Morning Star

by Pierce Brown

  But Aja doesn’t use her razor. She activates her gravBoots in a quick burst and launches back at him, two hundred kilograms of armor and Peerless Scarred propelled by gravBoots crashes into flesh and bones. You can almost hear his skeleton creak. His body wraps around her, forehead smashing against her armored shoulder. He drips off her and she spikes him to the ground. Mustang rushes her flank to stop her from finishing Cassius off. But Aja was expecting the rush from Mustang and used Cassius to bait her. She slashes Mustang shallowly across the stomach, nearly opening her lower intestine.

  I hurl my razor at Aja from behind. She somehow hears or feels it coming and bends sideways as it passes and sticks into the wall of the holodeck that separates it from the sitting room above. Aja’s leg shoots out at Mustang, impacting her kneecap and jamming it backward. Can’t tell if it dislocates, but Mustang stumbles back, razor outstretched and Aja turns back toward me, because I have no weapon.

  “Shit shit shit shit shit,” I hiss, scrambling toward the Praetorians to pick up one of their razors. I gain a pulseRifle and fire blindly behind me. Aja’s pulseShield absorbs the munitions, throbbing crimson as she sprints at me and slashes the weapon from my hand. I escape again, rolling backward, taking a long burning gash on the back of my hamstrings, but gaining a razor as I jump out of the holodeck ring up to the sitting level several feet above. She picks up a pulseFist and shoots it at me. I dive down so she loses her shot. The steel ceiling above me bubbles and drips down. I roll to the side.

  Razors keen on the deck bellow. I scramble back to the lip to get back in the fight. Aja’s cutting us to ribbons and all fleeing does is allow her to turn back to Cassius and Mustang. She bears down on him, using his limp and the new wound in his shoulder against him. Mustang attacks from behind before he’s cut down, but Aja bends when Mustang slashes, moving like she’s studied the fight before it ever happened.

  We’re not going to put her down, I realize. This was our fear. Losing my hand was never part of the plan, either. One by one she’s going to kill us.

  I have a brief moment of hope when Mustang and Cassius finally pin Aja between them. I jump down to help the assault. The woman pivots and twirls like a willow caught among three tornadoes. She knows her armor will take our glancing blows but our skin can’t take hers. She goes for shallow cuts, bleeding us out methodically, aiming for the tendons in our knees, arms, like Lorn taught us both. A sage digging the roots.

  Her blade cuts deep into my forearm, lacerates my knuckles, taking off a corner of my pinky. I roar anger, but anger isn’t enough. My instincts aren’t enough. We’re too spent, too overwhelmed by the monstrosity of her. Lorn trained her too well. Spinning, she delivers a two-handed thrust up into the right side of my rib cage. My world rocks. She lifts me up with a horrible bellow. My feet dangle half a meter above the deck. Cassius charges her and she flings me off the edge of her blade to parry his attack. I crash to the ground, my chest feeling like it is caving in on itself. Gasp for air, barely able to draw breath. Cassius and Mustang put themselves between Aja and me.

  “Do not touch him,” Mustang hisses.

  The blade missed my organs, wedging itself between two of the reinforced ribs Mickey gave me, but I’m bleeding all over myself. Trying to stand, scrambling across the deck. The Jackal watches me from his place on the ground, exhausted from trying to free himself. He’s grinning, despite the horror of bodies all around us, knowing Aja is going to kill me. The Sovereign’s face distant and fading she watches too, propped up against the lip of the holodeck as it rises to the rest of the room, Lysander’s hands holding her together. Aja looks at her in fear, knowing she has not long to live.

  “How could you choose him over us?” Aja shouts in rage to Mustang and Cassius.

  “Easily,” Mustang replies.

  Cassius pulls the syringe from the holster on his leg and tosses it across the room to me. “Do it before she kills us, man.” I stumble to my feet as Aja tries furiously to get at me, but Cassius and Mustang have strength enough to batter her away. She roars in frustration. The three slipping on blood, my friends not long for this world standing toe-to-toe with her. I make it to the edge of the holodeck, opposite the Sovereign, and climb toward Sevro’s body.

