“Smells like home,” I say, sucking on the finger. “Mum used to make blood soup out of the pitvipers. Not half bad to the truth of it.”

“You dip flaxbread in it and sprinkle in okrablossom?”

“How’d you know?” I ask.

“My mum did the same,” Dancer laughs. “We’d have it at Dancetide, or before the Laureltide when they’d announce the winner. Always squabbing Gamma.”

“Here’s to Gamma.” I laugh and finish another swig.

Dancer watches me. The smile eventually slips from his face and his eyes grow cold. “Matteo’s to teach you to dance tomorrow.”

“Thought you’d be the one doing that,” I say.

He thumps his bad leg. “Been a while since I’ve done that. Best dancer in Oikos. I could move like a deeptunnel draft. All our best dancers were Helldivers. I was one for several years, you know.”

“I figured.”

“Did you, now?”

I gesture to his scars. “Only a Helldiver would be bit so many times without drillBoys around to help pull the vipers off. Been bitten too. Got a bigger heart for it, at least.”

He nods and his eyes go distant. “Fell into a nest when fixing to repair a nodule on the clawDrill. They were up in one of the ducts and I didn’t see them. They were the dangerous kind.”

I see where he’s going with this. “They were babies,” I say.

He nods.

“They have less venom. Much less than their parents, so they weren’t burrowers bent on laying eggs inside of me. But when they bit, they used all the evil in them. Fortunately, we had antivenom with us. Traded some Gammas for it.” In Lykos we had no antivenom.

He leans toward me.

“We’re tossing you into a nest of baby vipers, Darrow. Mark that. Admissions testing is three months from now. I will be tutoring you in conjunction with your lessons from Matteo now. But if you do not quit judging yourself, if you continue to hate your guise, then you will fail the test or worse—you will pass it and then slip up and be found out while at the Institute. And everything will be squabbed.”

I shift in my seat. For once, there’s another fear in me—not of becoming something Eo would not recognize, but a more primal fear, a mortal fear of my enemies. What will they be like? I already see their sneers, their contempt.

“Doesn’t matter if they find me out.” I clap Dancer’s knee. “They’ve taken what they can from me already. That is why I am a weapon you can use.”

“Wrong,” Dancer snaps. “You’re of use because you’re more than a weapon. When your wife died, she didn’t just give you a vendetta. She gave you her dream. You’re its keeper. It’s maker. So don’t be spitting anger and hate. You’re not fighting against them, no matter what Harmony says. You’re fighting for Eo’s dream, for your family that is still alive, your people.”

“Is that Ares’s opinion? I mean, is it yours?”

“I am not Ares,” Dancer repeats. I don’t believe him. I’ve seen the way his men look at him, how even Harmony pays him deference. “Look into yourself, Darrow, and you’ll realize that you are a good man who will have to do bad things.”

My hands are unscarred and feel strange when I clench them till the knuckles turn that familiar shade of white.

“See. That’s what I don’t get. If I am a good man, then why do I want to do bad things?”

14

Andromedus

Matteo cannot teach me to dance. He shows me what each of the five form dances of the Aureate looks like and we are through. More emphasis is put on your partner in Gold dances than the dances my uncle taught me, but the movements are similar. I perform all five with greater skill than he can manage. To show off, I blindfold myself and perform each dance again in succession without music, by memory. Uncle Narol taught me to dance, and with a thousand nights of filling time with nothing but dance and song, I am masterful in recording the motions of my body, even this new body. It can do things my old one could not. The muscle fibers contract differently, the tendons stretch further, the nerves fire faster. There’s a sweet burn in the muscles as I flow through the movements.

One dance, the Polemides, has a nostalgic feel. Matteo has me hold a baton as I move about in swirling steps, baton arm outstretched as though fighting with a razor. Even as my body moves, I hear the echoes of the past. I feel the vibrations of the mine, the scent of my clan. I have seen this dance before, and I perform it better than all the others. It is a dance my body is made for, one so very similar to the illegal Reaping Dance.

When I finish, Matteo is angry.

“Is this some sort of game?” he snarls.

“What do you mean?”

He glares at me and taps his foot. “You have never been beyond the mines?”

“You know that answer,” I reply.

“You have never fought with a sword or shield?”

“Yes. I have. I’ve also captained starcruisers and dined with Praetors.” I laugh and ask what this is about.

“This is no game, Darrow.”

“Did I say it was?” I’m confused. What did I do to provoke him? I make a mistake in laughing to relieve the tension.

“You laugh? Boy, this is the Society with which you tangle. And you laugh? They are not some distant idea. They are cold reality. If they find out who you are, they will not hang you.” His face looks lost as he says it. As though he knows only too well.

“I know this.”

He ignores me. “The Obsidians will catch you and give you to the Whites and they will take you to their dark cells and they will torture you. They will pull out your eyes and cut away anything that makes you a man. They have more sophisticated methods, but I wager information won’t be their only aim; they have chemicals for that if they want. Soon after you tell them everything, they will kill me, Harmony, Dancer. And they will kill your family with fleshPeelers and stomp on the heads of your nieces and nephews. These are the things they don’t put on the HC. These are the consequences when the rulers of planets are your enemies. Planets, boy.”

I feel a chill creep into my bones. I know these things. Why does he keep hammering me with them? I’m already frightened. I don’t want to be, but I am. My task is swallowing me whole.

“So I ask you again, are you who Dancer says you are?”