“My, my.” Vixus makes a sound of approval. “That would have been a gorydamn prize and a half. You could have added another tear to your face, legionnaire. I’ve been hunting that Obsidian dog with the Seventh. Ash Lord’s offered quite the price for his slave’s return.” He snorts something up his nose. Sounds like one of the stim canisters Tactus was so fond of. “Who’s this, then?”
He means me.
I hear my heart in my ears.
“A gift from Praetor Grimmus in exchange for…the package she’s taking home,” Holiday says. “If you understand me, sir.”
“Package. Half a package, more like.” He chuckles at his own joke. “Anyone I know?” His hand touches the edge of my hood. I cower away. “A Howler would warm the heart. Pebble? Weed? No, much too tall.”
“An Obsidian,” Trigg says quickly. “Wish it was a Howler.”
“Ugh.” Vixus jerks his hand back as though contaminated. “Wait.” He has an idea. “We’ll put him in the cell with the Julii bitch. Let ’em fight for supper. What do you think, Thirteen? Up for some fun?”
“Trigg, kill the camera,” I say sharply from beneath my hood.
“What?” Vixus asks, turning.
Pop. A jamfield goes up.
I move, clumsy but fast. Snapping my hands out of the shackles, I pull free my hidden razor with one hand and rip off my hood with the other. I stab Vixus through the shoulder. Pin him to the wall and head-butt him in the face. But I’m not what I was, even with the drugs. My vision swims. I stumble. He doesn’t, and before I can react, before I can even focus my vision, Vixus pulls his own razor.
Holiday shields me with her body, shoving me away. I fall to the ground. Trigg’s even faster on the take; he jams his slug shooter straight up into Vixus’s open mouth. The Gold freezes, staring down the metal length of the barrel, tongue against the cold muzzle. His razor pauses centimeters from Holiday’s head.
“Shhhhhh,” Trigg whispers. “Drop the razor.” Vixus does.
“The hell are you thinking?” Holiday asks me angrily. She’s breathing heavily and helps me back up. My head’s still spinning. I apologize. It was stupid of me. I steady myself and look over at Vixus, who stares at me in horror. My legs tremble, and I have to hold myself up by one of the gravLift’s railings. My heart rattles from the strain of the drug in my system. Stupid to try to fight. Stupid to use a jammer. The Greens watching will piece it together. They’ll send Grays to investigate the prep room. Find the bodies.
I try to paste my splintering thoughts together. Focus. “Is Victra alive?” I manage. Trigg pulls the gun out just past the teeth so Vixus can answer. He doesn’t. Not yet. “Do you know what he did to me?” I ask. After a stubborn moment, Vixus nods. “And…” I laugh. It stretches like a crack in ice, spreading, widening, about to shiver a thousand different ways, till I bite my tongue to cut it short. “And…and still you have the balls to make me ask you twice?”
“She’s alive.”
“Reaper…they’ll be coming for us. They’ll know it’s jammed,” Holiday says, looking at the tiny camera node in the elevator’s ceiling. “We can’t change the plan.”
“Where is she?” I twist the razor. “Where is she?”
Vixus hisses in pain. “Level 23, cell 2187. It would be wise not to kill me. You might put me in her cell. Escape. I will tell you the proper path, Darrow.” The muscles and veins under the skin of his neck slither and rise like snakes under sand. No body fat to him. “Two backstabbing Praetorians won’t get you far. There’s an army in this mountain. Legions in the city, in orbit. Thirty Peerless Scarred. Boneriders in southern Attica.” He nods to the small jackal skull on the lapel of his uniform. “You remember them?”
“We don’t need him,” Trigg snaps, fingering his gun’s trigger.
“Oh?” Vixus chuckles, confidence returning as he sees my weakness. “And what are you going to do against an Olympic Knight, tinpot? Oh, wait. There are two here, aren’t there?”
Holiday just snorts. “Same thing you’d do, goldilocks. Run.”
“Level 23,” I tell Trigg.
Trigg punches the gravLift controls, diverting us from their escape route. He pulls up a map on his datapad and studies it briefly with Holiday. “Cell 2187 is…here. There will be a code. Cameras.”
“Too far from evac.” Holiday’s mouth tightens. “If we go that way, we’re cooked.”
“Victra is my friend,” I say. And I thought she was dead, but somehow she survived her sister’s gunshots. “I won’t leave her.”
“There’s not a choice,” Holiday says.
“There’s always a choice.” The words sound feeble, even to me.
“Look at yourself, man. You’re a husk!”
“Back off him, Holi,” Trigg says.
“That Gold bitch isn’t one of us! I won’t die for her.”
But Victra would have died for me. In the darkness, I thought of her. The childish joy in her eyes when I gave her the bottle of petrichor in the Jackal’s study. “I didn’t know. Darrow, I didn’t know,” was the last thing she said to me after Roque betrayed us. Death around, bullets in her back, and all she wanted was me to think well of her in the end.
“I won’t leave my friend behind,” I repeat dogmatically.
“I’ll follow you,” Trigg drawls. “Whatever you say, Reaper. I’m your man.”
“Trigg,” Holiday whispers. “Ares said—”
“Ares hasn’t turned the tide.” Trigg nods to me. “He can. We go where he goes.”
“And if we miss our window?”
“Then we make a new one.”
Holiday’s eyes go glassy and she works her large jaw. I know that look. She doesn’t see her brother as I do. He’s no lurcher, no killer. To her he’s the boy she grew with.
“All right. I’m in,” she says reluctantly.
“What about the Peerless?” Trigg asks.
“He puts the code in and he lives,” I say. “Shoot him if tries anything.”
—
We exit the elevator at level 23. I wear my hood again, having Holiday guide me along as Vixus walks ahead as if escorting us to a cell, Trigg ready with his gun close behind. The halls are quiet. Our footsteps echo. I can’t see past the hood.