I WAKE FROM A FITFUL SLEEP and expect to see Cassius standing there, filling the door, asking me if it’s the night terrors again. But he is gone. I remember slowly, then all at once. There’s a presence in the room. By the window an old Brown watches me. I’m too tired to be startled. His bark-colored eyes smile with deep respect from underneath cirrus-cloud eyebrows.
“Dominus Lune, I beg pardon for interrupting your sleep. But your presence is requested.”
“By whom?”
“A friend.”
Seraphina? He walks past my pallet, careful not to trod on the fabric, and sketches a strange symbol onto the stone wall. It rumbles very softly, dilating inward to reveal a hidden passage through which he seems to have entered. I hesitate, wondering if it could be some sort of trap. He wags his hand impatiently. “Come, come, dominus. She awaits.”
I follow the Brown in silence through the tunnels. He leads on through the darkness till we reach another wall where he sketches another symbol and the wall retracts. The Brown leads me into a sitting room and closes the new aperture behind us. He gestures to several silk cushions on the floor by the hearth.
“Wait here, dominus. May I prepare refreshment?”
“Tea, if you have it,” I say instinctively. Then I feel my hunger. “And food. Anything will do.” He bows and limps away. “Excuse me, steward. What is your name?”
“Aruka,” he says softly.
“Thank you, Aruka.” I dip my head in Rim fashion.
He bows again and leaves me there.
This room reflects the pre-Color heritage of the Raa more than any other. It is traditional and austere but for the use of wood. Tatami flooring, woven from pale igusa grass, stretches to a bank of windows overlooking the frozen waste. Entire tree trunks, stained a warm honey color, support the stone ceiling. A length of cypress forms the tokonoma, a raised alcove where a small tree grows and a razor hangs in midair above a gravWell. I’m drawn to the room’s lone eccentricity: a grand old piano made out of heartwood. It is a marvel. Of course, Ceres and some of the larger asteroid depots have pianos, but those are cheap plastic synth jobs. The wood to make this must have come from Ganymede or Callisto.
I run my hands over the piano’s keys. I was wrong. The piano is old. Perhaps older than the Society. Two golden S-shaped markings are imprinted on the fallboard above the keys. My hands run over the polished fiddleback grain. I close my eyes and imagine I can feel the energy that grew this tree on my face, that I can hear birds in the sky again. After ten years, they sing like I heard them yesterday. A flicker of a memory, no longer than the flash of a lighting match, burgeons in the recesses of my mind. A feeling, a scent of something lost.
Am I just homesick? Or is it something more?
“Do you know how to play?” a woman asks.
I turn to see Romulus’s mother, Gaia, shuffling into the room. Her back is crooked, shoulders slumped. In her youth, she would have been a slight thing. Her wrists are fragile as the stems of wineglasses, and her skin paper-pale and veined like bleu cheese. In fact, it seems all that keeps her from tipping forward and shattering on the floor is a thin wooden cane and the enormous arm of the grand Obsidian who escorts her. She clutches to him as if he were an old friend. He is aged, like her. A hunched gray golem with intense beetle-black eyes buried deep in the folds of an ancient face. His head is a boulder. His ears chipped and pointed at the tips. The lobes filled with gold disks the size of chicken eggs imprinted with the lightning dragon. A long uncut white beard hangs down the front of his gray scorosuit and is tucked into his belt.
“No,” I answer. “I never learned.”
“A child of Hyperion alien to music? What a crime. But you must have been a busy little thing. Your grandmother no doubt teaching you the alchemy of turning moons to glass instead. Or were those lessons the province of your godfather?”
The senile mask she wore before her family is gone. Curious.
“My godfather taught me to finish a fight,” I say. “Two hours of strategic instruction every day.”
“If only he had taken his own lessons. Then Darrow would be a memory instead of a ten-year plague.”
“My godfather is still the only man to ever best the Reaper in battle,” I say. “And I rather think it the habit of an indolent mind to indict a single man for a civilization’s failure.”
“True. Back and forth they go. But now a peace.”
“So they say.”
“What a thing it must be for you. Lorn for a grandfather. Octavia for a grandmother. Magnus, Aja, Moira, Atalantia…trapped between so many giants and having to watch the birth of two more.”
“Two?”
“Darrow and Virginia. I rather think it the habit of a boy’s mind to believe the man could exist without the woman.” She smiles.
