“Not now, mother,” I replied.
I didn’t bother turning to face her until she turned my shoulder herself. “Kale, listen to me.”
“I said not now!” I shrugged her off and took a step toward the entry, but she caught up and squeezed her way in front of me.
“I know what she did was wrong, but she’s family,” she said. Tears glazed her eyes. Her hair was disheveled, her eyes exhausted. She almost looked like she had in the quarantine, only she could at least stand under her own weight now.
“Not with me.”
Again, I went to go by her, but she didn’t move. “How many second chances did I give you? Stealing Earther tech. Getting into fights. We all make mistakes.”
“And what about the next one?” I bristled. “What if she or anyone else decides to sell us out to Earth? If they decide a free Titan isn’t worth the struggle? Do you know the things I did to get you free of their quarantine? Do you even understand?”
“I didn’t ask for any of it. All I wanted was one last chance to hug my boy.”
“And now you can. No mask, no gloves. Because I turned that quarantine into dust. Am I the only one willing to do what’s necessary to survive?”
“Survive? We’ve already won, Kale! Pervenio is gone. The USF was willing to sign Titan over to us. Our own world back. Everything we wanted. I’ve stood by and watched you push them further and further because you seem to think that the thing we all fought for isn’t good enough.”
“Good enough? Should we settle for good enough? The Ring was ours long before they crawled out of the ashes of the Meteorite. We should beg them for scraps because one day they decided to come here and infect us? Spread their Earther greed like an even worse sickness? We’ve lost too many lives because of them to settle.”
“Is Cora’s life really worth losing yourself?”
“This isn’t about her!” I bellowed. The echo of my voice caused my people to stop and stare.
My mother staggered back slowly, eyes bulging. “What happened to you?” she said softly. “What happened to my son?”
“He learned what it takes to protect the people he cares about. Now, please, get out of my way, or I’ll have to make an example out of you as well.” I wished I could take back that last part as soon as it left my mouth. She didn’t deserve it. She was only trying to do what a good mother should, but I was tired of her not understanding the sacrifices our revolution took.
Her fear gave way to anger. “Tell your Aunt Maya congratulations. She’s finally transformed you into your father.”
She rushed by me before I had a chance to answer. Not that I had anything to say. My father wasn’t there for us because he gave his soul to begin the Children of Titan as only a Trass could. To start the fight that I was finishing. Whatever line he’d crossed, I know he did it for me. For my future. Same as I was for my child. Why couldn’t she ever understand?
I drew a deep breath to settle myself, then started off toward the Hall of Ashes again. I barely made it two steps before Maya was in front of me to beg for Mazrah as well. She appeared neither sad nor irritated, not that showing emotion with half a face was easy. She dropped to her knees in front of me with all my people watching.
“Lord Trass, I’ve come to ask you to spare my sister,” she said.
I groaned, grabbed her by the shoulder, and heaved her to her feet. “Not in front of them,” I whispered, pulling her off to the side. She, the fearless, ruthless warrior who had ringed me into this fight shouldn’t be seen begging like my people used to for credits.
“It was my fault, Kale,” she said. “I brought her into this years ago when she wanted nothing to do with the movement, but she’s never had the stomach for this. She —”
“Did you know?” I asked calmly, stopping her mid-sentence.
“Know what?”
“That she, the Collector, and Aria had a serious history.”
Maya’s marred lips twisted. I could tell she considered lying, but in the end, she shook her head. “I knew she recruited Aria to be our Doctor. I didn’t realize they knew each other before that, but—”
I cut her off again. “She put both our cause and my son in jeopardy for a Pervenio Collector. Who knows what else she might have been planning while I left her here in control of Titan. You said it yourself. She didn’t want this.”
“Let me talk to her. I can figure out what she was really after.” I’d never seen my hardened aunt so rattled. She’d been at my side since the beginning, helping me make the hard choices for the good of Titan. Always calculating. Now her tongue flicked along her open scars like it always did when she was agitated, only more so now.
