by Pierce Brown
The Obsidian is taller than I am. A crooked iron blade sewn into his hand. Human bones strung together with dried tendon as a breastplate. Hot breath billows from under the snout of the ursine skull he wears as a helmet. Slow and measured, the deep ululation of an evil war chant blossoms from between his blackened teeth. They’ve seen our eyes and one screams something unintelligible.
The ship wheezes and the lights go out.
The first cannibal vaults toward us through the cluttered hall, the rest behind him. Shadows in the darkness. My pale razor lashes forward and hews through his iron knife, through his breastplate and clavicle straight into his heart. I twist aside so he doesn’t crash into me. His momentum takes him past me into Mustang, who sidesteps him and cuts his head clean off. His body spills to the ground past her, twitching.
An audible grunt, and a spear with a jagged iron end flies from one of the other cannibals. I duck under it and punch upward with my left hand, deflecting it into the ceiling, just over Mustang’s head. Then the Obsidian behind slams into me as I rise. As large as I am. Stronger. More creature than man. Overwhelming me with the frenzy of a lost mind, he pins me to the wall and snaps at me with blackened, sharp-filed teeth. The lights of the ship flash illuminating the sores around his mouth. My arms are pinned to my sides. He bites at my nose. I turn my face just before he rips it off. Instead, his teeth sink into the meat at the base of my lower jaw. I scream in pain. Blood flows down my neck. He chomps down again, pulling at my face. Eating me alive as the lights go out. His right hand tries to work a knife through the sealSkin to slide it between my ribs and into my heart. The fabric holds.
Then the cannibal goes slack, twitching, and his body falls to the ground, spinal cord severed by Mustang from behind.
A black missile blurs past my face and slams into Mustang. Knocking her off her feet. The fletching of an arrow sticks from her left shoulder. She grunts, scrambling on the ground. I lunge away from her, toward the three remaining Obsidian. One’s nocking another arrow, the second hefts a huge axe, the third holds a huge curved horn, which the cannibal brings through the bearhelm to its mouth.
Then a terrible howl comes from outside the ship.
The lights go out.
The darkness ripples with a fourth shape. Shadowy forms lashing at one another. Metal cutting flesh. And when the lights come back on, Ragnar stands holding the head of one Obsidian as he pulls his razor out of the chest of the second. The third, bow cut in half, pulls a knife, stabbing wildly at Ragnar. He hacks her arm off. Still she rolls away, mad, immune to pain. He stalks after her and rips off her helmet. Beneath is a young woman. Face painted white, nostrils slit open so she looks a snake. Ritual scars forming a series of bars under both eyes. She can’t be more than eighteen. Her mouth slurs out something as she stares at the vastness of Ragnar, large even for her people. Then her wild eyes find the tattoos on his face.
“Vjrnak,” she rasps, not in terror, but fevered joy. “Tnak ruhr. Ljarfor aesir!” She closes her eyes and Ragnar cuts off her head.
“You prime?” I ask Mustang, rushing to her. She’s already on her feet. The arrow sticks out from under her collarbone.
“What did she say?” Mustang asks past me. “Your Nagal is better than mine.”
“I didn’t understand the dialect.” It was too guttural. Ragnar knows it.
“Stained son. Kill me. I will rise Golden.” Ragnar explains. “They eat what they find.” He nods to the Golds. “But to eat the flesh of Gods is to rise immortal. More will come.”
“Even in the storm?” I ask. “Can their griffins fly in this?”
His lips curl in disgust. “The beasts do not ride griffin. But no. They will seek refuge.”
“What about the other wreck?” Mustang asks, pressing on. “Supplies? Men?”
He shakes his head. “Bodies. Ship munitions.”
I send Ragnar to fetch Holiday from her post. Mustang and I stay with plans to search the ship for gear. But I remain standing motionless in the cannibals’ charnel house even after Ragnar’s slipped out into the snow. The Golds might have been enemies, but this horror makes life feel so cheap. There’s a cruel irony to this place. It is terrifying and wicked, but it wouldn’t exist unless Gold made it exist to create fear, to create that need for their iron rule. These poor bastards were eaten by their own pet monsters.
