“You’re not angry with me?” I ask her.
“I just wish you would have told me,” she says. “I could have helped. If I had known…But it doesn’t matter. We can end this now. We can do this, Lysander. Together.”
Anxiety claws at me. Atlas was a tool I needed to set things right, but there are other tools now. “It would have to be Rhone too. If we fail…”
“We won’t,” she says. “The three of us together. How can we?”
84
LYSANDER
Hangar 17B
The three black nightRaptorscoast in from space. They broadcast no radio signals or light except the red range-finders on the tips of their wings. Even those are turned on only at the last possible moment.
To me, standing in the abandoned hangar flanked by Markus, Drusilla, and four more kill-pool dragoons, the range-finders seem like the eyes of Atlas himself. Nocturnal, omniscient. As the bait in the jaws of my own trap, I have never felt more like prey.
Pytha knew the hangar Atlas would use. It was cut from her systems by someone earlier in the day. Power outage supposedly. It is filled with war machines too damaged to repair and awaiting the attention of Oranges to be harvested for parts.
My razor hangs on my hip. My aegis-cuff on my left vambrace is dormant. I wear a sidearm, which is not too unusual. I wish I could’ve come in my pulseArmor, but Atlas will be suspicious enough to find me waiting for him in the hangar. He told me to meet him in the barracks, where he’d be untouchable. Only bullying Markus and Drusilla with my “intel” got me here where he can finally be killed.
Instead of pulseArmor, scarabSkin guards my body, concealed beneath my white uniform and cape. My hands sweat in my lambskin gloves. Only the Mind’s Eye keeps the sweat from my brow. It’s all I can do not to search the hangar for Cassius.
He is here.
Somewhere in the ranks of damaged ripWings and mechs. Orperhaps above, in the shadows of the high ceiling. It’s better I don’t know. I’m afraid Atlas will read my face immediately.
The nightRaptors hiss as they pass through the pulseField that hems in the hangar’s atmosphere. Their bulk is alienating. Battered and carbon-scored, they hover over me in a line, their engines groaning, their guns big as men. They stay there, floating as if waiting for me to kneel. When they set down, they do so in unison. Ramps unfurl from beneath their reinforced cockpits like tongues to disgorge their human cargo.
Only none comes.
An invisible jamField extends with a pop.
He knows.
No. He’s careful. Making sure no one records him.
I counted on this.
A few minutes pass. I resist the urge to flee. I wish I’d just had Pytha blast Atlas the moment his ships came in to land. But I had to be cautious. I was right to be. A fourth nightRaptor glides through space toward the hangar, far delayed behind the others.
A cautious man indeed.
As it lands, the Gorgons disembark. A Gray long-arms specialist trudges down the ramp of the rightmost ship with her rifle. Her face is half-covered with a bandage. She is hairless, her scalp bright red and peeling. She smiles at me like a ghoul—half monster, half militarist fantasy. More Gorgons follow with their gear and their wounded. Around thirty, all told. Whatever they faced on the moon of Orpheus, Atlas did not exaggerate its dangers.
Few are uninjured. Many are missing limbs and wear cautCuffs from their battle with Orpheus’s defenders. Unless some are remaining on the nightRaptors, their numbers have been depleted by eighty percent. Witnessing the state of Atlas’s dread force fills me with a measure of confidence. He’s not invulnerable.
I search their ranks for their leader, hoping to find him as wounded as his men. I am disappointed. He exits the fourth ship with all his limbs, but he is not in armor.
He is not in armor.
Clad in black fatigues, with only a pulseShield generator on his belt, he helps a bulky Gray woman bear out a man on a stretcher. Over Atlas’s shoulder is slung a reinforced pack. My eyes ache to stare at it, but it must be like the sun to them: forbidden. Atlas feels my eyes on him, andhis head turns like an owl’s to meet my gaze. He calls back into the nightRaptor. My heart sinks at the heavy bootsteps. Rhone trudges out in his full Praetorian field armor. Like Atlas, the man appears uninjured.
Of course he is. He just went out to escort Atlas in. His eyes sweep the ranks of machines in the hangar.
Do they know? No. He looks at everything like that.
Rhone told me when I was younger to always have a plan to kill everyone you meet, and any deviation in a pattern is a sign of someone preparing a trap. He’s just as big of a threat as Atlas is, especially in that armor.
