“Screw this.” Holiday reaches for her datapad.
Trigg tries to stop her. “Ares said it was only for emergencies. If they hack the signal…”
“Look at him. This is an emergency.” Holiday strips her datapad and tosses it to me. A call is going through to another device. Blinking blue on the display, waiting for the other side to answer. As I turn it in my hand, a hologram of a spiked sunburst helmet suddenly blossoms into the air, small as my clenched fist. Red eyes glow out balefully from the helmet.
“Fitchner?”
“Guess again, shithead,” the voice warbles.
It can’t be.
“Sevro?” I almost whimper the word.
“Oy, boyo, you look like you slithered out of a skeleton’s rickety cooch.”
“You’re alive…,” I say as the holographic helmet slithers away to reveal my hatchet-faced friend. He smiles with those hacksaw teeth. Image flickering.
“Ain’t no Pixie in the worlds that can kill me.” He cackles. “Now it’s time you come home, Reap. But I can’t come to you. You gotta come to me. You register?”
“How?” I wipe the tears from my eyes.
“Trust my Sons. Can you do that?”
I look at the brother and sister and nod. “The Jackal…he has my family.”
“That cannibalistic bitch ain’t got shit. I got your family. Grabbed them from Lykos after you got snagged. Your mother’s waiting to see you.” I start crying again. The relief too much to bear.
“But you gotta sack up, boyo. And you gotta move.” He looks sideways at someone. “Gimme back to Holiday.” I do. “Make it clean if you can. Escalate if you can’t. Register?”
“Register.”
“Break the chains.”
“Break the chains,” the Grays echo as his image flickers out.
“Look past our Color,” Holiday says to me. She reaches a tattooed hand down. I stare at the Gray Sigils etched into her flesh, then look up to search her freckled, bluff face. One of her eyes is bionic, and does not blink like the other. Eo’s words sound so different from her mouth. Yet I think it’s the moment my soul comes back to me. Not my mind. I still feel the cracks in it. The slithering, doubting darkness. But my hope. I clutch her smaller hand desperately.
“Break the chains,” I echo hoarsely. “You’ll have to carry me.” I look at my worthless legs. “Can’t stand.”
“That’s why we brought you a little cocktail.” Holiday pulls up a syringe.
“What is it?” I ask.
Trigg just laughs. “Your oil change. Seriously, friend, you really don’t want to know.” He grins. “Shit will animate a corpse.”
“Give it to me,” I say, holding out my wrist.
“It’s gonna hurt,” Trigg warns.
“He’s a big boy.” Holiday comes closer.
“Sir…” Trigg hands me one of his gloves. “Between your teeth.”
A little less confident, I bite down on the salt-stained leather and nod to Holiday. She lunges past my wrist to jam the syringe straight into my heart. Metal punctures meat as the payload releases.
“Holy shit!” I try to scream, but it comes out as a gurgle. Fire cavorts through my veins, my heart a piston. I look down, expecting to see it galloping out of my bloodydamn chest. I feel every muscle. Every cell of my body exploding, pulsing with kinetic energy. I dry-heave. I fall, clawing at my chest. Panting. Spitting bile. Punching the floor. The Grays scramble back from my twisting body. I strike out at the chair, half ripping it from its bolted place in the floor. I let out a stream of curses that’d make Sevro blush. Then I tremble and look up at them. “What…was…that?”
Holiday tries not to laugh. “Mamma calls it snakebite. Only gonna last thirty minutes with your metabolism.”
“Your mamma made that?”
Trigg shrugs. “We’re from Earth.”
They escort me like a prisoner through the halls. Hood on my head. Hands behind my back in unlocked manacles. Brother on my left, sister on my right, both supporting me. The snakebite lets me walk, but not well. My body, jacked with drugs as it is, still feels slack as wet clothes. I can barely feel my busted toe or feeble legs. My thin prisoner’s shoes scrape the floor. My head swims, but there’s a hyper speed to my brain now. It’s focused mania. I chew my tongue to keep from whispering, and to remind myself that I am not in the darkness like before. My body is shuffling down a concrete hall. It is walking toward freedom. Toward my family, toward Sevro.
No one here will stop two dragoons of the Thirteenth, not when they have clearance and Aja herself is here. I doubt many in the Jackal’s army know I’m even alive. They’ll see my size, my ghostly pallor, and think I’m some unlucky Obsidian prisoner. Still, I feel the eyes. Paranoia creeping through me. They know. They know you’ve left bodies behind. How long till they open that door? How long till we are discovered? My brain races through the possible ends. How it could all go wrong. The drugs. It’s just the drugs.
“Shouldn’t we be going up?” I ask as we descend on a gravLift deeper into the heart of the mountain citadel’s prison. “Or is there a lower hangar bay?”
“Good guess, sir,” Trigg says, impressed. “We’ve got a ship waiting.”
Holiday pops her gum. “Trigg, you’ve got some brown on your nose. Just…there.”
“Oh, shut your hole. I’m not the one who blushed when he was naked.”
“Sure about that, kiddo? Quiet.” The gravLift slows and the siblings tense. Hear their hands click the safeties off their weapons. The doors open and someone joins us.
“Dominus,” Holiday says smoothly to the new company, shoving me to the side to make room. The boots that enter are heavy enough for a Gold or Obsidian, but Grays would never call an Obsidian dominus, and an Obsidian would never smell like cloves and cinnamon.
“Sergeant.” The voice scrapes through me. The man it belongs to once made necklaces of ears. Vixus. One of Titus’s old band. He was part of the massacre at my Triumph. I shrink into the side of the gravLift as it descends again. Vixus will know me. He’ll sniff me out. He’s doing it now, looking our way. I can hear the rustle of his jacket collar. “Thirteenth legion?” Vixus asks after a moment. He must have noticed their neck tattoos. “You Aja’s or her father’s?”
“The Fury’s, for this tour, dominus,” Holiday replies coolly. “But we’ve served under the Ash Lord.”
“Ah, then you were at the Battle of Deimos last year?”
“Yes, dominus. We were with Grimmus in the leechCraft vanguard sent to kill the Telemanuses before Fabii routed them and Arcos’s ships. My brother here put a round in old Kavax’s shoulder. Almost took him down before Augustus and Kavax’s wife broke our assault team.”
“My, my.” Vixus makes a sound of approval. “That would have been a gorydamn prize and a half. You could have added another tear to your face, legionnaire. I’ve been hunting that Obsidian dog with the Seventh. Ash Lord’s offered quite the price for his slave’s return.” He snorts something up his nose. Sounds like one of the stim canisters Tactus was so fond of. “Who’s this, then?”
He means me.
I hear my heart in my ears.
“A gift from Praetor Grimmus in exchange for…the package she’s taking home,” Holiday says. “If you understand me, sir.”
“Package. Half a package, more like.” He chuckles at his own joke. “Anyone I know?” His hand touches the edge of my hood. I cower away. “A Howler would warm the heart. Pebble? Weed? No, much too tall.”
“An Obsidian,” Trigg says quickly. “Wish it was a Howler.”