by Pierce Brown
She is inescapable.
“I asked you a question.”
“I am awake.”
“Are you? How many crows are in the trees that line the steps?”
I look to Aja for help. She watches evenly from her perch on a fallen log.
“Will you look to Aja every time you need saving?”
“I do not know how many crows there are.”
“You do not know?” I look down. “Never manifest shame physically. Look at me.” There’s no anger in her face. There never is. “How many owls are there? Hawks? Squirrels?”
“I don’t know, Grandmother.”
“Do you really think you’ve earned the right to use contractions yet?” She leans forward. “Why do you not know? I will answer, since your tongue is lead. Your mind was asleep. Do you at least know how many steps there are?”
“Four hundred thirty-one.”
“How many turns?”
“Seventeen.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes, Grandmother.”
“Good. You know something at least. Pick up a rock.” I obey. It weighs half as much as my body. “Close your eyes. And run back down the steps.”
“Octavia…” Aja whispers.
“You have already spoilt your churlish spawn, Aja. Let us not ruin the batch. Is something the matter, Lysander? You said there are four hundred thirty-one steps. How many times have you run them? A thousand? Ten? This should be no difficulty. Begin.”
I surge downward, knowing this I can do. I can impress her. My steps are confident, even in the ice, even with the weight. I see the steps burned into the backs of my eyelids. I make it three hundred twenty-one steps before something on the steps starts. There’s a flutter of movement that slaps into my face. I lose my balance. The weight of the stone is unforgiving. It pulls me forward.
When I open my eyes, I am at the bottom of the steps. The bone of my right arm is out of the skin. It looks curiously pale. I begin to shudder. Aja is at my side, holding me. My grandmother descends the steps.
“Aja.”
“His bones haven’t fully—”
“Aja.”
Aja lets me go and I lie in the snow staring up at my grandmother.
“Stand up.” I struggle to my feet and look her in the eye. “Why did you fall?” I cannot speak for the pain. “Recede into your Mind’s Eye. Exist with the pain, then let it draw your inner pupil to tighter focus.”
I do as she demands. The pain does not lessen, but it no longer clouds. Its current pulls my mind narrower and constricts my concentration to retrace the memory. Sure enough, I find the outlying variable. A slight crunch as I descended the three hundred sixteenth step. Just before the crows.
“You put feed on the steps for the crows,” I whisper.
“Good. But are you not in control of your own body? Why did you let me dictate where you fell? If you were awake you would have sensed the crows were not in the trees any longer. You would have felt the seed underfoot, and adjusted to the fresh variable.” She bends down. “You have a brain like mine. That is why you are my heir. That is why I have made you my son. But you must never let your mind sleep. Your Mind’s Eye must rove without rest. Even as you speak, eat, move, it is not enough for it to collect data, it must digest it as a subfunction, or you will miss something and become a slave to another.”
She kneels to look me eye to eye. “You are known. Another will always seek to bridle you. With fists. With kisses. With tricks.” She brushes snow from my shoulders, and pain comes into her eyes. “The tragedy of the gifted is the belief they are entitled to greatness, Lysander. As a human, you are entitled only to death.” She stands. “Now, are you awake or asleep?”
“Awake.”
“Prove it. Again.”
I walk suspended between the past and the hard reality of the desert. There is pain. More than I thought possible. The left half of my face is a ruin of melted meat. It is swollen with fluid that expands the skin to bursting. Pus leaks through the bandage Kalindora helped me attach. My left eye is blind and obliterated. Bits of melted metal have hardened over much of the wound. Unable to see my reflection, I can only imagine the horror.
All I can do is walk.
Foot after foot over the hardpan. There is no more water left to share amongst our ragged band. While I could survive nine days without it in a temperate climate, the desert and my wound conspire to drain every drop.
I will not last long.
I cannot help but feel we are being followed. That something watches from the desert.
