“I told you why I did that.”
“Naturally. She kills our friend. She kills Quinn, but we let her walk away for the grander scheme. Everything costs something, Darrow. Perhaps you’ll soon tire of making your friends pay.”
“That’s not fair,” Mustang says quickly. “You know it’s not.”
“What I know is we’re running out of friends,” Roque replies. “Not all of us are as tough as the Reaper. Not all of us want to be warriors.”
Of course Roque thinks this life is a choice of mine. His own childhood was one of leisure and reading, spent going back and forth between his family estate in New Thebes and the highlands of Mars. His parents didn’t believe in enhanced learning uploads, so they hired Violets and Whites to teach him pedagogically—walking and talking in peaceful pastures and beside still lakes.
“Tactus didn’t sell the violin,” Roque says after a moment.
“The one Darrow gave him?”
“Yes. The Stratovarian. He sold it, then felt so guilty he didn’t let the sale finalize with the auction house. Made them cancel the order. He was practicing in private, shaking off some of the rust. Said he wanted to surprise you with a sonata, Darrow.”
The heaviness in me deepens. Tactus was always my friend. He just got lost in trying to be the man his family wanted him to be, when all along his friends loved the man he already was. Mustang puts a hand on my lower back, knowing what I’m thinking. Roque leans down now to kiss Tactus once on the cheek and to give him a benediction.
“Better to go into that other world in the full glory of some passion than to fade and wither with age. Live fast. Die young, my wayward friend.”
Roque walks away, leaving Mustang and me alone with Tactus.
“You have to fix that,” she says of Roque. “Fix it before you’ve lost him.”
“I know,” I say. “Soon as I fix a hundred other things.”
We sit in the warroom in full council around a grand wooden table. Coffee cups and trays of food litter it. Mustang sits at my side, boots up on the table, as ever, while she explains what went wrong with her father’s mission. Kavax leans forward precariously in his seat, terrified at the idea of Augustus suffering defeat. He wrings his hands nervously, so distressed that Daxo takes Sophocles from his lap and hands her to an uncomfortable Victra. Mustang’s voice fills the room and the holo Pliny gave her comes to life above the table. A brigade of corvettes rockets silently through space toward the famed shipyards of Ganymede that ring the industrial planet mottled green, blue, and swirling white.
“He dispatched a lurcher squad of Grays concealed in the belly of two tankers. They disabled three of the defensive platform’s nuclear reactors. Then my father came in hard with his ripWings and corvettes, as is his way—burning engines and dropping munitions before curling back around.
“It was a treasure trove—some seventeen destroyers and four dreadnoughts in dry dock, most near or at completion. Supposing the ships to be manned by skeleton crews, he boarded them simultaneously. He even commanded the leechCraft that boarded the moonBreaker with his two Stained. But the ships were not manned by skeleton crews. There were no crews at all. Instead, they were loaded with Praetorians, Gray lurcher squads. And Olympic Knights.”
“And he … surrendered?” Kavax asks in panic.
Mustang laughs. “My father? He nearly cut his way free. He killed the Hearth Knight, then he ran into some of our old friends.”
The holo shows Augustus flowing through twelve Grays, like a man wading through stalks of high, dry grass. His razor sings and shrieks, sparking against the walls, sliding through men and armor till he meets another man in armor the shade of flame. The Hearth Knight. There’s a flurry of tight lunges and then red mist. A head thumps to the ground. Then two men appear. One in a sun-crested helm, the other Fitchner in his wolfhead helm. Together, the men kill the Stained and put Augustus bleeding on the ground.
Lorn looks over at me. “Lady … Mustang, who was the man in the sun-crested armor?”
> She’s silent.
“That’s the armor of the Morning Knight,” I answer. “Cassius. They must have mended his arm. Or given him a new one.”
Mustang continues. “Julii ships were also there.” She looks at Victra. “They finished my father’s forces off.”
Sevro glares at Victra, taking Sophocles from her as though she couldn’t even be trusted with the fox. “Do you feel awkward? You should.”
“We’ve been over this,” Victra says, sounding quite bored with the accusations. “My mother was threatened by the Sovereign. She’s not political. She cares about money and little else.”
“So she doesn’t care about loyalty?” Mustang asks. “Interesting.”
“Pfah. Agrippina’s a wicked bitch,” Kavax grumbles. “Always has been.”
“Careful, large one,” Victra warns. “She’s still my mother.”
Kavax crosses his burly arms. “Apologies. That she is your mother.”
“And how do we know you’re not in collusion with them, Victra?” Daxo asks softly. “Perhaps you spy? Perhaps you wait. How do you trust her loyalty, Darrow? She could easily have sent word …”