More thugs guide us to a back table that seems made of iridescent water. A slim man reclines there with several creatures of the strangest sort. I thought them monsters at first, but the closer I look, the more confused I become. They are humans. But they’ve been made differently. Carved differently. A pretty young girl, no older than Eo, sits looking at me with emerald eyes. The wings of a white eagle sprout from the flesh of her back. She’s like something torn from a fever dream, except she should have been left there. Others like her lounge in the smoke and strange lights.

Mickey the Carver is a scalpel of a man with a crooked smile and black hair that hangs like a puddle of oil down one side of his head. A tattoo of an amethyst mask wreathed in smoke winds around his left hand. It is the Sigil of a Violet—the creatives—so it is always shifting. Other violet symbols stain his wrists. He’s playing with a little electronic puzzle cube that has changing faces. His fingers are fast, thinner and longer than they should be, and there are twelve of them. Fascinating. I’ve never seen an artist before, not even on the HC. They’re as rare as Whites.

“Ah, Dancer,” he sighs without looking up from his cube. “I could hear you from the drag in your step.” He squints at the cube in his hands. “And Harmony. I could smell you from the door, my darling. Terrible bomb, by the bye. Next time you need real sneaky craftsmanship, look Mickey up, yes?”

“Mick,” Dancer says, and seats himself at the table of dream-things. I can tell Harmony is growing a bit dizzy from the smoke. I’m used to breathing worse stuff.

“Now, Harmony, my love,” Mickey purrs. “Have you given up on this cripple yet? Come to join my family, perhaps? Yes? Get yourself a pair of wings? Claws on your hands? A tail? Horns—you would look fierce in horns. Especially wrapped in my silken bedsheets.”

“Carve yourself a soul and you might get a shot,” Harmony sneers.

“Ah, if it takes being a Red to have a soul, on this I shall pass.”

“Then to business.”

“So abrupt, my darling. Conversation should be considered an art form, or like a grand dinner. Each course in its own time.” His fingers fly over the cube. He’s matching them based on their electronic frequency, but he’s a bit too slow to match them before they change. He still hasn’t looked up.

“We have a proposition for you, Mickey,” Dancer says impatiently. He glances down at the cube.

Mickey’s smile is long and crooked. He does not look up. Dancer repeats himself.

“Straight to the main course then, eh, cripple? Well, propose away.”

Dancer swats the cube out of Mickey’s hands. The table goes silent. The thugs bristle behind us and the music continues to pound. My heart is steady and I eye the scorcher on the thigh of the nearest thug. Slowly, Mickey looks up and cuts the tension with a crooked smile. “What’s what, my friend?”

Dancer nods to Harmony and she slips a small box over to Mickey.

“A present? You shouldn’t have.” Mickey examines the box. “Cheap stuff. Such a tasteless Color, Red.” Then he slides the box open and gasps in horror. He recoils from the table, slamming the box shut. “You stupid sodding bastards. What is this?”

“You know what they are.”

Mickey leans forward and his voice becomes one lone hiss. “You brought them here? How did you get them? Are you insane?” Mickey glances at his followers, who peer down at the box wondering what has so unbalanced their master.

“Insane? We’re bloodydamn manic.” Dancer smiles. “And we need them attached. Soon.”

“Attached?” Mickey starts laughing.

“To him.” Dancer points at me.

“Leave!” Mickey screams at his entourage. “Leave, you simpering sycophantic miscreants! I’m talking to you … you freaks! Get out!” When his entourage has scurried away, he opens the box and dumps the contents onto the table. Two golden wings, the Sigils of a Gold, clatter onto the table.

Dancer sits. “We want you to make our boy here into a Gold.”

11

MAD

“You’re mad.”

“Thank you.” Harmony smiles.

“I assume you misspoke; pray repeat yourself,” Mickey says to Dancer.

“Ares will pay you more money than you’ve ever seen if you can successfully attach those to my young friend here.”

“Impossible,” Mickey declares. He looks over to me, measuring me for the first time. He is unimpressed despite my height. I don’t blame him. Once, I thought myself a handsome man of the clans. Strong. Muscular. Up here, I am pale and wiry, young and scarred. He spits onto the table. “Impossible.”

Harmony shrugs. “It’s been done before.”

“By whom? I ask.” He turns his head. “No. You cannot bait me.”

“Someone talented,” Harmony taunts.

“Impossible.” Mickey leans even farther forward; his thin face has not a single pore. “There’s DNA matching him with the wings, cerebral extraction. Did you know they have subdermal markings in their skulls? Of course you didn’t—datachips attached to their frontal cortexes to substantiate their caste? Then there’s synapse linkage, molecular bonding, tracking devices, the Quality Control Board. And there’s the trauma and the associative reasoning. Say we make his body perfect, there’s still one problem: we cannot make him smarter. One cannot make a mouse a lion.”

“He can think like a lion,” Dancer says plainly.

“Oho! He can think like a lion,” Mickey snickers.

“And Ares wants it done.” Dancer’s voice is cold.

“Ares. Ares. Ares. It doesn’t matter what Ares wants, you baboon. Never mind the science. His physical and mental dexterity is probably daft as a damn bowl cleaner’s. And his tangibles won’t match. He’s not their species! He’s a Ruster!”

“I’m a Helldiver of Lykos,” I say.

Mickey raises his eyebrows. “Oho! A Helldiver! Clear the halls! A Helldiver, you say!” He mocks me, but he squints suddenly as if he’s seen me before. My whipping was televised. Many know my face. “Bugger me blind,” he mutters.

“You recognize my face,” I confirm.

He pulls up the viral video and watches it, looking back and forth between it and me. “Aren’t you dead with that girlfriend of yours?”

“Wife,” I snap.

Mickey’s jaw muscles flicker under his skin as he ignores me. “You’re making a savior,” he accuses, looking over at Dancer. “Dancer, you bastard. You’re making a messiah for your gorydamn cause.”

I never looked at it that way. My skin prickles uneasily.

“Yes” is Dancer’s answer.

“If I make him a Gold, what will you do with him?”

“He will apply to the Institute. He will be accepted. There, he will excel well enough to reach the ranks of the Peerless Scarred; as a Scarred, he can train to be a Praetor, a Legate, a Politico, a Quaestor. Anything. He will advance to a prime position, the primer the better. From there, he will be in a position to do as Ares requires for the Cause.”

“Mother of God,” Mickey murmurs. He stares at Harmony, then at Dancer. “You want him to be a bona fide Peerless Scarred. Not a Bronzie?”

A Bronze is a faded Gold. Of the same class, but looked down on for inferior appearance, lineage, and capabilities. “Not a Bronze,” Dancer confirms.

“Or a Pixie?”

“We don’t want him to go to nightclubs and eat caviar like the rest of those worthless Golds. We want him to command fleets.”

“Fleets. You lot are mad. Mad.” Mickey’s violet eyes settle on mine after a long moment. “My boy, they are murdering you. You are not a Gold. You cannot do what a Gold can do. They are killers, born to dominate us; have you ever met one of the Aureate? Sure, they may look all pretty and peaceful now. But do you know what happened in the Conquering? They are monsters.”