Morning Star

by Pierce Brown

  Ragnar wedges the razor he threw into the Death Knight’s head under the pillar, using a rock as a fulcrum, and is about to heave upward with me when Victra calls for us to wait. “Look,” she says. Where the pillar’s top meets the wall, there’s a faint blue glow along a seam that runs from the floor up the wall to form a rectangle in the wall. It’s a hidden door. Quicksilver must have been rushing toward it when the pillar fell. Victra puts her ear against the door, and her eyes narrow.

  “PulseTorches,” she says. “Oh, ho.” She laughs. “Silver’s bodyguards are through there. Must have hid them in case things got tense. They’re speaking Nagal.” The language of the Obsidians. And they’re cutting their way through the wall. We’d be dead if the pillar hadn’t fallen and blocked the door.

  Pure luck saved our hides. All three of us know it, and it deepens the anger I have with Sevro and calms a bit of the wildness in Victra’s eyes. Suddenly she’s seeing how reckless this was. We never should have rushed into this place without its blueprints. Sevro did what I would have done a year ago. Same result. The three of us share a common thought, glancing at the main door of the room. We don’t have long.

  Ragnar and Victra help me pry Quicksilver free. The unconscious man’s legs drag behind him, broken, as Victra carries him back to the center of the room. There, Sevro is readying Clown and Pebble to push out from the room with our prisoners, Matteo and Kavax, who stares at me openmouthed. But Pebble can’t even stand. We’re all in shit shape.

  “We’ve too many prisoners,” I say. “We won’t be able to move fast. And we don’t have any EMPs this time.” Not that they’d do anyone any good on a space station when all that separates us from space is inch-thin bulkheads and air recyclers.

  “Then we trim the fat,” Sevro says, stalking toward Kavax, who sits wounded and bound with his hands behind his back. He points his pulseFist into Kavax’s face. “Nothin’ personal, big man.”

  Sevro pulls the trigger. I shove him sideways. The pulse blast misses Kavax’s head and slams into the ground near the slumped form of Matteo, nearly taking off the man’s leg. Sevro wheels on me, pulseFist pointing at my head.

  “Get that out of my face,” I say down the barrel. Heat radiating into my eyes, causing them to sting so I have to look away.

  “Who do you think that is,” Sevro snarls. “Your friend? He’s not your friend.”

  “We need him alive. He’s a chip to barter. And Orion might be alive.”

  “Chip to barter?” Sevro snorts. “What about Moira? Had no problem frying her, but you spare him.” Sevro squints at me, lowering his weapon. His lips curl back from his janky teeth. “Oh, it’s for Mustang. Of course it is.”

  “He’s Pax’s father,” I say.

  “And Pax is dead. Why? ’Cause you let enemies live. This isn’t the Institute, boyo. This is war.” He jams a finger in my face. “And war is really bloodydamn simple. Kill the enemy when you can, however you can, as fast as you can. Or they kill you and yours.”

  Sevro turns from me, realizing now that the others are watching us with growing trepidation. “You’re wrong about this,” I say.

  “We can’t drag them with us.”

  “Halls are swarming, boss,” Screwface says, returning from the main hall. “More than a hundred security personnel. We’re slagged.”

  “We can cut through them if we go light,” Sevro says.

  “A hundred?” Clown says. “Boss…”

  “Check your juice packs,” Sevro says, squinting at his pulseFist.

  No. I’ll not let Sevro’s shortsightedness ruin us.

  “Slag that,” I say. “Pebble, hail Holiday. Tell her evac is squabbed. Give her our coordinates. She’s to park one kilometer beyond the glass, ass end our way.” Pebble doesn’t reach for her datapad. She glances at Sevro, torn between us, not knowing who to follow. “I’m back,” I say. “Now do it.”

  “Do it, Pebble,” Ragnar says.

  Victra gives a small nod. Pebble grimaces at Sevro, “Sorry, Sevro.” She nods to me and opens up her com to hail Holiday. The rest of the Howlers look to me, and it hurts knowing I’ve made them choose like this.

  “Clown, grab Moira’s datapad if it isn’t fried and get the data from the console if you can. I want to know what contract they were negotiating,” I say quickly, “Screwface, take Sleepy and cover the hall. Ragnar, Kavax is yours. He tries to flee, cut his feet off. Victra, you got any rappelling line left?” She checks her belt and nods. “Start tying us together. Everyone in the center of the room. Has to be tight.” I turn to Sevro. “Lay charges at the door. Company’s coming.”

