"So he did play a part in the gossip. Thought Tactus was just running his mouth."

"A part? Darrow, he's been at war with you since the moment you kneeled to Augustus." She laughs. "Before then, even. He counseled Augustus to kill you then and there, or at least try you for the murder of Apollo. Didn't you know?" She shakes her head at my blank stare. "The fact that you're just now realizing this shows just how ill-equipped you are to play his game. And because of that, you're going to be killed. That's why I'm speaking with you. I'd rather you found an alternative instead of sulking in your beastly quarters. Otherwise, Ca.s.sius au Bellona is going to come and he's going to take a knife and dig right here ..." She caresses my chest with a long-nailed finger, etching the outline of my heart. "... and give his mother her first real meal in years."

"Then what is your suggestion?"

"You stop being such a little b.i.t.c.h." She smiles up at me and holds out a dataSlip. Grudgingly, I take the edge of the thin metal slip, but she holds on, pulling me toward the edge of the fountain, between her legs. Her lips part, her tongue playing along the top as her eyes trace my face, up and up to my eyes, where they try to spark a fire. But there's none there; with a feline sigh, she lets the dataSlip go. I run it over my personal datapad and an advertis.e.m.e.nt for a tavern appears on my display.

"This isn't on Citadel grounds," I say.

"So?"

"So, if I leave, it's open season on my head."

"Then don't advertise your leaving."

I take a step back. "How much are they paying you?"

"You think this is a setup!"

"Is it?"

"No."

"How do I know you're telling the truth?"

"Most people can't afford the truth. I can."

"Oh, that's right. I forgot. You never lie."

"I am of the gens Julii." She stands slowly, anger uncoiling like a razor. "My family trades in commerce enough to buy continents. Who could afford to purchase my honor? If ... one day I become your enemy, I will tell you. And I will tell you why."

"Everyone's honest till they're caught in a lie."

Her laugh is husky and makes me feel small and boyish, reminding me she's seven years older than I. "Then stay, Reaper. Trust in chance. Trust in friends. Hide here till someone buys your contract, and pray they didn't do it just to serve you up to the Bellona like a suckling pig."

I weigh the odds and extend a hand to help her up. "Well, when you put it that way ..."

"Colonel Valentin?" Victra asks the shorter of the two Grays who wait for us on the ramp of the shuttle. It's a s.h.i.t can. One of the ugliest fliers I've ever seen. Like the front half of a hammerhead shark. I eye the taller of the Grays warily.

"Yes, domina," Valentin says, nodding his cinderblock head with the rigid precision of a man risen through the ranks. "You are sure you were not followed?"

"Certain as death," Victra says.

"We should depart fastlike, then."

I follow Victra into the shuttle, scanning the grounds behind us. We wore ghostCloaks as soon as we departed Augustus's villa. A dozen hidden hallways and six old gravLifts later, we arrived in a dusty, seldom-used section of the Citadel's launch pads. Theodora left us there. She wanted to come, but I won't take her where we're going.

A Gray scans Victra and me for bugs as we board the ship.

The ship's ramp slides closed behind us. Twelve craggy Grays fill the small pa.s.senger hold of the shuttle. They're not the dashing sort. Just craftsmen of a dark trade.

Though there are averages, Colors are diverse in composition due to human genetics and the differing ecosystems throughout the Society. The Grays of Venus are often darker and more compact than those of Mars, but families move and mix and breed. The talent levels in each Color are even more variable than appearance. Most Grays aren't destined for anything more than patrolling shopping centers and city streets. Some go to the armies. Some to the mines. But then there are the Grays who were born a special breed of wicked and clever and have been trained all their lives to hunt the Gold enemies of their Gold masters. Like these in the shuttle with us. They call them lurchers-after the mutt dogs of Earth crossbred for uncommon stealth, cunning, and speed, all for one purpose: killing things bigger than they are.

"We're bound for Lost City and it's just the twelve of you?" I ask.

I know they're enough. I just don't like Grays. So I push their b.u.t.tons.

