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“Seventh Legion shuttles taking fire…”

“Warden forces firing on Lionguard outside Moon…”

“Echo of Ares reports their captain has been shot…”

“ArchImperator Zan moving on Augustan ships.”

“…Lake Silene has inbound Republic assault craft.”

Ships are going for Darrow’s mother, Vox legions assaulting ones loyal to me.

It is a coup.

With Daxo pushing me along in the center of a knot of Optimates, I rush up the last of the stairs to the West Door. We make the flats around the senate pit and rush to the exit. At the head of a clutch of heavily armed Lionguard, Holiday exchanges heavy fire outside the Forum with Warden elements. Taking casualties, they press up the stairs outside the forum as aerial soldiers in gravBoots dogfight over the parks.

But as they reach the top stair and make to meet us at the door, a forty-meter-tall Drachenjäger lands at the edge of the park. Its twin railguns train themselves on Holiday. She shouts to take cover. Too late.

I watch in horror as metal slugs moving at three times the speed of sound make my Martian soldiers mist. The slugs shred the marble steps and skip up into the Forum, raining splinters of rock down on us. I’m flattened by Gold and Gray senators, who use their bodies to shield mine. Senator Tiberius ti Han screams as his arm is taken off at the elbow by a ricochet. The next one takes his torso off at the hips.

From under their bodies, I see out the doors. The Drachenjäger is teetering sideways, a huge hole in its cockpit. From amidst the bodies of dead Lionguard, Holiday turns her anti-tank railrifle up the steps at the Wardens blocking our escape. Five Wardens are cut in half. A sixth Warden explodes in a shower of gristle and metal. His cape detaches and slaps wetly against the groaning marble door as it slides to trap us inside the Forum. Daxo reaches the door alone and hauls against it till the veins stand out in his neck and his fingers crack the stone. A shoulder pops from its socket.

“Run, you fools!” he roars at us.

I push the Gold senators off me, but I’m too far from the door and the mechanized hinges cannot be stopped even by a Telemanus.

“Go!” I shout at him. “Daxo, go!”

My heart breaks as Daxo looks at the narrowing sliver of salvation. His face is red from exertion. His lips pull back from his teeth. He could escape, abandon me, but instead a calmness comes over him and he releases his grip on the door. It seals with a loud thump and he turns to me and shrugs.

With my com I open a master channel to my entire security network. “Black Cathedral,” I say. “Repeat, Black Cathedral—” But the signal goes down. Daxo puts a hand on my shoulder. His eyes are fixed on something behind me. I turn in time to see a concussion detonate outside the East Door. In the plaza beyond, the colorful crowd has disintegrated into a frenzied mob.

“The shield…” Daxo whispers.

Smoke billows. A shield pylon teeters sideways. Sparks shiver out from its sides and, with a blue shimmer, the barrier separating us from the mob disappears. Oh no.

A tide of humanity rolls up the white steps toward the only open door.

Senators scream and scramble to beat against the other doors for escape. The remnants of the Vox Populi, some thirty of their fringe zealots, huddle around Dancer’s body down in the Senate pit. Publius is amongst them, his face wild with righteous rage as he shouts for the mob and points toward us as if he were some necromantic conjurer hurling his murderous spirits forward.

“Optimates, to me!” I shout.

Barely half of them hear me. The rest have broken up amongst the Forum to beat on the doors, to hide behind columns, to raise their hands in supplication to the mob that teems toward the open East Door. Their faces sunburnt and pale, wide and narrow, eyes Red and Brown and Orange, mad with communal rage, their arms carrying bent bits of fences, stakes from propaganda signs, hammers, and even blackmarket scorchers, they roil toward us. A dozen in front, a hundred behind, and thousands pushing them forward.

I watch a Blue senator tear herself away from her hiding place amongst the columns and stand bravely at the East Door and face down the mob with an outstretched hand. “No violence!” she declares majestically. “No violence!” she repeats just before a Red man caves her head in with an iron Vox pyramid on the end of a wooden pole. The mob swallows them. They disappear and all I can see is the iron pyramid rising and falling above the swarm. A Pink senator falls. Frail bones shatter as he curls inward like a dying spider. They pull Optimate senators from their hiding places and smash their heads open against the marble.

Senators flee from them, tripping and falling, skinning their knees and prying themselves up to scramble away, their togas white but for the hems that are stained in blood, so that they look like the fluttering wings of red doves in flight.

The Obsidian senators, all women, all former warriors, join our lines with a solemn nod.

“Virginia, stand behind me,” Daxo says in a low growl. I step to his side. With a small laugh, he peels the wool of his toga as if it were made of paper. Free of the encumbrance, he stands bare chested, bare limbed, a monster clothed only in undershorts before the mob. His shoulders are broad as a thunderhead. His back muscled like a sunblood stallion’s. The angels on his head glorious and golden and dancing down his spine to his lower back. But his huge hands are bare and empty.

“Daxo!” I hand him the Dawn Scepter. He spins it, a meter of solid iron with the fourteen-pointed star of our Republic glittering on the end. “Gold and Obsidian, first rank! Gray second.” I shout over the furor as the mob runs around the sides of the Senate pit to reach us. Those soldiers amongst the Optimates, many old and stooped, but sinewy and dogged in the ways of war, rustle forward to stand fifteen abreast in velvet slippers and white togas to defend the cluster of thin-boned senators behind us.

I pull on the metal tab underneath the left pocket of my jacket. My secondary razor slithers out of the spine of my jacket, to form into a meter and a third of rigid metal. I lean toward Daxo.

“On my command: terror.”

The mob does not hit us in a wave. The wild vanguard was prepped. Pupils flaring with stims and intoxicants, they sprint headlong at us with homemade weapons—hammers and knives—a few with blackmarket scorchers. A scorcher flares. White light ripples across the Forum and the Obsidian senator to the left of me screams as her stomach ruptures open. She stumbles away, half her torso boiling.