“Shut up!” Aja says, lashing out at him. But Sevro dances back and Cassius and I dart forward, stabbing at her. She parries Cassius’s thrust at her neck and his two successive moves, but not in time to counter me. I feign a thrust at her abdomen and slash her shin instead, raking through the metal. Metal sparks and blood coats my blade. Mustang stabs her calf. I dart back as she wheels on me, making her overextend so Sevro can strike again. He does, furiously slashing the Achilles tendon on her right leg. She grunts and stumbles before lashing at him. He dances back.
“You’re gonna die,” he says with an evil little hiss. “You’re gonna die.”
“Shut up!”
“That one’s for Quinn,” he hisses as Cassius cuts through the tendons of her left knee. “This one’s for Ragnar.” I impale her right thigh with an underhanded thrust. “This one’s for Mars.” Mustang takes her arm off at the elbow. Aja looks down at the appendage on the ground, as if wondering if it belongs to her.
But she’s given no respite. Sevro tosses aside his pulseFist, picks the Truth Knight’s razor from the ground and jumps in the air to bring both his swords down into her chest, hanging there, a foot off the ground. Their faces inches from one another, noses nearly touching as Aja sinks to her knees, setting Sevro back on his feet.
“Omnis vir lupus.”
He kisses her nose and jerks his razors out of her chest, letting them slither back into whips around his forearms. Arms outstretched, he backs away from the dying Protean Knight, greatest of her age as she pulses her last blood onto the cold floor. Still on her knees Aja’s eyes drift hopelessly to the Sovereign, the woman who became mother to her sisters, who raised her, loved her as truly as any who rules the Solar System can love, and now dies along with her.
“I’m sorry…my liege.” Aja wheezes wet breaths.
“Never be,” Octavia manages from her place on the ground. “You burned bright, my Fury. Time itself…will remember you.”
“Nah, prolly not,” Sevro says pitilessly. “Nighty, night, Grimmus.”
He lops off her head and kicks her in the chest. Her body teeters back and collapses to the floor, where he jumps atop it on all fours and howls. A deep moan escapes the Sovereign’s mouth at the hideous sight. She shuts her eyes, leaking tears as we make our way to her and Lysander. Cassius and I limping together, his arm around my shoulders to take pressure off the leg he drags behind him. Mustang follows us. Sevro secures the Jackal by sitting on his chest and juggling a razor over his head.
Soaked in his grandmother’s blood, Lysander grabs Octavia’s razor from the ground and bars our way. “I won’t let you kill her.”
“Lysander…don’t,” Octavia says. “It’s too late.”
The boy’s eyes are swollen with tears. The razor trembles in his hands. Cassius steps forward and extends a hand. “Drop the weapon, Lysander. I don’t want to kill you.” Mustang and I exchange a glance. One Octavia notices, and must make her soul shiver. Lysander knows he cannot fight us. His sense overcomes his grief and he drops the razor, stepping back to watch us hollowly.
Octavia’s eyes are distant and dark, already halfway to that other world where even she does not reign. I thought there’d be spite in the end from her, or begging like Vixus or Antonia. But there’s nothing weak in her even now. It’s sadness and love lost that come in the end. She did not create the hierarchy, but she was its keeper in her time. And for that, she must be held accountable.
“Why?” Octavia asks Cassius, shaking from sorrow. “Why?”
“Because you lied,” he says.
Wordlessly Cassius pulls the small holocube, a thumb-sized triangular prism, from his ammunition belt and sets it in her bloody hands. Images dance across its surfaces before floating into the air above the Sovereign’s hands. The scene of Cassius’s family dying plays, bathing her in blue light. Shadows move through a hall, becoming men in scarabSkin. They cut down his aunt in a hallway and the men move through and appear a moment later dragging children, which they kill with the razors and boots. More bodies are dragged and piled up, then lit on fire so there would be no survivors. More than forty children and non-scarred family members died that night. They thought they could heap the sin upon the shoulders of a fallen man. But it was the Jackal’s work. He finished the war between the Bellona and the Augustuses, and the Sovereign’s cooperation and silence was his price for my Triumph.
“You ask me why?” Cassius’s voice is barely above a whisper. “It is because you are without honor. I swore an oath as an Olympic Knight to honor the Compact, to bring justice to the Society of Man. You swore the same, Octavia. But you forgot what that meant. Everyone has. That is why this world is broken. Maybe the next one can be better.”
“This world is the best we can afford,” Octavia whispers.
“Do you really believe that?” Mustang asks.
“With all my heart.”
“Then I pity you,” Mustang says.
And so does Cassius. “My heart was my brother. And I no longer believe in a world that says he was too weak to deserve life. He would have believed in this. In the hope for something new.” Cassius looks over at me. “For Julian, I can believe that too.”
Cassius hands me the two other holocubes from his pouch. The first is the murder of my friends at my Triumph. The second is for the Rim; when they see this recording, they will know I have a struck a blow for them. Politics never rests. I set the two holocubes in the Sovereign’s hands to join the first. Rhea glows before her. A blue and white moon, gorgeous beside its brothers Iapetus and Titan as they orbit giant Saturn. Then over the moon’s north pole, tiny slivers which you’d hardly notice flicker several innocent times, and mushrooms of fire bloom upon the surface of the blue and white planet.
As the nuclear fire blazes in the Sovereign’s eyes, Mustang moves aside so I can crouch before the dying woman, speaking softly so she will know that justice, not vengeance, has found her in the end.
“My people have a legend of a being who stands astride the road leading to the world after. He will judge the wicked from the good. His name is the Reaper. I am not him. I’m just a man. But soon you will meet him. Soon he will judge you for all the sins you hold.”
“Sins?” Octavia shakes her head, looking back to the three holos dancing in her hands, these drops in her ocean of sins. “These are sacrifices. What it takes to rule,” she says, her hands closing around them. “I own them as I own my triumphs. You will see. You will be the same, Conqueror.”