It is a short flight, not long enough. I watch Mars through the duroglass floor. Though the planet is terraformed, vegetation is sparse along our flightplath. The planet’s surface is streaked with ribbons of green in its valleys and around her equator. The vegetation looking like green scars that cut across her pocked surface. I’ve taken virtual tours of the planet nearly every day since I received my golden eyes.

Water fills her impact craters, creating grand lakes. And the Borealis basin, which stretches across the northern hemisphere, brims with fresh water and teams with bizarre marine life. Great plains where dust devils gather cloaks of topsoil and tear through croplands. Storms and ice rule the poles where the Obsidians train and live. The weather there is said to be brutal and cold, though temperate climes are prevalent throughout much of Mars’s surface now.

There are one thousand cities on Mars, each ruled by a Governor, the ArchGovernor presiding over all. Each city is set in the center of a hundred mining colonies. The Governors manages these colonies, with the individual MineMagistrates like Podginus managing the day-to-day. The citadel of the ArchGovernor is located in Agea, in the Valles Marineris—the largest canyon in the Solar System.

With so many mines and so many cities, it was chance, I suppose, that brought the ArchGovernor to my home with his camera crew. Chance and my position as a Helldiver. They wanted to make an example out of me; Eo was an afterthought. And she would not have sung if the ArchGovernor had not been there. Life’s ironies are not charming.

“What will the Institute be like if I get in?” I ask Matteo as I peer out the window.

“Full of classes, I imagine. How should I know?”

“Is there no intel?”

“No.”

“No?” I ask.

“Well, some, I suppose,” Matteo admits. “Three sorts of people graduate: the Peerless Scarred, the Graduates, and the Shamed. The Peerless can ascend in society; the Graduates can as well, but their prospects are relatively limited and they still must earn their scars; and the Shamed are sent to the distant, hard colonies like Pluto to oversee the first years of terraforming.”

“How does one become a Peerless?”

“I imagine there is some sort of ranking system; perhaps a competition. I do not know. But the Golds are a species of built upon conquest. It would make sense if that were to be part of your competition.”

“How vague.” I sigh. “You’re as helpful as a legless dog sometimes.”

“I will explain.”

“No one is gorywell stopping you.”

“The game, goodman, in Gold society is patronage. Your actions in the Institute will serve as an extended audition for that patronage. You need an apprenticeship. You need a powerful benefactor.” He grins. “So if you want to help our cause, you’ll do as bloodydamn well as you can. Imagine if you became an apprentice to a Praetor. In ten years time, you could be a Praetor yourself. You could have a fleet! Imagine what you could do with a fleet, my goodman. Just imagine.”

Matteo never speaks about such flights of fancy, so the excitement in his eyes in contagious. It makes me imagine.

16

The Institute

My test results come when I am practicing my cultural recognition and accent modulation with Matteo in our high-rise penthouse. We have a view of the city, the setting sun behind. I’m midway through a clever retort about the Yorkton Supernova fauxWar sports club when my datapad beeps with a priority message sent to my datapad stream. I almost spill my coffee.

“My datapad has been slaved by another,” I said. “It’s the Board of Quality Control.”

Matteo shoots up from his chair. “We have perhaps four minutes.” He runs into the suite’s library, where Harmony is reading on an ergocouch. She jumps up and is down and out of the suite in less than three breaths. I make sure that the holopictures of me with my fake family are arranged in my bedroom and throughout the penthouse. Four hired servants—Browns and a Pink—go about domestic tasks in the penthouse. They wear the Pegasus livery of my fake family.

One of the Browns goes to the kitchen. The other, a Pink woman, massages my shoulders. Matteo shines my shoes in my room. Of course there are machines to do these things, but an Aureate would never use a machine for something a person could do. There is no power in that.

The towncraft appears like a distant dragonfly. It grows as it buzzes closer and hovers outside my penthouse window. Its boarding door slides open and a man in a Copper suit gives a bow of formality. I let my datapad open the duroglass window and the man floats in. Three Whites are with him. Each has a white Sigil upon their hands. Members of the Academians and a Copper bureaucrat.

“Do I have the pleasure of addressing one Darrow au Andromedus, son of the recently deceased Linus au Andromedus and Lexus au Andromedus?”

“You have the honor.”

The bureaucrat looks me up and down in a very deferential, but impatient manner. “I am Bondilus cu Tancrus of the Institute’s Board of Quality Control. There are some questions we must beg to ask of you.”

We sit across from one another at my oak kitchen table. There, they hook my finger to a machine and one of the Whites dons a pair of glasses that will analyze my pupils and other physiological reactions. They will be able to tell if I am lying.

“We will start with a control question to assess your normal reaction when telling truths. Are you of the Family Andromedus?”

“Yes.”

“Are you of the Aureate genus?”

“Yes.” I lie through my teeth, ruining their control questions.

“Did you cheat in your admissions test two months prior?”

“No.”

“Did you use nervenucleic to stimulate high comprehension and analytical functions during the test itself?”

“No.”

“Did you use a networkWidget to aggregate or synthesize outside resources in real time?”

“No.” I sigh impatiently. “There was a jammer in the room, ergo it would have been impossible. I’m glad you’ve done your research and are not wasting my time, Copper.”

His smile is bureaucratic.

“Did you have prior knowledge of the questions?”

“No.” I deem an angry response proper at this point. “And what is this about? I’m not accustomed to being called a liar by someone of your ilk.”

“It is procedure with all elite scorers, lord Aureate. I beg your understanding,” the bureaucrat drones. “Any upward outlier far removed from the standard deviation is subject to inquiry. Did you slave your widget to that of another individual during the test?”