There’s silence from my enemies.
The sight I must make—a tottering, withered form, dragging my friends, sunken eyes, face like that of a starving old demon, bearded and ridiculous—is pitiful. Twenty meters behind me, the two Olympic Knights stand imperious on the bridge where it meets the landing pad, flanked by more than fifty Grays and Obsidians who have come from the citadel doors behind him. Aja’s silver razor drips blood. But it’s not her weapon. It’s Lorn’s, the one she took from his corpse. My toes throb inside my wet slippers.
Their men seem so tiny against the face of the vast mountain fortress. Their metal guns so petty and simple. I look to the right, off the bridge. Kilometers away, a flight of soldiers rises from a distant mountain peak where the EMP did not reach. They bank toward us through a low cloud layer. A ripWing follows.
“Darrow,” Cassius calls to me as he walks forward with Aja off the bridge onto the pad. “You cannot escape.” He watches me, eyes unreadable. “The shield is up. Sky blocked. No ships can come from beyond to retrieve you.” He looks to the green smoke swirling from the canister on the landing pad into the winter air. “Accept your fate.”
The wind howls between us, carrying flakes of snow stripped from the mountain.
“Dissection?” I ask. “Is that what you think I deserve?”
“You’re a terrorist. What rights you had, you’ve given up.”
“Rights?” I snarl over Victra and Holiday. “To pull my wife’s feet? To watch my father die?” I try to spit, but it sticks to my lips. “What gives you the right to take them?”
“There’s no debate here. You are a terrorist, and you must be brought to justice.”
“Then why are you talking with me, you bloodydamn hypocrite?”
“Because honor still matters. Honor is what echoes. ” His father ’s words. But they are as empty on his lips as they feel in my ears. This war has taken everything from him. I see in his eyes how broken he is. How terribly hard he is trying to be his father ’s son. If he could, he would choose to be back by the campfire we made in the highlands of the Institute. He would return to the days of glory when life was simple, when friends seemed true. But wishing for the past doesn’t clean the blood from either of our hands.
I listen to the groaning wind from the valley. My heels reach the end of the landing pad. There’s nothing but air behind me. Air and the shifting topography of a dark city on the valley floor two thousand meters below.
“He’s going to jump,” Aja says quietly to Cassius. “We need the body.”
“Darrow…don’t,” Cassius says, but his eyes are telling me to jump, telling me to take this way out instead of surrendering, instead of going to Luna to be peeled apart. This is the noble way. He’s putting his cape over me again.
I hate him for it.
“You think you’re honorable?” I hiss. “You think you’re good? Who is left that you love? Who do
you fight for?” Anger creeps into my words. “You are alone, Cassius. But I am not. Not when I faced your brother in the Passage. Not when I hid among you. Not when I lay in darkness. Not even now.” I grip Holiday’s unconscious body as hard as I can, looping my fingers inside the straps of her body armor. Clutch Victra’s hand. My heels scrape the concrete’s edge. “Listen to the wind, Cassius. Listen to the bloodydamn wind.”
The two knights tilt their heads. And still they do not understand the strange groaning sound that drifts up from the valley floor, because how would a son and daughter of Gold ever know the sound of a clawDrill gnawing through rock? How would they guess that my people would come not from
the sky, but from the heart of our planet?
“Goodbye, Cassius,” I say. “Expect me.” And I push off the ledge with both legs, flinging myself backward into open air, dragging Holiday and Victra into thin air.
We fall toward a molten eye in the center of the snow-covered city. There, among rows of manufacturing plants, buildings shiver and tip as the ground swells upward. Pipes crack and spin into the air. Steam hisses through ruptured asphalt. Gas explosions ripple out in a corona, threading lines of fire through streets that buckle and heave, as if Mars itself were stretching six stories high to give birth to some ancient leviathan. And then, when the ground and city can stretch no more, a clawDrill erupts out into the winter air—a titanic metal hand with molten fingers that steam and grasp and then vanish as the clawDrill sinks back into Mars, pulling half a city block with it.
We’re falling too fast.
Jumped too soon. I lose my grip on Victra.
Ground rushing up to us.