A late autumn breeze cuts through the meaty, humid stink of my filth and makes me think that somewhere a child is sprinting through snow and trees, running his hands along bark and pine needles and getting sap in his hair. It’s a memory I know I’ve never had, but feel like I should. That’s the life I would have wanted. The child I could have had.
I weep. Less for me than for that boy who thinks he lives in a kind world, where Mother and Father are as large and strong as mountains. If only I could be so innocent again. If only I knew this moment was not a trick. But it is. The Jackal does not give except to take away. Soon the light will be a memory and darkness will return. I keep my eyes clenched tight, listening to the blood from my face drip on the stone, and wait for the twist.
“Goryhell, Augustus. Was this really necessary?” a feline killer purrs. Husky accent smothered in that indolent Luna lilt learned in the courts of the Palatine Hill, where all are less impressed by everything than anyone else. “He smells like death.”
“Fermented sweat and dead skin under the magnetic shackles. See the yellowish crust on his forearms, Aja?” the Jackal notes. “Still, he’s very much healthy and ready for your Carvers. All things considered.”
“You know the man better than I,” Aja says to someone else. “Make sure it is him. Not an imposter.”
“You doubt my word?” the Jackal asks. “You wound me.”
I flinch, feeling someone approach.
“Please. You’d need a heart for that, ArchGovernor. And you’ve many gifts, but that organ, I’m afraid, is dearly absent.”
“You compliment me too much.”
Spoons clatter against porcelain. Throats are cleared. I long to cover my ears. So much sound. So much information.
“You really can see the Red in him now.” It’s a cold, cultured female voice from northern Mars. More brusque than the Luna accent.
“Exactly, Antonia!” the Jackal replies. “I’ve been curious to see how he turned out. A member of the Aureate genus could never be so debased as this creature here before us. You know, he asked me for death before I put him in there. Started weeping about it. The irony is he could have killed himself whenever he chose. But he didn’t, because some part of him relished that hole. You see, Reds long ago adapted to darkness. Like worms. No pride to their rusty race. He was at home down there. More than he ever was with us.”
Now I remember hate.
I open my eyes to let them know I see them. Hear them. Yet as my eyes open, they are drawn not to my enemy, but to the winter vista that sprawls out the windows behind the Golds. There, six of the seven mountain peaks of Attica glitter in the morning light. Metal and glass buildings crest stone and snow, and yawn upward toward the blue sky. Bridges suture the peaks together. A light snow falls. It’s a blurred mirage to my nearsighted cave eyes.
“Darrow?” I know the voice. I turn my head slightly to see one of his callused hands on the edge of the table. I flinch away, thinking it will strike me. It doesn’t. But the hand’s middle finger bears the golden eagle of Bellona. The family I destroyed. The other hand belongs to the arm I cut off on Luna when we last dueled, the one that was remade by Zanzibar the Carver. Two wolfshead rings of House Mars encircle those fingers. One is mine. One his. Each worth the price of a young Gold’s life. “Do you recognize me?” he asks.
I crane my head to look up at his face. Broken I may be, but Cassius au Bellona is undimmed by war or time. More beautiful by far than memory could ever allow, he pulses with life. Over two meters tall. Cloaked in the white and gold of the Morning Knight, his coiled hair lustrous as the trail of a falling star. He’s clean-shaven, and his nose is slightly crooked from a recent break. When I meet his eyes, I do all I can to not fall into sobs. The way he looks at me is sad, nearly tender. What a shadow of myself I must be to earn pity from a man I’ve hurt so deeply.
“Cassius,” I murmur with no agenda except to say the name. To speak to another human. To be heard.
“And?” Aja au Grimmus asks from behind Cassius. The most violent of the Sovereign’s Furies wears the same armor I saw her in when first we met in the Citadel spire on Luna, the night Mustang rescued me and Aja beat Quinn to death. It’s scuffed. Battle-worn. Fear overwhelms my hate, and I look away from the dark-skinned woman yet again.
“He’s alive after all,” Cassius says quietly. He turns on the Jackal. “What did you do to him? The scars…”
“I should think it obvious,” the Jackal says. “I have unmade the Reaper.”
I finally look down at my body past my ratty beard to see what he means. I am a corpse. Skeletal and pallid. Ribs erupt from skin thinner than the film atop heated milk. Knees jut from spindly legs. Toenails have grown long and grasping. Scars from the Jackal’s torture mottle my flesh. Muscle has withered. And tubes that kept me alive in the darkness erupt from my belly, black and stringy umbilical cords still anchoring me to the floor of my cell.
“How long was he in there?” Cassius asks.
“Three months of interrogation, then nine months of solitary.”
“Nine…”
“As is fitting. War shouldn’t make us abandon metaphor. We’re not savages after all, eh, Bellona?”
“Cassius’s sensibilities are offended, Adrius,” Antonia says from her place near the Jackal. She’s a poisoned apple of a woman. Shiny and bright and promising, but rotten and cancerous to the core. She killed my friend Lea at the Institute. Put a bullet in her own mother’s head, and then two more into her sister Victra’s spine. Now she’s allied with the Jackal, a man who crucified her at the Institute. What a world. Behind Antonia stands dark-faced Thistle, once a Howler, now a member of the Jackal’s Boneriders by the looks of the jackal skull pennant on her chest. She looks at the floor instead of at me. Her captain is bald-headed Lilath, who sits at the Jackal’s right hand. His favorite personal killer ever since the Institute.
“Pardon me if I fail to see the purpose of torturing a fallen enemy,” Cassius answers. “Especially if he’s given all the information he has to give.”
“The purpose?” The Jackal stares at him, eyes quiet, as he explains. “The purpose is punishment, my goodman. This…thing presumed he belonged among us. Like he was an equal, Cassius. A superior, even. He mocked us. Bedded my sister. He laughed at us and played us for fools before we found him out. He must know it was not by chance that he lost, but inevitability. Reds have always been cunning little creatures. And he, my friends, is the personification of what they wish to be, what they will be if we let them. So I let time and darkness remake him into what he really is. A Homo flammeus, to use the new classification system I proposed to the Board. Barely different from Homo sapiens on the evolutionary timeline. The rest was just a mask.”
“You mean he made a fool of you,” Cassius parses, “when your father preferred a carved-up Red to his blood heir? That’s what this is, Jackal. The petulant shame of a boy unloved and unwanted.”
The Jackal twitches at that. Aja’s equally displeased by her young companion’s tone.
“Darrow took Julian’s life,” Antonia says. “Then slaughtered your family. Cassius, he sent killers to butcher the children of your blood as they hid on Olympus Mons. One would wonder what your mother would think of your pity.”
Cassius ignores them, jerking his head toward the Pinks at the edge of the room. “Fetch the prisoner a blanket.”
They do not move.
“Such manners. Even from you, Thistle?” She gives no answer. With a snort of contempt, Cassius strips off his white cloak and drapes it over my shivering body. For a moment, no one speaks, as struck by the act as I.