Wondering if I am mad.
Except Dio, Eo’s sister, whose face splits with a smile.
“I’m sorry, Dio,” I say quickly. “You look…just like her.”
She doesn’t allow it to be awkward, hushing my apologies. Saying it’s the kindest thing I could have said. “And who’s that, then?” I ask of the baby she holds. The little girl’s hair is absurd. Rust red and bound together by a hair tie so it sticks straight up on top of her head in a little antenna. She watches me excitedly with her dark red eyes.
“This little thing?” Dio asks, coming closer to my chair. “Oh, this is someone I’ve been wanting to introduce to you since Deanna told us you were alive.” She looks lovingly to my brother. I feel a pang of jealousy. “This is our first. Would you like to hold her?”
“Hold her?” I say. “No…I’m…”
The girl’s pudgy little hands reach for me, and Dio pushes the girl into my lap before I can recoil. The girl clings to my sweater, grunting as she turns and wriggles around till she’s seated according to her liking on my leg. She claps her hands together and laughs. Completely unaware of what I am. Of why my hands are so scarred. Delighted by the size of them and the Gold Sigils, she grabs my thumb and tries to bite it with her gums.
Her world is alien to the horrors I know. All the child sees is love. Her skin is pale and soft against mine. She’s made of clouds and I of stone. Her eyes large and bright like her mother’s. Her demeanor and thin lips like Kieran’s. Were this another life, she might have been my child with Eo. My wife would have laughed to think it would be my brother and her sister together in the end and not us. We were a little storm that couldn’t last. But maybe Dio and Kieran will.
—
Long after the lights have dimmed throughout the complex to ease the burdens on the generators, I sit with my uncle and brother around the table in the back of the room, listening to Kieran tell me his new duties learning from Oranges how to service ripWings and shuttles. Dio went to bed long ago, but she left me the baby, who now sleeps in my arms, shifting here and there as her dreams take her wherever they may.
“It’s really not that wretched here,” Kieran is saying. “Better than the stacks below. We have food. Water showers. No more flushes! There’s a lake above us, they say. Bloodydamn dazzling stuff, the showers. Children love it.” He watches his children in the low light. Two to a bed, shifting quietly as they sleep. “What’s hard is not knowing what’ll be for them. Will they ever mine? Work in the webbery? I always thought they would. That I was passing something down, a mission, a craft. You hear?” I nod. “I guess I wanted my sons to be helldivers. Like you. Like Pa. But…” He shrugs.
“There’s nothin’ to that now that you got eyes,” Uncle Narol says. “It’s a hollow life when you know you’re being stepped on.”
“Aye,” Kieran replies. “Die by thirty, so those folk can live to a hundred. It ain’t bloodydamn right. I just want my children to have more than this, brother.” He stares at me intensely and I remember how my mother asked me what comes after revolution. What world are we making? It was what Mustang asked. Something Eo never considered. “They have to have more than this. And I love Ares as much as anyone. I owe him my life. The lives of my children. But…” He shakes his head, wanting to say more but feeling the weight of Narol’s eyes on him.
“Go on,” I say.
“I don’t know if he knows what comes next. That’s why I’m glad you’re back, little brother. I know you’ve got a plan. I know you can save us.”
He says it with so much faith, so much trust.
“Of course I’ve a plan,” I say, because I know it’s what he needs to hear. But as my brother contentedly refills his mug, my uncle catches my eye and I know he sees through the lie and we both feel the darkness pressing in.
It’s early morning as I sip coffee and eat a bowl of grain cereal my mother fetched me from the commissary. I’m not yet ready for crowds. Kieran and Leanna have already gone to work, so I sit with Dio and Mother as the children dress for school. It’s a good sign. You know a people have given up when they stop teaching their children. I finish my coffee. Mother pours me more.
“You took an entire pot?” I ask.
“The chef insisted. Tried to give me two.”
I sip from the cup. “It’s almost like the real thing.”
“It is the real thing,” Dio says. “There’s this pirate who sends us hijacked goods. Coffee’s from Earth, I think. Jamaca, they said.”
I don’t correct her.
“Oy!” a voice screams in the hallways. My mother jumps at the sound. “Reaper! Reaper! Come out and play-e-ay!” There’s a crash in the hall and the sound of stomping boots.
“Remember, Deanna told us to knock,” says a thunderous voice.
“You are so annoying. Fine.” A polite knock comes at the door. “Tidings! It’s Uncle Sevro and the Moderately Friendly Giant.”
My mother motions to one of my excited nieces. “Ella, do us kind.” Ella darts forward to open the door for Sevro. He bursts through, scooping her up. She shrieks with joy. He’s in his undersuit, a black sweat-wicking fabric that soldiers wear under pulse armor. Sweat rings stain the armpits. His eyes dance as he sees me, and he tosses Ella roughly onto a bed and charges toward me, arms outstretched. A weird laugh escapes his chest, hatchet face split with a jagged grin. His hair a dirty, sweat-soaked Mohawk.
“Sevro, careful!” my mother says.
“Reap!” He slams into me, spinning my chair sideways, clacking my teeth together, as he half lifts me out of the chair, stronger than he was, smelling of tobacco and engine fuel and sweat. He half laughs, half cries like an excited dog into my chest. “I knew you were alive. I bloodydamn knew it. Pixie bitches can’t fool me.” Pulling back, he looks down at me with a rickshaw grin. “You bloodydamn bastard.”
“Language!” my mother snaps.
I wince. “My ribs.”
“Oh, shit, sorry brotherman.” He lets me sink back into the chair, and kneels so we’re eye to eye. “I said it once. Now I’ll say it twice. If there’s two things in this world that can’t be killed, it’s the fungus under my sack and the Reaper of bloodydamn Mars. Haha!”
“Sevro!”
“Sorry, Deanna. Sorry.”
I pull back from him. “Sevro. You smell…terrible.”
“I haven’t showered in five days,” he brags, grabbing his groin. “It’s a Sevro soup in here, boyo.” He puts his hands on his hips. “You know, you look…erm…” He glances at my mother and tames his tongue. “Bloody terrible.”
A shadow falls over the room as a man enters and blocks the overhead light near the door. The children cluster joyously around Ragnar so he can barely walk.
“Hello, Reaper,” he says over their shouts.
I greet Ragnar with a smile. His face is as impassive as ever. Tattooed and pale, callused from the wind of his arctic home, like the hide of a rhinoceros. His white beard is braided into four strands, and the hair on his head shaved except for a tail of white that is braided with red ribbons. The children are asking him if he’s brought them presents.
“Sevro.” I lean forward. “Your eyes…”
He leans in close. “Do you like ’em?” Buried in that squinting, sharp-angled face, his eyes are no longer that dirty shade of Gold, but are now as red as Martian soil. He pulls back his lids so I can better see. They’re not contacts. And the right is no longer bionic.
“Bloodydamn. Did you get Carved?”
“By the best in the business. Do you like ’em?”
“They’re bloodydamn marvelous. Fit you like a glove.”
He punches his hands together. “Glad you said that. Cuz they’re yours.”
I blanch. “What?”