Ninth City Burning (57 page)

I peer inside. There is Jax, sitting atop a desk and frowning in concentration, and beside him Naomi, Papa's fiddle on her arm.

“She's good,” Thom says, low enough that even I can hardly hear him. “You were, too.”

“No I wasn't,” I say.

He laughs softly. “No, not so good. But you liked it. You shouldn't have stopped.”

That last part is true enough. I never had talent the way Naomi does, but I have loved the sound of the fiddle ever since I was young, and when I played, I put my heart into it. But after I began scouting, there was never any time—I was either riding or too tired from it to play. Nearly two years went by before I decided I was in desperate need of practice, but when I finally got hold of a fiddle, somehow playing didn't seem worthwhile anymore.

I suppose that was about the time I had my first good long look at the road
ahead of me. What I saw was no place for fiddling. I thought it would be the same for Naomi, that going to war would cut her off from the girl she was before. But seeing her now, hearing her play, I know that isn't so. She's still Naomi, still my solemn, thorny, wonderful little sister. And she's stronger than I am, strong enough to become a warrior without losing herself to it.

“You may get rusty,” Thom says, “but you never forget.”

Our eyes meet just long enough for me to understand why it was Thom brought me here: to show me that, despite everything I feared for her, Naomi would be all right. Naomi, and maybe me as well.

Suddenly, the music breaks off, strings squeaking. “Who's there?” Naomi calls. “Rae?”

“Hey there!” I say, sidling to the doorway, guilt written all over me.

My sister takes me in, eyes narrowing. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, just out for a walk.”

“You are wearing your pajamas.” Naomi's tone indicates she considers such behavior improper but not out of character for me.

“I was with Thom,” I begin, only to discover the subject of my half-formed excuse has become a distant figure fast disappearing into the Academy's crowded labyrinths.

“Is something wrong?” Naomi asks, eyeing me more carefully now. “Did something happen?” An odd look has come over her, familiar and disorienting at once. It takes me a second to recognize it as the same fear I feel whenever Naomi herself is in danger. She has added up my abrupt arrival, my disheveled appearance, my overall state of confusion, and assumed terrible things have befallen people she loves.

“No, no,” I say. “No, Sunshine, nothing like that. It's all good news. We've had a letter from Mama.”

I
'm only an hour or so late to the party—well in time for the official send-off of our expeditionary force—even if from my perspective it's been more than three days since the whole celebration began. IMEC-1 was fully restored and furbished for its mission well before the Consulate and the Legion's upper echelons had attended to all the crucial executive decision-making necessary for that mission to begin, and so they decided to just go forward with the launch and catch up with everyone later. Boredom is a great enemy of armies, deadly as any salivating alien horde, and there seemed no point in making the whole expeditionary force—nearly half our remaining military, along with certain academics and other specialized passengers—wait around while a few stuffy bureaucrats went about their stuffy business. Far better to let our heroes fly ahead to Dis, where hours and hours of tedious administrative chores on Earth would pass in the time it took to pop a few champagne corks. It was the right idea, undoubtedly. I only wish one of the stuffy bureaucrats wading through those hours and hours of tedious administrative chores wasn't me.

One benefit of staring extinction in the face is that it has finally shaken us from a few of the more entrenched and dogmatic policies we've assumed over the past few centuries—among them, our long-standing campaign of duplicity and misinformation among the settlements. Preparing Earth to repel the next wave of invasion will require the complete and combined efforts of everyone on the planet, and it was decided the best way to secure the necessary level of cooperation would be to finally bring the settlements in on the full truth about our war. Part of me will be sorry to miss what may be the greatest overhaul to society since the establishment of the Principates, but the rest is just glad to be spared the hassle of sorting through
the bedlam that will doubtless become a worldwide reality for much of the near future. What the end result will look like, I can't say, but if we of the MapleWhite Campaign ever do make it back to Earth, I expect we'll find it a very different place from the one we left behind.

It's been just under six weeks, or roughly forty hours—depending on whether you're counting time in Hestia or Dis—since the first wave of the great Valentine Host was finally dispersed. In that time, we've set into motion the machinery that will, if all goes according to plan, yield a fully restored Legion in under twenty years' time, and successfully rebuilt our flying city—a process that involved a deal more actual building than getting it airborne in the first place—with a few notable improvements. Even Kizabel, who violently denies the merest suggestion that her baby could ever have been flawed in any way, will admit the restored version may possibly be
more
perfect than before.

