“You are a strange man,” she says with a soft sigh, all the vulnerability that was in her now gone. Her claws are back on. She leans back against the wall opposite me, bending a knee and putting a boot on the wall, laughing at me with her eyes. Here’s the Victra I know.
“You love women, but you do not enjoy us.” Smile lines crease as her lips part slightly. My eyes cannot help but trace the slender contours of her neck, the strength in her slim shoulders, and the rise of her breasts. Her eyes burn into me. “There’s much to enjoy. Do you even know how soft my skin is?”
I cough out a laugh. “You’re mocking me.”
“As ever.”
Victra is a schemer. It’s her way. But for a moment, she was vulnerable. And seeing that … seeing that made all the difference. I kill the sexual tension the best way I know how.
“Good night, sister,” I say, and kiss her on the brow.
“Sister? Sister?” She laughs dismissively as I leave. It takes her a moment, but she calls to me.
“Is it because you think me wicked?”
I turn back to her. “Wicked?”
“Is that why you’ve never wanted me?” She pauses, choosing her words with care. “Because you look down on me?”
“Why would you think that?” I ask gently.
She shrugs and looks around the hall, strangely hesitant. “I don’t …” She shakes her head, trying to find the right words. She gestures to herself. “This is how I survive, do you understand? It’s how my mother taught me. It’s what works.”
“What do you say we try something new?” I offer, walking back to her. I extend a hand. “Darrow. Contrary to popular rumor, I don’t eat glass. I love music, dancing and I’m very fond of fresh fruit, particularly strawberries.”
She snorts a laugh. “So stupid. We’re reintroducing ourselves?”
“No armor. Just two people. I’m waiting,” I say playfully.
Rolling her eyes, she steps forward, looking either way down the hall. She brings up her hand, fighting back a childish smile. “Victra. I like the way stone smells before rain falls.” She makes a face, cheeks flushing red. “And … don’t laugh. I actually hate the color gold. Green goes better with my complexion.”
I cannot sleep. The bodies of those I’ve left behind float in the darkness with me. I wake a dozen times, flashes of bombs, slashing of swords ripping into my dreams. I earned these sleepless nights. I know that, and that’s what makes them all the harder.
I stand and pace my new quarters, wandering its expanse. Six rooms. A small gymnasium. A large bath. A study. All belonging to the man who burned a moon. The father of the Furies. How could I sleep in a room like this? I take the pegasus pendant from my pocket, almost forgetting it’s a radium bomb.
Wandering the halls of the ship, ghostlike, I look behind me, wondering if Ragnar follows. I told him to sleep, but I know little of his moods, how he thinks, what he does at night. There is much to learn.
I pass through dimmed halls, past Orange technicians and Blue systems operators, who quiet and bend as I pass through metal halls down to the bowels of the ship, where Golds never tread. The ceilings are lower, meant for the Red workers and Brown janitors. This ship is a city, an island. All the Colors are here. I remember the roster. Thousands of jobs. Millions of moving parts. I examine a maintenance panel. What if the Orange who worked it were to overload the panel? What would happen? I don’t know. I wager few Golds really do. I make a note of it.
I continue on, hunger drawing me to the mess hall. Food could easily be delivered to my rooms, but my valets have not yet been organized. Anyway, I hate being waited on. In the mess hall, I find someone as sleepless as myself sitting at a long metal table.
Mustang.
24
Bacon and Eggs
I slide across from her.
“Can’t sleep?” I ask.
She wraps her knuckles against her head. “Lot rattling around.” She nods to the clamor of pans back in the kitchens. “The cook’s beside himself,” she says. “Thinks I need a feast. Told him I just wanted bacon and eggs. Pretty sure he’s disregarded everything I said. He babbled something about pheasant. Has this Earthborn accent. Hard to understand.”
Moments later, a Brown cook stumbles out from the kitchen, carrying a tray of not only bacon and eggs, but pumpkin waffles, cured ham, cheeses, sausages, fruits, and a dozen other dishes. But no pheasant. His eyes turn the size of the waffles when he sees me. Apologizing for something, he sets the tray down and disappears, only to reappear a minute later with even more food.
“How much do you think we eat?” I ask him.
He just stares at me. “Thank you,” Mustang says. He mumbles something inaudible and backs away bowing.
“I think the Ash Lord was a bit different from us,” I say. Mustang pushes the fruit toward me. “Thought you didn’t like bacon,” I say.
She shrugs. “I had it every morning on Luna.” She delicately butters her waffles. “Reminded me of you.” She avoids my eyes. “Why can’t you sleep?”
“Not much good at it.”
“You never were. Except when you have a hole in your stomach. You slept like a baby then.”
I laugh. “I think comas don’t count.”
We talk about anything but the things we should. Innocent and quiet, like two moths dancing around the same flame. “Amazing how big the beds are, even on a starship,” Mustang says. “Mine’s monstrous. Too big, really.”
“Finally! Someone else agrees. Half the time, I sleep on the floor.”
“You too?” she shakes her head. “Sometimes I hear noises and sleep in the closet, thinking if someone’s coming for me they won’t look there.”
“I’ve done that. Really does help.”
“Except when the closet is big enough to fit a family of Obsidians. Then its just as bad. She frowns suddenly. “I wonder if Obsidians cuddle.”
“They don’t.”
Her eyebrows rise. “Have you researched it?”
I finish a handful of strawberries, shrugging as Mustang frowns at my manners. “Obsidians believe in three types of touch. The Touch of Spring. The Touch of Summer. The Touch of Winter. After the Dark Revolt, where the Obsidians rose in arms against the iron ancestors, the Board of Quality Control debated destroying the entire Color. You know how they gave them religion, stole their technology. But what they wished to kill most of all was the incredible kinship the Obsidians then possessed. So they instructed the shaman of the tribes, bought and paid for liars, to warn against touch, saying it weakened the spirit. So now the Obsidians touch one another in sex. They touch each other to prevent death. And they touch each other to kill. No cuddling.” I notice her watching me with a small smirk. “But of course you knew all that.”
“I did.” She smiles. “But sometimes it’s nice to remember all that’s going on inside you.”
“Oh.” I redden for some reason.
“I forgot you can blush!” She watches me for a moment. “You probably don’t know this, but one of my dissertations on Luna concentrated on mistakes in the sociological manipulation theorems used by the Board of Quality Control.” She cuts a sausage delicately. “I deemed them shortsighted. The chemical sexual sterilization of the Pink genus, for instance, has led to a tragically high suicide rate within the Gardens.”
Tragically. Most would have said “inefficient.”
“The rigidity of laws maintaining the hierarchy are so strict they’ll one day break. Fifty years from now? A hundred? Who knows? There was this one case we studied where a Gold woman fell in love with an Obsidian. They had a blackmarket Carver alter their reproductive organs so his seed was compatible with her eggs. They were found out and both were executed, their Carvers killed. But things like this have happened a hundred times. A thousand. They’re just scrubbed from the record books.”