They eye me with the quiet reserve of a family meeting a stranger on the road. Valentin's the father. He's built like a squat block of dirty ice carved by a rusted blade, and his sun-blasted face is dark and set with quick eyes. His lieutenant, Sun-hwa, leans toward us, tough and gnarled as an olive tree.

Both are Earthborn by the looks of their continentally ethnic features. These Grays wear no triangular badge of the Society's Legion on their civilian street clothes. Means they've served their mandatory twenty years.

"We're tasked with your protection, dominus," says Valentin as Sun-hwa loads an exotic circular weapon on the inside of her left wrist. Looks plasma based. "My team has prepared a secure route. Estimated traveling time: twenty-four minutes."

"If Pliny finds out where I'm going, or if the Bellona know I'm out of the Citadel ..."

"The lurchers know the situation," Victra says.

"I don't see a Gold badge. Mercenaries?"

"Means we are good enough to live this long, dominus," Valentin says flatly. "We've prepared for all eventualities. Contingency plans and support have been organized."

"How much support?"

"Enough. We're just the transporters, dominus." His mouth twitches into a smile and I take his word for it. "Bigger problem than the Bellona is third parties thinking an opportunity's just stumbled their way. Where we're going, there will be a h.e.l.l of a lot of third parties, dominus. s.h.i.t complicates our ROI. Sun-hwa?"

"Wear this." Sun-hwa tosses me a bag of plain clothing. Her voice drones on in a monotone drawl. "You're tall can't do s.h.i.tall about that but we'll do a quick dye job with this this and this." She tosses Victra another bag. "For you. Boss thought you'd dress too fancy."

Victra laughs at that.

"Muzzles off, boys," Valentin barks as the ship trembles and rises in the air. "We're live." Thumpers and burners prime in practiced hands. Staccato sound of steel on steel. Like metal knuckles cracking as magnetic rounds go into chambers. The lurchers conceal weapons in hidden holsters over tight scarabSkin armor. Three wear illegal wrist weapons. I eye the contraband as I slip into my scarabSkin. It drinks in the light, a strange pupil-like black. More the absence of color than anything else. Better than the duroArmor we had at the Inst.i.tute, it'll stop some blades and the occasional projectile weapon like the common scorcher.

The ship shudders as its main engines overtake the vertical thrusters.

"Talon and Minotaur, be advised. Icarus is on the move," Valentin rasps into his com. "Repeat. Icarus is on the move."

7.

THE AFTERBIRTH.

On Luna, there is no dark. No true dark, at least. Lights of a million shades swim together, glossing over the moon's jagged, cracking steel skin of cityscape. Snaking public trams and air thoroughfares, flashing communication centers, bustling restaurants, and austere police stations weave into the metal dermis of the city like blood capillaries, nerve endings, sweat glands, and hair follicles.

We fall away from Gold districts, forsaking the high reaches of the city where stately shuttles and gravBoots ferry Golds to opera houses atop kilometers-high towers. We dive down past the wealthy Silver and Copper districts, wending our way through rungPaths and aerial trains, through the midDistricts where the Yellows, Greens, Blues, and Violets reside, past the lowDistrict where Grays and Oranges make their homes.

Down and down we go to the gutters of the city where the roots of this colossal steel jungle burrow into the ground. Myriad lowColors ride public transportation from factories to their windowless apartments, some no larger than one meter by three. Only room enough for a bed. Cars rattle out exhaust in clogged beacon-lit boulevards. The deeper we go, the fewer the lights, the dirtier the buildings, the stranger the animals, but the more brilliant the graffiti. I glimpse Gray police standing over arrested Brown vandals who covered an apartment complex with the image of a hanging girl. My wife. Ten stories tall, hair burning, rendered in digital paint. My chest constricts as we pa.s.s, cracking the walls I've built around her memory. I've seen her hanged a thousand times now as her martyrdom spreads across the worlds, city by city. Yet each time, it strikes me like a physical blow, nerve endings shivering in my chest, heart beating fast, neck tight just under the jaw. How cruel a life, that the sight of my dead wife means hope.

