Morning Star

by Pierce Brown

  She didn’t flinch at the mention of the weapons. Neither did the woman in the adjacent cell.

  “Crystal clear,” Antonia says. “I’m more than willing to cooperate.”

  “You’re a survivor, Antonia. But I wasn’t just talking to you.” I slam my hand on the bars of the cell next to hers where a shorter, dark-faced Gold sits watching me with raw eyes. Her face is sharp, like her tongue used to be. Hair curly and more golden than last time I saw her—artificially lightened, same with her eyes. “I’m talking to you too, Thistle. Whichever of you gives us more information gets to live.”

  “Devilish ultimatum.” Antonia applauds from the ground. “And you call yourself a Red. I think you were more at home with us than you are with them. Isn’t that right?” She laughs. “It is isn’t it?”

  “You have an hour to think it over.”

  I walk away from them, letting them stew in it. “Darrow,” Thistle calls after me. “Tell Sevro I’m sorry. Darrow, please!” I turn and walk back to her slowly.

  “You dyed your hair,” I say.

  “Little Bronzie just wanted to fit in,” Antonia purrs, stretching her long legs. She’s more than a head and a half taller than Thistle. “Don’t blame the runt, unrealistic expectations.”

  Thistle stares out at me, hands clutching the bars. “I’m sorry, Darrow. I didn’t know it would go so far. I couldn’t have…”

  “Yes, you did. You’re not an idiot. And don’t be pathetic and claim to be one. I understand how you could do it to me,” I say slowly. “But Sevro was supposed to be there. So were the Howlers.” She looks at the ground, unable to meet my gaze. “How could you do that to him? To them?”

  She has no answer. I touch her hair with my hand. “We liked you the way you were.”

  I join Sevro, Mustang, and Victra in the brig’s monitoring room. Two techs lean back in ergonomic chairs, several dozen holos floating around them at once. “They said anything yet?” I ask.

  “Not yet,” Victra answers. “But pot’s stirred and I’ve cranked the heat.”

  Sevro’s watching Thistle on the holoDisplay. “Did you want to talk with Thistle?” I ask.

  “Who?” he asks, raising his eyebrows. “Never heard of her.” I can tell he’s wounded by seeing her again. Wounded even more because he tells himself to be hard, but this betrayal—by one of his own Howlers—cuts at his core. Still he plays it off. Not sure if it’s for Victra, for me, or for himself. Probably all three.

  After several minutes, Antonia and Thistle drip with sweat. Per my recommendation, we’ve made the cells forty degrees Celsius to amp up their irritability. Gravity is jacked up a fraction too. Just outside the realm of perception. So far, Thistle’s done nothing but weep and Antonia has been touching the bruise on her cheek to see if any lasting damage has been done to her face. “You need to come up with a plan,” Antonia says idly through the bars.

  “What plan?” Thistle asks from the far corner of her own cell. “They’re going to kill us even if we give them information.”

  “You weeping little cow. Pick your chin up. You’re embarrassing your scar. You’re House Mars, aren’t you?”

  “They know we’re listening,” Sevro says. “Least, Antonia does.”

  “Sometimes it doesn’t matter,” Mustang replies. “Highly intelligent prisoners often play games with their captors. It’s the self-confidence that can make them even more vulnerable to psychological manipulation because they think they’re still in control.”

  “You know this from your own extensive personal experience being tortured?” Victra asks. “Do tell me about that.”

  “Quiet,” I say, turning up the holo’s volume.

  “I’m going to tell them everything,” Thistle’s saying to Antonia. “I don’t give a shit about this anymore.”

  “Everything?” Antonia asks. “You don’t know everything.”

  “I know enough.”

  “I know more,” Antonia says.

  “Who would ever trust you?” Thistle snaps. “Matricidal psychopath! If you even knew what people really thought about you…”

  “Oh, darling, you can’t really be so stupid.” Antonia sighs sympathetically. “You are. So sad to watch.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Use your head, you little simpleton. Just try, please.”

  “Slag you, bitch.”

  “I’m sorry, Thistle,” Antonia says, arching her back against the bars. “It’s the heat.”

