“It is finished,” Mai admitted, “for now. Chaos reigns outside of this system, and likely will be here in very short order. If we were prepared, it would be a golden opportunity.” For a moment, a flash of fire lit up the other man’s dark eyes. Then, “But we are not.”

Angry now, Evan stepped forward. His hand itched to grab something, and his needler came to mind. “We are out here, all of us, because of you,” he accused Mai Wa. “You made promises.”

“And it is no longer possible to keep them.” As if speaking to someone in the distance, the Ijori Dè Guāng leader added, “It will not be the first time I have had to break such promises.”

What was one more person to fail the Capellan people, and Evan? Raised as a ward of the state, Evan had hardened himself against most disappointments. But for the first time in years, he felt betrayed. Felt it deep down near where the fires of hope had burned hot not many hours before. If the secret he carried might change things, Evan would have spilled it in front of all. But it would not. He heard the sound of defeat lurking behind Mai Uhn Wa’s words. The movement’s sifu was crestfallen—emptied, and hiding it.

Evan turned away, ignoring questions that Mai would deftly deflect. He walked to the bluff’s edge, staring out over the dark valley as, behind him, cadre members abandoned plans and each other in their empty haulers.

Then all was silent. For a time.

“You are angry.”

Evan knew that Mai Wa had not left. The rebel leader’s eyes had never left the back of his neck. They burned there, drilling holes.

“Anger has its uses, Evan Kurst, but if you let it guide your next actions, you will be lost.”

“I no longer need to listen to you, Mai Uhn Wa. What I do next is my own business.” To stand alongside people who do, and not people who make excuses.

“If you think I enjoy seeing years of my work destroyed in a single night, you are greatly mistaken, and not the man I thought you would become.” Evan noticed that Mai held back from saying “the man I thought you were.” Mai stared through Evan. “I have more important people than you to whom I will answer for this failure. This time I gambled and I lost. Liao is on its own.”

Evan couldn’t trust anything the other man said. Mai Wa claimed ties to the highest authorities. To have been involved in several uprisings on Liao over the years. He did put together the Ijori Dè Guāng, and now he abandoned it—that was what Evan knew. That Mai thought it necessary made no difference to Evan.

More importantly, it made no difference to the Capellan people.

Evan waited until footsteps gave way to the whine of powerful turbines, and then until the last echoes of the hovercraft were lost back down the long access road. He watched the heavens rotate on the axis star, a parade of celestial beings. Thinking. Planning.

“We have always been alone,” he finally whispered into the dark summer’s night.

But that was not necessarily the case.

Not anymore.

Celestial Palace

Zi-jin Chéng (Forbidden City), Sian

Sian Commonality, Capellan Confederation

8 March 3134

Footsteps echoed in the outer corridor. Mai Uhn Wa nodded to himself. He sat cross-legged on his thin mattress, feeling the cold stone floor through a half inch of meager padding and his threadbare prison dungarees. Gooseflesh puckered his bared forearms.

He faced the gray cinderblock wall at the rear of his isolation cell, hunching forward in concentration. A few strands of graying hair fell across Mai’s face as he dabbed more of his homemade stain onto the wall’s porous surface. His ink was rancid pork fat rendered down by slow cooking under the light they never turned off, mixed with soy and the red juice he pulped out of beets. A strip of cloth torn from his prison dungarees acted as his brush. Wrap it over the end of two fingers, dip into the dark stain, and then dab carefully. One day’s work completed two or three ideograms.

He’d worked halfway through his second when his cell door slammed back and a pair of Maskirovka agents entered. Mai Wa did not flinch at their arrival, or even turn to look. Whatever was to happen would happen with or without his participation.

“More of your grandiose delusions?” Michael Yung-Te asked, disbelief coloring each word. A shrugged pause. “On your feet, Mai Wa.”

Snugging the cloth strip tighter against his discolored fingertips, Mai Wa continued to stain a dark line across the wall’s light gray facing.

Yung-Te stepped farther into the room. He scuffed his boot against the side of the thin mat. “I said get up.” His tone was darker this time. Angry.

A second request? How novel. Almost enough to convince him to obey. Instead, Mai Wa put finishing touches on the ideogram for “loyalty,” then straightened to survey his work.

“The highest and most important ideal in any MechWarrior’s life is loyalty,” he whispered softly.

That was the opening tenet of the sixth dictum of the Lorix Order, a quasireligious philosophy endorsed by the Capellan state. It was also among the strongest principles endorsed by Capellan Warrior Houses, the elite military enclaves of the Confederation: Imarra… Kamata… Dai Da Chi… Hiritsu…

Ijori?

As always, thoughts of the fallen Warrior House led Mai Uhn Wa back to his recent attempts to resurrect it on Liao, and to the disastrous timing of the ComStar Blackout. Ijori Dè Guāng. The Light of Ijori. If he’d only had six more months.

“Mai Wa—” Agent Yung-Te warned.

The Mask agents still hadn’t forced him away from his work. Sensing that this visit was something beyond their normal interrogation and reeducation attempts, Mai Wa now set his wooden cup of stain to one side and folded his strip of cloth next to it. He rose slowly to his feet, favoring his right side with the taped ribs and electroshock burns. Neat columns of ideograms very nearly covered the entire wall. Starting as high in the upper right corner as Mai Wa could reach, they scrolled from top to bottom and right to left in the ancient tradition. The first five dictums, all complete, and the start of the sixth. With effort, he would find just enough room to finish them.

“Such determination would have been admirable put in service to the State, rather than against it.”

Mai Wa turned and half bowed toward his keepers. “I am a traitor,” he agreed. “I serve the Confederation.”

Michael Yung-Te was in his late thirties, with black hair and a lean, angular face. Ambition burned behind gray-blue eyes. He was fast approaching that timeless quality some men of Asian descent were fortunate to gain. His associate looked older, with the sunken-eyed expression of a man who was part of too many secrets, too much senseless violence. Your basic agent of the Capellan secret police. Both wore Han-styled charcoal gray suits and high-necked, stiff white shirts. Their mandarin collars were closed at the throat with a triangular Confederation crest.

“You’ll serve as an example to other would-be traitors,” the older agent said, but his voice lacked the usual dogmatic conviction.

Mai Uhn Wa looked at both men with a faint stirring of curiosity. A tense smile crept at the right side of his face. The left no longer worked so well, even with the cheekbone reconstruction. “Will I?” he asked.