I lean forward.

“But win?” I ask. “What is there to win?”

He smiles.

“At this moment, you are in a remote terraformed valley in the southernmost part of Valles Marineris. In this valley, there are twelve Houses in twelve castles. After orientation tomorrow, you will go to war with your fellow students to dominate the valley by any means at your disposal. Consider it a case study in gaining and ruling an empire.”

There are murmurs of excitement. It is a game. And here I thought I would have to study something in a classroom.

“And what if you are Primus of the winning House?” Antonia asks. She twirls a finger through her golden curls.

“Then welcome to glory, darling. Welcome to fame and power.”

So, I must be Primus.

We eat a plain dinner. When Fitchner leaves, Cassius stirs, his voice coming cold and filled with dark humor.

“Let us all play a game, my friends. We will each say whom we killed. I will start. Nexus au Celintus. I knew him when we were children, as I know some of you. I broke his trachea with my fingers.” No one speaks. “Come now. Families should not keep secrets.”

Still, no one answers.

Sevro is the first to leave, making his derision for Cassius’s game clear. First to eat. First to sleep. I want to follow. Instead, I make small talk with peaceful Roque and massive Titus after Cassius gives up on his game and retires as well. Titus is impossible to like. He’s not funny, but everything is a joke to him. It’s like he’s sneering at me, at everyone, even though he is smiling. I want to hit him, but he doesn’t give me a reason. Everything he says is perfectly innocuous. Yet I hate him. It’s like he doesn’t think me a human; instead I’m just a chess piece and he’s waiting to move me around. No. Shove me around. He somehow forgot to be seventeen or eighteen like the rest. He is a man. Taller than two meters, easy. Maybe nearing two and a half meters. Lithe Roque, on the other hand, reminds me so much of my brother Kieran, if Kieran could kill. His smiles are kind. His words patient and wistful and wise, just as they had been earlier. Lea, the girl who looks like a limping baby deer, follows him everywhere. He’s patient with her in a way I couldn’t be.

Late in the night, I look for the places where the students died. I cannot find them. The stairs no longer exist. The castle has swallowed them. I find rest in a long dormitory filled with thin matresses. Wolves howl from the shifting mists that cloak the highlands beyond our castle. I find sleep quickly.

21

OUR DOMINION

Fitchner wakes us from the long dormitories in the dark of morning. Grumbling, we roll out of double bunk beds and set out from the keep to the castle’s square, where we stretch, then set off at a run. We lope easily in the .37grav.

Clouds drop soft showers. The canyon walls fifty kilometers west and forty kilometers east of our little valley tower six kilometers high. Between them is an ecosystem of mountains, forests, rivers, and plains. Our battlefield.

Ours is a highland territory. There rise mossy hills and craggy peaks that dip into U-shaped, grassy glens. Mist blankets all, even the thick forests that lie like homespun quilts over the foothills. Our castle stands on a hill just north of a river in the middle of a bowl-like glen—half grass, half woods. Greater hills cup the glen in a semicircle to the north and south. I should like it here. Eo would have. But without her, I feel as lonely as our castle looks on its high, removed hill. I reach for the locket, for our haemanthus. Neither is with me. I feel empty in this paradise.

Three walls of our hill castle stand atop eighty-meter stone cliffs. The castle itself is huge. Its walls rise thirty meters. The gatehouse swells out from the walls as a fortress with turrets. Inside the walls, our square keep is part of the northwestern wall and rises fifty meters. A gentle slope leads up from the glen’s floor to the castle’s western gate, opposite the keep. We run down this slope along a lonely dirt road. Mist embraces us. I relish the cold air. It purifies me after hours of fitful sleep.

The mist burns away as the summer day dawns. Deerling, thinner and faster than the creatures of Earth, graze in the fir woods. Birds circle above. A single raven promises eerie things. Sheep litter the field and goats wander the high rocky hills we run up in a line of fifty and one. Others of my House may see animals of Earth, or curious creatures the Carvers decided to make for fun. But I see only food and clothing.

The sacred animals of Mars make their home in our territory. Woodpeckers hammer oak and fir. At night, wolves howl across the highlands and stalk during the day through the woodlands. There are snakes near the river. Vultures in the quiet gulches. Killers running beside me. What friends I have. If only Loran or Kieran or Matteo were here to watch my back. Someone I could trust. I’m a sheep wearing wolves’ clothing in a pack of wolves.

As Fitchner runs us up the rocky heights, Lea, the girl with the limp, falls. He lazily nudges at her with his foot till we carry her on our shoulders. Roque and I bear the load. Titus smirks, and only Cassius helps when Roque tires. Then Pollux, a lean, craggy-voiced boy with buzzed hair, takes over for me. He sounds like he’s been smoking burners since he was two.

We trudge through a summer valley of forests and fields. Bugs nip at us there. The Goldbrows drip with sweat, but I do not. This is an icy bath compared to the rigors of my old frysuit. All about me are trim and fit, but Cassius, Sevro, Antonia, Quinn (the bloodydamn fastest girl or thing I’ve ever seen on two feet), Titus, three of his new friends, and I could leave the rest behind. Only Fitchner with his gravBoots would outpace us. He bounds along like a deerling, then he chases one down and his razor whips out. It encircles the deerling’s throat, and he contracts the blade to kill the animal.

“Supper,” he says, grinning. “Drag it.”

“You could have killed it closer to the castle,” Sevro mutters.

Fitchner scratches his head and looks around. “Did anyone else hear a squat ugly little Goblin go … well, whatever sound Goblins make? Drag it.”

Sevro grabs the deer’s leg. “Dickwit.”

We reach the summit of a rocky height five kilometers southwest of our castle. A stone tower dominates the peak. From the top, we survey the battlefield. Somewhere out there, our enemies do the same. The theater of war stretches to the south farther than we can see. A snowy mountain range fills the western horizon. To the southeast, a primordial wood knots the landscape. Dividing the two is a lush plain split by a massive southbound river, the Argos, and its tributaries. Farther south, past the plains and rivers, the ground dips away into marshes. I cannot see beyond. A great floating mountain hovers two kilometers up in the bluish sky. It is Olympus, Fitchner explains, an artificial mountain where the Proctors watch each year’s class. Its peak shimmers with a fairy-tale castle. Lea shuffles closer to stand beside me.

“How does it float?” she asks sweetly.

I haven’t the faintest clue.

I look north.

Two rivers in a forested valley split our northern territory, which is at the edge of a vast wilderness. They form a V pointing southwest to the lowlands, where they eventually form one tributary to the Argos. Surrounding the valley are the highlands—dramatic hills and dwarf mountains scarred with gulches where mist still clings.

“This is Phobos Tower,” Fitchner says. The tower lies in the far southwest of our territory. He drinks from a canteen while we go thirsty, and points northwest where the two rivers meet in the valley to form their V. A massive tower crowns a distant dwarf mountain range just beyond the junction. “And that is Deimos.” He traces an imaginary line to show us the bounds of House Mars’s territory.