He’s not like any boy I’ve ever known. He’s aware of himself. Who he is. Who his parents are. I think he knows how nervous I am. So he goes out of his way to be kind, cheery. But if he really was so chummy with servants all the time, he’d be watching in the break room, not skulking here in the garden. But in the race he loses the self-consciousness and the boyish energy bursts out, reminding me of my brothers.
We watch as the cherry racer speeds toward a huge white pylon. Behind the pylon is a floating wall on the edge of the racecourse. All the other ships slow to take the pylon turn. But Rex’s banks around the pylon, arcing like a kite on a tight line, and then rockets back the way it came, rounding the obstacle in a blink. “Hohoho,” Pax cheers. “That’s flying.”
His enthusiasm is infectious and I find myself cheering with him as the cherry racer speeds across the finish line several minutes later, the rest of the pack trailing far behind.
“So?” he asks.
“She’s good,” I admit. “But I still like Char.”
“Because he’s handsome.”
“No.”
“But he is.”
“Maybe you think he is….”
“Funny. Then why?”
“My brothers are in the legion. Infantry. Anyone who takes Society rippers out of the sky has got my love.”
“That’s a damn good reason.” He winces. “Sorry, not supposed to curse. Don’t tell Mother. It’s not genteel.”
“I’d be too terrified to tell your mother anything,” I say, trying to hide my bitterness with a smile.
“She can be a fright, can’t she? She’s really the kindest person you’re likely to meet.”
Sophocles has done his business and is staring at me impatiently. “I reckon I should get Sophocles back.”
“That’s right. Kavax might start weeping from separation anxiety.”
“Kavax is a great man.”
He looks horrified. “No, of course he is. He’s my godfather. Well, co-godfather? I think him and Uncle Sevro arm-wrestled for it. There was cheating. Anyway, I was just japing. Where are your brothers stationed?” he asks, joining me on my walk back.
“They’re in the Eighth,” I say. “They were on Mercury.”
“Harnassus’s Own,” he says knowingly. “He’s ArchLegate. A Red general. They’re in the dune cities doing aid work, I think.”
“They said it was classified.”
He nods. “Our secret? You haven’t talked to them?”
“Most of the satellites are down. Too expensive.”
“Because most were blasted out of the sky.” He says it like it just happened naturally, not like his father led ten million men in warships down onto the planet. I want to hate him. I have hated him. I hated him when he walked by his mother’s side on the silver carpet, and when I saw him on the news with all the photographers and journalists swarming. But it feels wrong now to have hated him. He’s not so different than Liam—just a boy with circles under his eyes who misses his father and has to hide in a garden to find a moment’s peace.
“May I ask you something, Lyria?” he asks awkwardly. “I don’t know how to ask….” Then don’t. “I know where you’re from. And I’ve always wondered, because my grandmother and father won’t tell me much. What’s it like? The mines?”
There it is.
I keep walking. “How did you know I was in the mines?”
“Father says it’s important to know everyone’s name and something about them. Not like a fact or something to memorize. But something real. I go over the new staff members so I can better understand them, and Kavax mentioned you offhand the other day. Said you saved his life, so I looked up your dossier….”
“My dossier?”
“Your history.”
I stop walking.
Then he knows about my family. Suddenly the attention makes sense. It’s guilt. Pity. All over again I feel sick and viciously angry at him in his perfect tuxedo with his white teeth and parted hair. Who is this little spoiled brat to try to bring my grief back to the light of day just so he can live like a peeping neighbor through my pain? My family didn’t die so he could learn a lesson or satisfy his curiosity.
“What was it like…” I murmur, turning on him and feeling the anger coming. Temper, temper, Ava would say.
“Yes. They keep me in a bubble here. I want to understand.”
“Understand?” He steps back from me and my cruel eyes. “Little Gold wants to hear about the nasty shit? The cancer, the pitvipers? Maybe you wanna go on about how they force us to marry at fourteen so we can get to breeding. Or how mine guards rape us for meds. They did that, you know, boys and girls. Don’t show that on the HC for all you highColors.”
“I’m not a highColor,” he says. “I’m a Red too….”
White anger flashes. “The fuck you are. You’re just as Gold as your da is.”
His face falls and it feels good to see it, to know I can hurt too. I turn away from him, pulling Sophocles along on the leash. They all want a part of it. A part of pain that’s not theirs. Nod their heads. Wrinkle their foreheads. Now they want to pity it, gorge on my pain. And when they’re done or bored or too sad, they whisk themselves away to stare at a screen or stuff their fat faces, thinking How lucky I am to be me. And then they forget the pain and say we should be good citizens. Get a job. Assimilate. Maybe the Vox are right.
They planted us in stones, watered us with pain, and now marvel we have thorns. Slag them. Slag the lot of them.
Stewing mad, I return Sophocles to the guards outside the conference room door, too sick in the stomach to face the hypocrites, and go back to the break room. I get so nauseous from all these lowColors buying the snakeshit myth that they matter, pretending they’re important because they shine shoes and carry capes and clone bloodydamn foxes. In moments I am back outside, smoking burners on a balcony, touching Philippe’s pendant and trying not to cry.
I watch the cold, ancient light of the stars and wonder which of them are already dead out there in the blackness. I miss my sister, my family. And though I speak to them still, all I want in all the worlds is for them to speak, to answer. Some proof that the Vale is real. That they are not simply gone into the dark.
But they do not speak to me.
—
When the Augustuses and Telemanuses have finally had their fill of partying and conspiring, we depart. I slump along with the procession with my head down, crushed with guilt, not just because of how cruel I was, but because I know a little prince with his feelings hurt will go and tell his mother and I’ll be sacked within the day. I feel Bethalia’s eyes on me and know she knows. I’m just as the other servants pegged me: a rusty bitch with mine manners and no place in their fine company.
The valets carry the gifts Quicksilver’s given to our masters into the shuttle’s staff entrance. I follow behind with Sophocles’s kit and my own basket, now almost forgotten, in my arms. I see Pax and a mean-looking Gold girl about the same age, saying farewell to their important mothers. Both the Sovereign and Lady Barca are going back to the Citadel along with most of the staff for more meetings, and I’m bound for Lake Silene with the Telemanuses, Sophocles, and the children for the week.