“I understand.” Looking at her is too hard. I glance down as I continue, trying to use my last seconds well. “Virginia, I need you to tell Pax something for me. Tell him…that I am proud of him. That all I’ve done was for him, even if it doesn’t feel like it. I didn’t do it all right. But I think…I believe I did it for the right reasons. Tell him I love him more than my own life. Tell him—”
I stop because she is already gone.
The signal has been cut on her end. Without her hologram, the room is darker and so am I. I linger in the silence, because as long as I linger, as long as I do not look up and see where her image once was, she does not feel so very far away. I’ve read throughThe Path of the Valeenough to know that some currents cannot be fought, no matter how good a swimmer I think I am. Far better to hope that the rapids I sail upon will carry me to new opportunities, new allies. Still, the closer we drew to Mars, the more I allowed myself to expect I would hold her in my arms, breathe in the life of her, make so many mistakes right. Not yet, I suppose.
When I’m ready to face reality, I look up into the empty space she had once filled with light.
“Tell him I wish he and I had kept riding that gravBike,” I say. “Tell him when this is over, we’ll ride from coast to coast. Just him and me.”
—
Dinner is a silent affair. Aurae joins us, and asks a few questions about our conversation with Virginia, but gives up when neither Cassius norI engage. The ship, now millions of kilometers further from Mars than when the day began, feels hollower even though no one has left. Sevro does not attend dinner.
After we’ve finished, I take Sevro a plate of ham and leave it outside the escape pod hatch. “I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s not fair. It’s not what I promised. If…if we had two ships, if there was a way to shoot you home with a catapult, I’d do it. It’s not fair I got to talk to Virginia and you didn’t get to talk to Victra. It’s not fair. I’m sorry. But they’re alive. Together. Like we are. They have each other’s backs. They’ll keep each other safe. Just like we’ll get each other home. I’ll shut up now. Oh. There’s food if you want it. It’s ham.” I can’t resist adding, “Cassius and I are training again in the morning. If you want to join.”
He doesn’t reply, but that’s fine. I said what I felt true and right.
I return to the galley to clean up, finding peace in making sure every crumb is accounted for and disposed of. Cassius looks for a similar peace in the bottom of his wine cup. Aurae disappears and returns with the lyre Harnassus made for her.
“I’ve never been so far from Io for so long,” she says. “I find myself very homesick. Yet it was Athena who told me there is no home for those born slaves. Only a prison the master tricked you into calling home. The true home for a slave is in dreams. Except on Mars where slaves make dreams real. I always found that a beautiful thought.”
There are no words to her song, but she hums along with the delicate sounds of the lyre. As she plays, the anvil weight of war lightens, and human emotions emerge in me. I close my eyes and think of my home. GodTrees grow and spread their limbs through my tired mind, the Thermic breeze rustles the tunic of my son, soft sunlight caresses my wife’s face.
The delicate music summons ghosts from my past.
Ragnar lives again, wild and big and brave. I see him toppled by Red children in Tinos, taking the razor from my hand in a field of mud. I see my father kissing my mother by our small kitchen table. I see Orion grinning at me across the bridge of the ship we called home. I see Lorn frowning at me in disapproval. Alexandar looking up at me for approval. Fitchner whisking me away to safety the moment I learned he was Ares, and he said,It’s me, boyo, it’s always been me. I see Eo looking back over her shoulder as she races into the deepmines, frozen in time like the light of a star, which carries on so many years after it dies.
Tears flow from my eyes. When I wipe them away, I see I am not alone. Cassius weeps as well. After Aurae has finished her song, Cassius fetches cups and pours us all wine. Seeing my eyebrows rise, he gives himself the smallest portion.
With the reddest eyes in the room, he sniffs, wipes his nose with his sleeve, and raises his glass. “To the engines, the reactor, rapid winds may they devise. To our hearts, to our hands, toward deeds brave and true may they rise. To the Republic, to Mars, for hope and liberty ever may they stride.” He thinks for a moment. “To our Sovereign, a lion Gold but wise as Minerva gray-eyed.”
We drink. When the wine is gone, we melt away into the hollows of the ship. Neither Cassius nor I mention training tonight. Laying in my bunk,The Pathon my chest, I look up at the ceiling at the scrawl that Lysander left behind after ten years of calling this ship home. My eyes fix on his family phrase:Lux Ex Tenebris.
Out of darkness, light.
The words of the enemy hang over my head, and I feel purpose in a way I haven’t in some time. I have done what I promised myself I would in the prison that was Marcher-1632. I listened to Virginia. Now the rest is up to me. I look out the small bunk window and see Mars. It is no longer a light whose growing brightness measures my progress home. The moment Virginia told me what I had to do, I thought my hope would diminish in seeing this last glimpse of Mars, but it doesn’t. I hold the light inside even as my home shrinks in the distance and our black ship races toward the Belt.
36
LYSANDER
Jurisdiction
“Lysander, wake up.”
I emerge from the darkness into pain. A familiar voice speaks in my ear. Pytha’s, rushed and worried. “Lysander, can you hear me? You were poisoned and put in a medically induced coma. We’ve only just brought you out. Something has happened. Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”
I can understand her but I cannot reply. My body is possessed by a cold flame. It ghosts through my bones like a memory of hell. It wants to be hot, the flame. Something restrains it, a drug. I feel the dumbness in my thoughts.
“This won’t do. We need him lucid. He’s an eggplant.” Cicero’s voice. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Pytha says.
“Boots. They’re coming. Dammit. Exeter must have told them.”
There’s a whoosh of a door retracting. Boots thump into the room. Pulse weapons whine. A demonic voice rasps:“Step back from the Blood.”
“Praetorians, we mean yourdominusno harm. It’s me. Cicero!”
