Chapter Text
Interlude: Julian
He hears them coming.1 Quinn rushes out to meet them. Roque lingers. He wants to help but he doesn’t know how. They sit together in the slowly dissolving silence. The warroom feels unfathomably empty. Empty in a way that curls around and cancels itself out. Golds don’t have ghosts, but surely there are spaces so chocked full of human emotion that they take on a life of their own, a death of their own. How many have sat in this room where he is now and failed, just like him? How many more, in the future?
“She is your friend,” Roque says gently. He puts his hand over Julian’s.
“I know.”
Eventually he leaves too and Julian is alone in the empty room full of ghosts. He understands their excitement, the draw to rush outside and see those who have come to rescue them. Because that is what this is, Mars needs to be saved.
He wrenches the Primus hand off his neck and drops it on the table. He can already imagine what his mother will say. The look on her face, the disappointed but not cross draw of her brows and shameful frown. He was supposed to do better, be better. Prove himself. Now he has to be pulled free of the disaster he helped make. How did it get here? When did the landslide start?—or, was it always moving, and Julian only began to see the signs once he was buried?
If Cassius were here,
That is how each thought starts. Every single one. If Cassius were here, none of this would have happened. Fewer people would have died. They wouldn’t have starved. Pluto would not have overwhelmed them so easily.
He could have led the house. He could have won on his own.
But if Cassius were here, Eo would not be here. How is that a fair trade? Could Julian choose between the two? Family, instinct says, family of course, of course. But…
She stands on the threshold. Draped in fur and gleaming armor. Lingering, waiting, uncertain. Hand on one side of the doorframe. She looks terribly lost, or frightened. Pity, Julian realizes, it is pity. Get used to that look, something vile hisses in the back of his mind.
“I’m back,” she smiles, awkward and overbearing. Too wide, too many teeth. Not Aureate at all, far too earnest. She does not smile like that often. A smile like a child, like someone who does not have family to impress and rigid expectations to fill and a life already written out for her to step into. He envies her, in a way.
Julian leaves his chair and despondency behind, rushing forth to wrap Eo in a hug. She stills, then returns the gesture, settling her head on his shoulder. After everything, she accepts him without judgement, without expectations. She doesn’t ask anything of him.
Julian pulls back, holding her hands. Her face is streaked in dirt and sun-red and freckled.
“You must tell me everything,” he says.
“In time. We have a problem I think you can help with.”
Finality is a physical feeling. It’s temporal; it sinks into the air, threads through the wind, lingers in the air. Eo can feel it, like a vise around her throat. The sun creeps closer to the horizon, bleeding the sky out orange as they head back to Olympus. A sparse few heavy clouds release the last of the thunderstorm. Half-formed bits of noncommittal hail bounce off the plates of her armor.
This is the end.
She split the army into pieces to cover more land. Tactus directs one of them. He is restless when they touch down on the edge of Olympus. There is an overdue rage, an insecurity in him Eo can relate to. He has trust issues almost as bad as hers. Which, ironically, makes her trust him more. He is unimpressed with Julian and brushes past him to Eo. There is news, he says.
Pax held on for thirty hours. He passed while Eo was away.
Tactus delivers this with a pitying little shrug and a scowl that is far too rehearsed to be a genuine display of apathy. He hides his grief well. Eo does too.
She wasn’t there for him in his last moments. The person he gave his life to save couldn’t even show up and be there for him as he died, and even now there is no time to grieve. She feels that vile hum in the back of her head again. The one that asks her what she is becoming. She sends Tactus off to keep watch, to be ready.
Julian is at the doors to the massive castle, accepting gear from Pebble and Nyla. Pebble’s left hand is bandaged to a bulky club and her face is pale with painkillers overtop blood loss, but she grins in spite of it all and riffs off something Nyla said. Julian laughs awkwardly, not in on the joke. He is reinvigorated in Eo’s presence, but there is a sullenness in him that was not there before. He carries the guilt for Mars’ fractured house on his shoulders.