Mustang stands from examining one of the Obsidian, wincing from the arrow that’s still imbedded in her shoulder. “Are you all right?” she asks, noting my silence. I gesture to the broken fingernails on one of the Golds.
“They weren’t dead when they started skinning them. Just trapped.”
She nods sadly and holds out her palm. Something she found on the Obsidian body. Six Institute class rings. Two Pluto Cyprus trees, a Minerva owl, a Jupiter lightning bolt, a Diana stag, and one which I pick from her palm, emblazoned with the Mars wolf head.
“We should look for him,” she says.
I reach up to the ceiling to examine the Golds who hang upside down from their seats. Their eyes and tongues are gone, but I can see, mangled as they are, none are my old friend. We search the rest of the upside-down ship and find several small bedroom suites. In the dresser of one, Mustang finds an ornate leather box with several watches and a small pearl earring set in silver. “Cassius was here,” she says.
“Are those his watches?”
“It’s my earring.”
I help Mustang remove the arrow from her shoulder in Cassius’s suite, away from the gore. She makes no sound as I break off the tip, push her against the wall, and jerk the arrow out by its tail end. She curls in on herself, slumping down to her heels in pain. I sit on the edge of the mattress that’s fallen from the ceiling and watch her hunch there. She doesn’t like being touched when she’s wounded.
“Finish up,” she says, standing.
I use the resGun to make a shiny patch over the hole on the front and back, just under her collarbone. It stops the bleeding and will help repair the tissue, but she’ll feel the wound and it’ll slow her for days. I pull her sealSkin back up over her bare shoulder. She zips the front up for herself before patching the wound on my jaw as well. Her breath fills the air. She comes so close I can smell the dampness of the snow that’s melted in her hair. She presses the resGun to my jaw and paints a thin layer of the microorganisms onto the wound. They scramble into the pores and tighten to make a fleshlike antibacterial coating. Her hand lingers on the back of my head, fingers wrapped in the strands of my hair, like she wants to say something but doesn’t have the words. Nor does she find them by the time Holiday and Ragnar return. Hearing Holiday calling my name, I squeeze Mustang’s good shoulder and leave her there.
Most of the ship’s gear is gone. Several sets of optics missing from their cases. The armory missing entirely, scattered across the mountains as the ship came apart and the cargo hold ripped open. The rest has been torn through by Obsidians or broken in the crash. All I get is static from the transponder and com gear.
Ragnar discerns that Cassius and the rest of his party, some fifteen men, departed several hours before we reached the vessel. They stripped it bare of supplies. The Eaters likely descended as soon as it landed, otherwise Cassius wouldn’t have left those Golds behind to be eaten. Supporting this idea, Mustang finds several Eater bodies nearer the cockpit, which means Cassius and his men were under attack as they left. Snow’s almost covered the corpses. We stack the fresher bodies outside in the snow in case worse predators than Eaters come to visit.
After scavenging the ship for supplies, I have Mustang and Holiday seal us inside the galley. Fusing the two entrances shut with welding torches found in the ship’s maintenance closet. The weapons and cold gear might have been stripped clean, but the ship’s cistern is full, the water inside not yet frozen. And the galley’s pantries are stocked with food.
It’s passingly cozy in our shelter. The insulation traps our heat inside. The light from two amber emergency lamps bathes the room in soft ora
nge. Holiday uses the intermittent power to cook a feast of pasta with marinara sauce and sausage over the galley’s electric stoves as Ragnar and I plot a course to the Spires and Mustang sorts through the stacks of scavenged provisions, filling military packs she found in storage.
I burn my tongue as Holiday brings Ragnar and me heaping portions of pasta. I didn’t realize how hungry I was. Ragnar nudges me and I follow his eyes to watch quietly as Holiday brings Mustang a bowl too and leaves her with a small nod. Mustang smiles to herself. The four of us sit eating in silence. Listening to our forks against the bowls. The wind shrieking outside. Rivets groaning. Steel gray snow piles against the small circular windows, but not before we see strange shapes moving through the white to drag off the corpses we set outside.
