Morning Star

by Pierce Brown

  “Oh, shit,” Victra sputters.

  Among the professional Colors rise six Golden knights in full pulseArmor. And I know them all. On the left, a dark-faced older man wearing the pure black armor of the Death Knight, on either side of him are pudgy-faced Moira—a Fury, sister of Aja—and good old Cassius au Bellona. To the right are Kavax au Telemanus, Daxo au Telemanus, and the girl who left me on my knees in the old mining tunnels of Mars nearly one year ago.

  Mustang.

  “Hold your fire!” I shout, pushing down Victra’s weapon, but Sevro’s barking orders, and Victra brings her weapon back up. We form a staggered line with our pulseFists and scorchers aimed at the Golds. We hold fire because we need Quicksilver alive, and I know Sevro’s as stunned as I to see Mustang, Cassius, and the Telemanuses here.

  “On the ground or we waste you!” Sevro screams, voice inhuman and magnified by his demonHelm. The Howlers join him, filling the air with a harpy’s chorus of commands. My blood pumps cold. The alarm throbs around the roaring voices. Not knowing what to do, I point my pulseFist at the most dangerous Gold in the room, Cassius, knowing what must be going through Sevro’s mind as he sees his father’s killer in the flesh. My helmet syncs with the weapon, to illuminate weak points in his armor, but my eyes drink in Mustang as she sets down a cup of coffee, graceful as ever, and steps back from the table, the pulseFist implanted in the left gauntlet of her armor slowly beginning to blossom open.

  My mind and heart war against each other. What the hell is she doing here? She’s supposed to be in the Rim. Like her, the other Golds aren’t listening to us. They don’t know who we are past our helmets. No wolfcloaks today. They step back, eyes wary, judging the situation. Cassius’s razor slithers on his right arm. Kavax slowly lifts himself from his chair along with Daxo. Quicksilver waves his hands frantically.

  “Stop!” he shouts, voice nearly lost in the chaos. “Do not fire! This is a diplomatic meeting! Identify yourselves!” We’ve stumbled into the middle of some negotiation, I realize. A surrender of Mustang’s forces? An alliance? Noticeably absent is the Jackal. Is Quicksilver betraying him? He must be. So must the Sovereign. That’s why this place is so deserted. No servants, minimum security. Quicksilver wanted only men he trusted at this meeting held so close under his ally’s nose.

  My stomach lurches as I realize the rest of the room must think we’re Boneriders. Which means they think we’re here to kill them, and this is going to end only one way.

  “On the bloodydamn ground!” Victra bellows.

  “What do we do?” Pebble asks over the com. “Reaper?”

  “I claim the Bellona,” Sevro says.

  “Use stun weapons!” I say. “It’s Mustang—”

  “Won’t do shit against that armor,” Sevro interrupts. “If they lift their weapons, kill the pricks. Full pulse charges. I’m not risking any of our family.”

  “Sevro, listen to me. We need to talk to—” My words cut short because he uses the master command built into his helmet to jam my com output signal. I can hear them, but they can’t hear me. I curse futilely at him.

  “Bellona, stop moving!” Clown shouts. “I said stop.”

  Opposite Mustang, Cassius silently drifts through the Silvers, using them as cover to close the gap between us. He’s only ten meters away. Getting closer. I sense Victra tensing beside me, hungry to be let loose on one of the men who she blames for her mother’s death, but there’s civilians between us and the Golds, and Quicksilver’s a prize we can’t afford to lose.

  My eyes judge the plump cheeks of the Silvers and Coppers. Not a soul here is oppressed. Not a belly here has ever been hungry. These are collaborators. Sevro would scalp them one by one if given a rusty knife and a few idle hours.

  “Reaper…” Ragnar says quietly, looking to me for instruction.

  “Take your hand away from the razor!” Victra shouts at Cassius. He stays quiet. Coming forward, certain as a glacier. Moira and the Death Knight follow after him. Kavax’s helmet is slithering up to cover his head. Mustang’s face is already covered. Her pulseFist active and pointed at the ground.

  I know death well enough to hear it gather its breath.

  I activate my external speakers. “Kavax, Mustang, stop. It’s me. It’s—”

  “Stop moving, you piece of shit!” Victra snarls. Cassius smiles pleasantly and he lunges forward. Ragnar makes a weird twisting movement to my left, and one of the two razors he carries flies through the air and skewers the Death Knight through his forehead. The Silvers gape at the famous Olympic Knight teetering to the ground.