  “Or syphilitic madness,” Thistle mutters, now pacing, arms wrapped around herself.

  “How…base. It’s in the upbringing really.”

  I consider pulling Thistle out, extracting the information she’s willing to give. “Could be a ruse,” Mustang says. “Something Antonia designed in case they were captured. Or maybe my brother’s play. That’d be like him to sow misinformation. Especially if they just let themselves be captured.”

  “Let themselves be captured?” Victra asks. “There’s over fifty dead Golds in the morgues of this ship who would disagree with that statement.”

  “She’s right,” Sevro says. “Let it play. Might make Antonia open up more when we get her in a room.”

  Antonia closes her eyes, resting her head against the bars, knowing Thistle will ask what she meant by “use her head.” And sure enough, Thistle does. “What did you mean when you said if I tell them everything, I’d have no more use?”

  Antonia looks back at her through the bars. “Darling. You really haven’t thought this through. I’m dead. You said it yourself. I can try to deny it, but…my sister makes me look like the village cat. I shot her in the spine and played acid drip with her back for almost a year. She’s going to peel me like an onion.”

  “Darrow wouldn’t let her do that.”

  “He’s Red, we’re just devils in crowns to him.”

  “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “I know a Goblin that would.”

  “His name’s Sevro.”

  “Is it?” Antonia couldn’t care less. “Point’s the same. I’m dead. You might have a chance. But they only need one of us alive for information. The question you have to ask yourself is if you tell them everything, will they still keep you alive? You need a strategy. Something to hold back. To barter incrementally.”

  Thistle approaches the bars that separate the women. “You’re not fooling me.” Her voice becomes brave. “But you know what, you are done. Darrow is going to win and maybe he should. And you know what? I’m going to help him.” Thistle looks up at the camera in the corner of her cell, taking her eyes off Antonia. “I’ll tell you what he’s planning, Darrow. Let me make…”

  “Get her out,” Mustang says. “Get her out now.”

  “No…” Victra murmurs beside me, seeing what Mustang sees. Sevro and I look at the women in confusion, but Victra’s already halfway to the door. “Open cell 31!” she shouts to the techs before disappearing through into the hall. Realizing what’s happening, Sevro and I rush after her, knocking over a Green who’s adjusting one of the holoscreens. Mustang follows. We break into the hallway and run to the brig security door. Victra’s hammering on the door, shouting to be let in. The door buzzes and we fly in behind her, past the confused security guards who are gathering their gear, and into the cell block.

  Prisoners are shouting. But even then I hear the wet thwop, thwop, thwop before we make it to Antonia’s cell and see her hunched over Thistle. Her hands through the bars that separate their cells, drenched in blood. Fingers gripping Thistle’s curly hair. The shattered remnants of the top of the Howler’s skull bend around the bar as Antonia jerks Thistle’s head toward her and against the bars between them one last time. Victra shoves open the magnetized cell door.

  Antonia rises, grisly deed finished, bloody hands held in the air innocently as she bestows a little smirk upon her older sister. “Careful,” she taunts. “Careful, Vicky. You need me. I’m the only one left with information to sell. Unless you want to stumble into the Jackal’
s maw you’ll…”

  Victra breaks Antonia’s face. I can hear the brittle snap of bone from ten meters away. Antonia reels back, trying to escape. Victra pins her to the wall and beats her. Machinelike and eerily quiet. Elbow pumping back, driving from her legs, just as they teach us. Antonia’s fingers claw at Victra’s muscled arms, then go limp as the sound becomes wet and muddy. Victra doesn’t stop. And I don’t stop her, because I hate Antonia, and that dark little part of me wants her to feel the pain.

  Sevro shoves past me and launches himself at Victra, pinning her right arm back and choking her with his left. He sweeps her legs and takes her backward to the floor, locking his legs around her waist, immobilizing her. Released from Victra’s hold, Antonia flops sideways. Mustang lunges forward to keep her head from cracking on the sharp edge of the welded metal bed pallet. I kneel and reach through the bars to feel Thistle’s pulse though I don’t know why I bother. Her head is caved in. I stare at it. Wondering why I’m not horrified at the scene.