“What was it like growing up here?” Mustang asks Ragnar. She sits cross-legged with her back against the wall. I lay adjacent to her, a backpack between, on one of the mattresses Ragnar dragged inside the room to line its floor, on my third serving of pasta.
“It was home. I did not know anything else.”
“But now that you do?”
He smiles gently. “It was a playground. The world beyond is vast, but so small. Men putting themselves in boxes. Sitting at desks. Riding in cars. Ships. Here, the world is small, but without end.” He loses himself in stories. Slow to share at first, now it seems he revels in knowing that we listen. That we care. He tells us of swimming in the ice floes as a boy. How he was an awkward child. Too slow. Bones outracing the rest of him. When he was beaten by another boy, his mother took him to the sky for his first time on her griffin. Making him hold on to her from behind. Teaching him it is his arms that keep him from falling. His will. “She flew higher, and higher, till the air was thin and I could feel the cold in my bones. She was waiting for me to let go. To weaken. But she did not know that I tied my wrists together. That is as close to Allmother death as I have ever been.”
His mother, Alia Volarus, the Snowsparrow, is a legend among her people for her reverence for the gods. A daughter to a wanderer, she became a warrior of the Spires and rose in prominence as she raided other clans. Such is her devotion to the gods that when she rose to power, she gave four of her own children to serve them. Keeping only one for herself, Sefi.
“She sounds like my father,” Mustang says softly.
“Poor sods,” Holiday mutters. “My ma would make me cookies and teach me how to strip down a hoverJack.”
“And what about your father?” I ask.
“He was a bad sort.” She shrugs. “But bad in a boring way. A different family in every port. Stereotypical Legionnaire. I got his eyes. Trigg got Ma’s.”
“I never knew my first father,” Ragnar says, meaning his birth father. Obsidian women are polygamous. They might have seven children from seven fathers. Those men are then bound to protect the other children of her brood. “He went to become a slave before I was born. My mother never speaks his name. I do not even know if he lives.”
“We can find out,” Mustang says. “We’d have to search the Board of Quality Control’s registry. Not easy, but we can find him. What happened to him. If you want to know.”
He’s stunned by the idea and nods slowly. “Yes. I would like that.”
Holiday watches Mustang in a very different way than she did just hours before when we were leaving Phobos, and I’m struck by how natural this feels, our four worlds colliding together. “We all know your father.” Holiday says. “But what is your ma like? She looks frigid, from what I’ve seen, just on the HC, you know?”
“That’s my stepmother. She doesn’t care for me. Just Adrius, actually. My real mother died when I was young. She was kind. Mischievous. And very sad.”
“Why?” Holiday presses.
“Holiday…” I say. Her mother is a subject I’ve never pushed. She’s held her back from me. A little locked box in her soul that she never shares. Except tonight, it seems.
“It’s all right,” she says. She pulls up her legs, hugging them, and continues. “When I was six, my mother was pregnant with a little girl. The doctor said there would be complications with the birth and recommended intervening medically. But my father said that if the child was not fit to survive birth, it did not deserve life. We can fly between the stars. Mold the planets, but father let my sister die in my mother’s womb.”
“The hell?” Holiday mutters. “Why not give her cell therapy? You got the money.”
“Purity in the product,” Mustang says.
“That’s insane.”
“That’s my family. Mother was never the same. I’d hear her crying in the middle of the day. See her staring out the window. Then one night she went for a walk at Caragmore. The estate my father gave her as a wedding present. He was in Agea working. She never came home. They found her on the rocks beneath the sea cliffs. Father said she slipped. If he was alive now, he’d still say she slipped. I don’t think he could have survived thinking anything else.”
“I’m sorry,” Holiday says.
“As am I.”
“It’s why I’m here, since that’s what you were wondering,” Mustang says. “My father was a titan. But he was wrong. He was cruel. And if I can be something else”—her eyes meet mine—“I will be.”
By the time we wake, the storm has cleared. We bundle ourselves with insulation taken from the ship’s walls and set out into the bleakness. Not a cloud mars the marbled blue-black sky. We head toward the sun, which stains the horizon a cooling shade of molten iron. Autumn has few days left. We head for the Spires with plans of lighting fires as we go, in hopes of signaling the few Valkyrie scouts active in the area. But smoke will also bring the Eaters.