It is hard to tell. More bands like ours wander the playa, only to disappear behind veils of dust. It would not be good to congregate with wayward infantry anyway. Supplies dwindle. Weary bands trudge toward their imagined salvation. But we are all just burnt shadows of war.
The killing field was days ago, yet it stalks me like a ghost through the days. Perhaps that is what I feel. The sensation of destiny broken. The dread of the killing field. Two starShells pinning me down. Mutilated men and metal carpeting the ground. The battle had moved on shortly after I woke. Its sound echoed like distant thunder, and all I could do was lie there as night came, listening to the delirium of the dying.
When the sun dipped behind the mountains, the nocturnal predators came to feast on the dead. Their eyes glowed like coins as they fed. I could hear men wailing as they were dragged into the night. Then came the human scavengers down from the bleak mountains to sift through the bodies and harvest electronics and weapons. Heads covered in dust-colored cloth and silver goggles. A boy with a welding torch came for my sigils. There was a firefight, I remember. Then familiar faces.
I think it was Rhone and Kalindora who freed the first of us. The pain consumed me and makes it hard to remember. But I know I was guided by Kalindora away from the slaughter to where survivors exchanged water from their suit caches and bandaged wounds. Rhone said he would come back for us once they freed more Praetorians from their suits.
He never did.
We hid in the foothills, leeched of bravery as Rising soldiers landed in force. We were too weak to contest them. So we watched as they gathered up Rhone and our comrades and herded them onto shuttles at gunpoint. They headed south, to Heliopolis, I imagine.
So Ajax lost.
I can feel no satisfaction in that. How many men died for Atalantia’s avarice? For Ajax’s glory? For Darrow’s victory?
For days we have walked, striking north in hopes of finding Society patrols. We were thirty at the start. Then seventy as elements of Ajax’s shattered legions caught up with us before their boots or bikes died. On the second day, Cicero and four of his Golds found us camped in a ravine. They joined us without comment, all but guns and water satchels discarded. Though later we learned that Ajax fled the battle when the tide turned, and few of his men escaped.
The Scorpion Obsidians die first from the heat. Then many of the Grays, including my Praetorians. Only the hardiest amongst them stagger with us now. We have little water to share.
Seven Golds remain, including Kalindora and Cicero. To the west, the mountain peaks ride the waves of the heat-warped horizon. To the east, the waste stretches as if it were all that existed. War machines move beyond the irradiated clouds.
Desiccated tanks from Darrow’s surprise retreat across the Ladon stand blackened in the distance, victims of lucky hits by naval guns through the mess of the electrical storm. How Darrow slipped the noose is beyond understanding. Or it would be if the Golds fought as an army instead of as a collective of greedy autarchs.
We did this to ourselves. And our men, my Praetorians, millions of civilians and loyal legionnaires paid the price.
Umbra visit us as we walk. White chalk twisters that spin ninety meters high. They cake us with chalk and coat our lungs with a thin white film that comes out in clumps wh
en we cough.
A fever has gripped me since I was pulled from the killing field. Reveries come and go. I see my father and grandmother often. Sometimes there is a chair. Great and silver and carved with eccentric faces. I have never seen it before. And there is a white door that appears always on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of cicadas and the crashing of waves.
I have seen it before in my dreams.
Sometimes I reach it.
It swings open to reveal nothing but shadow. And then it is on the horizon again.
I stumble often on the unstable sand and chalk, but Kalindora steadies me. She cauterized her left arm just beneath the shoulder where Darrow’s blade hacked it off. Still, she is the source of our momentum, the quiet, optimistic heart of our desperate push toward Erebos. We will not make it, I think. With the interference from the storm disrupting our trackers, our best hope is a chance encounter with Society forces. If any still remain.
In late afternoon, we discover the remains of a stork crashed into the sand. We harvest it for supplies, and gather around to see if its coms are working. They are not. But at least we have water and rations. Kalindora declares it our camp for the night. Five Praetorian Grays and seven Golds hunker between the boulders to wait for the sun to depart.
Soon after nightfall we hear ships in the sky.
