Six asked no one, everyone, “Is he going to jump?”
The Sector Vigil said, “Of course he’ll jump.”
Seven: “No. He’s talking. He’s weaseling his way out of it.”
Six: “Five denari says he doesn’t jump.”
Eight: “
Nego!
He will. He has to. I got your five.”
Gemma raised her hand, not looking up from her own station. “I’m good for ‘he jumps.’”
Seven studied the tyro’s face uncertainly. His brows met. “You think? You’re on.”
“Plant it,” Gemma said.
The other observers slapped their wagers on Six’s console.
Six offered a side bet, “He’s going to piss.”
There were no takers for that action.
Cliff-dwelling creatures dropped from their crags, spread leathery wings wide, and soared on the thermals.
Cinna hesitated on the windy height. A silicate sting in the dry air bit his cheeks. His tunic and his trouser legs fluttered. He tried to force a calm tone into his voice, but a thin note of panic cut in. “This is pointless. I understand if I refuse, then I am not whom you want, and I deserve to die. But when I do obey, I will prove my devotion, but I’ll also be dead and no use to you.”
“You are assuming this is all about you,” Orissus said, cold.
Nicanor said, “Ever think this might be
our
trial.
We
can’t afford to be soft.”
“There are things more important than you,” Pallas said. “Jump.”
Cinna looked straight down.
Oh, bull
. This was a loyalty challenge. There was a catch in here somewhere. He had to stop looking down. And don’t stand here too long. Longer made it harder.
Fear of heights was hard-coded into a gene that most human beings carried. Fear of heights was a survival trait—to keep you from doing something like this.
The rational mind could overrule instinct. Trust must overcome natural fear. That’s what this was about.
Cinna resolved to take that step.
Fortune favors the bold
.
So said the mind. The body was in full revolt. The hard-wired terror in his lizard brain subverted his conscious will. His legs were turning to gelatin.
A balk showed fear and distrust. He needed to get this over with before terror trickled down his leg.
I’m freezing up. Too much thinking. Go
.
The ground below was so very far away.
Go
.
Just go.
“There he goes!” Observer Eight crowed as the tyro stepped off the cliff edge.
“Pay me,” said Gemma, still not looking, at the same time as the Vigil’s hand slapped down on the console with a victorious, “Ha!”
“Get stuffed.” Seven sulked his way back toward his own station.
Six groaned.
Observer Eight snatched up the pot to divide among the winners while the jumper plummeted.
It was an eternal way down. The youth was still dropping. The camera tracked him all the way.
The Vigil shuddered, watching.
Gods, that’s terrifying
.
Gravity was strong on Phoenix, but the air was thick. The Vigil was not sure what that did to terminal velocity. It was still fast.
Abruptly the sour mutters of the losers and cackles of the winners cut off, and all the watchers jerked straight up like a stand of vibrating spears with a collective shout, “
Shit!
”
Nox spat a mouthful of windblown dust into a rubbery bush while his brothers leaned over the cliff edge, watching the fall. Faunus whistled a descending note.
Nox heard their sudden gasps.
Faunus’ whistle sputtered short.
Nox’s brothers convulsed. Clogged wordless sounds gurgled in their throats. They backed away from the edge.
When they turned around for Nox to see, their bronze-toned faces were nearly white. Their wide eyes and open mouths told Nox that the net hadn’t deployed.
A delayed sound of impact traveled up from below.
“No,” said Nox. It had to be a joke. They were playing him. “No.”
But not one of them broke character.
Nox silently coaxed them,
Come on. Somebody crack a grin
.
Anybody
.
Faunus!
Jovial Faunus looked ill.
Okay, they got him to bite. His brothers were razzing him. Had to be. Just had to be. Nox marched to the edge to see for himself.
Way down below lay a red spray like a lopsided flower. The compact pile in the center had to be the broken body. It was very realistic.
And there was nothing joking in the sounds of his brothers’ ragged breathing behind him. Nox turned toward them.
The white line around Faunus’ lips. Leo and Galeo’s constricted pupils. Those were hard to fake. Tears welled in Pallas’ eyes.
Nox stared at them blankly. The sick feeling rooting in his gut was unacceptable. He needed someone to make it stop. Step back a frame. Make this not real.
Nox turned round again, looked down. The horror was still down there, stark, simple, finite.
No
.
Someone—Nicanor—grabbed Nox by the back of the tunic, dragged him back from the edge.
And then they were all running.
The running didn’t seem to have a start. Just suddenly they were all doing it, racing down the path, back the way they came.
Nox’s heart pounded in his aching chest. His pulse roared in his ears. His thoughts jammed into a ball and unraveled.
He was falling behind the others. His brothers were titans. Nox, not a natural brother, was the runt of this litter, at a shrimpy six foot tall. He was the ugly duckling.
Nox was not as powerful as a Roman-designed son. There was no stigma to adoption here. Once a family accepted your pledge, you were in. And Nox’s tall, bronzed brothers considered him one of their own.
Another one of their own lay back there, broken at the foot of the cliff. Cinna.
Nox’s breaths drew in harshly. He tasted dust.
Skidded to halt and turned around.
Pallas glanced back, stopped and yelled, “Nox! What the hell!”
“I need to go get him,” Nox cried.
