Morning Star

I’m alone, far away from the horror, standing weightless and clean on a road that smells of moss and earth. My feet touch the ground, but I cannot feel it underfoot. To either side stretches the grass of wind-beaten moors. The sky flashes with lightning. My hands are without Sigils and drift along the cobbled wall that meanders on ahead to either side. When did I start walking? Somewhere in the distance, wood smoke rises. I follow the road, but I feel I have no choice. A voice calls to me from beyond a hill.

Oh tomb, O marriage chamber, hollowed out

house that will watch forever, where I go.

To my own people, who are mostly there;

Persephone has taken them to her.

Last of them all, ill-fated past the rest,

shall I descend, before my course is run.

Still when I get there I may hope to find

I come as a dear friend to my dear father

To you, my mother, and my brother too.

All three of you have known my hand in death

I wash your bodies…

It is my uncle’s voice. Is this the Vale? Is this the road I walk before death? It can’t be. In the Vale there is no pain, but my body aches. My legs sting. Still I hear his voice ahead of me, drawing me through the mist. The man who taught me to dance after my father died, who guarded me and sent me to Ares. Who died himself in a mineshaft and dwells now in the Vale.

I thought it would be Eo who greeted me. Or my father. Not Narol.

“Keep reading,” another voice whispers. “Dr. Virany said he can hear us. He just has to find his way back.” Even as I walk, I feel a bed under me. The air around cold and crisp in my lungs. The sheets soft and clean. The muscles in my legs twitch. Feels like little bees are stinging them. And with each sting, the dream world fades and I slide back into my body.

“Well, if we’re gonna read to the squabber, might as well be something Red. Not this poncy Violet shit.”

“Dancer said this was one of his favorites.”

My eyes open. I’m in a bed. White sheets, IVs going into my arms. Under the sheets, I touch the ant-sized nodes that have been stuck to my legs to channel electrical current through my muscles to combat atrophy. The room’s a cave. Scientific equipment, machines, and terraria litter it.

It was Uncle Narol I heard in the dream after all. But he’s not in the Vale. He’s alive. He sits at my bedside, squinting down at one of Mickey’s old books. He’s grizzled and wiry, even for a Red. Callused hands trying to be gentle with the frail paper pages. He’s bald now, and deeply sunburned on his forearms and the back of his neck. Still looks like he was cobbled together out of cracked old leather. He’ll be forty-one now. Looks older. More savage. A brooding danger to him, lent teeth by the railgun in his thigh holster. A slingBlade has been sewn onto his black military jacket above a Society logo that’s been peeled off and inverted. Red at the top. Gold the foundation.

The man’s been at war.

Beside him sits my mother. A bent, fragile woman since her stroke. How many times did I imagine the Jackal standing over her, pliers in hand? She’s been safe the whole time. Her crooked fingers weave needle and thread through tattered socks, patching the holes. They don’t move like they used to. Age and infirmity have slowed her. Her broken body is not what she is on the inside. There she stands tall as any Gold, broad as any Obsidian.

Watching her sit there breathing quietly, intent on her task, I want to protect her more than anything else in the world. I want to heal her. Give her all she never had. I love her so much, I don’t know what to say. What to do that can ever show her how much she means to me. “Mother…” I whisper.

They look up. Narol frozen in his chair. My mother setting a hand on his and rising slowly to my bedside. Her steps slow, wary. “Hello, child.”

She stands above me, overwhelming me with the love in her eyes. My hand is almost larger than her head, but I gently touch her face as if to prove to myself she is real. I trace the crow’s-feet from her eyes to the gray hair at her temples. As a boy, I did not like her as much as I liked father. She would hit me at times. She would weep alone and pretend nothing was wrong. And now all I want is to listen to her hum as she cooks. All I want are those still nights where we had peace and I was a child.

I want the time back.

“I’m sorry…,” I find myself saying. “I’m so sorry…”

She kisses my forehead and rocks her head against mine. She smells like rust and sweat and oil. Like home. She tells me I am her son. There is nothing to apologize for. I am safe. I am loved. The family is here. Kieran, Leanna, their children. Waiting to see me. I sob uncontrollably, sharing all the pain my solitude forced me to hoard. The tears a deeper language than my tongue can afford. I’m exhausted by the time she kisses me again on the head and pulls back. Narol comes to her side and puts a hand on my arm. “Narol…”

“Hello, you little bastard,” he says roughly. “Still your father’s son, eh?”

“I thought you were dead,” I say.

“Nah. Death chewed on me a bit. Then spat my bloody ass back out. Said there was killing that needed doin’ and some wild blood of mine that needed savin’.” He grins down at me. That old scar on his lips joined by two new ones.