  “KAVAX AU TELEMANUS,” Kavax roars and rushes forward with Daxo. Mustang breaks sideways. Moira charges, lifting her pulseFist.

  “Waste ’em,” Sevro says with a snarl.

  The room erupts. Air torn to shreds by superheated particles as the Howlers open fire at point-blank range into the crowded room. Marble turns to dust. Chairs melt into gnarled chunks of metal and kick across the floor. Meat and bone explode, filling the air with red mist, as Silvers and Coppers are caught in the crossfire. Sevro misses Cassius, who dives behind a pillar. Kavax is shot a dozen times, but he doesn’t falter even as his shields overheat. He’s going to smash into Sevro and Victra with his razor when Ragnar charges from the side and hits the smaller man so hard with his shoulder that Kavax is lifted clean off his feet. Daxo attacks Ragnar from behind, and three giants tumble to the side of the room, crushing two scrabbling Coppers half their size as they go. The Coppers scream on the ground, legs shattered.

  Behind Kavax, Mustang takes two shots to the chest, but her pulseShield holds. She stumbles, fires back at us, hitting Pebble in her thigh. Pebble’s lifted backward and flipped into the wall, leg shattered from the blast. She screams and clutches at it. Clown and Victra cover her, firing back at Mustang, dragging Pebble behind a pillar. Screwface and four other Howlers who guarded the door and kept Matteo outside now fire into the room from the hallway.

  I stumble sideways, lost in the chaos, as the marble where I stood shatters. Silvers scramble under the table. Others kick away from their chairs, racing for the imagined safety of the columns on the fringes of the room. Hypersonic pulsefire rips between them, over their heads, through them. Buckling the columns. Quicksilver runs behind two Coppers, using them as human shields when shrapnel rips into them, and they all tumble down in a mess of limbs and blood.

  Moira, the Fury, rushes Sevro to impale my friend from behind with her razor as he tries to move past Ragnar, who’s fighting both Telemanuses, to get at Cassius. I fire my pulseFist point-blank into her side just before she reaches him. Her armor’s pulseShield absorbs the first few rounds, rippling blue in a cocoon around her. She stumbles sideways, and if I did not continue to fire, she’d have nothing but a bruise in the morning. But my middle finger is heavy on the trigger of the weapon. She’s an engineer of oppression, and one of the best minds of Gold. And she tried to kill Sevro. Bad play.

  I fire till her shield buckles inward, till she falls to a knee, till she twitches and screams as the molecules of her skin and organs superheat. Boiling blood comes out her eyes and nose. Armor and flesh fuse together, and I feel the rage ride wild inside me, numbing me to fear, to sense, to compassion. This is the Reaper who laid Cassius low. Who slew Karnus. Who Gold cannot kill.

  Moira’s pulseFist fires wildly as the tendons of her fingers contract in the heat. Shooting into the ceiling on full automatic. Twitching sideways, whipping a stream of death across the room. Two Silvers running for cover explode. The glass of the viewport at the far end of the room, which looks out onto the space city, cracks perilously. Howlers scramble for cover till the pulseFist glows molten on Moira’s left hand and the barrel overheats to melt inward with a corrupt fizzle. With that last gasp of rage, the wisest of the Sovereign’s three Furies lies in a charred husk.

  My only wish is that it could have been Aja.

  I turn back to the room, feeling the cool hand of wrath guiding me, hungering for more blood. Bu
t all those that are left are my friends. Or once were. I shudder with hollowness as the rage leaves me as fast as it came. Replaced by panic as I watch my friends try to kill one another. The ordered lines have broken down into a hi-tech brawl. Feet sliding on glass. Shoulder blades slamming into walls. PulseFist battles between pillars. Hands and knees scrambling against the floor as pulseFists wail and blades clamor and hack.

  And it’s only now, only with this terrifying clarity, that I realize that there is only one common thread that binds them. It’s not an idea. Not my wife’s dream. Not trust or alliances or Color.

  It’s me.

  And without me, this is what they will do. Without me, this is what Sevro has been doing. What an inevitable waste it seems. Death begets death begets death.

  I have to stop it.