I feel a sudden surge of enjoyment at the riposte.
I like this woman. She reminds me of Atalantia.
“All others here call him the Slave King, yet you do not?”
“That brat is flesh and bone. Why feed the legend?” She wheezes as her Obsidian helps her sit on the flame-maple bench. “Thank you, Goroth.” He turns from her to take a place at the window, and as he does I see a screaming skull has been tattooed to cover the back of his head in blue ink. “Don’t let the old blackeye frighten you,” Gaia says. “He’s as batty as I am.” Goroth shakes his head in disagreement as he reaches the window. “Oh, quiet, you.” She pats the bench beside her as she produces a thin white pipe from her robes, along with a match. “Sit here with me, Lysander. I will teach you.” She strikes the match on the calluses of her heel and holds the flame to the pipe bowl.
Glancing uneasily at the Obsidian, I sit down in the cloud of smoke at her side.
She pats the piano. “My husband gave this to me as a gift when I was twenty-nine. Do you want to guess how old I am now?”
“You hardly look older than sixty,” I say with a smile.
“Sixty!” She cackles. “What a rogue you are! That Bellona philanderer rubbed off on you, I see.” She scrutinizes me. “I hope you didn’t catch anything from him.”
“He was like a brother to me.”
“Well, that’s not saying much in the Core.”
“My home is Luna. Not the Core.”
“Pfah. It’s all the same to us.”
Why am I here? In accepting the invitation, I’ve walked into some scheme. Is this a test of some sort? Just because I’m grieving doesn’t mean the dance has stopped. If anything, the pace has increased as the coup solidifies and the dissenters are clipped one by one. While Cassius may be gone, I still have Pytha to protect. Seems a lofty goal at this point.
Gaia is unaware of my inner turmoil as she touches the keys and strokes out a simple melody. A strange sense of belonging courses through me and I forget about the dance.
“Must be grotesque for you, seeing age,” she says. “I know how the deviants in the Core love their rejuvenation therapy. Pfah.” She hacks something into a crusty handkerchief, examines the prize, then makes the kerchief disappear back into her thick kimono. “Your grandmother never looked older than sixty, but I remember her when we were both girls dancing at her father’s galas. I was a plain little thing to her. She had such jewels. Such refinement. But was always so haughty. Pretending she didn’t know who I was. A sizable stick up her gahja ass, that one. But now I have the last laugh!” She cackles again. “How old are you, child?”
“Twenty.”
“Twenty? Twenty! I’ve ingrown hairs older than you.”
I laugh despite myself. “You’re not very discreet, are you?”
“Ha! I’ve earned indiscretion.” Her cloudy eyes soften and she pulls on her pipe before pointing it at me like a finger. “I know you wear the mask of court. What did they call it again?”
“The dancing mask.”
“Yes. That. You Lunes are famous for it. The composure. I once saw your great-grandaddy bitten in the face by a Venusian manticore at his birthday gala. Took a chunk out of his cheek and he didn’t even flinch. Just bit the thing back, threw it to its handler, and ordered champagne. Terrifying man, Ovidius. Might be too hot-blooded for the mask myself, but I see through yours. Your friend died today. And so did my grandson, granddaughter, and grandniece.” She reflects on them for a solemn moment and drags from her pipe.
“I will miss them. Even that noxious scorpion, Bellerephon. But I will not say I am sorry. That is life, neh? Play with blades you get pricked. Like my kin, your Bellona made his bed long ago. But you are different. Your weapon is in there…” She pokes my head. “If you are wise and lucky and live long as me, you will learn this pain is just a drop in the sea.” She sets a hand on my heart, her eyes intense. “So feel all of it, boy, before time makes you forget.”
“Could you play something for them?” I ask.
“For them?”
“The departed. Cassius and your kin. A requiem, perhaps?”
She laughs. “Yes. Yes. I like your gray matter.” She turns to the piano and begins a song, slow, mournful, that sounds like the wind in my dreams. As her fingers drift over the keys, the song wakes something inside me besides grief—a shadow, a shadow of a shadow in the library of my mind, something I never knew forgotten. I feel a presence at my back, though there is no one there. I smell a perfume that is not in the air, and feel a heartbeat against my spine that ceased to beat so many years ago.
Gaia senses my unease. “Are you well, child?”
