I’m scared. They cannot kill me, I cannot kill them. Not here. Not now. All of us know how this dance will end. But dance we do.
Karnus snaps his fingers and they rush toward me all at once. I throw the stone into Cagney’s face. She goes down. I rush at Karnus, howling like a mad wolf, slipping past his first blow, and rage a flurry of strikes into his nerve centers, driving my elbow into his right bicep, rupturing tissue. He rocks back, and I press into him, using his bulk to shield me from the others and their sticks. I strip a stick away from one of the Bellona cousins, leveling her with an elbow to her temple. Then I turn, spinning the stick toward Karnus’s face. But it’s blocked. Something hits the back of my head. Wood shatters. Splinters dig into the scalp. I don’t stumble. Not until Karnus hits me so hard with his elbow in my face that a tooth pops out.
They don’t take turns coming one by one. They surround me and they punish me with the efficiency of their deadly art, kravat. They aim for nerves, organs. I manage to stand, hit a few of my assailants. But I’m not long on my feet. Someone jams their stick into my spin, impacting the subcostal nerve. I drip down to the ground like melting wax and Karnus kicks me in the head.
I bite through half my tongue.
Warmth fills my mouth.
The ground is the softest thing I feel.
Choking on salt.
Blood and air spray out of my mouth as Karnus puts his foot on my stomach, then throat. “In the words of Lorn au Arcos, if you must only wound the man, you better kill his pride.”
I gurgle for breath.
Cagney replaces Karnus, sitting on my chest, knees pinning down my arms. I suck down air. She smiles in my face and looks at my hairline, lips parted with excitement of dominating another person. She twists my hair into her grip. Her hot breath smells like spearmint. “What have we here?” she asks, pulling my datapad from its place on my arm. “Dammit. He hailed the Augustans. I’d rather not fight that Julii bitch without my armor.”
“Then stop dawdling,” Karnus growls. “Do it.”
“Shh,” she whispers as I try to speak, tracing a knife over my lips, pushing it into my mouth till the brittle metal clacks against my teeth. “That’s a good little bitch.”
Roughly, she saws off my hair.
“Nice and quiet. Good Reaper. Good.”
Blood stings my eyes as Karnus shoves Cagney off my chest, grabs me and hoists me off the ground with his left hand. He flexes his right arm, cursing about his ruined bicep. He can’t pull it back to swing a punch, so instead he grins toothily at me and head-butts me once in the chest just at the sternum. My world rocks. There’s a crackle. The sound of twigs over a fire. I wheeze out bubbling, inhuman sounds. Karnus head-butts me again and tosses my aching body to the ground.
I feel warmth splash over me and the smell of piss claw into my nostrils. They laugh and Karnus breathes into my ear.
“Mother bid me to tell you: a pauper can never be a prince. Every time you look in the mirror, remember what we did to you. Remember you breathe because we let you. Remember your heart will one day be on our table. Rise so high, in mud you lie.”
4
Fallen
I stand before my master, but he does not care.
The office walls are of paneled wood, and on the floor lies an ancient rug his iron ancestor took from a palace of Earth after the fall of the Indian Empire, one of the last great nations to stand against Gold. What dread those natural-born humans must have felt to see the Conquerors falling from the sky. Man perfected, but bringing chains instead of hope.
I stand in front of Augustus’s desk, a bare thing of wood and iron, just before the seven-hundred-year-old bloodstain where the final Indian emperor had his head parted from his body by a sleek Gold killer.
Idly, Nero au Augustus strokes the lion that lies beside his desk. They look like twin statues. Behind them is space. A viewport peers into the blackness, where the ships of the Scepter Armada lie like giant golems in terrible slumber. We pass them on the last leg of our three-week voyage from Mars.
Augustus peers at his desk as a stream of data runs over the wood.
It seems so long ago that he took me on a tour of Mars to show me our domains—from the latfundias where highReds toil over crops to the great polar reaches where Obsidians live in medieval isolation. He favored me then, bringing me close, teaching me the things his father taught him. I was his favorite, second only to Leto. Now he is a stranger, and I, an embarrassment.
It’s been two months since the day Karnus beat me at the Academy. Though my hair has grown back and my broken bones have mended, my reputation has not. And because of that, my tenure in ArchGovernor Augustus’s employ is tenuous, at best. My enemies grow by the day. But these new ones prefer whispers to razors.
More and more do I believe the Sons of Ares chose the wrong man. I am not made for the cold war of politics. Not made for subtlety. Hell, I’d hide a boy in the gut of a horse any day, but I wouldn’t know how to bribe someone properly if my life depended on it.
A gentle, warm voice made for half-truths drifts through the ArchGovernor’s office. “Three refineries. Two nightclubs. And two Gray police outposts. All bombed since we left Mars. Seven attacks, my liege. Fifty-nine Gold fatalities.”
Pliny. Slender as a salamander, with skin as smooth as a Pink’s. The Politico is no Peerless Scarred, never even went to the Institute. His glittering eyes peer out from eyelashes that would put peacock plumage to shame. Muted lipstick coats thin lips. His hair is coiled and scented. His body thin, but muscular in a pleasing but utterly fascile way beneath a too-tight embroidered silk tunic. A child could beat the living hell out of this beautiful kitten of a man. Yet he’s ended families with a rumor here, a joke there. His power is a different breed. Where I am kinetic energy, he is potential.
I’ve heard he’s also responsible for ruining my reputation. Tactus even hinted that Pliny might have put Karnus up to the violence in the garden, or at the very least, arranged a holoCam to record my proud moment.
Beside Pliny stands the fourth man in the room, Leto. He’s a bright lancer ten years my senior with braided hair and a half-moon grin. He’s also a poet with the razor, a younger Lorn au Arcos, according to some. It’s likely he’ll inherit Augustus’s estate instead of the ArchGovernor’s blood heirs—Mustang and the Jackal. I rather like the man.
“The Sons of Ares grow too bold,” Augustus mutters.