“Have you colluded with Atlas this whole time? Since Mercury?”
“No. Atlas contacted me after we took Phobos. He was crossing into the asteroid belt. He did not want you to join Diomedes in his unfortunate fate. He tasked me with preventing that. I failed because Cicero and Pytha meddled. And I underestimated your resistance to the poison. Had I not feared killing you, I would have used more. You may not believe me, but I do not want to see you harmed, Lysander. The poison was merely a necessary evil.”
“This alliance was everything to me,” I say. “It was the future of the Society.”
“The future of the Society should be decided by its patriots, not its betrayers. The Rim is eating the meal they served us.” He stands. “Atlas is out of surgery. He is asking for you.” He opens the door. Markus, Drusilla, and Demetrius wait in the hall. “We expect you to listen to what he has to say with open ears.”
—
I follow Rhone through the gloomy halls of the blackops torchShip. It is named theLethe. Like all of Atlas’s favorite toys, it is utilitarian, well-used, and entirely off the books. While everyone thought he’d gone off to pacify South America on the more powerfulStyx,he must have ridden theLetheout to the Rim and laid in wait. The disgust I feel toward his methods and his action are dwarfed by the absolute awe I have for his capacity and his brutality. A cheer goes up from a common room filled with off-duty Gorgons. They suck down cigars and toast as I pass the open door.
“Fá. Fá. Fá,” they chant.
“What’s happened?” I ask Rhone.
“The Garter. Its battlewall was breached a few hours ago. Fá’s army is pouring in like water.”
“Your mission with the Gorgons…” I murmur.
He nods. “Nothing could break the Garter’s shields from without.Atlas knew a route to strike from within. His father showed him as a child.”
I hang my head. The worlds are upside down. Atlas colludes with Obsidian ravagers against innocents. These hardliners celebrate massacre as patriotism. The groupthink is so heavy in the room I worry I’ll vomit.
The lights are low inside the medical bay as I enter alone. Atlas, the object of so much fear, speculation, and dread that he can be believed to be on every world at once, is slumped on a stool, thin, tired, and mutilated. Even now, he studies a globe of Io that seems to be constructed of free-flowing mercury held within a stasis field. He’s monitoring the invasion, one he no doubt planned down to every minuscule detail. I pity anything and anyone that has his full attention. Poor Io.
The invasion is in Fá’s hands now, though. Atlas’s arms are missing from the elbows down. The angry red nubs are capped with silver stasis sleeves. A pair of thicker forearms and hands lie discarded in a metal basin along with a carver’s replica of Helios’s face and Helios’s eyes. Atlas’s own limbs float in a tank to the left. His eyes have only freshly been re-installed in their sockets.
Atlas’s Violet carver examines his freshly implanted eyes with a large monocle. She pulls back and smiles down at him in worship. “The ocular nerves are tethered and your dendrites fully rewoven,dominus. But they won’t familiarize for several hours. Avoid bright lights and holoscreens. Don’t fret about the fog on your periphery. Your vision will clear by cycle’s end. It won’t be as bad as the last time.”
The last time?
“Gratitude, Xanthus. Arms in the morning?” She hesitates. “I told you it would be a rush job. Now is a decisive moment.”
“Yes,dominus. Arms in the morning.”
“It was the blade, wasn’t it?” Atlas says to me. “His daughter’s. Helios lost his kitari to space when we took him. Wasn’t sure which one he was packing.” Atlas’s eyes creep in my direction as the carver departs. They are bloodshot and rheumy. “Ave,Lysander.”
“Atlas. Or is it Allfather?”
He grimaces. “Ugly business, godhood, but not the first time a man’s hidden behind the visage of the divine.” My gaze drifts to the bed in one of the medBay’s two clean rooms. Helios—or what is left of Helios—lies naked on the bed behind the glass partition. He is a grotesquerie.His arms amputated, his eyes extracted, and head penetrated by wires linked to a spindly Green. The Green twitches over Helios like a pagan priest.
“I thought mastering his physiognomy would be the most difficult part. I underestimated how hard it would be to take him alive. Tough man,” Atlas says.
“Veracity confirmed,dominus,” the Green murmurs. “The codes to the Sungrave’s defense grid are confirmed.”
Atlas sighs. “It’s good to be sure. Well done, Centix. Decouple and send the codes to Pale Horse. I want Io wrapped up on schedule.” To the Yellows he says: “His duty is done. Send him to the Void.”
I watch the Yellows inject Helios. His chest heaves twice then falls still. He dies without pain. I mourn for the great man’s dignity as much as his passing. I mourned already for Diomedes, Dido, and the honorable dark rose of Rim knighthood that must have perished in Atlas’s ambush. So many lives, so much hope, fed to monsters. Monsters that now have Demeter’s Garter. Soon Sungrave will fall too.
There must be a way to do more than mourn. To warn them. Atlas isn’t the sort of man who’d let me out of my cage if there was any way I could interfere, yet we’re now alone in the room.
“Your mother will be in Sungrave,” I say. “Gaia.”
“Yes, she will be,” Atlas confirms. “Along with my sister, my nieces, and my nephews. And tonight as we sleep, or maybe tomorrow as we eat breakfast, the Ascomanni will enter through our family tunnels and Fá will breach the main gate. After that…well, you’re a student of history. You know what happens to cities that resist, and Sungrave has resisted the Society for hundreds of years. Its death will therefore be proportionate.”
“Do you hate your family so much? Do you hate your home so much that both have ceded any right to exist?”
He’s offended.
