I’M DEPOSITED IN MY ROOM to change for dinner with the Raa family. The room, like all Ionian rooms, was made with attention to geometrical energy. It is perfectly square, without frivolous comfort and with no furniture except for a thin sleeping mat on a slightly raised platform. A small window looks out onto the heavy darkness of a night nearly a billion kilometers from the sun. I doff my robe and stand naked before the window, pressing my nose to it, appreciating the chill of the rock on my bare skin, and imagine I am floating in the cool waves of Lake Silene. I wonder if the Reaper’s child now climbs the stone stairs there from the shore to Silene Manor and his waiting parents. Do they warm themselves by the fire pit? Sleep in the room I slept in when I was a boy, where all Lunes have slept since the children of Silenius? A deep anger fills me, but I push it into the void.
All is silent in the room.
Not the busy silence of space, where air purifiers hum and engines tremble through the metal. It is the silence of stone and the silence of darkness that stretches into an unseen, unending frozen landscape. A cavernous, alien silence.
Those crewmembers on the Vindabona will be dead by now. It’s the only mercy I know to hope for. How long did they last?
Two lonely lights glide across the plain in the distance, too low to be aircraft. Hoverbikes? Where are those two souls going? What errand do they attend? Are they lovers? Friends? Then a score of lights burns out of the blackness behind them, chasing them across the expanse. I lean forward in excitement as bright orange tongues of flame lick out from the pursuers and the two leading lights vanish in blossoms of white fire.
Two more fall to the coup. It seems it is not as peaceful as Dido would like us to believe. Cassius is right, yet again.
All across the city men will be dying. Silent squads will arrest loyal members of Romulus’s faction. The cells will fill. Guns may rattle. Razors drip with blood. All balanced and gambled on the promise of the evidence Seraphina brought back.
I know coups, and am little impressed by them. They’re more common than weddings in my family. These Rim rustics hold their noses at Golds of the Interior, at my family and the “bitch on Luna.” But they’re little better.
Then I remember Seraphina. How she stood before her father, and the sadness I saw upon her face when she realized his intent. Torn between the love of her people and mother, and the love of her father. What choice would I make?
I see my own father in my mind’s eye and try again in vain to summon my mother. I reach for her, but my fingers rake nothing but shadow, and I feel, in no small way, that her absence is my fault. I did not study her enough. Did not love her enough. And so, she will never hold me in her arms, never kiss me upon the brow. As if she never existed.
My thoughts are interrupted when a jammer activates with a static pop behind me.
I swing around to see a pair of amber eyes staring at me from the shadows of the sitting room. “Jove in hell!” I flick on the glow lights to reveal a woman sitting on my sleeping mat. She watches intently as I scramble to put my robe back on. “Seraphina?” She’s at home now, her prisoner jumpsuit gone, and wears the garb of the Io. A gray wool cloak held together with a charcoal sash. She peers up at me, amused.
“Do all Martians have such dreadful hearing?”
Her eyes rove as I pull tight my robe. She wears rubber-soled slippers and two heavy rings—on her left middle finger a dragon eating a lightning bolt, on her right a simple iron Institute ring of House Diana’s stag’s antlers. I should have guessed she’d be a hunter.
“Are all Moonies as rude as you?” I look at the door, and know it made no sound, and, more impressively, neither did she. Must have come through the walls, then. A secret door. “Are you lost?”
She frowns. “Lost?”
“Well, you do seem to be in my room.”
“Your room?” Her sudden laugh is surprisingly girlish. Then the drawl comes back. “You are in my city, gahja. On my moon. There are cameras in the stone. What does it matter that I watch you through the camera or here? This is more honest, no?”
“Well, it is entirely eerie either way,” I say with a smile. “Most inhospitable.”
“If I remember correctly, you are a watcher too. I saw you looking at me on the table….”
“You were injured,” I say. “I was checking your—”
“Tits?”
“Your wound. The one on your—”
“Breasts.”
“Stomach. You’re clearly still insensate. Took a knock on the head, turned a bit mad. Or do your kind all talk like gutterborns?”
“I have manners,” she says with a smile. “The dust is a hard teacher.” She hurls a package at my face as she stands. I barely catch it. “Clothing. Yours was soiled from the journey.”
“Charitable of you.” I open the package to don the clothes. “Our pilot,” I say. “You said she’s alive and well. I want to see her.”
“No.”
“No negotiation? Very well.” I thumb the clothing she brought. She doesn’t turn away or leave. “Do you mind?”
“Mind?”
“Yes, I’d like to change now.”
She cocks her head in challenge. “I have seen naked men before.”
Unlike her own, mine was a solitary upbringing. “A Sovereign is an island,” my grandmother would say.
“It’s just carbon. Are you ashamed of your body?” she asks. “Or perhaps you are embarrassed you do not know how to use it?”
“So that’s why you sent the Pinks. So you could watch?” I find myself unusually pleased by the revelation. “Why so curious?”
Her brow wrinkles. “Were you injured? Is that why you turned them away? Does your manhood not work?”
“That…is absolutely none of your concern. Thank you for your interest, however. It works just fine.”
“I am sorry,” she says. “I did not mean to offend.”
“Well, you’re quite accomplished at it. Compliments to whoever taught you.”