“So she can spin more lies?” I asked. “Keep more secrets? That was her job on the old Titan, wasn’t it? Exchanging secrets. Knowing things to get the upper hand.”
“We can trust her.”
“We can only trust our own.”
Maya grabbed me by the chest plate, her features warping with rage. If I were anybody else, she would have struck me. I didn’t flinch. Not with my people watching.
“She’s as much one of us as Aria!” she seethed. “What if she planned this? Would you destroy her too?”
“Aria kept the same secret from me.” I pictured her at the controls of the Cora before Maya stopped them. She wasn’t a hostage. She was as ready to fly the thing back to Earth as any of them. Ready to leave me behind.
“She will raise our child so that the blood of Trass, our blood, goes on,” I said, “but she will never speak for us again. Be happy, Maya. Now you get to say you were right about her.”
She released me, and her head drooped. “Now I don’t want to. I understand that you have to make an example of one of them, Kale. Trust me, I do. But, please, send Mazrah away instead. Make her live with her other half. I’m not asking you as your advisor but as your blood.”
“It’s only because you are who you are that she isn’t being killed. Freeing a Pervenio Collector and stealing my unborn child makes us look weak enough as it is.”
“You might as well be killing her.”
“What happened to whatever it takes?”
A mouthful of air slipped through her lips, the healthy side beginning to tremble. She stared up at me, a single tear dribbling down her cheek in and out of her grisly scars. “Be better than me,” she said.
I wrapped my hand around her gruesome jawline. Most people cringed at the site of her. I did once but not anymore. “We’ll bear the weight of our hard choices so that they’ll never have to,” I whispered. “We’re so close, Maya. Don’t lose sight.” I drew her into a tight embrace, then strode into the Hall of Ashes.
It was even more packed than for Gareth’s funeral. My guards formed a line on either side of me and pushed through the mob of baffled faces. Most had no idea that Mazrah had betrayed us all. That a woman born half of Titan and half of Earth would choose the latter.
She stood in front of one of the tubes the ashes of the dead were sent through, her wrists bound and shoved into the opening. She watched me the entire way over, repulsed. I’m not sure how I never saw how she felt about me before. I was blinded by Maya’s trust, I suppose. A part of me couldn’t believe my fearsome aunt had a weak spot. It made me feel more alone under the crushing weight of my responsibility than ever before.
“Kale, let me out of here!” Mazrah shouted over the raucous crowd, pulling to try and free her arms from the tube. “This is insane. Just listen to me.”
I stopped directly in front of her. My guards gave us space and held the others at bay. I scanned her from head to toe. For once, she couldn’t wield her charm and beauty as a weapon. Her dress was ripped, her shoes broken. Makeup like the Earthers wore ran down from her eyes. She looked plain.
“I trusted you,” I said.
“I trusted you! Trusted Maya that you’d all be different, when you’re just as bad as the others. And trust me, Kale Trass, nobody knows that better than me. I knew all Pervenio’s little secret
s, but at least they were honest before they sent us out an airlock.”
The back of my armored hand crashed into her face, splitting her cheek. She couldn’t fall with her arms jammed, but she folded over the protruding tube and spat a gob of blood.
“Kale!” Maya shouted. She burst through the guards, but I whipped around and stuck my finger in her direction.
“Stop!” I bellowed. She didn’t dare disobey. “This woman betrayed us all!” I addressed the crowd. “She attempted to free the Pervenio Collector who murdered Orson Fring in cold blood.” The collective gasp of everyone watching was as loud as a tram zipping by. “But this Earther-sympathizing snake didn’t stop there. I wanted him to be born healthy before I shared the news with Titan, but my son grows within our ambassador. He is the blood of Trass, and this woman tried to take him from me. From you!”
“Traitor!” a Titanborn in the crowd spat.
“Whore!” shrieked another.
They surged inward, forcing my guards to use the strength of their armor to keep them from ripping Mazrah apart. I raised my arms to try and control them, then circled Mazrah. I pointed to her arms, trapped within the tube.
