by Pierce Brown
Our escorts are at ease on the property. They file in ahead of us through the iron gate that leads to the grass courtyard into the home, removing their dust-caked skipper boots and setting them just inside the entryway beside a pair of black military boots. Mustang and I exchange a glance then remove our own. It takes me the longest to remove my bulky gravBoots. Each weighing nearly nine kilos and having three parallel latches around the boot that lock my legs in. It’s oddly comforting to feel the grass between my toes. I’m conscious of the stink of my feet. Odd seeing the boots of a dozen enemies stacked by the door. Like I’ve walked in on something very private.
“Please wait here,” Vela says to me. “Virginia, Romulus wishes to speak with you alone first.”
“I’ll scream if I’m in danger,” I say with a grin when Mustang hesitates. She winks as she leaves to follow Vela, who noticed the subtlety of the exchange. I feel there’s little the older woman misses, even less that she doesn’t judge. I’m left alone in the garden with the song of a wind chime hanging from a tree above. The courtyard garden is an even rectangle. Maybe thirty paces wide. Ten deep from the front gate to the small white steps that lead into the home’s front entrance. The white plaster walls are smooth and covered with thin creeping vines that wander into the home. Little orange flowers erupt from the vines and fill the air with a woodsy, burning scent.
The house rambles, rooms and gardens unfolding out from each other. There is no roof to the house. But there’s little reason for one. The pulseBubble seals off the property from the weather outside. They make their own rain here. Little misters drip water from the morning’s watering of the small citrus trees whose roots crack the bottom of the white stone fountain in the center of the garden. A little glance at a place like this was what led my wife to the gallows.
How strange a journey she’d think this was.
But also, in a way, how marvelous.
“You can eat a tangerine if you like,” a small voice says behind me. “Father won’t mind.” I turn to find a child standing by another gate that leads off from the main courtyard to a path that winds around the left of the house. She might be eight years old. She holds a small shovel in her hands, and the knees of her pants are stained with dirt. Her hair is short-cropped and messy, her face pale, eyes a third again as large as any girl of Mars. You can see the tender length of her bones. Like a fresh-born colt. There’s a wildness in her. I’ve not met many Gold children. Core Peerless families often guard them from the public eye for fear of assassination, keeping them in private estates or schools. I’ve heard the Rim is different. They do not kill children here. But everyone likes to pretend that they don’t kill children.
“Hello,” I say kindly. It’s a fragile, awkward tone I haven’t used since I saw my own nieces and nephews. I love children, but I feel so alien to them these days.
“You’re the Martian, aren’t you?” she asks, impressed.
“My name is Darrow,” I reply with a nod. “What’s yours?”
“I am Sera au Raa,” she says proudly. “Were you really a Red? I heard my father speaking.” She explains. “They think just because I don’t have this”—she runs a finger along her cheek in an imaginary scar—“that I don’t have ears.” She nods up to the vine-covered walls and smiles mischievously. “Sometimes I climb.”
“I still am a Red,” I say. “It’s not something I stopped being.”
“Oh. You don’t look like one.”
She must not watch holos if she doesn’t know who I am. “Maybe it’s not about what I look like,” I suggest. “Maybe it’s about what I do.”
Is that too clever a thing to say to a six-year-old? Hell if I know. She makes a disgusted face and I fear I’ve made a mistake.
“Have you met many Reds, Sera?”
She shakes her head. “I’ve only seen them in my studies. Father says it’s not proper to mingle.”
“Don’t you have servants?”
She giggles before she realizes I’m serious. “Servants? But I haven’t earned servants.” She taps her face again. “Not yet.” It darkens my mood to think of this girl running for her life through the woods of the Institute. Or will she be the one chasing?
“Nor will you ever earn them if you don’t leave our guest alone, Seraphina” a low, husky voice says from the main entry to the house. Romulus au Raa leans against the doorframe of his home. He is a serene and violent man. My height, yet thinner with a twice broken nose. His right eye a third larger than mine set in a narrow, wrathful face. His left eyelid is crossed with a scar. A smooth globe of blue and black marble stares out at me in place of eyeball. His full lips are pinched, the top lip bearing three more scars. His dark gold hair is long and held in a ponytail. Except for the old wounds, his skin is perfect porcelain. But it’s how he seems more than how he looks that makes the man. I feel his steady way. His easy confidence, as if he’s always been at the door. Always known me. It’s startling how much I like him from the moment he winks at his daughter. And also how much I want him to like me, despite the tyrant I know him to be.
“So what do you make of our Martian?” he asks his daughter.
“He is thick,” Seraphina says. “Larger than you, father.”
“But not as large as a Telemanus,” I say.
She crosses her arms. “Well, nothing is as large as a Telemanus.”
I laugh. “If only that were true. I knew a man who was nearly as large to me as I am to you.”
“No,” Seraphina says, eyes widening. “An Obsidian?”
I nod. “His name was Ragnar Volarus. He was Stained. A prince of an Obsidian tribe from the south pole of Mars. They call themselves the Valkyrie. And they are ruled by women who ride griffins.” I look at Romulus. “His sister is with me.”