“Would you be at ease if I were naked again too?” Even under the folds of her loose tunic, I see the subtle rise of her breasts, the length of her muscled legs, and…
I cough and shake my head. She waits patiently till I have a small, annoying epiphany. “Do you always toy with your guests?”
“Sometimes.” She smirks. “You do look a little like a toy. All that hair and those dandy little limbs.”
“Dandy?”
“Dandy. And your nose has only been broken recently. Are your eyes real?” She leans in. “You didn’t have them carved like a Corish Pixie, did you?” I don’t dignify the question with an answer.
“You’re not going to leave, are you?”
“Why would I? Everyone is busy preparing for supper. I am bored. You are entertaining.”
“Very well then.” I drop my robe to the floor, intending to embarrass her. She doesn’t look away. She scrutinizes.
“You have more scars than most Pixies,” she says after a moment.
“Because I am not a Pixie.”
She surprises me with a laugh and counts my scars till she finds one curious. It is a long, thin scar, like a necklace around my neck. “Who gave you this one?” Her pale fingers brush against the scar, and impossibly I hear the howling of the wind outside my window. And in the darkness there and in my mind, he lurks, the Reaper’s beast, the demon of my childhood. Instinctively, I put my robe back on and sit on the ground. She looks suddenly apologetic.
“A man gave it to me when I was young,” I say, chastising myself for losing control of the memory. Some demons never leave. Grandmother wanted to laser the scar off. I convinced her to let me keep it.
She joins me on the floor. “A lover?”
“No.”
“Did you kill him for it? For hurting you?”
I shake my head.
“Why not?”
“Like I said, I was young. He was not.”
“Did you find him and kill him later? You are a man now.”
“No.”
“Why not? If he hurt you and remains alive, then he is your master. That is why I slayed the Obsidian warchief who beat me on the Vindabona.”
“It’s in the past. The past doesn’t define me.” I repeat Cassius’s words like they were my own. How many times did he tell me this? How many times have I failed to believe him?
“Stupid gahja.” She taps my forehead. “Nothing is past. Everything that was, is. That scar is a story of your subjugation. Slay the man who gave you that, and it becomes the story of your liberation.”
“Did your father teach you that?” I say, angry that she would preach to me.
Her eyes turn cold and flinty, sensing the accusation.
I’m suddenly achingly aware of the difference between us. She might be the child of a Sovereign like me, but she is a soldier. She was raised in gladiatorial academies amongst sinewy killers on a moon that breaks down your DNA if you step outside without at least three centimeters of high-grade radiation shielding. She has a scar from the Io Institute. There is none more brutal. The students don’t kill as much as Martians or rape as much as Venusians, but the games can last for years in temperatures that freeze your blood before it drips from a wound.
What have I done but read and run all my life? I suddenly feel indicted by my own banter. Like I’m a dog barking at a wolf who knows very well that I’m not from the wild, but lets me bark because it entertains.
“Apologies,” I say carefully.
“Forgiven,” she replies. “Yes, my father taught me that scars are why our ancestors were able to shape the worlds. As Golds, we were born as perfect as man can be. It is our duty to embrace the scars our choices give us, to embrace and remember our mistakes, else we live believing our own myth.” She smiles to herself. “He says a man who believes his own myth is like a drunk thinking he can dance barefoot on a razor’s edge.” The smile disappears as she perhaps remembers her father’s face when he was led away by her brother. And I see clear as day the true war that rages inside the girl. It softens me to her, because it feels a reflection of the same war inside of me. I fight back the urge to touch her hand.
“You think me wicked,” she says quietly, her eyes fixed on the window. “Betraying my own father…”
Why does she care? “Families are…complicated.”
“Yes. They are.”
A silence grows between us, and in it we share an understanding that goes beyond words.
“You are strange,” she says finally. “Your friend is a killer. But you, you are gentle.”
“I’m not gentle.”
I’m suddenly conscious of how close she is. How aware of her body I am. The space between us vibrates and trembles with something raw, newly woken and terrifying to me. I feel the heat in her breath, the cold petals of her pale lips, and the lonely fire in her dark eyes that would pull me into her and consume me. I would let it, and that frightens me more than her family. More even than the death that awaits me if she learns my family name.
She feels the same tension between us, and breaks it by turning away. “Marius says you are spies. That it was not by chance that you found me.”
“You don’t seem to put much trust in what Marius thinks.”
“He is a reptile, but not a fool.”
“I care more about what you think.”
She considers. “Anything gentle that lives long, hides its stinger well.” She turns to the wall to make her exit.
“Why did you take my razor?” I say, feeling a sudden flash of anger at her. “All those people died because I couldn’t get them out.”
“I know,” she says quietly. “But that is the horror the Slave King has made.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“I did it for the greater good. You will understand.”
“Your mother doesn’t know you’re here, does she?” I ask her, nodding to the jammer on her belt. “Why did you really come?”
She hesitates as if she doesn’t even know.
“You saved my life. I…wanted to see if yours was worth saving.”
“And?”
“I have not decided.” She looks at me with strange pity. “You play with things you don’t understand.”
“Your mother made me a guest. I’m protected by old law.”
“My mother is not my father.” She pauses. “Give her what she wants. For your own sake.”
“What does she want?” I ask, but the wall has already parted, and Seraphina has slipped into its shadows. Cassius was right.
We are not guests here. We are prey.