Morning Star

I used to think the life strands of my friends frayed around me, because mine was too strong. Now I realize that when we are wound together, we make something unbreakable. Something that lasts long after this life ends. My friends have filled the hollow carved in me by my wife’s death. They’ve made me whole again. My mother joins them now on the ramp, walking with Kieran to set foot on Earth for the first time. She smiles like I did when she smells the salt. The wind kicks her gray hair. Her eyes are glassy and full of the joy my father always wanted for her. And in her arms she carries a laughing child with golden hair.

“Mustang?” I ask. My voice trembling. “Who is that?”

“Darrow…” Mustang smiles over at me. “That is our son. His name is Pax.”

Pax was born nine months after the Lion’s Rain, as I lay in the Jackal’s stone table. Fearing that our enemies would seek the boy out if they knew of his existence, Mustang kept her pregnancy a secret on the Dejah Thoris until she was able to give birth. Then, leaving the child to be guarded by Kavax’s wife in the asteroid belt, she returned to war.

That peace she intended to make with the Sovereign was not just for her and her people, but for her son. She wanted a world without war for him. I can’t hate her for that. For keeping this secret from me. She was afraid. Not just that she could not trust me, but that I was not prepared to be the father my son deserves. That was her test, all this time. She almost told me in Tinos, but after conferring with my mother, she decided against it. Mother knew if I realized I had a son, I would not be able to do what needed to be done.

My people needed a sword, not a father.

But now, for the first time in my life, I can be both.

This war is not over. The sacrifices we made to take Luna will haunt our new world. I know that. But I am no longer alone in the dark. When I first stepped through the gates of the Institute, I wore the weight of the world on my shoulders. It crushed me. Broke me, but my friends have pieced me together. Now they each carry a part of Eo’s dream. Together we can make a world fit for my son. For the generations to come.

I can be a builder, not just a destroyer. Eo and Fitchner saw that when I could not. They believed in me. So whether they wait for me in the Vale or not, I feel them in my heart, I hear their echo beating across the worlds. I see them in my son, and, when he is old enough, I will take him on my knee and his mother and I will tell him of the rage of Ares, the strength of Ragnar, the honor of Cassius, the love of Sevro, the loyalty of Victra, and the dream of Eo, the girl who inspired me to live for more.

To sister, who taught me to listen

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I was afraid to write Morning Star.

For months I delayed that first sentence. I sketched ship schematics, wrote songs for Reds and Golds, histories of the families and the planets and the moons that make up the savage little world I’d stumbled onto in my room above my parents’ garage almost five years ago.

I wasn’t afraid because I didn’t know where I was going. I was afraid because I knew exactly how the story would end. I just didn’t think I was skillful enough to take you there.

Sound familiar?

So I put myself in seclusion. I packed my bags, my hiking boots, and left my apartment in Los Angeles for my family’s cabin on the wind-ripped coast of the Pacific Northwest.

I thought isolation would help the process, that somehow I would find my muse in the quiet and the fog of the coast. I could write sunup to sundown. I could walk among the evergreens. Channel the spirits of mythmakers past. It worked for Red Rising. It worked for Golden Son. But it didn’t work for Morning Star.

In my isolation, I felt shuttered, trapped by Darrow, trapped by the thousand paths he could follow and the congestion in my own brain. I wrote the initial chapters in that mental space. I suppose it helped their formation, giving Darrow a weird, sad mania behind his eyes. But I couldn’t see beyond his rescue from Attica.

It wasn’t until I returned from the cabin that the story began to find its voice and I began to understand that Darrow wasn’t the focus anymore. It was the people around him. It was his family, his friends, his loves, the voices that swarm and hearts that beat in tune with his own.

How could I ever expect to write something like that in isolation? Without the coffee powwows with Tamara Fernandez (the wisest person I know without white hair), the early dawn breakfasts with Josh Crook where we conspire to take over the world, the Hollywood Bowl concerts with Madison Ainley, the hours of debate about Roman military warfare with Max Carver, the ice cream crusades with Jarrett Llewelyn, the Battlestar nerdouts with Callie Young, and the maniacal plotting with Dennis “the Menace” Stratton?