Morning Star

“Mask off,” Mustang barks as Loki’s hands wrap around the blade sticking from his chest. She slaps his hands away from his datapad. “No coms.” Holiday strips the razor from the man’s hip as his pulseShield shorts. I take Freya’s razor from her corpse. “Do it.”

Sefi and her Valkyrie stare wide-eyed from their knees at the blood pooling beneath Freya. I remove Freya’s helmet from her head to reveal the mangled face of a middle-aged Peerless Scarred woman with dark skin and almond-shaped eyes.

“Does this look like a god to you, Sefi?” I ask.

Mustang snorts a dark little laugh when Loki removes his mask. “Darrow. Look who it is. Proctor Mercury!” The pudgy, cherub-faced Peerless Scarred who endeavored to recruit me into his own house at the Institute before Fitchner stole me away. When last we saw each other five years ago, he tried to duel me in the halls as my Howlers stormed Olympus. I shot him in the chest with a pulseFist. He smiled all the while. He’s not smiling now as he stares at the metal in his chest. I feel a pang of pity.

“Proctor Mercury,” I say. “You have to be the least lucky Gold I’ve ever met. Two mountains lost to a Red.”

“Reaper. You have to be shitting me.” He shudders in pain and laughs at his own surprise. “But you’re on Phobos.”

“Negative, my goodman. That’d be my diminutive psychotic accomplice.”

“Gorydammit. Gorydammit.” He looks at the blade in his chest, grunting as he sits on his haunches and wheezes out breaths. “How…did we not see you…”

“Quicksilver hacked your system,” I say.

“You’re…here for…” His voice trails away as he looks at the Valkyrie rising to gather around the dead god. Sefi bends over Freya. The pale warrior traces her fingers over the woman’s face as Holiday strips off her armor.

“For them,” I say. “Bloodydamn right I am.”

“Oh, goryhell. Augustus,” our old proctor says turning to Mustang with a bitter laugh. “You can’t do this…it’s madness. They’re monsters! You can’t let them out! Do you know what will happen? Don’t open Pandora’s box.”

“If they are monsters, we should ask ourselves who made them that way,” Mustang says in the Obsidian tongue so Sefi can understand. “Now, what are the codes to Asgard’s armory?”

He spits. “You’ll have to ask nicer than that, traitor.”

Mustang is deadly cold. “Treason is a matter of the date, Proctor. Must I ask again? Or must I begin trimming your ears?”

Beside Freya’s body, Sefi dips her finger into the blood and tastes it.

“Just blood,” I say, crouching beside her. “Not ichor. Not divine. Human.”

I hold out Freya’s razor for her to take. She flinches at the idea, but forces herself to wrap her fingers around the hilt, hand trembling, expecting to be struck by lightning or electrocuted like men are who touch pulseShields with bare hands. “This button here retracts the whip. This one controls the shape.”

She cradles the weapon reverently and looks up at me, furious eyes asking which shape she should conjure. I nod to mine, trying to build kinship with her. And I do. If only in this martial way. Slowly her razor takes the shape of the slingBlade. The skin on my arm prickles as the Valkyrie laugh to one another. Vibrating with excitement, they pull their own axes and long knives and look at me and Mustang.

“There’s five gods left,” Mustang says. “How’d you ladies like to meet them?”

We drag the bodies of seven gods, two dead and five captured, behind us. I wear the armor of Odin. Sefi the armor of Tyr. Mustang the armor of Freya. All of which we pillaged from the armory on Asgard. Blood smears the stone of the hall. Feet slide and stumble as Sefi jerks one of the living Golds behind us by his hair. Her Valkyrie drag the rest.

We returned to the Spires on a shuttle stolen from Asgard, which we slipped through silently, using Loki’s codes to access the armory and drape ourselves in the panoply of war before seeking the remaining gods out. Two we found in Asgard’s mainframe leading a team of Greens attempting to purge Quicksilver’s hackers from their system. Sefi with her new razor claimed the arm of one and beat the other unconscious, terrifying the Greens, two of which held up fists to me as silent acknowledgment of their sympathy for the Rising. With their help, we locked the others in a storage room as the two Green sympathizers connected me directly with Quicksilver’s operations room.

We didn’t reach Quicksilver himself, but Victra relayed news that Sevro’s gamble worked. A little more than a third of the Martian defense fleet is under control of the Sons of Ares and Quicksilver’s Blues. Thousands of the Society’s best troops are trapped on Phobos, but the Jackal is hitting back hard, taking personal command of the remaining ships and recalling forces from the Kuiper Belt to reinforce his depleted fleet.

The rest of the Golds we located through the station’s biometric sensor map in the lower levels. One practicing with her razor in the training rooms. She saw my face and dropped her blade in surrender. Reputation is a fine thing sometimes. The remaining two Golds we found in the monitoring bays, shifting back and forth between the cameras. They’d only just discovered that the footage was archival from three years before.

Now, all our Gold captives wear magnetic handcuffs and are tied together by long pieces of rope from Sefi’s griffin, all gagged, all glancing around at the Spires like we’ve dragged them into the mouth of hell itself.

Obsidians of the Spires flock to us in the halls. Rushing from the deeper levels to see the strange sight. Most would only have seen their gods from a distance, as flashes of gold streaking over the spring snow at mach three. Now we come among them, our pulseShields distorting the air, our shuttle’s pulse cannons melting open the huge iron doors which closed off the griffin hangar from the cold. The doors melt inward like the door on the Pax melted when Ragnar offered me Stains.

This is not how I intended to bring the Obsidians into my fold. I wanted to use words, to come humbly, in seal skin, not armor, putting myself at the mercy of the Obsidians to show Alia that I valued her people’s worth. Valued their judgment, and was willing to put myself in peril for them. I wanted to do as I preached. But even Ragnar knew that was a fool’s errand. And now I don’t have time for intransigence or superstition. If Alia will not follow me to war, I’ll drag her to it, kicking, screaming, like Lorn before her. For Obsidian to hear, I must speak in the only language they understand.