“Yes, there were!”

“Then their sacrifice will be remembered,” Harmony says solemnly.

“Vox clamantis in deserto,” I exclaim.

Mickey sits quiet, but he allows himself a small smile.

“Trying to impress us with your Gold fancy talk?” Harmony asks.

“He feels like a voice crying out in the desert. Shouting all in vain,” Mickey explains. “It’s simple Latin.”

“So you know what’s what,” Harmony says. “Become a Gold and suddenly you have all the answers.”

“Wasn’t that the point of me becoming a Gold? So we could see how they think?”

“No. It was to position you to strike at their jugular.” She balls her fist and strikes the palm of her metal hand in emphasis. “Don’t act like you were born better than I. Remember, I know what you are inside. Just a scared boy who tried to kill himself when he was too weak to save his wife from hanging.”

I sit speechless.

“Harmony, he’s just trying to help,” Evey says softly. “I know it must be hard, Darrow. You’ve spent years with them. But we have to hurt them. See, that’s all they understand. Pain. Pain is how they control us.”

She continues slowly.

“The first day I served a Gold was the greatest pleasure I felt in all my life. I can’t explain it to you. It was like meeting God. Now I know that it wasn’t pleasure I felt. It was the absence of pain.

“That is how they train Pinks to live a life of slavery, Darrow. They raise us in the Gardens with implants in our bodies that fill our lives with pain. They call the device Cupid’s Kiss—the burn along the spine, the ache in the head. It never stops. Not even when you close your eyes. Not when you cry. It only stops when you obey. They take the Kiss away eventually. When we’re twelve. But … you can’t know what it’s like, the fear that it’ll come back, Darrow.”

Evey plays with her nails. “Gold needs to feel pain. They need to fear it. And they need to learn they may not hurt us without consequences. That’s what Harmony means.”

And I thought the Golds were broken. We’re all just wounded souls stumbling about in the dark, desperately trying to stitch ourselves together, hoping to fill the holes they ripped in us. Eo kept me from this end. Without her, I’d be like them. Lost.

“It’s not about hurting them, Evey,” I say. “It’s about beating them, Eo taught me that, Dancer too. We’re swinging at the apples when we should be digging at the roots. What will bombing them do? What will assassination accomplish? We need to undermine their Society as a whole, erode their way of life, not this.”

“You’ve lost sight of your mission, Darrow,” Harmony says.

“You say that to me?” I ask. “How could you possibly understand what I’ve seen?”

“Exactly. What you’ve seen. Dine with the masters and forget the slaves. You can afford to live a life of theories. What about what I’ve seen? We’re down in the shit. We’re dying. And what are you doing? Philosophizing. Living the plush life. Bedding Pinks. I had to listen as Dancer died. I had to hear the bloodydamn screams rattle over the coms as the lurchers came to kill. And I could do nothing to save them. If you had lived through that, you would know fire can only be fought with fire.”

I know where these words lead. They gave me a hole in my gut. Put me weeping in the mud, Cassius standing over me. That is how this will end.

“You may have lost all you love, Harmony. I’m sorry for that. But my family is still in a mine. They will not suffer because you are angry. My wife’s dream was about a better world. Not a bloodier one.” I stand. “Now, I want to talk to Ares.”

Silence lies heavy upon the room.

“Give us a moment.” Harmony looks at Mickey and Evey. She watches Mickey stand reluctantly. He pauses, as if to say something to me, but, feeling Harmony’s eyes on him, thinks better of it.

“Good luck, my darling,” he says simply, patting my shoulder.

“Let me stay,” Evey says, drawing close to Harmony. “I can help with him.”

Harmony touches her hip. “Ares wouldn’t allow it.”

“After what I did today … don’t you trust me? I’m not like the rest.”

“I trust you, as much as any Red. But this is something I can’t share with you.” She kisses Evey softly on the lips. “Go.”

Evey pauses at the door, looking back at me. “We’re not your enemies, Darrow. You have to know that.”

The door clicks shut behind her and we’re left alone in Mickey’s office.

“Does she know?” I ask.

“Know what?”

“That you sent her on a suicide mission.”

“No. She’s not like us. She trusts.”

“And you’d sacrifice her?”

“I’d sacrifice any of us to kill a Peerless Scarred. All we get are worthless Pixies and Bronzies. I want the real tyrants.”

“You’re using her worse than Mickey ever did.”

“She has a choice,” Harmony mutters.

“Does she?”

“Enough.” Harmony sits and gestures for me to do the same. “Dancer may be dead, but Ares has a plan for you.”

“No. No. I’m done listening to his plans through others. I’ve sacrificed three years of my life for him. I want to see his face.”

“Impossible.”

“Then I’m done.”

“How can you be done, eh? You’re trapped. You bloodywell can’t go home to Lykos, can you? One way out. Buckle tight and stay the course.”

Her words strike hard. I can’t go back. The loneliness in that is inexpressible. Where is my home? Where will I go even if this all ends with Gold falling to ashes?

“You won’t meet Ares. Even I’ve never even seen his face, Helldiver.”

“You haven’t? You’ve worked for him almost as long as Dancer. Years. How can you of all people trust him?”

“Because he put the first gun in my hand. He wore his helmet and pushed a mark IV scorcher with a full ion clip into my palm.”

“Is Ares a man?” I ask.

“Who cares?” She pulls up a holoDisplay The electrons swirl in the air, coalescing into a series of maps. I recognize the topography. Mars. Venus. Luna, I think. Dozens of red dots blink throughout blueprints of cities, dockyards, and a dozen other vital organs. Bombs, I realize. Harmony looks tiredly at the map. “This is Ares’s plan. Four hundred bombings. Six hundred assaults on weapons depots, government facilities, electric companies, communications grids. It is the sum of the Sons of Ares. Years of planning. Years of scraping up resources.”

I had no idea we could carry out such action. I stare at the map in awe.

“The bombings today were meant to provoke a response. Get them all hot and bothered. We want them mobilizing. If they mobilize, they condense. Easiest to burn pitvipers when they are packed tight.”

“When will this take place?”

“Three nights from now.”

“Three nights,” I repeat. “At the conclusion of the Summit. He can’t want me to do th—”

“He does. Three nights from now, the Summit finishes up nice with a gala. Wine, Pinks, silks, whatever the hell you Goldbrows do. All the bloodydamn Governors, all the Senators, Praetors, Imperators, Judiciars from across the Society will be here. A Solar System of monsters brought by the power of the Sovereign to one place. It’ll be ten more years before we see this. There’s no way for the Sons to get in, but you can go where we can’t. You can strike the blow that we cannot.”

I feel the words coming like a train down a tunnel.

“When they have all gathered nice and tightlike. When the Sovereign stands to give her speech, you kill the Goldbrow bastards with a radium bomb we hide on you. Mickey and a crew of gizmos built the tech. Once we see the bomb has detonated via the dataRecorder we’ll plant on you, we unleash hell across the system. Burn them out.”

This is the sum of all I’ve done?

“There has to be another way.”

“There were always two plans, Helldiver. This, and you. Ares and Dancer said you were our hope, our chance at another path. They boasted like boys that you could destroy Gold from inside. But you failed, like I said you would. You’re gonna claim blood is on Evey’s hands. Well, it’s on yours too.”