  He says nothing. It’s not anger behind his eyes. It’s the secret seeds of self-doubt and fear coming to blossom, hate seeping into his eyes. I know the look. I’ve felt it on my own face too many times to count. I’m ripping away the only thing he’s ever cared about. His Howlers. After all he’s done, I make them choose me over him, when he doesn’t trust I’m ready. It’s an indictment of his leadership, a validation of the intense self-doubt I know he must feel in the wake of his father’s passing.

  It shouldn’t have been that way. I said I’d follow and I didn’t. That’s on me. But this isn’t the time for coddling. I tried words with him, tried using our friendship to make him see reason, but since I’ve been back I’ve seen him respond to things only with violence and force. So now I’ll speak his bloodydamn language. I step forward. “Unless you want to die here, sack up and get moving.”

  His wrinkled little face hardens as he watches his Howlers run to do my bidding. “You get them killed, I’ll never forgive you.”

  “Makes two of us. Now go.”

  He turns away, running toward the door to plant the remaining explosives from his belt. I remain looking around the broken room, finally seeing organization in the chaos as my friends work together. They’ll all have deduced my plan by now. They know how manic it is. But the confidence with which they work breathes life into me. They put the trust in me that Sevro wouldn’t. Still, I catch Ragnar glancing at the viewport three times now. All our suits are compromised. Not one of us will be able to stay pressurized in vacuum. I don’t even have a mask. Whether we live or die is up to Holiday. I wish there was some way I could control the variables, but if the time in darkness taught me anything, it’s that the world is larger than my grasp. Have to trust others. “Jammers on, everyone,” I say, toggling my own on my belt. Don’t want the cameras outside spotting anyone’s exposed faces.

  “Holiday is in position,” Pebble says. I glance out the window to see the transport hovering a click beyond the window. Hardly larger than a pen tip at this distance.

  “On my mark, we are going to fire at the center of the viewport,” I tell my friends, making an effort to keep the fear from my voice. “Screwface! Sleepy! Get back here. Put your masks on the unconscious prisoners.”

  “Oh, goryhell,” Victra mutters. “I was hoping you had a better plan than that.”

  “If you try to hold your breath, your lungs will explode. So exhale soon as the viewport shatters. Let yourself pass out. Have sweet dreams, and pray for Holiday to be as quick on the stick as Clown is in the bedroom.”

  They laugh and cluster tight, letting Victra wind her rappelling line through our munitions belts so we’re together like grapes on a vine. Sevro’s finishing laying explosives at the door, Sleepy and Screwface join us, waving at him to hurry.

  “Attention,” a voice booms from hidden speakers in the walls as Victra leans close to me to link me with Ragnar. “This is Alec ti Yamato. Head of Security for Sun Industries. You are surrounded. Discard your weapons. Release your hostages. Or we will be forced to fire on you. You have five seconds to comply.”

  There’s no one in the room but us. The main doors are closed. Sevro runs back to us from laying the charges. “Sevro, fastlike!” I shout. He’s not halfway to us when he crumples to the ground like an empty can crushed by a boot. I’m slammed down to the floor by the same force. Knees buckling. Bones, lun
gs, throat all stomped down by massive gravity. My vision swims. Blood moving sluggishly to my head. I try to lift my arm. It weighs more than three hundred pounds. Security has increased the artificial gravity in the room, and only Ragnar’s not on his belly. He’s fallen to a knee, shoulders hunched and straining, like Atlas holding up the world.

  “The hell is that…” Victra manages, on the floor looking past me to the door. It’s opened, and through it comes not a Gray or an Obsidian or Gold. But a giant black egg the size of a small man, rolling sideways. It’s smooth and glossy, and small white numbers mark its side. A robot. As illegal as EMPs. Augustus’s great fear. Like reaching out of an oil spill, the metal morphs at the point of the egg to reveal a small canon, which aims at Sevro. I try to rise. Try to aim my pulseFist. But the gravity is too much. I can’t even lift my arm to point the weapon. For all her strength, Victra can’t either. Sevro’s grunting on the floor, crawling away from the machine.

  “The viewport!” I manage. “Ragnar. Fire at the viewport.”

