by Pierce Brown
She can barely stand herself.
“We don’t have enough.”
“Take more. There’s always a chance we’ll find something, maybe in that bomber. But no chance at all if you die now.” She tilts the canteen and I swallow another mouthful. She sits down beside me and splays out her long legs. The fabric of her thermaskin, like mine, is caked white with chalk.
“While the lips are calm and the eyes cold, the spirit weeps within.”
Kalindora smiles softly as I recite.
“I see you’re still fond of Shelley. Does it help take your mind away?”
“No,” she replies. “I just don’t think anyone should die without hearing poetry one last time.” Whether she means me or herself is unclear. “I’m going to have hot tea,” she says suddenly.
“What?”
“When we get back. A hot tea and a cold bath. How about you?”
“Fralic juice and vodka,” I say.
“Fralic juice and vodka?” She squints at me, finding more meaning in it than I meant. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never even had it before.” That seems to puzzle her. “Octavia said that her greatest mastery of the Mind’s Eye came when she could make herself taste a food simply by thinking of it,” I say.
“Well, I can do that,” she says. “Watch. Dust.” She licks her lips. “Gods, just like the real thing.” I am unable to smile from the burn. “What’s it like?” she asks. “The Mind’s Eye.”
“It is difficult to explain.” She waits for me to try. “Have you ever had a moment where you couldn’t fail? Where everything seemed slow, except you? Like you were the center of all gravity, all time, and your thoughts themselves were second to your actions?”
“Sometimes, in combat.”
“Bad comparison,” I say. “You were a sailor before, yes?”
She considers. “Sometimes when the wind is strong, you slide like a knife over the water…it feels like you’re flying.”
“Then you have touched it. But imagine you could control that peace, that sense of harmony, and summon it according to your will.”
She reconsiders me.
“You can do that at will?”
“At times. Octavia could like this.” I snap my fingers. “It isn’t without flaw. It didn’t make her a warrior equal to Aja. But it made her very…dangerous. She said it could even stop poison, if mastered.”
“All poison?”
I’m about to answer when I see movement to the north. I squint out at bright chalk flats. Amidst a cloud of dust, a herd of pale sunbloods race one another against the horizon. Not one, not ten, but hundreds. I stand up to watch, wondering if it is real or a desert mirage. Either way it is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
Then I realize it is not one another they race.
“Not again,” Kalindora whispers.
A dark smudge rolls across the desert behind the stampede.
“Sandstorm!” Cicero shouts. “Damn that man! Damn him! Everyone, to the bomber! That sand will shred us to the bone! Hurry!”
We bolt to our feet and run east toward the wreckage, but the Grays and I are falling behind. Kalindora tries to help me along, but with me weighing her down, she’ll never make it.
Uninjured, Cicero and his Golds chew up the kilometers with their rangy legs. They don’t even bother looking back for us. The wall of sand is close enough now that it seems to scrape the sky.
It swallows a dozen horses whole. I shove Kalindora away. “Go!” She bats my arms out of the way and lunges to try and pick me up with one arm. I back away from her. “Go!”
She glances at the encroaching wall, then back at me, with real fear in her eyes. For a moment, I think she will stay. Then she turns and sprints away, long strides making her bounce like a jackrabbit in the low gravity. I am left alone.
I face the wall, and grip Cassius’s razor as if it will save me. Everything has darkened. Dust obscures the sky. The Grays continue to try to make it to the bomber. They won’t. I search for some hiding place. Some boulder or wreckage to shelter behind. There is nothing. Nothing.
A cool certainty slides over me.
I race back the way we came and see dirt swirling over the hydra burrow’s entrance. It is wide enough for a Red, but not for me. Flattening my thumb against the shape sensor, I form the razor into a wide-mouthed falchion and chop furiously at the ground, expanding the hole’s circumference.
The wall is nearly upon me. I dive into the burrow at the last second. My shoulders clear, my hips stick. Ripping skin from my sides, I crawl into the darkness just as the wall hits.
THERE IS A MONSTER sharing the darkness with me. A dread creature I cannot see or hear for the howling darkness of the storm outside. I can sense it moving, judging the creature that has invaded its home.
I have never seen a hydra with my own eyes. Five hundred years ago, the Votum commissioned a sect of Lunese carvers to create them so that they might have something challenging to hunt. Some say the carvers were far too ambitious in their designs.
I lie trembling on my back, with my razor rigid and pointed outward from my belly as the hours creep past. They are the longest hours of my life. Especially when a mass of scales rested against my leg. The Hydra is digesting another meal.
When the storm finally passes, I hear a faint hissing, like dry skin dragged over tin. Very carefully, I slide backward out of the hydra’s burrow, keeping my razor pointed downward in case it decides to make a last-minute meal of me.
When I finally see the sun again, I stumble away from the hole and almost vomit from tension. Only when I am far enough away do I fall on my back and start to laugh and cry.
I never knew I’d be so happy to not be a hydra’s lunch.
After a half a minute, the sun begins to burn my face. I sit up and squint into the waste.
