“Your mother?”

He says nothing. Arcos edges in beside me. I put a hand out to stop him.

“Would you kill them, if Augustus told you to?” Tactus asks me, turning slightly.

“No,” I say. “I’d rather die.”

“I didn’t think so. She was right. I am the Mighty Servant.”

I open my hands to him. “I don’t know what I’m to do now, Tactus.”

“That’s a first.” He laughs bitterly, voice slurring slightly.

“Hardly. I didn’t know what to do when I whipped you,” I say. “At the Institute. I didn’t want to lose you from my army because of your talents. But I couldn’t not punish you.”

“Talents. Talents. Talents. Then that’s the difference between us,” Tactus’s voice thickens further. “Because if it had been my army, I would have killed your arrogant ass.” He turns more and I see the hints of the ruin the bomb’s made of his face.

“You know what happens if you kill any of them?”

He nods to me, then to the Rage Knight, as if saying it’ll be either one or the other that does him. “I’m not sorry I took Lysander, you know.”

“I don’t think you’re ever sorry for much.”

“Not sorry.” He chuckles and dips a toe in the blood surrounding him. “But I think I shouldn’t have done it. I was testing you at the Institute. But … I wanted to see what you’d do. If you were worth following.”

“Was I?”

“You know that answer.”

“Am I still?”

He nods. “Always,” saying it so pathetically that it feels like my heart has been pulled into my throat. He’s a traitor, a liar, a cheat. Yet I see a friend. I want to fix him and make him whole. What am I doing? I have to put him down. But I’ve done that before with Titus. That cycle erodes us. Death begets death begets death, and ever more.

“What if I let you live?” I ask suddenly, drawing a confused, frantic glance from Tactus. Of course he doesn’t understand forgiveness. “What if I let you come back?”

“What?”

“What if I forgave you?”

“You’re lying.” He turns more and I see the full measure of what the bomb did to him. His nose is crooked, broken. The rest looks like a cherry stripped of its skin. My friend …

“I’m not lying.” I did not put my faith in Tactus once, and I lost him. Now I will. I’ll take the same leap I ask him to take. I step forward. “I know there’s good in you. I saw your face when those children were killed at the gala. You’re not a monster. Come back to me. You would be one of my lieutenants again, Tactus. I would give you a legion to lead when we take Mars. You’ll carry one of my standards. But you can’t wear that ugly armor.”

“It is uncomfortable,” he wheezes with a slight smile. “But Sevro, Roque, Victra …”

“They miss you,” I lie. “Drop your razor and come back to my army. I promise you will be safe.” The razor dips in his hand. One of the children spares a smile at his younger siblings, a hopeful smile. “Just leave the children alone, and all is forgiven.”

I mean it. Deep in my heart, I mean it.

“We all make mistakes,” he says.

“We all make mistakes. Just come back. I won’t hurt you.” I drop my own razor. “Neither will Arcos.” I stare at Arcos till he nods his weathered head in complicity.

“I want to come home,” Tactus murmurs quietly, pain in his voice. “I want to come home.”

“Then come home.”

Tactus’s razor clatters to the floor and he falls to a knee in front of me. He’s rasping from pain. Relief floods the room. The children start crying again from the tortuous shift from death to life. The caretakers hug their charges, their tears making lines on their faces. I go forward to Tactus and motion him upward to clasp my arm. He wraps me in a frantic hug and sobs into me. Body shaking, bloody features painting my armor.

“I’m sorry,” he says a dozen times. He’s weeping hard into my shoulder, clasping tight. His face is such a ruin. And I hug him. Exhaustion fills me. His sadness is like a weight that nearly drives me to tears. Yet I’m buoyed by the strange feelings of having him back, standing with me, gripping me. It is a humbling thing knowing someone cannot live without you, knowing that though they’ve betrayed you, they wish for nothing but absolution. And as he clenches my back, I wrap my arms around his armor and try not to cry myself. Even the cruel feel pain. And even the cruel can change. I hope this changes him. He could do so much, if only he would learn.

In so many ways, he is the embodiment of his race. And so if Tactus can change, Gold can change. They must be broken, but then they must be given a chance. I think that’s what Eo would have wanted in the end.

When at last his sobs are done and we part, he stands at my side, loyal as a puppy, looking to me subtly for signs of affection. His hands tremble from the pain of his wounds, yet he watches in silence with Arcos and me as the children, high and low alike, file upward out of the hidden bunker with their caretakers. Pebble comes down to giddily tell us Roque is wrapping up the space engagement. Seeing Tactus’s wounds, she pales. I tell her to fetch a Yellow.

Soon Lorn, Tactus, and I are left alone in the basement.

Lorn looks over to us. “Now that the children are gone, consequences.” His hands flash faster than a hummingbird’s wings. An ionDagger appears, lurches forward four times into Tactus’s armpit, where the armor is the weakest. I rush to stop Lorn, but it’s already done. He twists like he’s wringing a towel, severing the artery, an old man killing a young one. Tactus’s ruined face wrenches with pain; and he gasps, as though he knew justice would finally find him in the end.

Lorn leaves. And I hold my friend as he dies, his eyes fading to some distant place, where perhaps he’ll find that peace Roque always wished for him.

30

Gathering Storm

“How long till we reach the rendezvous?” I ask Orion on the command deck. Except for our attendants, we are alone in front of the viewports of the Pax, watching my ships cross through space. The newest additions to our fledgling armada are painted white and carry Lorn’s angry-faced purple griffin. With them fly the black and blue and silver warships captured from Kellan au Bellona above Europa. Oranges and Reds crawl over the exteriors of the metal monsters, mending the holes made by leechCraft and preparing them for the siege of Mars.