  At the center of the room, Cassius stumbles after Victra through twisted chairs and shattered glass. Blood slicks the floor beneath them. Her damaged ghostCloak sparks on and off and she flashes between ghost and shadow like an undecided demon. Cassius cuts her again across the thigh and spins as Clown shoots at him, cutting Clown across the side of his head before bending back to dodge a shot from Pebble on the ground across the room. Victra rolls under the table to escape Cassius, slicing at his ankles. He jumps onto the table, firing his pulseFist into the onyx till it caves in the center, trapping her beneath. He’s inches from killing her when Sevro shoots him from behind, the blast absorbed by Cassius’s shield, but one that knocks him several meters to the side.

  To the right, Ragnar, Daxo, and Kavax fight a duel of titans. Ragnar pins Kavax’s arm to the wall with his razor, leaves the weapon, ducks, fires his pulseFist into Daxo at point-blank range. Daxo’s shields absorb the blast, and his razor misses Rangar and takes out a chunk of the wall instead. Ragnar hits Daxo in his joints and is about to snap his neck when Kavax skewers him through the shoulder with a razor, screaming his family name. I rush to help my Stained friend, but as I do I feel someone to my left.

  I turn just in time to see Mustang flying through the air at me, her helmet covering her face, her razor arching down to cut me in two. I bring my own razor up just in time. Blades slam together. Vibrations rattle down my arm. I’m slower than I remember, much of my muscle instinct lost to the darkness despite Mickey’s lab and my training bouts with Victra. Plus Mustang’s gotten faster.

  I’m pressed back. I try to flow around Mustang, but she moves her razor like she’s been at war for the last year. I try to slip to the side, like Lorn taught me, but there’s no escape. She’s smart, using the rubble, the pillars, to corner me. I’m being hemmed in, corralled by the flashing metal. My defense doesn’t cave, but it erodes along the edges as I protect my core.

  The blade parts an inch-deep gash through my left shoulder. Stings like a pitviper bite. I curse and she slices through more flesh. I’d shout at her to stop. Shout my name, something, if I had even half a second to breathe, but it’s all I can do to keep my arms moving. I bend back just in time as she cuts a shallow gash through the neck of my scarabSkin. Three quick cuts at the tendons of my right arm follow, just missing. Building a rhythm. My back’s touching the wall. Cut. Cut. Stab. Fire opening up my skin. I’m going to die here. I call for help over my com, but they’re still jammed by Sevro.

  We’ve bitten off more than we can chew.

  I scream in futility as Mustang’s blade scrapes through three of my ribs. She spins the blade in her hand. Swings backhanded to cut my head off. I manage to deflect the razor into the wall with mine, pinning it above my head so her helmet is near my mask. I head-butt her. But her helmet’s stronger than the composite duroplastic of my mask. She reels back her own head and slams it into mine, using my own tactic. A seam of pain splinters down my skull. I nearly black out. Vision rushing out, in. Still standing. Feel part of my mask crack off and slide off my face. Nose broken again. Seeing spots. The rest of the mask crumbles and I stare at the death-eyed horse helmet of Mustang as she prepares to end me.

  Her razor arm draws back to deliver the killing stroke. And it stays there above her head. Trembling as she looks at my exposed face. Her helmet slithers away to reveal her own. Sweat-soaked hair clings to her forehead, darkening the golden luster. Beneath, her eyes are wild, and I wish I could say it’s love or joy I see in them, but it’s not. If anything, it’s fear, maybe horror that draws the blood from her face as she stumbles back, gesturing speechlessly with her off-hand.

  “Darrow…?”

  She looks over her shoulder to see the mayhem that still grips the room, our quiet moment a little bubble in the storm. Cassius flees, disappearing through a side door, leaving the corpse of the Death Knight and Moira behind. Our eyes meet before he disappears. Victra gives chase until Sevro reels her back in. The rest of the Howlers are turning toward Mustang. I take a step toward her, and stop when the tip of her razor pricks my collarbone.

  “I saw you die.”

  She backs away toward the main door, boots sliding over the marble, crunching on bits of glass from the walls. “Kavax, Daxo!” she calls, a vein in her neck bulging from strain. “Pull back!”

  The Telemanuses scramble to separate themselves from Ragnar, confused at who the masked man they are fighting is and why they’re bleeding in so many places. They try to regroup on Mustang, both men rushing for her in a hasty retreat, but as they pass me to join her near the door, I know I can’t just watch her go. So I whip my razor around Kavax’s neck. He gags and reels against me, but I hold on. With the press of a button, I could retract my whip and sever his head. But I’ve no interest in killing the man. He falls only when Ragnar sweeps his leg and puts a knee into his chest. Slamming to the floor. Screwface and the others are on him, pinning him down.

