“You really mean that?” I ask. “All of you?”
“Family is all that matters,” Kavax says. “And you are family.” Daxo sets an elegant hand on my shoulder. Even Sophocles seems to understand the gravity of the moment, resting his chin on my foot beneath the table. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes.” I nod gratefully “I am.”
With a tight smile, Mustang pulls a piece of paper from her pocket and slides it to me. “That’s Orion’s com frequency. I don’t know where they are. Probably in the belt. I gave them a simple directive: cause chaos. From what I’ve heard from Gold chatter, they’re doing just that. We’ll need her and her ships if we’re going take down Octavia.”
“Thank you,” I say to them all. “I didn’t think we’d ever have a second chance.”
“Nor did we,” Daxo replies. “Let me be blunt with you, Darrow: there is a matter of concern. It’s your plan. Your design to use clawDrills to allow the Obsidians to invade key cities around Mars…we think it is a mistake.”
“Really?” I ask. “Why? We need to wrest the Jackal’s centers of power away, gain traction with the populace.”
“Father and I do not have the same faith in the Obsidians you seem to have,” Daxo says carefully.
“Your intentions will matter little if you let them loose on the populace of Mars.”
“Barbarians,” Kavax says. “They are barbarians.”
“Ragnar ’s sister…”
“Is not Ragnar,” Daxo replies. “She’s a stranger. And after hearing what she did to the Gold prisoners…we can’t in good conscience join our forces to a plan that would unleash the Obsidians on the cities of Mars. The Arcos women won’t either.”
“I see.”
“And there’s another reason we think the plan flawed,” Mustang says. “It doesn’t deal properly with my brother. Give my brother credit. He’s smarter than you. Smarter than me.” Even Kavax does not
contest this. “Look what he’s done. If he knows how to play the game, if he knows the variables, he’ll sit in a corner for days running through the possible moves, countermoves, externalities, and outcomes. That’s his idea of fun. Before Claudius’s death and before we were sent to live in different homes, he’d stay inside, rain or shine, and piece together puzzles, create mazes on paper and beg me over and over again to try and find the center when I came back from riding with Father or fishing with Claudius and Pax. And when I did find the center, he would laugh and say what a clever sister he had. I never thought much of it until I saw him afterward one day alone in his room when he thought no one was watching. Shrieking and hitting himself in the face, punishing himself for losing to me.
“The next time he asked me to find the center of a maze I pretended I couldn’t, but he wasn’t fooled.
It was like he knew I’d seen him in his room. Not the introverted, but pleasant frail boy everyone else saw. The real him.” She gathers her breath, shrugging away the thought. “He made me finish the maze. And when I did, he smiled, said how clever I was, and walked off.
“The next time he drew a maze, I couldn’t find the center. No matter how hard I tried.” She shifts uncomfortably. “He just watched me try from the floor among his pencils. Like an old evil ghost inside a little porcelain doll. That’s how I remember him. It’s how I see him now when I think about him killing Father.”
The Telemanuses listen with a foreboding silence, as afraid of the Jackal as I am.
“Darrow, he’ll never forgive you for beating him at the Institute. For making him cut off his hand.
He’ll never forgive me for stripping him naked and delivering him to you. We are his obsession, just as much as Octavia is, as much as Father was. So if you think he’s going to just forget how Sevro waltzed into his citadel with a clawDrill and stole you from under him, you’re going to get a lot of people killed. Your plan to take the cities won’t work. He’ll see it coming a kilometer off. And even if he doesn’t, if we take Mars, this war will last for years. We need to go for the jugular.”
“And not just that,” Daxo says, “we need assurances that you’re not aiming to begin a dictatorship, or a full-demokracy in the case of victory.”
“A dictatorship,” I ask with a smirk. “You really think I want to rule?”
Daxo shrugs. “Someone must.”
A woman clears her throat at the door. We wheel around to see Holiday standing there with her thumbs in her belt loops. “Sorry to interrupt, sir. But the Bellona is asking for you. It seems rather important.”