“You wanted to speak to me?”
Anji. “Yes,” Constance said, and put the bottle down. She pushed it firmly to the back of the shelf with the rest of the things she would be leaving behind.
Anji sauntered across the bar, weaving her way through the dark imitation wood tables and stepping over the bent and tortured metal of the dismembered cameras. Her black hair was still cropped close—shorter even than Ivan’s had been—and the same red jewels glinted in the brown shell of her ear. She still had the same swaggering step, the same smiling face, the same way of kicking out a bar stool with her heel without regard for the integrity of Constance’s floors. She looked, in short, like the exact same girl who had befriended Constance on Miranda, cajoling her boss to give Constance a job at his bar, teasing the teenage Mattie when he followed Constance to work instead of going to school, jumping into a fight at any opportunity.
Anji was not Mattie, and she was not Ivan. But Constance felt a weight on her shoulders ease, anyway.
Anji hoisted herself up onto a bar stool and leaned her elbows onto the scarred and pitted surface of the bar. “What are you doing?”
“Keeping any with high proof.” This was the kind of task she could delegate if she wanted. There was no solid reason she should do it herself except that this place had been her home. She had owned it in her own name, bought it with her own work, maintained it with her own hands. She would be the one to clean it out.
“Why? Are you spending your revolution drunk?”
“Antiseptic,” said Constance. “And if not, high proof burns.” She moved to put another bottle aside.
“Oh, you’re not throwing that out, are you?”
“Take it,” Constance said, and handed the bottle to Anji.
Anji took it and snuck a sly grin up at Constance. “I’ll make sure to toast you over some System corpses.”
“I’d prefer if you spit on them for me.”
“I can do that, too.”
“Good.” Constance surveyed the shelves behind her bar. She had made a sizable amount of progress; they were nearly empty. “Has the System organized their attack yet?”
“Not yet. I think Doctor Ivanov was right; they’re still stunned. Christoph says that the System fleet is heading inward but that it looks like they’re on a path toward Earth.”
Constance nodded. Anji and her forces had been with Christoph on the outer planets, helping to create a distraction to keep the System’s attention away from Earth. If the System fleet had been near Earth, Constance’s revolution would have died before it began. The distraction had worked, and the System fleet—the main military power of the government—had gone out toward Uranus and Neptune to quell the revolts there. While the System had been distracted, Constance and Mattie had flown in toward Earth and detonated the bombs she had planted there. Even with the fleet gone, the inner planets were still the source and capital of the System’s power. Therefore, Constance had recalled Anji from the outer planets to join her on Mars in case the System reacted immediately, leaving Christoph to handle the outer moons on his own.
But the System had not managed to coordinate a counterattack yet, so Constance’s war could move to the next stage.
“How is Christoph doing?” Constance asked.
“Not good. He says Puck’s a ruin.”
Constance knew that in luring the fleet away from Earth, she had turned it on the outer planets, including Puck. She knew the fleet was raining fire and death on the moons that harbored her people. She knew the terror they faced.
The System fleet would leave her people, she told herself. It would come back to the inner planets to rain hell down on her. Constance’s revolution would live or die by its first battle against the fleet. No enemy had ever faced the System fleet and survived.
She turned away from Anji to hide the chill in her fingers and picked up the next bottle in the line. This one was high proof: good enough. She put it in the bag at her feet to be saved.
“Is Puck their only target?” Puck was a Uranian moon like Constance’s birthplace, Miranda.
“No, they’re all over Uranus. But Puck’s the only one they’ve completely destroyed—it’s ash and craters, Constance. The greenhouse enclosure is shattered all over. No one’s left.”
Anji did not say what they both thought, that Puck had suffered the same end as Saturn’s moons had endured when Connor Ivanov’s revolution had failed thirty years earlier. Systematic depopulation was the fate of rebellious moons, the wholesale genocide of the people who had lived there. It was what would happen to all of the outer moons if Constance’s revolution failed.
“Can Christoph handle it?”
“He’d better be able to,” said Anji. “System fleet’s going to come to Jupiter before they come here; I’ll be dealing with them soon.”
“Jupiter is on the other side of the sun from Uranus,” Constance reminded her.
“You don’t think they’ll stop by Jupiter before coming here?”
Constance put down the bottle she was holding and turned to face her friend. Anji sat, as she always had, like someone who could handle herself in a brawl. But this revolution was not a brawl, and Constance saw the tension in her pressed lips, in the fingers curled in against the wooden top of the bar.
“They might,” Constance said, because lies were as bad a currency as doubt, “but not for long. They are looking for me. And you can hold them off: remember all the years we fought them and burned them and they could never touch us.”
“Like a fly they couldn’t swat,” Anji said.
“We’re not a fly now.” Constance turned back around to the shelves of liquor. “I’m sending Julian and his troops to Christoph. If the System fleet goes to Jupiter and you need assistance, call for me. Remember that the Jovians will help you. They hate the System like everyone else.”
“Right,” Anji said, some of the tension fading from her voice. There was still some fear, but that was necessary. Only an idiot wouldn’t fear the System—an idiot or the Mallt-y-Nos. Constance wrapped the bottle she was holding in a length of fabric that once had been her kitchen curtains and loaded it into the bag at her feet.