Sorting through the aftermath of the battle wasn't easy, not by any means. There were too many losses we simply couldn't repair or replace. I can say with confidence that reviewing the casualty reports for the encounter at Dis was the worst experience of my life. I knew, intellectually, that we lost even more people during the opening attack, when the Valentines had a clear shot at our cities and settlements, and I understood the toll would have been incalculably greater had we evacuated as Feeroy proposed. But even so. This was the one scenario in which people died as a direct result of my actions. Staying to defend Earth was my idea; if it weren't for me, it's likely this battle would never have happened. Meaning that, in a very real sense, each of those lost lives is on me.

I can't help thinking how many might have been saved if only I'd been a little smarter, acted a little faster, planned a little better, worked a little harder. I tell myself the Valentines were always the aggressors, that I did only what was necessary for our survival, that every life lost should only motivate me further to end this war any way I can. But there are still days when it seems nothing can justify something so destructive, days when it feels like I've left a gaping wound in the universe, a crater in reality, that will never heal no matter what I do.

And then there are days like this one.

The festivities awaiting me, which began three days ago in Hestia and have been continuing in Dis for a matter of hours, are part victory celebration, part memorial service, part
bon voyage
party, all wrapped up in a
careful schedule of elaborate meals, inspirational speeches, moments of silence, congratulatory toasts, and assorted binge drinking, culminating in a rousing valediction to Earth as our expeditionary force begins its heroic mission to close our home off from the rest of the Realms.

But as the velo I'm riding passes through Lunar Veil into Dis, at the rear of a formation carrying the last of the officers who so selflessly delayed their participation in this momentous event, it's apparent those already at the celebration couldn't wait for the show to begin. Even from this distance, splashes of light and color—all impromptu artifices, by the look of them—can be seen spattering like raindrops across the bubble of atmosphere surrounding IMEC-1.

Or perhaps I should say “the Keep,” as people have popularly come to refer to our expeditionary city. I haven't yet discovered the origin of this
nom de guerre
, but there's little question it has become so ubiquitous over the past month as to replace the official designation of IMEC-1 in all but the most formal and technical contexts—much to the chagrin of Kizabel, who considers her presence one such formal and technical context.

To see it now, with its gaily illuminated buildings and streets brimming with revelers, its lush forests and pristine lakes, you'd never guess that only two days ago, local time, the Keep was a virtual ruin, a confusion of rubble and wreckage. In fact, if it weren't for the arrays of towering City Guns and toothy battle spires scattered across its surface, one could easily mistake the Keep for a perfectly ordinary, peaceful, everyday flying city.

Mine is the last velo to land, lowering onto a wide grassy lawn in the Academy's outer courtyards. I join a line of officers filing inside, where Dux Feeroy waits to greet me with one of his signature noncommittal nods. I'm almost certain he still despises me, but it wouldn't be politic to let his dislike show, seeing as he and I are widely viewed as the heroic duo that rescued the Legion from the brink of devastating defeat.

As commander of the reserve, Feeroy was the natural audience for my budding thoughts on worst-case scenarios, but more importantly, he was the only one who would even pretend to listen. I'd already approached—or tried to approach—every superior officer from Reydaan on down, and no few subordinates as well. None wanted anything to do with me or my worries over problems it was too late to fix. I was informed—with such consistency that I began to wonder whether there had been some kind of
internal memo on the subject of never even contemplating retreat—that what mattered now was winning this battle, not what would happen if we lost, and anyway, weren't contingency plans a matter for the reserves?

The plan I had in mind wasn't perfect—in fact it was flawed in more ways than I cared to count—but it was better than nothing, which was what we had until then, and it was simple enough to implement. Most importantly—as far as anyone in the Legion is concerned, anyway—it worked, and far better than I could have hoped. The Valentines took some pretty extreme risks trying to capitalize on their advantage after IMEC-1 went dark, and when our guns came back online, large portions of their forces were caught out in the open. Faced with already heavy losses, they chose to retreat rather than risk annihilation. As a result of this stunning reversal, and also because almost no one in Command took any interest in my last-minute preparations, Feeroy and I were both left looking pretty good once all the smoke had cleared. Feeroy, along with the rest of Command, was perfectly happy to ignore the fact that the only reason any of us are still alive is that the evacuation force disregarded orders and joined the battle, but that doesn't keep him from blaming me personally for their insubordination.