No matter our reputations, no enemy would seek us here. No ears to listen. No eyes to see. This is a place of gang killings, robberies, turf battles, drug trade. That my new friend wants such human privacy, privacy not even a jamField can really offer in the Citadel and the High City, means much. It worries me. Means the rules are void. But Victra was right and Roque was not. Patience will do me nothing. I must take a risk.

The team of lurchers has secured an abandoned garage. They provide security for the shuttle while Valentin's team escorts me from the garage into the bustle of the dirty street outside. Refuse and water make bogs out of alleys. Humid air is thick with the sweet musk of rot and the charred soot of burning garbage. Hawkers cry out wares from cracked sidewalks, clogged with Reds, Browns, Grays, and Oranges of all species-urchin, invalid, working cla.s.s, gangers, tweakers, mothers, fathers, beggars, cripples, children. The lost.

Eo would say this is the h.e.l.l they've built their heaven upon. And she'd be right. Gazing up, I see more than half a kilometer of tenement buildings before the polluted haze makes a ceiling for the human jungle. Clotheslines and electrical lines crisscross overhead like vines. This sight is hopeless. What is there to change here but everything?

We're to meet at the Lost Wee Den. It is a large, tall tavern with a flickering red sign covered in pithy graffiti. Fifteen levels, all open and looking down on a central drinking hall of tables and booths filled with some two hundred customers. I can smell the p.i.s.s in the metal booths, which sag from use. Bottles rattle and gla.s.ses clink as swill is slammed back. Indigo and pink lights flicker on the fifteenth floor, where they've dancers and private rooms for customers. I pa.s.s with Valentin through two bouncers with biomod hands-one Obsidian with skin pale as bleached marble and arms thicker than mine, the other a dark-skinned Gray with a scorcher muzzle built into his arm.

The rest of my Grays filter in behind me in staggered intervals. Some wearing contacts, pretending to be other Colors. One even wearing a fleshMask to look pretty as a Pink. Can't even tell it's digital till you put a magnet near it. They look like they belong here. I doubt I do, despite the Obsidian dye job they've done to me.

The Sigils on my hands are covered with Obsidian prosthetics. My hair is white, eyes black. Skin made paler with cosmetics. Victra and I are too large to pa.s.s for any other Color. Fortunately, Obsidians, though rarer than the other lowColors, are not out of place down here. I follow Valentin to a table in an alcove near the back of the hall where a young man lounges behind a pack of mercenaries and a single Obsidian. A deep silence fills me as I watch the Obsidian stand and leave the table to sit at an adjacent one. Others eye him too before remembering themselves and looking down at their drinks-like water birds as a crocodile glides past. The Obsidian is a foot taller than I. And the whole of his face is tattooed with a skull. Stained.

So much for a low profile.

"Better to reign in h.e.l.l than serve in heaven?" I ask the reclining man.

"Reaper! Even Milton knew Lucifer was a petty son of a b.i.t.c.h." He smiles enigmatically and waves to the chair across from him. "Do stop towering over me."

He's not even wearing a disguise. I look over at Victra. "Thought it was going to be a new friend."

"Well, you two have never been friends before. That'd be the new part. You boys have fun now."

"You're not staying?" I ask.

"I showed you the door. You have to walk through it." She squeezes my b.u.t.t playfully and sways out. The Jackal watches her leave, leaning slightly to get a better view.

"Didn't think you cared about women."

"I could be dead and I'd still appreciate her. But I don't have to tell you that. Alone in s.p.a.ce for months on end. Ship all to yourself. Whatever was there to do?"

I sit across from him. He offers me a bottle of greenish liquor.

I shake my head. "I drink to forget about men like you."

"Ha! An Arcosian insult, if I'm not mistaken. One of Lorn's best. Though there's enough to choose from." He leans back. Enigmatic in his dullness. Face plain. Eyes like smooth, worn coins. Hair the color of desert sand. Lone hand twirling a silver stylus with the quickness of an insect skittering over blasted ground, crack to crack. "The Jackal of Augustus and the Reaper of Mars, together again, at long last. How we have fallen."

