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“Icarus … urgent … on … read me?” His signal breaks up as lightning slashes overhead. Jamming devices from both sides already molest the airwaves. “Dar … ead … me … in Agea.”

“Roque? Roque?” I know the plan for the battle above, but the tone of his voice worries me.

“Coms are all scattered,” I tell Mustang.

“Local frequencies are fine. It’s the jammers and storm.” Rain splatters over her faceplate.

Sevro points up. “Gonna have to get your ass above it to hear.” Above, a ship is struck by lightning. Her systems fail and she plummets before reactivating, only to collide with a passing ripWing.

“Oh, goryhell.” I give Ragnar and Jupiter orders to push forward of the mountain range and secure the northern valley for our main force of Gray legions. While we besiege other cities to divert Bellona attention, to me Agea is all that matters. A million men will go at her walls. The Stained opens his hand to me in salute and then jumps off the mountain peak with Jupiter and a hundred Obsidian warriors.

Mustang and Sevro wait below as I rip up through the lightning-laced clouds with several of my bodyguards. Past the clouds, I float in relative peace, hailing Roque.

“Icarus!” he shouts into the com. “She’s here. She’s not on Luna or with the main Societal fleet! We just found out. Kavax’s men found Praetorians on board the Warchild … she’s here! She came in secret without her fleet; we caught her.”

“Roque. Slow down. What are you saying?”

“Darrow, the Sovereign is on Mars. Her shuttle is trapped behind the shields on Agea. She is trapped.”

“Roque. I already know. She’s why I want Agea.”

39

At the Wall

He doesn’t ask how I knew. Later I’ll tell him that I let Aja e

scape from Europa so we could track her back to the Sovereign via my bomb’s radiation signature. She’s her personal killer. Of course she would return to her side. I’ve told no one but Mustang and Sevro. I couldn’t risk it spreading, especially with how Roque’s been acting.

He hangs up the com without another word.

The vanguard of my force, Ragnar’s men, have made landfall in the valley ahead. I see the fat ships descending, then disappearing into the ground where the Valles Marineris stretches kilometers beneath. We have our Blues in space lay fire down on Agea itself. The deluge heats the shield, causing it to pulse opaque. We’ll be coming at her at ground level along the bottom of the hundred-kilometer-wide canyon from the north and south, just through the two-hundred-meter gap her shields must maintain above soil to avoid creating seismic disturbances.

I hop off the mountain peak at the head of my bodyguard. Sevro and Mustang accompany me as we jump to another peak, then skip through the lower foothills, taking fire as we go.

The Sovereign is the key to this war, the key to fracturing this Society so the Sons of Ares can rise. With her captured, the Society itself will wonder in confusion if it even exists without Octavia atop its throne. Senators and governors will try to seize power. There will be a dozen local wars, fracturing manpower and cohesion.

Beneath me, a world of bounty lounges along the bottom of the vast canyon—lakes and streams, waist-high grasses, trees blooming with flowers and Spartan pines growing at odd angles from the kilometers-high canyon walls despite the steep declivity. Above all this, the great floating mountain, Olympus, reigns. I glimpse the quiet castles and see deer running in the vale of Mars. But I see no children along the great rivers, no boys and girls in armor. Only memories and muddied earth. The students have already been collected. How strange that must have been—fighting for their lives with medieval weapons, only to be scooped up by dropships as invaders came from space.

We meet with Jupiter and Ragnar on one of floating Olympus’s white spires. There are dead men in the halls, on the slopes.

“They used it as a base,” Jupiter says cheerily. “Your Stained disagreed with their presumptuousness. I like the beast!” Our men secure the section of the Valles Marineris set aside for the Institute, far east of Agea in the upper arm of the grand canyon. I watch out the window as hundreds of friendly dropships descend on the staging ground, depositing more than three hundred thousand men in thirty minutes. A Gold runs out of each lowered ramp, always the first onto enemy soil.

“No resistance,” I say quietly, my starShell helm popped. I look at Mustang uneasily.

She wipes blonde hair from her eyes. “The longer we’re dug in, they harder we are to dislodge. Why are they waiting?”

“Want to cluster us up like a bunch of grapes before stomping,” Sevro guesses. “Atomics?”

“Silly children.” Jupiter goes through the pockets of one of the dead men. “That’s why we have Grays. Let them be stomped. They will lubricate our passage.”

“No atomics,” Mustang says. “Sensors would have picked them up from a hundred clicks away.” She looks out over the land. “They’re waiting because they don’t have enough men to contest our passage through the valley. Or we’ve caught them flat-footed, which is doubtful. Or they deployed too many men to halt Lorn’s advance. Or they’ve created choke points in the valley. Or they marshal them around the Citadel. Or there’s a trap ahead.”

Her mind is a machine.

“There’s a trap,” she says after a moment. “But they are over-relying upon it to stall us while they reallocate men and materiel.” She snorts in contempt. “Static defenses without massive mobile support haven’t been relevant since the Maginot Line.”

“But they know we don’t want to waste the city or the populace,” I say.