“Not exactly.” I lead him into the lounge. He’s slow and loud in the forty kilogram prisoner boots they’ve sealed his feet inside, but is still more at home in the room than I am. I pour him a scotch as he sits on the couch, still expecting some sort of trap. He raises his eyebrows at the glass.
“Really, Darrow? Poison isn’t your style.”
“It’s a cache of Lagavulin. Lorn’s gift to Roque after the Siege of Mars.”
Cassius grunts. “I never was fond of irony. Whisky, on the other hand…we never had a quarrel we couldn’t solve.” He looks through the whisky. “Fine stuff.”
“Reminds me of my father,” I say, listening to the soft hum of the air vents above. “Not that the stuff he drank was good for anything more than cleaning gears and killing brain cells.”
“How old were you when he died?” Cassius asks.
“About six, I reckon.”
“Six.” He tilts his glass thoughtfully. “My father wasn’t a solitary drinker. But sometimes I’d find him on his favorite bench. Near this eerie path on the spine of the Mons. He’d have a whisky like this.” Cassius chews the inside of his cheek. “Those were my favorite moments with him. No one else around. Just eagles coasting in the distance. He’d tell me what sort of trees were on the hillside. He loved trees. He’d ramble on about what grew where and why and what birds liked to roost there. Especially in winter. Something about how they looked in the cold. I never really listened to him. Wish I had.”
He takes a drink. He’ll find the spirit in the glass. The peat, the grapefruit on the tongue, the stone of Scotland. I can never taste anything but the smoke. “Is that Castle Mars?” Cassius asks, nodding to the hologram above Roque’s console. “By Jove. It looks so small.”
“Not even the size of the engines on a torchShip,” I say.
“Boggles the mind, the exponential expectations of life.”
I laugh. “I used to think Grays were tall.”
“Well…” He smiles mischievously. “If your metric is Sevro…” He chuckles before growing serious. “I wanted to say thank you…for inviting me to the funeral. That was…surprisingly decent of you.”
“You’d have done the same.”
“Hmm.” He’s not sure of that. “This was Roque’s console?”
“Yeah. I was going through his vids. He’s rewatched most of these dozens of times. Not the strategies or the battles against other houses. But the quieter bits. You know.”
“Have you watched them?” he asks.
“I wanted to wait for you.”
He’s struck by that, and suspicious of my hospitality.
So I press play and we fall back into the boys we were in the Institute. It’s awkward at first, but soon the whisky dispels that and the laughs come easier, the silences stretch deeper. We watch the nights when our tribe cooked lamb in the northern gulch. When we scouted the highlands, listening to Quinn’s stories by the campfire. “We kissed that night,” Cassius says when Quinn finishes a story about her grandmother’s fourth attempt to build a house in a mountain valley a hundred kilometers from civilization without an architect.
“She was climbing into her sleeping roll. I told her I heard a noise. We investigated. When she found out I was just throwing rocks into the dark to get her alone, she knew what I wanted. That smile.” He laughs. “Those legs. The kind meant to be wrapped around someone, you know what I mean?” He laughs. “But the lady did protest. Put her hand in my face, shoved me away.”
“Well, she wasn’t an easy one,” I say.
“No. But she did wake me up near morning to give me a kiss or two. On her terms, of course.”
“And that is the first time throwing stones has ever worked on a woman.”
“You’d be surprised.”
There’s moments I never knew existed. Roque and Cassius try to catch fish together only for Quinn to push Cassius in from behind. He takes a deep drink beside me now as his younger self splashes in the water and tries to pull Quinn in. We watch private moments where Roque fell in love with Lea, where they scouted the highlands in the dark. Their hands brushing innocently together as they stop for water. Fitchner surveying them from a copse of trees, taking notes on his datapad. We watch the first time they sleep snuggled under the same blankets in the gate’s keep, and as Roque takes her off to the highlands to steal his first kiss only to hear boots on rocks and see Antonia and Vixus emerge from the mist, eyes glowing with optics.
They took Lea and when Roque fought, threw him off a cliff. He broke his arm and was swept down the river. By the time he returned, after three days of walking, I was supposedly dead by the Jackal’s hand. Roque mourned for me and visited the cairn I built atop Lea only to find that wolves dug in and had stolen the body. He wept there by himself. Cassius grows somber witnessing this, reminding me of the distress on his face when he returned with Sevro to discover what had happened to Lea and Roque. And perhaps feeling guilty for ever allying himself with Antonia.
There’s more videos, more little truths I discover. But the one viewed the most according to the holodeck was the time Cassius said he’d found two new brothers and offered us places as lancers to House Bellona. He looked so hopeful then. So happy to be alive. We all did, even I, despite what I felt inside. My betrayal feels all the more monstrous watching it from afar.
I refill Cassius’s tumbler. He’s quiet under the glow of the hologram. Roque’s riding his dappled gray mare away from us, looking pensively down at his reins. “We killed him,” he says after a moment. “It was our war.”
“Was it?” I ask. “We didn’t make this world. And we’re not even fighting for ourselves. Neither was Roque. He was fighting for Octavia. For a Society that won’t even notice his sacrifice. They’ll play politics with his death. Blame him. He died for them and he’ll just be a punch line.” Cassius feels the disgust I intended. That’s his greatest fear. That no one will care that he goes. This noble idea of honor, of a good death…that was for the old world. Not this one.
“How long do you think this goes on?” He asks pensively. “This war.”
“Between us or everyone?”
“Us.”