“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 small 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.”
Cold fear wells in me, beginning in the deep hollow of my stomach and spreading upward. “Mustang…”
“They’re here,” she says, horrified.
“What’s happening? What’s here?” Sevro hisses.
“Darrow…” Cassius whispers.
“The nukes aren’t on Mars,” I say. “They’re on Luna.”
The Jackal’s smile stretches. Slowly, he gains his feet and not one of us dares touch him. It all falls into place. The tension between him and the Sovereign. The subtle threats. His boldness in coming here into the Sovereign’s place of power. His ability to mock Aja without consequence.
“Oh, shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.” Sevro pulls his Mohawk. “Shit.”
“I never wanted to nuke Mars,” the Jackal says. “I was born on Mars. It is my birthright, the prize from which all things flow. Her helium is the blood of the empire. But this moon, this skeleton orb is, like Octavia, a treacherous old crone sucking at the marrow of the Society, crowing about what was instead of what can be. And Octavia let me ransom it. Just as you will, because you are weak and you did not learn what you should have at the Institute. To win, you must sacrifice.”
“Mustang, can you find the bombs?” I ask. “Mustang!”
She’s been struck dumb. “No. He would have masked the radiation signatures. Even if we could, we couldn’t deactivate them….” She reaches for the com to call our fleet.
“If you make the call, then I detonate a bomb every minute,” the Jackal says, tapping his ear where a little com has been implanted. Lilath must be listening. She must have the trigger. That’s what he meant. She’s his insurance. “Would I really tell you my plan if you could do anything about it?” He straightens his hair and wipes blood from his armor. “The bombs were installed weeks ago. The Syndicate smuggled the devices across the moon for me. Enough to create nuclear winter. A second Rhea, if you will. When they were in place, I told Octavia what I had done and I told her my terms. She would carry on as Sovereign until the Rising was put down, which…has taken a surprising twist…obviously. And afterward, on the day of victory, she would convene the Senate, abdicate the Morning Throne and name me her successor. In return, I would not destroy Luna.”