“We’ve been waiting for you to wake up,” Mother says. “It’s been two days since they brought you back in the shuttle.”

I can still taste the smoke from burned flesh in the back of my throat.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“Tinos. The city of Ares.”

“Tinos…,” I whisper. I sit up quickly. “Sevro…Ragnar…”

“They’re alive,” Narol grunts, pushing me back down. “Don’t rip out your tubes and resFlesh. Took Dr. Virany hours to thread you up after that bloody mess of an escape. Boneriders were supposed to be in EMP radius. They weren’t. They ripped us to pieces in the tunnels. Ragnar’s the only reason you’re living.”

“You were there?”

“Who do you think lead the drillteam that punched up into Attica? It was Lykos blood, Lambda and Omicron.”

“And what about Victra?”

“Easy, boy.” He sets his hand on my chest to stop me from trying to get up again. “She’s with the doc. Same for the Gray. They’re alive. Getting patched.”

“You need to check me, Narol. Tell the doctors to check me for radiation trackers. For implants. They might have let me go on purpose, to find Tinos….I need to see Sevro.”

“Oy! I said easy,” Narol says sharply. “We checked you. Two implants were in you. But both fried in the EMP. You weren’t tracked. And Ares ain’t here. He’s still out with the Howlers. Came back just to deliver the wounded and scarf down grub.” There were almost a dozen wolfcloaks. So he’s recruited. Thistle betrayed us, but Vixus mentioned Pebble and Clown. Wonder if Screwface is with them too.

“Ares is always on the move,” mother says.

“Lots to do. Only one Ares,” Narol replies defensively. “They’re still out looking for survivors. They’ll be back soon. By morning, luck holds.” My mother shoots him a harsh look and he shuts up.

I lean back in the bed, overwhelmed by speaking to them. By seeing them. I can barely form sentences. So much to say. So much unfamiliar emotion running through me. All I end up doing is sitting there, breathing fast. My mother’s love fills the room, but still I feel the darkness moving beyond this moment. Pressing in on this family I thought I lost and now fear I cannot protect. My enemies are too great. Too many. And I too weak. I shake my head, running my thumb over her knuckles.

“I thought I would never see you again.”

“Yet here you are.” Somehow she makes it sound cold. So like my mother to be the one with dry eyes when both the men can barely speak. I always wondered how I survived the Institute. It damn well wasn’t because of my father. He was a gentle man. Mother is the spine in me. The iron. And I clutch her hand as if such a simple gesture could say all that.

A light knock comes at the door. Dancer pokes his head in. Devilishly handsome as ever, he’s one of the only Reds alive who makes old age look good. I can hear his foot dragging slightly behind him in the hall. Both my mother and uncle nod to him in deference. Narol steps aside respectfully as he approaches my bedside, but my mother stays put. “This Helldiver’s not done yet, it would seem.” Dancer grips my hand. “But you gave us a hell of a scare.”

“It’s bloodydamn good to see you, Dancer.”

“And you, boy. And you.”

“Thank you. For taking care of them.” I nod to my mother and uncle. “For helping Sevro…”

“It’s what family is for,” he says. “How are you?”

“My chest hurts. And everything else.”

He laughs lightly. “It should. Virany says that crank the Nakamuras gave you almost killed you. You had a heart attack.”

“Dancer, how did the Jackal know? Every day I’ve wondered. Picked it apart. The clues I left him. Did I give myself up?”

“It wasn’t you,” Dancer says. “It was Harmony.”

“Harmony…” I whisper. “She wouldn’t…she hates Gold.” But even as I say it, I know how reckless her hate is. How vengeful she must have felt after I did not detonate the bomb she gave me to kill the Sovereign and the others on Luna.

“She thinks we’ve sold out the rebellion,” Dancer says. “That we’re compromising too much. She told the Jackal who you were.”

“He knew when I was in his office. When I gave him the gift…”

He nods tiredly. “Your presence proved her claims. So the Jackal let us rescue her and the others. We brought her back to base, and an hour before his kill squads came, she disappeared.”

“Fitchner is dead because of her. He gave her a purpose…I understand how she could betray me, but him? Ares?”

“She found out he was a Gold. Then she gave him up. Must have given the Jackal the base’s coordinates.” Ares was her hero. Her god. After her children died in the mines he gave her a reason to live, a reason to fight. And then she discovered he was the enemy, and she got him killed. It crushes me to think that’s why he died.

Dancer surveys me quietly. It’s clear I’m not what he expected. Mother and Narol watch him almost as carefully as they watch me, deducing the same.

“I know I’m not what I was,” I say slowly.

