“Do you remember a chair?” I say nothing. “Octavia had many monstrous machines. But none so cruel as the chair. She called it Pandemonium. With it, she could…pervert the mind. When she discovered Anastasia’s treason, she swore she would erase her from history. She did not succeed in that. But she did steal her from you. Lysander, after your mother died, you were inconsolable. She was a good mother. She loved you more than anything in the worlds. Octavia grew jealous. After two weeks in the chair, her work was done, and you didn’t cry anymore.”
I wish I did not believe it, but I do. What else could erase the face of a mother from the memory of her only son? I feel myself struggling to breathe. It was not enough to rob me of my childhood, not enough to rob me of my parents. She robbed me of the one thing that is mine. The one thing that no one should ever be able to take away.
“Did Aja know?”
“Know? She nearly broke her oath to Octavia over it. Atalantia didn’t bat an eye. She is a monster. Yet I swore an oath to serve Magnus, and when he found he was dying, he made me swear an oath to her.” Kalindora swallows. “I am a monster. I know that. I turned my back on the covenants of the Olympics, on my own heart. But I will not die a monster. I won’t let her devour you. She cannot sit upon the Morning Chair. She must not. She would burn the worlds so long as the ashes kneel.”
I stand, unable to look at Kalindora.
“I wasn’t strong enough to make a stand. But when you came back…I knew it was time. That is why I called the Praetorians.” She reaches for my hand. “You are the Sovereign, the last heir of Silenius, the last hope of Gold, and you are good. What are the chances? You can repair what Darrow and Octavia broke. Make all this horror be for something. Fix what is broken in our people, Lysander. I know it won’t be easy. And I am sorry I cannot be there to help you. Keep Rhone and Atlas close. He loved your father and mother too much for Octavia to ever tell him the truth, so she sent him to the Kuiper, thinking he would never return. He will protect you with his life.”
I can’t take any more. I head for the door.
“Do your duty!” she says. “Do your duty or the worlds will burn.”
I leave the room, a hollow avatar of myself, and find Atalantia smiling at me from amidst the Golds, waiting to say farewell to the hero. She motions me to come to her, and I do. I smile and laugh beside my lover, the killer of my mother, and later that night as I sit across from her at supper as she gloats over the wreck her creatures have made of the Republic’s Senate, and Darrow’s heart. We receive word that Kalindora has died.
We attend the spectacle of her sunburial on the Annihilo. The honor guard of Praetorians, led by White ceremonial virgins, carries her casket to a burial gun set in the main hangar, which fires her toward the sun. Rhone stands at attention, Atalantia weeps, Atlas does not speak, Ajax wavers in rage, almost too drunk to stand as he glares at me with such hatred it is a wonder he does not call me out then and there as Atalantia gives the benediction with glassy eyes.
That night, she sends for me.
I have no choice but to go.
I find her weeping in her meditation chamber. I console her, and we stare at the mural of our family, at the blurred face of my mother, as Atalantia kisses my neck and whispers in my ear for me to take her pain away and take her to bed.
When she is done with me, she turns over to sleep, and I lie there staring at the ceiling feeling dead inside.
“DEJAH THORIS, THIS IS PHOBOS COMMAND. Your approach vector is prime. Welcome home, our Sovereign.”
There is a small vault in my heart where certain words are guarded like fragile artifacts. Family, home, love, son, husband, brother. My enemies have cracked the vault open, ransacked it, and defecated on its floor.
Home. I don’t recognize that word anymore. It has been violated. I have been violated.
A corner of my heart was always reserved for my twin, despite all his failings. Now, the existence of Lilath’s Abomination eats at me. The Abomination has Sevro, Mercury has fallen, my husband is still missing with Cassius, and I have fled to Mars. It was the only choice; our failure to come together until too late robbed us of any alternatives.
I left Sevro and Clown and Pebble.
I left my husband to die.
It was Cassius Kavax sent for him. The man was found in his deepspace corvette. The communications equipment had been destroyed and his ship barely managed to limp back to Mars. The details of his escape from his Rim imprisonment are fuzzy at best. But it seems he was spared from execution by one of Romulus’s sons. He was secluded in a private estate on Europa to be released when the war ended. He broke out, and stole his ship back to escape. After delivering the news to Kavax, he offered his service to the Republic.
I never thought I’d hear that in all my life.
I watch out the viewport of the Dejah Thoris as forty nimble corvettes form an honor lotus before our fleet and head back to the outer picket line. I don’t deserve it. While Cassius plunged into the heart of the enemy for Darrow with only a small strike team, I had an armada and I ran away. It was the right choice. But those are the ones that age you.
Ahead, the blue ion tails of our honor guard await. Thirty crimson Ecliptic Guard torchShips guide us toward Mars’s defensive sphere. First through roving patrols, then a ten-thousand-meter gulf followed by thickets of minefields and light cannon array, then the hunting grounds for attack squadrons of destroyers and torchShips, and finally into the realm of the apex predators—the defense platforms, the dreadnoughts and their battle groups.
Mars has rallied for its Sovereign.
“The loyal stand ready, ma’am,” Holiday says from my shoulder.
“But will they be enough, Nakamura?”
She is not used to hearing doubt in my voice. Nor do I often allow it to intrude. But I feel a kinship with the commando that has deepened these last days as our shared dream crumbles around us. She took the news of Ephraim’s death stoically, but I know it eats at her. Just as I may be free from the Abomination’s grasp, but I am yet enslaved by the work undone, the enemies unvanquished, the friends unsaved, and the mistakes I made.
Could I have gone for Darrow? Or was the Rim waiting to clo
se the trap and pin me against the Ash Armada?