“Where are the children?” I ask Sevro.
“What children? We found none.”
Cursing, I chase Arcos.
“I hid them,” he says over his shoulder to me as he sprints down the castle’s hall. He’s fast for an old man, but the gravity slows us till we start using our hands on the walls and ceiling, using gravBoots to take the long halls. We launch around corner after corner. And when he touches the head of a stone griffin and a steel wall falls away to reveal a hidden passage, I smell blood. Two corpses lie on the other side of the passage. One Gray, one Obsidian. I push past Arcos and fly ahead. I pull myself down a series of stairs using handholds in the ceiling till I find myself before two doors. I open one. Just a storeroom. I open another and let my razor slither into hand.
“Tactus,” I say slowly.
His back is to me. Three bodies lie around him, their blood making a pool about his shoes. His razor coils in his hand, hardening as he stands with his head lowered in a room of children and women. Blood slithers down the mercurial blade. He killed two men and a woman. Obsidians.
When I came, Arcos hid the children from me here, some Gold, some Silver, some Pink and Brown. Tactus could kill half of them with a lazy swing of his razor before we reach them.
“Tactus, remember your brothers,” I say to him, looking at the children.
“My brothers are shits.” He laughs coarsely, voice sounding strange. “Said I should get out of your shadow. Mother calls me the Mighty Servant. Did you know that?”
Children sob in the corner. One buries her face in her mother’s lap. The women are not armed. These are not warriors like Victra and Mustang. A Brown nursemaid covers a Gold child’s eyes. I hear Arcos in the tunnel behind me.
“Lune’s orders are wrong,” I say to Tactus.
“She asked me if I could fill your place, Reaper,” Tactus says quietly. “Said she didn’t think I could. Said I was so long in your shadow that she didn’t know if I would ever be more than an echo of you. I told her I could do anything you could do.”
“Tactus, she is evil.”
“Is she?” He spits blood on the ground, still not facing me. “They say the same thing about you. They wonder who you think you are to do what you do. To challenge the men and women you challenge. They wonder what right you have.”
“We all have a right to challenge. That’s the point.”
“The point. Was there a point?” he asks. “I was never told. You took me for granted. Never telling me anything.” Just as I’m doing with Roque. “Always whispering with others. Dismissing me like I’m a fool. You’re just like her …”
“Your mother?”
He says nothing. Arcos edges in beside me. I put a hand out to stop him.
“Would you kill them, if Augustus told you to?” Tactus asks me, turning slightly.
“No,” I say. “I’d rather die.”
“I didn’t think so. She was right. I am the Mighty Servant.”
I open my hands to him. “I don’t know what I’m to do now, Tactus.”
“That’s a first.” He laughs bitterly, voice slurring slightly.
“Hardly. I didn’t know what to do when I whipped you,” I say. “At the Institute. I didn’t want to lose you from my army because of your talents. But I couldn’t not punish you.”
“Talents. Talents. Talents. Then that’s the difference between us,” Tactus’s voice thickens further. “Because if it had been my army, I would have killed your arrogant ass.” He turns more and I see the hints of the ruin the bomb’s made of his face.
“You know what happens if you kill any of them?”
He nods to me, then to the Rage Knight, as if saying it’ll be either one or the other that does him. “I’m not sorry I took Lysander, you know.”
“I don’t think you’re ever sorry for much.”
“Not sorry.” He chuckles and dips a toe in the blood surrounding him. “But I think I shouldn’t have done it. I was testing you at the Institute. But … I wanted to see what you’d do. If you were worth following.”
“Was I?”
“You know that answer.”
“Am I still?”
He nods. “Always,” saying it so pathetically that it feels like my heart has been pulled into my throat. He’s a traitor, a liar, a cheat. Yet I see a friend. I want to fix him and make him whole. What am I doing? I have to put him down. But I’ve done that before with Titus. That cycle erodes us. Death begets death begets death, and ever more.
“What if I let you live?” I ask suddenly, drawing a confused, frantic glance from Tactus. Of course he doesn’t understand forgiveness. “What if I let you come back?”
“What?”
“What if I forgave you?”
“You’re lying.” He turns more and I see the full measure of what the bomb did to him. His nose is crooked, broken. The rest looks like a cherry stripped of its skin. My friend …
“I’m not lying.” I did not put my faith in Tactus once, and I lost him. Now I will. I’ll take the same leap I ask him to take. I step forward. “I know there’s good in you. I saw your face when those children were killed at the gala. You’re not a monster. Come back to me. You would be one of my lieutenants again, Tactus. I would give you a legion to lead when we take Mars. You’ll carry one of my standards. But you can’t wear that ugly armor.”
“It is uncomfortable,” he wheezes with a slight smile. “But Sevro, Roque, Victra …”
“They miss you,” I lie. “Drop your razor and come back to my army. I promise you will be safe.” The razor dips in his hand. One of the children spares a smile at his younger siblings, a hopeful smile. “Just leave the children alone, and all is forgiven.”
I mean it. Deep in my heart, I mean it.
“We all make mistakes,” he says.
“We all make mistakes. Just come back. I won’t hurt you.” I drop my own razor. “Neither will Arcos.” I stare at Arcos till he nods his weathered head in complicity.
“I want to come home,” Tactus murmurs quietly, pain in his voice. “I want to come home.”
“Then come home.”
Tactus’s razor clatters to the floor and he falls to a knee in front of me. He’s rasping from pain. Relief floods the room. The children start crying again from the tortuous shift from death to life. The caretakers hug their charges, their tears making lines on their faces. I go forward to Tactus and motion him upward to clasp my arm. He wraps me in a frantic hug and sobs into me. Body shaking, bloody features painting my armor.
“I’m sorry,” he says a dozen times. He’s weeping hard into my shoulder, clasping tight. His face is such a ruin. And I hug him. Exhaustion fills me. His sadness is like a weight that nearly drives me to tears. Yet I’m buoyed by the strange feelings of having him back, standing with me, gripping me. It is a humbling thing knowing someone cannot live without you, knowing that though they’ve betrayed you, they wish for nothing but absolution. And as he clenches my back, I wrap my arms around his armor and try not to cry myself. Even the cruel feel pain. And even the cruel can change. I hope this changes him. He could do so much, if only he would learn.
In so many ways, he is the embodiment of his race. And so if Tactus can change, Gold can change. They must be broken, but then they must be given a chance. I think that’s what Eo would have wanted in the end.
When at last his sobs are done and we part, he stands at my side, loyal as a puppy, looking to me subtly for signs of affection. His hands tremble from the pain of his wounds, yet he watches in silence with Arcos and me as the children, high and low alike, file upward out of the hidden bunker with their caretakers. Pebble comes down to giddily tell us Roque is wrapping up the space engagement. Seeing Tactus’s wounds, she pales. I tell her to fetch a Yellow.