by Pierce Brown
We burst back to the Praetorians and land where Rhone has set up his coms tower on the hull of the Storm God.
There’s a gargling sound as the signal connects. Ajax’s voice is washed in static. His face warps in and out.
“Lysander? I see you seized the moment. I had no doubt you would. Octavia would be proud.” His voice mocks me.
“Where’s our evac?” I snap. “We have inbound enemy armor. Our shells are dead. Our mobility—”
“It doesn’t seem long ago that we were last in New Sparta, does it?”
“Ajax, we need evac, do you register?”
“I looked forward to those winters on Grandfather’s estate more than anything. Believe me when I say that. You were less serious there, away from the old crone. There was no one to impress. Not until Grandfather took us hunting and left us in the bush. He told us to race back.” His eyes narrow. “You remember. Of course you do. You remember everything.”
Kalindora’s face falls as she understands. Cicero’s face becomes a mask of utter contempt. I hold out hope that it is not what it seems.
“You remember how I begged you not to leave me behind because I sprained my ankle. Didn’t really. I was just afraid of being left alone, because you were always so sure where you were going. If it was just us, you would have helped me. But you had to win, didn’t you? You had to show them that you were worthy of being the Heir of Silenius.” His lips curl back from his teeth. “You left me behind. It took me three days to find my way back. And when I did, Grandfather wouldn’t even let me join the dinner table because I was…unwashed. You found me crying behind the stables. You’d brought me your own food and you sat with me and do you remember what you said?”
“Ajax…”
“ ‘You really must learn your navigations, Ajax.’ ”
“I see.” The silence between us is cold and final and mutually understood. “Is this your choice or Atalantia’s?”
“Mine. I will mourn for you, little brother, but I will not step aside. This is my time. Give Kalindora my apologies, but she chose poorly.” He pauses, no mockery in his voice. “Should the Void take you, celebrate, my brother. For before death, there was glory.”
The link drops.
I stand rooted to the spot. I thought if betrayal came, it would come from Atalantia. Not Ajax. I saw the signs, but I chose to believe in a friend. What a pity for us both. For all those memories to come to this.
Is this how Cassius felt?
“I am to die for a brotherly feud,” Cicero spits. “This is utterly…Venusian.”
Rhone speaks in a tight whisper. “My liege, we can evacuate you south via air.”
“And how many men could we take?” I ask.
“Less than a third.”
I search the Praetorians on the ground beneath as they attempt to leech energy from downed starShells. They came for me. To save my life, I would have to abandon six hundred of them.
I search for some alternative, and find only one. “I would know the names of my wingmen on the third charge.”
“Flavius ti Vessia and Charon ti Occipiter.”
I repeat the names as the sound of the enemy machines grows louder. “What would Octavia do?” I ask.
Rhone says nothing.
“She would run,” Kalindora replies with a blank expression.
“A fine idea,” Cicero says. “Let’s.”
I stare into the dust. “If that is the measure of our loyalty to our men, perhaps we deserve to die.”
Kalindora tilts her head at me.
“Are you mad?” Cicero’s narrow eyes go wide.
Rhone steps forward. “My liege, you are—”
“Not a Sovereign. Not anything really.” I grimace. “But I will not live while men sworn to me die. I know the risk they took in coming here.” Kalindora gives me a nod of surprised approval. “Rhone, prepare the Praetorians as you see fit. The enemy won’t be long.”
This is not how Rhone thought it would be, but he holds his salute for an extra second before hopping down to his men. “I will not die here,” Cicero says. “Your boots have juice, you fool. Enough to get you to Heliopolis!”
“Go if you must, Cicero. I abandoned the Praetorians before. I will not do so again.”
He comes within an inch of my face. “They say a strain of madness runs through the gens Lune. Oh, how right they are. Farewell, ye infected victims of the martial disease.” Cicero takes to the air without a word of apology to his men who cannot follow. Two dozen fly with him. More than twelve hundred watch their leader go and look down at their depleted armor.