Anji said, “And the plan?”
“The plan is the same,” said Constance. She had spent months on this plan, working with Ivan, talking it out late into the night in the privacy of the Annwn or whispering it into each other’s ears under the covers where the System would not think to listen. “Christoph will be with the outermost planets. He will handle Uranus and Neptune and the trans-Neptunian bodies.”
Reciting it was familiar. Like reciting a prayer. Constance could almost hear Ivan whispering it along with her.
“You will be in the middle belt,” she said to Anji. “You will take Jupiter and the asteroid belt and hold Saturn.”
Anji was nodding. The words were as familiar to her as they were to Constance.
“And I,” said Constance, not and I and Mattie and Ivan, “will be in the inner solar system. First I will take Mars; with Earth gone, this is the planet most valuable to the System. Then I will take Venus, the next most powerful. Then Mercury. And last, Luna.”
Take them in that order, the Ivan of her memory whispered to her, one hand brushing hair from her cheek and concealing the motion of his mouth from the System’s camera in the same gesture, and the System won’t be able to rebuild its strength.
Anji said, “Nothing’s changed for you?”
The question was discordant, not a part of the usual recitation of the plan. “No.”
“Even though Ivan and Mattie aren’t here?”
The mention of the men brought an unwelcome edginess into Constance’s focus, as if sparks were traveling beneath her skin. Anji was looking at her with sympathy, one friend ready to comfort another.
“Nothing,” Constance said, “has changed,” and Anji’s open look closed off, and when Anji’s manner had fully changed from friend to subordinate, Constance said, “I’m almost done here. Get the cases from
the kitchen.”
“Sure,” Anji said. A moment later she had started setting up, wedging oblong containers beneath tables and beside load-bearing walls. By the time Constance had finished sorting through her liquor, Anji had finished her task.
“Let’s go,” Constance said, and led Anji out the front door. She did not turn back to look at her bar. She knew what she would see: dusty shelves and abandoned liquor, torn-out cameras and empty chairs, paintings and other decorative pieces that had been gifts from Mattie and Ivan (Your bar looks fucking depressing, Connie, and If you’re trying to pretend to be a normal person, you should make your house look like a normal person’s house) but served no useful function and hence had been left behind. She knew what she would see, and so she did not look back.
Constance handed her bag off to one of her people as soon as she stepped out into the thin, whipping air of Mars. The sun was high and bright, and she had to squint the moment she entered the light. Most of her fleet and Anji’s was already in the air, hovering out past the edge of the scarp, light glinting off the ships’ metal sides. Only her own ship and Anji’s ship remained landed, with their crews waiting for her out in the light of the sun, milling like hounds over the sand and the stone. “Let’s go!” she shouted to her people on the ground, and at her call, they came.
“See you on the other side?” Anji asked.
“I don’t intend to die,” said Constance.
“Just meant it as a saying, Con.”
“Remember, don’t overextend yourself. Strike fast but don’t let them corner you.”
“I remember,” Anji said. “I’ll kill them for you, Con. And for Ivan, right?”
Constance had nothing to say to that. She started to leave, but Anji’s hand fell on her elbow with a grip of surprising strength.
“If I hear from Mattie,” Anji began, and Constance nearly turned away again, “and he’s in trouble, what do you want me to do?”
“Nothing,” said Constance. “This revolution is what matters. If he’s in trouble, he will have to find a way out on his own.”
Anji’s hand slipped from Constance’s arm.
Her fleet was ready to leave. “See you on the other side,” Constance said, and Anji nodded, and they parted with Anji running off to her own ship, shouting for her people to join her.
Right before Constance boarded the Wild Hunt, she turned to look back at her bar, standing dark and empty atop the scarp.
She pressed the detonator, and the bombs she and Anji had planted within it exploded, fire igniting, the building collapsing. The Martian wind howled in and then rushed back, carrying with it the heat of the blaze, and Constance turned her back on it and strode inside her craft, giving the signal to blast off.
With the bar burning on the scarp behind them, the Wild Hunt began.
—
“Here’s a tough one,” Althea said. “Are you ready?”
“I am ready,” said her daughter, gleaming and perfect in the holographic terminal.
Althea hitched her notepad a little higher onto her knees, keeping an eye on the camera overhead, checking behind herself to make sure there were no reflective surfaces.
“You’re standing in a hallway,” she said. “Ahead of you, it splits in two. Each of the two paths ends in a door, and there’s a person standing in front of each door.”
“So two people,” said Ananke.
“Two people,” Althea agreed. “One of them only tells lies, and the other only tells the truth. One of the two doors leads to heaven, and the other leads to hell.”
“Does the honest person stand in front of heaven and the liar in front of hell?”
“No,” said Althea. “I mean, you don’t know. And you don’t know which door leads where.”
“But I want to get to heaven.”
“Yes,” Althea said. “You’re allowed to ask one question. You can ask either person, but you can only ask one question, and then you have to pick a door.”
“Why only one question?”
“Because that’s part of the riddle. You can only ask one. What question do you ask to figure out which door leads to heaven?”
