WALKING OUT OF THE ASH LORD’S fortress, I am an empty shell.
The Howlers wait on the landing pad at the top of the tower. The Nessus hovers to the left of the Ash Lord’s shuttle and is readying her to depart. Colloway’s battle-scarred ripWing is docked on her topside. Far below, the tattered remnants of Apollonius’s forces and those of the Ash Lord fight a desperate running battle on the south end of the island. Our injured and dead have been loaded up. I don’t yet know the tally. The jubilation my friends expected to feel with the Ash Lord’s death never comes. Not when they see our faces. And when they hear of Pax and Electra, and Atalantia’s fleet, they turn as pale as Sevro. Rhonna is stunned.
“No,” she whispers. “It’s bullshit. Virginia would have protected him. I know it. He fed you a line.”
“Society fleet ripWings are eight minutes out,” Pebble says. “We’ll have to burn like hell to escape. At current orbit, we can be back on Luna in four weeks.”
I barely hear her. My mind is apart from them, from this place. If only I could go back in time and never come to this hope-forsaken planet. I just want to hold my boy again in my arms. I would protect him from the worlds. I would never leave him. Is he even alive? Would I feel it? The horror grips me again. The world swims and I feel the tears of anger itch behind my eyes. Sevro is locked in his own rage. He storms up the ramp, shouting for the Howlers to load up.
But my feet do not follow. They cannot.
“Darrow?” Pebble murmurs. “What are you doing?”
Sevro turns at the top of the ramp to look down at me.
“I’m not coming,” I say, and as I say it, I feel the last of my soul empty itself from the vessel of my body. Sevro watches me with contempt. “I’m not going back to Luna.”
“Boss,” Colloway says. “What are you talking about? They have your kid. We have to go back.”
Pebble comes back to touch my shoulder. Her hands are coated with dried blood, likely her husband’s. “You’re in shock. You need to get on the ship.”
“Whatever happened, it’s over,” I say. “If he was taken, Mustang will get him back as well as I can. If he is dead…there is nothing to be done.” Even to myself, my voice is like that of a condemned man. Pax. I see his eyes as he watches me rise from Wulfgar’s body. The key is so heavy on its chain against my sternum it’s all I can do to remain standing.
“Don’t say that, Darrow,” Pebble says.
“Mustang needs you,” Thraxa says; her own love for my son runs deep, just as it does in her whole family. Where were they? Why didn’t they protect him? “Your family needs you.”
I think of my wife. She won’t survive this with the Senate. They’ll say she’s unfit to rule. Compromised. She might already be deposed. The life I left behind is shattered, and my fist put the first cracks in it. Whoever took my child did it to wound me and my wife. Our sins passed down to that perfect, innocent boy.
Death begets death begets death.
How many sons did Lorn bury? Four?
I have made my choice and it kills me to know I chose not to be a father. Not to be a husband. I failed at both when I chose the Rising over my family. And now it teeters on the razor’s edge. Orion might already be lost. Our fleet, cobbled together, the product of ten years, might already be debris.
The Red boy inside me would run home to his family.
But I cannot.
The Ash Lord was right. Nothing of the Red remains. I am trapped in my duty. Like Lorn. Like Magnus himself. Like Octavia. Sevro and I did not understand them when we were boys. But now that we are men, we become them.
“My army needs me,” I say. “Atalantia might already have destroyed the fleet. That means our men on Mercury are trapped. Fathers, wives. Nine million of them marooned under the city shields. They’ll be exterminated like the Sons in the Rim. Like the Reds in the mines. I took them there. I will not abandon them.”
“So you abandon your child instead?” Sevro asks, finally coming back down the ramp to face me. The Howlers back out of the way. “And steal me from mine?”
“We don’t even know if they are alive.”
“Shut up.” His sorrow finds a home in his fist. It trembles at his side. “Slag you. How many times have I followed you? How many times have I trusted you? You were wrong! You didn’t listen. But I followed. Like a good little dog. And now my daughter…” His voice falters. “My baby…”
“I’m sorry, Sevro. I am.”
“You’re a father!”
“I’m not asking you to come with me.”
“Oh, trust me, I won’t be.”
“Take the Nessus. Reach Victra and Mustang and bring our children back to us.”
“How will you get off-planet?” Pebble asks.
I turn to look at the Ash Lord’s shuttle. “If I can’t turn the tide on Venus and Mercury, they’ll be coming for Luna or Mars next. You have to prepare the defenses.” Done with me, Sevro turns to walk up the ramp into the Nessus. “Sevro…” He doesn’t turn around. “Sevro…” He disappears inside and his name lingers in the air.
Too little, too late.
I stand alone in the Ash Lord’s shuttle. The grim walls press in on me. I sit in the pilot’s chair and begin the preflight procedures. There’s a sound behind me. I turn to see Alexandar coming up the open ramp, leading the Gold prisoners we took from Deepgrave. Colloway, Tongueless, Thraxa, and Rhonna follow him, their starShells left dented and smoldering on the landing pad. They toss down several bags of gear, lock the prisoners in the cargo hold, and settle into the passenger compartment. “Sevro says you’d need them,” Thraxa says.
Colloway saunters up, a burner hanging between his lips. “You’re in my seat.”
I get up and find my way back toward the passenger compartment. A lone figure stands at the bottom of the ramp in bloodied armor. “Apollonius,” I say.
“The clock’s still ticking,” he says, tapping his head.
Sevro and I in our despair forgot about the man entirely. I look down at my dented datapad and pull up the program. Ten minutes left before the munitions in his head go off. “Are you a man of your word?” he asks.
I look down at the man and see nothing I value. Just a murderer who saved my life. But all the evils that have befallen us today, all the mistakes I’ve made, have come from my pride and the duplicity I’ve sown.
“Today I am.” I deactivate the bomb. “Venus is yours, if you can take her.”
“And the hostages?” he asks. “The Carthii and Saud family members you promised me?”
“We need them more,” I say, and hammer my hand on the door control. The ramp rolls up, and the last I see is Apollonius staring at me in rage.
My men say nothing as I rejoin them in the passenger hold. I settle into my chair as Colloway lifts off and we trail in the Nessus’s wake. Thunder rolls outside as the frigate fires at the Society ripWings that pursue us. Colloway says something about capital ships cutting off our escape as we breach orbit. Over the com, I hear Sevro snarling at the Society Praetors, showing them pictures of the Gold family hostages we had in the Nessus’s brig. Just as planned. Even as I mourn for my own son, we use the sons and daughters of the Golds of Venus to escape. The dark irony is not lost on me. All that holds the guns of Venus from destroying us is the love of parents for their children. They do not fire, and I wonder if I had my enemy in my grasp, would I have done the same?
I say no farewell over the com to Sevro and Pebble and Clown, friends who have been with me for half my life. People think I believe my own myth, that I’m a singular whirlwind of nature. I know I am not. I was the concentrated force of the people around me, balanced, hardened, inspired by Ragnar, Fitchner, Lorn, Eo. Sevro.
Now I sit a world apart, in silence as my friends lie dead and the rest return to my son while I race away from him toward the war. Accompanied only by the tattered remains of the Howlers, an old prisoner, and a girl of barely twenty years.
I feel lost. But in the void, drifting away from my friends, I feel something else. Something I have not felt for some time. The Ash Lord claimed he did not take my son. But I know his designs. It was not a friend who took them. He and Atalantia played me for a fool. She thought I would abandon my army, my fleet, and rush home to save my son. But she does not know what she has awoken.
I pull the key Pax gave me from my neck and put it in my bag, setting aside the father, welcoming the Reaper, and letting the old rage take hold.