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Or it is a trap.

I cannot believe that. I will not. Atalantia was there the day I was born. She was the first to set me upon a horse. What she offers is an opportunity to shepherd the alliance and take back the mantle of justice from the Rising, but to do that, I must take the leap.

I bend again on my knee.

I was a fool declaring myself an Iron Gold to Dido. And I feel a fool now. “Dictator, I ask your leave for House Lune to fall in the Iron Rain.”

“Oh, he’s going to pop his cherry!” Ajax purrs.

Atalantia’s smile is incandescent. “Granted, son of Luna.” She pulls me to my feet and kisses me softly on the mouth. Ice, guilty excitement, and bewilderment race through my veins as she lingers there, her mouth open, lips wrapped around mine longer than appropriate even by Venusian standards.

When she pulls back, she stares at me in pride.

“My little Lysander. Today, you will earn your scar. I have no doubts.”

Ajax has grown quiet. “With whom will he fall?”

Still a little bewildered, I nod to him. “With you, brother. If you will have me.”

He considers for a moment, suddenly very internal, and then nods. “About gory time. With a good scar, maybe you will look less like a Pink harlot.”

With a melancholy smile, Atalantia takes our hands and guides us to the family mural. It is oddly stirring to stand before what we considered our family. I remember the day we all posed for Glirastes. Atalantia had six Pinks fanning her with peacock feathers. My father teased her mercilessly and apparently farted in her general direction. Atlas even cracked a smile. I see him up there, a wan man leaning on the far end of the frame beside Aja and chubby little Ajax. He’s smiling at my father, likely because of the fart. I cannot see my mother. Her face is hidden behind a veil of gray paint.

“Octavia, Aja, Moira, Anastasia, Brutus, my father…all gone,” Atalantia whispers. She grips our hands as if she never wanted to let them go. “Only we and Atlas remain. But where there were three there are now four. Let the slaves tremble.” She pauses. Then she rips her hands away from ours as if we were the ones who pulled us all together. “Right! Well, off to war now, boys. I’ll meet you in Tyche.” She smiles at Ajax. “Or somewhere a bit…warmer.”

THE SUN HANGS LOW and swollen over the desert as I roar out the garage ramp. More engines whine behind me as Rhonna and twenty bodyguards follow. Guided by Colloway, fist-sized drones careen through the sky to feed data into my helmet. They sight gravBike signatures winding through the sand like rectilinear snake tracks. In their troughs are small depressions. Telltale sign of Gorgon skipper boots.

“Skip trace,” I say. “Stick tight.”

We abandon the tracks and push toward a string of axeblade mountains. Following Alexandar’s coordinates, we ditch the bikes at the base of the mountains and use our gravBoots to scale the escarpments, careful to not fly too high for fear of ground-to-air missiles.

In short order, we find Alexandar sitting with his helmet off in the shadows of an arroyo. He wears lizardSkin light armor, thinner and more sustainable long-term in the desert than my pulseArmor. His looks to be held together more by field patches and dirt than nanofiber. Only his iron lancer badge—a sword against a flying pegasus—is clean.

Four weeks tracking the Fear Knight with Thraxa seem to have worn him down to his essential elements. He is even thinner, and taller, than his grandfather. His sunburnt skin is drawn tight and flakes around patrician cheekbones. On his neck a wretched scab weeps puss. His warhawk is smashed flat and dark with helmet sweat.

He looks up as we scramble down. I recall my helmet into its catch and wince at the heat, squinting hard until I step into the shadows where it is fifty degrees cooler. Alexandar bolts to his feet. Beneath his chrome desert contacts, his eyes are haunted.

“Bloodyhell, just sprawled out Fury-may-care,” Rhonna says, her multiRifle on her shoulder. Her eyes scan the rocks. “Fear Knight’s gonna gut you while you have your picnic, Princess.”

His face is too haunted to feign a smile. “We have pathfinders.”

She half-lowers her rifle. “You look a ghost. You prime?”

Not long ago he would have bitten her head clean off with a classist retort. Now he stares at her as if trying to remember who she is. What has he seen out here?

“Thraxa is this way, sir.”

I find Thraxa lying belly-down on a ridge overlooking a plain stretching from the mountains to Angelia. She props herself up on her elbows. One is made of flesh. The other is unpolished asteroid metal, etched with Obsidian runes by Valdir Unshorn, Sefi’s mate, after Thraxa saved his life in the running skirmishes over the Bay of Bengal.

The mountain ridge is littered with boulders and spiked ephedra, but empty of Howlers. I toggle my right ocular implant. Throbbing red embers from the quantum ID dots in their skulls fleck the ridgeline. Sevro’s little monsters. They don’t feel whole without him. The army may miss its mascot, but the pack misses its big brother. I’ve been too much a distant father of late.

“Reap.” The large Telemanus acknowledges

me without looking. Her wolfcloak has taken on the color of the desert, thanks to its chameleon properties. The two Obsidian pathfinders move for me, and I crawl even with her as my own cloak turns brown. Thraxa squints through a pair of optics. Freckles form a mask over her face. She hands me her optics set.

Knowing what I’ll see, I put the optics to my eyes. An all-too-familiar forest has been erected in front of the city. I feel nothing, but then again I don’t smell it yet.

“He did this while you slept?” I ask. “He would have needed hours.”