The playa is cleansed. Cacti sway like leftover shish-kebab sticks. No life stirs. No debris can be seen. The Grays have been swallowed by the desert. I make my way over to the bomber, now just a hump of sand, and call for Kalindora. There is no answer. Nor is there when I call for Cicero.
I dig through the sand and find nothing but two decaying Blue pilots, half-eaten by predators. They wear no insignia but a child’s face wreathed in serpents. Gorgons. This was one of Atlas’s bombers.
The hold is empty. The magazines have ruptured inward. Unfired missiles lie in the hold. A ration bar wrapper lies on the floor. One of ours. Outside the bomber, I find indentations in the sand, indicating the passage of a shuttle. A spent railgun battery lies on the ground.
Not one of ours. Sun Industries tech.
I squint south and see the shuttle as a dot racing for Heliopolis. Kalindora must be on it. Another captive for the Rising.
I go back inside the bomber and collapse in the hold amongst the unfired missiles. I lie there forlorn until I fall asleep. When I wake, my loneliness in the silence is absolute.
Pytha knew this was coming.
But I believed the myth of war.
Worse, I thought myself special. Immune to the horrors lesser men face.
Diomedes was right. All men are tiny before the storm.
There is nothing but pain from my ruined face and deep, indescribable exhaustion. Seraphina is dead. The alliance may be broken because of it. My Praetorians rotting or captured. The tears sting my wounds as I weep. Why did I betray Cassius? For this? Why did I return to this horrible place?
My hopes of a united Gold, of peace, now seem so laughable.
Not only did I overestimate my own importance. I underestimated the scope of war.
There is no escape from this. It will eat us all.
I could flee this pain, find refuge in the Mind’s Eye meditation and slip slowly into the Void as my body fails, but I cannot give Grandmother that honor. She did some
thing to me. Something I cannot understand. I was a child who needed love in the shadow of his parents’ deaths. Instead, she beat me into the shape of a cup and poured her lessons into me. I will not let those lessons be my last act in this world.
“Cry not, mortal child,” a voice says in the darkness. “They come on wings of sable, to rend your precious flesh, and send you to the doom which lies beyond this realm of pain.”
I sit up. Am I going mad?
“Lie still and it will end. Lie still and the seed of Silenius will wither to time.”
“Who is there?” I ask. A translucent mass squats in the shadows of the downed aircraft. It seems immense. The air warps above the ghostCloak with hornlike projections. If it is a ghostCloak and not the madness of the desert creeping in.
“Dwell not on me, mortal. Nocturnal devils are afoot. Awake, arise, or be forever fallen.”
I hear it now. The sound of gravBoots.
I watch through a fissure in the hull as seven armored men land in the night. Seneca’s voice drifts from the darkness. “Lysander, oh, Lysander, come out, come out, little boy. Death has come.”
So Ajax has sent his boar of a bodyguard to finish the task.
The thought of dying at the hands of some thin-blood brute fills me with irrational fear. I am not fit for this world of rough killers. My hand goes to the side of my neck where I received my mission implant. They tracked it at last. I turn to the man in the darkness.
“Help me,” I beg.
“I help no man who does not help himself, and no man do I help who is no boon to me. Six years I have collated knowledge to become the mightiest of mortal vessels. Yet one morsel still eludes my voluminous mind. Hidden in no Fury. No books. Trusted to no digital void. It lingers yet, this knowledge in one sepulchre. Four days I have followed. Four days you have denied me my quest. I must know the Mind’s Eye. Show it to me. Or perish.”
The air ripples as the man slips out of the ship.
“Lysander,” Seneca taunts. “There’s nowhere to run. Will the Heir of Silenius die in a rat hole? Have dignity in the end; your ancient blood demands it.” The thin-bloods chuckle to one another.
I spotted seven of them, all in fresh pulseArmor. I won’t stand a chance. But will I die here cowering? Or will I die with dignity? As I stand, my feet disturb the spilled munitions on the floor, and I sense a fresh variable.
Seven Peerless Scarred stand in the darkness as I emerge barefoot.
Their predatory Iron Leopard war helmets watch with no human emotion. As if my left arm were broken, I cradle the internal payload of a firebrand munition wrapped in torn seat lining.
I need those helmets off.
“Ajax couldn’t even take out his own trash,” I mock. My voice is ragged. “How admirable.”
Seneca chuckles. “He would, but Atalantia has him under lock and key, such is her grief at the death of precious Lysander. Shall we formalize it?”
Seven razors unfurl. Mine remains on my hip.
“What did he promise you, Seneca?”
“A torchShip each,” one of the Golds says.
“That’s the price of my life?”
“Draw your iron, boy. Ajax made me promise you’d die well.”
“Does any man die well if he cannot look his killer in the eye?” I peer around at the grim visages of the battered warhelms. “Which of you will it be? Which of you will kill the last Heir of Silenius? Don’t you want me to know as I lie dying?”
Oh do I know my people.
Their helmets unfurl to reveal their faces.
My name still means something. They want me to see their eyes as they kill me. They want me to comprehend their superiority. And each wants to deliver the blow, and with it declare themselves stronger than my decrepit bloodline. They are the future, not the last blood of Lune who couldn’t even survive a week at the front. And they want me to know it.
