“No. I recall how you brought Lorn into that civil war. Trapped him in treason, so he had to fight.”
“Then why?” I ask.
“Why?”
“Why let me board, why be here at all? Why watch me come all this way?”
“We were performing engine tests when your wife’s agent arrived. They’re ready, but now I need an exit window. My engines may be fast, eventually, but this is a lot of mass to get moving and once it gets moving, it can’t hide.”
I puzzle over that. With the war concentrated in the Core, Quick should already have his window. “Ah. The Shadow Armada.”
“Yes, the Rim’s roving fleet. Amongst other threats.”
“Where is it now?” I ask.
“Almost far enough away,” he says with a soft smile.
He watches me out of the corner of his eye as we walk through a field of grass toward a glade of trees woolly with crimson leaves. The gravity is higher than that of Mars. “You’ve changed since I last saw you. Perhaps your time on the Marcher really did teach you something.”
“Maybe.” I peer at the upside-down world over my head. It must be more than three kilometers between the tip of the tree I lean against and those that hang from the ceiling. “This place. It would have taken longer than a few years to build. You started when we were winning.”
“Yes.”
“Did it spring from doubt or hope?”
“Both. This was always my dream, long before Fitchner and I began to conspire. I tried to build this place when you were just a child, but it was too ambitious then. I hadn’t the technology or the access to theright scientists. When the planets fell to you, I had my pick of Gold’s best.”
He twists his famous ring, a nervous tic. The Gold eyeball within the ring watches me as Quicksilver takes a seat in the grass. Wind moves the leaves. It’s strange to feel it here inside an asteroid, but the world he’s made seems to have its own weather patterns to go with its own gravity and its own tiny sun.
“All this effort, all the resources…you could have made me four moreMorning Stars. We might have beaten Gold years ago,” I say, trying to keep accusation from my voice.
“The first time in history a man is called a villain for beating swords into ploughshares.”
“I didn’t call you a villain,” I say.
“But you think it, even as you pour honey in my ear. One gets tired of investing in war. What do you think happens, if you did win, Darrow? If you do beat Gold down to nothing? The Vox just proved what’s waiting on the other side—with a little Gold prodding, sure. But still. You were on the precipice of victory, and already the people turned on you. Even if you win, these worlds will never be free of that sickness. Of Gold. I learned that lesson a long time ago.” He kneads his hands together, twisting and twisting his ring. He looks down at it with little affection. “You know you’re the only person I can think of who has never asked why I wear this.”
“You wear it so people will ask, so I never did.”
He hesitates. “Since this will be the last time we see one another, I feel an urge to be understood. What I’d have given to have that moment with Fitchner. Full clarity.”
He takes time gathering his thoughts.
“I…had a partner in my first enterprises, Darrow. A Silver whom I loved as deeply as I love Matteo. He was…better than me. Where I had already surrendered to the…pummeling nature of reality and become a pragmatist, he was a dreamer. It was because of him that we adopted children.”
“You had children?” I ask.
“Four of them.” He goes quiet, turning and turning his ring. “After our first enterprise met some trouble and failed, as they do more often than not, our name was ruined. I took out a loan with a dangerous Goldto finance our second venture. I had no choice. The guild had docked me, so you know, ambitious me invited a shark into the pen. The Gold thought it amusing to insert a clause allowing him to collect in flesh, should we default.
“We didn’t mind. We were used to such…demeaning eccentricities, and our cash flow was dependable. But then, a shipment of ore was hijacked by pirates. Then another. And another until we defaulted on that loan, and I had to cut a pound of flesh from my thighs and buttocks to give to our creditor. He fed them to his horses. Yes. He had carnivorous horses. Humiliated, my partner investigated the pirates.
“Of course, you will not be surprised to learn the pirates were led by none other than my creditor’s youngest daughter. But I was surprised then, and naïve. So naïve even though I thought I was a student of realpolitik. I reported the offense to the proper authority. Unfortunately, that ‘proper authority’ and my financier had been to the rhetoric school on Rhodes together.
“A week later, the daughter and her father and brothers broke into our home. They found us in bed, and our children in their beds. They wrapped them in the sheets, hung them from the ceiling, and beat them until no more blood would come out. I sat in that rain…that red rain…and I understood there is no such thing asproper authority. Violence is the only authority. They said one of us could live. My partner refused to choose. I chose me.”
I stay quiet, allowing him to exhume the grief on his own terms.
“Only Matteo knows this. I was…too ashamed to tell Fitchner. He would have died for his wife. I feared the way he’d look at me knowing I didn’t die for my love.” He sighs away years of shame, and carries on, detached. “After that night, I was spared and forced to play the market for my creditor until I bought my way under a bigger wing. It took me years to have my revenge. By the time I was done, the Gold who’d wronged me was destitute, childless, and hunted by Olympic Knights. I’d done it all to him with payments, whispers, and the violence of others. The last time I saw him, I put a spoon in his hand, and told him I’d give him his life for the price of one eye.”
