“Have you been shot before?” Pax asks warily.
“Not exactly. Congratulations, you just saw me get my cherry popped,” I say through chattering teeth. It hurts worse by the minute. I look down at the wound. I thought I’d go into shock sooner. Fighting alongside the Sons, I saw Golds bleed out from scrap metal to the thigh. Others I’ve seen take bullets or pulseblasts to the face and keep ticking with half their jaws hanging off. A Red once kept fighting for an hour with his arm a shredded stump from a grenade. Died after, but still. Everyone is different. I’m a little proud of myself.
But the pride is quickly eaten up by fear.
The wound is bad and there’s no exit hole on my back. My fingertips are going cold. My teeth rattle together and the pain becomes unimaginable. I look over at the children, who talk amongst themselves, as we fly over the manufacturing districts of Endymion—areas hard hit by the Battle of Luna and not as well loved by Quicksilver—and wonder if they know how bad the wound is. I shift over to the ship’s holopad, which rests to the right of the flight control console, and tap in Holiday’s number from memory. She answers the call almost immediately. I face her, the Sovereign, and several others.
“Ephraim…” she says in relief. “Did you…”
“Right here,” I say. I expand the camera view to include the entire cockpit so they can see the children too.
“Pax!” the Sovereign says, her voice almost breaking. Tears fill the Gold’s obnoxiously symmetrical eyes.
“I’m here, Mother.”
“Did they hurt you?”
“No,” he lies. “I’m safe.” The Sovereign looks to someone off-camera. “Call Victra, tell her Electra is alive.”
“She’ll hit the Syndicate if she knows.”
“I’m counting on it.”
The Sovereign looks back to the camera. “Where are you, Ephraim? Send us your coordinates and my men will rendezvous.”
“No,” I say. “I’m not going to risk you shutting me in prison. Release Volga, and soon as she’s safe and tidy I’ll dump the kids on a rooftop, then your men can find them.”
“That wasn’t what we agreed upon.”
“Tough bloody luck.”
“You’re bleeding everywhere…” Electra says. She looks past me. “He’s going to crash the ship anyway.”
“I’ll trust a backalley Yellow’s clinic before I’ll trust a Gold’s word,” I sneer.
“We’re going to the Citadel,” Pax says from behind me.
“Maybe you didn’t hear…” I turn and find the tip of a razor centimeters from my right eyeball. He stands in a fencer’s position.
“Comply, citizen. Or I’ll be forced to learn how to fly a ship.”
FROM A BALCONY, I watch a squadron of ripWings rise from the Palatine landing pads up into the night. Their engines plume blue and shrink in the distance, leaving the Citadel wall behind and crossing the trees toward Hyperion.
The children are safe. And so is Ephraim. My own relief in knowing the bastard lives comes as a surprise to me. I’ve never been the forgiving type, but I feel pity for the man and his pain. I recognized the fear in him when he saw the Obsidian the Sovereign’s men captured. He’s a man. Like my father, like my brothers, raised in a place without love, trampled by the same clumsy Republic that brought us from the mines. I can’t hate him any more than I can hate myself. Maybe that isn’t forgiveness, but it’s all I have to give.
Just because he has pain doesn’t mean he should bring others into it.
That’s on him.
Holiday stands motionless beside me, watching the ships, a wistful expression caged by the hard lines of her face. The Sovereign held her back from the mission. Says it was because she hasn’t slept in forty-eight hours, but even I know it’s because of Holiday’s connection to Ephraim. There’s no forgiveness in the hard woman. I wonder if she was always this intense.
“What odds did you give him?” I ask.
At first I think she doesn’t hear me and might be listening to the pilots and commandos on her internal com, then I realize she’s just ignoring me.
“I don’t gamble,” she says after a moment.
“Course you don’t.”
“Ephraim won’t die,” she says.
“He blessed or something? Touched by the Vale?”
“No. Not blessed,” she says distantly. “He used to work for the Sons, you know. Joined after my brother died.” Her voice is slow and robotic. “Served as a recruiter before becoming a scar hunter. Back before House Lune fell, before the Battle of Ilium even. When the Society’s agents owned this moon, he brought in people like you. Like me. He taught them how to fight. How to survive so they could take back just some of what’d been taken from ’em. After Luna fell to the Rising, he was given a mission in Endymion to find a Gold who was organizing raids. It was a trap. They interrogated his men in front of him. Skinned them alive and made him watch. By the time we got there, he was the only one left. The Gold was captured with the peeling knife in hand.” She pauses, disliking the memory. “But…the Gold had information the Sovereign needed, information he exchanged for a full pardon. Ephraim watched the man who skinned his friends walk free.” She looks at me. “Point is, Ephraim wants to die, but he can’t. That’s his curse.”
“That’s why you took the Obsidian,” I say. “Because he couldn’t watch another friend die?”
She shrugs. “I know where to hurt.”
There’s no regret in her eyes. She seems a person made all of flint and iron, one who came into the world full-born, without mother or father or past or future. Less a woman than shovel or an axe. If there is more than that to her, she would never show it to me. “What sort of person does that make you?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer immediately.
She points east to the New Forum on the far side of the Citadel grounds. The domed building is pale in the night and rises out of the trees around it like a hill of snow, stark in contrast with the brutal lines of the pyramid forum the Society used. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” I nod. She stares on at it. “You think clean hands built it?”
—
The Sovereign is in conference with Theodora and Daxo when we join them. I keep my distance from both Pink and Gold, my arm still itching from the torture. Above the table, a map shows the progress of the squadron toward the stolen shuttle. The Sovereign watches it coolly as she converses with Theodora, but I can sense the underlying tension in her. Her eyes are bloodshot and heavy bags have formed under them. Coffee cups and the remnants of a meal litter the table. How long can a Gold go without sleep?
“…could not have done this alone,” Daxo is saying to Theodora. He cuts short when he sees me enter the room with Holiday.
“Continue,” the Sovereign says.
Daxo hesitates for a moment with me in the room. “The Syndicate is working with someone. I recommend we conceal this from the Senate until we know more. My spies will have names by the morning. Heads by the end of the week.”