  “Don’t kill him,” I shout. Screwface knew Pax. He’s met the Telemanuses, so he holds his blade and snaps at the newer Howlers to do the same. Daxo tries to rush to his father’s aid, but Ragnar and I bar his way. His bright eyes stare in confusion at my face.

  “Go, Virginia!” Kavax roars from the ground. “Flee!”

  “I have the Pax. Orion is alive,” Mustang says, eying the bloody Howlers who are at my back, coming for her and Daxo. “Don’t kill him. Please.” And then, with a sorrowful look to Kavax, she flees the room.

  “What did she mean, Orion’s alive?” I ask Kavax. He’s as shell-shocked as I am, nervously eying the black-clad Howlers prowling through the room. We didn’t lose one, but we’re in shit shape. “Kavax!”

  “What she said,” he rumbles. “Exactly what she said. The Pax is safe.”

  “Darrow!” Sevro shouts as he reenters the room with Victra. They pursued Cassius through the blackened door on the far side of the room but return empty-handed and limping. “On me!” There’s more I want to ask Kavax, but Victra’s wounded. I rush to her as she leans against the shattered onyx table, hunched over a deep gash in her biceps. Her mask’s off, face twisted and sweating as she injects herself with painkillers and blood coagulant to stem the flow from the wound. I see the hint of bone through the blood.

  “Victra…”

  “Shit,” she says with a dark laugh. “Your boyfriend is faster than he used to be. Almost got him in the hall, but I think Aja taught him a little of your Willow Way.”

  “Looked like,” I say. “You prime?”

  “Don’t worry about me, darling.” She gives me a wink as Sevro calls my name again. He and Clown are bent over Moira’s smoking remains. The terrorist lord is unfazed by the carnage around us.

  “One of the Furies,” Clown says. “Roasted.”

  “Good cooking, Reap,” Sevro drawls. “Crispy on the edges, bloody down the middle. Just how I like. Aja’s gonna be pissed—”

  “You cut my coms,” I interrupt angrily.

  “You were acting a bitch. Confusing my men.”

  “Acting a bitch? The hell is wrong with you? I was using my head instead of just shooting everything. We could have done without murdering half the damn room.”

  His ey
es are darker and crueler than those of the friend I remember. “This is war, boyo. Murder’s the name of the game. Don’t be sad we’re good at it.”

  “That was Mustang!” I say, stepping close to him. “What if we killed her?” He shrugs. I poke his chest. “Did you know she would be here? Tell me the truth.”

  “Naw,” he says slowly. “Didn’t know. Now back up, boyo.” He looks up at me impudently, like he wouldn’t mind taking a swing. I don’t back up.

  “What was she doing here?”

  “How the hell would I know?” He looks past me to Ragnar, who is pushing Kavax back toward the Howlers gathering in the center of the room. “Everyone prepare to squab out. We’re gonna have to cut through an army to get out of this shit den. Evac point is ten floors up on the black side.”

  “Where’s our prize?” Victra asks, eying the carnage. Bodies litter the ground. Silvers shivering in pain. Coppers crawling across the floor, dragging broken legs.

  “Probably fried,” I say.

  “Prolly,” Clown agrees, casting me a commiserating look as we move from Sevro to pick through the bodies. “It’s a slaggin’ mess.”

  “Did you know Mustang would be here?” I ask.

  “Not at all. Seriously, boss.” He glances back at Sevro. “What’d you mean he jammed your coms?”

  “Stop jawin’ and find the bloodydamn Silver,” Sevro barks from the center of the room. “Somebody grab the Pink from the hall.”

  Clown finds Quicksilver at the opposite end of the room, farthest from the hallway door, to the right of the grand viewport that looks down onto Phobos. He’s lying motionless, pinned under a pillar that broke from its place in the floor to fall sideways against the wall. The blood of others covers his turquoise tunic. Bits of glass jut from wounded knuckles. I feel his pulse. He’s alive. So the mission wasn’t a damn waste. But there’s a contusion on his forehead from shrapnel. I call Ragnar and Victra, the two strongest of our party, to help pry the pillar off the man.