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As ever, Holiday senses my mood. “Ma’am, I know you’ll think you were only one hundred meters away. Not gonna lie. That’ll haunt you sure as a fold against a single comet bluff. But they taught in the ludus the surest path between two points ain’t always the shortest.”

I turn on her. “You think there’s a chance we’ll get Sevro back?”

She gives me a grim smile. “It’s been done before.”

“Victra found my son. I lost her husband. No amount of calculus will fix that arithmetic.”

“Yet Victra did not sail on Luna. She respected your orders.” She gives a curt nod out the viewport where Mars’s moons are coming into sight. I step forward. The full might of the Julii fleet roves around the pincushion city moon of Phobos and the battle moon of Deimos. The Pandora’s comforting mass is sorely missed, but Victra’s personal fleet is larger even than my own. With her lost child, and Sevro in captivity, I feared she would run wild. Instead, her trade armada readies for war.

Light flares on the Julii-Sun Dockyard halo as we pass. Hundreds of new ships teem with expedited industry as the workers and automatons race against the doomsday clock. And then we are past the dockyard, and the planet itself looms before us.

On Mars, I was born and rode horses at Ishtar. On Mars, my eldest brother bled to death on the Agean cobbles before Karnus au Bellona, my mother jumped off a cliff, my father and best friend were killed by my twin. On Mars, I met my husband.

But only my son waits below.

It seems a lifetime ago that Darrow led my father’s Rain against our planet. I watched the friction trails bloom from this very bridge. How simple the world seemed then in the tunnel of youth. Could I have really been only nineteen? Can it be wrong to feel nostalgic for a day of blood? Or was it the innocence I miss, before we truly knew what turned the world?

The melancholy is scored away by wrath as the nightside of the planet comes into view. Cimmeria is cloaked in darkness. The Obsidian I allowed to seize the continent in hopes they would call it home and defend it with their lives have ravaged it instead. The central cities of Nike, Phoenicia, and Olympia are dark. I believed in the Obsidians. I believed in Sefi. I was too optimistic. It only took a single man to topple her reign and unleash her people.

Now, the Obsidian army and fleet are gone, having disappeared mysteriously after Kieran gave Volga over to the father of Ragnar. It seems all this Volsung Fá wanted was Sefi’s army and only half her stores of helium. The rest they left abandoned in containers on the tarmacs as casually as if the containers were filled with surplus dining utensils.

“What does Mars mean to you, Nakamura?” I ask.

The Terran hesitates. “Hope. And you, my liege?”

“War.” I turn on a heel for the hangar.

* * *

—

As pitcrews prepare Pride Two for disembarkation, Kavax sits on the hangar floor. He stares out at Mars floating on the other side of the pulseField. Sophocles spools in his lap, watching his master with concern. I set a hand on Kavax’s shoulder as I approach. He closes his eyes in a moment of warmth, then looks back at the planet.

“Daxo loved Mars because she never pretended to be a maiden,” he says.

“?‘The beautiful scarred,’ he called her,” I reply.

“The beautiful scarred.” Kavax loses himself for a moment in the echo. “He loved South Pacifica, but he was born here, in Zephyria. Where I was born. When he was as high as my knee, I took him, as my father once took me, through the heartwood, and I showed him the tree that grew from the seed of my father’s heart, and his before him. I showed him where mine would be planted. Where his would be planted beside his brother’s.” His voice trails away. Kavax was not able to recover Daxo’s body. The Vox cremated the slain senators and mixed them into the sewers so they could not be collected by their kin and brought back to Mars. “Pardon me,” he says, collecting himself, “sometimes the indignity…is more than I can bear.”

Kavax is no longer the indestructible man who helped raise me. His decline started with Volga’s grievous wound to his side, then Thraxa going missing, and finally Daxo’s remains floating through the sewers of a moon Kavax hated. He despairs he will lose his remaining daughters, his wife, and his planet. He looks up at me with wet eyes. “Must it be here?” he asks.

“It must.”

I offer a hand to help him rise.

With a heavy sigh, the weary family man kisses his pet on the brow, takes my hand, rises, and transforms once more into my father’s enforcer—the warrior giant of House Telemanus. Even I feel inclined to shiver. But it is a tragedy to see any man sacrifice his nature for his vocation, much less a man I love so much. To be what we need, what I need, he must go to war again. All his life he waited to pass the reins to his children; now so few are left.

It is not how he thought it would be, but he endures.

He puts an arm around my shoulders. “There is evil in us, as there is good. But we do not regret our good as we do our evil. So we know what we are, my daughter. We know what we are.” His voice fades, his conviction exhausted. So I pull him closer.

“We know what we are,” I reply.

He hears the certainty in my voice and straightens to his full height and pulls away. “When your father would return to Mars, he would run the Iron Circle to prove who owned the planet.”

“I am not my father.”

“Not in all ways. That’s been proved. But sometimes you need to show a little fang.”