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He nods. “She’s coming here and has ordered the Republic to summon its strength to Mars. So I believe I should be very industrious until she arrives. Especially in matters as curious as this.”

“If you read the report, you know.” I knock on my head. “Poor thing went and broke on me. Done’s done. Her people can’t figure anything, and don’t know how to extract it without killing me. Still got the orb, though, and that’s mine.”

“Why would you want it extracted when all it wants is to be repaired?” he asks. “Isn’t it giving you instructions?”

I don’t answer. Even now, I feel the urges of the parasite. They heightened near the city. Maybe it’s the communication towers. I feel an emotional ache to return home to someplace I’ve never been. But I know that’s not me talking, because I don’t have a home, and the feeling seems to be coming from a great distance. Then Pax says something I didn’t include on the report.

“O my mountain hyacinth, what shepherds trod upon you with clumsy, rustic foot? Now you are a broken seal: a scarlet stain upon the earth. Figmentum es.”

I blink at him. “How did you—”

“So I was right.” He smiles to himself. “I read everything and cross-reference latently. Including files only ten people have access to. My mother wanted me to be prepared, and I think I know how to help you. Her spymaster had…relevant information. Wouldn’t you like to be someone who could make a difference, Lyria of Lagalos?” He looks up after the Obsidian fleet.

“Did Victra send you?”

“No. She wants to protect you from what you could be. But she only knows that Figment inherited the parasite, and gained…advantages from it. She has no idea what it really is, or where it comes from.”

“And you do?”

“I have my suspicions.”

I don’t take the bait. “My brothers were in Heliopolis. Liam’s the only family I have left.”

“Family is more than just blood.”

I look up after the ships. I helped those girls save themselves. I helped Victra. I helped Volga. The little man is right. I do want to make a difference.

“What if I told you that I could find Liam easier than you could, without leaving a computer? Would you do something for me?”

I squint at him. “Be more specific.”

He pulls out a thin holoMap of the inner asteroid belt and hands it to me. “Have you ever heard of a city called Oculus?”

I STAND LOOKING OUT AT HELIOPOLIS from the Lady Beatrice.

Cassius is alive. I do not know how, or why. But somehow he survived the Rim’s perversion of justice. Diomedes must have had a hand in it. Was it for honor that he was spared? Or some nefarious purpose I cannot yet divine? I would ask the man, but he departed Mercury to prepare the Rim’s entrance into the war long before Heliopolis’s liberation. Pytha told me he searched the Ladon for ten days for his sister before departing with a heavy heart.

There is a war inside me. I would have given nearly anything to bring Cassius back from death. Anything except this. He died for the Rising. Now he fights with them.

He is my enemy. I cannot come to terms with it.

I believe I am the only one who knows Cassius’s hand in the fiasco at the Mound. If Atalantia found out, the ramifications for me, for the Rim, would be calamitous.

Whatever pact Cassius made with the Rising earned the Archimedes a boon. Her new engines were faster than any the Core ships possessed. Her hull cloaked even more thoroughly than Atalantia’s hunting corvettes. I sense Quicksilver’s hand at work. Because of my old friend, Darrow, Harnassus, Telemanus, and the core of the Howlers managed to either hide on Mercury or slip out of its orbit.

Their army was not so fortunate.

Those who survived the Long Night, as they now call it, languish in camps south of the spaceport, pressed into labor to rebuild the planet they helped break. After seeing the ruins of Tyche and northern Helios, I know it will be no short affair.

Today is the first day since recapturing Heliopolis that the city does not rattle with sounds of construction. The cranes are quiet in the city sky today, but the streets bubble with noise. Rooftops along the Via Triumphia writhe with color and jubilation. Mercury has turned out for my Triumph.

“Are you there?” I ask the air. “Apollonius?”

No one replies.

“Whomever are you talking to?” Glirastes crows from the doorway.

“Just phantoms.” Did he ever really exist in the desert? Did he follow me, or was it the imaginings of a sun-leached brain?