So we hope.
Under the supervision of Holiday, Sefi has set off to Mars to begin the slow process of freeing the rest of her people, visiting the poles with medicine instead of weapons. I remember how dark her eyes seemed when she looked at one of the Jackal’s nuclear craters in person. For now, she’s embraced the legacy of her brother, and plans to settle on warmer land set aside for her people on Mars. Though she wishes to keep her people from the alien cities, I think she knows deep down that she will not be able to control them. The Obsidians will leave their prisons. They will grow curious, spread, and assimilate. Their world will never be the same. Nor will that of my people. Soon I will return to Mars
to help Dancer lead the migration of Reds to the surface. Many will stay and continue the lives they know. But for others, there will be a chance for life under the sky.
I said farewell to Cassius the day before last as he departed Luna. Mustang wanted him to stay and help us shape a new, fairer system of justice. But he’s had enough of politics. “You don’t have to go,”
I told him as I stood with him on the landing pad.
“There’s nothing for me here but memories,” he said. “I’ve been living my life too long for others.
I want to see what else is out there. You can’t fault me for that.”
“And the boy?” I asked, nodding to Lysander, who moved into the ship carrying a satchel of belongings. “Sevro thinks it’s a mistake to let him live. What were his words? ‘It’s like leaving a pitviper egg under your seat. Sooner or later it’s gonna hatch.’?”
“And what do you think?”
“I think it’s a different world. So we should act like it. He’s got Lorn’s blood in his veins as much as he’s got Octavia’s. Not that blood makes a difference anymore.”
My tall friend smiled fondly at me. “He reminds me of Julian. He’s a good soul, despite everything.
I’ll raise him right. Away from all this.” He extended a hand, not to shake mine, but to give me the ring he took from my finger the night Lorn and Fitchner died. I closed his hand back around it.
“That belongs to Julian,” I said.
He nodded softly. “Thank you…brother.” And there, on a citadel landing platform in what was once
the heart of Gold power, Cassius au Bellona and I shake hands and say farewell, almost six years to the day since we first met.
—
Weeks later, I watch the waves lap at the shore as a gull careens overhead. Whitecaps mark the dark water that lashes the northern beach’s sea stacks. Mustang and I set our little two-person flier down on the east-northeast coast of the Pacific Rim, at the edge of a rain forest on a great peninsula. Moss grows on the rocks, on the trees. The air is crisp. Just cold enough to see your breath. It is my first time on Earth, but I feel like my spirit has come home. “Eo would have loved it here, wouldn’t she?”
Mustang asks me. She wears a black coat with the collar pulled up around her neck. Her new Praetorian bodyguards sit in the rocks a half kilometer off.
“Yes,” I say. “She would have.” A place like this is the beating heart of our songs. Not a warm beach or a tropical paradise. This wild land is full of mystery. It holds its secrets covetously behind arms of fog and veils of pine needles. Its pleasures, like its secrets, must be earned. It reminds me of my dreams of the Vale. The smoke from the fire we made of driftwood rises diagonally across the horizon.
“Do you think it will last?” Mustang asks me, watching the water from our place in the sand. “The
peace.”
“It would be the first time,” I say.
She grimaces and leans into me, closing her eyes. “At least we have this.”
I smile, reminded of Cassius as an eagle skims low over the water before rising up through the mist and disappearing in the trees that jut from the top of a sea stack. “Have I passed your test?”
“My test?” she asks.
“Ever since you blocked my ship from leaving Phobos, you’ve been testing me. I thought I passed
on the ice, but it didn’t stop there.”
“You noticed,” she says with a mischievous little grin. It fades and she brushes hair from her eyes.
“I’m sorry that I couldn’t just follow you. I needed to see if you could build. I needed to see if my people could live in your world.”
“No, I understand that,” I say. “But there’s more to it. Something changed when you saw my mother.
My brother. Something opened up in you.”
She nods, eyes still on the water. “There’s something I have to tell you.” I look over at her. “You lied to me for nearly six years. Since the moment we met. In the Lykos tunnel you broke what we had.
That trust. That feeling of closeness we built. Piecing that together takes time. I needed to see if we could find what we lost. I needed to see if I could trust you.”
“You know you can.”
“I do, now,” she says. “But…”