Morning Star

I squint up past Holiday as an iridescent defensive shield ripples into place over the seven peaks of Attica, cutting us off from the clouds and the sky beyond. The shield generator must have been out of the EMP’s blast range. No help will come to us from beyond it.

“Trigg! Get back here!” she shouts as he plants the last mine on the bridge.

A single gunshot shatters the winter morning. Echoing brittle and cold. More follow. Crack. Crack. Crack. Snow kicks around him. He sprints back as Holiday leans to cover for him, her rifle rocking her shoulder. Straining, I push myself up. My eyes ache as they try to focus in the sun’s light. Concrete explodes in front of me. Shards rip into my face. I duck down, shivering in fear. The Jackal’s men have found their backup weapons.

I peer out again. Through squinting lids, I see Trigg pinned down halfway to us, exchanging gunfire with a squad of Grays carrying gas-powered rifles. They pour out of the fortress’s blast doors, now opened at the opposite end of the bridge. Two go down. Two more step near a proximity mine and disappear in a cloud of smoke as Trigg shoots it at their feet. Holiday picks another off just as Trigg staggers back into cover, hit with a round in the shoulder. He jams a stimshot into his thigh and pops back up. A bullet slaps into the concrete in front of me, kicks up into Holiday to impact her ribs just under the armpit of her body armor with a meaty thud.

She spins down. Bullets force me to crouch beside her. Concrete rains. She spits blood and there’s a wet, phlegmy echoing to her breath.

“It’s in my lung,” she gasps as she fumbles with a stimshot from her leg pouch. Were the circuits of her armor not fried, meds would inject automatically. But she has to crack open the case and pull a dose manually. I help, pulling free one of the micro-syringes and injecting her in the neck. Her pupils dilate and her breath slows as the narcotic drifts through her blood. Beside me, Victra’s eyes are closed.

The gunfire stops. Carefully, I peek out. The Jackal’s Grays hide behind concrete walls and pylons across the bridge, some sixty meters away. Trigg reloads. The wind is the only sound. Something’s wrong. I search the sky, fearing the quiet. A Gold is coming. I can feel it in the battle’s pulse.

“Trigg!” I shout till my body shudders. “Run!”

Holiday sees the look on my face. She struggles up, wheezing in pain as Trigg abandons his cover, boots slipping on the ice-slicked bridge. He falls and gains his feet, scrambling toward us, terrified. Too late. Behind him, Aja au Grimmus rips out of the fortress’s door, past the Grays, past the Obsidians who lurk in the shadows. She’s in her black formal jacket. Her long legs reel Trigg in now. It’s one of the saddest sights I’ve ever seen.

I fire my pistol. Holiday unloads her rifle. We hit nothing but air. Aja sidesteps, twists, and, when Trigg is ten paces from us, spears him through the torso with her razor. Metal glistens wetly from his sternum. Shock widens his eyes. His mouth makes a quiet gasp. And he screams as he’s hauled into the air. Pried upward by Aja’s razor like a twitching pond frog on the end of a makeshift spear.

“Trigg…” Holiday whispers.

I stumble forward, toward Aja, pulling my razor, but Holiday jerks me back behind the wall as bullets from the distant Grays rip into the concrete around us. Her blood melts the snow under her. “Don’t be stupid,” she snarls, dragging me to the ground with the last of her strength. “We can’t help him.”

“He’s your brother!”

“He’s not the mission. You are.”

“Darrow!” Aja calls from the bridge. Holiday peers out where Aja stands with her brother, her face bloodless and quiet. The knight holds Trigg up on the end of her razor with one hand. Trigg wriggles on the blade. Sliding down it toward her grip. “My goodman, the time for hiding behind others is over. Come out.”

“Don’t,” Holiday murmurs.

“Come out,” Aja says. And she tosses Trigg off her blade over the side of the bridge. He falls two hundred meters before his body splits against a granite ledge below.

Holiday makes a sick choking sound. She brings up her empty rifle and pulls the trigger a dozen times in Aja’s direction. Aja ducks before realizing Holiday’s weapon is empty. I pull Holiday down as a sniper’s bullet aimed at her chest slams into her gun, shattering it and kicking it from her grip, mangling a finger. We sit shivering, backs to concrete, Victra between us.

“I’m sorry,” I manage. She doesn’t hear me. Her hands shake worse than mine. No tears in her distant eyes. No color in her lined face.

“They’ll come,” she says after a hollow moment. Her eyes following the green smoke. “They have to.” Blood leaks through her clothing and out the corner of her mouth before freezing halfway down her neck. She grips her boot knife and tries to rise, but her body is done. Breaths wet and thick, smelling like copper. “They’ll come.”