“With those hands, she unlocked the Earther’s shackles. In their attempt to escape, he nearly killed me.” I gestured to a cut on my cheek from my brawl with Malcolm. Again, the crowd gasped. “But we are stronger than they think!”
They erupted, half cheering, half spewing insults at Mazrah. Maya sank back behind my guards, a thousand-meter gaze aimed in the direction of her half sister.
“I ask you, my people. What should be done to someone willing to sell us out to our enemies? Someone willing to free an Earther and let him walk our halls, spreading his sickness and germs?”
“Kill her!” a man across the hall yelled. Chants echoing his sentiments rang out through the crowd, but I ignored them. Instead, I turned and regarded Mazrah.
“You want to know why I tried to free them?” she muttered. “You.” Blood bubbled in the corner of her lips. “They’re going to wipe us out because of you. Maya wanted a heartless leader for her revolution. You got more than you bargained for, didn’t you, Sister!” She lunged at Maya, but her trapped arms snapped her back. For the first time in my life, I saw Maya flinch.
Before any of my people noticed, I clutched Mazrah by her flawless jawline. “Is that what you want to see?” I said. “Titan covered in Pervenio red again so you can go back to whoring credits?”
“Can’t be worse than living under a murderer. So go ahead and kill me. Because if you don’t, and you touch a hair on Aria’s body, I swear I’ll bring this whole thing down.”
My hand fell to her throat and squeezed so that the rest of what she said was garbled. I wanted to crush her. Who knew how long she’d been whispering in Aria’s ears, turning her against me until she was willing to run? It was only the sight of my aunt out of the corner of my eye that convinced me to let go.
Mazrah coughed. I turned back to my people. “The former Voice of Titan would have had her spaced without a second thought, but we are not them!” I announced. “Mazrah, for your crimes against Titan in this time of struggle, you will never be able to free an Earther from his cell again. Never be able to touch and manipulate all those who thought they could trust you.”
I approached the controls for opening the tube that allowed ashes to pass through. Mazrah and her sister’s eyes went wide. My aunt mouthed, “Please” for me to stop, but her body remained still.
“Too much of a coward to kill me, are you, Kale?” Mazrah muttered. The crowd of Titanborn was too loud for anybody but me to hear her. “What’s another body on the pile you’ve started.”
“You did this to yourself, Mazrah,” I said.
“You’re right. It’s what I get for looking out for anybody else. But you know the one thing I learned as an information broker here?”
“What?”
“That there’s always one secret deeper. You do what you want with me, but if Aria gets hurt because she was naïve enough to love a monster like you, I’ll tell yours.”
I paused at the controls with one command left to open the exterior valve and expose her to Titan’s frigid air.
“You don’t know anything,” I said. “And that terrifies you, doesn’t it?”
Her bloody lips curled into an impish smile, the same that had probably been used to work over countless men before me. It was probably how she got Malcolm to trust her despite being an offworlder. Probably the reason I took Maya at her word and trusted her sister without digging deeper.
“There were many secrets hidden in Pervenio Station after we took it,” she said. “My favorite was an early passage from one of Titan’s first settlers. So old that the data couldn’t be opened on our devices, but I found my way in. Darien Trass sent three-thousand people to Titan before the Meteorite hit. All our lives we’ve been told his daughter was among them, but Darien Trass didn’t have a daughter. Not by blood anyway.” She started to snicker. “You and Maya and your father are as much Trasses as anyone in this room.”
She grinned all the way through her revelation, at least until she realized that I wasn’t shocked at all. I felt like I should be. Like I should have gone faint upon hearing that our entire revolution was based on a lie. But I didn’t feel a thing.
Maybe she was telling the truth, but it didn’t matter. I was only a descendent of Trass because my people needed me to be. They needed a symbol, a name, to rally behind. To be honest, it was almost a relief to feel the weight of living up to the most brilliant man in human history lifting off me. The truth was that I, Mazrah, every Titanborn in the room were all the children of those he selected. The three-thousand most worthy people on an Earth that deserved to die.
