“I’ve heard the rumors. Any true?”

“Most.” He pulls more noodles out of the bowl, spreading red pepper sauce over them. “I am a businessman now, Darrow. I buy things. I own things. I create. Of course I’m seen as a money-grubbing Silver by those pretentious Peerless jackasses. But I am not one of the fading lords of twentieth-century Europe. I understand there is power in being practical, in owning things. People. Ideas. Infrastructure. So much more important than money. So much more insidious than”—he makes a funny motion with his hand—“spaceships and razors. Tell me, does a ship matter if you can’t supply and transport the food to feed its crew?”

“You own this place, don’t you?” I ask.

“In a manner.” He smiles with too much teeth. “I feel I must be blunt with you. We were nearly eighteen when we left the Institute. We are now twenty. I have been two years in exile, and now I wish to return home.”

“To socialize with Peerless jackasses?” I laugh. “If you have been paying attention at all, you’ll know I don’t have your father’s ear.”

“Paying attention …” He shares a glance with Victra and leans forward. “Reaper. I am the attention. Do you know how much of the communications industry I have acquired?”

“No.”

“Good. That means I’m doing it properly. I’ve acquired more than twenty percent. With my silent partner, I own nearly thirty. You’re wondering why? Certainly families like Victra’s do not consider themselves dirtied by business. After all, the Julii have partaken in trade for centuries. But media is different for us. Slimy. Leave that to Quicksilver and his ilk. So why would someone with my lineage dirty his hands with it? Well, I want you to imagine media as a pipeline to a city in the desert.” He waves around. “Our metaphorical desert. I can only provide thirty percent of the content of what comes through that pipeline, but I can affect one hundred percent of it. My water contaminates the rest. That is the nature of media. Do I want this city in the desert to hallucinate? Do I want its inhabitants to writhe in pain? Do I want them to rise up?” He sets his chopsticks down. “It all starts with what I want.”

“And what do you want?” I ask.

“Your head,” he says.

Our eyes meet like two iron rods colliding, sending stinging reverberations through the body. A palpable discomfort even being near him, much less meeting those dead gold orbs. He’s so young. My age, but there’s a childishness to him, a curiosity despite the ancient cast of his eyes, that makes him feel like a perversity. It’s not that I feel cruelty and evil radiating from his eyes. It’s the feeling that crept over me when Mustang told me how, as a boy, he killed a baby lion because he wanted to see its insides to understand how it worked.

“You have a weird sense of humor.”

“I know. But I’m so glad you get my jokes. So many prickly Peerless these days. Duels! Honor! Blood! All because they’re bored. There’s no one left to fight. So gorydamn tedious.”

“I believe you were making a point.”

“Ah, yes.” The Jackal runs his hand through his slicked-back hair, like I’ve seen his father do. “I brought you here because Pliny is an enemy of mine. He’s made my life very difficult. Even penetrated my harem. Do you know how many spies of his I’ve had to kill? I went through so many servants. I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me,” he says quickly.

“I was on the verge of it.”

“Understanding my plight, however, is how you will help me best. As of now, Pliny controls my father’s favor. Like a snake hissing in his ear. Leto is his design, did you know that?” I didn’t. “He found the darling boy, knew he would win my father’s cold heart because he would remind Father of my dead brother, Claudius. So Pliny cultivated him, trained him, and convinced my father to adopt him as a ward with aims of making him the heir. Then you come waltzing into our lives and disrupt Pliny’s plan. It took two years to dispatch you, but patiently, he did. Just as he did me. Now Leto will be my father’s heir, and Pliny will be Leto’s master.”

That hits me hard. I knew Pliny was dangerous. Perhaps I never really knew just how dangerous.

“So what’s your plan?” I glance around the room. “Going to take back your father’s favor with plebeians and pitchforks?”

“As any Gold with a decent education would know, there’s a certain crime syndicate that runs things in Lost City. A vast criminal enterprise that, if you trace it all the to the tip-top, is under the influence of the office of the Sovereign of our little Society. Octavia au Lune may seem the paragon of Gold virtue. But she’s got a fetish for the dirty stuff—assassinations, organizing workers’ strikes in her own ArchGovernors’ domains, rigging appointments. Her handling of Lost City is no different.

“She and her Furies handpicked the crime family leadership; these three individuals are her creatures. But here’s the juicy kink. I’ve found certain members of that same organization who are … restless.”

I frown. “They don’t like Lune?”

“She’s an onerous bitch. One who has spat in my father’s eye and cozied up to the Bellona. But no. My champions don’t think on that plane. They are lowColors, Darrow. They’re restless to be atop the shitpile.”

“Why Lost City?” I ask. “What does it matter?”

“It is merely a piece of the puzzle. I’m going to help these ambitious lowColors move up, for a price. When they are in power, they are going to kill off a menace that plagues the Society: Ares and his Sons.”

8

Alliance

I go cold inside. “The Sons of Ares? I wasn’t aware they were so dire a threat.”

“They’re not yet, but they will be,” he says. “The Sovereign knows it. So does my father, even if it is not in vogue to say it aloud. The Society has faced terrorist cells before. Throw enough lurcher teams at them and they are dispatched easily enough. But the Sons are different.

“They are not a rat biting our heels, but a termite colony slowly gnawing our foundation as quietly as possible till they’ve done such work that our house crumbles around us. My father has given Pliny the task of eliminating the Sons. But Pliny has been failing. He will continue to fail because the Sons of Ares are clever, and because my media adores giving them attention. But when they become a thing so dreadful to the Society, to the Sovereign, to my father, that the very machine of governance grinds to a halt, I will step forward and say, ‘I will cure this disease in three weeks.’ And then I will, with my media, with the syndicates systematically killing all the Sons, and with you gloriously beheading Ares himself.”