I take my razor and let it unfurl into the killing blade.
“No bribe? No begging?” Seneca asks. “I expected more whinging from the entitled cur.”
“As a human, I am entitled only to death.”
“That’s the spirit.” Seneca smiles with his pack. “Kill the Pixie.”
Seven Peerless butchers slip forward. My left hand pulls the activation wire of the firebrand payload, I drop the seat lining, and toss the payload into the air. I bury my face in the sand.
The air stills as the firebrand detonates overhead. It releases no kinetic wash of energy, only spasms of ultraviolet light brighter than that of a nuclear explosion. It makes no sound.
Even with my head in the sand, I go blind.
But so do the bare-faced killers. As they scream from the weapon flash burning their retinas, I search myself for the fear that has stalked me since I landed on this planet. I need not search further than what I felt in the hydra burrow. Fear writhes like a dark, maggoty river from my pelvis to the tip of my spine. Pulsing. Roaring. Not fear of death. Fear of failure. Fear of being a fool. Fear of inconsequence. Fear of being alone. Fear of proving I am nothing more than my grandmother’s puppet. Fear that I am weak and meant for the maggots.
But the Mind’s Eye waits for me like an old glove.
I am the last of its acolytes.
It is not Grandmother’s anymore. It was never an inheritance. I earned it by suffering as a boy as she did as a girl. Fear is the torrent.
My transition into the folds of harmony is fulfilling.
My eyes may be blind, but my mind sees.
The world rushes through the multi-sensorial pupil of the Mind’s Eye. The projection stems from memory. I see the grains of sand as they were before the blast of light. I feel the weight of the men on its surface. Smell the musty sweat of unwashed armor, the bitter roast of coffee, the sweet reek of combat chemicals and the protein cubes they ate before they descended. Blood pumps in their veins. Insulated feet slide in their boots. I feel their skins, knowing where instinct will take them, where training will guide them to my blade like sheep to slaughter. I see them in the blindness, and I take on the Winter Whirlwind stance of the Willow Way.
Are you awake or asleep, Lysander?
I slip forward.
Three die without even swinging their razors.
The pommel of the Bellona razor jolts in my hand as the blade carves through pulseArmor, bone, and flesh of the third man. I feel the heat of blood sluicing down my arm. Hear the puking as it comes out of the man’s mouth. I pull the razor upward from his belly, holding his sword hand down, and saw through his breastplate. I stop shy of his heart so that he will continue to scream. I trip him and ride his momentum down to the ground, rolling forward then upward and crouching on a knee.
They shout to one another now. The noise of the dying a bedlam to muddle their ears. GravBoots whine as one takes blindly to the air. I rip the pulseFist off the dying man. With the Mind’s Eye, I sort through the soup of sound until I find the whine of the gravBoots and feel the reverberation. I swivel toward it, brace myself on a knee, lead the sound by several meters, and fire five shots in a diagonal line. I hear the snapping sound of a pulseShield absorbing the blast. There he is. I fire thirty shots until I hear the pulseShield collapse with a scream. Metal and man crash down into the sand.
Four down. Three left.
I slide toward the ship as they fire at anything that makes noise. GravBoots whine at my eleven o’clock. I fire a full stream from my cover. The man gets away. Several seconds pass. There is a thump in the desert. My visitor doesn’t want any escaping either.
The last two are difficult to locate. My memory is outdated now by a minute, but as I killed I populated the mental image with my victims. I know the second body is approximately nine meters and a half west and has a pulseFist still. I know the fourth body creates a tripping barrier between a broken wing of the downed bomber and the fus
elage. And when I hear a clink, I know one of the two survivors is checking the pulse of the first corpse two meters behind me.
I swoop to kill him with a backhand flick of the razor. It glances off his risen helmet. I parry his first riposte, knowing it would come as a lower thrust because he was in a crouch and it is the natural transition strike to prepare for a diagonal downward slash. I parry that slash and three more blows of a tight set. He is a clever swordsman, far stronger supplemented with his armor, but he relies upon sustained contact to know where I am. I break off. Wait. And as he probes the darkness with tentative thrusts, I rotate around and slip soundlessly forward. The razor digs the roots. It severs his leg at the thigh. The second strike takes his hand. The third his ankle.
I let him bleed out. His groans give me cover to move.
Seneca calls to his compatriots. None answer but the wounded.
“What the fuck?” he growls. I hear his razor hissing through the air as he swings wildly. His pulseFist roars. “You little prim bastard! How can you see?”
“Rather, how is it you are blind, Seneca?” As I move quietly over the sand, I can hear the heartblood pumping out of the dying men. Glug. Glug. Glug into their broken armor. “Is this how you saw your future?”
He fires at the sound of my voice. Unlike the others, he is difficult to find. I think he’s stripped off his boots too now. His heart rate is steady. His feet quiet despite his mass. This is a real killer. To guard Ajax’s back, he’d have to be.
“Is there even a future past this moment, Seneca?”
He fires again and misses again. He’s back near the ship. I weave through the downed bodies and find a pulseFist. I set it back down. It doesn’t seem honorable.