“Who ride griffins?” The notion dazzles the girl. She’s not yet gotten there in her studies. “Where is he now?”
“He died, and we fired him toward the sun as we came to visit your father.”
“Oh. I’m sorry…,” she says with the blind kindness it seems only children still have. “Is that why you looked so sad?”
I flinch, not knowing it was so obvious. Romulus notices and spares me from answering. “Seraphina, your uncle was looking for you. The tomatoes won’t plant themselves. Will they?” Seraphina dips her head and gives me a farewell wave before departing back down the path. I watch her disappear and belatedly realize that my child would be her age now.
“Did you arrange that?” I ask Romulus.
He steps into the garden. “Would you believe me if I said no?”
“I don’t believe much from anyone these days.”
“That’ll keep you breathing, but not happy,” he says seriously, voice having the clipped staccato delivery of a man raised in gladiatorial academies. There’s no affectations here, no purring insults or games. It’s a refreshing, if estranging, directness. “This was my father’s refuge, and his father’s before mine,” Romulus says, gesturing for me to take a seat on one of the stone benches. “I thought it a fitting place to discuss the future of my family.” He plucks a tangerine from the tree and sits on an opposite bench. “And yours.”
“It seems a strange amount of effort to expend,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“The trees, the dirt, the grass, the water. None of it belongs here.”
“And man was never meant to tame fire. That’s the beauty of it,” he says challengingly. “This moon is a hateful little horror. But through ingenuity, through will we made it ours.”
“Or are we just passing through?” I ask.
He wags a finger at me. “You’ve never been credited for being wise.”
“Not wise,” I correct. “I’ve been humbled. And it’s a sobering thing.”
“The box was real?” Romulus asks. “We’ve heard rumors this last month.”
“It was real.”
“Indecorous,” he says in contempt. “But it speaks to the quality of your enemy.”
&nbs
p; His daughter left little muddy footprints on the stone path. “She didn’t know who I was.” Romulus concentrates on peeling the tangerine in delicate little ribbons. He’s pleased I noticed about his daughter.
“No child in my family watches holos before the age of twelve. We all have nature and nurture to shape us. She can watch other people’s opinions when she has opinions of her own, and no sooner. We’re not digital creatures. We’re flesh and blood. Better she learns that before the world finds her.”
“Is that why there are no servants here?”
“There are servants, but I don’t need them seeing you today. And they aren’t hers. What kind of parent would want their children to have servants?” he asks, disgusted by the idea. “The moment a child thinks it is entitled to anything, they think they deserve everything. Why do you think the Core is such a Babylon? Because it’s never been told no.
“Look at the Institute you attended. Sexual slavery, murder, cannibalism of fellow Golds?” He shakes his head. “Barbaric. It’s not what the Ancestors intended. But the Coreworlders are so desensitized to violence they’ve forgotten it’s to have purpose. Violence is a tool. It is meant to shock. To change. Instead, they normalize and celebrate it. And create a culture of exploitation where they are so entitled to sex and power that when they are told no, they pull a sword and do as they like.”
“Just as they’ve done to your people,” I say.
“Just as they’ve done to my people,” he repeats. “Just as we do to yours.” He finishes peeling the tangerine, only now it feels more like a scalping. He tears the meat of it gruesomely in half and tosses one part to me. “I won’t romanticize what I am. Or excuse the subjugation of your people. What we do to them is cruel, but it is necessary.”
Mustang told me on our journey here that he uses a stone from the Roman Forum itself as a pillow. He is not a kind person. Not to his enemies at least, which I am, regardless of his hospitality.
“It’s hard for me to speak to you as if you were not a tyrant,” I say. “You sit here and think you are more civilized than Luna because you obey your creed of honor, because you show restraint.” I gesture to the simple house. “But you’re not more civilized,” I say. “You’re just more disciplined.”
“Isn’t that civilization? Order? Denying animal impulse for stability?” He eats his fruit in measured bites. I set mine on the stone.
“No, it’s not. But I’m not here to debate philosophy or politics.”
“Thank Jove. I doubt we’d agree upon much.” He watches me carefully.
“I’m here to discuss what we both know best, war.”
“Our ugly old friend.” He glances once at the door to the house to make sure we’re alone. “But before we move to that sphere, may I ask you a question of personal note?”
“If you must.”
“You are aware my father and daughter died at your Triumph on Mars?”
“I am.”
“In a way it’s what began all this. Did you see it happen?”
“I did.”
“Was it as they say?”
“I wouldn’t presume to know who they are or what they say.”
“They say that Antonia au Severus-Julii stepped on my daughter’s skull till it caved in. My wife and I wish to know if it is true. It’s what we were told by one of the few who managed to escape.”
“Yes,” I say. “It is true.”
The tangerine drips in his fingers, forgotten. “Did she suffer?”
I hardly remember seeing the girl in the moment. But I’ve dreamed of the night a hundred times, enough to wish my memory was a weaker thing. The plain-faced girl wore a gray dress with a broach of the lightning dragon. She tried to run around the fountain. But Vixus slashed the back of her hamstrings as he walked past. She crawled and wept on the ground until Antonia finished her off. “She suffered. For several minutes.”
