Morning Star

Mustang and I are dragged down the cargo plank of the shuttle by Obsidians in black armor, each nearly as large as Ragnar and wearing the badge of the lion. I try to kick up at them, but they jam two-meter long ionPikes down into my stomach, electrocuting me. My muscles cramp. Electricity screaming through me. They toss me down to the deck, pulling me up by my hair so I’m on my knees staring down at the body of Sevro. Mercifully his eyes are shut. His mouth pink from smeared blood. Mustang tries to rise. A muffled thump as an Obsidian hits her in the stomach. Putting her back on her knees, gasping for breath. Cassius has been forced to his knees as well.

Antonia joins Lilath, who stands before us in black armor. A screaming gold skull on either shoulder and another in the center of the breastpiece. Down her sides are human rib-bones embedded in the armor. The first bonerider in all her barbaric finery. The Jackal’s Sevro. Head shaved. Quiet eyes sunken in a small, pinched face that likes little of what it sees in the world. Behind her, tower ten young Peerless Scarred, heads shaved like hers for war. “Scan them,” she orders.

“What the hell is this?” Cassius asks.

“Jackal’s orders.” Lilath watches carefully as the Golds scan me. Cassius suffers the indignity as Lilath continues. “Boss doesn’t want tricks.”

“I have the Sovereign’s warrant,” he says. “We’re to take the Reaper and Virginia to the Citadel.”

“Understood. We received the same orders. Bound there soon.” She motions Cassius to stand as her men clear them. No bugs or devices or radiation tracking. Cassius dusts his knees off. I remain on mine as Lilath peers at Sevro, who one of the Obsidians has dragged down the ramp. She feels his pulse and smiles. “A fine kill, Bellona.”

One Bonerider, a lofty, striking man with blazing eyes and a statue’s cheekbones makes a little cooing noise. Tattooed fingers with painted nails tap his bottom lip. “How much for Barca’s bones?” he asks.

“Not for sale,” Cassius replies.

The man flashes an arrogant smile. “Everything’s for sale, my goodman. Ten million credits for a rib.”

“No.”

“One hundred million. Come now, Bellona…”

“My title, Legate Valii-Rath, is Morning Knight. You may address me as sir or not at all. Ares’s body is property of the state. It’s not mine to sell. But if you ask me about it again, I will have more than words with you, sir.”

“Will you have a rut?” Tactus’s elder brother asks. “Is that what you mean?” I’ve never met the annoyingly aristocratic creature before, and I’m glad for it. Tactus seems the better of the bunch.

“You gorydamn savage,” Mustang says through bloody teeth.

“Savage?” Tactus’s brother asks. “Such a pretty mouth. That’s not how you should use it.” Cassius takes a step toward the man. The other Boneriders reach for their blades.

“Tharsus. Shut up.” Lilath tilts her head, listening to a com in her ear as he returns to her side, lifting his nose. “Yes, my liege,” she says into her com. “Barca is dead. I checked.”

Antonia steps forward. “Is that Adrius? Let me speak with him.”

She holds up a hand to the taller woman. “Antonia wants to speak with you.” She pauses. “He says it can wait. Tharsus, Novas, uncuff the Reaper and spread his arms.”

“What about Virginia?” Tharsus asks.

“Touch her, you die,” Cassius says. “That’s all you need to know.” There’s fear behind Cassius’s eyes, even if he doesn’t show it. He never would have brought her here if he could have helped it. Unlike the Sovereign’s men, the Jackal is liable to do anything at anytime. Aja’s guarantee of safety suddenly feels very frail. Why would the Sovereign send us here?

“No one will touch your prizes,” Lilath says, voice that eerie one note. “Except the Reaper.”

“I’m to deliver him…”

“We know. But my master requires compensation for past grievances. The Sovereign granted him permission while you were landing. Precautionary measures.” She flashes her datapad. Cassius reads the order and goes a little pale, looking back at me. “Now may we proceed, or do you do care to fuss further?”

Cassius has no choice. He depresses the remote. The metal cuffs locking my hands to my chest open. Tharsus and Novas are there to grab my arms and haul them to the sides, wrapping their whip form razors around each wrist, pulling taut till my shoulders grind in their sockets.

“You’re going to let them do this?” Mustang snarls at Cassius. “What happened to your honor? It is as false as the rest of you?” He’s about to say something, but she spits at his feet.

