Then he turns and walks down the dune toward death, his hand at his side, his shoulders proud and square, head held back in defiance of the cold and poisoned air. The frozen sulfur crystals crack under his feet, wounding the skin. By the tenth step, blood smears a glittering red trail behind him. By the twentieth, his body shudders against the wind.
“Twenty-nine,” Seraphina whispers, counting her father’s steps. Romulus clutches his chest with his one arm, desperate to keep his spirit of warmth from the gnawing moon. “Thirty-two.” His spine stands out as he hunches. “Thirty-seven.” His hair is frozen and no longer whips in the wind but clumps to the back of his neck like a dead animal.
“Forty-five.” He drifts sideways, his path bending away from the monument. “Fifty.” He falls to his knees. Paleron sobs at his mother’s side. Dido watches without blinking. Frost crusts her eyelashes. Romulus wills himself up. Blood pours down his knees and freezes to his shins as he stumbles on, his will inexorable. One foot after the other. They are black and red now. Blood frozen onto the bottom of the dead flesh to make a shoe.
“Sixty.” Seraphina’s voice grows louder, wishing her father a triumph in the end. “Sixty-four.” The man will not stop. His will is immense. All the pain of all the years has culminated into this single testament of will to prove to the moon that despite its horrors, it is under his power.
“Sixty-eight.”
I find myself wishing strength.
“Seventy…” Romulus takes another impossible step up the side of the dune. Then his legs betray him. He falls hard to the ground ten steps from the monument, striking his head on the ice before sliding back, supine. His black hand paws at the ground. Steam seeps from his mouth. But with one arm, he cannot lift himself up. He heaves himself upward one last time. The effort is in vain. He does not stand again. Soon, he does not move. Ice crusts over his white body amongst the corpses of his humbled ancestors. Ten steps from the honored Golds who reached the monument lies the greatest man of a people.
“Pulvis et umbra sumus,” Seraphina whispers, and I alone hear her. Below, the family weeps. The moon howls, the darkness quickens, and the Raa leave their father behind and, like the dust, fly away with the wind and fade into the ebbing twilight.
DIDO SITS SLUMPED IN a low chair by a window that looks out over the sulfur plain. The weather is clear. Her arms hang off the edge of the armrests. Her large, angry eyes look out into the waste but are trained on her past. She is an island of regret, bled of pride, of spirit, and swollen with the torpor of loss.
“What is it you want, Lune?” She asks this without turning around when Seraphina and I enter the room. The young woman escorted me in silence.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say. She does not respond. I glance nervously at Seraphina, knowing my presence here is unwanted in this moment of grief. The girl looks back at me with cold, inhospitable eyes. “He was the noblest of men.”
“What do you know of my husband?” she asks harshly.
“From what he said to me before he died, I learned enough.”
“He was something out of time. A paragon. His life spent honoring the Conquerors. But he was greater by far than they could ever have been. Now…such a waste.” She shakes her head. “Uncurl your tongue, boy, and leave me to my grief.”
“I wish to join your war,” I say flatly.
She watches a lone volcano vomit ash into the chrome horizon.
Seraphina scowls. “There’s no place for a Lune in our army.”
“I beg to differ.”
“And what good would you do me, Lysander au Lune?” Dido asks. “Can you skim a dune like a Dustwalker or fly a warhawk in storm or operate a starShell in an Iron Rain as your friends die around you?” She snorts. “You have no scar. You know theory, games. You were raised in a palace, raised to be a king. And there is no more wretched a creature than a king without a kingdom.”
“I am not a king.”
“Then what are you?”
What am I? I have been asking this of myself for a decade or more.
Little has been certain since my grandmother fell. I looked out at the worlds in flux, in constant motion beneath my feet. Denying me a foundation. Filling me with uncertainty, fear. I did not know my own heart. But no matter the shifting of the worlds, I know the bedrock of my soul. I know the foundation upon which I stand and no longer fear my blood. Just because my grandmother was a tyrant does not mean I will be.
I see the faces of those I left behind on the Vindabona.
They need a protector. A shepherd.
I know who I am, or at least, who I want to become. And with that realization, I feel the culmination of the souls who have filled my life. I feel my father’s calm, Aja’s love, my grandmother’s brilliance, Cassius’s honor, and even the faint heartbeat of my mother; and I know that Romulus spoke wisdom I somehow already knew deep in the heart of me.
“I am no heir of empire or conqueror of men,” I say slowly. “But I have the same birthright as you. The same inheritance. We were created because Earth broke itself. Because man disintegrated into tribal strife. Chaos is the nature of man; order, the dream of Gold. We were made to shepherd. To unite, despite our differences—that is what Romulus said to me in the end. And he is right.”
Seraphina stares at me, a rebuke frozen on her lips.
“You called my grandmother a tyrant. She was. But I am not her. I am not Aja. I am not my godfather. I am an Iron Gold.”
Slowly, Dido turns around.
“As you gather your armada to sail on the Rising, send me to the Core with a cohort of your best. I will find my godfather. I will tell him that the Rim is coming, that the sins of the past must be forgotten, and that you seek an alliance against the Reaper so that Gold may be united once again. If peace must be brought with a sword, let us hold it together.”
The silence stretches between us. She stands imperiously over me. Then her eyes narrow. And slowly on Dido’s dour, grieving face, her lips curl into a smile.
I SLUMP OVER THE CONTROLS, guiding us over the gray cityscape at high altitude. Electra sits in the co-pilot chair with the razor pointed at me from the side. Of course the little warlords know first aid. Pax has cut open my shirt and sealed the hole in my chest with resFlesh from the ship’s medkit, but I’m in shit shape. Need a doctor and blood packs or I’ll die, and soon. I’d rather bleed out in this ship than die in a cell, but that’s not much of a choice anymore. I eye my Omni in Electra’s lap and wonder if I could throw the ship hard to port and get a jump on the little bastards.
“How far are we?” Pax says.
“Republic escorts are twenty out.” I eye the roofs beneath us and the flow of pedestrian traffic in the airspace below and wonder if the Syndicate can still reach us here.
“You going to make it?” Electra asks me.
“Do I look like a Yellow?”
“Can you feel your hands?” she asks.
“No.” She looks back at Pax. “Don’t look at him, hatchetface. I’d rather fly unconscious than let a kid behind the grip of a…” I grimace at the pain. “…of a Hornet.”
“I fly gravBikes all the time,” the boy says.