  His pulseFist is at his side. Straining, he begins to lift it against the massive gravity. Arm shaking. Throat gargling that eerie war chant that sounds like a distant avalanche. The sound rises, an otherworldy bellow till his whole body convulses with effort and his arm draws level and the smallest of stars is born in his palm as the pulseFist gathers its trembling molten charge.

  The entirety of my friend shudders and his fingers release the trigger. His arm wrenches back. The pulsefire leaps forward to scream into the center of the glass pane. The many stars ripple as the pane bends outward and cracks shoot down the window.

  “Kadir njar laga…” Ragnar bellows.

  And the glass shatters. Space drinks the air of the room. Everything slides. A Copper flips past us, screaming. She goes silent when she hits vacuum. Others who cowered during our brawl cling to the broken table in the center of the room. They wrap themselves around pillars. Fingers bleeding, nails cracking. Legs flailing. Grips giving out. Corpses flip end over end out into space as the abyss hungers for everything the building has. Sevro’s ripped into the air away from the robot, lighter than our combined group. I reach for him and grab his short Mohawk till Victra wraps her legs around him and pulls him to her body.

  I’m terrified as we slide toward the broken viewport. Hands shaking. Doubting my decision as I now stare it in the face. Sevro was right. We should have pushed into the building. Killed Kavax or used him as a shield. Anything but the cold. Anything but the Jackal’s darkness from which I only just escaped.

  It’s just fear, I tell myself. It’s just fear making me panic. And it’s spread through my friends. I see the horror on their faces. How they look back at me and see that fear reflected in my own. I cannot be afraid. I’ve spent too long being afraid. Too long being diminished by loss. Too long being everything except what I need to be. And whether I am the Reaper, or whether it’s just another mask, it’s one I must wear, not just for them, but for myself.

  “Omnis vir lupus!” I shout, kicking my head back to howl, exhaling all the air in my lungs. Beside me, Ragnar’s eyes widen in wild ecstasy. He opens his massive mouth and bellows out a howl to make his ancestors hear him from their icy crypts. Then Pebble joins, and Clown, and even regal Victra. It’s rage and fear leaving our bodies. Though space drags us across the floor to its embrace. Though death might come for us. I am home in this weird screaming mass of humanity. And as we pretend to be brave, we become so.

  All except Sevro, who remains silent as we fly into space.

  We rip through the broken viewport into vacuum at eighty kilometers an hour. Silence swallows our howling. A shock hits my body, like I’ve fallen into cold water. My body twitches. The oxygen expands in my blood, forcing my mouth to hiccup for air that isn’t there. Lungs don’t inflate. They’re collapsed fibrous sacks. My body jerks, desperate for oxygen. But as the seconds tick by and I see the inhuman metal of Phobos’s skyscrapers, and watch my friends linked together in the darkness, held together by hands and bits of wire, a stillness settles over me. The same stillness that came in the snows with Mustang, that came when the Howlers and I hunkered tight in the gulches of the Institute to roast goat meat and listen to Quinn tell her stories. I sink slowly into another memory. Not of Lykos, or Eo or Mustang. But of the cold Academy hangar bay where Victra, Tactus, Roque, and I first learned from a pale Blue professor what space does to a man’s body.

  “Ebulism, or the formation of bubbles in body fluids due to reduced ambient pressure, is the most severe component of vacuum exposure. Water in the tissues of your body will vaporize, causing gross swelling….”

  “My darling airhead, I’m well accustomed to gross swelling. Just ask your mother. And your father. And your sister.” I hear Tactus say in the memory. And I remember Roque’s laugh. How his cheeks blushed at the crudeness of the joke, which makes me wonder why he stood so close to Tactus. Why he cared so much about our bawdy friend’s drug use and then wept by Tactus’s bedside when he lay dead. The teacher continues….

  “…and multiplicative increase in body volume in ten seconds, followed by circulatory failure…”

  I feel sleepy even as pressure builds in my eyes, warping my vision and distending the tissue there. Pressure builds in my freezing fingers and aching, popped eardrums. My tongue is huge and cold, like an ice serpent slithering through my mouth into my belly as liquid evaporates. Skin stretches, inflating. My fingers are plantains. Gas in my stomach ballooning my gut. Darkness coming to claim me. I glimpse Sevro beside me. His face is freakish, swollen to twice its normal size. Legs still wrapped around him, Victra looks a monster. She’s awake and staring at him with cartoonish, bloodshot eyes, hiccupping for oxygen like a fish out of water. Their hands tighten around each other’s.

