Morning Star

By the time we wake, the storm has cleared. We bundle ourselves with insulation taken from the ship’s walls and set out into the bleakness. Not a cloud mars the marbled blue-black sky. We head toward the sun, which stains the horizon a cooling shade of molten iron. Autumn has few days left. We head for the Spires with plans of lighting fires as we go, in hopes of signaling the few Valkyrie scouts active in the area. But smoke will also bring the Eaters.

We scan the mountains as we pass, wary of the cannibal tribes and of the fact that somewhere ahead Cassius and maybe Aja trudge through the snow with a troop of special forces operators.

By midday we find evidence of their passing. Churned snow outside a rocky alcove large enough for several dozen men. They camped there to wait out the storm. A cairn of stacked stones lies near the campsite. One of the stones has been carved with a razor and reads: per aspera ad astra.

“It’s Cassius’s handwriting,” Mustang says.

Pulling off the rocks, we find the corpses of two Blues and a Silver. Their weaker bodies froze in the night. Even here, Cassius had the decency to bury them. We replace the rocks as Ragnar lopes ahead, following the tracks at a speed we can’t match. We follow after. An hour later, manmade thunder rumbles in the distance, accompanied by the lonely shriek of distant pulseFists. Ragnar returns soon after, eyes shining with excitement.

“I followed the tracks,” he says.

“And?” Mustang asks.

“It is Aja and Cassius with a troop of Grays and three Peerless.”

“Aja is here?” I ask.

“Yes. They flee on foot through a mountain pass in the direction of Asgard. A tribe of Eaters harries them. Bodies litter the way. Dozens. They sprang an ambush and failed. More come.”

“How much gear do they have?” Mustang asks.

“No gravBoots. ScarabSkin only. But they have packs. They left the pulseArmor behind just two kilometers north. Out of energy.”

Holiday looks at the horizon and touches Trigg’s pistol on her hip. “Can we catch them?”

“They carry many supplies. Water. Food. Injured men now too. Yes. We can overtake them.”

“Why are we here?” Mustang interjects. “It’s not to hunt Aja and Cassius down. The only thing that matters is getting Ragnar to the Spires.”

“Aja killed my brother,” Holiday says.

Mustang’s taken aback. “Trigg? The one you mentioned? I didn’t know. But still, we can’t be pulled to the side by vengeance. We can’t fight two dozen men.”

“What if they reach Asgard before we reach the Spires?” Holiday asks. “Then we’re cooked.” Mustang’s not convinced.

“Can you kill Aja?” I ask Ragnar.

“Yes.”

“This is an opportunity,” I say to Mustang. “When else will they be so exposed? Without their Legions? Without the pride of Gold protecting them? These are champions. Like Sevro says, ‘When you have the chance to waste your enemy, you do it.’ This is one time I’d agree with the mad bastard. If we can take them off the board, the Sovereign loses two Furies in one week. And Cassius is Octavia’s link to Mars and the great families here. And if we expose her negotiations with you to him, we fracture that alliance. We sever Mars from the Society.”

“An enemy divided…” Mustang says slowly. “I like it.”

“And we owe them a debt,” Ragnar says. “For Lorn, Quinn, Trigg. They came here to hunt us. Now we hunt them.”

—

The trail is unmistakable. Corpses litter the snow. Dozens of Eaters. Bodies still smoking from pulsefire near a narrow mountain pass where the Obsidians sprang an ambush on the Golds. They did not understand the firepower the Golds could bring to bear. Huge craters pock the craggy slopes. Deeper imprints in the snow mark the passing of aurochs. Huge steerlike animals with shaggy coats that the Obsidian ride.

The pass widens into a thin alpine forest that skins an expanse of rolling hills. Gradually the craters decrease and we begin seeing discarded pulseFists and rifles and several Gray bodies with arrows or axes embedded in them. The Obsidian dead are closer to the Gold trail now and bear razor wounds. There’s dozens with missing limbs, clean decapitations. Cassius’s band is running out of ammunition and now Olympic Knights are doing the work up close. Yet the wind still crackles with gunfire kilometers ahead.

We pass moaning Obsidian Eaters who lie dying from bullet wounds, but it’s only over a wounded Gray that Ragnar stops. The man’s still alive, but barely. An iron axe is buried in his stomach. He wheezes up at an unfamiliar sky. Ragnar crouches over him. Recognition goes through the Gray’s eyes as he sees the Stained’s uncovered face.

