“Holiday…” I say. Her mother is a subject I’ve never pushed. She’s held her back from me. A little locked box in her soul that she never shares. Except tonight, it seems.
“It’s all right,” she says. She pulls up her legs, hugging them, and continues. “When I was six, my mother was pregnant with a little girl. The doctor said there would be complications with the birth and recommended intervening medically. But my father said that if the child was not fit to survive birth, it did not deserve life. We can fly between the stars. Mold the planets, but father let my sister die in my mother’s womb.”
“The hell?” Holiday mutters. “Why not give her cell therapy? You got the money.”
“Purity in the product,” Mustang says.
“That’s insane.”
“That’s my family. Mother was never the same. I’d hear her crying in the middle of the day. See her staring out the window. Then one night she went for a walk at Caragmore. The estate my father gave her as a wedding present. He was in Agea working. She never came home. They found her on the rocks beneath the sea cliffs. Father said she slipped. If he was alive now, he’d still say she slipped. I don’t think he could have survived thinking anything else.”
“I’m sorry,” Holiday says.
“As am I.”
“It’s why I’m here, since that’s what you were wondering,” Mustang says. “My father was a titan. But he was wrong. He was cruel. And if I can be something else”—her eyes meet mine—“I will be.”
By the time we wake, the storm has cleared. We bundle ourselves with insulation taken from the ship’s walls and set out into the bleakness. Not a cloud mars the marbled blue-black sky. We head toward the sun, which stains the horizon a cooling shade of molten iron. Autumn has few days left. We head for the Spires with plans of lighting fires as we go, in hopes of signaling the few Valkyrie scouts active in the area. But smoke will also bring the Eaters.
We scan the mountains as we pass, wary of the cannibal tribes and of the fact that somewhere ahead Cassius and maybe Aja trudge through the snow with a troop of special forces operators.
By midday we find evidence of their passing. Churned snow outside a rocky alcove large enough for several dozen men. They camped there to wait out the storm. A cairn of stacked stones lies near the campsite. One of the stones has been carved with a razor and reads: per aspera ad astra.
“It’s Cassius’s handwriting,” Mustang says.
Pulling off the rocks, we find the corpses of two Blues and a Silver. Their weaker bodies froze in the night. Even here, Cassius had the decency to bury them. We replace the rocks as Ragnar lopes ahead, following the tracks at a speed we can’t match. We follow after. An hour later, manmade thunder rumbles in the distance, accompanied by the lonely shriek of distant pulseFists. Ragnar returns soon after, eyes shining with excitement.
“I followed the tracks,” he says.
“And?” Mustang asks.
“It is Aja and Cassius with a troop of Grays and three Peerless.”
“Aja is here?” I ask.
“Yes. They flee on foot through a mountain pass in the direction of Asgard. A tribe of Eaters harries them. Bodies litter the way. Dozens. They sprang an ambush and failed. More come.”
“How much gear do they have?” Mustang asks.
“No gravBoots. ScarabSkin only. But they have packs. They left the pulseArmor behind just two kilometers north. Out of energy.”
Holiday looks at the horizon and touches Trigg’s pistol on her hip. “Can we catch them?”
“They carry many supplies. Water. Food. Injured men now too. Yes. We can overtake them.”
“Why are we here?” Mustang interjects. “It’s not to hunt Aja and Cassius down. The only thing that matters is getting Ragnar to the Spires.”
“Aja killed my brother,” Holiday says.
Mustang’s taken aback. “Trigg? The one you mentioned? I didn’t know. But still, we can’t be pulled to the side by vengeance. We can’t fight two dozen men.”
“What if they reach Asgard before we reach the Spires?” Holiday asks. “Then we’re cooked.” Mustang’s not convinced.
“Can you kill Aja?” I ask Ragnar.
“Yes.”
“This is an opportunity,” I say to Mustang. “When else will they be so exposed? Without their Legions? Without the pride of Gold protecting them? These are champions. Like Sevro says, ‘When you have the chance to waste your enemy, you do it.’ This is one time I’d agree with the mad bastard. If we can take them off the board, the Sovereign loses two Furies in one week. And Cassius is Octavia’s link to Mars and the great families here. And if we expose her negotiations with you to him, we fracture that alliance. We sever Mars from the Society.”
“An enemy divided…” Mustang says slowly. “I like it.”
“And we owe them a debt,” Ragnar says. “For Lorn, Quinn, Trigg. They came here to hunt us. Now we hunt them.”
—
The trail is unmistakable. Corpses litter the snow. Dozens of Eaters. Bodies still smoking from pulsefire near a narrow mountain pass where the Obsidians sprang an ambush on the Golds. They did not understand the firepower the Golds could bring to bear. Huge craters pock the craggy slopes. Deeper imprints in the snow mark the passing of aurochs. Huge steerlike animals with shaggy coats that the Obsidian ride.
The pass widens into a thin alpine forest that skins an expanse of rolling hills. Gradually the craters decrease and we begin seeing discarded pulseFists and rifles and several Gray bodies with arrows or axes embedded in them. The Obsidian dead are closer to the Gold trail now and bear razor wounds. There’s dozens with missing limbs, clean decapitations. Cassius’s band is running out of ammunition and now Olympic Knights are doing the work up close. Yet the wind still crackles with gunfire kilometers ahead.
We pass moaning Obsidian Eaters who lie dying from bullet wounds, but it’s only over a wounded Gray that Ragnar stops. The man’s still alive, but barely. An iron axe is buried in his stomach. He wheezes up at an unfamiliar sky. Ragnar crouches over him. Recognition goes through the Gray’s eyes as he sees the Stained’s uncovered face.
“Close your eyes,” Ragnar says, pressing the man’s empty rifle back in his hands. “Think of home.” The man closes his eyes. And with a twist, Ragnar breaks his neck and sets his head gently back on the snow. A shrill horn echoes across the mountain range. “They call off the hunt,” Ragnar says. “Immortality is not worth the price today.”
We pick up our pace. Kilometers to our right, Mounted Eaters on aurochs skirt the edges of the woods, heading for their high-mountain camps. They do not see us as we move through the pine taiga. Holiday watches the hunting party disappear behind a hill through the scope of her rifle. “They carried two Golds,” she says. “Didn’t recognize them. They weren’t dead yet.”
We all feel the chill.
It’s an hour later that we spy our quarry beneath us in an uneven snowfield striped with crevasses. Two arms of forest hug the snowfield. Aja and Cassius chose an exposed route instead of continuing through the treacherous forest where they lost so many Grays. There’s four left in the company. Three Golds and a Gray. They wear black scarabSkin, cloaked with pelts and extra layers they stripped from the dead cannibals. They move at a breakneck pace, the rest of their party massacred in the depths of the woods. We can’t tell which is Aja or Cassius because of the masks and the similar shapes they make under the cloaks.