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“What are they singing?” I ask, still a bit woozy from the G’s that the kids seem barely to have noticed Pax amplifies the ship’s external ears

“The Song of Persephone,” he says, and takes us down

As atch from the rae or the beheading of kneeled ene sense of fraternity and weary justice that even an outsider could sense After the brutality of the Obsidians, it is beautiful

I spot flags and armbands with the Gamma crest And then other crests, other tribes: Lambda, Beta, Alpha, Omicron, Silver trade icons, Gray mercenary bands, and athered on an empty airpad

These are the demons of Mars The butchers of Lyria’s family

More than half of the began Stripped of their weapons and coats, they loo

k sickly, and they shiver in fear as they are surrounded by the people they tortured for so many years Do they even knohy they did it? In defeat, they’ve abandoned any creed They huddle not together in a band, but each isolated and alone in their misery

I’d pity them if I didn’t loathe them so much

A crowd of Gammas and their new allies rush toward the Snowball to celebrate the pilot and his prophetic ainst the torchShip From a distance, they think it was me and not the small human by athering in a sort of wary peri and old, all sunburnt They hold antique rifles, household pistols, even slingBlades A ripple of recognition goes through the as they see the pilot halo Pax wears It isn’t disbelief on their faces when he takes it off It is fulfillh at the naïveté of their own conviction, only to see that they were right all along

I sense the weight of the moment, and it chills me

This is how a legend begins The First Boy The Son of the Rising, fulfilling his parents’ promise He looks afraid to step into his neorld, as if he feared this moive hiement This time, he needs none With Electra at his side, he steps past me and into the crohich parts and raises their clenched fists in salute as they chant his father’s name

I follow at a distance

—

The heavy roan The first up thea woh the crowd and scoops the young girl up They’re hit from the side by a woether crying in a mess of limbs and red hair This scene repeats itself until I stand stock-still, dreading a

I ith Pax and Electra in the shadow of this coet to share the joy of the others Each grime-spattered face, each weary set of shoulders that cos fresh hope and then disappointa?