Golden Son (32 page)

Rolling her eyes, she steps forward, looking either way down the hall. She brings up her hand, fighting back a childish smile. “Victra. I like the way stone smells before rain falls.” She makes a face, cheeks flushing red. “And … don’t laugh. I actually hate the color gold. Green goes better with my complexion.”

I cannot sleep. The bodies of those I’ve left behind float in the darkness with me. I wake a dozen times, flashes of bombs, slashing of swords ripping into my dreams. I earned these sleepless nights. I know that, and that’s what makes them all the harder.

I stand and pace my new quarters, wandering its expanse. Six rooms. A small gymnasium. A large

bath. A study. All belonging to the man who burned a moon. The father of the Furies. How could I sleep in a room like this? I take the pegasus pendant from my pocket, almost forgetting it’s a radium bomb.

Wandering the halls of the ship, ghostlike, I look behind me, wondering if Ragnar follows. I told him to sleep, but I know little of his moods, how he thinks, what he does at night. There is much to learn.

I pass through dimmed halls, past Orange technicians and Blue systems operators, who quiet and

bend as I pass through metal halls down to the bowels of the ship, where Golds never tread. The ceilings are lower, meant for the Red workers and Brown janitors. This ship is a city, an island. All the Colors are here. I remember the roster. Thousands of jobs. Millions of moving parts. I examine a maintenance panel. What if the Orange who worked it were to overload the panel? What would happen? I don’t know. I wager few Golds really do. I make a note of it.

I continue on, hunger drawing me to the mess hall. Food could easily be delivered to my rooms,

but my valets have not yet been organized. Anyway, I hate being waited on. In the mess hall, I find someone as sleepless as myself sitting at a long metal table.

Mustang.

24

BACON AND EGGS

I slide across from her.

“Can’t sleep?” I ask.

She wraps her knuckles against her head. “Lot rattling around.” She nods to the clamor of pans back in the kitchens. “The cook’s beside himself,” she says. “Thinks I need a feast. Told him I just wanted bacon and eggs. Pretty sure he’s disregarded everything I said. He babbled something about pheasant. Has this Earthborn accent. Hard to understand.”

Moments later, a Brown cook stumbles out from the kitchen, carrying a tray of not only bacon and eggs, but pumpkin waffles, cured ham, cheeses, sausages, fruits, and a dozen other dishes. But no pheasant. His eyes turn the size of the waffles when he sees me. Apologizing for something, he sets the tray down and disappears, only to reappear a minute later with even more food.

“How much do you think we eat?” I ask him.

He just stares at me. “Thank you,” Mustang says. He mumbles something inaudible and backs away,

bowing.

“I think the Ash Lord was a bit different from us,” I say. Mustang pushes the fruit toward me.

“Thought you didn’t like bacon,” I say.

She shrugs. “I had it every morning on Luna.” She delicately butters her waffles. “Reminded me of you.” She avoids my eyes. “Why can’t you sleep?”

“Not much good at it.”

“You never were. Except when you have a hole in your stomach. You slept like a baby then.”

I laugh. “I think comas don’t count.”

We talk about anything but the things we should. Innocent and quiet, like two moths dancing around the same flame. “Amazing how big the beds are, even on a starship,” Mustang says. “Mine’s monstrous. Too big, really.”

“Finally! Someone else agrees. Half the time, I sleep on the floor.”

“You too?” She shakes her head. “Sometimes I hear noises and sleep in the closet, thinking if someone’s coming for me they won’t look there.”

“I’ve done that. Really does help.”

“Except when the closet is big enough to fit a family of Obsidians. Then it’s just as bad.” She frowns suddenly. “I wonder if Obsidians cuddle.”

“They don’t.”

Her eyebrows rise. “Have you researched it?”

I finish a handful of strawberries, shrugging as Mustang frowns at my manners. “Obsidians believe in three types of touch. The Touch of Spring. The Touch of Summer. The Touch of Winter. After the Dark Revolt, where the Obsidians rose in arms against the iron ancestors, the Board of Quality Control debated destroying the entire Color. You know how they gave them religion, stole their technology. But what they wished to kill most of all was the incredible kinship the Obsidians then possessed. So they instructed the shaman of the tribes, bought and paid for liars, to warn against touch, saying it weakened the spirit. So now the Obsidians touch one another in sex. They touch each other to prevent death. And they touch each other to kill. No cuddling.” I notice her watching me with a small smirk. “But of course you knew all that.”

“I did.” She smiles. “But sometimes it’s nice to remember all that’s going on inside you.”

“Oh.” I look away as she tries to hold my gaze.

“I forgot you can blush!” She watches me for a moment. “You probably don’t know this, but one of my dissertations on Luna concentrated on mistakes in the sociological manipulation theorems used by the Board of Quality Control.” She cuts a sausage delicately. “I deemed them shortsighted. The chemical sexual sterilization of the Pink genus, for instance, has led to a tragically high suicide rate within the Gardens.”

Tragically
. Most would have said “inefficient.”

“The rigidity of laws maintaining the hierarchy are so strict they’ll one day break. Fifty years from now? A hundred? Who knows? There was this one case we studied where a Gold woman fell in love

with an Obsidian. They had a blackmarket Carver alter their reproductive organs so his seed was compatible with her eggs. They were found out and both were executed, their Carvers killed. But things like this have happened a hundred times. A thousand. They’re just scrubbed from the record books.”

“It’s terrible,” I say.

“And beautiful.”

“Beautiful?” I ask, repulsed.

