“No,” I snap. “Quiet.”
…men entered Troy. Found mothers. Found children. Guess what they did?
“Shut up!”
You know what they did. Bone. Sweat. Flesh. Ash. Weeping. Blood.
The darkness cackles with glee.
Reaper, Reaper, Reaper…All deeds that last are painted in blood.
Am I asleep? Am I awake? I’ve lost my way. Everything bleeding together, drowning me in visions
and whispers and sounds. Again and again I jerk Eo’s fragile little ankles. Break Julian’s face. Hear Pax and Quinn and Tactus and Lorn and Victra sigh their last. So much pain. And for what? To fail my wife. To fail my people.
And fail Ares. Fail your friends.
How many are even left?
Sevro? Ragnar?
Mustang?
Mustang. What if she knows you’re here…What if she doesn’t care…And why would she? You who betrayed. You who lied. You who used her mind. Her body. Her blood. You showed her your true face and she ran. What if it was her? What if she betrayed you? Could you love her then?
“Shut up!” I scream at myself, at the darkness.
Don’t think of her. Don’t think of her.
Why ever not? You miss her.
A vision of her is spawned in the darkness like so many before it—a girl riding away from me across a field of green, twisting in her saddle and laughing for me to follow. Hair rippling as would summer hay fluttering from a farmer ’s wagon.
You crave her. You love her. The Golden girl. Forget that Red bitch.
“No.” I slam my head against the wall. “It’s only the dark,” I whisper. Only the dark playing tricks on my mind. But still I try to forget Mustang, Eo. There is no world beyond this place. I cannot miss what does not exist.
Warm blood trickles down my forehead from old scabs, now freshly broken. It drips off my nose. I
extend my tongue, probing the cold stone till I find the drops. Savor the salt, the Martian iron. Slowly.
Slowly. Let the novelty of sensation last. Let the flavor linger and remind me I am a man. A Red of Lykos. A Helldiver.
No. You are not. You are nothing. Your wife abandoned you and stole your child. Your whore turned from you. You were not good enough. You were too proud. Too stupid. Too wicked. Now, you are forgotten.
Am I?
When last I saw the Golden girl, I was on my knees beside Ragnar in the tunnels of Lykos, asking
Mustang to betray her own people and live for more. I knew that if she chose to join us, Eo’s dream would blossom. A better world was at our fingertips. Instead, she left. Could she forget me? Has her love for me left her?
She only loved your mask.
“It’s only the dark. Only the dark. Only the dark,” I mumble faster and faster.
I should not be here.
I should be dead. After the death of Lorn, I was to be given to Octavia so her Carvers could dissect me to discover the secrets of how I became Gold. To see if there could be others like me. But the Jackal made a bargain. Kept me for his own. He tortured me in his Attica estate, asking about the Sons of Ares, about Lykos and my family. Never telling me how he discovered my secret. I begged him to end my life.
In the end, he gave me stone.
“When all is lost, honor demands death,” Roque once told me. “It is a noble end.” But what would a rich poet know of death? The poor know death. Slaves know death. But even as I yearn for it, I fear it.
Because the more I see of this cruel world, the less I believe it ends in some pleasant fiction.
The Vale is not real.
It’s a lie told by mothers and fathers to give their starving children a reason for the horror. There is no reason. Eo is gone. She never watched me fight for her dream. She did not care what fate I made at the Institute or if I loved Mustang, because the day she died, she became nothing. There is nothing but this world. It is our beginning and our end. Our one chance at joy before the dark.
Yes. But you don’t have to end. You can escape this place, the darkness whispers to me. Say the words. Say them. You know the way.
It is right. I do.
“All you must say is ‘I am broken,’ and this will all end,” the Jackal said long ago, before he lowered me into this hell. “I will put you in a lovely estate for the rest of your days and send you warm, beautiful Pinks and food enough to make you fatter than the Ash Lord. But the words carry a price.”
Worth it. Save yourself. No one else will.
“That price, dear Reaper, is your family.”
The family he seized from Lykos with his lurchers and now keeps in his prison in the bowels of his Attica fortress. Never letting me see them. Never letting me tell them I love them, and that I’m sorry I was not strong enough to protect them.
“I will feed them to the prisoners of this fortress,” he said. “These men and women you think should rule instead of Gold. Once you see the animal in man, you will know that I am right and you are wrong. Gold must rule.”
Let them go, the darkness says. The sacrifice is practical. It is wise.
“No…I won’t…”
Your mother would want you to live.