More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
That bloodydamn Bellona. That arrogant Peerless shit. I’m going to break his knee if I ever see him again.
I think of Mars and her highland moors and whispering woods… No. Virginia told me to endure. I’ve been imprisoned before. I know I must force away the thoughts of home before they make debris of me.
The anger that once made planets tremble is now toothless. Shorn of my myth by my failure, shorn of my army by my mistakes, shorn of my friends and family by the demands I made on them, I know hate will not return what I have lost or repair what I have broken.
The sun has raged for 4.6 billion years. I have raged for sixteen.
“Welder twenty-three. Ignore your existential dread for a moment and do reply…”
I have seen things a Red miner was never meant to see—unspeakable horrors, impossible beauty.
Whatever it is, I feel like today I have enough strength to look the other way, past the shadowy shoulder of the Archimedes to an expanse of stars in the distance where my eyes settle on a dim, ruddy light. Home.
I close my eyes and hear the whisper of the godTrees, the murmur of the Thermic Sea, the beating of griffin wings, Victra shouting at Sophocles, Sevro cackling at his girls, the clink and whir of Pax fiddling around in the garage, the voice of my wife.
Our pack’s done. Our army’s rotting on the pales. I don’t blame you. I don’t blame me. I don’t blame the troops. I blame the mobs that balked and the politicians that connived.” So much for that spark I was seeking. I leave Aurae’s book in my bag. Screw doesn’t need words. He needs to go home. “All the same…bitch to me, not the men,” I say.
More than anything I wanted to return to Pax when he was kidnapped. To rescue him. To prove in the end I was there for him. I chose the duty of an Imperator over the duty of a father. Now I’m alone playing with blades. The silence strangles me.
My arm throbs. A good reminder of unfinished business.
“Computer. Voice sample from holofile one three one: Sovereign’s Saturnalia Address.” A moment later, Virginia’s voice fills the room.
He's so down bad
“Has Mars fallen? Has Mars fallen?” He sneers. “Where is your faith, Martian? Mars stands. As will she always.”
When the pale-eyed Syndicate auctioneer waves a hand, the helmet detaches and floats into the air to bare an ugly, cantankerous face that means more to me than my own flesh. Sevro.
Even with his broken nose more crooked than a lightning bolt, his hair wild, his ears masticated, and his lips tattered, even with ten years of war and what happened to him on Luna wracking his body, I can only see the weird little wolfchild who saved me and Cassius from freezing to death in a loch. The teenage menace who used to stare at me from beneath a stinking pelt, half ready to run, half aching for a hug, desperate to prove he’s worth a damn.
“They whisper you are dead. That is how you left me: for dead. But I have claimed a new domain.” The hangar disappears, replaced by an angelic, evil visage. “Are you dead, Darrow?” Apollonius au Valii-Rath
“Were you two in touch these last weeks? You’re acting like you share a secret language all of a sudden.” “Isn’t that always the case with those who’ve read the same books?” Aurae says with a little mischief.
It’s just I…don’t think you quite understand where Darrow is going, or how he goes places, or what he does when he gets there.
“So please tell me you’re not planning to duel Apollonius.” “You know me. I never fight fair if I can help it.”
“Lysander, I am scared. For you. For me. Of every shadow, every glass of wine.” “Maybe you should quit drinking then,” I say.
“Outfitting the Morning Star alone would have bankrupted the Republic.” “So?” “That’s what I said.” He laughs. “No wonder the Senate didn’t like you.”
If I were him, I’d have bombs and a dead man’s switch. He and I often do think alike. I reach over to the seat beside me and pet Dominus Portobello, our lone atomic, for reassurance.
A chill trickles over my skin as I see the world through the pulseArmor’s lenses. Even if I loathe war, my body thrills to its rituals like a drunk hearing the clink of ice into a whiskey tumbler.
With Cassius armored and ready beside me, I feel infused with the luck of House Mars, sixteen again and preparing to steal the enemy standard.
He climbs on my back, muttering. “Let’s go to war with the Reaper of Mars, I thought. Truly, I envisioned something far more glamorous.”
With danger ahead, but my life in my hands, I come alive again.
