He looks at the blood. The bodies. His disembodied right hand lying on the floor. The bag at my feet. Horror grips him.
“You used me? For that? For this?” he asks. “To cut your strings and pin it all on me. The Betrayer.”
“Yes.”
He sways and looks around as if mortally wounded. “Lysander…I thought we were…I…believed in you.”
“You believed in your own reflection,” I say. “We’re not brothers. Let us go our separate ways. Take a nightRaptor. Fly away. Live. Escape this. I can’t. I won’t. I will be Sovereign. I will be a fair Sovereign. I will fix what is broken. But I must break what no longer works. Division.” I toe the bag. “With this.”
“That’s a biological weapon,” he concludes.
I nod. “I couldn’t trust it in Atlas’s hands.”
“But it’s safe in yours?”
“If I don’t control it, someone else will. Why not me?” I ask. “I didn’t start the war. I have only ever tried to do what is right! Why not me?”
“Because I don’t trust you, Lysander,” he says. “If you give it to me, I will take a nightRaptor and drive it straight into that monster.” He jerks his head toward Jupiter. The Gas Giant swirls beyond the pulseField to the hangar. “Your strings are cut, Lysander. You’re free. We can take on Atalantia. Is that not enough?”
“It’s time for you to go, Cassius.”
He watches me for a long moment.
“Say I don’t?”
“Then you’re choosing death.”
He staggers, exasperated. “No, Lysander.Youchoose. That’s the point of it all. Isn’t it?Youchoose. The chair means this much to you? More than the people in your life who love you?”
“Go, Cassius.”
“Not without that weapon.”
“This is not a debate. You are thirteen meters away. Your armor has quit. My mind is made up. And my pistol has nineteen rounds.”
“What happened to y—”
I point the gun at him. “Go.”
He looks at the gun as if it were an interloper, goes very dark for a moment, and then laughs. “You’re being ridiculous. In the end I’ll be more famous than you anyway. Cassius Bellona, the Man Who Killed Fear.”
“Leave. Cassius. Please.”
“You won’t kill me. You love me too much. The guilt will crush you.”
“I will learn to bear it.”
He looks me in the eye, sad. “No. You won’t. But if it must be guilt that drags you down, brother, I will be your millstone.” He smiles at me, forlorn. “Remember when you told me Octavia never allowed yousweets? First chance I got, I took you to that candy emporium on Eros and piled a stack of credits in your hand. That look on your face when I said you could buy as much as we could carry…”
He takes a deep breath and sighs it out. He adjusts his armor and gets a better grip on his razor.
“Cassius…don’t—” I warn.
“I must. I am Cassius Bellona, son of Tiberius, son of Julia, brother of Darrow, Morning Knight of the Solar Republic, and my honor remains.”
Then he rushes forward.
He is not fast. Not injured and in dead armor. But he is determined and he is brave and he is tough and he is clever and he is daring. He is only things I admire in him in that moment, and none of the things I don’t. He covers his exposed head with his armored arms and runs at me for all he’s worth. I fire methodically, breathing through my nose, both eyes open, like Rhone taught me. At first Cassius runs through my fire, then he plows, trudges, stumbles, until the gun is empty and he sways. But he does not fall. Not Cassius au Bellona.