“Did she weep?”
“Yes. But she did not beg.”
Romulus watches out the iron gate as sulfur dust devils dance across the barren plain beneath his quiet home. I know his pain, the horrible crushing sadness of loving something gentle only to see it ripped apart by the hard world. His girl grew here, loved, protected, and then she went on an adventure and learned fear.
“Truth can be cruel,” he says. “Yet it is the only thing of value. I thank you for it. And I have a truth of my own. One I do not think you will like…”
“You have another guest,” I say. He’s surprised. “There’s boots at the door. Polished for a ship, not a planet. Makes the dust stick something awful. I’m not offended. I half expected it when you didn’t meet me in the desert.”
“You understand why I will not make a decision blindly or impetuously.”
“I do.”
“Two months ago, I did not agree with Virginia’s plan to negotiate for peace. She left of her own accord with the backing of those frightened by our losses. I believe in war only insofar as it is an effective tool of policy. And I did not believe we stood in a position of strength to gain anything from our war without achieving at least one or two victories. Peace was subjugation by another word. My logic was sound, our arms were not. We never made the victories. Imperator Fabii is…effective. And the Core, as much as I despise their culture, produces very good killers with very good logistical supply and support. We are fighting uphill against a giant. Now, you are here. And I can achieve something with peace that I could not with war. So I must weigh my options.”
He means he can leverage my presence into suing the Sovereign for better terms than she would have given if the war had continued. It’s boldly self-interested. I knew it was a risk when I set this course, but I’d hoped he’d be hot-blooded after a year of war with the woman and would want to pay her back. Apparently Romulus au Raa’s blood runs a special kind of cold.
“Who did the Sovereign send?” I ask.
He leans back in amusement. “Who do you think?”
Roque au Fabii sits at a stone table in an orchard along the side of the house, finishing a dessert of elderberry cheesecake and coffee. Smoke from a brooding dwarf volcano twirls up into the twilight horizon with the same indolence as the steam from his porcelain saucer. He turns from watching the smoke to see us enter. He’s striking in his black and gold uniform—lean like a strand of golden summer wheat, with high cheekbones and warm eyes, but his face is distant and unyielding. By now he could drape a dozen battle glories across his chest. But his vanity is so deep that he thinks affectation a sign of boorish decadence. The pyramid of the Society, given flight with Imperator wings on either side, marks each shoulder; a gold skull with a crown burdens his breast, the Sigil of the Ash Lord’s warrant. Roque sets the saucer down delicately, dabs his lips with the corner of his napkin, and rises to his bare feet.
“Darrow, it’s been an age,” he says with such mannered grace that I could almost convince myself that we were old friends reuniting after a long absence. But I will not let myself feel anything for this man. I cannot let him have forgiveness. Victra almost died because of him. Fitchner did. Lorn did. And how many more would have had I not let Sevro leave the party early to seek his father?
“Imperator Fabii,” I reply evenly. But behind my distant welcome is an aching heart. There’s not a hint of sorrow on his face, however. I want there to be. And knowing that, I know I still feel for the man. He is a soldier of his people. I’m a soldier of mine. He is not the evil of his story. He’s the hero who unmasked the Reaper. Who smashed the Augustus-Telemanus fleet at the Battle of Deimos the night after my capture. He does not do these things for himself. He lives for something as noble as I. His people. His only sin is in loving them too much, as is his way.
Mustang watches me worriedly, knowing all I must feel. She asked me about him on the journey from Mars. I told her that he was nothing to me, but we both know that isn’t true. She’s with me now. Anchoring me among these predators. Without her I could face my enemies, but I would not hold on to so much of my
self. I would be darker. More wrathful. I count my blessings that I have people like her to which I can tether my spirit. Otherwise I fear it would run away from me.
“I can’t say it’s a pleasure to see you again, Roque,” she says, taking the attention away from me. “Though I am surprised the Sovereign didn’t send a politico to treat with us.”
“She did,” Roque says. “And you returned Moira as a corpse. The Sovereign was deeply wounded by that. But she has faith in my arms and judgment. Just as I have faith in the hospitality of Romulus. Thank you for the meal, by the bye,” he says to our host. “Our commissary is woefully militaristic, as you can imagine.”
“The benefit of owning a breadbasket,” Romulus says. “Siege is never a hungry affair.” He gestures for us to take our seats. Mustang and I take the two facing Roque as Romulus sits at the head of the table. Two other chairs to the right and left of him are filled with the ArchGovernor of Titan and an old, crooked woman I don’t know. She wears the wings of Imperator.
Roque watches me. “It does please me, Darrow, knowing you’re finally participating in the war you began.”
“Darrow isn’t responsible for this war,” Mustang says. “Your Sovereign is.”
“For instilling order?” Roque asks. “For obeying the Compact?”
“Oh, that’s fresh. I know her a bit better than you, poet. The crone is a nasty, covetous creature. Do you think it was Aja’s idea to kill Quinn?” She waits for an answer. None comes. “It was Octavia’s. She told her to do it through the com in her ear.”
“Quinn died because of Darrow,” Roque says. “No one else.”