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“My boy,” he says, gripping my shoulder with his left hand. It’s stronger than all the rest of him put together. He smells like tobacco. Nails are yellow. “My bloodydamn beautiful little bastard of a boy. You look so bloody grand!” He laughs and laughs again, shaking his head. “There are no words. I’m sorry I couldn’t reach you. Sorry I let Harmony use you like that. There are so many things, Darrow.”

“Stop.” I clap the back of his neck. “We’re brothers. No need for apologies. We’re bound by blood and past. But please, please don’t let it happen again.” He nods. “How is my family, do you know?”

“Alive,” he says. “Still in the mines. I know. I know. But that’s the safest place for them with this war abound. No one wants to blow up Mars’s industry. Register?

He waves me to a seat. “Don’t know many Golds, but that Sevro’s a nasty little shit. When I delivered his father’s instructions to him out on the Rim, I thought he was going to cut me from gob to pucker.” He lights a burner, winks at me. “Never met anyone like him.”

“He’s loyal as they come,” I say. “Like you.”

“No! I mean he can swear better than any bloodydamn Red.”

“Sevro swears?” I smile. “Guess you get used to it. Though he does like saying ‘bloody’ a hell of a lot now.”

“It’s a fine word. Rolls off the tongue. Done some research.” He puffs up his chest. “Been with us since the first ancestors, you know. The first Golds, the ones with normal eyes and gold uniforms, took most of the early recruits from the poor bastards from the Irish isles after the radiation from London turned the isles into a wasteland. The Golds took the highly skilled migratory workforce and recruited them to be the first Pioneers. Their slang just stuck around, jumbled up a bit. History’s fascinating, isn’t she?”

“Harmony’s been making up her own history,” I say.

“That’s right. I’m dead!” He shakes his head and lights another burner, flicking the other onto the floor. I pick it up and put it in the wastebasket. “She went her own way about a year after you left. We discovered several Senators were going to be vacationing on the Gorgon Sea. So we showed up to bug their villa to see if we couldn’t get any secrets. We didn’t. Just lots of … depraved shit. And that was that, we thought. But not for Harmony. On the last night, she walked in and killed the Senators and their guests. Then she left us.”

“So there was never a lurcher squad that raided your headquarters?”

He shakes his head. “They came because of her. Killed Matteo and about forty others. But she’d already left for Luna. Ares saved us. Came in hard with a mixed pack of Obsidians and Grays. Laid waste to those lurchers, then slipped away before reinforcements came. It’s lucky he killed them all. No way they wouldn’t know he was a Gold after that. Had our first face-to-face that day. Man’s bloodydamn scary.”

“Not the word I’d choose.” Though maybe it’s accurate considering how well he fooled me. “It doesn’t bother you that he’s a Gold?”

“It doesn’t bother him that we’re Reds. Ares would die for the cause, Darrow. Shit. He started it. You know why he did?”

I shake my head.

“It’s his story.” Dancer traces the pitviper bites on his neck. “A man has the right to tell his own story. But his isn’t a happy one. Sad as yours. Sad as mine. Strip a man of what he loves, and what is left? Just hate. Just anger. But he was the first to know there could be something more. He found me. He found you. Who the bloodydamn are we to question him?”

The door opens suddenly. We both turn and Mickey limps in. He looks half dead, thin as a reed, paler than before. Without a word, he hobbles over to me and kisses me full on the mouth, his affection desperate and true. Then he starts weeping like a child. Dancer and I don’t know what to do, so I just wrap my arms around him and let him cry. He whispers “Thank you” to me a dozen times.

What did they do to him? Never mind. I know the things the Grays are trained to get information. He says he told them nothing. Still, I have to discover what the Jackal learned from this. What deductions he’s made from finding Mickey’s lab.

I look over Mickey’s head to see Fitchner standing there, smiling sadly. After a long moment, Mickey pulls back. “I tried to warn you, when you came to us on Luna,” he says apologetically. “Wanted to say to run. But she would have killed me if I said any more. I was afraid you would believe her over me.”

“I would have believed you, Mickey.”

“You would have?” He sniffles. “I knew you’d come for me. I said my darling boy was too kind to forget about Mickey, but she spat on me. Said I was a slaver.” He hangs his head, sniffing and so vulnerable, drained and nearly mad from what must have been done to him in the Jackal’s torture chambers. “She was right. I am. I am wicked. I hurt the girls and boys. I sold them even when I loved them. Of course she was right. Why would you come? Why would you do anything for wicked little Mickey?”

“Because you’re my friend.” I bring his hands to my lips, kissing them gently as he looks up at me with hopeful eyes. “Weird as you are, wicked as you were. I know you want to be better. You want to live for more. We all do. And there’s not a place they could take one of my friends that I would ever abandon them.”

It feels good to speak the truth.

“Thank you,” he says quietly. He draws himself up after that, strong enough to turn and walk out of the office. Fitchner closes the door.

“Well, that was emotional.”

I nod. This is the man I’d rather be. Not constantly on guard. Not lying through my teeth. I suppose I didn’t even know how much affection I felt for Mickey till now. It’s not because he helped make me. It’s that he’s always loved me so much. Even if it was a strange sort of love, it was real. And I do believe he wants to be a man he thinks I would respect. Just like I want to be a man Eo and Mustang would respect. And that’s the good sort of love.

“We need to talk, Fitchner,” I say. We didn’t have a chance earlier. Sevro came to me with Dancer’s plan—call a meeting, attach the Sons to my ship, let them infiltrate the building. All I did was suggest Sun-hwa as the scapegoat, and let them know Victra was not to be harmed.

“I’ll leave you two to it,” Dancer says, pushing back his metal chair.

“No, I want you to stay,” I say. “I’ve too many secrets from too many people. I won’t have any more between the three of us.”

“Learn to count, shithead,” Sevro says, coming around a rusted engine block. The cheap metal door to the outside slams behind him. Smells like autumn even in Agea’s oil-stained manufacturing district. He hops onto the rusted chassis of an old fighter and sits with his legs dangling. “Hey, look, it’s all pricks for once. Let’s tell sexist jokes.”