It’s passingly cozy in our shelter. The insulation traps our heat inside. The light from two amber emergency lamps bathes the room in soft orange. Holiday uses the intermittent power to cook a feast of pasta with marinara sauce and sausage over the galley’s electric stoves as Ragnar and I plot a course to the Spires and Mustang sorts through the stacks of scavenged provisions, filling military packs she found in storage.
I burn my tongue as Holiday brings Ragnar and me heaping portions of pasta. I didn’t realize how
hungry I was. Ragnar nudges me and I follow his eyes to watch quietly as Holiday brings Mustang a
bowl too and leaves her with a small nod. Mustang smiles to herself. The four of us sit eating in silence. Listening to our forks against the bowls. The wind shrieking outside. Rivets groaning. Steel gray snow piles against the small circular windows, but not before we see strange shapes moving
through the white to drag off the corpses we set outside.
“What was it like growing up here?” Mustang asks Ragnar. She sits cross-legged with her back against the wall. I lay adjacent to her, a backpack between, on one of the mattresses Ragnar dragged inside the room to line its floor, on my third serving of pasta.
“It was home. I did not know anything else.”
“But now that you do?”
He smiles gently. “It was a playground. The world beyond is vast, but so small. Men putting themselves in boxes. Sitting at desks. Riding in cars. Ships. Here, the world is small, but without end.” He loses himself in stories. Slow to share at first, now it seems he revels in knowing that we listen. That we care. He tells us of swimming in the ice floes as a boy. How he was an awkward child.
Too slow. Bones outracing the rest of him. When he was beaten by another boy, his mother took him
to the sky for his first time on her griffin. Making him hold on to her from behind. Teaching him it is his arms that keep him from falling. His will. “She flew higher, and higher, till the air was thin and I could feel the cold in my bones. She was waiting for me to let go. To weaken. But she did not know that I tied my wrists together. That is as close to Allmother death as I have ever been.”
His mother, Alia Volarus, the Snowsparrow, is a legend among her people for her reverence for the gods. A daughter to a wanderer, she became a warrior of the Spires and rose in prominence as she raided other clans. Such is her devotion to the gods that when she rose to power, she gave four of her own children to serve them. Keeping only one for herself, Sefi.
“She sounds like my father,” Mustang says softly.
“Poor sods,” Holiday mutters. “My ma would make me cookies and teach me how to strip down a
hoverJack.”
“And what about your father?” I ask.
“He was a bad sort.” She shrugs. “But bad in a boring way. A different family in every port.
Stereotypical Legionnaire. I got his eyes. Trigg got Ma’s.”
“I never knew my first father,” Ragnar says, meaning his birth father. Obsidian women are polygamous. They might have seven children from seven fathers. Those men are then bound to protect the other children of her brood. “He went to become a slave before I was born. My mother never speaks his name. I do not even know if he lives.”
“We can find out,” Mustang says. “We’d have to search the Board of Quality Control’s registry. Not easy, but we can find him. What happened to him. If you want to know.”
He’s stunned by the idea and nods slowly. “Yes. I would like that.”
Holiday watches Mustang in a very different way than she did just hours before when we were leaving Phobos, and I’m struck by how natural this feels, our four worlds colliding together. “We all know your father.” Holiday says. “But what is your ma like? She looks frigid, from what I’ve seen, just on the HC, you know?”
“That’s my stepmother. She doesn’t care for me. Just Adrius, actually. My real mother died when I
was young. She was kind. Mischievous. And very sad.”
“Why?” Holiday presses.
“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.