“Yes,” I say distantly, only now realizing that I’ve set my hands on the keys, blocking her from playing. I should take my hands back, but instead press down on a key. The note sings through my body. The memory coalesces. Warms. The shadow dripping from it like dirty snow from a statue. I find another key. My eyes close. My hands move and more notes emerge through me, taking me to another place, another time, a spirit inside guiding me, a spirit that has long been caged and hidden so I did not even know it was once there. But now it flies. The cobwebs of my mind burn away.
My hands glide along the keys and a song pours out, a requiem for Cassius and all those others I have lost. I’m swept away by its music to a far-off study where a fire crackles and a small leopard paces around my legs. She is behind me. Her hair falling around my cheeks. Her earthy scent filling my nose. Her dazzling eyes and truculent mouth. All of it, all of her in that moment rushing back on the wings of the melody. When the last mournful note hangs in the air and my hands linger on the keys, I sit there breathless, tears streaking my face.
I look over at Gaia, confused.
“I thought you couldn’t play,” she says.
“I can’t,” I murmur. “Unless I forgot.”
“How could you forget something like that? It was splendid, child.”
“I don’t know.” For a breath, for the briefest flicker, I saw her. The face of my mother. The soft skin. The small nose and strident mouth. Those eyes that burned in a face time stole from me. Or was it something else that stole it away, a lock placed upon her memory that the music unfastened?
“My mother played,” I say, remembering now.
“And she taught you.”
“Yes. I…I don’t know why I couldn’t remember.”
“Sometimes bottling pain is the only way to survive.”
“No…I don’t forget,” I say, somehow knowing there’s more beneath the shadows that I’ve yet to remember. A whole life buried in my own mind. “I never forget anything. My grandmother said it was my greatest gift….”
“Sounds more like a curse to me.” She watches sympathetically. “My mother died when I was young like you. Even though she would be a withered fossil now, I remember her as she was young. Young death is divine. It freezes the flower in time. A gift in a way, to remember her as that instead of watching age ravage and devour…” Her blue-veined hands pull absently at the loose folds of her neck. “…till she is a shadow of what she was.”
“I don’t think you’re a shadow,” I say. “I think you are rather marvelous.”
“I don’t need your pity,” she snaps, startling me. Then she smiles and taps me with her pipe again. “You’re not as good at being a rogue as the Bellona. Are you? You flatter an old fool, but I think it’s another who has stolen your heart.” Her eyes twinkle with mischief. “My granddaughter.”
“You’re mistaken.”
“There are easier women to fall in love with. But you know that. Don’t you?”
“Love? There are more important things than love.”
“Like?”
“Duty. Family. She let my friend be butchered. His death is on her.” I hang my head. “And it is on me. There is no love between us. Only a slight mutual curiosity—understandable and now fled.”
“She kept you from being tortured,” Gaia says. “When her mother discovered it was Cassius behind that mask, Seraphina begged her to spare your life and to let Bellona have an honorable end.”
“Before she knew who I was,” I say. “The only thing Lune and Raa share is responsibility for losing the Society. For allowing Darrow to divide us and spending precious resources and ships against one another.”
I turn to her.
“What do you want?” There’s a dull ache between my shoulder blades that now is working its way into my head. I’m weary of this. She’s talking like we’re old friends, pretending that we mean anything to one another. On another night I might have patience for it. “Why did you bring me here? It wasn’t to commiserate or show me your piano. I know I’m going to die. Is that why you’ve stopped pretending you’re senile? Because you know I won’t last the night?”
“No. It is because I want your help.”
“My help?” I laugh bitterly. “Why would I ever help you? I gave you the war you all seem to want. Isn’t that enough?”
“Who said I wanted war?” She tries to get up from the bench. Goroth rushes to help her, his own knees crackling as he comes. She shoos him away and manages on her own with great difficulty. She extends a hand to me. “Come. I will show you.”
I hesitate, then take her hand. I support her as she leads us back through the door through which Aruka disappeared earlier. It leads us into a humid artificial solarium that smells like flowers and pastries. Luminescent ivy crawls up the walls. The steward is there, pouring tea at a low table at which sits a lone, hunched woman with short dark blue hair in a prisoner uniform.
“Pytha?”
She bolts upward and bowls toward me with her spindly limbs, shocking me by wrapping her arms around me in an embrace. She holds tight, the top of her head under my chin. The latticework of her rib cage presses against mine.
