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She checks the hydraulics in the knees “Keep your fortune Every scar I have earned has led ahja The courage of a soldier is heightened by her knowledge of her profession” She looks me up and down “Go do your duty”
I suspected it before, but I feel it now as I see the excitement on her face as she turns back to the war machine
She didn’t betray her father because she loves her mother There was another, hidden reason, which was the source of the guilt I saw in her eyes as she watched Roer she feels toward hier that should be for herself, because deep down she knows that it wasn’t loyalty to the Rim or her mother that incited her to ferry evidence of Darrow’s criainst the Rim back to the council
It was her hunger for war
Now, after weeks of starvation, she is about to be fed
THE FEAR KNIGHT IS a sadist
Unlike the vain Golds of the Core, he appreciates guerrilla warfare and its effect on arh I met him only once in my days of service
to Nero, I saw enough in hilory When I squeezed his hand, eager to ith on what then would have been a superior of stratospheric heights, he let his go limp It embarrassed me Little did I know then that the wan, plain-dressed man would soionnaires by the thousands
Atlas’s reputation was er before the start of the Solar War He was known prie of the Great Library of Delphi His inglorious position as a ward of the Sovereign And his abrupt disappearance, one that was clarified when he returned after the fall of Earth froe of the system
Born after the failed First Moon Lord’s Rebellion, he was raised on Io with his more famous brother, Romulus When he turned ten, his parents said their farewells and sent hin as yet another noble hostage to ensure the Rim’s obedience
Aed and educated, yet derided for being the spawn of a traitor It was there he met Atalantia, and there that Octavia ainst his traitor fa the seeds that would make him into the man behind the Pale Mask Of all my enemies, I loathe him the most
We stand before his newest forest of corpses
Bodies hang impaled on vertical poles There are more than two hundred Each with the Fear brand on their bare chests—a fleshy wound in the shape of a child’s face ringed with hair of serpents
A grisly proh the is is tattered and fouled with boot prints and blood It will be booby-trapped
I look at the bodies, at their faces This is why I left Luna Those glossy peacocks in the Senate read our reports But the further you are away from it, the more war reads like arithmetic, and past that it reads like fiction, past that it’s just an annoying video on your info streauish on the faces of the dead? How could thehandouts ever know on a sensory level that when a human rots, it isn’t just the skin that stinks, but the intestines, the stomach, the liver?