I prick a thumb with the needle.
The Core Golds watch as a single drop of blood rolls down the needle to be absorbed into the metal. Whatever poison it contained does not activate. If Atalantia didn’t have my DNA before, now she does. The orb ripples with wonderful ingenuity as the serpents carve paths along its exterior until a bust of my preadolescent face stares back at me. The slave returns it to Ajax.
He examines the face.
“DNA profile confirmed,” a bald Green adjunct says. His pupils glow from his uplink. “Security helix processing.” A lengthy pause. Kalindora turns, but Ajax’s eyes never leave my face. “DNA profile authenticated. Forgery probability one in thirteen trillion.”
“I concur,” Kalindora says. Her demeanor softens.
The Core Golds stiffen at the news, their competitive brains calculating how my return affects their individual machinations.
Still unconvinced, Ajax tosses the Manteío to the slave. “What did my grandfather say to my mother the night he had her execute Flavius au Grecco?”
I don’t smile at the memory. “Now that the pig is filleted and eaten, what’s for dessert?”
His eyes widen.
“Brother!” He springs through the Obsidians to rattle my bones with a powerful hug that lifts my feet clean off the deck. This is the Ajax I remember. The kind, generous brother who could never bridle either affection or fury. “I’m sorry, we had to be certain. The enemy is devious in his gambits.” When he sets me down, he clutches my face between his long-fingered hands and kisses me firmly on the mouth. “Little Lysander. Haha! They said you were dead. But look at you…” He dusts off my shoulders. “Corporeal as a cormorant and still a spry dandy of a thing after so long in captivity.” He makes a feint at my face. “Not that spry.”
Captivity.
Cassius would laugh.
I’m not eager to disabuse Ajax of the notion just yet.
“They said you were your mother’s spitting image,” I reply. “They didn’t say you were taller.”
It’s an understatement. He’s far larger.
Awash with joy, he claps my shoulders and leans his forehead down to press it against mine. He breathes deep. Scent has always been his favorite sense.
“When we received the family code, we thought it was one of the Slave King’s tricks. Then we saw your signifier. The complexity of the code was a symphony upon my heartstrings.” He closes his eyes. “Together again.”
“Together again, brother,” I say. It still seems impossible to me, and I hold back because I know the revelations I must share will be held against me. Only when Ajax hugs me after I have shared those revelations will this reunion be real. “I mourned for your grandfather. He deserved far better.”
Ajax pulls away, his face downcast.
“Yes, well, he made his mark, didn’t he? Now it is our turn.” His eyes break away from our private moment long enough to survey the Raa. His voice becomes truculent. “Unless you have a new family…”
Kalindora clears her throat. With apologies, I greet her with less informality than I would like and introduce Diomedes and the Rim deputation. In reply to Diomedes’s formal bow, Kalindora merely clicks her tongue.
“When we received Lysander’s communiqué, we thought you a mummer’s fiction. But here you are, bold as alley cats, and just as dusty.”
“On behalf of the Rim Dominion—” Diomedes begins before Kalindora interrupts him.
“Your uncle extends his apologies. Atlas would be here to greet you himself, but war is a…consuming affair.” Her lovely eyes narrow. “I’m sure you wouldn’t know.”
Ajax steps territorially between Diomedes and me to measure the Rim Knight. “So you’re the eldest spawn of Romulus and that Venusian whore. How bold you must be to liberate Lysander from the captivity of the Traitor.” So that is what they call Cassius. Not ideal. “I suppose I owe you a debt, cousin.”
Odd as it is to hear aloud, they are cousins. Both with the pure Raa blood of the Conquerors in their veins. But, like so many of the dwindling apex genetic lines, they hold little in common except that shared lineage and the layered animosity of ancestral infighting.
Diomedes looks at me, then back to Ajax.
“I hold no man in my debt,” he replies.
“I assume the Traitor is dead?” Ajax asks. Diomedes nods. “Did you deliver the killing blow? Did he squeal?” Diomedes does not reply. “I see your aesthetic penury extends to your vocabulary. In the Core, it is polite to answer a question when asked.”
Seraphina’s jaw muscles work as she watches her brother suffer the insult.
“I take no joy in the demise of an honorable man,” Diomedes says to the taller man with princely dignity. “But I fear before he fell, he…slew your half-brother, Bellerephon.”
Ajax startles Diomedes with a laugh. Despite his admitted dislike for his cousin Bellerephon, seeing amusement at the death of a man he knew all his life fills Diomedes with a sense of disappointed understanding. He is in a different world now where down is up and up is down. One can never really prepare for that.
“Bellerephon?” Ajax laughs. “Never knew the spawn. Our spies say you were barely better than him with the blade. Tell me, who is the most exemplary of the Rim Knights? You?”
“I would be a poor judge. But if you measure the worth of a man by his skill with a blade, then I imagine it is the person least like you.”
Seraphina blinks at her brother as if he just grew horns. A slow smile grows.
The Rim is not here to be pushed around.
Kalindora raises an eyebrow at me.
Ajax, on the other hand…well, he was mocked as a child, and does not like it any better as a man. He circles Diomedes and succumbs to mock rage when he spies the lightning and clouds on Diomedes’s cloak. “It seems you wear my crest, goodman.”
“It is not your crest any more than it was the crest of the man who came before you. It represents an idea. In our case, humility.”
“Humility? And how is that?”
“A man is nothing before the storm.”
Ajax stands nose-to-nose with the smaller man. “I am the storm. Take it off.”
Oh, Hades is the shared thought of every single person watching, maybe even Ajax. Atalantia certainly doesn’t want him killing or getting killed by a Raa in a hangar bay.
Never deny your enemy a chance for retreat. Victory may cost too much.
“Why?” Diomedes replies evenly. “I am the Storm Knight of the Rim Dominion. I make no claim to be that of the Core.”