Chapter 877: A flaming sword to the back

Arthur’s head bounced off the basalt again.

Lucy didn’t wait for it to settle. She dragged her fist back up, lightning spitting off her split knuckles, and put it straight back into the same cheek. The rock under his skull cracked. A flat chunk of it broke loose and skidded across the crater floor.

"Get up," she said. Her voice had gone raw from screaming and she hadn’t noticed. "Come on. I know you can take more than this."

Arthur’s lips moved. Blood came out instead of words, black and thick, running sideways into his ear.

"Lucy... please..."

"No. No, you don’t get to say please." She hit him again. "You’ve been alive longer than my family’s been keeping records. You think I don’t know what this is? You go limp, you beg, I slow down, and then something comes crawling up out of the floor at me. I’m not stupid!"

His fingers twitched against the stone. She grabbed his wrist and slammed it flat, pinning it under her knee next to the other one. One of his metal spikes was still buried in her forearm, and when she leaned down it ground against the bone. She leaned anyway.

"You said there was another way. Up there. I heard you." Her face was inches from his. "So say it again."

"I... the energy, it..."

"Say it!"

He coughed, and more blood came up. His one good eye rolled toward the sky and back to her.

Lucy pulled her arm back. The current around her fist got so dense that the gravel near her knees started hopping in place, little stones jumping and dropping and jumping again.

"LUCY!"

A voice came from above. It was loud enough that she felt it in her back teeth.

Her fist was already on its way down.

"IT’S ENOUGH!"

Heat hit the back of her neck, dry and sudden, nothing like lightning. Her fist stopped an inch from Arthur’s nose.

She looked up.

A man was coming down out of the sky on fire. He wasn’t falling. He was taking his time, flames pouring off his shoulders and trailing behind him in two long ribbons, his boots leaving smoke in the air with every slow step he took on nothing. He had his arms spread wide like he was walking onto a stage.

"Lucy Grey!" he boomed. "Look at you! Look at this hole! Did you make this hole? Of course you did. Who else would make a hole like this?"

Lucy blinked blood out of her eye. "Aurelius?"

"Your Majesty, to most people." He grinned down at her. "But you’ve earned the first name. Clearly. Gods, girl, what did you do to him?"

He kept descending, and the air around the crater got warmer by the second. Lucy could feel sweat starting under the wreck of her armor.

"I’ll tell you something," Aurelius said, "and I want you to know it hurts me to say it. I got word two days ago that the Queen of Raiju was taking her whole army to Arthur Kaine’s front door." He pressed a flaming hand to his chest. "Two days! And do you know how many invitations I received?"

"Aurelius..."

"None! Not a letter. Not a call. Nothing." He shook his head at her like a disappointed uncle. "I would have brought ships. I would have brought snacks. I would have brought the good wine."

"I wasn’t really thinking about wine."

"Nobody ever is, that’s the tragedy." He dropped the last few feet and landed on the crater’s rim. Little flames licked up out of the basalt where his boots touched it. "But do you know what disappointed me more? I asked around. Quietly. And not one of the other families sent a single soldier. Not Sterling, not the Marricks, none of them. A Grey walks into Arthur Kaine’s house to settle what all eight of us should have settled a long time ago, and the rest of them are, what, having lunch?"

Lucy didn’t move off Arthur. "We weren’t alone. I brought my army."

"Your army is magnificent. Truly. My people are with them right now, actually." He jerked a thumb back toward the fortress. "That old man’s shadow soldiers keep standing back up after you put them down, which is extremely rude. So we’re helping with that."

Lucy turned her head. Three miles off, the stronghold was still smoking. She’d been staring at Arthur for so long that she hadn’t looked at it once since they hit the ground. Above it now, mixed in with her own storm, there were streaks of orange fire cutting through the dark.

"Huh," she said.

"Huh!" Aurelius laughed. "That’s all I get. Huh." He started down the slope of the crater, loose rock rolling ahead of his feet. "Listen to me. Lucy. You can ease up on the old geezer now. Look at him. He’s not going anywhere."

