Page 246 of Light Bringer
“Of course you are,” Sevro says.
Athena grimaces after Diomedes. “Since I’m sending our fleet with you, Darrow, if his people turn on us, they’ll be able to wipe us out in a week,” she says.
“But they won’t,” Aurae says. “They need us too now.”
“You sure you don’t want to come with?” Sevro asks Athena. “Just in case?”
“I am not a warrior, and this is my home. The people need me more now than ever. Cheon will have to do,” she replies.
“If that’s the case…” I unwrap Pyrphoros from my arm. Aurae laughs.
Athena ignores the blade and peers up at the falling ash. “The Garter will take decades to rebuild. Without the croplands of the Core, we’ll starve out here. Maybe not this year. But the one after? Raa knows it. I know it. So you have to win, lads. Martian grain. Martian fruit. Martian cows and pigs. That’s your sentence. Feed us, and don’t break all my ships.”
With a nod to Aurae, she turns to head back to the refugee camp.
Sevro bumps Aurae’s shoulder with a fist. “Will miss your songs,” he says. “For a while they were the only thing that could make me feel anything.” Without waiting for a reply, he swivels away and heads for thePandora.
I face Aurae. “It’s been a journey,” I mumble. “I wanted to say thank you. For bringing us here. For giving meThe Path to the Vale. I was spiraling. People have saved my life before, but I think you saved my soul.”
“And you saved Cassius’s,” she says. “It wasn’t me that did it. I liked him very much. In another life, I might have loved him. But he didn’t need a woman’s love. He needed a brother’s. The way he talked about you. Well…” Her eyes swim with tears. “Lysander was an obligation. You were an aspiration. He was so afraid on our journey to the Core. So nervous to see you and be rejected. But when he saw you respected him, valued him, he shined like a star. His path led back to you, because you made him feel loved. That is all that matters, Darrow. When he died, heknew he was loved. So when you think of him, when you feel sad, remember that.” She kisses me on the cheek. “If we do not meet again, I will see you in the Vale with Cassius. You know the path.”
—
It is a strange mismatched fleet that departs Io. Not just because the Obsidian ships are hulking juggernauts while the Athenian vessels are lean lightning. It is the people on the ships too. The ships the Daughters stole or built themselves are understaffed and, while rich with crafty specialists and brigades of Black Owls, are short of meaningful infantry that can challenge the Ash Legions. The Obsidian ships, while rich with quality infantry, are riven by animosity between the crews and the returning Volk. The Blues and Oranges and Reds on those ships will never forget the treatment they faced under Fá’s rule, nor should they. Once they were hired contractors serving under Sefi’s generous hand, then they were slaves again to the very braves who called them colleagues. Only my tearful petition, the threat to Mars, and Volga’s immediate reforms keep the lowColor crews from using their newfound freedom to sabotage or abandon the ships. Still I imagine most of them will hate the Obsidians for the rest of their lives.
It is good Lysander did not want to fight our fleet. We have no cohesion yet and would have lost despite our advantage in numbers. I hope on the journey home Sevro and I can form the ragtag fleet into a fighting force that can combine with the Republic ships not grounded on Mars to help turn the tide. I know it will be an uphill struggle.
On a journey full of surprises, it seems the Rim has yet one more in store for us. Twelve hours out from Io, we receive a hail from a ship that thePandora’s scanners cannot see.
It is theArchimedes.
—
My heart is heavy as I walk toward the ship with Sevro. Each step up the ramp reminds me of a friend I’ve lost. Eo.Thunk.Ragnar.Thunk.Orion.Thunk.Dancer.Thunk.There are less steps to reach the top of the ramp than I have dead friends to list. They all drift away when I enter the ship with Sevro. It is empty and quiet. The inspection teams have come and gone. If Lysander left a trap, it is in human form. Pytha, the former co-pilot of theArchimedesand former captain of theLightbringer,waits for me in thePandora’s brig.
Sevro lets me enter alone. I wander. I see Cassius everywhere I go—hunched over its controls in the cockpit pretending not to be nervous, navigating its halls with his too-wide shoulders, giving his toast in the commissary, grinning down at me from the training room as he puts me on the floor again. But when I stand before the door to his room, the only room in the ship I’ve never been inside, I feel his absence. The cold of the ship. And I know I have to face him.