"You chose the venue," I say as he sets his stylus behind his ear and takes a chicken leg from a platter on the table. He strips the skin with his teeth.

"Does it unnerve you?"

"Why would it? We both know how fond you are of the dark."

He suddenly laughs, a whining high-pitched bark, like a dog being stabbed. "So much pride to you, Darrow au Andromedus. Family all dead. Disgraced, penniless things. So average that your parents didn't even try to introduce you to Society. No friends remaining. No one who knew you before you slipped into the Inst.i.tute, so una.s.suming-like. But how you rose when given a chance."

"Well, at least you still like to talk," I mutter.

"And you still like to make enemies."

"Everyone has a hobby." I examine the stump where his right hand should be. "Desperate for attention? You're the only Gold alive that wouldn't bother getting a new hand."

"I wonder why you provoke me still when your reputation is shattered. Your bank accounts emptied." I shift in my seat. "Oh, yes. You didn't know? Pliny is thorough when he cuts a man's hamstrings. He emptied all your funds. So really there's very little to you. But here you sit, at the bottom of a moon. Alone. With me, with mine. Throwing insults."

"These are yours?" I ask, glancing at the lowColors around us. "I would have thought they'd disgust you."

"Who said you have to like your children?" the Jackal asks pleasantly. "They are a product of our Golden loins." He gnaws on the chicken leg, cracking the bone with his teeth before discarding it. "Do you know what I have been doing with my time?"

"w.a.n.king off in the bushes?"

"Alas, no. My defeat at your hands set me back. I'm not afraid to say it. You hurt me and my plans. My sister also wounded me. Gagging me? Binding me naked and throwing me at your feet? That stung, especially when all the grand lords and ladies of our fine Peerless caste got a chuckle at my expense."

"We both know you don't feel pain, Adrius."

"Oh, call me the Jackal. Hearing 'Adrius' from your lips is like hearing a cat bark." He shivers, but leans delightedly forward in his seat when a Brown woman with thick arms and tattoos webbing her pale, pockmarked skin slips from the kitchens carrying three steaming bowls. She sets them before us. "Thank you!" he says, taking two for himself.

I eye the bowl suspiciously.

"I'm not a poisoner," he says. "I could poison my father anytime I want, but I don't. Do you know why?"

"Because you've not gotten what you need out of him."

"And that is?"

"His approval."

The Jackal watches me through the steam of his bowl. "Quite. I have been offered a great deal of apprenticeships. They offer it to my father's name, not to me. They despise me because I ate students. But it's such hypocrisy. What else was I to do? We're told to win, and I did my best. And then they criticize. Act n.o.ble, as though they didn't commit murder themselves. Madness."

He shakes his head with a little sigh. "Yes, I could have gone to study war at the Academy like you. I could have studied politics at the Politico School on Luna. I might have been a decent Judiciar if I could stomach Venus. But I will rise without their hypocrisy. Without their schools."

"I've heard the rumors. Any true?"

"Most." He pulls more noodles out of the bowl, spreading red pepper sauce over them. "I am a businessman now, Darrow. I buy things. I own things. I create. Of course I'm seen as a money-grubbing Silver by those pretentious Peerless jacka.s.ses. But I am not one of the fading lords of twentieth-century Europe. I understand there is power in being practical, in owning things. People. Ideas. Infrastructure. So much more important than money. So much more insidious than"-he makes a funny motion with his hand-"s.p.a.ceships and razors. Tell me, does a ship matter if you can't supply and transport the food to feed its crew? I above all others know the importance of food."

"You own this place, don't you?" I ask.

"In a manner." He smiles with too much teeth. "I feel I must be blunt with you. We were nearly eighteen when we left the Inst.i.tute. We are now twenty. I have been two years in exile, and now I wish to return home."

"To socialize with Peerless jacka.s.ses?" I laugh. "If you have been paying attention at all, you'll know I don't have your father's ear."

"Paying attention ..." He shares a glance with Victra and leans forward. "Reaper. I am the attention. Do you know how much of the communications industry I have acquired?"

"No."