“Volga, strip and burn,” I say when she emerges from the clean room. She dumps corrosive acid into the barrel after she’s stripped her gear.
“Found it,” the Yellow with a metal sniffer nose says inside the clean room. “Right shoulder blade.” The Violet, this one with multihued chimeras tattooed onto either side of his neck, finds the mark, and soon two wicked-looking drills whir to life. Metal burrows into skin. The children whimper through numb mouths as the Syndicate contractors dig out the imbed tracking devices with forceps. Tears tumble out of the children’s paralyzed ducts. The men toss the bloody little chips into a container.
“They’re babynaked and ready to roll,” the Violet says.
“Double-check for radiation stains,” I say, gingerly feeling my ribs. “Don’t be sloppy.” After they’ve finished, the two operators shove the children into plastic smocks and then drag them out of the clean room. The knights on the hologram jump into the garage through the hole punched by the ships. The operators leave the children with us and depart in their own vehicle, taking it through a subterranean tunnel that links with abandoned tramways. Volga takes both children and loads them into the back of the taxi, laying them parallel on the seats as gentle as a mum tucking her kids in for a nap. She lingers there looking down at them.
“Volga.”
She jerks her head up to glare at me and slams the taxi door hard enough to rattle the glass. “Fuck you too,” I say calmly. I leave her to go activate the timer on the explosive charges outside the clean room. Thirty seconds starts ticking down. I activate the charges in the junker car, toss another next to the barrel for good measure, and hop in the driver’s seat of the taxi as Volga tosses one of her charges into the clean room too. I follow the path of the Syndicate operators down into the tunnels.
“If you gotta leave the field, do it in style,” I mutter without heart. Soon as the old drill instructor’s words are out of my mouth, the concussion of the charges going off shakes the tunnel. A second set of charges goes off a minute later at the tunnel’s entrance, collapsing it behind us. We drive in silence, Volga pinched in the seat next to mine.
The high of the heist died with Dano. Neither Volga nor I expected to survive this. And now that we have, the weight of living comes crashing down on the big girl. She rolls down her window and closes her eyes, sticking her hand out into the wind like it’s a dolphin riding the waves. She sits six inches from me, but we might as well be worlds apart. Cold, fetid air from the tunnels rolls through the car. We pass ramps going down deeper into the undergrid of the city. The tension works its way out of my jaw, but the sight of Dano’s blood on the fists of the Gold oozes through my skull. Volga links her datapad with the taxi and turns on Ridoverchi.
As his piano plays a gentle melody and we carve our way through the darkness, tears stream from her eyes, but not from mine.
Pulvis et umbra sumus. “We are but dust and shadow.”
—HOUSE RAA
CASSIUS IS LOST IN THOUGHT, staring up at a dragon carved into the stone of the antechamber. Its snout is long. Its greedy maw open and lined with uneven teeth. The bold knight that faced down the Raa family has departed, leaving behind the tormented, reflective soul I know. The wounds where the gruesli pierced his face are swollen and red, but he’s shaved his beard and looks younger than he has in years. Only his eyes are old.
“What are you thinking?” I ask. He does not seem to hear me. The distant voices from a hundred throats whisper from behind two black doors down a set of stone stairs just beneath the dragon’s gaze. Our Gray guards give us space, allowing us to speak. “Cassius?”
“It was a flower,” he says quietly.
“A flower?”
I realize he is far from here. “A white edelweiss. That was the last thing Father gave me before he died.” He pauses, eyes still fixed on the dragon. He rarely speaks of his family. “It was a proud day,” he says slowly. He spares a look at the guards. “You were too young then. Mother kept you at Eagle Rest. But the rest of us were in Agea on the Citadel steps, where Augustus used to give the Perennial Address. The Sovereign summoned us there for a council of war. Augustus’s ships were two days from Deimos. The sun was high in the sky; you could feel the energy of a storm in the air. Wind had already come. Rain was following. I remember smelling the flowering judas trees from the steps. And…for once, our silver eagle flew from the flagpoles of the Citadel, where all my life I’d only ever seen lions. It was to be the end of a corrupt Mars and the beginning of our era.
“We had the numbers. We had the right. And once we defeated Augustus, we would have Mars—something Father never coveted, so I knew he would treat her well. But I was ashamed. After I lost the duel to Darrow, my father told me he was disappointed. Not that I had lost. He was ashamed at my selfishness.” He grimaces. “My petty pride. The carvers mended me and I put myself to one purpose: redemption in his eyes. I begged the Sovereign to let me lead the legions sent to trap Augustus at the Dockyards of Ganymede after Pliny gave us the intel. She sent Barca along to ensure I did not fail. I didn’t. I returned to Agea dragging Augustus behind us in chains. I found redemption in her eyes. But I didn’t have Father’s till we stood on those steps and he saw how I’d changed.
“He was to meet the Augustans in orbit with our cousins and sisters. I was given the rest of our family forces to defend Agea. You’ve never known pride like it, Castor. The shining faces. The laughter. The hair and pennants kicking in the wind as two full generations of Bellona strolled out from the summit in armor under the sun.
“He turned to me at the foot of the stairs and told me he loved me. He’d done it a thousand times before. But it was different. ‘The boy has fled,’ he said. ‘In his place, I see a man.’ It was the first time I felt I deserved his love, to be his son. I realized how lucky I was, how blessed I was to have a father like him. In a world of terrible men, he was patient, kind. Noble in the way the stories told us to be as boys.”
I glance to see if the guards are listening. Their faces from the bridge of the nose down are covered with duroplastic breathing units. The flinty eyes that peer out from beneath the gray hoods give nothing away.
“He took an edelweiss from a pouch in his armor and pressed it into my hands and told me to remember home. To remember the Olympus Mons. To remember why we fight. Not for family or for pride, but for life.