  Some part of me has died. But when did it die? Why did I not notice?

  Mustang is shouting for a Yellow. The guards picking up the call.

  I shake myself.

  Sevro’s letting go of Victra. She coughs from where he restrained her, shoving him away angrily. Mustang bends over Antonia, who’s now snoring through her shattered nose. Face a ruin. Bits of teeth littering mashed lips. Except for her hair and Sigils, you can’t even tell she’s a Gold. Victra leaves the room without looking at her, pushing through the Gray guards so hard two of them fall down.

  “Victra…” I call after her like there’s something to say.

  She turns back to me, eyes red, not with rage, but a fathomless sadness. Knuckles frayed open. “I used to braid her hair,” she says forcefully. “I don’t know why she’s like this. Why I am.” Half of one of her sister’s broken teeth protrudes from the meat between her middle and ring knuckle. She pulls the tooth from her knuckles, and holds it up to the light like a child discovering sea glass on the beach before shivering in horror and letting it clatter to the steel deck. She looks past me to Sevro. “Told you.”

  —

  Later that day, as the doctors tend to Antonia, the Sons go through Thistle’s personal effects in her suite aboard the torchShip, the Typhon. Under a false bottom in a cabinet, they find the stinking, cured fur of a wolf. Sevro chokes up when Screwface brings it to him.

  “Thistle cut her down,” Clown says as the remaining original Howlers loiter around the room. Mustang gives them space, watching from the wall. Pebble, Screwface, and Sevro are with us. “When Antonia was crucified by the Jackal at the Institute, Thistle cut her down.”

  “I’d forgotten,” I say from her desk.

  Sevro snorts. “What a world.”

  “Remember when you had her fight Lea when Lea couldn’t skin the sheep? Trying to make her tough,” Pebble says with a little laugh. Sevro laughs too.

  “Why are you laughing?” Clown asks. “You were still off eating mushrooms and howling at the moon back then.”

  “I was watching,” Sevro says. “I was always watching.”

  “That’s creepy, boss,” Screwface says drolly. “What were you doing while you were watching?”

  “Wanking in the bushes, obviously,” I say.

  Sevro grunts. “Only when everyone was asleep.”

  “Gross.” Pebble wrinkles her nose and tucks the Howler cloak in her pack. “Howl on, little Thistle.” The kindness in her eyes is almost too much to bear. There’s no recrimination. No anger. Just the absence of a friend. Reminds me how much I love these people. Clown and Pebble leave hand in hand, Screwface taunting them all the while. I smile at the sight as Sevro and I linger behind. Mustang still hasn’t moved from her place at the wall.

  “What did Victra mean when she said ‘told you’?” I ask.

  Sevro glances at Mustang. “Ah it doesn’t matter anymore.” He acts like he’s going to leave, but hesitates. “She called it off.”

  “It?” I ask.

  “Us.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry, Sevro,” Mustang says. “She’s going through a lot right now.”

  “Yeah.” He leans against the wall. “Yeah. It’s my fault, prolly. Told her…” He makes a face. “I told her I…loved her before the battle. Know what she said?”

  “Thank you?” Mustang guesses.

  He flinches. “Naw. She just said I was an idiot. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I just read too much into it. Just got excited, you know.” He looks at the ground, thinking. Mustang nods at me to say something.

  “Sevro, you’re a lot of things. You’re smelly. You’re small. Your tattoo taste is questionable. Your pornographic proclivities are…uh, eccentric. And you’ve got really weird toenails.”

  He swivels to look at me. “Weird?”

  “They’re really long, mate. Like…you should trim them.”

  “Nah. They’re good for hanging on to things.”

  I squint at him, not sure if he’s joking, and carry on as best I can. “I’m just saying, you’re a lot of things, boyo. But you are not an idiot.”

  He makes no sign of having heard me. “She thinks she had poison in her veins. That’s what she was talking about in the brig. Said she’d just ruin everything. So better just to cut it off.”

  “She’s just scared,” Mustang says. “Especially after what just happened.”

