“You’re saying my father played mercenary. For you?”

“I’m saying he played assassin. I was growing. There was resistance in the marketplace to that growth. So the marketplace had to make room. You think all Silvers play it safe and legal?” He chuckles. “Some, maybe. But business in a crony-capitalist society is the craft of sharks. Stop swimming, the others will take your food and feed on your body. I gave your father money. He hired a team. Worked off-site. Did what I needed him to do. Until I discovered he was using my resources for a side project. The Sons of Ares.”

He makes a mockery of the words.

“But you didn’t report him?” I ask skeptically.

“Golds treat sedition like cancer. I’d have been cut out too. So I was trapped. But he didn’t want me trapped. He wanted a co-conspirator. Gradually he made his case. And here we are.”

Sevro paces away, trying to make sense of it. “But…we’ve…been dying like flies. And you’ve been up here…humping your Pinks. Fraternizing with the enemy. If you were one of us…”

Quicksilver lifts his nose up, regaining what poise he lost during the beating. “Then I would have done what, Mr. Barca? Do tell. From your extensive experience in subterfuge?”

“You would have fought with us.”

“With what? Hm?” He waits for an answer. None comes. Sevro’s speechless. “I have a private security force of thirty thousand for myself and my companies. But they’re spread from Mercury to Pluto. I don’t own those men. They are Gray contractors. Only a fraction are owned Obsidians. I have the weapons, but I don’t have the muscle to tussle with Peerless Scarred. Are you crazy? I use soft power. Not hard power. That was your father’s purview. Even a minor house could wipe me out in direct conflict.”

“You have the largest software company in the Solar System,” Sevro says. “That means hackers. You have munitions plants. Military tech development. You could have spied for us on the Jackal. Given us weapons. You could have done a thousand things.”

“May I be blunt?”

I grimace. “If ever there was a time…”

Quicksilver leans back to peer down his humped nose at Sevro. “I’ve been a Son of Ares for more than twenty years. That requires patience. A long-eyed view. You’ve been one for less than a year. And look what’s happened. You, Mr. Barca, are a bad investment.”

“A bad…investment?”

It sounds ridiculous coming from a man chained to a metal chair with blood dribbling down his lips. But something in Quicksilver’s eyes sells his point. This isn’t a victim. It’s a titan of a different plane. Master of his own domain. Equal, it seems, to Fitchner’s own breed of genius. And more vast a character, more nuanced than I would have expected. But I reserve any affection for the man. He’s survived by lying for twenty years. Everything is an act. Probably even this.

Who is the real man beneath this bulldog face?

What drives him? What does he want?

“I watched. I waited to see what you would do,” he explains to Sevro. “To see if you were cut like your father. But then they executed Darrow”—he looks up at me, still confused on that note—“or pretended to, and you acted like a boy. You began a war you couldn’t win, with insufficient infrastructure, materiel, systems of coordination, supply lines. You released propaganda in the form of Darrow’s Carving to the worlds, to the mines, hoping for…what? A glorious rise of the proletariat?” He scoffs. “I thought you understood war.

“For all his faults, your father was a visionary. He promised me something better. And what has his son given us instead? Ethnic cleansing. Nuclear war. Beheadings. Pogroms. Whole cities shredded by fractious groups of Red rebels and Gold reprisals. Disunity. In other words, chaos. And chaos, Mr. Barca, is not what I invested in. It’s bad for business, and what’s bad for business is bad for Man.”

Sevro swallows slowly, feeling the weight of the words.

“I did what I had to,” he says, sounding so small. “What no one else would.”

“Did you?” Quicksilver leans forward nastily. “Or did you do what you wanted to do? Because your feelings were hurt? Because you wanted to lash out?”

Sevro’s eyes are glassy. His silence wounding me. I want to defend him, but he needs to hear this.

“You think I haven’t been fighting, but I have,” Quicksilver continues. “The Sovereign’s opinion of the Jackal seems to have soured of late.”

“Why?” I ask.

“I couldn’t guess before, but now I’d bet anything it’s because you escaped the Jackal’s prisons. In any case, I saw an opportunity. I brought Virginia au Augustus and the Sovereign’s representatives here to broker a peace that would give Virginia the ArchGovernorship of Mars and would remove the Jackal from power and put him in prison for life. It’s not the end I wanted. But if what we’re seeing on the Jackal’s Mars is any indication, he is the single greatest threat to the worlds and our long-term goals.”

“And yet you helped him consolidate power in the first place,” I say.

Quicksilver sighs. “At the time, I thought him less of a threat than his father. I was wrong. And so were you. He needs to be removed.”

The Jackal’s been betrayed by two allies, then.

“But your plans for an alliance are slagged now.”

“Indeed. But I don’t mourn the opportunity lost. You’re alive, Darrow, and that means this rebellion is alive. It means Fitchner’s dream, your wife’s dream, is not yet gone from this world.”

“Why?” Sevro asks. “Why the bloodyhell would you want war? You’re the richest man in the system. You’re not an anarchist.”

“No. I am not an anarchist, a communist, a fascist, a plutocrat, or even a demokrat, for that matter. My boys, don’t believe what they tell you in school. Government is never the solution, but it is almost always the problem. I’m a capitalist. And I believe in effort and progress and the ingenuity of our species. The continuing evolution and advancement of our kind based on fair competition. Fact of the matter is, Gold does not want man to continue to evolve. Since the conquering, they have routinely stifled advancement to maintain their heaven. They’ve wrapped themselves in myth. Filled their grand oceans with monsters to hunt. Cultivated private Mirkwoods and Olympuses of their very own. They have suits of armor to make them flying gods. And they preserve that ridiculous fairy tale by keeping mankind frozen in time. Curbing invention, curiosity, social mobility. Change threatens that.