Ananke fell silent. Althea watched her curiously.
“No going into System databases and finding records of this riddle and its answer, either,” Althea added on a sudden suspicion.
Ananke tilted her chin up in a gesture that Althea found disorientingly familiar: it was her own mannerism. “I don’t need to cheat,” Ananke said.
“Okay,” said Althea. While she watched the hologram, it seemed to grow incrementally more and more still. To begin with it had seemed natural, like a real and living girl, but somehow now it slid sideways almost imperceptibly into something else, something unnatural and still, something that had never been alive, a three-dimensional picture, a sculpture of light. Althea’s daughter was a frozen figure, a Galatea before her quickening.
And then the hologram moved again so suddenly that the image glitched, warping so swiftly to another image that Althea did not have time to perceive what that other image was before Ananke corrected herself and again Althea’s daughter was beaming out at her.
“I would go up to one man and ask him which door the other man would say heaven was behind,” said Ananke. “And then I would go through the door that he said did not have heaven behind it.”
Ananke had switched pronouns, Althea noticed, but shook it from her head. She’d probably done it for syntactic simplicity. “And why’s that?”
“Because the liar would lie about the honest man’s truth, and the honest man would tell the truth of the liar’s lie. Whichever man I asked my question of, I would receive the same answer,” said Ananke. “The trick is to use them both, not one or the other. The riddle can only be solved by accepting that they are a pair.”
Here was her daughter, beautiful and brilliant. Althea tossed her paper to the ground, unfolding herself from the uncomfortable pretzeling position she’d adopted to keep the notepad out of Ananke’s sight.
“And one more question,” she said, feeling a warmth all through her chest, a contentment. Everything, Althea told herself, was going to be all right. “We don’t have to decide this now. The whole universe is ours, Ananke,” Althea said. “Where do you want to go?”
—
Someone had told Constance once that Mars was the planet most like Earth. It was colder, and the air was thinner, and the gravity was weaker, but the sky was a slate gray that was nearly blue and the rocks and dunes looked like some Terran deserts. It had been the first planet colonized by the System. The System’s control of Mars was subtler than its control of the outer planets: on Mars, the System did not march its military around or build greenhouse enclosures to contain the populace like goldfish in a jar.
To control Mars, the System controlled the water.
The process of terraforming Mars, warming its surface and growing a thicker atmosphere, had allowed liquid water to exist on its surface: some of the mares of Mars now truly held seas. But most of Mars’s precious water was in the ice caps or beneath the ground as permafrost. This System base was built in the Cerberus Fossae, a deep natural gouge in the surface of the planet above a vast reservoir of groundwater a few miles away from the town of Isabellon, which relied on that water to survive. Constance crouched atop the edge of one of the sides of the fossa and looked through the sandy air toward the System base, its steel glinting in the sunlight.
They were all laid out the same way, Constance knew. The System was nothing if not consistent. Three buildings: one for a barracks, one for food and fuel and medical supplies, and one for weaponry. In the center of the grouped buildings where there usually would be an open space for drills and executions was a dome covering the water pumps. To the side was the shipyard: a small fleet of ships that had landed on the surface of Mars for maintenance or reserve. On Miranda or one of the other outer moons, such a base would be fenced in or have some sort of perimeter to guard it. On Mars, the buildings stood apart in
the open, and the only fence was the one surrounding the shipyard.
There were not very many ships in the shipyard, and the ones that were there were not particularly powerful: they ranged from circular or cylindrical spacecraft to smaller aerodynamic ships designed for atmospheric flight. The largest and most powerful System ships could not be landed on a planet and would be in orbit somewhere overhead. Regardless of their number or strength, Constance needed them; her own fleet was too small. When the System fleet came, it would destroy her.
She needed the fuel and the weaponry and the supplies the System base had, as well. She could not fight a war with stones. And she would not harm the water pumps—if she did, she would starve Isabellon.
The only building she wanted to destroy, then, was the barracks.
“What are you thinking?” Milla Ivanov asked from beside her, her voice barely audible over the low whistle of the Martian wind. If Constance looked back, she could see the rest of her scouting party spread out over the desert, nearly invisible among the stones. The System base had not seen them yet; her people were too good at evading its eye.
Constance leaned over so that she and Milla would share a line of sight. “There,” she said, and pointed to the building she’d identified as the barracks. “That’s the building we want destroyed. The others we want captured.”
“Especially the ships,” Milla observed. “If we are planet-bound, we have already lost.”
Suffocating thought: confined to the narrow stretch of land that was a single planet, prey for the System to pick off one by one or trapped there slowly to die when the System decided simply to destroy the planet entirely. “Especially the ships,” said Constance. “We have to come in on foot or they’ll send out their own ships to attack ours.”
“They’ll send out their own ships, anyway, if they see us coming.”
Constance smiled humorlessly. “They won’t see us coming.”
She took her troops in at dusk, when the long low rays of the sun made shapes hard to distinguish in the desert, when the System soldiers were dining.
They got into the fossa easily enough, but approaching the System base on flat and open land was more difficult. Constance had them hug the walls of the fossa until they could come no nearer without being seen. Then they waited.
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