—
Later that day, as the doctors tend to Antonia, the Sons go through Thistle’s personal effects in her suite aboard the torchShip, the Typhon. Under a false bottom in a cabinet, they find the stinking, cured fur of a wolf. Sevro chokes up when Screwface brings it to him.
“Thistle cut her down,” Clown says as the remaining original Howlers loiter around the room. Mustang gives them space, watching from the wall. Pebble, Screwface, and Sevro are with us. “When Antonia was crucified by the Jackal at the Institute, Thistle cut her down.”
“I’d forgotten,” I say from her desk.
Sevro snorts. “What a world.”
“Remember when you had her fight Lea when Lea couldn’t skin the sheep? Trying to make her tough,” Pebble says with a little laugh. Sevro laughs too.
“Why are you laughing?” Clown asks. “You were still off eating mushrooms and howling at the moon back then.”
“I was watching,” Sevro says. “I was always watching.”
“That’s creepy, boss,” Screwface says drolly. “What were you doing while you were watching?”
“Wanking in the bushes, obviously,” I say.
Sevro grunts. “Only when everyone was asleep.”
“Gross.” Pebble wrinkles her nose and tucks the Howler cloak in her pack. “Howl on, little Thistle.” The kindness in her eyes is almost too much to bear. There’s no recrimination. No anger. Just the absence of a friend. Reminds me how much I love these people. Clown and Pebble leave hand in hand, Screwface taunting them all the while. I smile at the sight as Sevro and I linger behind. Mustang still hasn’t moved from her place at the wall.
“What did Victra mean when she said ‘told you’?” I ask.
Sevro glances at Mustang. “Ah it doesn’t matter anymore.” He acts like he’s going to leave, but hesitates. “She called it off.”
“It?” I ask.
“Us.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry, Sevro,” Mustang says. “She’s going through a lot right now.”
“Yeah.” He leans against the wall. “Yeah. It’s my fault, prolly. Told her…” He makes a face. “I told her I…loved her before the battle. Know what she said?”
“Thank you?” Mustang guesses.
He flinches. “Naw. She just said I was an idiot. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I just read too much into it. Just got excited, you know.” He looks at the ground, thinking. Mustang nods at me to say something.
“Sevro, you’re a lot of things. You’re smelly. You’re small. Your tattoo taste is questionable. Your pornographic proclivities are…uh, eccentric. And you’ve got really weird toenails.”
He swivels to look at me. “Weird?”
“They’re really long, mate. Like…you should trim them.”
“Nah. They’re good for hanging on to things.”
I squint at him, not sure if he’s joking, and carry on as best I can. “I’m just saying, you’re a lot of things, boyo. But you are not an idiot.”
He makes no sign of having heard me. “She thinks she had poison in her veins. That’s what she was talking about in the brig. Said she’d just ruin everything. So better just to cut it off.”
“She’s just scared,” Mustang says. “Especially after what just happened.”
“You mean what’s happening…” He sits against the wall and leans his head back against it. “Startin’ to feel like a prophecy. Death begets death begets death….”
“We won at Jupiter…,” I say.
“We can win every battle and still lose the war,” Sevro mutters. “The Jackal’s got something up his sleeve and Octavia’s only wounded. Scepter Armada is bigger than the Sword Armada, and they’ll pull the fleets from Venus and Mercury. We’ll be outnumbered three to one. People are gonna die. Probably most of the people we know.”
Mustang smiles. “Unless we change the paradigm.”
After Mustang details the broad strokes of her plan to us and we finish laughing, analyzing and dissecting its flaws, she leaves us to ruminate on it and departs to rejoin the rest of the fleet with the Telemanuses. We stay behind with Victra and the Howlers to interrogate Antonia and oversee ship repair.
The beautiful Antonia is a thing of the past. The damage she suffered was superficially catastrophic. Left orbital bone pulverized. Nose flattened, crushed so brutally they had to pull it out of her nasal cavity with forceps. Mouth so swollen it makes a hissing sound as air goes between her shattered front teeth. Whiplash and severe concussion. The ship doctors thought she was in a ship crash until they found the imprint of House Jupiter’s lightning crest in several places on her face.
“Marked by justice,” I say. Sevro rolls his eyes. “What? I can be funny.”
“Keep practicing.”
When I question Antonia, her left eye is a swollen black mass. The right peers out at me in rage, but she cooperates. Perhaps now because she thinks threats against her carry a bit of merit, and that her sister is just waiting to finish the job.
According to her, the Jackal’s last communiqué stated he was making preparations for our attack on Mars. He gathers his fleet around retaken Phobos and recalls Society ships from The Can and other naval depots. Similarly, there’s an exodus of Gold, Silver, and Copper ships away from Mars to Luna or Venus, which have become refugee centers for disenfranchised patricians. Like London during the first French Revolution or New Zealand after the Third World War when the continents brimmed with radioactivity.
The problem with Antonia’s information is that it’s difficult to verify. Impossible really, with long range and intra-planetary communication essentially back to the stone age. For all we know the Jackal might have prepared contingency information for her to give us in case she was captured under duress. If she uses that information and we act on it, we could easily be falling into a trap. Thistle would have been crucial to our understanding of information. Antonia’s murder of her was horrific, but tactically very efficient.
Holiday joins me on the bridge of the Pandora as I try to make that contact. I sit cross-legged on the forward observation post attempting to log in to Quicksilver’s digital dataDrop again. It’s late night ship-time. Lights dimmed. Skeleton crew of Blues manning the pit below guiding us back to the rendezvous with the main fleet. Shadowy asteroids rotate in the distance. Holiday plops down beside me.
“Fortify thyself,” she says, handing me a tin coffee mug.
“That’s nice of you,” I say in surprise. “Can’t sleep either?”
“Nah. Hate ships actually. Don’t laugh.”
“That’s gotta be inconvenient for a Legionnaire.”
“Tell me about it. Half of being a soldier is being able to sleep anywhere.”
“And the other half?”
“Being able to shit anywhere, wait, and to accept stupid orders without going manic.” She taps the deck. “It’s the engine hum. Reminds me of wasps.” She wiggles off her boots. “You mind?”
“Go on.” I sip the coffee. “This is whiskey.”
“You catch on quick.” She winks at me boyishly.
She nods to the datapad in my hands. “Still nothin’?”
“Asteroids are bad enough, but Society is jamming everything they can.”
“Well, Quicksilver gave them a run for it.”
We sit quietly together. Hers isn’t a naturally soothing presence, but it’s the easy one of a woman raised in the agriculture backcountry where your reputation’s only as good as your word and your hunting dog. We’re not alike in many ways, but there’s a chip on her shoulder I understand.
“Sorry about your friend,” she says.