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The Iron Circle is an old custom popularized by Silenius. To prove the depth of his dominion over a planet or moon, he would fly his shuttle without escort in a ring around it upon arrival, no matter the political tensions or adversaries at large on it: take your shot. It was his fucking planet. The custom has gotten quite a few powerful men killed—sometimes people just can’t resist tossing a stone at Goliath—and fell out of practice with most households. To do it now, in the wake of the violence Mars has seen, despite the threats at large, is saying no more and no less to the worlds than “Look how big my cock is.”

With my main shuttle, Pride One, in the hands of the Abomination, we leave the hangar of the Dejah Thoris in Pride Two. The war shuttle bucks as it descends through atmosphere without its escort of ripWings. Niobe’s Fox One joins us starboard. As we perform the Iron Circle, I sit rolling my fingers along the rim of my husband’s ring. Cassius sent it back to him, and Darrow gave it to me. He gave everything to me he could give. I wish I could let him know it was enough. Let Cassius have found him. Let me slide into bed with him one last time. Let me feel his warmth again.

I need him more now than ever. Mars needs him.

All the ships and gun batteries in the worlds don’t make Mars seem safe without the Reaper. My officers in the cabin do their best not to look nervous as we pass over the Amazonian Sea toward war-torn Cimmeria to complete the Circle.

What will I say to my son when I see him? Pax is neither stupid nor helpless, especially not with Electra at his side. He would not have woken up every day praying it would finally be the day his mother would save him and make everything right in the world again. No. He would use game theory. He would work the models in his mind until he saw the reasons, the permutations, the tectonic plates in motion. Then he would scheme a way to help me as much as he could.

I wonder if Pax realizes yet that I raised him to be as much an ally as a son, and if he understands my guilt over that? If he knows could he still grasp how losing him was like losing a limb? How my love for him goes beyond logic, beyond explanation?

“Virginia…” Kavax whispers at the viewport. “Look.”

I can’t muster the energy. “Either someone shoots at us or doesn’t,” I say. “The Iron Circle was your idea.”

“Just look.”

Holiday tries to join Kavax at the viewport. When he won’t move, she takes the next viewport down and shatters my officers’ grim mood with a throaty laugh. “Ma’am. You’ll wanna see this.”

Frowning, I slide open my viewport shade and see a line of fire racing across the dark landscape east of Nike, another flaring west of Phoenicia, and yet another southeast of Olympia itself. To be so visible at this height, the lines must be nearly a hundred kilometers long.

As I watch, the lines of fire curve into the shape of a slingBlade.

Mars endures.

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Despite the recent violence, no surface-fire licks upward at my ship during its passage around the planet. Even I didn’t believe we’d complete the Iron Circle without incident. The mood of the officers has changed. The holoCans in the back of the shuttle rumble with beating drums and singing crowds in cities all across Mars. In my shame, it is not the response I would have expected. Mars’s zealotry has always been reserved for my husband and his first wife. Kavax sits by the door, tapping his heels, eager to set foot on his home soil again. Holiday watches the holos with a look of love for the planet as it hails Lionheart and the Republic.

Clouds embrace the shuttle, and when they pull back, we see the Valles Marineris gashing the world with its glittering towers and the glowing green parks and forests that sprawl along the cityscape and crawl up its towering walls.

Millions of civilians line the rim of the great canyon. Hundreds of thousands of new recruits pour onto the grounds outside what was once my Institute but is now the Pegasus Legion barracks. As we approach Agea, the ground becomes lost beneath the shifting tides of humanity that gather in the parks and the courtyards and main avenues. The Via Triumphia is as clogged as it was on Mars’s first Liberation Day. They are all holding something red above their heads.

My shuttle sets down between the Republic’s Victory Obelisks that lead to the Lion Stairs. The sounds of the sea of humanity that fill the courtyard wash against the shuttle. I see now what they hold above their heads.

Their millions of clenched fists are dipped in red.

A great murmur seeps through the crowd as I descend the plank with Kavax and Holiday at my side. They grow silent enough I can hear my boots on the metal plank and then on the marble as I cross the Courtyard of Victories to the Lion Steps. Niobe joins us along with the centurions of Pegasus Legion, loyalist Skyhall and house naval captains, and the remaining three widows of Arcos. The drums along the courtyard boom from the labor of Red tribal drummers.

I ascend the steps quickly when I see my boy waiting at the top of them. He is real. He is alive. Just ten meters away. It is as if he has walked through a doorway and come out not as a man, but finally the blueprint of the man he will one day be. He’s a hand taller, his cheeks shrunken, new scars on his face. But the real change is in his eyes. The look of childish wonder is gone forever. Now they hold the dullness that marks the passage into wisdom.

I wish I could wrap my boy in my arms and hold him until he became part of me again. I would garland him with kisses and apologies and promises. But we are at war, and I am the Sovereign, and so the mother must wait her turn.

Kavax sees my distress, and breaks from the procession to scoop my son up into his arms with a madman’s laugh. He perches him on his shoulder and crows about the Boy Who Killed a TorchShip.

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I approach the ArchGovernor. My husband’s brother smiles up at me. As charismatic as Darrow, but without even a hint of his brother’s violent temperament, Kieran was always demure in private and popular with the crowds. It looks right to see him with the Sword of the Rising on his hip. Behind him stand the Praetors of the Martian Legions, the Imperators of the Ecliptic Guard, and the old Sons of Ares commanders, all battle-hardened and clever, if a far cry from those we lost on Mercury.

Kieran clears his throat.