I remain with Kalindora atop the Storm God as the enemy machines groan and rattle within the dust. I close my eyes, seeking my mother’s face. Even now in the darkness, I cannot find her.
I feel so alone. Then I hear Kalindora draw her razor. “Lysander.”
When I open my eyes, a single figure emerges from the dust less than a kilometer away. A desiccated rag flaps from his shoulder. He spots us on the Storm God and thrusts his hand up into the profane crux.
Only a few of his words reach us. “…heart beats like a drum…”
The scout disappears and a moment later the sound that has plagued my dreams from the Palatine to the Belt finds me in the desert waste. The sound could only come from a legion escorting the Reaper.
The howling of wolves.
Ahhhroooooooooooooooooo
Kalindora goes still.
He should be in the north, pinned in by Atalantia’s legions. Not a thousand kilometers south. Not here. How could they still have power? How could they cross so much distance when we barely made it a hundred kilometers into the hypercane’s headwinds before draining our suits?
Kalindora’s awed voice answers the unspoken question.
“He rode the storm.”
* * *
—
The wait for Darrow is not long, but it is horrid. My eyes sting from the heat. It radiates up from the metal hull we perch upon. My nose fills with the fumes of machines, the dry lifelessness of the desert, and smoke.
The enemy emerges from the dust like a line of mechanized Mongols. A depleted legion of filthy metal Drachenjägers carried by the winds of the storm trudges over the crest. They are not so numerous as they sounded. I glance over at Rhone. A grin spreads on his face. With the high ground and an entrenched position, we might yet survive this.
Kalindora thinks otherwise.
My tongue tastes the chalky roof of my mouth and feels the contours of my teeth. I tense my hand around my razor. It feels small in the pulseArmor gauntlet. I raise my helm.
Ahhhroooooooooooooooooo
“Stay with the heir,” Kalindora says to Rhone. Thirty-three Praetorians with life yet in their starShell cores cluster tight around me atop the downed Storm God’s highest perch. Nearly two thousand Scorpions and Praetorians shelter in firing lines along the rim of the broken engine below.
It begins in silence, and then comes the terrific clamor of four wedges of Drachenjägers thundering across the desert. Their armored legs, each twice as tall as a starShell, eat up the distance. Guided antipersonnel missiles slither toward us. Interceptors race to challenge them. Depleted uranium rounds hammer through the wreckage around our position like it’s cheesecloth. Praetorians fire back from prone positions all along the rim of the Storm God. There are no better sharpshooters in all the legions. A drachen teeters sideways and explodes. Another runs off at an oblique angle as its pilot is shot through the cockpit.
With a heavy anti-tank rifle, Rhone fires down at the plain.
I scan the charging Drachenjägers. Darrow won’t be in one of those rigs. He likes mobility. Where is he? I turn around to search our flanks for Darrow. As a boy, I watched him become a leader. I’ve studied him more than any other man. I know his trade, but t
hat knowledge seems so useless here in the chaos of battle. There are only four directions, but Darrow has used so many tactics over the years, I freeze. It feels like he could come from anywhere.
I spot shadows moving in the dust cloud kicked up by the Drachenjägers’ charge. “He’s using them to obscure his movements,” I say to Kalindora. “Like at the Battle of Gibraltar. With a frontal sally we can hit him when he swings to a flank.”
“I concur. Prepare to charge,” Kalindora tells the Praetorians. StarShell pulseFists whine as my men shunt their remaining core power to their weapons and their boots. The heat of the desert invades my suit.
On Kalindora’s signal, we break from our position, bursting upward into the sky and ricocheting forward, headlong toward the shadows over the charging Drachenjägers. Then something ripples above in the sky.
A Praetorian’s body comes apart beside me, bisected cleanly at the waist. I lift my razor just in time. Something clangs against it, knocking me downward. The air contorts above as men in ghostCloaks shear down through the center of my charging Praetorians. I shoot point-blank at a blur and see the light bend as the railgun round goes through a man’s chest. He spins downward, his wolfcloak rippling.