“Close your eyes,” Ragnar says, pressing the man’s empty rifle back in his hands. “Think of home.” The man closes his eyes. And with a twist, Ragnar breaks his neck and sets his head gently back on the snow. A shrill horn echoes across the mountain range. “They call off the hunt,” Ragnar says. “Immortality is not worth the price today.”

We pick up our pace. Kilometers to our right, Mounted Eaters on aurochs skirt the edges of the woods, heading for their high-mountain camps. They do not see us as we move through the pine taiga. Holiday watches the hunting party disappear behind a hill through the scope of her rifle. “They carried two Golds,” she says. “Didn’t recognize them. They weren’t dead yet.”

We all feel the chill.

It’s an hour later that we spy our quarry beneath us in an uneven snowfield striped with crevasses. Two arms of forest hug the snowfield. Aja and Cassius chose an exposed route instead of continuing through the treacherous forest where they lost so many Grays. There’s four left in the company. Three Golds and a Gray. They wear black scarabSkin, cloaked with pelts and extra layers they stripped from the dead cannibals. They move at a breakneck pace, the rest of their party massacred in the depths of the woods. We can’t tell which is Aja or Cassius because of the masks and the similar shapes they make under the cloaks.

Initially, I wanted to lie in wait and ambush them to take the tactical initiative, but I remember how the optics were missing from their boxes and assume Aja and Cassius are both wearing them. With thermal vision, they’ll see us hiding under snow. Might even see us if we hide inside the bellies of dead aurochs or seals. So instead, I have Ragnar lead me on the path he found to cut them off at a pass they must travel through and block their path to draw their eyes.

I’m panting beside Ragnar, coughing the cold out of aching lungs, when the party of four arrives on our chosen ground. They jog along the edge of a crevasse in improvised snowshoes, hunched against the weight of food and survival gear they drag behind them on little makeshift sleds. Textbook Legion survival skills, courtesy of the military schools of the Martian Fields. All four wear black optics visors with smoky glass lenses. It’s eerie as they see us. No expressions on the optics or masked faces. So it feels like they expected us to be here waiting at the edge of the snowfield, blocking the pass out.

My eyes dart back and forth between them. Cassius is easy enough to distinguish by his height. But which of the four is Aja? I’m torn between two thick Golds, each shorter than Cassius. Then I see my old razormaster’s weapon dangling from her belt.

“Aja!” I call, removing the sealSkin balaclava.

Cassius pulls off his mask. His hair is sweaty, face flushed. He alone carries a pulseFist, but I know its charge must be running low, based on the dispersion patterns of the dead cannibals behind them. His razor unfurls, as do the rest. They look like long red tongues, blood frozen on the blades.

“Darrow…” Cassius mutters, stunned by the sight of us. “I saw you sink…”

“I swim just as well as you. Remember?” I look past him. “Aja, you going to let Cassius do all the talking?”

Finally, she steps from the other to stand by the tall knight, removing from around her waist the rope that attaches her to her makeshift sled. She doffs her scarabSkin mask, revealing her dark face and bald head. Steam swirls. She scans the crevasses that thread their way through the snow, and the rocks and trees, the pen in the snowfield, wondering where my ambush will come from. She remembers Europa well enough, but she can’t know who my crew was or how many survived.

“An abomination and a rabid dog,” she purrs, eyes lingering on Ragnar before coming back to me. The scarabSkin she wears is unmarked. Can she really not have taken a single wound from the Obsidian? “I see your Carver has pieced you back together, ruster.”

“Well enough to kill your sister,” I say in reply, unable to keep the poison out of my voice. “Pity it wasn’t you.” She makes no reply. How many times have I seen her kill Quinn in memory? How many times have I seen her rob Lorn of his razor as he lay dead from the Jackal and Lilath’s blades? I gesture to the weapon. “That doesn’t belong to you.”

“You were born to serve, not speak, abomination. Do not address me.” She glances up to the sky where Phobos glitters on the eastern horizon. Red and white lights flicker around it. It’s a space battle, which means Sevro has captured ships. But how many? Aja frowns and exchanges a worried look with Cassius.

“I have long awaited this moment, Aja.”

“Ah, my father’s favorite pet.” Aja examines Ragnar. “Has the Stained convinced you he’s tamed? I wonder if he told you how he liked to be rewarded after a fight in the Circada. After the applause faded and he cleaned the blood from his hands, Father would send him young Pinks to satisfy his animal lusts. How greedy he was with them. How frightened they were of him.” Her voice is flat and bored of this ice, of this conversation, of us. All she wants is what we have to give her, and that is a challenge. After all the Obsidian bodies behind her, she still is not tired of blood. “Have you ever seen an Obsidian rut?” she continues. “You’d think twice about taking off their collars, ruster. They have appetites you can’t imagine.”

