Shouts boom as the Sovereign calls for peace. But it is beyond her. A woman screams at Cagney’s ruined body. Dozens of men and women, all with blades, slash into each other. Tactus takes a razor through the shoulder defending me again. I spin to my friend’s aid and hack the arm off the Bellona man as he pulls his blade out of Tactus. I jerk my friend toward me. Slashing a path clear. A blade scratches my forearm. I glimpse Mustang in the chaos, covering Cassius’s wounded body. I don’t know if the Bellona will kill her. They let her sit at the table. Still, I don’t know. I rush toward her, throwing my weight into the bodies between us. Tactus helps.

I smash into a woman. Antonia. Her eyes light up as she brings a knife up to my stomach, but Victra, her sister, punches her in the face and Tactus starts kicking her in the head as she falls. Victra offers me a laughing smile until Karnus jerks her down by her hair. He’s fought off as Leto enters the fray, turning back the tide with the precise thrusts of his rainbow razor. The Telemanuses join him, father and son decimating the Golds who come before them with razors half the size of my body.

“Tactus, on me!” I shout.

Tactus is bleeding, but he’s up and howling madly like he’s still fighting beside Sevro. Together, we jump high in this easy gravity. He knows I go for Mustang. But the Bellona are too thick. Razors too deadly.

“Mustang!” I shout, fending two Bellonas off. Slash away one’s face and punch another in the throat with my aegis. Another joins them. And another, till there’s a thick Bellona bullwark blocking my path.

“Protect the ArchGovernor!” Mustang shouts at me, voice more composed than my own, making me feel an idiot obsessed with chivalry. Of course she does not need me to save her. “Protect my father!” And though I can’t see her amongst the throng, I obey.

I let Tactus jerk me away by the collar toward our retreating line, which is being assailed from the side. Someone else roars for us to protect Augustus. Others scream to defend Imperator Bellona and Cassius. Many family lords have been carried away by armed cadres of family members, who back out of the chaos with their blades at the ready. They flee the spire, using the lifts to take them from the place, as gravBoots were forbidden. It’s nearly deserted. The Sovereign’s Praetorians—purple-and-black-clad Obsidians and Golds—cluster around and fly her from the ruined gala. Razors and pulseBlades fill calloused hands. Grays come led by Golds in Praetorian purple to disperse us. They wear riot gear and their scorchers shoot painballs and scatterwaves at the battling families, scattering the Golds like summer flies.

“AUGUSTUS!” huge Karnus screams as he rushes from the Bellona ranks, through the scatterwaves like a madman. He knocks someone down with his shoulder, shatters a lancer’s face with his aegis, and charges headlong at Augustus, hoping to kill his family’s rival in one fell swoop. “AUGUSTUS!”

Leto, our best swordsman and Augustus’s ward, intercepts him in front of the ArchGovernor.

“Hic sunt leones!” he calls to the sky.

Leto moves like the sea, fluid and terrible in his grace. He crashes Karnus back and is about to open him along the belly when suddenly he falters. Freezes mid-swing. Karnus stumbles back, then straightens, perhaps confused that he is still alive. He cocks his head at Leto, who reaches for his thigh, as though stung.

Leto sinks slowly to a knee, arms sluggish. His long hair tumbles over his face, then he seems to freeze in place, suddenly motionless in the center of the chaos. Sad eyes glow with the engine plume of a passing ship as it coasts peacefully into the horizon. He is beautiful in that moment before Karnus chops off his head.

“Leto!” Augustus roars.

His eyes widen and he pushes against the Telemanus men, who bear him away. I glimpse the Jackal tucking his silver stylus into his sleeve, the one he spun on his fingers as he proposed our secret alliance.

We lock eyes.

He grins toothily.

And I know I’ve made a deal with the devil.

13

Mad Dogs

We flee the top of the spire. I had to leave Mustang behind. She knows what she is doing. Somehow I had managed to forget that. She always knows what she’s bloody doing.

“They won’t hurt her,” Augustus says to me, and I believe it’s the first time I’ve seen emotion on his face. No. The second time. When he screamed for Leto, it was as if he’d lost a son. He looks that way now, face slack and older by twenty years. He lost his eldest son. He lost his second wife, the mother of his children. Now he loses the man he adopted to replace that son, and he fears for the woman who reminds him of that wife.

If they do hurt her, it’s on me.

I’ve set things in motion. For once, it couldn’t have gone better. Blood trickles down my hands, sheeting between the fingers, pooling around the cuticles in a horseshoe. Knuckles flex white where there is no blood. It disgusts me, but this is what my hands were made for.

We flee the place of winter and trees, having drenched it red. Many carry our wounded, nearly a dozen in number. Seven dead. Barely twenty unscathed in the entire entourage. Others are missing. Matchless Leto is gone, Pliny’s aide was cut apart, and one of our Praetors took a blade in her neck from Kellan au Bellona.

I carry the Praetor in my arms and try to staunch the bleeding as we take the lift down the spire. Hard chance. Victra presses a piece of her dress against the wound.

I’d give anything for a pair of gravBoots. We cluster tight around our lord. Razors out. Blood soaks my arm to the elbow. Sweat dribbles down my face and ribs. Red drops splatter at our cadre’s feet against the lift’s floor, dripping from hands, wounds, blades. Yet there are white smiles slashing the faces around me.

I’m hot in my uniform, so I undo the top buttons. Tactus bleeds beside me. His wound goes through his left shoulder. Clean thrust.

“It’s just blood,” he tells Victra, who worries over him.

“It’s a hole in you.”

“Not a strange thing.” He smiles at her waistline. “Goryhell. You’ve hole in you, and you don’t see me complaining. Sheeeeeeowww.” He yelps as she jams a bandage from her dress onto his wound. He laughs in pain a second more, then looks at me and shakes his head, eyes wild and happy. “Training with Lorn au Arcos, man. You sneaky ponce.”

He saved me from Cagney. I nod and bump bloody fists, past slights and wagers on my life temporarily forgotten.

Many of the other Golds, the Praetors, the knights, the martial men and women in particular—and we have more in proportion to our Politicos and economists than most houses—wipe their brows, leaving ruddy smears. These are the sort of Golds who would tell you the problem with being a Gold is that everyone is already conquered. Means no one worth fighting. No one to use all that training and all that power against. Well, I just gave them a fresh taste of battle. And even though their Governor’s ward is dead, even though their chief Praetor bleeds out on my shoulder and Mustang is in enemy hands, they want to play. And making corpses is the game of the day.