“Are you? Are you really?” Fá asks, very intrigued. He squints at my Obsidian prosthetics, dubious, then laughs in delight. “So you are. Xanthus has outdone herself yet again.” Fá bows but does not kneel. “DominusLune. An honor to meet one of the Blood.” He raises an eyebrow at Atlas. “Am I to understand there has been a change of plans regarding the beneficiary of this endeavor, then?” He smirks. “Or has the new Lune come to banish us like the last Lune?”
“The former,” Atlas says. “The three of us have much to discuss, but first I must see my kin.”
I trail the two men through the brig until they come to the void cell containing Atlas’s sister. Its occupant can neither see nor hear us. Vela is a hard-faced veteran with even less charisma than Romulus and more fire than Atlas. She lies on her bed without moving. “You broke her back,” Atlas notes.
Fá gestures to several of his bandages. “For my trouble. It was theonly way, I fear. To take a warrior like her alive in a pitched fray…very difficult.”
“Apologies. Diomedes was meant to be a sure thing.” Atlas glances at me.
“We scoured the battlefield and the escape pods as thoroughly as we could. My Kinshield believe he was likely vaporized in a blast. Per your recommendation, I was liberal with the Grimmus atomics you supplied. If I had known we would need to search for a survivor…”
“I don’t blameyou,Vagnar.” He insists on using Fá’s original name. A sign of friendship. Then he shoots a look of annoyance back at me to show Fá who he does blame.
“Vela will do?” Fá asks. “Even with a broken back?”
“She will,” Atlas says. “I need her nervous system, not her spine.”
“And what exactly do you need her for?” I ask.
“He doesn’t know?” Fá asks.
“Not everything, not yet,” Atlas says.
“You said you’d be fully transparent,” I say. “I’ve thrown in with you, at the cost of my soul. What could you possibly think you need hold back?”
“What’s a soul to an atheist?” Atlas asks Fá.
Fá makes a farting sound. “Gas.”
Atlas smiles and moves on to the middle cell. I am about to press the issue, but Atlas preempts my question. “Just a moment, lad. All of my cards will be on the table in short order…”
Atlas trails off as he approaches the cell of his mother. Gaia, the old matron of House Raa, is a broken woman. Her vacant eyes stare at the gray wall of her cell as she murmurs a phrase I can’t quite make out. Atlas watches her for a few moments, his emotions inscrutable. “My nieces, nephews. Did my mother see it done?”
Fá hesitates. “She…cut their throats with her own hand, but she could not bring herself to kill the youngest.” Atlas’s eyes soften for his mother. For a moment he looks like he will cry. Instead, he turns his attention to the last Gold prisoner. A girl still shy of puberty with red-rimmed eyes, and the long face of the Raa. Thalia. Diomedes’s younger sister.
“Neither could you, it seems,” Atlas says.
“She looks like you, and she bit me very hard.”
She does look like Atlas. Her face is slender, her eyes narrow and quiet, and has the same distant boredom so commonly seen in Atlas’s expression. “You were not so soft before Volga joined us. Was she there with you?” Atlas asks.
Fá grimaces. She was. “I thought you might need a bargaining—”
“Have I ever minced words with what I do and do not need, old friend?”
“I will kill the girl now then.” Fá moves to open the cell.
“No,” I say. Atlas turns and lifts an eyebrow. Knowing only proving her utility will spare the girl, I conjure some from the ether. “The Rim is stubborn and proud. Many will resent me as Sovereign even if I am their savior. But if I were wed to an ancestor of Akari, then might not that ease the pill down?”
Atlas’s eyes narrow. “It will be years before she’s of age.”
“I thought you were a man who planned for the future. Seems a waste to trim this possible future from our tree, no? Better to have the option.”
“You more than anyone should know the perils of mercy,” Atlas says. “More than anyone except Darrow, perhaps.”
“The difference is I watched Darrow cut down Octavia. Thalia has only seen him.” I dip my head in Fá’s direction.
Atlas smiles softly. “We’ll consider it.” He waves Fá away from the cell. “Come. We have plans to iron out.”
