Golden Son

“I did.” She smiles. “But sometimes it’s nice to remember all that’s going on inside you.”

“Oh.” I redden for some reason.

“I forgot you can blush!” She watches me for a moment. “You probably don’t know this, but one of my dissertations on Luna concentrated on mistakes in the sociological manipulation theorems used by the Board of Quality Control.” She cuts a sausage delicately. “I deemed them shortsighted. The chemical sexual sterilization of the Pink genus, for instance, has led to a tragically high suicide rate within the Gardens.”

Tragically. Most would have said “inefficient.”

“The rigidity of laws maintaining the hierarchy are so strict they’ll one day break. Fifty years from now? A hundred? Who knows? There was this one case we studied where a Gold woman fell in love with an Obsidian. They had a blackmarket Carver alter their reproductive organs so his seed was compatible with her eggs. They were found out and both were executed, their Carvers killed. But things like this have happened a hundred times. A thousand. They’re just scrubbed from the record books.”

“It’s terrible,” I say.

“And beautiful.”

“Beautiful?” I ask, repulsed.

“No one knows of these people,” she says. “No one but a handful of Golds with access. The human spirit tries to break free, again and again, not in hate like the Dark Revolt. But for love. They don’t mimic each other. They aren’t inspired by others who come before them. Each is willing to take the leap, thinking they are the first. That’s bravery. And that means it’s a part of who we are as people.”

Bravery. Would she say that if she knew one of those people sat across from her? Does she live in the world of theories Harmony spoke of? Or could she really understand …

“So how long, I wonder,” she continues, “till a group like the Sons of Ares finds the records, broadcasts them? They did it with Persephone. The girl who sang. It’s only a matter of time.” She pauses, squinting at me as I react involuntarily to the mention of Eo. “What’s wrong?”

I can’t tell her what I’m thinking, so I lie. “Dissertations. Sociology. You and I specialize in very different things. I always wondered what your life was like on Luna.”

Mustang eyes me playfully. “Oh? So you thought about me?”

“Maybe.”

“Day and night? What is Mustang wearing? What is she dreaming about? What boy is she kiss—?”

She winces at that last part.

“Darrow, I want to explain something.”

“You don’t have to,” I say, waving her off.

“With Cassius it—”

“Mustang, you don’t owe me anything. You weren’t mine. You aren’t mine. You can do what you want when you want with whomever you want.” I pause. “Even though he is a gorydamn jackass.”

She snorts a laugh. The humor fades as fast as it came. There’s pain in her eyes. In her half-opened mouth. Her idle knife and fork hover over her forgotten plate. She looks down and shakes her head.

“I wanted it to be different,” she says.

“Mustang …” I rest my hand on her wrist. Despite her strength, it’s frail in my hard hands. Frail as the other girl’s was when I held her in the deepmines. I couldn’t help that girl. And now I feel like I can’t help this woman. Would that my hands were meant to build. I would know what to say. What to do. Maybe in another life I would have been that man. In this one, my words, like my hands, are clumsy. All they can do is cut. All they can do is break. “I think I know how you feel—”

Mustang jerks back from me. “How I feel?”

“I didn’t mean—” I pause, hearing a noise.

We look over and the cook stands there awkwardly with another tray. He tiptoes forward and then leaves the room, backing away awkwardly.

“Darrow. Shut up and listen.” She peers fiercely up at me through the strands of hair that have fallen across her face. “You want to know how I feel? I’ll spit it out at you. All my life I’ve been taught to regard my family over all else.

“What happened with my brother at the Institute … when I handed him over to you, that set me against everything I was raised to do. But I thought that you …” She takes a deep breath that wavers at the end. “… were a person who earned my loyalty. And I thought that it would be so much more important if I gave it to you in that moment than to Adrius, who has never lifted a finger on my behalf. I knew it was the right thing to do, but it was a repudiation of my father, of all he taught me. Do you even know what that means? He has broken families as easily as other men break sticks. He wields unimaginable power. But more than that. He is the man who taught me to ride horses, to read poems and not just the military histories. The man who stood beside me, letting me raise myself up by my own strength when I fell. The man who couldn’t look at me for three years after my mother died. That is the man I rejected for you. No,” she corrects herself, “not for you. For living differently, living for more. More than pride.

“At the Institute you and I decided to break the rules, to be decent in a place of horror. So we made an army of loyal friends instead of slaves. We chose to be better. Then you spat in the face of that by leaving to become one of my father’s killers.” She puts a finger in the air. “No. Don’t speak. It’s not your turn just because I pause.”

She takes her time in gathering her thoughts, folding her hands.

“Now, I’m sure you understand that I felt lost. One, because I thought I’d found someone special in you. Two, because I felt you were abandoning the idea that gave us the ability to conquer Olympus. Consider that I was vulnerable. Lonely. And that perhaps I fell into Cassius’s bed because I was hurt and needed a salve to my pain. Can you imagine that? You may answer.”

I squirm on my cushion. “I suppose.”

“Good. Now shove that idea up your ass.” Her lips make a hard line. “I am not some frill-wearing tramp. I am a genius. I say this because it is a fact. I am smarter than any person you’ve ever met, except perhaps my twin. My heart does not make my brain a fool. I sought out a relationship with Cassius for the same reason I let the Sovereign think she was turning me against my father: to protect my family.”