Ragnar steps forward, holding his razors in either hand. He unfastens the white fur he took from the Eaters and lets it fall behind him. It’s strange being here surrounded by wind and snow. Stripped of our armies, our navies. The only thing protecting each of our lives: little coils of metal. The hugeness of the Antarctic laughs at our size and self-importance, thinking how easily it could snuff out the heat in our little chests. But our lives mean so much more than the frail bodies that carry them.

Ragnar’s step forward is a sign to Mustang and Holiday in the trees.

Aim true, Holiday.

“Your father bought me, Aja. Shamed me. Made me his devil. A thing. The child inside fled. The hope vanished. I was Ragnar no more.” He touches his own chest. “But I am Ragnar today, tomorrow, forever more. I am son of the Spires, brother of Sefi the Quiet, brother of Darrow of Lykos, and Sevro au Barca. I am the Shield of Tinos. I follow my heart. And when yours beats no more, foul Knight, I will pull it from your chest and feed it to the griffin of the…”

Cassius scans the craggy rocks and stunted trees that cup the snowfield to his left. His eyes narrow when they fall upon a cluster of broken timber at the base of a rock formation. Then, without warning, he shoves Aja forward. She stumbles, and just behind her, where she stood, the head of their remaining Gray explodes. Blood splatters the snow as the crack of Holiday’s rifle echoes from the mountains. More bullets tear into the snow around Cassius and Aja. The Fury moves behind the third Gold, using his body as cover. Two bullets slam into his scarabSkin, penetrating the strong polymer. Cassius rolls on his shoulder and uses much of the last juice from his pulseFist. The hillside erupts. Rocks glowing. Exploding. Snow vaporizing.

And under that noise is the sound of a bowstring releasing. Aja hears it too. She moves fast. Spinning as an arrow fired by Mustang from the woods careens toward her head. It misses by centimeters. Cassius fires on Mustang’s position on the hill, shattering trees and superheating rocks.

Can’t tell if she’s hit. Can’t spare the seconds to look because Ragnar and I use the distraction to charge, vision narrowing, slingBlade curving into form. Closing the distance over the snow. PulseFist glowing in his hand, Cassius turns just as I bear down on him. He fires the pulseFist. It’s a weak charge that I dive beneath, hitting the ground and rolling up like a Lykos tumbler. He fires again. The pulseFist is dead, battery drained from firing on the hillside. Ragnar hurls one of his razors at Aja like a huge throwing knife. It flips end over end in the air. She doesn’t move. It slams into her. She spins backward. For a moment I think he’s killed her. But then she turns back to us, holding the razor by the hilt in her right hand.

She caught it.

A dark fear sweeps through me as all of Lorn’s warnings about Aja come rushing back. “Never fight a river, and never fight Aja.”

The four of us smash together, turning into a clumsy mash of cracking whips and clattering blades. Scrambling and twisting and bending. Our razors faster than our own eyes can track. Aja swipes diagonally at my legs as I go for hers; Ragnar and Cassius aim for each other’s necks in quick no-look thrusts. Identical strategies, all. It’s so awkward we all almost kill one another in the first half second. Yet each gambit misses by a hair.

We separate. Stumbling backward. Humorless smiles on our faces—a bizarre kinship as we remember we all speak the same martial language. All that hateful breed of human Dancer told me about before I was Carved, the ones Lorn lived among and despised all the while.

I shatter the weird peace first. Lashing forward in a tight series of thrusts at Cassius’s right side, peeling him away from Aja so Ragnar can take her down singly. Behind Cassius, Mustang stirs from among the rubble. Rushing across the snow, huge Obsidian bow in hand. Still fifty meters away. I sweep my razor whip twice at Cassius’s legs, retracting it into a blade as he swings diagonally at my head. The blow rattles my arm as I catch it halfway along the razor’s curve. He’s stronger than I am. Faster than he was the last time we fought. And he’s practiced now against the curved blade. Training with Aja, no doubt. He forces me back. I stumble, fall, between his legs I see the Fury and the Stained tearing into each other. She stabs him through his left thigh.