  “You cannot run!” Aja shouts. “I will carve your eyes out. There’s nowhere to run, you rusty coward!” But I am not running. I fall to my knees beside Sevro. The front of his chest is a chaos of laboratory blood and torn fabric from the entry wounds of Cassius’s execution. I cut open his shirt with my razor. Six holes stare up at me from the combat vest Cyther made him, bits of Carved flesh looking so real. His face is quiet and peaceful. But peace isn’t in his nature, and we haven’t earned it yet. I pop open the syringe filled with Holiday’s snakebite. Enough to wake the dead. Even those faking eternal sleep from Narol’s wicked cocktail of haemanthus extract. I pull off his vest.

  “Wakey, wakey, Goblin,” I say as I lift high the syringe, praying the silent prayer than his heart doesn’t fail, and plunge it straight into my best friend’s chest. His eyes burst open.

  “Fuuuuuuuuck.”

  Exploding upward out of the coma induced by the haemanthus oil in the flask he was drinking from before we freed Cassius, he flails past me, gaining his feet, looking around with manic, wild eyes, hands vibrating. Holding his heart, gasping in pain as I did when Trigg and Holiday brought me from my prison. The last thing he saw was my face in the brig, now to wake here, to be thrust into the battle, blood and bodies littering the floor. He stares at me with crazed, bloodshot eyes, pointing at my belly. “You’re bleeding! Darrow! You’re bleeding!”

  “I know.”

  “Where is your hand? You’re missing a fucking hand!”

  “I know!”

  “Bloodydamn.” His eyes dart around, seeing the Jackal pinned and Octavia on the ground, Aja beating Cassius and Mustang back. “It worked! It fucking worked! We’ve got to help the Goldbrows, shithead. Get up! Get up!” He hauls me to my feet and shoves my razor back into my hand, rushing into the holopit, howling the hideous battle cry we made as children among the frozen pines. “I’m going to kill you, Aja! I’m going to kill you in your face!”

  “It’s Barca!” the Jackal screams from the ground. “Barca’s alive!”

  On the run, Sevro scoops up a pulseFist from a dead Praetorian and tramples over the Jackal’s body, stomping on his face as he grabs the razor that pins the young ArchGovernor to the ground without stopping. He flies into Aja, firing with the pulseFist. Insane with the drugs and the victory he can smell.

  The pulse blasts ripple over Aja’s shield, spreading crimson around her silhouette, impairing her vision enough to finally let Cassius slip his razor through her guard. Still, she twists as it comes so it only takes her in the shoulder, but then Sevro is on her, stabbing her twice in the small of her back. She grunts in pain, backing away. I join the fray as Aja gains separation, stumbling back from us. But on the ground behind her, she leaves something few humans have seen: a thin ribbon of blood. It coats Sevro’s razor. He wipes it from the tip of the blade and smears it between his fingers.

  “Hahaha. Well look at that. You do bleed. Let’s see how much more ya got in there.” He hunches like an animal, stalking toward her as Mustang, Cassius, and I pin her between us, making a square around the greatest living Olympic Knight, like a wolfpack come upon a great panther of the forest. Shrinking before it as it charges, striking at its hindquarters, slashing its flanks. Bleeding it out. We’re a prison of four. Sevro swishes his razor through the air, howling rabidly.

  “Shut up!” Aja says, lashing out at him. But Sevro dances back and Cassius and I dart forward, stabbing at her. She parries Cassius’s thrust at her neck and his two successive moves, but not in time to counter me. I feign a thrust at her abdomen and slash her shin instead, raking through the metal. Metal sparks and blood coats my blade. Mustang stabs her calf. I dart back as she wheels on me, making her overextend so Sevro can strike again. He does, furiously slashing th
e Achilles tendon on her right leg. She grunts and stumbles before lashing at him. He dances back.

  “You’re gonna die,” he says with an evil little hiss. “You’re gonna die.”

  “Shut up!”

  “That one’s for Quinn,” he hisses as Cassius cuts through the tendons of her left knee. “This one’s for Ragnar.” I impale her right thigh with an underhanded thrust. “This one’s for Mars.” Mustang takes her arm off at the elbow. Aja looks down at the appendage on the ground, as if wondering if it belongs to her.