“They can’t see us,” Cicero says from the nest he’s made in the dirt. Of all the survivors, he seems the only one to retain any of his humor.
“Thirty million soldiers fought in that battle,” Kalindora says. “Even if they could, you try picking up all those pieces.”
“But we are the scions of ancient houses,” Cicero protests. “The very desert should lift us to salvation. I tell you. When I saw the Morning Star emerge from the storm, I thought I’d take any form of possible future as grace. But between the heat, the sun, this blasted sand, the nightcrawlers, and Rising hunting parties, I have the sneaking suspicion that we are going to die in the most worthless fashion.”
“Pulvis et umbra sumus,” I reply.
“That was a Raa, wasn’t it?” Cicero asks. “The one who tried to dance with the rail slug?” I nod. “I swear, those fuckers quote themselves almost as much as the Augustans. Here be lions indeed. What I’d give for a nice lion hunt right now. Sherry by the fire on the savanna as a nice flank of meat bubbles over the fire.”
“You eat lion?” I mumble, though the act of speaking makes my face feel as though it will fall off. “Isn’t it—”
“Stringy? Oh indeed, it’s more about the aesthetic and political innuendo really. Actually, I have a tale! You lot look like you could use one.” He rubs his hands together. He always did love the limelight. “Father let me join when he took old Nero au Augustus himself for a hunt once—my, but that man was mad. Refused to eat anything he didn’t kill with a razor. He was fast, though, almost caught a white gazelle at a watering hole. Two more strides and he would have had him in the sprint.”
“No one can catch a desert gazelle. I don’t care how ancient one’s genes are,” Kalindora says. “The Augustans were no faster than anyone else.”
Cicero pauses, cocking his head toward the desert as if he heard something. With a shake of his curled hair, he returns to his story, frowning when a clump of it falls out. “That’s what Father told old Telemanus. But Kavax just told him to watch. You know what Nero did when the gazelle escaped? He kept running, even when it had him by two kilometers. He was gone the whole night. And then he came back with it on his shoulders while the Browns were laying out breakfast the next morning. All covered in cuts and dirt. I’ll remember what he said till the day I’m shot into the sun.” He takes on a very obnoxious rendition of Augustus’s Martian timbre. “Beasts must stop for water. I carry mine.”
Kalindora belts out a laugh that startles one of the sleeping Grays. “That’s a load of shit.”
Cicero looks direly offended. “How dare you impugn my honor. As sure as Heliopolis is the second most beautiful city in the worlds, Tyche being the first, of course.”
Kalindora snorts. “More like Elysium. No arguments for Hyperion, Lysander?”
I shrug.
“Elysium is as cold as a logos’s groin,” Cicero crows. “And he said what he said, ‘I carry mine.’ What a man, Nero. But that’s not the best part. Father doesn’t like to be the small man on his own planet. So the next day, he shot himself one of those big Nemean lions and tried serving it up to Augustus at dinner.”
“I imagine that went well,” Kalindora says.
“Surprising fact about Nero,” Cicero says with a wag of the finger. “Vast sense of humor.”
“Like you knew him.”
“I did. And I watched as he ate without complaint and even asked for seconds. Old Kavax was sitting there all quiet-like, though. You could tell he was nervous. And then a month later, after the trade talks were complete and we all felt a little slutty about making Augustus richer than Jove, he sends this young man. A lancer. One of those Martian war machines. You know the type, Kalindora. The sort that made sure you were no spring flower by the time you got to Luna. Killing in their veins. Huge. Not the biggest man I’d ever seen, mind you, that was Magnus’s slaveknight—Pale Horse or whatever his name was—but his anger was like heat off a tank barrel. His manners were flawless, for an upstart, still you could hear that Martian war-drum heart beating along with Nero’s silent boast. Look at my fresh crop. I have more of these. In his hands, that big killer carried the most delicate, beautiful box. Carved ivory with lions in all sorts of dramatic poses. ‘Compliments of Mars,’ breathed the man and away he went back to a gorydamn destroyer with helium to burn.”