Antonia smiles repugnantly, captivated by the sight of me in pain. Lilath takes my razor from Cassius and walks away toward the ripWings that escorted us into the hangar. There, she holds my slingBlade up into one of the smoldering engines.

“Tell me, Reaper, did you piddle my baby brother. Is that why he was so besotted?” Tharsus asks as we wait. His perfumed locks fall over his eyes. He alone has not shaved his head. “Well, you’re not the first to plow that field, if you catch my flow.”

I stare straight ahead.

“Is he right or left handed?” Lilath calls over.

“Right,” Cassius replies.

“Pollox, tourniquet,” Lilath instructs.

I realize what they intend and my blood runs cold. It feels like it’s happening to someone else. Even when the rubber tightens around my right forearm and the needle-pricks of sensation tingle through the tips of my fingers.

Then I hear my enemy.

The clicking of his black boots.

The delicate shift in everyone’s mannerisms.

The fear.

The Boneriders part to watch their master enter out of the mouth of the main hall to the hangar bay, flanked by a dozen more towering Gold bodyguards with shaved heads. Each tall as Victra. Gold skulls laugh on their collars, on the handles of their razors. Bones rattle on their shoulders, finger joints taken from their enemies. Taken from Lorn, from Fitchner, from my Howlers. These are the killers of my time. Their arrogance drips from them. As they look at me, it isn’t hate I see in their violent eyes, but a fundamental absence of empathy.

I told the Jackal I didn’t hate him. That was a lie. It’s all I feel watching him walk across the deck, the pistol he killed my uncle with hanging on a magnetic strip holster on his thigh. His armor gold. Roaring with Gold lions. Human ribs implanted along the sides of the torso, each carved with details I cannot make out. Hair combed and parted on the side. His silver stylus in his hand, twirling, twirling. Antonia takes a step toward him, but stops herself when she sees he’s walking to Sevro and not to her.

“Good. The bones are intact.” After he’s examined Sevro’s bloody body, he stands over his sister. “Hello, Virginia. Nothing to say?”

“What is there to say?” she asks through gritted teeth. “What words have I for a monster?”

“Hm.” He takes her jaw between his forefingers, causing Cassius’s hand to drift to his razor. Lilath and the Boneriders would cut him to pieces if he even drew it. “It is us against the world,” the Jackal says softly. “Do you remember telling me that?”

“No.”

“We were young. Mother had just died. I couldn’t stop crying. And you said you’d never leave me. But then Claudius would invite you somewhere. And you’d forget all about me. And I’d stay home in a big old house and cry, because I knew even then I was alone.” He taps her nose. “These next hours are going to test who you are as a person, sister. I’m excited to see what’s beneath all the bluster.”

He moves on to me, loosening my muzzle. Even on my knees my physicality dwarfs him. Fifty kilograms heavier. Still, his presence is like the sea: strange and vast and dark and full of hidden depths and power. His silence, his roar. I see his father in him now. He tricked me, guessing my play on Luna, and now I’m afraid all I’ve done is going to unravel.

“And here we are again,” he says. I do not reply. “Do you recognize these?”

He runs his stylus down the ribs in his armor, coming closer so I can see the details. “My dear father thought a man’s deeds make him. I rather think it’s his enemies. Do you like it?” He steps even closer. One of the ribs shows a helmet with a spiked sunburst. Another rib shows a head in a box.

The Jackal is wearing Fitchner’s rib cage.

Anger roars out of me and I try to bite his face, bellowing like a wounded animal, startling Mustang. I strain against the men holding me, trembling with rage as the Jackal watches me squirm. Cassius stares at the ground, avoiding Mustang’s gaze. My voice croaks out of me, hardly my own. That deeper demon only the Jackal can summon from me. “I’m going to skin you,” I say.

Bored of me, he rolls his eyes and snaps his fingers. “Put the muzzle back on.” Tharsus binds my mouth. The Jackal opens his arms as if welcoming two long-lost friends to a party. “Cassius! Antonia!” he says. “Heroes of the hour. My dear…what happened?” He asks when he sees Antonia’s face. They were lovers during my imprisonment. Sometimes I’d smell her on him as he came to visit me before the box. Or she’d drag a nail along his neck as she passed. He goes close to her now, taking her jaw in his hand, tilting her head to examine the damage done to her. “Did Darrow do this?”

“My sister,” she corrects, disliking his examination. She mourned her face in our captivity more than she mourned her own mother’s death. “The bitch will pay. And I’ll have it fixed, don’t worry.” She pulls her head back from him.