“No, boy. You’ve been through hell. It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

He exchanges a look with my mother. “You’re sure?”

“He needs to know. Tell him,” she says. Narol nods too.

Dancer hesitates still. He looks for a chair. Narol rushes to pull one out for him and set it near the bed. Dancer nods his thanks and then leans over me, making a steeple of his fingers. “Darrow, you’ve gone too long with people hiding things from you. So I want to be very transparent from here forward. Until five days ago, we thought you were dead.”

“I was close enough.”

“No. No, I mean we stopped looking for you nine months ago.”

My mother’s hand tightens on mine.

“Three months after you were captured, the Golds executed you on the HC for treason. They dragged a boy identical to you out to the steps of the citadel in Agea and read off your crimes. Pretending you were still a Gold. We tried to free you. But it was a trap. We lost thousands of men.” His eyes drift over my lips, my hair. “He had your eyes, your scars, your bloodydamn face. And we had to watch as the Jackal cut off your head and destroyed your obelisk on Mars Field.”

I stare at them, not fully comprehending.

“We grieved for you, child,” Mother says, voice thin. “The whole clan, city. I led the Fading Dirge myself and we buried your boots in the deeptunnels beyond Tinos.”

Narol crosses his arms, trying to seal himself off from the memory. “He was just like you. Same walk. Same face. Thought I had watched you die again.”

“It was likely a fleshMask or they Carved someone, or digital effects,” Dancer explains. “Doesn’t matter now. The Jackal killed you as an Aureate. Not as a Red. Would have been foolish for them to reveal your identity. Would have handed us a tool. So instead you died just another Gold who thought he could be king. A warning.”

The Jackal promised he would hurt those I love. And now I see how deeply he has. My mother’s façade has broken. All the grief she’s kept inside thickens behind her eyes as she stares down at me. Guilt straining her face.

“I gave up on you,” she says softly, voice cracking. “I gave up.”

“It’s not your fault,” I say. “You couldn’t have known.”

“Sevro did,” she says.

“He never stopped looking for you,” Dancer explains. “I thought he was mad. He said you weren’t dead. That he could feel it. That he would know. I even asked him to give up the helm to someone else. He was too reckless searching for you.”

“But the bastard found you,” Narol says.

“Aye,” Dancer replies. “He did. I was wrong in it. I should have believed in you. Believed in him.”

“How did you find me?”

“Theodora designed an operation.”

“She’s here?”

“Working for us in intelligence. Woman’s got contacts. Some of her informants in a Pearl Club caught word that the Olympic Knights were taking a package from Attica back to Luna for the Sovereign. Sevro believed you were that package, and he put a huge portion of our reserve resources behind this attack, burned two of our deep assets…”

As he speaks, I watch my mother stare distantly at a crackling lightbulb in the ceiling. What is this like for her? For a mother to see her child broken by other men? To see the pain written in scars on his skin, spoken in silences, in far-off looks. How many mothers have prayed to see their sons, their daughters return from war only to realize the war has kept them, the world has poisoned them, and they’ll never be the same?

For nine months, Mother has grieved for me. Now she’s drowning in guilt for giving up and desperation in hearing the war swallow me again, knowing she’s helpless to stop it. In the past years, I’ve trampled over so many to get what I think I want. If this is my last chance at life, I want to do it right. I need to.

“…But now the real problem isn’t materiel, it’s manpower we need….”

“Dancer…stop,” I say.

“Stop?” He frowns in confusion, glancing at Narol. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. But I’ll talk with you in the morning about this.”

“The morning? Darrow, the world is shifting under your feet. We’ve lost control over the other Red factions. The Sons will not last the year. I have to give you a debriefing. We need you back….”

“Dancer, I am alive,” I say, thinking of all the questions I want to ask, about the war, my friends, how I was undone, about Mustang. But that can wait. “Do you even know how lucky I am? To be able to see you all again in this world? I haven’t seen my brother or my sister in years. So tomorrow I’ll listen to your debriefing. Tomorrow the war can have me again. But tonight I belong to my family.”

—

I hear the children before we reach the door. I feel a guest in someone else’s dream. Unfit for the world of children. But I’ve little say in the matter as Mother pushes my wheelchair forward into a cramped dormitory cluttered with metal bunks, children, the smell of shampoo, and noise. Five of the children of my blood, fresh from the showers by the looks of their hair and the little sandals on the floor, are scrumming on one of the bunks, two taller nine-year-olds holding an alliance against two six-year-olds and a tiny little cherub of a girl who keeps head-butting the biggest boy in the leg. He hasn’t yet noticed her. The sixth child in the room I remember from when I visited Mother in Lykos. The little girl who couldn’t sleep. One of Kieran’s. She watches the other children over her glossy book of fables from another bunk and is the first to notice me.