“You’re alive,” she says into my chest. “You’re fucking alive.”
I did not expect an embrace from her. I would not have given one myself.
“Pytha…there’s something I have to tell you. About Cassius…”
She pulls back, eyes red. “I know.”
I swallow the stone in my throat. “Where have you been?”
We sit sipping tea at the table as Pytha recounts her trials. She was not accorded the same comfort Cassius and I were. She was tortured by Pandora on the first night we were captured and has trouble remembering what she revealed. Here on Io, she’s been treated well, but she’s still famished and devours a plate of thin sandwiches that Aruka serves. I nibble on one without tasting it, mulling over what she’s told me. Gaia picks tobacco from her pipe with a short knife.
“You still haven’t told me,” I say. Gaia looks up, confused. “What you want from me…from us.”
“As you said, you are going to die. Soon. Both of you. I believe Dido will execute you after Romulus’s trial tomorrow. Perhaps before. It will be quiet. A blackblood scorpion in your room. A needle drone. A poisoned cup of tea.” I set down my cup uneasily. “She will want the grandson of Lune to disappear. You complicate her plans, Lysander. She can stand no challenges to her authority. So disappear you shall, regardless of Seraphina’s intervention.”
“Damn, you’re depressing as an empty stimpack,” Pytha mutters, but she’s not depressed enough to stop eating the sandwiches. “So what do we do? Just wait to die like Cassius?”
“No,” Gaia says. “I suggest an alternative: survive.”
It’s not the answer I expected, but it fits. “And how do you propose we do that?” Pytha asks sharply. “Even if we get past the guards and steal a ship, we need to get past Sungrave’s guns. Then we need to get to orbit before warhawks shred us with railguns. Then we need to outrace the orbital guard. Then the fleets themselves. Prolly won’t even chase us. They’ll just send a long-distance missile and it’ll do the work. We run, we die a dozen ways.” She loses interest in her meal and pushes it away. “We’re trapped on this shithole moon.”
“I understand you are angry,” Gaia says. “But speak to me in that way again, lowborn, and your tongue will fertilize my tobacco garden.” Gaia puffs away on her pipe as Pytha blanches. “And, yes, you are trapped…unless…”
“Unless what…domina?” Pytha asks nervously.
“Unless Dido’s not in power,” I guess. “Unless Romulus defeats her coup. Then he may let us go.”
“Romulus, who let me be tortured by that Pandora…” Pytha spares a quick look at Gaia. “…woman? Didn’t you say he wanted to cut your head off and send the Archi into Jupiter? Aren’t you a little raw about that?”
“It’s in the past. And it made sense, considering his predicament.”
“Killing you made sense?”
“Technically.”
She considers. “Well, I have thought of it a few times.”
I mull over an idea, seeing Gaia’s intention. “You want us to help you. You want us to free Romulus from the Dust Cells.” Gaia nods at me through her pipe smoke.
“So we can get killed by those turbaned psychopaths? Are you spacemad?” Pytha crosses her arms. “Don’t you have your own men…domina?”
“All my men have been arrested or displaced,” Gaia says. She gestures to Aruka and Goroth. “We crones are all that’s left. What mischief could we do, feeble as we are?” Goroth bares his black teeth, chilling me.
“Golds wanting us to do their dirty work. Typical,” Pytha mutters. “I don’t want to die for them, Lysander.”
“This might be the only way we don’t die today,” I say with a smile. But inside, behind the dancing mask, my logic is cold and clinical.
“Don’t tell me you’re actually thinking about this!”
“Dido is preparing for war, Pytha. We’re afterthoughts to her. She’ll delete us or use us…use me as a bargaining chip somehow. I won’t have that. Not at all.” I turn to Gaia. “Would Diomedes help?”
“No. The vain boy is a slave to his honor. He’s bound by his oath to the Olympic Knights, and they’ve accepted Dido’s coup. Romulus’s trial begins tomorrow. Diomedes will deliver him to that trial for justice to be served there.”
“His own father?” Pytha asks.
“It is our way.”
“You have a plan, I assume?” I ask Gaia.
“So you’ll do it?” she says slyly.
“I did not say that. What is your plan?”
“My daughter, Vela, waits in the desert with legions loyal to Romulus. They will begin an assault on Sungrave to capture Dido. But she cannot attack if he is a hostage. I need you to go to the Dust Cells. Free him. I’ve arranged for hoverbikes in a garage. You will need them to cross the Waste and reach Vela.