“Stop,” the Jackal says sharply. “Why fixed?”

“It’s disgusting.”

“Disgusting? My dear, scars are what you are. They tell your story.”

“This is Victra’s story, not mine.”

“You’re still beautiful.” He pulls her down gently by her chin and kisses her lips delicately. He doesn’t care for her. Like Mustang said, we’re just sacks of meat to him. But while Antonia’s as wicked a thing as I’ve ever met, she wants to be loved. To be valued. The Jackal knows how to use that.

“This was Barca’s,” Antonia says, handing the Jackal Sevro’s pistol. The Jackal runs a thumb over the howling wolves engraved in the hilt.

“Fine work,” he says. He strips his own gun from his magnetic holster and tosses it to a bodyguard before holstering Sevro’s. Of course he takes my friend’s pistol as a trophy.

His datapad flashes and he holds up a hand for silence. “Yes, Imperator?”

The grotesque Ash Lord appears in the air before the Jackal as a disembodied, gigantic head. Dark Gold eyes peer out from beneath twin thickets of eyebrows. His jowls hang over the high black collar of his uniform. “Augustus, the enemy is under way. TorchShips in front.”

“They’re coming for him,” Cassius says.

“How many?” the Jackal asks.

“More than sixty. Half bearing the red fox.”

“Do you wish me to spring the trap?”

“Not yet. I will assume command of your ships.”

“You know the arrangement.”

The Ash Lord’s wide mouth makes a straight line. “I do.You are to continue to join the Sovereign as planned. Escort the Morning Knight and his package to the Citadel. My daughter will take custody of him there.Go now, for Gold.”

“For Gold.”

The head disappears.

The Jackal glances over to the Obsidians who pulled me down the cargo ramp. “Slaves, attend to Praetor Licenus on the bridge. You are no longer needed.” The Obsidians leave without question. When they are gone, he eyes the thirty Boneriders. “The Morning Knight has given us an opportunity to win this war today. The Telemanuses will come for my sister. The Howlers and the Sons of Ares will come for the Reaper. They will not have them. It is upon our shoulders to deliver them to our Sovereign and her strategists in the Citadel.”

He addresses Antonia and Cassius. “Set aside your little grievances. Today we are Gold. We can bicker when the Rising is ash. Most of you lived the darkness of the caves with me. You watched by my side as this…creature stole what was ours. They will take everything from us. Our homes. Our slaves. Our right to rule. Today we fight to keep what is ours. Today we fight against the dying of our Age.”

They lean into his words, awaiting his orders hungrily. It’s terrifying to see the cult he’s built around himself. He’s taken bits of me, of my speaking pattern, and transposed it onto his own behavior. He continues to evolve.

The Jackal turns from his men as Lilath brings back my slingBlade, red-hot from engine’s heat, and hands it to him hilt first. “Lilath, you’re to stay with the fleet.”

“You’re sure?”

“You’re my insurance plan.”

“Yes, my liege.”

Antonia’s not sure what they’re talking about, and she doesn’t like it one bit. The Jackal twirls my razor in his hand. And then looking between me and Mustang’s he’s struck by a thought. “How long were you imprisoned by Darrow, Cassius?”

“Four months.”

“Four months. Then I believe you should do the honors.” He flips the red-hot razor to Cassius, who smoothly catches it by its hilt. “Cut off Darrow’s hand.”

“The Sovereign wants him…”

“Alive, yes. And he will be. But she doesn’t want him coming in to her bunker with his sword arm attached to his body, now does she? We’re to take all his weapons. Neuter the beast and let’s be on our way. Unless…there’s a problem?”

“No problem,” Cassius says. Stepping forward, he lifts high the razor, metal throbbing with heat.

“Is this what you’ve become?” Mustang asks. Cassius suffers her gaze, shame on his face. “Look at me, Darrow,” Mustang says. “Look at me.”

I will myself to forget the blade. To watch her, taking strength from her. But as the superheated metal cleaves through the skin and bone of my right wrist, I forget her. I scream in pain, looking back where my hand was to see a stump lazily dripping blood through charred capillaries. Smoke from my burning flesh slithers into the air. And through the agony I can see the Jackal picking my hand up from the ground and holding it in the air. His newest trophy.

“Hic sunt leones,” he says.

“Hic sunt leones,” echo his men.