“Pa,” she calls back, eyes wide. “Pa…”

Kieran bursts up from his game of dice with Leanna when he sees me. Leanna’s slower behind him. “Darrow,” he says, rushing to me and stopping just before my wheelchair. He’s bearded now too. In his mid-twenties. No slump to his shoulders like there used to be. His eyes radiate a goodness that I used to think made him a little foolish, now it just seems wildly brave. Remembering himself, he waves his children forward. “Reagan, Iro, children. Come meet my little brother. Come meet your uncle.”

The children line up awkwardly around him. A baby laughs from the back of the room and a young mother rises from her bunk where she was breastfeeding the child. “Eo?” I whisper. The woman’s a vision of the past. Small, face the shape of a heart. Her hair a thick, tangled mess. The sort that frizzes on humid days, like Eo’s did. But this is not Eo. Her eyes are smaller, her nose elfin. More delicacy here than fire. And this is a woman, not a girl like my wife was. Twenty years old now, by my count.

They all stare at me strangely.

Wondering if I am mad.

Except Dio, Eo’s sister, whose face splits with a smile.

“I’m sorry, Dio,” I say quickly. “You look…just like her.”

She doesn’t allow it to be awkward, hushing my apologies. Saying it’s the kindest thing I could have said. “And who’s that, then?” I ask of the baby she holds. The little girl’s hair is absurd. Rust red and bound together by a hair tie so it sticks straight up on top of her head in a little antenna. She watches me excitedly with her dark red eyes.

“This little thing?” Dio asks, coming closer to my chair. “Oh, this is someone I’ve been wanting to introduce to you since Deanna told us you were alive.” She looks lovingly to my brother. I feel a pang of jealousy. “This is our first. Would you like to hold her?”

“Hold her?” I say. “No…I’m…”

The girl’s pudgy little hands reach for me, and Dio pushes the girl into my lap before I can recoil. The girl clings to my sweater, grunting as she turns and wriggles around till she’s seated according to her liking on my leg. She claps her hands together and laughs. Completely unaware of what I am. Of why my hands are so scarred. Delighted by the size of them and the Gold Sigils, she grabs my thumb and tries to bite it with her gums.

Her world is alien to the horrors I know. All the child sees is love. Her skin is pale and soft against mine. She’s made of clouds and I of stone. Her eyes large and bright like her mother’s. Her demeanor and thin lips like Kieran’s. Were this another life, she might have been my child with Eo. My wife would have laughed to think it would be my brother and her sister together in the end and not us. We were a little storm that couldn’t last. But maybe Dio and Kieran will.

—

Long after the lights have dimmed throughout the complex to ease the burdens on the generators, I sit with my uncle and brother around the table in the back of the room, listening to Kieran tell me his new duties learning from Oranges how to service ripWings and shuttles. Dio went to bed long ago, but she left me the baby, who now sleeps in my arms, shifting here and there as her dreams take her wherever they may.

“It’s really not that wretched here,” Kieran is saying. “Better than the stacks below. We have food. Water showers. No more flushes! There’s a lake above us, they say. Bloodydamn dazzling stuff, the showers. Children love it.” He watches his children in the low light. Two to a bed, shifting quietly as they sleep. “What’s hard is not knowing what’ll be for them. Will they ever mine? Work in the webbery? I always thought they would. That I was passing something down, a mission, a craft. You hear?” I nod. “I guess I wanted my sons to be helldivers. Like you. Like Pa. But…” He shrugs.

“There’s nothin’ to that now that you got eyes,” Uncle Narol says. “It’s a hollow life when you know you’re being stepped on.”

“Aye,” Kieran replies. “Die by thirty, so those folk can live to a hundred. It ain’t bloodydamn right. I just want my children to have more than this, brother.” He stares at me intensely and I remember how my mother asked me what comes after revolution. What world are we making? It was what Mustang asked. Something Eo never considered. “They have to have more than this. And I love Ares as much as anyone. I owe him my life. The lives of my children. But…” He shakes his head, wanting to say more but feeling the weight of Narol’s eyes on him.

“Go on,” I say.

“I don’t know if he knows what comes next. That’s why I’m glad you’re back, little brother. I know you’ve got a plan. I know you can save us.”

He says it with so much faith, so much trust.

“Of course I’ve a plan,” I say, because I know it’s what he needs to hear. But as my brother contentedly refills his mug, my uncle catches my eye and I know he sees through the lie and we both feel the darkness pressing in.