“I need no bonus,” Volga says.
Dano sighs. “You ain’t helping the cause, love.”
“What the shit is your damage?” Cyra glares at Dano past Volga between them. “Always jacking on about my business? Why don’t you tend your own and focus on catching diseases from Pink slips.”
I lurch to my feet. “All right, this was fun. Try not to catch anything.”
“And he’s out like a Drachenjäger.” Dano checks his newest shiny chronometer. This one has rubies embedded in the hands. “Two minutes flat.”
“When’s the next job?” Cyra asks.
“Yeah, boss,” Dano says. “When’s the next job? Cyra’s got bills to pay.”
r /> She flips him the crux and stares at me with more desperation than she probably means to show. It’s pitiful. “So? Your man’s got another job, right?”
“Not this time. We’re all done.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said.” Seeing rain slithering down the windows, I pop the collar of my jacket.
“Ephraim,” Volga says plaintively. “You just arrived. Stay for a drink. We can order you something else?” She stares up at me with those big mopey eyes, and for a moment I consider it, until I hear a telltale hush of the patrons and turn to see two towering figures emerge from outside through the dirigible’s metal door. Golds. They wear black jackets with legion epaulets, their shoulders eclipsing the heads of the other patrons. They blithely survey the room with entitled eyes, before one of them catches sight of Dano’s Pink and strides to the bar. The others make room and he introduces himself without a care in the world. There’s an iron griffin pin on his chest. Arcos spawn. Dano’s eyes go down as the Gold’s hand drifts to the Pink’s waist.
“Boss…” Dano says, eyeing me warily.
I realize my hand has drifted to the butt of the pistol under my jacket.
Bloodydamn Aureate. We should have purged the lot of them, or exiled them to the Core. But that chance is gone. All for the war effort.
“Just one drink, Ephraim,” Volga says plaintively. “It will be fun. We can tell each other stories. And share jokes, as friends do.”
“It’s always the same story!”
As I leave the dirigible in the gravLift, the warm laughter of one of the Gold youths chases me down into the night.
THE BAKING SAND WARMS MY FEET. They’re smaller than I remember. Paler. And the gulls that careen overhead much larger, much fiercer as they spin and dive into the water of a sea so blue I cannot tell where ocean ends and sky begins. Gentle waves call to me. I’ve been here before, but I cannot remember when or how I came to be on this beach.
A man and woman are in the distance, their feet leaving slender paths that the waves, in time, slowly devour, step by step, then all at once till they are gone as if they were never there. I call to them. They begin to turn, but I do not see their faces. I never do. Something is behind me, casting a shadow over them, over the sand, darkening the beach and the sea as the wind builds to a feral howl.
My body jerks awake.
I’m alone. Far from the beach, drenched in sweat upon my sleeping pallet. A ventilator whirs rhythmically in the dimness of my room and I shudder a breath. The fear fades. It was just a dream.
Above me on the bulkhead, the words of my fallen house glare down at me, etched into the metal. LUX EX TENEBRIS. “Light from darkness.” And spinning outward from those words like the spokes of a wheel are the idealist poems of youth, the wrathful, slashing script of adolescence, when I was all blood and fury and ruled by wilder passions. Then, finally, the first fledgling steps of wisdom as I began to realize how terrifyingly small I really am.
My father never seemed small. I remember him and his immense calm. The smile lines around his eyes. His unruly hair, his slender hands, how they sat folded in his lap when he listened. There was a vast, settled peace inside him, a tranquility given to him by his father, Lorn au Arcos, who stressed duty and honor under the banner of the griffin. Lost things to this world. Though somewhere out there, the griffin still flies.
My memory is a formidable thing. In many ways it is my grandmother’s great legacy, her teachings preserved in me. Despite that, my mother’s face is a night shade in my mind, always roving in the chasms, slipping beyond my grasp. I’ve heard she was wild, a woman of vast ambition. But history is so often molded from tainted clay by those who remain. I know more of her from my grandmother’s mouth than from my own memory. Such was my grandmother’s grief after her passing that no servant was permitted to speak her name aloud. Who was she? The few pictures I’ve found on the holoNet are all obscured, taken from a distance. As if she were a figment even cameras could not capture. Now time erodes her face in my mind like waves did the footprints in the sand.
I was young when my parents’ starship went down over the sea. They say it was terrorists. Outriders from the Rim.
Only when I read the few poems my mother left behind in her notebooks do I feel her heart beat against my spine. Her arms wrapped around my shoulders. Her breath in my hair. I sense that strange magic of her that my father so loved.
“The night terrors again?” The voice of my teacher startles me. He stands looking into my room, Golden eyes dark pools in the starship’s night-cycle lighting. His powerful shoulders fill the doorway and he bends at the neck, wary of the low doorframe. The engines hum soothingly beyond my small metal room. The place had space enough when I was a boy. But twenty now, I feel like a potted plant spilling root and limb from a cracking clay bowl. Books fill the spaces between my bunk, tiny closet, and lavatory. Salvaged, stolen, purchased, and found over the last ten years. My new prize, a third edition of the The Aeronaut, sits by my bedside.
“Just a dream,” I say, wary of showing vulnerability in his eyes because I know how young the Martian still thinks I am. I swing my slender legs from the bed and bind my mess of hair behind my head with a band. “Have we arrived?”
“Just.”