  “You mean what’s happening…” He sits against the wall and leans his head back against it. “Startin’ to feel like a prophecy. Death begets death begets death….”

  “We won at Jupiter…,” I say.

  “We can win every battle and still lose the war,” Sevro mutters. “The Jackal’s got something up his sleeve and Octavia’s only wounded. Scepter Armada is bigger than the Sword Armada, and they’ll pull the fleets from Venus and Mercury. We’ll be outnumbered three to one. People are gonna die. Probably most of the people we know.”

  Mustang smiles. “Unless we change the paradigm.”

  After Mustang details the broad strokes of her plan to us and we finish laughing, analyzing and dissecting its flaws, she leaves us to ruminate on it and departs to rejoin the rest of the fleet with the Telemanuses. We stay behind with Victra and the Howlers to interrogate Antonia and oversee ship repair.

  The beautiful Antonia is a thing of the past. The damage she suffered was superficially catastrophic. Left orbital bone pulverized. Nose flattened, crushed so brutally they had to pull it out of her nasal cavity with forceps. Mouth so swollen it makes a hissing sound as air goes between her shattered front teeth. Whiplash and severe concussion. The ship doctors thought she was in a ship crash until they found the imprint of House Jupiter’s lightning crest in several places on her face.

  “Marked by justice,” I say. Sevro rolls his eyes. “What? I can be funny.”

  “Keep practicing.”

  When I question Antonia, her left eye is a swollen black mass. The right peers out at me in rage, but she cooperates. Perhaps now because she thinks threats against her carry a bit of merit, and that her sister is just waiting to finish the job.

  According to her, the Jackal’s last communiqué stated he was making preparations for our attack on Mars. He gathers his fleet around retaken Phobos and recalls Society ships from The Can and other naval depots. Similarly, there’s an exodus of Gold, Silver, and Copper ships away from Mars to Luna or Venus, which have become refugee centers for disenfranchised patricians. Like London during the first French Revolution or New Zealand after the Third World War when the continents brimmed with radioactivity.

  The problem with Antonia’s information is that it’s difficult to verify. Impossible really, with long range and intra-planetary communication essentially back to the stone age. For all we know the Jackal might have prepared contingency information for her to give us in case she was captured under duress. If she uses that information and we act on it, we could easily be falling into a trap. Thistle would have been crucial to our
understanding of information. Antonia’s murder of her was horrific, but tactically very efficient.

  Holiday joins me on the bridge of the Pandora as I try to make that contact. I sit cross-legged on the forward observation post attempting to log in to Quicksilver’s digital dataDrop again. It’s late night ship-time. Lights dimmed. Skeleton crew of Blues manning the pit below guiding us back to the rendezvous with the main fleet. Shadowy asteroids rotate in the distance. Holiday plops down beside me.

  “Fortify thyself,” she says, handing me a tin coffee mug.

  “That’s nice of you,” I say in surprise. “Can’t sleep either?”

  “Nah. Hate ships actually. Don’t laugh.”

  “That’s gotta be inconvenient for a Legionnaire.”

  “Tell me about it. Half of being a soldier is being able to sleep anywhere.”

  “And the other half?”

  “Being able to shit anywhere, wait, and to accept stupid orders without going manic.” She taps the deck. “It’s the engine hum. Reminds me of wasps.” She wiggles off her boots. “You mind?”

  “Go on.” I sip the coffee. “This is whiskey.”

  “You catch on quick.” She winks at me boyishly.

  She nods to the datapad in my hands. “Still nothin’?”

  “Asteroids are bad enough, but Society is jamming everything they can.”

  “Well, Quicksilver gave them a run for it.”

  We sit quietly together. Hers isn’t a naturally soothing presence, but it’s the easy one of a woman raised in the agriculture backcountry where your reputation’s only as good as your word and your hunting dog. We’re not alike in many ways, but there’s a chip on her shoulder I understand.

  “Sorry about your friend,” she says.

  “Which one?”

  “Both. You know the girl long?”

  “Since school. She was a bit nasty. But loyal…”

  “Till she wasn’t,” she says. I shrug in reply. “Julii is rattled.”