Mazrah’s features darkened when she realized her final slight had no effect. Not a soul among my people would believe her anyway. I stared straight into her eyes, never breaking contact, and then I keyed the command. The outer seal of the tube opened, allowing the bitter cold of Titan to slip through. At first Mazrah went silent, then she fell to her knees. Her cries were drowned out by the crowd.
It only lasted a few seconds before I resealed the tube, but it was long enough for the chill of my world to slip by her arms and give me goose bumps. Maya and two guards ran forward to pull Mazrah free from the tube. She collapsed, her entire body shivering, her lips blue. The skin up to her forearms was frozen solid, and when her hands hit the floor, they began to crack. The only thing that kept them from shattering was that the intolerable cold had fused them together.
I laid my hand upon Maya’s shoulder as she struggled to calm her writhing sister. “Have her body warmed, then meet me at Javaris’s workstation. Word came through this morning. His engines are complete.”
Maya glanced up at me, incredulous. She needed time, but so had I when she invaded the Piccolo and made me a rebel. The Earther fleet was near, and enough time had already been wasted with traitors when we should’ve been preparing.
“That’s an order,” I said, then left them behind.
My people reached out to brush my armor as I passed, praising my mercy. Mazrah howled in agony until I was out of the Darien Hall of Ashes. It was the same sound I’d grown used to while visiting my mother in the quarantine zone. Only, those were my people suffering. The woman at my back, no matter what Maya thought, wasn’t one of us. Not anymore.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
MALCOLM GRAVES
Feeling my age wasn’t new, but for the first time in my life I felt like a cripple. The pounding I took after Kale stopped our escape was one for my personal record books, especially after all the others since I was brought to Titan. Ringers on their own, weak. Dozens of them kicking my ribs with their armor on as they dragged me back to my cell? Different story.
I could barely move either leg, and they didn’t even bother whipping up a new electromag band to disable my manmade one. I feared what that meant for Mazrah. My hips popped any time I tried to move them, like I wa
s an elder shoved into some clan family retirement clinic. Even drawing breath led to a sharp pain pulling at my side.
Even with all of that, however, it was my mind that felt the worst. We were so close to being free of Titan forever. The frozen world where nothing good in my life had ever happened. It was there that I decided to leave Mazrah and keep being a Collector for credits I’d waste on whores and gambling dens. Where I was forced to kill my friend and partner. Where I’d learned my daughter was working with terrorists, and later that she was carrying the child of their leader.
All I kept think about was how much easier things would’ve been if Luxarn had left me out to freeze. No fake leg. No more worrying about Aria. Just peace, quiet, and an eternity of darkness.
“On your feet, Earther!” a hardened Titanborn ordered, banging on my cage. Desmond was gone. If I knew the self-proclaimed king of Titan like I thought I did, Desmond’s failure to control me probably got him punished. Or killed, more likely.
“You plan on helping me up?” I groaned, voice muffled by a new sanitary mask strapped to my face even tighter. Speaking brought about aches that I didn’t even know were humanly possible. A tough feat, considering I’d spent a lifetime fighting. “Didn’t think so.”
Before my new guard could answer, a throng of heavy feet marched into the cavern. They spread around the perimeter of Javaris Venta’s workspace. Whatever he was building, it was encased in a series of large, metal tubes. It couldn’t be anything good. The hollow was freezing when I was first sent down who knows how long ago, just how the Ringers liked it, but his creation emitted heat like a warm hovercar engine. By the bars of my cell it was enough to make me sweat.
“Mr. Venta,” the familiar voice of my captor addressed him. “I trust everything is in working order.”
“Yes...yes, of course,” Javaris stammered. “Tests show that the plasmatic pulse drives are operating at 90 percent yield in comparison to those constructed for the Departure Ark. I attempted to produce comparable models, but in these conditions and with the materials available, I...I...”
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