Do you care about him? hisses that sardonic voice in the back of Eo’s head, the Gold. Eo doesn’t know how to answer that. It makes her frustrated with herself, with him.
She stands on the edge of Olympus. Kicks a bit of snow and watches it flurry down, taken by the wind. Is her strength cracking under the pressure? She trusted Mustang, now look where she is. And even then, she can no longer bring herself to feel fully opposed to Julian and Sevro and the others. What would the Sons think of this?
Things will be different on the outside. Eo glances up at the bubbleroof, where it warps the sunset as it bruises from orange to magenta. Wisps of clouds at this height she could reach out and touch turn pinkish. Is this how they live? Above everything? Dancing in the heavens, watching the masses languish. That ever-present rage bubbles, boils just under the surface.
Her officers stir, riled up by something over the comms. Eo digs the earpiece out of her pocket, but it was crushed sometime during the fighting.
Eo heads over to Tactus and grabs his shoulder. For a split-second she feels that similar vertigo she got when walking through the halls of Castle Mars, when she was in the trees in the snow, when Titus left her for dead. She brushes it off and turns Tactus around.
“What’s happening? Talk to me.”
“Mustang,” he says, grinning. He points. “Look.”
Eo shields her eyes against the setting sun as Mustang lands on the floating platform. No one moves to apprehend her for what she has brought with her. Snow is displaced, puffing up in a disorderly cloud when Mustang drops the Jackal, incapacitated.
The game is over.
It ends like this, with the setting sun on Eo’s back and the gradual uptick in conversation as the crowd becomes saturated with officials and patrons flooding in through an opening in the bubble.
Augustus is here. Eo stares at him—can’t not stare at him. His face is a scar in her mind. A twisted, not small part of her wants him to glance over at her and recognize her. She wants to see the blood drain from his face. Wants him to look upon the monster he helped create, the ghost that has come back to rain hell. But he doesn’t even look at her, just surveys the motley crew of starved and bloody teenagers, unimpressed.
Interlude: Aja
Octavia sits primly at her desk, filing through tabs on the holoprojector, brow creased just slightly. The cell rejuvenation therapy won’t let anything beyond the smallest of wrinkles form, but that is not necessary. Her frustration hangs in the air like a pestilence. Aja stands by the paned window and gazes out at the slowly dying sun, a safe distance from Octavia’s venom.
“It is a conduit,” Octavia mutters, voice rising in volume. “Not some machine that can malfunction or fall apart. Someone sabotaged it—that’s the only possibility that makes even a modicum of sense.” She tucks a strand of pale gold hair behind her ear and glances from the array of holos to Aja. “Do you know what this is? Do you understand what the Device could have done? Do you see what we lose if it stays broken?”
“I do,” Aja replies evenly, not turning. In moments the sun will dip at the mathematically perfect angle and seem to bathe the horizon in fire.
“Good. Tell me what happened that day. I need to know everything.” The holos hum as Octavia brushes some away, summons others for closer inspection.
“All functionality ceased after Augustus left.” Other than that, the day was uneventful.
“How long after?”
“Hours. Three hours.”
“Why did he leave?”
“An execution.”
There is a buzz of excitement to the air that—that—
Who is that?
Eo’s gaze latches suddenly on someone drifting through the crowds. Eo watches their back, feeling something coil in her gut, instinctual. Her ears pop and she gets the impression of being seen through a window, as if someone has peeled back the outer layer of the sky to peer down at her, or, perhaps, the other way around; as if she has found an opening to another space, like when she first snuck alone into the bubbleGarden.
Interlude: Aja
“He oversaw it to make an example,” she continues. The details are superfluous. If Augustus knew, he would make a show of it. “The Sons of Ares have been getting bold, he said.”
Octavia shakes her head. “Paranoid bastard. Do you think he could have done this?”