“He is
dead!
”
“I know. You go. I can’t just—” He cut himself short. There was no way out of this. None. He started over, “There’s going to be an inquest. They’ll need to hang this on someone. I’ll take the hit. You were never there!
Go!
”
Nox didn’t wait for arguing. He was already running again, back to where a side path forked off. The path that would lead him to Cinna.
Nox ran. Not so much a run as a controlled fall, moving so fast he could scarcely get each foot down in front of him to take the next step as the ground came up.
By the time he got to level ground, the muscles in his legs felt solidified. He kept going, hauling his legs forward as though he were dragging and dropping tree stumps.
He closed his stinging eyes. The image came back, as if imprinted on the insides of his eyelids. A pile of bones at the bottom of the cliff.
His eyes flew back open.
He saw his future. There was nothing in it.
He hadn’t just hazed Cinna, which was a crime. He hadn’t just failed to save Cinna from the danger he’d put him into. He’d run away. He left him.
Even though Cinna wasn’t going anywhere, Nox felt an urgent need to get to him.
The broken pile of bloody bones just shouldn’t be alone.
“
Deus! Deus! Deus
!” Observer Six cried.
The whole of Sector Primus Surveillance Center focused on one subject only.
Gemma pushed away from her own console to come over to Six’s monitor.
Wagers fell from hands as if the money were bleeding on them.
Observer Six gawked at his monitor. “They dropped him!”
“They
left
him!” the Vigil breathed.
“Can’t be,” said Gemma. The thought was beyond Roman comprehension. She wedged her way in with the Vigil to see the satellite image. “They’re running to get him. The path winds around to the bottom. They’re going back.”
“
No they’re not!
” Six cried, close to hysteria. “They
left
him!”
He angled the camera wider over to the cloud of dust. The seven surviving ephebes were running down the wrong path—the one that led straight away from the cliff and away from the dead man.
The Vigil commanded, “Six, keep a tracker on Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Gemma, call a skyhook to go get Humpty Dumpty.”
The Vigil paced the compartment, treading on the fallen money, rage banging inside his skull.
Cowards! Cowards! Cowards!
Bleary-eyed, the air knifing his lungs, his throat raw and dry, Nox cast about the flat land for his brother. His muscles shook with dehydration. He couldn’t find Cinna.
This was the place. The foot of Widow’s Edge. But Nox couldn’t see the body. There ought to be an obvious bloody mess.
He called out for Cinna.
Which was stupid because Cinna was dead. Nox had seen the blood spatter from the cliff top.
He spied a dark shadow on the sun-baked dirt, and he stumbled closer. As he drew near he saw the dark color was not a shadow.
He had found the blood. All the moisture had seeped into the thin layer of dust on the parched ground. It looked nearly black.
But where was the body?
Nox walked a helpless circle, bewildered.
His hands lifted and fell to his sides, useless.
He dropped down to sit in the middle of the bloodstain on the hard ground. He leaned over his knees, his head hanging forward. He raked his hands back through his dusty blond hair.
Shit shit shit
.
A disk of bright light fell on him from above, brighter and hotter even than the sunlight, blasting away any shadow. He heard the hovercraft and a loud voice through a bullhorn: “Halt in the name of the Empire!”
Halt what?
Nox stayed in his sit. He lifted his hands over his bowed head.
3
A
THUNDERING RUMBLE shook Glenn Hamilton awake, rattled all the gear in the ship’s lockers, and sent tremors through the deck.
Sounded like grinding rocks in an avalanche. It was a sound you never want to hear on a ship traveling faster than light in the middle of the big black empty between stars.
Glenn patted the mattress beside her. No husband. She was alone in the bed.
Another wave of crashing booms sent her scrambling under the rack to retrieve emergency life sacs for herself and her husband. There wasn’t a proper spacesuit on board this crate, and any second the hull was going to rip open to the lightless, airless, flash-freeze of perfect vacuum at way below nothing Celsius.
She’d been told that it was not the cold that kills you. Freezing required the presence of other matter to conduct the heat out of your body. She didn’t believe it.
But she did know for sure that eyes and lungs and stomachs and guts ruptured in zero pressure.
She didn’t know how much pain you felt when dying like that. Didn’t ever want to know.
Glenn scrambled for the sleep compartment’s hatch.
Abruptly the noise shut off.
A sheepish laugh carried through the thin partitions of the ship. “Sorry! Sorry!”
Glenn dropped into a crouch, let her forehead rest against the compartment’s hatch. She growled, hugging the his-and-hers life sacs. She knew that voice.
Patrick. Her husband.
From another sleeping compartment someone else called a sleepy scold, “Less decibelage is required!” Sounded like Aaron Rose, the xenoaerologist.
Glenn never trusted LEN spacecraft, never imagined she would be traveling on one in the company of an international scientific exploration team. She felt much safer on board the space battleship
Merrimack
in the middle of a firefight with Romans than in this flimsy civilian box.
This ship bore the typically benign League of Earth Nations name
Spring Beauty.
Through the vents Glenn could see lights going on outside her compartment. Feet shuffled and clomped on the ship’s single deck. Apparently the scientists were assembling out there in the common area.
The other xenos would want to see what Patrick, the xenolinguist, was up to so loudly in the middle of ship’s night.