I see the play too late to stop it. Darrow baited us with the shadows, and flanked our aerial charge by sending a small group around to hit us as we forsook our position. They cleave through us.
I pivot in the air to witness slaughter behind me.
The world slows as I see him amidst my men. The camouflage withering away to reveal a hurricane in battered crimson pulseArmor, a white razor sparking as it carves through a Praetorian’s starShell to sever half his neck.
I burst toward the Reaper and am smashed sideways as I collide with another body. Kalindora shields me from an armored man’s pulsefire. Rhone mows him down. I try to rally the left wing of my men, but it is a slaughter. And at the center of it swirls a god of death. The fighter’s helmet flashes. Around his body whirls that famous Gold-killing blade.
As violence reaches for him, Darrow does not flinch like a man; he reaches like a covetous river. He pulls violence to him, drinks it into his current, and leaps around the battlefield with a seemingly mindless capriciousness. Which, when inspected, illuminates the genius of his violence. He herds us together, making sure we are tight and compact so that our options constrict and his men’s expand.
It is something you can only understand when you feel dread sinking into you when you realize you’re between the claws of a trap, and they’re about to close. You feel surprised that it was so easy to trick you. Surprised that this is how it happens. All those years of preparing, reviewing battles, correcting others. It doesn’t feel like we fell into a trap. It feels almost accidental, yet still inevitable. I feel small and stupid.
“Kill the Reaper!” I shout as I plunge for him, Kalindora at my right, Rhone and three others at my left. We cut through two Rising knights and then, as if smelling the murder on our minds, Darrow, without even looking, jolts backward toward us at a surprising angle.
A Praetorian’s head splits in half. Rhone is knocked from the sky. Kalindora’s left arm spins from her body. My own razor arcs forward toward Darrow’s turned head and finds only air as he performs some aerial alchemy and bends, floating upward, only to shoot back down.
His razor slashes at me as he flies past. I parry, but the force is incredible. I feel a blazing pain in my arm. I’m struck again as he backhands me like a child with his blade. The razor cuts through my gravBoots and I plummet from the sky.
I slam down onto the hardpan, but do not lose consciousness. I stare up in my broken armor. Metal men dance against the crackling clouds. Bodies fall like dying metal birds, leaking blood and machine fluid. The Reaper is already passing on, leaving the leftovers for his men.
A starShell crashes down atop me, pinning me down. Another slams into the sand. I feel heat on my right cheek and turn just enough to see a downed shell’s broken boot thruster sputtering flame against my helmet. I panic and shove in vain. Heat grows as it melts through the armor from the side. I shout and scramble, but I go nowhere as the heat intensifies and a hole opens in the right side of my helmet. My skin begins to itch. I flail, overcome with dread. The itch becomes agony. My right eyebrow curls as it burns. The epidermis begins to bubble and peel away. Fire reaches down to the dermis, shrinking it and splitting it open as fat leaks out and feeds the flames.
The wolf howls fade in the distance. The flames eat my eye.
Only then do I begin to scream.
WE BRUSH AWAY LIGHT resistance at the downed Storm God. Without bothering to complete the kills, we head for Heliopolis. Behind us, we leave the enemy grounded or dying. Radioactive dust drifts south to dim the sun. Soon another sandstorm swallows the daylight entirely.
Visibility shrinks, masking but not slowing our approach on Heliopolis. When we emerge on Ajax’s rear, will it be to a conquered city? Will we be alone against ten legions? Will our own guns be turned to be used against us? Or will the Morning Star have somehow shepherded my army through the Waste?
I can only hope, just as I hope Alexandar is not drowned beneath the sea.
Forward. Forward. One foot after the other.
Our Drachenjägers have barely an hour of charge left. My starShell is dead in the desert. Half the others managed to save energy by riding the drachen through the storm. All trudge on their own now. We hold on to sanity by a thread. Our water ran out in the night. Our ammunition is low. Stims power our senses and keep us from succumbing to the side effects of either the anti-rads or the radiation itself, but they have hollowed our cores. Twenty-four hours engaged with the enemy. How many days awake does that make it for me now? Six? Seven?
