I find Victra in an isolated room with several Sons guarding the door. She lies with her feet sticking off the edge of a medical cot, watching a holo at the foot of her bed as Society news channels drone on about the valiant Legion attack on a terrorist force that destroyed a dam and flooded the lower Mystos River Valley. The flooding has forced two million Brown farmers out of their homes. Grays
deliver aid packages from the backs of military trucks. Easily could have been Reds who blew up the dam. Or it could have been the Jackal. At this point, who knows?
Victra’s white-gold hair is bound in a tight ponytail. Every limb, even the paralyzed legs, is cuffed to the bed. Not much trust here for her kind. She doesn’t look up at me as the holo story kicks over to a profile on Roque au Fabii, the Poet of Deimos and the newest heartthrob of the gossip circuit.
Searching through his past, conducting interviews with his Senator mother, his teachers before the Institute, showing him as boy on their country estate.
“Roque always found the natural world to be more beautiful than cities,” his mother says for the camera. “It’s the perfect order in nature that he so admired. How it formed effortlessly into a hierarchy. I think that’s why he loved the Society so dearly, even then….”
“That woman would look much better with a gun in her mouth,” Victra mutters, muting the sound.
“She’s probably said his name more in the last month than she did his entire childhood,” I reply.
“Well, politicians never let a popular family member go to waste. What was it Roque once said about Augustus at a party? ‘Oh, how the vultures flock to the mighty, to eat the carcasses left in their wake.’?” Victra looks at me with her flashing, belligerent eyes. The madness I saw in them earlier has retreated but not vanished entirely. It lingers like mine. “Might as well have been talking about you.”
“That’s fair,” I say.
“Are you leading this little pack of terrorists?”
“I had my chance to lead. I made a mess of it. Sevro is in charge.”
“Sevro.” She leans back. “Really?”
“Is that funny?”
“No. For some reason I’m not surprised at all, actually. Always had a bigger bite than bark. First time I saw him, he was kicking Tactus’s ass.”
I step closer. “I believe I owe you an explanation.”
“Oh, hell. Can’t we skip this part?” she asks. “It’s boring.”
“Skip it?”
She sighs heavily. “Apologies. Recrimination. All the trifling shit people muddle through because
they’re insecure. You don’t owe me an explanation.”
“How do you figure?”
“We all enter a certain social contract by living in this Society of ours. My people oppress your tiny kind. We live off the spoils of your labor. Pretending you don’t exist. And you fight back. Usually very poorly. Personally, I think that’s your right. It’s not good or evil. But it’s fair. I’d applaud a mouse that managed to kill an eagle, wouldn’t you? Good for it.
“It’s absurd and hypocritical for Golds to complain now simply because the Reds finally started fighting well.” She laughs sharply at my surprise. “What, darling? Did you expect me to scream and rant and piss on about honor and betrayal like those walking wounds, Cassius and Roque?”
“A little,” I say. “I would….”
“That’s because you’re more emotional than I am. I’m a Julii. Cold runneth through my veins.” She
rolls her eyes when I try to correct her. “Don’t ask me to be different because you need validation, please. It’s beneath the both of us.”
“You’ve never been as cold as you pretend to be,” I say.
“I’ve existed long before you ever came into my life. What do you really know of me? I am my
mother ’s daughter.”
“You’re more than that.”
“If you say so.”
There’s no artifice to her. No coy manipulation. Mustang’s all smirks and subtle plays. Victra’s a wrecking ball. She softened before the Triumph. Let her guard down. But now it’s back and it’s as alienating as when I first met her. But the longer we speak, the more I see her hair is shot with gray, not just pale Gold. Her cheeks are hollow, her right hand, the one on the opposite side of the cot, clenching the sheets.
“I know why you lied to me, Darrow. And I can respect it. But what I don’t understand is why you
saved me in Attica. Was it pity? A tactic?”
“It’s because you’re my friend,” I say.
“Oh, please.”
“I would rather have died trying to get you out of that cell than let you rot in there. Trigg did die getting you out.”
“Trigg?”
“One of the Grays who were behind me when we came into your cell. The other one is his sister.”
“I didn’t ask to be saved,” she says bitterly, her way of washing her hands of Trigg’s death. She looks away from me now. “You know Antonia thought we were lovers, you and I. She showed me your Carving. She taunted me. As if it would disgust me to see what you are. To see where you came from. To see how I had been lied to.”
“And did it?”
She sneers. “Why would I care what you were? I care about what people do. I care about truth. If
you had told me, I wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. I would have protected you.” I believe her. And I believe the pain in her eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”