The night ends on a sour note as I am woken an hour into sleep. Mustang sits on the edge of my bed as my eyes flutter open. When I see her, I feel a spike of terror in me, assuming she’s come for a different reason, that her hand on my leg means something simple, something human. Instead, she brings me news I wished never to hear again.

Tactus flouted my authority and tried to rape a Ceres slave during the night. Milia caught him, and Mustang barely stopped her from cutting Tactus a thousand different ways. Everyone is up in arms.

“It’s bad,” Mustang says. “The Diana students are in their wargear and are about to try and take him back from Milia and Pax.”

“They’re mad enough to fight Pax?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll get dressed.”

“Please.”

I meet her in the Ceres warroom two minutes later. The table is already carved with my slingBlade. I didn’t do it, and it’s much better work than I could have managed.

“Thoughts?” I fall into the seat opposite Mustang. We’re a council of two. It’s times like this when I miss Cassius, Roque, Quinn, all of them. Especialy Sevro.

“When Titus did this, you said we make our own law, if I remember right. You sentenced him to death. So are we still doing that? Or are we doing something more convenient?” she asks me as though she already thinks I’m letting Tactus off the hook.

I nod, surprising her. “He’ll pay,” I say.

“This … it just pisses me off.” She takes her feet off the table and leans forward to shake her head. “We’re meant to be better than this. That’s all Peerless are supposed to be—transcendent of the urges that”—she holds up ironic airquotes—“enslave the weaker Colors.”

“It isn’t about urges.” I tap the table in frustration. “It’s about power.”

“Tactus is of House Valii!” Mustang exclaims. “His family is ancient. How much power does that asshole want?”

“Power over me, I mean. I told him he couldn’t do something. Now he’s trying to prove he can do whatever he wants.”

“So he’s not another heathen like Titus.”

“You’ve met him. Of course he’s a heathen. But no. This was tactical.”

“Well, the clever shit has put you in a tight spot.”

I slap the table. “I don’t like this—someone else picking the battles or the battlefield. That’s how we will lose.”

“It’s a no-win, really. We can’t come out ahead. Someone is going to hate you either way. So we just have to figure out which way is the least damaging. Prime?”

“What about justice?” I ask.

Her eyebrows float upward. “What about winning? Isn’t that what matters?”

“You trying to trap me?”

She grins. “Just testing you.”

I frown. “Tactus killed Tamara, his Primus. Cut her saddle and then rode over her. He’s wicked. He deserves any punishment we give him.”

Mustang raises her eyebrows as if this is all to be expected. “He sees what he wants, and he takes it.”

“How admirable,” I mutter.

She tilts her head at me, lively eyes going over my face. “Rare.”

“What’s that?”

“I was wrong, about you. That’s rare.”

“Am I wrong about Tactus?” I ask. “Is he wicked, really? Or is he just ahead of the curve? Does he just grasp the game better?”

“No one grasps the game.”

Mustang puts her muddy boots on the table again and leans back. Her golden hair falls past her shoulders in a long braid. The fire crackles in the hearth, her eyes dance over my face. I don’t miss my old friends when she smiles like that. I ask her to explain.

“No one grasps the game, because no one knows the rules. No one follows the same set of rules. It is like life. Some think honor universal. Some think laws binding. Others know better. But in the end, don’t those who rise by poison die by poison?”

I shrug. “In the storybooks. In life there’s no one left to poison them, often.”

“They expect an eye for an eye, the House Ceres slaves. Punish Tactus, you piss off the Diana kids. They get you a fortress and you spit on them for it. Remember, as far as they are concerned, Tactus hid in a horse’s belly half a day for you when you took my castle. Resentment will swell like a Copper bureaucracy. But if you don’t punish him, you’ll lose all of Ceres.”

“Can’t do that.” I sigh. “I failed this test before. I put Titus to death and thought I was meting out justice. I was wrong.”

“Tactus is an Iron Gold. His blood is as old as the Society. They look at compassion, at reform, as a disease. He is his family. He will not change. He will not learn. He believes in power. Other Colors are not people to him. Lesser Golds are not people to him. He is bound to his fate.”

Yet I’m a Red acting like a Gold. No man is bound to his fate. I can change him. I know I can. But how?

“What do you think I should do?” I ask.

“Ha! The great Reaper.” She slaps her thigh. “When have you ever cared what anyone thinks?”

“You’re not just anyone.”

She nods and, after a moment, speaks. “I was once told a story by Pliny, my tutor—a ghastly fellow, really. And a Politico now, so take this all with a shipload of salt. Anyway: On Earth, there was a man and his camel.” I laugh. She keeps going. “They were traveling across this grand desert full of all sorts of nasties. One day, as the man prepared camp, the camel kicked him for no reason. So the man whipped the camel. The camel’s wounds grew infected. It died and left the man stranded.”

“Hands. Camels. You and metaphors …”

She shrugs. “Without your army, you’re a man stranded in a desert. So tread carefully, Reaper.”

I speak with Nyla, the Ceres girl, in private. She’s a quiet one. Smart as a whip, but not physical in any way. Like a shuddering songbird, like Lea. She has a bloody swollen lip. It makes me want to castrate Tactus. She didn’t come in wicked like the rest. Then again, she got through the Passage.

“He told me he wanted me to rub his shoulders. Told me to do what he said because he was my master because he spent blood taking the castle. Then he tried … well … you know.”

A hundred generations of men have used that inhuman logic. The sadness her words create in me makes me miss home. But that happened there too. I remember the screams that made the soup ladle tremble in my mother’s hand. Remember how my cousin earned antibiotics from that Gamma.

Nyla blinks and stares for a moment at the floor.

“I told him I was Mustang’s slave. House Minerva’s. It’s her standard. I didn’t have to obey him. He just kept pushing me down. I screamed. He punched me, then he just held my throat till things started to fade and I barely smelled his wolfcloak anymore. Then that tall girl, Milia, knocked him off, I guess.”

She didn’t mention that there were other Diana soldiers in the room. Others watched. My army. I gave them power and this is how they use it. It’s my fault. They are mine but they are wicked. That will not be fixed by punishing one of them. They have to want to be good.

“What would you like for me to do to him?” I ask her. I don’t reach out to comfort her. She doesn’t need it, even though I think I do. She reminds me of Evey too.

Nyla touches her dirty curls and shrugs.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing isn’t enough.”

“To fix what he tried to do to me? To make it right?” She shakes her head and her hands clutch her sides. “Nothing is enough.”

The next morning, I assemble my army in the Ceres square. A dozen limp; few Aureate bones can really be broken because of their strength, so most of the injuries suffered in the assault were superficial. I smell the resentment from Ceres students, from Diana students. It’s a cancer that’ll eat away at the body of this army, no matter who it is focused on. Pax brings Tactus out and shoves him to his knees.

I ask him if he tried to rape Nyla.

“Laws are silent in times of war,” Tactus drawls.