“It’s not just about my son,” she says, baring all her cards. “I was friends with your grandfather, Lorn. He was a stuck-up old goat, but so am I.” She could be lying. “He came to Europa because he tired of the ambition of the young and the pride of the old. I tire of empire, just like Old Stoneside did. War eats families. I told my husband that when he went to Augustus’s war and raced to fall in the Lion’s Rain. He did not listen. My son did. All he’s done, all he’s hidden, has been for the good of the Rim.”
“Did Romulus know Darrow destroyed the docks?” I ask.
“No. I suspected, and I counseled my son not to seek war with him.”
“Logical, at the time, considering your losses. But dishonorable.”
“Stupid boy. Do you know how many proud humans I’ve seen die for honor? Melted onto the floors of landing craft? Crying on the battlefield for their mothers as they try to push their guts back into their bodies? Honor.” She sips her tea. “Romulus knows the cost. A leader may not always be logical and honorable. At times, he must choose. I’m surprised, of all people, your grandmother did not teach you that. Or are you trying to be Lorn?”
I say nothing. She makes a small noise of amusement.
“My son, for all his power, is a humble man. He listened to me. Because of him, our civilization survived the destruction of the docks, and the starvation and economic collapse that followed. We built new ships out of the ruins of the very docks that fell on Ganymede. Now we have peace. I want to die knowing that it will last and that the Venusian strumpet won’t pull us into her planet’s endless war.”
Gaia does this to protect her family and the Rim. She could care less about the Interior and their people. Seraphina suddenly seems so very noble compared with her grandmother. The young girl’s eyes were incandescent when she spoke of bringing peace to the Core.
There’s only one answer I can give Gaia that will let me walk out of here.
“I will do it,” I say carefully. “I will free your son. Pytha, you can stay here….”
“Last time I did that, you slagged things up good and I got thrown in a cell,” she says. She pushes away her tea. “I come with.”
I eye her frail arms.
“Then you must hurry.” Gaia stands with Goroth’s help. “Dido is in council with her Praetors now. But soon she’ll learn I brought you both here.”
We follow her back into the main room. “I’ll need something. A letter. A recording so Romulus knows you sent me,” I say.
“You’ll have a guide,” she says. “He knows Goroth.”
“Then why not just send him?”
“Goroth is not what he once was.” She looks at the Obsidian with grave affection. “And he does not know how to pilot the hoverbikes. I assume you do.”
I nod. Appraising Goroth, I look back at Gaia. “I’ll need a weapon.”
“Yes…Aruka, my hasta.” Aruka rushes to the tokonoma and, using tongs instead of his hands, brings back the razor from its gravity perch. “Show him this. I have not held her for many years. Her name is Shizuka. She is yours until I ask for her again. Take it, boy.”
I take the hasta in my hands. It is cold and alien and outlandishly long. Its handle is pale brown leather and is as long as my forearm. Its blade clear as glass, like Seraphina’s. My hand touches the small activation toggle near the top of the handle and the whip snaps rigid.
Gaia glances nervously to the door, no longer the collected woman who sat with me at the piano. It took all her energy to make that show of confidence, to sell herself, the gambit. Now her own nerves and exhaustion betray her.
“You must leave now. Goroth will lead you into the tunnels.” She guides me to a wall where she traces her fingers over the stone. The wall rumbles backward, revealing a dark passage. “We know the secrets of this mountain better than that Venusian tramp.” She hands me a transponder. “Remember, as soon as you have him and can hide, signal for the legions.”
“I will.”
The old Obsidian joins us there and looks sadly down at Gaia, torn by the parting. Tears glisten in his black eyes. “Oh, don’t weep, you old brute,” she says to the giant. “Tears do not become us.” He bends down suddenly and kisses her upon the brow with his tattered lips. She’s so startled she barely has time to be offended.
“Farewell, domina,” he rumbles.
She shakes her head and shoves him weakly in the chest. “Go!”
Goroth tears himself away and presses into the darkness of the tunnel. “Thank you for the sandwiches,” Pytha says to Gaia. “If they find out you helped us, won’t they kill you?”
“Stupid girl, not all who live fear death.” She backs away, the door closes between us, but I hear her last words weakly through the stone. “Save my son.”