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Despair robbed me my mind. With my despair numbed, I find a way to sleep by tearing a strip of cloth from my jumpsuit and tying myself to the vent duct when gravity makes it the floor. Soon as I doze off, the floor becomes the ceiling again, and I hang there like a deepmine bat, bits of jumpsuit shoved in my ears and wearing a blindfold fashioned from my pant leg.

Sleep is the Vale itself. I eat again. I sleep. I eat. I sleep. I grow bored and make the dancing lights my playmate, racing to touch the tips of the light as it morphs and expands. It reacts to my touch, turning crimson or purple. There’s pattern to it, a code maybe, but I just can’t crack it.

One day or night or afternoon, I fasten myself to the duct to sleep again, and notice a rolled ball of cloth in the vent. Making a little hook with a piece of rubber gnawed off from my prisoner slippers, I hook the cloth and draw it toward me.

The light illuminates brown letters in a blocky, flaking print. It is a message written in blood.

“My name is Volga. I am a prisoner. I do not know for how long. Am I alone?”

I stare down at the piece of cloth as if it were a message from an alien race. A weird numbness prickles across my face. The same numbness I felt when Vanna of Omicron spit in my eye and called my pa a tinsucker when I was eight.

Pure rage.

Volga was the name of Ephraim’s Obsidian. The Hyperionin lowlife who shot great Kavax in the chest so that his skin melted from his rib cage. I ball the cloth in my fist.

Yet I do not drop it.

Suddenly, all I can remember of the woman is the hollowness in her eyes as she looked down at me in the back of their aircar. That was a soul ripping itself to pieces. I know because I felt it too, because I wore those eyes when I knew what Ephraim had used me to do.

Was that Volga’s truth? Did she feel the same shame I did? Could it be I wasn’t the only one used by Ephraim fucking Horn? Maybe…or maybe I just want to talk to someone. Maybe I just want to prove I’m alive.

I bite my thumb till it bleeds and tear the edge of a nail away. I dip it in the blood and begin to write on the back of the piece of cloth: “My name is Lyria. You might remember me…”

COMMUNICATION ON EAGLE REST has been cut off to all but high-ranking Alltribe personnel. Sefi doesn’t want information getting out, or possibly in. HoloNet access severed. Several of my skuggi, including Freihild, were called away for service to the Queen before a scheduled run-through of a highrise infiltration down in Olympia, which was summarily canceled and all passes to the city general revoked.

Pax and I gossip audibly in case of listening devices, and arrange the peas on our plates in the code he developed for us. Having recently gone through Xenophon to acquire fiberwire for the skuggi, I set out six peas. Pax, having built the harnesses I requested, sets out two, then seven in query of the ship Sefi promised me. I squash the peas. No ship. Still a flight risk.

The door bursts open. Electra stalks in.

“Hatchetface! We saved you some peas.” I gesture to the ones I smashed. At first I think she’s jealous of our little suppers, until she throws open the windows and goes out onto the terrace. Pax frowns and we follow. Beyond the pulseBubble encasing my suite, something is happening in Olympia.

Down in the city, candles flicker from broken windows and atop crumbling towers. A sea of them move through the street. The Forbidden Song drifts ominously in the wind.

She looks over at Pax.

Has Mercury fallen?

Before anyone can put words to the fear, the door to my suite opens again. Ozgard comes out onto the terrace. “The Queen has summoned you. All of you.”

* * *

—

Instead of being taken to the throne room, we’re led through the night to an armored military shuttle. “You got a bead on this?” I ask them as we board. Electra ignores me.

Pax shakes his head. “You?”

“I’ve got a few ideas.”

“Thank Jove for the mercenary and his professional opinion,” Electra snaps, but her teeth are dull today. Is it her parents or Pax’s that have gone down? Is it Mercury or Luna, or something else?

The military shuttle has no view windows in the bunkrooms or mess we’re sequestered within for the three-day voyage, but all of us can feel the calm before the storm. Pax devotes his days to a sort of waking slumber—a meditation practice Ozgard has taught him. Together they recite obscure prayers while Electra drives all mad by pacing the deck like a pissed-off alley cat.

“What kind of Nagal is that?” I ask Pax before we bunk down for the evening. “Didn’t sound familiar.”

He glances at Ozgard. Finding the shaman sleeping, he explains in a low voice, “It isn’t Nagal. It’s Tetkjr. Some of the old prayers survived. Ozgard found remnants of them in old temples on Mercury. He’s been teaching me. Hasn’t been spoken inside the Belt since the Dark Revolt.”

The Dark Revolt was a myth in the legions, believed only by conspiracy theorists and drunks. But after the Fall, the Republic published the history that the Society did their best to scrub out of existence. Read like fiction. Five hundred years before the Reds rebelled, the Obsidians nearly toppled the Society, led by a shadowy figure known as King Kuthul. Of course, Pax is only too eager to explain in excruciating detail.