“What was in the box?” Kalindora asks. “A head?”
“Grapes. Only grapes. And a little note. ‘Work in progress.’ Father went white as the box and didn’t sleep for a week. Mother had to buy five new Stained and a whole new fleet of courtesans before Father would even use his harem again.”
Kalindora grins down at her ration bar wrapper. “Now, that is cold.”
“None colder than old Nero,” Cicero replies. “Want to hear the best part? Guess who the lancer was?”
“Darrow,” I rasp through my tattered lips.
“That’s right,” Cicero says with a squint. “We had him here. I think it was sixteen years ago. Just after the Institute. One of his first missions. Seventeen, a lackey to a god, and ticking, ticking, like a time bomb.”
Later, after Kalindora has gone to sleep, Cicero slides over to me. “So much for Atalantia’s bagwoman.” In the darkness, Kalindora looks less like a warrior. Peaceful in a way, as peaceful as a woman with a cauterized stump for a left arm can look while suffering radiation sickness. Maybe it was foolish to meet the Reaper in open battle. But I cannot erase the pride I felt when she nodded to me at my decision to stay. Still, how many Praetorians lie in the dust for that valor? How many men and women drowned in the sea? Cicero eyes the rancid stump where her left arm used to be. “Think she’ll die of infection?”
“Not before rad poisoning,” I say. “Or thirst.”
He eyes the soiled bandage on my face. “How much does it hurt?”
“Enough.”
“You knew that story,” he says. “How?”
“You mean how did I know about the Storm Gods?” I reply, intuiting his real question. “Nero had his helium. You have your metals. Octavia had her information.”
“Information, yes. Speaking of information…” His voice lowers. “I’ve some information an erudite mind like yours has no doubt already deduced. Based on our water requirements, and our likely rate of consumption, we’ll run out several days from Erebos. We don’t have enough to get all of us there. The Grays will have a trial in this next stretch. It’s straight desert for several hundred klicks. If a patrol doesn’t find us, or we don’t get lucky with civilians…”
“No,
” I say.
“You couldn’t stop me. You can barely walk,” he says flatly.
“If that’s the man you want to be, go on then,” I say, with every intention of killing him in the night if I suspect he intends to kill my Grays.
“You think I want to do it for myself? You think I’m that venal? I’m not a Venusian or a Lunese sucking others dry,” he says in disgust. “We Votum are builders. You don’t know me at all. What I’ve had to watch.” I don’t say anything to that. “Darrow might have broken our planet, but Atalantia and her father have been raping it for years to feed their war. It’s a lonely feeling when you realize your father, despite his many triumphs, is an invertebrate. I’ll tell you that. My brother and sister stood up to Atalantia, but they were at Tyche. And that storm…” He looks north and doesn’t finish the sentence. “Father can’t handle her on his own.”
“What do you want from me?” I ask. “Permission to abandon good men? You won’t have that.”
“You abandoned yours,” he says. “Watched them fly right away to Heliopolis. Including Rhone ti Flavinius himself. So who are you angry at, me or yourself?”
He’s right, and he knows it. Still, it’s the principle. And if I give up that, I’ll have nothing left. “I might not be able to stop you. But if you go for the Grays, you’ll have to kill me too.”
He mutters something to himself as he edges away to find a place amongst the rocks. Soon he is fast asleep. Kalindora opens her eyes. She’s been listening.
“I’ll take watch,” she whispers. “Try and get some sleep.”
I’M WOKEN IN THE EARLY MORNING by a presence. A lean man moves through my room. He stands by the edge of the bed with his hands hidden. But I no longer sleep in beds, not even here in the center of my army. From the bathroom, upon the thin campaign mattress, I watch with my hand clutched around a pistol. How did he get past the guards? I aim for the base of his skull. A sliver of light from a passing ship illuminates his face as he turns. It is Screwface.
I clear my throat and he turns, jumping a little as he sees the gun.