“What is the plan?” I ask her. Her eyes close. I shake her. “How will they come?”

She nods to the edge of the landing pad. “Listen.”

“Darrow!” Cassius’s voice calls over the wind. He’s joined Aja. “Darrow of Lykos, come out!” His rich voice is unfit for this moment. Too regal and high and untouched by the sadness that swallows us. I wipe the tears from my eyes. “You must decide what you are in the end, Darrow. Will you come out like a man? Or must we dig you out like a rat from a cave?”

The anger tightens my chest, but I don’t want to stand. Once I would have, when I wore the armor of Gold and thought I would tower over Eo’s killer and reveal my true self as his cities burned and their Color fell. But that armor is gone. That mask of the Reaper gnawed away by doubt and darkness. I am just a boy, and I shiver and cower and hide from my enemy because I know the price of failure, and I am so very afraid.

But I will not let them take me. I will not be their victim, and I will not let Victra fall into their hands again.

“Slag this,” I say. I grab Holiday’s collar and Victra’s hand and, eyes flashing with the strain, blinded by the sun on the snow, face numb, I drag them with all my strength from our hiding place across the landing pad to the far edge where the wind roars.

There’s silence from my enemies.

The sight I must make—a tottering, withered form, dragging my friends, sunken eyes, face like that of a starving old demon, bearded and ridiculous—is pitiful. Twenty meters behind me, the two Olympic Knights stand imperious on the bridge where it meets the landing pad, flanked by more than fifty Grays and Obsidians who have come from the citadel doors behind him. Aja’s silver razor drips blood. But it’s not her weapon. It’s Lorn’s, the one she took from his corpse. My toes throb inside my wet slippers.

Their men seem so tiny against the face of the vast mountain fortress. Their metal guns so petty and simple. I look to the right, off the bridge. Kilometers away, a flight of soldiers rises from a distant mountain peak where the EMP did not reach. They bank toward us through a low cloud layer. A ripWing follows.

“Darrow,” Cassius calls to me as he walks forward with Aja off the bridge onto the pad. “You cannot escape.” He watches me, eyes unreadable. “The shield is up. Sky blocked. No ships can come from beyond to retrieve you.” He looks to the green smoke swirling from the canister on the landing pad into the winter air. “Accept your fate.”

The wind howls between us, carrying flakes of snow stripped from the mountain.

“Dissection?” I ask. “Is that what you think I deserve?”

“You’re a terrorist. What rights you had, you’ve given up.”

“Rights?” I snarl over Victra and Holiday. “To pull my wife’s feet? To watch my father die?” I try to spit, but it sticks to my lips. “What gives you the right to take them?”

“There’s no debate here. You are a terrorist, and you must be brought to justice.”

“Then why are you talking with me, you bloodydamn hypocrite?”

“Because honor still matters. Honor is what echoes.” His father’s words. But they are as empty on his lips as they feel in my ears. This war has taken everything from him. I see in his eyes how broken he is. How terribly hard he is trying to be his father’s son. If he could, he would choose to be back by the campfire we made in the highlands of the Institute. He would return to the days of glory when life was simple, when friends seemed true. But wishing for the past doesn’t clean the blood from either of our hands.

I listen to the groaning wind from the valley. My heels reach the end of the landing pad. There’s nothing but air behind me. Air and the shifting topography of a dark city on the valley floor two thousand meters below.

“He’s going to jump,” Aja says quietly to Cassius. “We need the body.”

“Darrow…don’t,” Cassius says, but his eyes are telling me to jump, telling me to take this way out instead of surrendering, instead of going to Luna to be peeled apart. This is the noble way. He’s putting his cape over me again.

I hate him for it.

“You think you’re honorable?” I hiss. “You think you’re good? Who is left that you love? Who do you fight for?” Anger creeps into my words. “You are alone, Cassius. But I am not. Not when I faced your brother in the Passage. Not when I hid among you. Not when I lay in darkness. Not even now.” I grip Holiday’s unconscious body as hard as I can, looping my fingers inside the straps of her body armor. Clutch Victra’s hand. My heels scrape the concrete’s edge. “Listen to the wind, Cassius. Listen to the bloodydamn wind.”

The two knights tilt their heads. And still they do not understand the strange groaning sound that drifts up from the valley floor, because how would a son and daughter of Gold ever know the sound of a clawDrill gnawing through rock? How would they guess that my people would come not from the sky, but from the heart of our planet?

“Goodbye, Cassius,” I say. “Expect me.” And I push off the ledge with both legs, flinging myself backward into open air, dragging Holiday and Victra into thin air.