Her eyes focus on her new, frightening reality. As she tries to scream, I wrap Bad Lass around her neck and say: “Your life is in your hands. Don’t drop it.”
“My goodman, search your memory. I said I promised I would take your recommendation to heart, and I certainly did.” He touches his breast. “In fact my heart was so torn over the matter, I nearly sprained my wrists holding it together.”
How could a man who never pays a bill ever be expected to keep his vows. Hollow then. Hollow now. Hollow ever after.”
“Why have you returned from your exile, Bellona? Come to test your prowess? Bringing with you, perhaps, some esoteric battle form from the icy depths of the system? Shadowfall? Windstrider? Bringer of Dawn?”
“Indeed, for the glory,” Cassius replies. “But mostly for the patrician pleasure of watching an ill-mannered brute from a mediocre bloodline crumble under the burden of his own grandiosity.” “Better a grandiose scion of mediocrity than a mediocre scion of a grand line.”
The roaring of the crowd fades away, replaced by the pounding of blood, the panting of breath, the clang of razors, and the immediate terror of a duel without armor.
I planned to keep him at a distance if it came to a fight, but the collision of the blades and the news of Sevro’s death incite my blood to reckless violence. I will kill him.
A laughing demon inside me tells me he is mine. He may be stronger, faster, bigger, but I am the Willow and my rage is rekindled.
Bitemark. Bomb. Sevro? “Only the rats know,” I murmur. “What?” Cassius asks. Hope stirs. Apollonius had Sevro. Sevro got loose. In the ducts? I hold on to that hope.
“If I were a man looking for an explanation, I might care. As it is, I am a man looking for an excuse.
“What are your orders, dominus?” Apollonius frowns, as if his Oranges fitting him in his purple panoply was an obvious mission statement. “Bequeath them hell, of course.”
Go now to your legions. Deny the Carthii every meter of deck, and any measure of mercy. Ravage them. Break them. Venus is the planet of love. What is Mars the planet of again?” They smile in silence, and rush off to answer with their deeds.
I see two figures staggering in an embrace, like lovers. One is Cassius. The other Vorkian. He’s headbutting her repeatedly. Unfortunately for him, she wears a helmet, and all Cassius does is knock himself out.
These two idiots toppled the Lune Regime
Under a bird’s nest of hair, a demonic, bearded face black with grease screams in the stuttered light of the starShell’s deluge. Sevro.
He’s dressed in battered scarabSkin. A trophy necklace of fetid ears hangs from his neck.
Of course he bit Appollonius in the face, escaped into the ducts, and immediately started collecting ears.
By the time we emerge into a viewing garden I have a clearer picture of Sevro’s stay on the dockyards. He must have escaped soon after his imprisonment and spent the past months waging a one-man guerilla war against Apollonius.
Sevro shouts to Aurae. I can’t hear what. He looks back at me. His red eyes are shiny with tears in his grease-dark face. He lowers his forehead to mine and only pulls back when gravity returns.
we are so back
Yet there’s something…fearsome about her, as if she’d been slapped earlier in the day and has been carrying it around all day to give back to someone else.
Her eagle hisses at me. It’s an attack bird, I’ve noticed. Metal-reinforced talons. Lovely.
“Help me!” Tharsus screams at the guests. No one raises a finger. “Help—” Then he hears Atlas land behind him. He goes still.
At the same time, we can’t seem to ever be more than one room away from each other or avoid touching each other when we are in the same room. It’s weird like that. The push and pull of a war bond that goes as deep as ours. So much guilt, but at the same time he’s my security and refuge, and I am his.
the bromance to end all bromances
“Be honest. It’s the ears,” he says. “I’d get rid of them, but how else could I mock the dead?” He brings an ear to his mouth. “Galerius, you still squealing like a piggy down there?”
I love Sevro to death, and he is fundamentally a good friend, but he feels no need to be a good person when dealing with enemies.
“Least Orion took some of those Ash bastards with her. Went out proper. You should have let her drown the whole bloody planet. Maybe then the cockroaches wouldn’t keep coming back.” “That wasn’t Eo’s dream,” I say. “And it isn’t mine. We’re no Ash Lords.” “Naw. We’re Pixies. You had Atlas and you let him live. We had Lysander and we let him live. We had Apollonius and we let him live.”
