Golden Son

“I know, Darrow. I don’t avert my eyes. I know the policies. I know the conditions your people suffer, but that doesn’t excuse the murders, the rapes, the torture he committed.”

“It’s what we suffer every day. Titus did what he did out of hate. Out of a misguided hope of revenge. In another life, I could have been him.”

Mustang searches my eyes. “And why weren’t you in this life?”

“My wife.” I look up at her. “And you.”

“Don’t say that.” Voice thick with regret. She takes a step back, shaking her head. “You don’t have the right to say that.”

“Why not? You always wondered what ran beneath the surface of me. Know the deep current.”

“Darrow …”

“Titus had pain. But that’s all he had. I had something more. Eo’s dream of a world where our children could be free. But I would have lost it if I never met you.” I take a step forward. “You kept me from becoming a monster. Can’t you see?” I gesture, trying to encompass my desperation. “I was surrounded by the people who had enslaved mine for hundreds of years. I thought all Golds cruel, selfish murderers. I would have caved to revenge. But then you came … and you showed me there was kindness in them. Roque, Sevro, Quinn, Pax, the Howlers proved it too.”

“Proved what exactly?” she asks.

“That this isn’t about my people against yours. You aren’t Gold. We aren’t Red. We’re people, Mustang. Each of us can change. Each of us can be what we like. For hundreds of years they’ve tried to tell us otherwise. They’ve tried to break us. But they can’t. You are that proof. You are not your father’s daughter. I see the love in you. I see the joy, the kindness, the impatience, the flaws. They’re in me. They were in my wife. They’re in all of us because we are human. Your father would have us forget that. Society would have us live by its rules.”

I take another step toward her.

“You told me I gave you hope that we could live for more after we won the Institute our way. Then you said I turned my back on that idea when I accepted your father’s patronage and went to the Academy. But I never turned my back. Not for one moment.” Another step.

“You’ll destroy my family, Darrow.”

“It is possible.”

“They are my family!” she shouts, face collapsing into grief. “My father hanged your wife. He hanged her. How can you even look at me?” She shudders out a breath. “What do you want, Darrow? Tell me. Do you want me to help you kill them? Do you want me to help you destroy my people?”

“I don’t want that.”

“You don’t know what you want.”

“I don’t want genocide.”

“You do!” she says. “And why not? After what we’ve done to your people. After what my father did to you.” She unbuttons another catch on her jacket as if it will help her breathe through this. The gun shakes in her hand. Finger tenses on the trigger. “How can I live with this? If I don’t pull the trigger, millions will die.”

“If you pull it, you accept that billions should live as slaves. Imagine all those unborn. If it is not me, someone else will rise. Ten years from now. Fifty. A thousand. We will break the chains, no matter the cost. You cannot stop us. We are the tide. All you can do is pray it is not someone like Titus who rises in my place.”

She levels the scorcher at my right eyeball.

“Pull the trigger, and you die.” Ragnar speaks like the darkness itself.

“Ragnar, no!” I snap. I can’t even see him in the shadows of the tunnel. “Stop! Do not hurt her.” He must not have pursued the tracking signal as I told him to. How long has he listened?

“Stay back.” Mustang shuffles sideways so her back is to the wall. “Does he know too? Do you know what he is, Ragnar?”

“The Reaper trusts me.”

Mustang tosses her light on the ground and pulls free her razor.

“He isn’t here to kill you, Mustang.”

“What else does a Stained do?”

I hold my hands up. “Ragnar isn’t going to do anything. Are you, Ragnar?”

No answer. I swallow hard. Everything is unwinding. “Ragnar, listen to me …”

“You must not die, Reaper. You are too important for the People. Lady Augustus, you have ten breaths left.”

“Ragnar, please!” I beg. “Trust me. Please.”

Nine.

“I trusted you at the river, my brother. You are not always right. That is the cost of mortality.” The voice comes from above. Somewhere near the ceiling of the mine this time. He’s not wrong. He put his trust in me during our siege of Agea, and I led them into a trap. Luck preserved me.

Laughing bitterly, Mustang coils her muscles to strike. “See, Darrow? You start this war, it’ll be beasts like him who finish it and take their revenge.”

Seven.

“This isn’t about revenge!” I try to calm myself. “It’s about justice. It’s about love against an empire built on greed, on cruelty. Remember the Institute. We freed those we were meant to take as slaves. We put our trust in them. That is the lesson. Trust.”

Five.

“Darrow,” she pleads. “How can you be so foolish?”

Her mind is made up.

Four.

“It never foolish to hope.” I strip off my razor, my datapad, and toss them to the ground as I go to my knees. “But if you can’t change, no one can. So shoot me dead and let the worlds be as they may.”

Three.

“You think too much of me, Darrow.”

“Two.”

“Let’s skip the foreplay, Ragnar.” Mustang twirls her razor. Its horrible hum fills the tunnel. “Come at me, dog, and show Darrow what your kind lives for.”

The silence stretches long.

“One,” Mustang growls, stomping out her own lamp. No light, no color but darkness. The silence is deeper than the tunnel. It meanders through the heart of Mars, stretching forever, echoing to places only the lost have ever been.

Ragnar shatters it with his voice.

“I live for my sisters.”

There is no scorcher flash. No scream of the razor. No movement. Just the echoing of the words down and down with the fragments of silence.