I send Ragnar to fetch Holiday from her post. Mustang and I stay with plans to search the ship for gear. But I remain standing motionless in the cannibals’ charnel house even after Ragnar’s slipped out into the snow. The Golds might have been enemies, but this horror makes life feel so cheap. There’s a cruel irony to this place. It is terrifying and wicked, but it wouldn’t exist unless Gold made it exist to create fear, to create that need for their iron rule. These poor bastards were eaten by their own pet monsters.
Mustang stands from examining one of the Obsidian, wincing from the arrow that’s still imbedded in her shoulder. “Are you all right?” she asks, noting my silence. I gesture to the broken fingernails on one of the Golds.
“They weren’t dead when they started skinning them. Just trapped.”
She nods sadly and holds out her palm. Something she found on the Obsidian body. Six Institute class rings. Two Pluto Cyprus trees, a Minerva owl, a Jupiter lightning bolt, a Diana stag, and one which I pick from her palm, emblazoned with the Mars wolf head.
“We should look for him,” she says.
I reach up to the ceiling to examine the Golds who hang upside down from their seats. Their eyes and tongues are gone, but I can see, mangled as they are, none are my old friend. We search the rest of the upside-down ship and find several small bedroom suites. In the dresser of one, Mustang finds an ornate leather box with several watches and a small pearl earring set in silver. “Cassius was here,” she says.
“Are those his watches?”
“It’s my earring.”
I help Mustang remove the arrow from her shoulder in Cassius’s suite, away from the gore. She makes no sound as I break off the tip, push her against the wall, and jerk the arrow out by its tail end. She curls in on herself, slumping down to her heels in pain. I sit on the edge of the mattress that’s fallen from the ceiling and watch her hunch there. She doesn’t like being touched when she’s wounded.
“Finish up,” she says, standing.
I use the resGun to make a shiny patch over the hole on the front and back, just under her collarbone. It stops the bleeding and will help repair the tissue, but she’ll feel the wound and it’ll slow her for days. I pull her sealSkin back up over her bare shoulder. She zips the front up for herself before patching the wound on my jaw as well. Her breath fills the air. She comes so close I can smell the dampness of the snow that’s melted in her hair. She presses the resGun to my jaw and paints a thin layer of the microorganisms onto the wound. They scramble into the pores and tighten to make a fleshlike antibacterial coating. Her hand lingers on the back of my head, fingers wrapped in the strands of my hair, like she wants to say something but doesn’t have the words. Nor does she find them by the time Holiday and Ragnar return. Hearing Holiday calling my name, I squeeze Mustang’s good shoulder and leave her there.
Most of the ship’s gear is gone. Several sets of optics missing from their cases. The armory missing entirely, scattered across the mountains as the ship came apart and the cargo hold ripped open. The rest has been torn through by Obsidians or broken in the crash. All I get is static from the transponder and com gear.
Ragnar discerns that Cassius and the rest of his party, some fifteen men, departed several hours before we reached the vessel. They stripped it bare of supplies. The Eaters likely descended as soon as it landed, otherwise Cassius wouldn’t have left those Golds behind to be eaten. Supporting this idea, Mustang finds several Eater bodies nearer the cockpit, which means Cassius and his men were under attack as they left. Snow’s almost covered the corpses. We stack the fresher bodies outside in the snow in case worse predators than Eaters come to visit.
After scavenging the ship for supplies, I have Mustang and Holiday seal us inside the galley. Fusing the two entrances shut with welding torches found in the ship’s maintenance closet. The weapons and cold gear might have been stripped clean, but the ship’s cistern is full, the water inside not yet frozen. And the galley’s pantries are stocked with food.
It’s passingly cozy in our shelter. The insulation traps our heat inside. The light from two amber emergency lamps bathes the room in soft orange. Holiday uses the intermittent power to cook a feast of pasta with marinara sauce and sausage over the galley’s electric stoves as Ragnar and I plot a course to the Spires and Mustang sorts through the stacks of scavenged provisions, filling military packs she found in storage.
I burn my tongue as Holiday brings Ragnar and me heaping portions of pasta. I didn’t realize how hungry I was. Ragnar nudges me and I follow his eyes to watch quietly as Holiday brings Mustang a bowl too and leaves her with a small nod. Mustang smiles to herself. The four of us sit eating in silence. Listening to our forks against the bowls. The wind shrieking outside. Rivets groaning. Steel gray snow piles against the small circular windows, but not before we see strange shapes moving through the white to drag off the corpses we set outside.
“What was it like growing up here?” Mustang asks Ragnar. She sits cross-legged with her back against the wall. I lay adjacent to her, a backpack between, on one of the mattresses Ragnar dragged inside the room to line its floor, on my third serving of pasta.
“It was home. I did not know anything else.”
“But now that you do?”
He smiles gently. “It was a playground. The world beyond is vast, but so small. Men putting themselves in boxes. Sitting at desks. Riding in cars. Ships. Here, the world is small, but without end.” He loses himself in stories. Slow to share at first, now it seems he revels in knowing that we listen. That we care. He tells us of swimming in the ice floes as a boy. How he was an awkward child. Too slow. Bones outracing the rest of him. When he was beaten by another boy, his mother took him to the sky for his first time on her griffin. Making him hold on to her from behind. Teaching him it is his arms that keep him from falling. His will. “She flew higher, and higher, till the air was thin and I could feel the cold in my bones. She was waiting for me to let go. To weaken. But she did not know that I tied my wrists together. That is as close to Allmother death as I have ever been.”
His mother, Alia Volarus, the Snowsparrow, is a legend among her people for her reverence for the gods. A daughter to a wanderer, she became a warrior of the Spires and rose in prominence as she raided other clans. Such is her devotion to the gods that when she rose to power, she gave four of her own children to serve them. Keeping only one for herself, Sefi.
“She sounds like my father,” Mustang says softly.
“Poor sods,” Holiday mutters. “My ma would make me cookies and teach me how to strip down a hoverJack.”
“And what about your father?” I ask.
“He was a bad sort.” She shrugs. “But bad in a boring way. A different family in every port. Stereotypical Legionnaire. I got his eyes. Trigg got Ma’s.”
“I never knew my first father,” Ragnar says, meaning his birth father. Obsidian women are polygamous. They might have seven children from seven fathers. Those men are then bound to protect the other children of her brood. “He went to become a slave before I was born. My mother never speaks his name. I do not even know if he lives.”
“We can find out,” Mustang says. “We’d have to search the Board of Quality Control’s registry. Not easy, but we can find him. What happened to him. If you want to know.”
He’s stunned by the idea and nods slowly. “Yes. I would like that.”
Holiday watches Mustang in a very different way than she did just hours before when we were leaving Phobos, and I’m struck by how natural this feels, our four worlds colliding together. “We all know your father.” Holiday says. “But what is your ma like? She looks frigid, from what I’ve seen, just on the HC, you know?”
“That’s my stepmother. She doesn’t care for me. Just Adrius, actually. My real mother died when I was young. She was kind. Mischievous. And very sad.”
“Why?” Holiday presses.