“You should have killed Cassius or sent him away,” Mustang tells me.
“Would have thought you nobler than that,” I say.
“I like to win. Family trait. And sometimes cheating is in the rule-book.” She smiles. “You get a merit bar every time you recapture your standard. So I arranged for it to be lost to House Diana by someone else several times. Then rode out to capture it. Got to Primus in a week.”
“Tricky. Yet your army liked you,” I say.
“Everyone likes me. Now eat your damn rabbit. You’re skinny as a razor.”
The winter grows colder. We live in the deep north woods, far north of Ceres, northwest of my former highlands. I have not yet seen a soldier of Mars. I don’t know what I would do if I did.
“I’ve hidden from everyone but you,” Mustang says. “It keeps me alive and ticking.”
“What’s your plan?” I ask.
She laughs at herself. “To be alive and ticking.”
“You’re better at it than I am.”
“How do you mean?”
“No one in your House would have betrayed you.”
“Because I didn’t rule like you,” she says. “You have to remember, people don’t like being told what to do. You can treat your friends like servants and they’ll love you, but you tell them they’re servants and they’ll kill you. Anyway, you put too much stock in hierarchy and fear.”
“Me?”
“Who else? I could spot it a mile away. All you cared about was your mission, whatever it is. You’re like a driven arrow with a very depressing shadow. First time I met you, I knew you’d cut my throat to get whatever it is you want.” She waits for a moment. “What is it that you want, by the way?”
“To win,” I say.
“Oh, please. You’re not that simple.”
“You think you know me?” The coals crackle in our small fire.
“I know you cry in your sleep for a girl named Eo. Sister? Or a girl you loved? It is a very off Color name. Like yours.”
“I’m a farplanet hayseed. Didn’t they tell you?”
“They wouldn’t tell me anything. I don’t get out much. Strict father.” She waves a hand. “Anyway, doesn’t matter. All that matters is that no one trusts you because it’s obvious you care more about your goal than you do about them.”
“And you’re something different?”
“Oh, very much so, Sir Reaper. I like people more than you do. You are the wolf that howls and bites. I am the mustang that nuzzles the hand. People know they can work with me. With you? Hell, kill or be killed.”
She’s right.
When I had a tribe, I did it right. I made every boy and every girl love me. Made them earn their keep. I taught them how to kill a goat as if I knew how. I gave them fire as if I had created the matches. I shared a secret with them—that we had food and Titus didn’t. They saw me as their father. I remember it in their eyes. When Titus was alive, I was a symbol of goodness and hope. Then when he died … I became him.
“Sometimes I forget that the Institute is meant to teach me things,” I say to Mustang.
The golden girl tilts her head at me. “Like how we must live for more?”
Her words strike my heart. They echo through time from another’s lips. Live for more. More than power. More than vengeance. More than what we’re given.
I must learn better than them, not simply beat them. That is how I will help Reds. I am a boy. I am foolish. But if I learn to become a leader, I can be more than an agent of the Sons of Ares. I can give my people a future. That is what Eo wanted.
Deep winter. The wolves are hungry now. They howl in the night. When Mustang and I make a kill, we sometimes have to scare them off. But when we kill a caribou at dusk, a pack descends from the northlands. They come from the trees like dark specters. Shadows. The biggest of them is my size. His fur is white. The fur of the others is gray, no longer black. These wolves change with the season. I watch how they surround us. Each moves with individual cunning. Yet each moves as part of the pack.