“No,” Seraphina says, hanging her head. “Mother was wrong.”
I catch the slightest movement of Romulus’s lips, so slight all but a Pink and a boy raised by my grandmother might have missed it. Relief. Interesting. He feared she would bring something back. “You wanted war so badly?” he asks his daughter.
“I want justice,” Seraphina says. But she has noticed something else, and echoes my own thoughts. “Why did you not bring me to Sungrave? Why here?”
“All of Io believes you are on a mission for me,” Romulus says. “That is what I’ve claimed. If the council discovered the truth—that you went into the Gulf of your own accord—you would be executed for treason. I brought you here to protect you.”
“Then where is Mother? Why is she not here?”
“I think you know why,” Romulus says. “She used you, child. She would have had you spark her war. But as I told her, you cannot draw blood from the stone. There is no mystery. No conspiracy. Fabii destroyed our docks. Anything else is the fantasy of a warmonger.” Romulus steps back from her. “Now what am I to do with you?”
“Let me return to Sungrave. Let me serve the Rim.”
Romulus looks down at his daughter, but his eye is fixed on the past, heavy with the weight of age. He lost his firstborn daughter in the Reaper’s Triumph. His son Aeneas at the Battle of Ilium. How much more will he lose? he wonders. I know because I have seen that same look in Cassius’s eyes. The same weight in his spirit.
“If only I could,” he says to her. He nods to the robed Obsidians. They seize Seraphina from behind. She struggles in vain against their huge hands.
“Father!”
“Were I stronger, I’d bring you before the Moon Council. But I don’t have the heart to watch you meet the dust. You risked a war. You broke the law. Now this place is your home. Living quarters have been installed for your comfort. But it has no communications equipment. It has no transports. The nearest outpost is three hundred kilometers away. The Sohai I leave behind will be here for your safety. But they will have no kryll. No scorosuits or radiation shielding. If you attempt to leave on foot, the dust will devour you in a kilometer. This is the fate you made yourself.”
I don’t know these people, but I feel a keen ache seeing family trauma as Seraphina begs her father not to do this, for her brother to stop him. But they’re right, it was not her place to risk war.
Diomedes looks pained. “It is this or death. I am sorry, Little Hawk. It has to be.”
Face torn with betrayal, Seraphina is dragged cursing from the room. Cassius and I are left on our knees, a sick feeling spreading through me, as I realize that we too must be forgotten. All those weeks in the cell just to face the same end. For me. For Pytha. For Cassius.
“What of the gahja?” Diomedes asks his father.
“They could be the Slave King’s spies…” Marius murmurs. “Interrogate them.”
Romulus paces before Cassius and me.
“You saved my daughter’s life. For that, I give the gift of my thanks and my son has given you the gift of reprieve from torture. By the calluses on your hands, I know you are men of weight, and so I awarded you the dignity of my attention.”
“We’re your guests—” I begin, prepared to launch into a long spiel about honor and dignity. But he speaks over me.
“Guests are invited. You cannot stay. You cannot leave. So the only right I can afford you is a swift end.” He turns to Pandora. “Behead them, put their bodies into their ship, and then cast it into Jupiter.”
“Diomedes,” I say, hoping I gauged him right.
There’s a small hesitation in the large man. “They saved Seraphina’s life,” he says.
“And to keep her alive, there must be no witnesses to her return except those we trust,” Romulus replies.
I search for some clever gambit, straining for an outlandish conceit that might save us. Something out of the Reaper’s own book. Cassius is preparing to launch himself not at Diomedes, but at Romulus himself, to try to take a hostage. I know the current of my friend’s mind, and how I might help him using my body as a shield against Diomedes. I’ll likely die for it. But he’ll have a chance. The tension builds first in his muscular neck, then his toes as he finds purchase on the stone. And just before Cassius is about to fling himself forward, the ground rumbles under our feet. Diomedes steps back from us.
“What was that?” Diomedes asks. “Volcanism?”
“No.” Romulus puts a hand to the ground. “A missile strike.”
Vela pulls her datapad and snaps several questions into it. “Romulus, we have incoming vessels. Our escorts are down.”
“Impossible,” Marius whispers. “No one knows we are here.”
“Evidently someone does,” Romulus replies. “How many ships?”
Vela blinks hard at her datapad. Romulus is forced to repeat himself, “How many?”
“Ten warhawks.”
“Ten?” Diomedes repeats, startled by the number.
“And more chimeras.”
“How could they get past the orbital defenses?” Marius asks.
“They didn’t come from orbit,” Romulus murmurs. The Golds all tense at the implication. Vela takes control.
“Pandora, have your Krypteia stall them in the hangar.” Pandora salutes and heads toward the hallway, flanked by her men. Vela turns to the rest of the bodyguards. “Protect your Sovereign.”
But then Romulus begins to laugh.
“Father?” Diomedes says, sparing a confused glance at Marius as their father sits back down on his cushion and sets his razor on the ground. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting…”
“For what?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Your mother.”
DIDO AU RAA, WIFE of Romulus au Raa and mother to his seven children, enters the warroom as if she has the intention of tearing it down from the inside. She stalks at the head of an armored column of cloaked Peerless Scarred dressed for war. Orange goggles cover their eyes. Dark ugan wrap around their faces. Unlike Romulus and his sons, they carry heavy weapons and wear battle masks and skipBoots. I see not a single Obsidian or Gray amongst them. This is a Gold affair. Cassius and I crouch together, momentarily forgotten. We search for some passage from the room, but there’s only one door.