We’re to meet at the Lost Wee Den. It is a large, tall tavern with a flickering red sign covered in pithy graffiti. Fifteen levels, all open and looking down on a central drinking hall of tables and booths filled with some two hundred customers. I can smell the piss in the metal booths, which sag from use. Bottles rattle and glasses clink as swill is slammed back. Indigo and pink lights flicker on the fifteenth floor, where they’ve dancers and private rooms for customers. I pass with Valentin through two bouncers with biomod hands—one Obsidian with skin pale as bleached marble and arms thicker than mine, the other a dark-skinned Gray with a scorcher muzzle built into his arm.
The rest of my Grays filter in behind me in staggered intervals. Some wearing contacts, pretending to be other Colors. One even wearing a fleshMask to look pretty as a Pink. Can’t even tell it’s digital till you put a magnet near it. They look like they belong here. I doubt I do, despite the Obsidian dye job they’ve done to me.
The Sigils on my hands are covered with Obsidian prosthetics. My hair is white, eyes black. Skin made paler with cosmetics. Victra and I are too large to pass for any other Color. Fortunately, Obsidians, though rarer than the other lowColors, are not out of place down here. I follow Valentin to a table in an alcove near the back of the hall where a young man lounges behind a pack of mercenaries and a single Obsidian. A deep silence fills me as I watch the Obsidian stand and leave the table to sit at an adjacent one. Others eye him too before remembering themselves and looking down at their drinks—like water birds as a crocodile glides past. The Obsidian is a foot taller than I. And the whole of his face is tattooed with a skull. Stained.
So much for a low profile.
“Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven?” I ask the reclining man.
“Reaper! Even Milton knew Lucifer was a petty son of a bitch.” He smiles enigmatically and waves to the chair across from him. “Do stop towering over me.”
He’s not even wearing a disguise. I look over at Victra. “Thought it was going to be a new friend.”
“Well, you two have never been friends before. That’d be the new part. You boys have fun now.”
“You’re not staying?” I ask.
“I showed you the door. You have to walk through it.” She squeezes my butt playfully and sways out. The Jackal watches her leave, leaning slightly to get a better view.
“Didn’t think you cared about women.”
“I could be dead and I’d still appreciate her. But I don’t have to tell you that. Alone in space for months on end. Ship all to yourself. Whatever was there to do?”
I sit across from him. He offers me a bottle of greenish liquor.
I shake my head. “I drink to forget about men like you.”
“Ha! An Arcosian insult, if I’m not mistaken. One of Lorn’s best. Though there’s enough to choose from.” He leans back. Enigmatic in his dullness. Face plain. Eyes like smooth, worn coins. Hair the color of desert sand. Lone hand twirling a gold stylus with the quickness of an insect skittering over blasted ground, crack to crack. “The Jackal of Augustus and the Reaper of Mars, together again, at long last. How we have fallen.”
“You chose the venue,” I say as he sets his stylus behind his ear and takes a chicken leg from a platter on the table. He strips the skin with his teeth.
“Does it unnerve you?”
“Why would it? We both know how fond you are of the dark.”
He suddenly laughs, a whining high-pitched bark, like a dog being stabbed. “So much pride to you, Darrow au Andromedus. Family all dead. Disgraced, penniless things. So average that your parents didn’t even try to introduce you to society. No friends remaining. No one who knew you before you slipped into the Institute, so unassuming-like. But how you rose when given a chance.”
“Well, at least you still like to talk,” I mutter.
“And you still like to make enemies.”
“Everyone has a hobby.” I examine the stump where his right hand should be. “Desperate for attention? You’re the only Gold alive that wouldn’t bother getting a new hand.”
“I wonder why you provoke me still when your reputation is shattered. Your bank accounts emptied.” I shift in my seat. “Oh, yes. You didn’t know? Pliny is thorough when he cuts a man’s hamstrings. He emptied all your funds. So really there’s very little to you. But here you sit, at the bottom of a moon. Alone. With me, with mine. Throwing insults.”
“These are yours?” I ask, glancing at the lowColors around us. “I would have thought they’d disgust you.”
“Who said you have to like your children?” the Jackal asks pleasantly. “They are a product of our Golden loins.” He gnaws on the chicken leg, cracking the bone with his teeth before discarding it. “Do you know what I have been doing with my time?”
“Wanking off in the bushes?”
“Alas, no. My defeat at your hands set me back. I’m not afraid to say it. You hurt me and my plans. My sister also wounded me. Gagging me? Binding me naked and throwing me at your feet? That stung, especially when all the grand lords and ladies of our fine Peerless caste got a chuckle at my expense.”
“We both know you don’t feel pain, Adrius.”
“Oh, call me the Jackal. Hearing ‘Adrius’ from your lips is like hearing a cat bark.” He shivers, but leans delightedly forward in his seat when a Brown woman with thick arms and tattoos webbing her pale, pockmarked skin slips from the kitchens carrying three steaming bowls. She sets them before us. “Thank you!” he says, taking two for himself.
I eye the bowl suspiciously.
“I’m not a poisoner,” he says. “I could poison my father any time I want, but I don’t. Do you know why?”
“Because you’ve not gotten what you need out of him.”
“And that is?”
“His approval.”
The Jackal watches me through the steam of his bowl. “Quite. I have been offered a great deal of apprenticeships. They offer it to my father’s name, not me. They despise me because I ate students. But it’s such hypocrisy. What else was I to do? We’re told to win, and I did my best. And then they criticize. Act noble, as though they didn’t commit murder themselves. Madness.”
He shakes his head with a little sigh. “Yes, I could have gone to study war at the Academy like you. I could have studied politics at the Politico School on Luna. I might have been a decent Judiciar if I could stomach Venus. But I will rise without their hypocrisy. Without their schools.”