  “Water and dissolved gas in the blood forms bubbles in your major veins, which travel throughout the circulatory system, obstructing blood flow and delivering unconsciousness in fifteen seconds….”

  My body fades. Seconds becoming an eternal twilight, everything slowed, everything so pointless and poignant as I see how ridiculous our human strength is in the end. Take us from our bubbles of life, and what are we? The metal towers around us look carved of ice. The lights and flashing HC screens like the scales of dragons frozen inside them.

  Mars is over our heads, consuming and omnipotent. But in Phobos’s fast rotation, we’re already nearing a place on the planet where dawn comes and light carves a crescent into the darkness. Molten wounds still glow where the two nuclear bombs detonated. And I wonder, in my last moments, if the planet does not mind that we wound her surface or pillage her bounty, because she knows we silly warm things are not even a breath in her cosmic life. We have grown and spread, and will rage and die. And when all that remains of us is our steel monuments and plastic idols, her winds will whisper, her sands will shift, and she will spin on and on, forgetting about the bold, hairless apes who thought they deserved immortality.

  —

  I’m blind.

  I wake on metal. Feel plastic against my face. Gasping around me. Bodies moving. The coldness of a shuttle engine rumbling under the deck. My body seizes and shivers. I suck down the oxygen. It feels like my head has caved in. The pain is everywhere and fading with each pulse of my heart. My fingers are their normal size. I rub them together, trying to orient myself. I’m shivering, but there’s a thermal blanket on me, unsentimental hands rubbing me to promote circulation. To my left, I hear Pebble calling for Clown. We’ll all be blind for several minutes as our optic nerves recalibrate. He answers her groggily and she nearly breaks down crying.

  “Victra!” Sevro’s slurring. “Wake up. Wake up.” Gear rattles as he shakes her. “Wake up!” He slaps her face. She wakes with a gasp.

  “…the hell. Did you just hit me?”

  “I thought…”

  She slaps him back.

  “Who is that?” I ask the hands that rub my shoulders through the blanket.

  “Holiday, sir. We scooped
you popsicles up four minutes ago.”

  “How long…How long were we out there?”

  “ ’Bout two minutes, thirty seconds. It was a shitshow. We had to empty the cargo bay and have the pilot fly backward into you, then pressurize it on the fly. These carrots can’t soldier, but they can damn well steer garbage ships. Still, if you hadn’t been linked, most of you would be dead as lead. There’s rubble and corpses floating around the sector now. HC crews crawling everywhere.”

  “Ragnar?” I ask fearfully, not having heard him yet.

  “I am here, my friend. The Abyss will not claim us yet.” He begins to laugh. “Not just yet.”

  We’re in trouble, and Sevro knows it. Seizing command back from me as soon as we land in the dilapidated docking berth of a Sons of Ares safe house deep in industrial sector, he orders the still-unconscious Matteo and Quicksilver to the infirmary to be woken up, Kavax to a cell, and tells Rollo and the Sons to prepare for an assault. The Sons stare at us, dumbstruck. Our Obsidian disguises are obliterated. Particularly mine. The prosthetics on my face have fallen off in the battle. Contacts sucked off in the vacuum. Black hair dye thinned out from sweat. Still got my gloves, though. But these Sons don’t look at a pack of Obsidians now. They’re staring at a cadre of Golds, an Obsidian, a Gray, and at least one ghost.

  “The Reaper…,” someone whispers.

  “Keep your mouth shut,” Clown snaps. “Not a word to anyone.”

  Whatever he says, soon the rumor will spread among them. The Reaper lives. Whatever the effect it’ll have, it’s not the right time. We may have avoided police pursuit, but such a high-profile kidnapping, not to mention the assassination of two high-level Peerless, will ensure that the full analytical weight of the Jackal’s counterterrorism units is brought to bear on the evidence. Praetorian and Securitas antiterrorism tech squads will already be poring over the footage of the attack. They’ll discover how we gained access to the facility, how we made our escape, and who our likely compatriots were. Every weapon, piece of equipment, ship used will be traced to its source. Society reprisals against lowColors throughout the station will be swift and brutal.