“He doesn’t know about the Device.”
“You don’t know what he does and does not know,” Octavia snaps.
Aja is stunned into momentary silence. She turns from the blinding red sunset, back now to the window. Octavia scowls, looking away from her and to another holo that she reads furiously.
“Have you told him?” Aja asks after a moment. She was under the impression the Device was a heavily-guarded secret.
“Of course not.” A flick of her wrist sends a hovering itinerary away. “But he is opportunistic. If there is a leak, he will have taken advantage of it.”
“Do you want something done?”
“Not presently. He cannot know that it is broken. No one can.”
She weaves through the crowd, pushing past students and officials, eyes on the space between the boy’s shoulders, right where the tangled golden hair drapes over his back. She moves faster, urgent, nearly steps on the back of his heel, reaches out for his shoulder and closes on open air where the person once was.
A pang of loneliness hits her, so abrupt and all-encompassing, as if this person—who must be the disappearing boy—took her entire life with him when he vanished. Eo stands there, feeling momentarily shocked out of her body at the experience. Had she lost her mind somewhere in the snow?—or is this something deeper than that? If she asked the others, would they too have seen this person? And, more importantly, why does she feel so suddenly miserable? The thrill of the mystery and resulting frustration at it is gone, now replaced with a hollow longing, as if finding this vanishing person would lend her a closure she has yet to find.
Interlude: Aja
An aircar passes loudly below, somewhere beyond this fortress of glass and marble and stone.
“Who else knows?”
Octavia does not like being questioned. She doesn’t even look at Aja, just huffs an exasperated breath through her nose. “No one. You, your father…” Her eyes are lost in the holos. “Lysander.”
All this time, Eo assumed the boy was of a rival house and therefore an enemy. But now the game is over. She tries picturing things from his perspective. When she tried to grab him in the tree, it must have felt like she was attacking him, and maybe she was, maybe she wanted him to feel her nails in his arm. He is probably terrified of her. He has good reason to be, given what Eo is, what she has become.
What she will become.
Interlude: Aja
Aja’s resolve wavers. What could her reasoning be for telling Lysander of all people about this disaster of a pet-project? The bodies… has he seen them? “He is a child.”
Now her eyes flick up, deadly and hard, and Aja sees flashes of the powerful girl who beheaded her father and threw his body off the throne. “You think I am unaware, Knight? He may be a child, but firstly he is my hier.”
She is so deeply lost in thought that she doesn’t notice Lorn au Arcos approach until she almost steps on his foot. Eo wonders for the thousandth time how she got here. Standing in the shadow of a Gold from modern myth. All she can think about is the disappearing boy. That and the bone-deep, acidic rage this man stirs in her. She does not want to be patient any longer. She wants to tear this whole thing apart, she wants ruination on the empire he helped build.
Interlude: Aja
Anastasia’s gentle features come into focus in the forefront of Aja’s mind. The socialite. The pianist. The mother. Does she know she is expected to fail? Does she know how Octavia sees through her and to the child?
Octavia tilts her head. “Do you have something to say?”
“No, my liege.”
She eyes Aja for a moment, then turns away. “Find out what Augustus knows. No, find out who did this. I want to know how the Device broke. Bring them to me and I will deal with it. I was so close…”
Can a weapon feel remorse? Eo wonders, gliding languid and dreamlike through the throng, following this ancient man. She sees her peers but can’t perceive them, hears conversation as a thick drone. Can’t feel her legs as they guide her away. Does the pitviper feel guilt? Do the gallows reel in horror at what they were made for?
Does Eo falter when she is offered an apprenticeship by one of Gold’s best warlords?
No. The answer is no.
There is no remorse, no guilt, no horror, and Eo does not falter. She feels nothing but that familiar rage, and that familiar fear. Fear not for herself. Of herself.
If this anger has a half life it will depreciate Eo to nothing.