I could not sleep in the passage despite my perch on the Drachenjäger.
The night was hell and howling wind and avalanches so frequent we had to abandon the pass and risk the desert. Blackness was our master. Static and sand and gargling radiometers narrated our endless nightmare. Orion’s storm no longer escalates, but it has run wild without her focusing its wrath.
Two sandstorms swallowed a third of our number. The rest, including myself, face cellular decay from fallout. I puke again into my cockpit. The catch is full. The vomit laced with blood. It leaks down into the cracks to trickle over my armored legs. My head pounds. Eyeballs aching at their roots. My symptoms are minor compared with the Grays, Blues, and our remaining Obsidians. Some have already succumbed to delirium as their DNA unwinds. Only the Reds and Golds hold strong.
I just want rest. I just want water. And to sleep.
Forward. Forward. Forward.
The morning is the color of bronze when we come upon the Graveyard of Tyrants. Harnassus dumped the monoliths the Golds built to honor seven centuries of Sovereigns in the desert. The giant statues lie on their backs as sand swirls around them. A skirmish was fought amidst them. Waves of sand lap at the half-submerged and smoldering carcasses of war machines.
The debris field thickens. Phantoms move through the dust. Lone infantrymen without clothes and covered in blood walk past us. We cannot tell their tribe. Blackened husks sit cross-legged in the sand. A desert hyenadile gnaws at a dead man, looks at us, fans the threat-wings on its neck, and flees as an artillery shell detonates nearby. War machines scream and groan in the distance. Their shadows flit through the gloom, growing more substantial with every step.
It is like emerging from one dream into another.
I draw what remains of my force up on a hill with a view of the storm wall of Heliopolis. Our flanks secured by a sheer mountain façade, I survey the siege with Screwface. My heart sinks.
Heliopolis has fallen.
With the desert Storm God down, the storm has lost its direction. It sweeps eastward. Ajax’s army fights in the sunshine.
Acrid smoke rises from huge gashes in the storm wall. Iron Leopard and Ful
minata shock troops claw through gaps three hundred meters from the ground. Tanks roll into canyons bored through the durosteel by particle cannons. A firefight rages on the ramparts of the wall, where a thin gap exists between the wall and shield. Her great guns are silent. Harnassus may already be dead.
If they take the city, if they take down her shield generators, the Ash armada can reinforce them, and lower torchShips and Annihilo herself across the south. My army will come out of the desert after surviving the storm and be met with oblivion.
Screwface understands. “I’ll scout forward and see where we should hit.” He jumps off the ledge to cross the boulder field below in small bursts.
I turn back to my men.
They can hear the battle if not see it. Less than a third of the force that set out for Tyche joins me on the hill. Many lie dead in the Plains of Caduceus, or were swept away by water or wind on our path to Tyche. Alexandar is gone. Rhonna and Colloway sent into the storm. It has been nearly twenty-four hours since I’ve seen Thraxa. Only Felix is left amongst my Gold Howlers.
I feel the despair.
“Where is the Morning Star?” a Green pilot asks. His hair has already started to fall out. His mech is smoothed by sand like a river stone. Does his gun even work?
“It is on its way,” I say. “We must buy Harnassus time. One last charge of metal. I will—”
The Green’s head disappears. Screaming munitions slam into my men from above with pinpoint accuracy. A depleted uranium round gouges a hole through my armor and punches through the meat of my right hamstring. I go down hard.
Spitting dust from my mouth, I watch as shrouded figures in billowing desert cloaks fall from a cliff hundreds of meters above. Bursts of air come from their skipBoots, cushioning them as they land on my Drachenjägers’ open cockpits to drive razors through the top of my pilots’ skulls, or land behind them to scalp off their faces or claim their heads. I can’t tell if Felix goes down.
In less than ten seconds, I am the only one alive except for a pilot they pull from his cockpit to vivisect on the shoulder of his own mech.