"He keeps saying that’s the point."

"I know why you’re doing this." His voice dropped, and most of the show went out of it. "Lucas. I know."

Lucy’s jaw moved, but she didn’t answer.

"That boy is my friend too, you know," Aurelius went on. "He stood on my ship. He ate more of my kitchen than any guest I’ve had in fifty years. He and Noah went outside my hull and beat each other half to death on a moon for fun and came back in laughing about it." He shook his head, smiling a little. "When I heard what was done to him, I broke a table. A very old table. My wives were furious."

Arthur made a small wet noise under her. Lucy pressed down harder on his wrists.

"So let me take him from here," Aurelius said. "You’ve done enough. More than enough. Get your people together, get them off this rock, go home and sleep for a week. I’ll make sure the old man stays where he’s put."

Lucy looked at him for a long moment. Her breath was coming out in short, hard pulls.

"Did Eclipse send you?"

Aurelius slowed. "Eclipse?"

"Did they know you were coming? Did they ask you to come?" She laughed, and it came out ugly. "Because if they had time to call you, but they couldn’t find the time to come out here for Lucas themselves... for their friend, the guy who’s bled for every single one of them..."

"No, no. Lucy." He held up his hands. "Nobody sent me. I came on my own."

She stared at him.

"Oh," she said. "Okay."

Aurelius nodded and kept walking down toward her.

"Then how’d you know?"

He didn’t answer right away.

"Nobody knew," Lucy said slowly. "I didn’t tell Eclipse. I didn’t tell the EDF. I didn’t tell anybody. This stayed inside the family. Only Greys knew we were coming here, and only the ones I picked."

Aurelius reached the bottom of the crater. He walked the last few steps until he was standing right beside her, close enough that she could feel the heat coming off his coat on her bare arm. He looked down at Arthur’s ruined face, then over at her.

He smiled.

"That’s because Ares reach goes well beyond the Eternal Pyre."

His eyes caught fire. Not a glow. Actual flame came up out of them, and his hands went from skin to something bright and liquid, dripping orange onto the basalt.

Lucy started to move.

But the flamboyant king was a step ahead. He put his palm flat against her chest.

BOOOM!

The blast picked her up off Arthur like she weighed nothing. She went backward across the crater, through the far wall of it, through the rock behind that, and kept going until the ground stopped her. She hit and rolled and hit again, and then she wasn’t moving anymore.

Aurelius stood still for a second, looking at the trench she’d cut through the stone. Smoke drifted up from the far end of it.

Then he bent down, took Arthur by the front of his shredded collar, and lifted him with one hand. Arthur’s head lolled. His one eye found Aurelius’s face and stayed there.

Neither of them said a word.

The flames around Aurelius roared up, and he left the ground so fast that the crater floor cracked under the launch.

Lucy came to with a ringing in her ears that sounded like an alarm going off three rooms away.

She was on her back. The sky over her was swimming. She tried to sit up and her chest screamed at her, and when she looked down, the front of her armor had melted into a stiff, blackened lump that was still smoking.

’What...’

She got an elbow under herself. Then a hand. Everything tilted.

Up in the sky, a small burning figure was climbing straight up, getting smaller fast.

Lucy tracked it with her eyes, higher, higher, past her own storm clouds, up into the thin edge of the atmosphere. And then she saw where it was going.

There was a shape up there. It hadn’t been there before. A huge, dark mass sitting against the stars, so big that she could see it from the ground in daylight, lights running along its length like a city seen from a mountain.

The Eternal Pyre.

The flaming figure reached it and disappeared.

Lucy stayed on her elbow, staring up, her mouth half open.

****

Back on Earth, it had been four days since the fleet jumped home from the Corvane Expanse, and nobody had slept properly in any of them.

All four Cardinals were on the highest alert anyone had ever recorded. Shelters that hadn’t been opened in years were getting restocked. EDF patrols were doubled in every major city, then doubled again. Every news channel was running some version of the same warning: there may be an attack, stay close to home, know where your nearest shelter is.

What nobody would tell them was an attack from what.

