“Edmon, sire,” Alberich grumbles. The pilot lands, and I bolt through the hatch before the sonic wings even retract into the scarab’s carapace.
“Edmon!” my father calls after me, but I’m already racing to the roof’s edge.
I see him, Phaestion, at the top of the rotunda stairs.
“For too long your fathers and grandfathers have scrounged for scraps cast down by the nobility. For too long have they bowed their backs and thrown their hands up in what? Gratitude? While all these so-called great houses, Wusong, Flanders, Mughal, Ruska, Leontes, and yes, even Julii, have made their children fat. Is the wealth of Tao for them or for the strong?”
The crowd screams, “The strong!” Phaestion nods, his hair the color of a flame in the breeze. When he speaks, he commands the attention of the mob like a king of old.
“The Great Song founded our society on an ideal we’ve strayed from. Food lines so long that children starve? Natural resources depleted? An interstellar trade so impoverished that even a working man cannot clothe himself? What would our emperor say now?”
My father coughs as he hobbles up behind me, leaning on Alberich for support. “He denounces the very system that grants him an audience. He includes the name Leontes when it was I who climbed from the muck of the arcos.”
A fit seizes Edric as Phaestion continues.
“You may say, ‘Phaestion, you’re prince of the Julii,’ and I will proclaim that I am. But I am not my father, or my father’s father, or kin in mind to any ancestor save the founder, Bushi Tamerlane Song. I, my companions, and you—we are the new generation. Together we proclaim the Pantheon is not birthright. It’s every man’s right. You are the new Pantheon!”
Cheers erupt from the crowd. I have to get closer and look him in the eye. I jump onto the roof ledge and run along it to a drain pipe that rides the edge of the scraper all the way to the street below. I leap into the air and snag the pipe. I slide down, zooming toward the city floor.
“I’ll win this Combat and claim my place among the Electors,” continues Phaestion. “I’ll face the challenges and defeat any opponent thrown my way. I’ll fight without enhancers or off-world narcotics. I’ll kill with weapons or bare-handed. I’ll fight without magical techniques . . .”
I hit the pavement and push through the crowd.
“When I win, I will not be silent. I will speak for you!” Phaestion proclaims. “We’ll end corruption and injustice perpetrated by these indolent blood-suckers on the Synod. These so-called Wusong-Leonteses, these Ruskas, these Angkors, these Temujins. We’ll end their reign and usher in a new order of the true master race of Tao!”
I shoulder my way up to the steps.
“Workers of the shipyards, farmers of the kelp forests, you are the product of a thousand years of breeding. We’ll not stop with Tao. Our armies will sweep through the Nine Corridors, Lyria, Thera, Nonthera, Albion, Eruland. We’ll claim Market and the realms of the dead Miralian Empire that drove our forefathers from the stars. We will save all of humanity for the pure!”
I race to the top of the stairs amid thundering applause. It pounds in my head. I block it out, and I focus on a single heartbeat, the one that ticks like a metronome, unwavering.
“We’ll cleanse humanity’s blood, cull those who have diluted and deluded themselves, spliced themselves with false genes. Mutants, spypsies, all those who have fragmented humanity and weakened it. We’ll make a unified galaxy carved in the pristine image of the Nightsider. We start here at home. The impurity of these Daysiders—”
I burst through the crowd, slam through two Julii shock troopers, and come face-to-face with my foster brother. The crowd gasps. The boy who taught me to use a spear, the child I played music with, and the friend I braved the leviathan with stands before me. He’s an inch or so taller, which is quite tall for someone from a high gravity planet. I hate that he’s taller. Then again, I’m used to being the ugly one.
He regards me with his cool gray eyes. “Edmon of House Leontes, do you join us in this holy crusade?” he shouts to the crowd. “Do you join your strength to ours to overthrow corruption?”
I stand perfectly still. Any movement I make will be seen as an answer.
He lowers his voice and says for my ears alone, “I will find a way to give you your voice back. I swear it, brother.” Then he turns to the crowd. “Yours is the strength we need, Edmon. Even with your mixed blood.”
I see fire. He would not find my voice; he’d replace it with another voice that would owe him.
Shame on you. Warmonger. Racist. Hypocrite. Shame on this place that made you. I condemn him with my eyes.
“War then,” he whispers.
CHAPTER 29
ARISTEIA
Alberich massages my muscles and kneads the knots from my back, readying me for the fight. He fastens greaves to my shins and gauntlets to my arms. He holsters the siren sword in the obi around my waist. “The cape is leviathan skin,” he says as he cinches the garment over one shoulder. “A sea dragon hasn’t been speared for over a hundred years, but your father swears it is true.”
The smooth scales do remind me of the creature. Could the monster have appeared to Edric as well?
“We’ll be watching from the box.” The seneschal smiles like a proud parent. “When you are Patriarch, my debt to your family will have been paid in full.”
You helped kill my mother, helped kill Nadia, and helped poison Edric. I’ll remember your service.
He stares as if he heard my thoughts spoken aloud. “I should let you alone before the fight.” He leaves.
I hear sounds of the other semi bout in the rotunda above. The obstacle machinery rumbles. The crowd roars as someone falls. My skin tingles. I know that Phaestion fights now. There’s no killing today, but if he wins and I win, death will be all that’s between us tomorrow.
I don’t know if I can do it. If I can, I don’t know that I should. I don’t desire the vengeance I once did. I only desire to somehow not . . . succumb. I wave my hand over the aquagraphic sensor in the middle of the room. Images of the current bout appear.
The Julii prince moves like a predator. He leaps over streams of fire, twists midair over a spear’s thrust, and barely touches the ground before he flies again. He lands behind an opponent and places a palm on the man’s back. Each competitor wears an undergarment outfitted with technology that registers the pressure of any strike. If a touch is delivered to a vital part of the body, the garment electrifies, shocking the opponent out of the match. Phaestion’s opponent screams as the radiating stun paralyzes him and he drops.
“Brilliant, isn’t he?” Talousla Karr’s electric-blue eyes shine at me from the doorway. “You do remember me, Edmon of the Leontes? Of course you remember. You have the bones I gave you.”
I ignore him. How the spypsy got into the competitors’ room, I don’t know.
Phaestion scissors his legs midair around a man’s neck and sends the man spinning head over heels into an electrified pool. The combatant’s stun harness activates and shocks him out of the fight.