Cassius’s body is stored in the cargo hold. He lies within a funeral torpedo stamped with the sigil of his house. Lysander’s last grace for the man who became his surrogate father, brother, family. Cassius is dressed in his favorite pale blue tunic with the ink stain on the cuff and a storm cloak. His family razor lies spooled on his chest. His face and hands have been cleaned and dressed with preserving oils, but the wounds and contusions and the purple kiss of the rope cannot hide the violent way he met his end. He hardly looks like the same man I knew. My hand trembles as it touches his hair, the only part of him that escaped the brutality of Lysander. His hair is no less golden now that he is dead. A single sob comes out of me, followed by tears and silence. Cassius had a heart like Eo, though it took him longer to find it. I wish he’d found it sooner. I don’t know how long I stand there thinking not of the past but all the life he had yet to live now that he’d become the man I always hoped he would be.
Footsteps bring me back into my body. I hurt all over. I wipe my face and look up to see Sevro. He looks at Cassius with the same annoyance he first looked at him sixteen years ago. “The Blue says he killed Atlas.”
“A poor trade,” I reply.
“Yut. Bloodydamn Bellona. The Man Who Killed Fear. Gods we’re gonna hear that song in all the bars when we’re fat and old. Shit. Is that…” He walks to the far wall and holds up a helmet. “Da’s main helm.” He shoves it on his head. “Fits like a glove. Man. Still stinks like Fitch too.” He turns to me. “I just realized it could be booby-trapped.”
“I had them check the helmet, Sevro.”
“Good. Whew. Ugh, the thought of Lune snooping in my room. Disgusting.” He goes quiet and takes the helmet off. He looks down at it, one of his only mementos of his father, then puts it with Cassius between his feet. He touches Cassius’s leg and grows somber. I don’t know if I’ve ever loved Sevro more than I do in the depths of his silence. We stand quiet for a few minutes before he closes the coffin’s lid.
He nods for me to follow him. “Found something.”
I follow Sevro to Cassius’s room. The door is open. I feel anger toward Sevro for violating Cassius’s sanctum, but then I see the cramped room into which Cassius fit his huge life. On one wall his childhood, filled with moving pictures of Eagle Rest, Julian, his father, his brothers, his sisters, even his mother—all curly-haired and smiling. There are a few swordsmanship badges and mementos whose meaning will never now be known. A purple stone with flecks of gold. A chunk of metal the size of an apple. A carved length of wood. A large knife with an eagle-shaped pommel. On another wall hangs a House Mars pendant, surrounded by printed news clippings of my pack. Not just me, but Sevro, Screwface, Clown, Pebble, Virginia, even Pax. They are all happy moments, and it makes me sad that he couldn’t be there to share them with us. On the third wall are images of Lysander, Pytha, and Cassius through the years. But it’s the holoprojector that makes me stare. A loch floats in the air filled with two shivering boys while a wolflike creature slinks around its edges.
“Looked through his deck to see what the creep liked to wank it to,” Sevro says. He picks up the eagle knife and pockets it. “He’s got hundreds of hours of Institute footage in here. Some people peak too early.” He winces. “Sorry. He’d get that.” He sighs and takes a seat in Cassius’s lone chair and nods to the floor. I take a seat. He plops his hand on my shoulder. “It’s a long trip home. Where should we start?”
“Wherever he left off,” I say. Together, now at the age of many of the Proctors who watched our antics from Olympus, we watch the three boys ride their horses across a moonslit plain. The boys were us once. Drunk on victory, they carried an owl standard and howled like idiots at the moons. We were idiots. Trapped in a world of lies, maybe the howls were the truest things that came out of our mouths. We were all just lonely and in search of a pack.
I’ve already tried a tightbeam to Mars. I don’t know if they received my message. So I take Pax’s key in my hands and send a silent message to Virginia and my boy.
I love you. I am coming home. I have an army. I have an armada. We will win. For Eo, for Ragnar, for Fitchner, for Cassius. For them all.