While I'd like to believe Feeroy's loathing of me is a loathing tempered with respect, the best I've seen thus far has been cool indifference with a hint of contempt—all of which can be awkward, since I'm now part of his advisory staff. Another bit of administrative business that needed to be taken care of before we left was my latest promotion. I am now Legatus Vinneas, head of Ninth Legion's Fourteenth Cohort. Not bad for a legionary whose only discernible duty during the last engagement was self-appointed worrier.

When I request permission to be excused from the officers' banquet slated to follow this evening's closing of Lunar Veil, Feeroy consents with lordly indifference. What I do with myself is beneath his interest, is his stance, though he doesn't pass up the opportunity to get rid of me as soon as possible. “You may want to watch the closing someplace other than the Dominium,” he says, referring to the building formerly known as the Hall of the Principate, now home to the offices of Dominus Reydaan, the Keep's supreme commander. “The crowds will make it difficult to slip away afterward.”

“My thoughts exactly,” I say, saluting. “Thank you, sir.”

When I was at the Academy, we would occasionally form classes up at the Forum for review, and it always felt like the place was so big, you could keep adding cadets forever and never run out of space. But today, the great stone plaza is overflowing from every side, and the crowd becomes denser the farther you go. The Legion domiciled on the Keep is now comprised of four full Legions—the Second, the Sixth, the Tenth, and, of course, the Ninth, each supplemented with reinforcements from the others remaining behind—and it feels like each and every one of those legionaries must be wedged in here with me.

I try to make my way without accidentally bumping anyone or treading on the multitude of toes crisscrossing beneath me like roots in an especially overgrown forest, though it quickly becomes apparent most people neither notice nor care when I blunder into them. The noise is fantastic, shouts and laughter punctuating the general human babble and the pervasive swell of music—that truly dreadful stuff always commissioned for official events.

The Font of the Principate—Old Fife, that is—looms tall over the sea of dimly lit faces, itself covered in the shadowy figures of legionaries stacked into a teetering tower silhouetted against the subtly starry sky, pouring down cheers of triumph at having climbed so high. Here and there at random, artifices pop upward with sparkling loops and darts, then bloom into pearls and blossoms of luminescence that shimmer a moment and disperse into the expanse of stars, sometimes leaving behind a sharp bang or prolonged howl and a scattering of excited applause.

It takes me nearly half an hour, but eventually I work my way around the stage erected outside the Dominium and duck into the long passageway leading beneath—the same trip I used to make during every atmospheric incursion, back when I was still with the Academy and this place was still the Hall of the Principate. Sounds from the Forum echo with a weird, eerie ebb and flow, then fade almost completely as I emerge onto the balcony on the opposite side.

It's certainly crowded, but not nearly so much as Curator Ellmore—or I—expected. I realize the odd sensation I experienced in the passageway must have been an artifice erected to discourage unwanted guests from finding their way out here; though whether it was put in place by the people on this balcony or the officers who will be enjoying their banquet on
another patio above us—and no doubt would prefer to be spared the drunken shouting of common legionaries—I don't know.

No sooner have I stepped out from the tunnel than one of the figures gathered along the balustrade shouts, “Vinn, is that you? I thought I smelled you over there!”

The voice belongs to Imway, who greets me with an enthusiastic and slightly inebriated embrace. “Nicely done, Vinn!” he says, sniffing me for comic effect. “Been celebrating without us? You smell like you've finished two bottles of aquavee and taken a bath in a third. Better hope no one from Command sees you like that!” The joke being, of course, that I'm someone from Command.

“A drink or two may have spilled on me while I was en route,” I concede.

“The trick is to get the drink into your mouth first,” Imway tells me sagely. “Here, I'll arrange a demonstration so you can get an idea of the fundamentals.”

He slaps a hand onto my shoulder, guiding me toward the waiting group of legionaries. Most of them are holding small silver cups, though I notice a few have dropped theirs to stand at attention, a hint of unease in their postures.

Fortunately, Imway and his escadrille have all known me long enough that their first instinct is to punch me in the shoulder rather than salute, and soon everyone else is following their example of informality, my new rank—still only a few hours old, as far as anyone present is concerned—mostly forgotten. The 126th is all here, and they know that's something worth celebrating: Very few fighting units made it out of the battle so completely intact. As I share hugs and toasts and slaps on the back, however, I notice one eques is conspicuously absent.