“No one knows of these people,” she says. “No one but a handful of Golds with access. The human

spirit tries to break free, again and again, not in hate like the Dark Revolt. But for love. They don’t mimic each other. They aren’t inspired by others who come before them. Each is willing to take the leap, thinking they are the first. That’s bravery. And that means it’s a part of who we are as people.”

Bravery. Would she say that if she knew one of those people sat across from her? Does she live in the world of theories Harmony spoke of? Or could she really understand …

“So how long, I wonder,” she continues, “till a group like the Sons of Ares finds the records, broadcasts them? They did it with Persephone. The girl who sang. It’s only a matter of time.” She pauses, squinting at me as I react involuntarily to the mention of Eo. “What’s wrong?”

I can’t tell her what I’m thinking, so I lie. “Dissertations. Sociology. You and I specialize in very different things. I always wondered what your life was like on Luna.”

Mustang eyes me playfully. “Oh? So you thought about me?”

“Maybe.”

“Day and night? What is Mustang wearing? What is she dreaming about? What boy is she kiss—?”

She winces at that last part.

“Darrow, I want to explain something.”

“You don’t have to,” I say, waving her off.

“With Cassius it—”

“Mustang, you don’t owe me anything. You weren’t mine. You aren’t mine. You can do what you

want when you want with whomever you want.” I pause. “Even though he is a gorydamn jackass.”

She snorts a laugh. The humor fades as fast as it came. There’s pain in her eyes. In her half-opened mouth. Her idle knife and fork hover over her forgotten plate. She looks down and shakes her head.

“I wanted it to be different,” she murmers. “You know that.”

“Mustang …” I rest my hand on her wrist. Despite her strength, it’s frail in my hard hands. Frail as the other girl’s was when I held her in the deepmines. I couldn’t help that girl. And now I feel like I can’t help this woman. Would that my hands were meant to build. I would know what to say. What to do. Maybe in another life I would have been that man. In this one, my words, like my hands, are clumsy. All they can do is cut. All they can do is break. “I think I know how you feel—”

Mustang jerks back from me. “How I feel?”

“I didn’t mean—” I pause, hearing a noise.

We look over and the cook stands there awkwardly with another tray. He tiptoes forward, sets it down, and then leaves the room, backing away awkwardly.

“Darrow. Shut up and listen.” She peers fiercely up at me through the strands of hair that have fallen across her face. “You want to know how I feel? I’ll spit it out at you. All my life I’ve been taught to regard my family over all else.

“What happened with my brother at the Institute … when I handed him over to you, that set me against everything I was raised to do. But I thought that you”—She takes a deep breath that wavers at the end—“were a person who earned my loyalty. And I thought that it would be so much more important if I gave it to you in that moment than to Adrius, who has never lifted a finger on my behalf. I knew it was the right thing to do, but it was a repudiation of my father, of all he taught me.

Do you even know what that means? He has broken families as easily as other men break sticks. He wields unimaginable power. But more than that. He is the man who taught me to ride horses, to read poems and not just the military histories. The man who stood beside me, letting me raise myself up by my own strength when I fell. The man who couldn’t look at me for three years after my mother died.

That is the man I rejected for you. No,” she corrects herself, “not for you. For living differently, living for more. More than pride.

“At the Institute you and I decided to break the rules, to be decent in a place of horror. So we made an army of loyal friends instead of slaves. We chose to be better. Then you spat in the face of that by leaving to become one of my father ’s killers.” She puts a finger in the air. “No. Don’t speak. It’s not your turn just because I pause.”

She takes her time in gathering her thoughts, pushing away her plate.

“Now, I’m sure you understand that I felt lost. One, because I thought I’d found someone special in you. Two, because I felt you were abandoning the idea that gave us the ability to conquer Olympus.

Consider that I was vulnerable. Lonely. And that perhaps I fell into Cassius’s bed because I was hurt and needed a salve to my pain. Can you imagine that? You may answer.”

I squirm on my cushion. “I suppose.”

“Good. Now shove that idea up your ass.” Her lips make a hard line. “I am not some frill-wearing tramp. I am a genius. I say this because it is a fact. I am smarter than any person you’ve ever met, except perhaps my twin. My heart does not make my brain a fool. I sought out a relationship with Cassius for the same reason I let the Sovereign think she was turning me against my father: to protect my family.”

She looks down at her food.

“I’ve always been able to manipulate people. Men, women, it makes no difference. Cassius was a

walking wound, Darrow, raw and bloody despite the fact it has been two years since you killed Julian.

I saw it in him in a second, and I knew how I could make him love me. I gave him someone who would listen, someone who would fill the void.”

The sternness in her voice fades. She looks around as if she could escape the conversation she started. If she stopped, I would be happier for it.

“I made him think he could not live without me. I knew it was the only thing that could keep the rest of my house safe. I knew it was the best weapon I could wield in this game. Yet … I felt so cold. So horrible. Like I was the cruel witch snaring Odysseus, making him fall in love, keeping him for my own selfish aims. It seemed so logical. And when he put his arms around me, I felt like I was drowning. Like I was lost, suffocating under the weight of all I’d done, suffocating knowing there was a life ahead of me with someone I did not love.

“Yet it was for family. It was for the people I love even if they don’t deserve it. Many have sacrificed more. I could sacrifice that.” She shakes her head, the tears that build there mirroring those that well in my own eyes. They fall when she says, “Then you walked in at the gala, and … and it was like the ground had broken open to swallow me. I felt like a fraud. A wicked girl who’d contrived a reason to do something stupid.” She tries to wipe her eyes. “Can’t you see why I did it? I didn’t want you to die. I don’t want you to die. Not like my brother, Claudius. Not like Pax. I would have done anything to stop it.”