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I heed Octavia’s ministrations and fall back on an identity with long-term upside, which I can defend and they will be unable to verify. Can’t be Rising. Can’t be Society. I have no scar on my face, and can properly emulate the Mercurian dialect popular in what counts as high society in Erebos. The identity is natural, and a little hilarious. But I’m half mad from dehydration, so I dive in.

“Cato au Vitruvius,” I say. The identity I used for security reasons when I would visit Glirastes for studies. It belongs to a fictional son of a real local family of high history and middling future.

“Salve, Cato. I’m Alexandar. Drusilla, Ignacius, Crastus, Hadrian.” In turn, he nods at the kind-eyed woman, the giant, a pretty man in his thirties, and a squat bull of a Gold male. “The Knights of Elysium at your service, such as we are.”

“Oh, now you’re a Knight of Elysium,” Drusilla mutters.

“Arcosian Knights,” one corrects.

“Who are you?” Ignacius demands of me.

“He means how did you end up in this hell?” Alexandar asks. He smiles crimson. Not one of his teeth remains. I’m surprised by the kindness of him, considering. He looked haughtier on camera, and Grandmother’s Securitas file said he was incredibly arrogant, intelligent, if not too creative, with a paternal deficit complex after the death of his father. His defensiveness of the Reaper suggests the complex’s newest placeholder.

I tell them a nervous story of the dam breaking at Erebos. Ordnance falling on the city accounts for my burns; trying to rescue survivors, for the sunburns; and trying to take the impaled victims down, for the tacNet wounds. Drusilla asks me sly, trick questions about my home, suggesting she’s been to Erebos. But so have I, and I trapped it all in amber. I can still see the silk market, and the bright belts of the citizens, and the gold filigree in every single street sign.

I pass their meager tests.

“You’ve been here a while, haven’t you?” I ask.

“Yut,” Alex replies, with another trap.

“Pardon?” I ask, flummoxed.

“You’re not a soldier, are you?” Alexandar says.

Another assumption trap. “I don’t understand.”

“Never mind.”

“I hardly know a single mate who’s enough money to pull the Institute,” I reply. “My parents are…were silk merchants, and not grand ones by any judge.”

“Then what did you do?” Drusilla asks.

“Drank mostly,” I reply. “My father bribed the magistrate to let me stay in Erebos after the Conscription as a civil engineer magistrate. War is such a ghastly affair.” I give a little shudder.

“So he’s a duty-dodging Pixie. I’m not swallowing this snakeshit,” Ignacius says. “He’s a plant or, at the very least, a slaver by participation.”

“So’s every person on Mercury according to you.”

“They all act like it. Only thing you get out of hugging a Mercurian is a knife in the back. They’re all swindlers and drunks, the sundark lot of them.”

“I’m darker than him,” Drusilla says.

“Semantics.”

“Will you two hens stop pecking?” Alexandar snaps. “Why’d you want to know how long we’ve been here, Cato?”

“It’s just that Heliopolis hasn’t fallen,” I say. “You said it must have.” Even Ignacius listens intently. “I heard from a man who’d been in the Ladon that Darrow led his army across the desert under the cover of the storm. He hit Ajax au Grimmus as he was besieging the city.”

“That madness worked?” Alexandar asks. He grins hideously with empty gums at Ignacius. “I told you. The boss has everything under control.”

Or he’s lost control completely.

XENOPHON LEADS ME INTO the skuggi hangar with a bored expression on that wan face. “Gods, it’s quiet,” I mutter. Not in the city below, where construction crews work night and day to bring Olympia to its former glory, or in the lands around, which vibrate with the sound of Obsidian flocking to the Volkland, or on the coasts where Alltribe ripWings eye Republic fighters across the Thermic, or in the mines where Reds and Oranges hijack Quicksilver’s robots to continue helium operations. It is quiet in Eagle Rest and only Eagle Rest because Sefi and Valdir have taken the children to hunt, my skuggi are off on missions, and I am left like an old man to rattle around an abandoned house.

“Walk faster, please, we mustn’t be late to the kill,” the logos says.

“Maybe we should be heading to the landing pads then, genius.”