anything beyond it. Quicksilver sits with his shoulders back in the metal chair in the center of the room. Arms bound behind his back. His turquoise robe is bloody and rumpled. Bulldog eyes patient and measuring. Wide forehead’s covered in a thick sheen of sweat and grease.