Another arrow whispers through the air. It slams into Cassius’s back. His scarabSkin holds. Off balance, he swings again in a tight set of eight moves. I throw myself backward just as the razor hisses through the air where my head had been. I sprawl on the snow, centimeters from the edge of a huge crevasse. Scrambling up as Cassius rushes me. I block another downward swing, teetering on the edge. I fall backward and push off the edge as hard as I can so I land and clear the other side, using my agility to avoid his onslaught. Behind him, Aja spins under Ragnar’s blade, slicing at his hamstrings. She’s peeling him apart.

Cassius pursues me, hurdling the crevasse and swinging down at me. I block the blade. It would have opened me from shoulder to opposite hip. I throw a rock at his face. Gain my feet. He slams his blade down again in a feint, pivots his wrist, and swings to carve off my knees. I stumble to the side, barely dodging. He converts his razor to a whip, cracks it at my legs, and rips them out from under me. I fall. He kicks me in the chest. Wind gushes out of me. He stands on my wrist, pinning my razor down, and is about to plunge his razor into my heart, his face a mask of determination.

“Stop,” Mustang shouts. She’s twenty meters away, aiming her bow at Cassius. Hand quivering from the strain of the taut string. “I will put you down.”

“No,” he says. “You would…”

The bowstring snaps. He jerks his razor up to deflect the arrow. Misses, slower than Aja. The serrated iron tip punches through the front of his throat and out the back of his neck, the feather fletching scratching the underside of his dimpled chin. There’s no spray of blood. Just a meaty, wet gurgle. He flops back. Hitting the ground hard. Gagging. Hacking hideously. His feet kick as he clutches the arrow. Hissing for breath, eyes inches from my own. Mustang rushes to me. I scramble to my feet, away from Cassius, and grab my razor from the snow, pointing it at his thrashing body.

“I’m prime,” I say, tearing my eyes from my old friend as blood pools beneath him and he fights for his life. “Help Ragnar.”

Over Cassius’s body, we see the Stained and Aja whirling at each other on the edge of a crevasse. Blood paints the snow around them. All of it coming from Ragnar. But still he presses the woman knight back, a furious song cascading out of his throat. Beating her down. Overwhelming her with his two hundred and fifty kilograms of mass. Sparks flare from their blades. She caves before him now, unable to match the anger of the banished prince of the Spires. Heels skidding on the snow. Arm shuddering. Bending back away from Ragnar. Bending like a willow. His song roars louder. “No,” I murmur. “Shoot her,” I tell Mustang.

“They’re too close….”

“I don’t care!”

She fires a shot. It rips inches past Aja’s head. But it does not matter. Ragnar has already fallen into the trap the woman has laid for him, Mustang doesn’t see it yet. She will. It’s one of the many Lorn taught me. The one Ragnar could not have learned because he never had a razormaster. He only ever had his rage and years of fighting with solid weapons, not the whip. Mustang loads another arrow. And Ragnar swings down at Aja with a blacksmith’s overhead strike, Aja raises her rigid blade to meet his. She activates the whip function. Her blade goes limp. Expecting to meet the resistance of solid polyenne fiber, Ragnar’s whole weight carries down on empty air. He’s athletic enough to slow the movement so his blade doesn’t smash into the ground, and against a lesser opponent he would have recovered with ease. But Aja was the greatest student of Lorn au Arcos. She’s already spinning to the side, contracting the whip back into a blade and using her momentum to hack sideways at Ragnar as she finishes her spin. The movement is simple. Laconic. Like one of the ballerinas Mustang and Roque would watch at Agea’s opera house as I studied with Lorn, pivoting through a fouetté. If I didn’t see the blood paint her blade and spray a delicate arc of red across the snow, I could be convinced that she missed.

Aja does not miss.

Ragnar tries to turn and face her, but his legs betray him. Crumpling underneath. His gaping wound a bloody smile against the white of his sealSkin. Aja cut into his lower back, through his spinal cord, and out the front of his stomach at the belly button. He flops down at the lip of a crevasse. Razor skipping across the ice. I howl in rage, in crushing disbelief, and charge Aja as Mustang fires her bow, running with me. Aja sidesteps Mustang’s arrows and stabs Ragnar twice more in the stomach as he lies grasping his wound. His body jerks. The blade slides in and out. Aja sets her feet now, preparing for me, when her eyes go wide. She steps back, marveling at something in the sky above my head. Mustang fires twice in quick succession. Aja’s head jerks. She twists away from us, spinning backward to the edge of the crevasse. Ice caves beneath her foot, crumbling off into the crevasse. Her arms windmill, but she can’t regain her balance as her eyes meet mine and she pitches with the ice headfirst into the darkness.