  But she’s given no respite. Sevro tosses aside his pulseFist, picks the Truth Knight’s razor from the ground and jumps in the air to bring both his swords down into her chest, hanging there, a foot off the ground. Their faces inches from one another, noses nearly touching as Aja sinks to her knees, setting Sevro back on his feet.

  “Omnis vir lupus.”

  He kisses her nose and jerks his razors out of her chest, letting them slither back into whips around his forearms. Arms outstretched, he backs away from the dying Protean Knight, greatest of her age as she pulses her last blood onto the cold floor. Still on her knees Aja’s eyes drift hopelessly to the Sovereign, the woman who became mother to her sisters, who raised her, loved her as truly as any who rules the Solar System can love, and now dies along with her.

  “I’m sorry…my liege.” Aja wheezes wet breaths.

  “Never be,” Octavia manages from her place on the ground. “You burned bright, my Fury. Time itself…will remember you.”

  “Nah, prolly not,” Sevro says pitilessly. “Nighty, night, Grimmus.”

  He lops off her head and kicks her in the chest. Her body teeters back and collapses to the floor, where he jumps atop it on all fours and howls. A deep moan escapes the Sovereign’s mouth at the hideous sight. She shuts her eyes, leaking tears as we make our way to her and Lysander. Cassius and I limping together, his arm around my shoulders to take pressure off the leg he drags behind him. Mustang follows us. Sevro secures the Jackal by sitting on his chest and juggling a razor over his head.

  Soaked in his grandmother’s blood, Lysander grabs Octavia’s razor from the ground and bars our way. “I won’t let you kill her.”

  “Lysander…don’t,” Octavia says. “It’s too late.”

  The boy’s eyes are swollen with tears. The razor trembles in his hands. Cassius steps forward and extends a hand. “Drop the weapon, Lysander. I don’t want to kill you.” Mustang and I exchange a glance. One Octavia notices, and must make her soul shiver. Lysander knows he cannot fight us. His sense overcomes his grief and he drops the razor, stepping back to watch us hollowly.

  Octavia’s eyes are distant and dark, already halfway to that other world where even she does not reign. I thought there’d be spite in the end from her, or begging like Vixus or Antonia. But there’s nothing weak in her even now. It’s sadness and love lost that come in the end. She did not create the hierarchy, but she was its keeper in her time. And for that, she must be held accountable.

  “Why?” Octavia asks Cassius, shaking from sorrow. “Why?”

  “Because you lied,” he says.

  Wordlessly Cassius pulls the small holocube, a thumb-sized triangular prism, from his ammunition belt and sets it in her bloody hands. Images dance across its surfaces before floating into the air above the Sovereign’s hands. The scene of Cassius’s family dying plays, bathing her in blue light. Shadows move through a hall, becoming men in scarabSkin. They cut down his aunt in a hallway and the men move through and appear a moment later dragging children, which they kill with the razors and boots. More bodies are dragged and piled up, then lit on fire so there would be no survivors. More than forty children and non-scarred family members died that night. They thought they could heap the sin upon the shoulders of a fallen man. But it was the Jackal’s work. He finished the war between the Bellona and the Augustuses, and the Sovereign’s cooperation and silence was his price for my Triumph.

  “You ask me why?” Cassius’s voice is barely above a whisper. “It is because you are without honor. I swore an oath as an Olympic Knight to honor the Compact, to bring justice to the Society of Man. You swore the same, Octavia. But you forgot what that meant. Everyone has. That is why this world is broken. Maybe the next one can be better.”

  “This world is the best we can afford,” Octavia whispers.

  “Do you really believe that?” Mustang asks.

  “With all my heart.”

  “Then I pity you,” Mustang says.

  And so does Cassius. “My heart was my brother. And I no longer believe in a world that says he was too weak to deserve life. He would have believed in this. In the hope for something new.” Cassius looks over at me. “For Julian, I can believe that too.”