The anchors guessed. Harbingers, mostly. Some of them said the purge. One channel had a retired colonel on for an hour talking about a rogue faction, and he was wrong about almost everything, but people watched him anyway because at least he sounded sure.

Down at the bottom of the ocean, Eclipse headquarters had gone quiet in a nervous way. People walked faster in the halls. Conversations stopped when somebody walked in.

Kelvin was on a couch in his lab, holding a cup of tea he did not want.

"I could just look at it," he said.

"No," Diana said. She was sitting on the arm of the couch, not looking at him, scrolling through something on a pad.

"I’m not saying build. I’m saying look. With my eyes. At the workbench."

"You’ll look at it, and then you’ll touch it, and then it’ll be three in the morning and you’ll have a soldering iron in your mouth."

"That happened one time."

"Twice."

"The second time doesn’t count, I was holding it for Sam."

Diana finally turned and looked at him. He’d lost weight on the trip back. There was a bandage on the side of his neck and another one running up his left forearm, and every few minutes he pressed two fingers into his right temple and held them there like he was trying to push something back in.

He was doing it right now.

"Headache?" she said.

He took his fingers away. "No."

"Kelvin."

"A little one. It’s fine. It’s a normal amount of headache for a man who blew up a planet." He sipped the tea and made a face. "This is chamomile."

"It’s good for you."

"It tastes like a lawn."

The door slid open, and Sophie walked in with Lila and Angel behind her. Sera came last, her wings tucked tight to her back to fit through the frame.

Sophie dropped into a chair and put her face in her hands.

"That bad?" Diana asked.

"He asked me three times," Sophie said through her fingers. "Three times, in one briefing, if Eclipse had any eyes near the Corvane corridor."

"We don’t," Angel said.

"I told him that. All three times." Sophie sat back. "He just kept nodding at me, like if he asked enough I’d remember a secret outpost we forgot about."

Lila had gone to the window. Outside, a school of silver fish was turning in the floodlights, all of them changing direction at once. She didn’t seem to be watching them.

"What’d they say about tracking?" Kelvin asked. "Did they pick anything up? Heat, a gravity wake, anything?"

"Nothing," Sophie said. "Every deep scanner the EDF has is pointed at that part of space, and it’s like it just..." She opened her hand. "Gone."

"It’s not gone," Lila said without turning around.

"I know it’s not gone."

"I’m just saying. It’s not."

"Lila, I know."

Sera leaned against the wall, her arms crossed. "How fast could it reach us? Truly. If it chose to."

Everyone looked at Kelvin.

He put his tea down. "Okay, so that depends on whether it can do space travel, and I don’t know if a five-horn that just got... unmade... can do that right away, because I’ve never seen anything regrow from that much damage. Nobody has. I’m not even sure it’s thinking straight. If it’s even thinking."

"That’s not an answer," Angel said.

"Because I don’t have one! That’s my answer. I don’t know."

"Give me a number."

"Weeks," Kelvin said. "Maybe. If it’s slow. If it’s not slow..." He shrugged and went for his temple again, then caught himself and put his hand back in his lap.

Diana watched him do it and didn’t say anything.

"And if it comes here," Angel said. "Just say it does. Say it shows up over the Northern Cardinal tomorrow morning. What do we have?"

Nobody answered.

"I’m asking," Angel said. "Seriously. Lucas is out. Noah’s... wherever Noah is. Kelvin’s suit is space dust..."

"...and the rest of us are still picking glass out of ourselves from the last one. So what do we have?"

"Thank you," Kelvin said.

"...So what do we have?"

"We have the General," Sophie said.

"Who wants to kill it."

"Yes."

"Who said, out loud, in front of a room full of people, ’They captured it, I can kill it,’ and then just walked out."

"So we were told," Sophie said. "We heard it."

"And you believe him?"

Sophie opened her mouth, then closed it. "I believe he believes it."

"That’s not the same thing."

"I know it’s not the same thing, Angel!"

The room went quiet. Out in the hall, somebody laughed at something, and it sounded wrong.

