“Why would you want a man who so easily trades his allegiance?” I turn and look Fitchner dead in the eye. “Such a man is little more than a common whore.”

“Augustus abandoned you before you abandoned him,” the Sovereign says. “His daughter saw it even if you don’t. I will not abandon you. Ask my Furies. Ask their father. Ask Virginia. I give a chance to those who stand apart. Join at my side. Lead my legions and I will make you an Olympic Knight.”

“I am an Aureate.” I spit on the ground. “I am no trophy.”

I stalk away.

“If I can’t have you, no one can.”

Then they come. Three Stained file through the door. Each a foot taller than I. Each garbed in purple and black and carrying pulseAxes and pulseBlades. Their faces hide behind bonelike masks. Eyes of killers grown in the arctic poles of Earth and Mars stare out at me. Glittering black, like oil. I pull my razor and take my battle stance. Their throat-sung war chant rumbles under their masks, like the funeral dirge for a dead god.

“Go on. Sing to your gods.” I twirl my razor. “I’ll send you to meet them.”

“Reaper, please stop,” Lysander calls loudly. I turn to find him walking toward me, hands splayed plaintively. His coat is simple and black. He stands half my height.

His voice floats. Trembles like a delicate bird’s.

“I have watched all your videos, Reaper. Six, maybe seven times. Even the Academy. My tutors believe you are the closest man to the Iron Golds since Lorn au Arcos, the Stoneside.”

That’s when I realize why he’s looked so nervous. I almost laugh. I’m this little bastard’s boyhood hero.

“We need not see you die tonight. Could you not find a home here as you found with Sevro? With Roque and Tactus, and Pax, the Howlers, and all your great warriors? We have warriors too. You could lead them. But …” He steps back. “If you fight, then you die because you make the mistake of believing righteousness puts you beyond my grandmother’s power.”

“It does,” I say.

“Reaper, there is no place beyond her power.”

This is how it happens. They give them heroes. They raise them on lies and violence, and then they let them grow into monsters. What would he be without their guiding hand?

“He wanted to see you,” the Sovereign says. “I told him legend never matches fact. Better not to meet your heroes.”

“And what do you think?” I ask little Lysander.

“It all depends on your next choice,” he says delicately.

“Join us, Darrow,” Fitchner drawls. “This is the place for you now. Augustus is done.”

Smiling inwardly, I relax my blade. Lysander clenches a fist happily. I pace with him back to his grandmother, playing along but not yet proclaiming any allegiance.

“You’re always telling me to bow,” I tell Fitchner as I pass.

He shrugs. “Because I don’t want you to break, boyo.”

“Lysander, fetch me my box,” the Sovereign says. Happily, the boy rushes out of the room as I sit across from his grandmother. “I fear the Institute taught you the wrong lesson—that you can overcome anything if you but try. That is incorrect. In the real world, you must go along. You must cooperate and compromise. You cannot bend the worlds to your morals.”

“Why the hell not?”

She sighs. “Your pride is uglier than you think.”

Lysander returns moments later, carrying a small wooden box. He hands it to his grandmother and waits patiently by her side, eating a tart that Aja hands him. The Sovereign sets the box on the table.

“You value trust. So do I. Let us play a game absent weapons, absent armor. No Praetorians. No lies. No falsity. Just us and our naked truths.”

“Why?”

“If you win, you may request anything of me. If I win, I get the same.”

“If I ask for the head of Cassius?”

“I will saw it off myself. Now open the box.”

I lean forward. Chair creaking. Rain patters on the windows. Lysander smiles. Aja watches my hands. And Fitchner, like me, has no idea what’s in the bloodydamn box.

I open it.

15

Truth

It takes everything I am not to flee. What comes hissing from the box is pulled out of nightmare, pulled so perfectly out of the depths of my subconscious that I nearly think the Sovereign knows where I come from. Where I truly come from.

“The game is one of questions,” she says. “Lysander, please do the honors.” She hands her son a knife. The boy cuts the sleeve of my uniform to the elbow, rolling it back to expose my forearm. His hands are gentle. He smiles at me apologetically.

“Don’t be afraid,” he says. “Nothing bad will happen, so long as you don’t lie.”

The carved creatures from the box—two of them—stare at me with three blind eyes apiece. Part scorpion. Part pitviper. Part centipede. They move like liquid glass, organs, skeleton, visible through skin, chitinous mouths chattering and hissing at the same time as one slithers onto the table.

“No lies.” I force a laugh. “That’s a breezy order when you’re a child.”

“He never lies,” Aja says proudly. “None of us do. Lies are rust on iron. A blemish on power.”

Power they’re so drunk on, they can’t even remember how many lies they stand upon. Tell my people you don’t lie, you brutish bitch, and see what they do to you.

“I call these Oracles,” the Sovereign says. One of her rings ripples liquid, forming a shell over her finger, turning it into a talon, needle growing slowly at the end. With this needle, she pricks my wrist and says the words “Truth over all.”

One Oracle slips forward, skittering onto my arm, coiling itself around my wrist. Its strange mouth seeks the blood, latching on like a leech. Its scorpion tail arches four inches upward, drifting back and forth like a cattail in summer wind. The Sovereign pricks her own wrist, repeats the oath, and the second Oracle slithers from the box.

“Zanzibar the Carver designed this especially for me in his Himalayan laboratories,” she says. “The poison won’t kill you. But I’ve cells filled with men who have played my game and lost. If there is a hell, what’s in that stinger is as close to it as science has let us come.”

My pulse quickens as I watch the tail sway.

“Sixty-five,” Aja says of my pulse. “He was resting at twenty-nine beats per minute.”