  Cassius hands me the two other holocubes from his pouch. The first is the murder of my friends at my Triumph. The second is for the Rim; when they see this recording, they will know I have a struck a blow for them. Politics never rests. I set the two holocubes in the Sovereign’s hands to join the first. Rhea glows before her. A blue and white moon, gorgeous beside its brothers Iapetus and Titan as they orbit giant Saturn. Then over the moon’s north pole, tiny slivers which you’d hardly notice flicker several innocent times, and mushrooms of fire bloom upon the surface of the blue and white planet.

  As the nuclear fire blazes in the Sovereign’s eyes, Mustang moves aside so I can crouch before the dying woman, speaking softly so she will know that justice, not vengeance, has found her in the end.

  “My people have a legend of a being who stands astride the road leading to the world after. He will judge the wicked from the good. His name is the Reaper. I am not him. I’m just a man. But soon you will meet him. Soon he will judge you for all the sins you hold.”

  “Sins?” Octavia shakes her head, looking back to the three holos dancing in her hands, these drops in her ocean of sins. “These are sacrifices. What it takes to rule,” she says, her hands closing around them. “I own them as I own my triumphs. You will see. You will be the same, Conqueror.”

  “No. I will not.”

  “In the absence of a sun, there can be only darkness.” She shudders, cold now. I fight off the urge to put something over her. She knows what’s being left behind. When she dies, the succession struggle will begin. It’ll tear Gold apart. “Someone…someone must rule, or a thousand years from now, children will ask, ‘Who broke the worlds? Who put the light out,’ and their parents will say it was you.” But I already know this. I knew this when I asked Sevro if he knew how this would end. I will not replace tyranny with chaos. There must be order, even if it is a compromise. But I don’t tell her that. She swallows painfully, a struggle to even breathe. “Listen to me. You must stop him. You must…stop Adrius…”

  Those are the last words of Octavia au Lune. And as they fade, the fire of Rhea cools in her eyes and life leaves a cold pupil surrounded by gold, staring into infinite dark. I close her eyes for her. Chilled by her passing, by her words, her fear.

  The Sovereign of the Society, who has ruled for sixty years, is dead.

  And I feel nothing but dread, because the Jackal has begun to laugh.

  His laughter rattles through the room. His face pale under the glow of the holo of the moon and the fleets pummeling one another in the darkness. Mustang has turned off the holodeck’s broadcast and is already analyzing the Sovereign’s data center as Cassius moves toward Lysander and I rise above Octavia’s body. My body burns from wounds.

  “What did she mean, stop him?” Cassius asks me.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Lysander?”

  The boy’s too traumatized by the horror around him to speak.

  “Video went out to the ships and the planets,” Mustang says. “People are seeing Octavia’s death. Communiqué boards are flooding. They don’t know who is in control. We have to move now before they marshal behind someone.”

  Cassius and I approach the Jackal. “What did you do?” Sevro’s asking. He shakes the s
mall man. “What was she talking about?”

  “Get your dog off me,” the Jackal says from under Sevro’s knees. I pull Sevro back. He paces around the Jackal, still vibrating with adrenaline.

  “What did you do?” I ask.

  “There’s no point in talking with him,” Mustang says.

  “No point? Why do you think the Sovereign let me in her presence,” the Jackal asks from the ground. He comes up to a knee, holding his wounded hand to his chest. “Why she did not fear the gun on my hip, unless there was a greater threat keeping her in line?”

  He looks up at me from under disheveled hair. His eyes calm despite the butchering we’ve done.

  “I remember the feeling of being under the ground, Darrow,” he says slowly. “The cold stone under my hands. My Pluto housemembers around me, hunched in the darkness. The steam on their breaths, looking to me. I remember how afraid I was of failing. Of how long I had prepared, how little my father thought of me. All my life weighed in those few moments. All of it slipping away. We’d run from our castle, fleeing Vulcan. They came so fast. They were going to enslave us. The last of our housemembers were still running through the tunnel by the time I rigged the mines to blow, but so were Vulcan. I could hear my father’s voice. Hear him telling me how he was not surprised I failed so quickly. It was a week before we killed a girl and ate her legs to survive. She begged us not to. Begged us to choose someone else. But I learned then in that moment if no one sacrifices, then no one survives.”