"Sorry," Sophie said after a second.

"No, it’s fine." Angel rubbed the back of her neck. "I’m scared too."

Lila finally turned from the window. "My parents held that thing for three years," she said. "Three years, and none of us knew. They had it in a box underneath a fake mine and they talked about it at dinner, probably." She let out a short breath. "If they could keep it quiet that long, somebody else can find it and keep it quiet too. That’s what scares me. Not it showing up here. Somebody getting to it first."

Diana set her pad down. "That’s the General’s whole argument."

"I know," Lila said. "That’s why it scares me."

Kelvin’s pad buzzed on the cushion beside him. He glanced at it, frowned, and glanced again.

"That’s a Raiju channel," he said.

Sophie sat up. "Lucy?"

"Priority line. Emergency tag." He was already swiping it onto the big wall screen. "Okay, everybody... just, okay."

The screen flickered, cut to static, and then Lucy was there.

Diana stood up.

Lucy’s face was covered in blood. Some of it was dry and cracked across her forehead, and some of it was still running from her hairline down past her ear. Her chest armor was a melted, black mess. Behind her there was rock, and smoke, and a dark sky, and somewhere off camera people were shouting orders.

"Lucy," Sophie said. "Lucy, what happened, are you..."

"I’m fine."

"You’re not fine, you’re..."

"I said I’m fine." Lucy wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and smeared the blood further. "I need you to listen to me. All of you. I went after Arthur."

Nobody said anything.

"I took my army. We found his stronghold, we hit it, we took it." She was breathing hard, like she’d been running. "He was weak. Really weak. He was down to almost nothing, and I fought him, and I had him. I had him on the ground."

"You went after Arthur?" Kelvin said. "By yourself?"

"I had an army."

"That’s still by yourself! Why didn’t you call us? We would’ve..."

"Would you?" Lucy looked straight into the camera. "Would you really? Because last time I called you about Lucas, I got a lot of ’we’re looking into it’ and not much else."

Kelvin’s mouth stayed open, but nothing came out of it.

"That’s not fair," Diana said quietly.

"Maybe not." Lucy didn’t look away. "Doesn’t matter now. I had him. He was talking about another way to help Lucas. He said it. I heard him say it. I was going to make him tell me."

"Okay," Sophie said slowly. "Okay. So where is he?"

Lucy’s jaw tightened.

"Aurelius took him."

The room went completely still.

"I’m sorry," Kelvin said. "Say that again."

"King Aurelius showed up. Out of nowhere. Told me he’d heard about the raid, told me his people were helping mine at the fortress, told me to ease up. Talked to me about Lucas. About how Lucas was his friend." Her voice cracked on the last word and she pushed straight through it. "And then he put his hand on my chest and blew me through a wall, and he picked Arthur up and flew him back to the Eternal Pyre."

"King Aurelius did what?" Angel said.

"Aurelius?" Sera said at the same time. "The king who hosted us? Who..."

"That can’t be right," Diana said. "Lucy, that can’t... he helped us start Eclipse. He’s..."

"I know what he is!" Lucy shouted, and the speakers crackled. "I know! I’ve known him longer than you have! He hugged me when my father came home!"

Diana shut her mouth.

Lucy took a breath. When she spoke again, her voice was low and flat.

"Nobody knew about that raid. Nobody outside my family. And he knew. He knew where we’d be and he knew when." She leaned closer to the camera. "So I’m going to say this one time, and I need you to hear it. One of the original families is working with Arthur."

"Lucy..." Sophie started.

"And that man just cost me my brother."

The screen went black.

Nobody moved. On the wall, the call window showed a single line of grey text: [Connection terminated by sender.]

Kelvin was still holding his pad up in front of him. Slowly, he lowered it.

Diana sat back down on the arm of the couch without seeming to decide to.

Sophie looked at Lila. Lila looked at Angel. Angel looked at the dead screen, then at Sera, and Sera’s wings had come halfway open without her noticing.

Out in the hallway, the same person laughed again.

"What," Angel said finally, "just happened?"