We scan the mountains as we pass, wary of the cannibal tribes and of the fact that somewhere ahead Cassius and maybe Aja trudge through the snow with a troop of special forces operators.
By midday we find evidence of their passing. Churned snow outside a rocky alcove large enough for several dozen men. They camped there to wait out the storm. A cairn of stacked stones lies near the campsite. One of the stones has been carved with a razor and reads: per aspera ad astra.
“It’s Cassius’s handwriting,” Mustang says.
Pulling off the rocks, we find the corpses of two Blues and a Silver. Their weaker bodies froze in the night. Even here, Cassius had the decency to bury them. We replace the rocks as Ragnar lopes ahead, following the tracks at a speed we can’t match. We follow after. An hour later, manmade thunder rumbles in the distance, accompanied by the lonely shriek of distant pulseFists. Ragnar returns soon after, eyes shining with excitement.
“I followed the tracks,” he says.
“And?” Mustang asks.
“It is Aja and Cassius with a troop of Grays and three Peerless.”
“Aja is here?” I ask.
“Yes. They flee on foot through a mountain pass in the direction of Asgard. A tribe of Eaters harries them. Bodies litter the way. Dozens. They sprang an ambush and failed. More come.”
“How much gear do they have?” Mustang asks.
“No gravBoots. ScarabSkin only. But they have packs. They left the pulseArmor behind just two kilometers north. Out of energy.”
Holiday looks at the horizon and touches Trigg’s pistol on her hip. “Can we catch them?”
“They carry many supplies. Water. Food. Injured men now too. Yes. We can overtake them.”
“Why are we here?” Mustang interjects. “It’s not to hunt Aja and Cassius down. The only thing that matters is getting Ragnar to the Spires.”
“Aja killed my brother,” Holiday says.
Mustang’s taken aback. “Trigg? The one you mentioned? I didn’t know. But still, we can’t be pulled to the side by vengeance. We can’t fight two dozen men.”
“What if they reach Asgard before we reach the Spires?” Holiday asks. “Then we’re cooked.” Mustang’s not convinced.
“Can you kill Aja?” I ask Ragnar.
“Yes.”
“This is a
n opportunity,” I say to Mustang. “When else will they be so exposed? Without their Legions? Without the pride of Gold protecting them? These are champions. Like Sevro says, ‘When you have the chance to waste your enemy, you do it.’ This is one time I’d agree with the mad bastard. If we can take them off the board, the Sovereign loses two Furies in one week. And Cassius is Octavia’s link to Mars and the great families here. And if we expose her negotiations with you to him, we fracture that alliance. We sever Mars from the Society.”
“An enemy divided…” Mustang says slowly. “I like it.”
“And we owe them a debt,” Ragnar says. “For Lorn, Quinn, Trigg. They came here to hunt us. Now we hunt them.”
—
The trail is unmistakable. Corpses litter the snow. Dozens of Eaters. Bodies still smoking from pulsefire near a narrow mountain pass where the Obsidians sprang an ambush on the Golds. They did not understand the firepower the Golds could bring to bear. Huge craters pock the craggy slopes. Deeper imprints in the snow mark the passing of aurochs. Huge steerlike animals with shaggy coats that the Obsidian ride.
The pass widens into a thin alpine forest that skins an expanse of rolling hills. Gradually the craters decrease and we begin seeing discarded pulseFists and rifles and several Gray bodies with arrows or axes embedded in them. The Obsidian dead are closer to the Gold trail now and bear razor wounds. There’s dozens with missing limbs, clean decapitations. Cassius’s band is running out of ammunition and now Olympic Knights are doing the work up close. Yet the wind still crackles with gunfire kilometers ahead.
We pass moaning Obsidian Eaters who lie dying from bullet wounds, but it’s only over a wounded Gray that Ragnar stops. The man’s still alive, but barely. An iron axe is buried in his stomach. He wheezes up at an unfamiliar sky. Ragnar crouches over him. Recognition goes through the Gray’s eyes as he sees the Stained’s uncovered face.