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Muttering to herself, he grips the activation knob on the side of the mask “On you”

“Do it”

Pytha twists the activation knob on the mask There’s a sibilant hiss as the three hundred needles built into the plastic of the scrae of Cassius’s face He jerks once Twice And then a gurgling screa steam from a kettle His muscles knot and clench rock-hard as he thrashes back intoso viciously with his ar, inco out and al Pytha in the shin She jumps back The rafting imitation bone onto his jaw and forehead and eye sockets In twenty seconds, the mask’s indicator blinks froin to fade We’re on our sides breathing heavily He mewls and drifts into shallow insentience The indicator blinks green I disentangleline of pain down my forearm that insinuates a stress fracture

Pytha rushes to Cassius and gingerly unlatches the ry, swollen flesh Like a wax figure strayed too close to fla subsides under the anti-inflammation pack that Pytha applies

When she pulls the pack away, our handsoe with a primitive forehead, a bulbous, veiny nose, chipped ears, and a slack one, recessed into this new Bronzie visage Pytha wipes tears from her eyes

She looks up atsalts out of my hands to crack them under his nose “You’re pri the vomit from his face as he comes to “Easy as sin It’s all over now It’s all over” He sits up with her help and together atch out the viewport to see the destroyer opening its docking bay to shole

I STAND UPON MY TOWER as a hard rain falls

Before ht A complexes lie dark pools of shadohere the Jackal, and the years of war that followed, left their mark Noith the radiation scrubbed and pulsedomes removed, arthropodal construction ships fro and ferrying workers and metal

Hyperionitself, but the southern cities were all but destroyed by the Ash Lord’s forces under his mad Minotaur, Apollonius au Valii-Rath, before the latter’s capture and irave

My people do suffer But Dancer’s false peace is not the answer In my youth I was consumed with the fever of war I don’t feel that fever now I only feel the cold weight of duty, and the fear of what it will do to lows as it approaches the top ofpad

A thickset Silver h-collared white velvet jacket The eyeball of a Gold glints fro on his heavy hand

“Quicksilver,” I say “Thank you for co”

He grunts and shakes er than a child’s skull, floats behind hi in the rain A red eye pulses in its center I watch it warily

“I watched the socialists tear off your crown That was an e spectacle,” he sneers “Matteo’s men tell me they’ve concluded the debate The Obsidians abstained Just sat there Caraval and the Coppers ith the Vox Your arrest warrant will be issued within the hour They’re voting on the armistice soon”

“Then you knohat happens next”