foot taller than I. Each garbed in purple and black and carrying pulseAxes and pulseBlades. Their faces hide behind bonelike masks. Eyes of killers grown in the arctic poles of Earth and Mars stare out at me. Glittering black, like oil. I pull my razor and take my battle stance. Their throat-sung war chant rumbles under their masks, like the funeral dirge for a dead god.
“Go on. Sing to your gods.” I twirl my razor. “I’ll send you to meet them.”
“Reaper, please stop,” Lysander calls loudly. I turn to find him walking toward me, hands splayed plaintively. His coat is simple and black. He stands half my height.
His voice floats. Trembles like a delicate bird’s.
“I have watched all your videos, Reaper. Six, maybe seven times. Even the Academy. My tutors believe you are the closest man to the Iron Golds since Lorn au Arcos, the Stoneside.”
That’s when I realize why he’s looked so nervous. I almost laugh. I’m this little bastard’s boyhood hero.
“We need not see you die tonight. Could you not find a home here as you found with Sevro? With Roque and Tactus, and Pax, the Howlers, and all your great warriors? We have warriors too. You could lead them. But …” He steps back. “If you fight, then you die because you make the mistake of believing righteousness puts you beyond my grandmother’s power.”
“It does,” I say.
“Reaper, there is no place beyond her power.”
This is how it happens. They give them heroes. They raise them on lies and violence, and then they let them grow into monsters. What would he be without their guiding hand?
“He wanted to see you,” the Sovereign says. “I told him legend never matches fact. Better not to meet your heroes.”
“And what do you think?” I ask little Lysander.
“It all depends on your next choice,” he says delicately.
“Join us, Darrow,” Fitchner drawls. “This is the place for you now. Augustus is done.”
Smiling inwardly, I relax my blade. Lysander clenches a fist happily. I pace with him back to his grandmother, playing along but not yet proclaiming any allegiance.
“You’re always telling me to bow,” I tell Fitchner as I pass.
He shrugs. “Because I don’t want you to break, boyo.”
“Lysander, fetch me my box,” the Sovereign says. Happily, the boy rushes out of the room as I sit across from his grandmother. “I fear the Institute taught you the wrong lesson—that you can overcome anything if you but try. That is incorrect. In the real world, you must go along. You must cooperate and compromise. You cannot bend the worlds to your morals.”
“Why the hell not?”
She sighs. “Your pride is uglier than you think.”
Lysander returns moments later, carrying a small wooden box. He hands it to his grandmother and waits patiently by her side, eating a tart that Aja hands him. The Sovereign sets the box on the table.
“You value trust. So do I. Let us play a game absent weapons, absent armor. No Praetorians. No lies. No falsity. Just us and our naked truths.”
“Why?”
“If you win, you may request anything of me. If I win, I get the same.”
“If I ask for the head of Cassius?”
“I will saw it off myself. Now open the box.”
I lean forward. Chair creaking. Rain patters on the windows. Lysander smiles. Aja watches my hands. And Fitchner, like me, has no idea what’s in the bloodydamn box.
I open it.
15
Truth