“That’s because you’re not an engineer. Assuming we get the helium we need, theArchimedeswill be ready to fly when Bellona returns. If Bellona’s not being tortured in a Grimmus sorrow sphere, that is.”
“You might be the only one who thinks he intends to come back,” I say with a glance for his men.
He shrugs. “We wouldn’t be around to doubt him now if he didn’t save us on Mercury. But I am worried he is bedblind. We should be warier about that Pink of his.”
“Not that it’s any of our business, but I don’t think they’re sleeping together,” I say.
He’s shocked. “Really? The man’s utterly besotted.”
“I don’t think he has much say in the matter,” I reply.
Cassius told me the tale of his escape from the Rim after we landed on the Marcher. He’d been a prisoner of the Rim with Lysander and forced into a series of unfair duels on Io. Impressed by Cassius, Diomedes au Raa falsified his death to protect him after he’d survived the duels. Diomedes hid Cassius in his estate on nearby Europa after accepting his parole—a promise not to flee until the war was done. Aurae, a hetaera of House Raa, helped Cassius escape Diomedes’s estate on theArchimedes. She claimed to be a sympathizer of the Republic. Together they rushed back to the Core to warn the Republic of the Rim’s plan to enter the war. They were too late. She’s served as Cassius’s crewmember ever since.
“Well even if they’re not shagging, just because she looks like a dryad, sings like a Siren, talks like an oracle, and has a bloodydamn alibi doesn’t mean she ain’t Krypteia.”
“If she were Rim intelligence, we’d already be dead,” I say. Calling the Krypteia “Rim intelligence” is a compliment. Intelligence work is part of their charge, certainly. But the Krypteia’s most insidious duty is maintaining the hierarchy in the Dominion at all costs.
“Unless she’s leading the Krypteia to us right now. You have to admit: even for a Raa hetaera, she does have a diverse collection of skills. Medical. Engineering. Not exactly the domains of a courtesan.”
My eyes narrow. “You’ve been talking to Screwface, haven’t you?”
He grimaces. “Man does like to talk these days. Sows doubt like it’s his job. Might do for you to check in on him?”
I don’t know if I have anything left to say that will pull Screw from his depression. A thought comes to me. Maybe he’ll be more receptive to Aurae’s book than I am. He’s a reader, Screw. I clap Harnassus on the shoulder and head for the door. I call back, “Cadus, if you thought Aurae was Krypteia, why’d you make her a lyre?”
Before she left with Cassius, Aurae would play her lyre and sing the songs of her spheres to the troops after dinner. Harnassus never missed a performance.
“It was for the troops,” he lies with a blush.
—
I tell myself I’m checking on Screwface to keep him straight, but it’s my own loneliness that inspires the visit. Of all my survivors, he is the only one who shares memories of the Institute. I just want a spark of our days of glory from an old member of my pack.
Taking two thermoses of the diluted caf from the processor, I grab my training pack and Aurae’s book from my room and make my way through the base’s upper labyrinth toward the coms chamber. I find Screw bathed in computer screens under thermal blankets next to his space heater. He looks more like an animated stack of laundry than the legend he is. It breaks my heart.
Screwface is a man uncelebrated by the public, because his sacrifices have always been in the shadows. Much to his chagrin. A lover of the high life, he envies the fame of Colloway Char or Sevro. When I met him at the Institute, he was ugly, lazy, and a freeloader. He is still a freeloader and would rather amputate his own testicles than pay for a drink. But with three years behind enemy lines and after being carved by Mickey and given a new identity by Theodora to infiltrate the Ash Legions, no one could describe him as lazy.
At first, he was delighted by his deep cover mission. Chronically insecure, when he emerged from Mickey’s recovery suite, broad shouldered, ruggedly Roman in the face, with a chin almost as fine and just a little larger than Cassius’s, I’d never seen a man finally so at home in his own skin.
“Fit, mate. I look bloodydamn fit to slag an entire ballet troupe. Bellona, what? Ash Legions here I come,” he’d said, striking an Olympian pose. He was nude. Epically proportioned. Theodora even applauded.
But now? Now Screwface is ugly again, and he hates it. When Heliopolis fell, he was scalped and lost a leg. He covers the livid scar that starts just above his eyebrows with a wool cap, but the base’s stores lack prosthetics, so he’s made do with a peg of plastic padded with packing foam against the stump.
My command has ruined the man.Twice.Bitterness seeps through his every word, but he was there for me in Heliopolis, before it fell. He helped pull me back from despair. So, I can stomach his bitterness. “Word from Bellona?” I ask, handing him the caf.
He doesn’t thank me. “Oh, we’re calling the Decapitator of Ares byhis real name today?” He pouts. “Alas, no the Chin and the Siren are still wayward.”
“Do you always have to bring that up?” I ask.
“Aw, come now. Yesterday’s talk was so fun. You had many adjectives for the Feckless Quim. The Avian Turncloak. Even a few adverbs.”
“I was—”
“Bitter and drunk?” he asks. “You’re all wrath when you’re bitter and drunk. Honestly, I think this war would be won if you were that way the whole time, but then I fear it’d just be you and me lording over an autarchy.” He chuckles at his rhyme, his lingo inverse to his birth, which was low. “Let’s be candid though, everyone’s been bitter about Bellona their entire life. Handed all the cards, wasn’t the Putrid Adonis?”
“And misplayed them all,” I offer.
“Except that dimpled chin. Oh, the dew-dappled valleys it’s explored. My kingdom to be a hair on that mentum…”
