Golden Son

47

FREE

The Pot is a piece of shit—a three-hundred-meter-deep nest of metal and concrete humid with the stink of swill and cleaning agent. Once it seemed to tower above Lykos’s Common like some lofty castle. But as my ship descends, it’s just a dull metal blister in the southern Martian taiga, far removed from the grand cities where men marshal for the great effort against Octavia au Lune.

The Grays inside aren’t fit to get paid doing anything but intimidate Reds. To think I once considered the Grays like Ugly Dan crack troops. Sad to see how weak and petty the demons of my youth really were. As though I come from some hollow fantasy past.

They did not know my ship was coming. They don’t know why I’m here, nor must I tell them. They just scatter like horseflies as I stalk down my ship’s ramp onto the engine-blackened landing pad, Obsidian bodyguards flowing out before me. Ragnar towering behind as I stalk through the metal-grated halls. Any of these Grays will know how to get where I need to go, but I am looking for a familiar face.

“Dan,” I ask one of the Brown janitors. “Where is he?”

I burst into one of their common rooms, where a dozen Grays play cards and smoke cigars. A woman notices me, turning her attention from an HC where several talking heads—a Silver, a Violet, and two Greens—debate the political ramifications of Mars’s conquest over a montage of my exploits. Her cigar falls out of her mouth. The man sitting at her side slaps the cigar as it falls on his pant leg and catches the fabric.

“Carly, you dumb meat sheath.” He flings himself back from the table. “Goddamn. The hell is your …”

Ugly Dan swivels to see me for the first time in four years. I can feel the hairs on his skin rise as the spring of discipline hidden in his slothful body snaps to attention. There’s no recognition in his eyes, no fear, just obedience.

This gives me no catharsis. Dan should have an impudent sneer on his lips, a nasty hyena cast to his aspect. But he’s doesn’t. He’s tame. Obedient. Face pocked from childhood acne. The greasy hair Loran and I teased him for behind his back, now gone. A crater of baldness has replaced it, fringed with shoots of withered gray. He’s as scary as a wet dog. This is the man I let kill Eo.

How could I not have stopped him? Was I ever so weak?

“The bubbleGarden,” I say to Dan, voice filling the metal common room. “Take me there.”

I’ve already turned on a heel. Ragnar pats his thigh. “Come, dog.”

It’s been four years since I last stood here. Stars twinkle in the gray above as night pulls on its hood. The garden is smaller than I remember. Less filled with color, with sounds. I suppose that’s to be expected, being where I’ve been, seeing what I’ve seen. There’s more trash. More signs of Grays using the place for screwing and drinking. I toe an empty beer can with my shoe. A candy bar wrapper marks the place where Eo and I last lay together.

I remember it a bed of soft grass. But there are weeds now. Maybe there were weeds then and I just didn’t notice them. The flowers are wilted, paltry things. I touch one with my finger and feel a sadness pull at me as I peer up through the bubbleRoof to see stars shooting across the sky. I snort. Once they might have been stars. I thought them such when I was younger. But now I know they are the warships that prepare for an assault on Luna. I don’t know what I expected. No magic remains here.

Should have left this place perfect in memory. I wonder if Eo is safer there, safe from my eyes. If I saw her now, if I came back, would I be so in love? Would she seem so perfect?

I walk through the garden. It really is barely larger than my suites on the Pax. I’m thicker than the trees I walk under. The grass balds near the base of them where the roots rear through the ground.

I find the place I came for. Haemanthus flowers live atop Eo’s grave. Dozens. It would seem a miracle if I did not remember the flower bud I set in the grave with her. She’s not there any longer. I know that. The Grays would have dug her up and strung her from the Common to rot after they hanged me.

There’s a dark irony I’m only just realizing. I came here to ask for her blessing but she’s not here. She’s fled this cage for the Vale.

So I sit cross-legged, waiting for the sun to set, where once I waited for it to rise. When it does, the day’s waning light fills the bubbleGarden with a bloody hue. And then the sun surrenders to the horizon and night draws its star-pierced shroud over Mars.

I laugh at myself.

Ragnar slips from his place at the door.

“I’m fine,” I say without turning to him. “She’d laugh at me for coming here.”

“Laughter is a gift.”

“Sometimes.”

I stand and dust my pants, giving the place one last look.

The garden isn’t as perfect as it was in memory. And neither was she. She was impatient. She could be spiteful for small reasons. But she was a girl. Not even seventeen. And she gave the most she could, did the best she could with what she had. That’s why I will always love her, and it is why I know whether or not she would give her blessing for what I go to do. My heart can’t stay here in this cage she herself has fled. It must move on.