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Cassius wakes to bruises and a beating straight from Hell. He expects them to stop after he retches and stars explode across his vision but they keep going–bashing his legs, his stomach, his arms until he can barely move.
They push a bag over his head, one that sticks to his skin from the sweat and vomit layered on his face. They drag him through an endless maze of halls and then they go up and back down again.
They strip him bare and then they throw him against a floor that sends chills up his spine. The Passage , he thinks and the words twist in the pit of his stomach. Father had warned him of this, spent years teaching them both the Kravat. He’s more than fair with a Razor but this fight comes down to the bare essentials–nothing but skin and bones as they wrestle in a bare room.
He only hopes that Julian’s fight is quick and painless. Poor kid will have trouble grasping the harsh reality of the situation. He’s jam-packed with too much empathy and blind faith in the system that’s about to stab him in the back.
Cassius lifts his bag and comes face-to-face with a mirror version of himself. Julian is curled up on the stone, a line of bruises going up his forearm.
“Cassius?” he rasps out and his eyes soften at the sight, the tension in his shoulders relaxing. Cassius feels his stomach turn cold again, wrenching at his gut. “What’s going on?”
He opens his mouth to respond but his voice fails him, his lips flapping uselessly. Proctor Fitcher uses that time to fling the door open, strolling in with a wad of gum between his teeth.
He takes in the sight of the two brothers lying cold and naked as they were in the womb before him. Something akin to pity flicks through his eyes but it’s gone before Cassius can fully analyze it.
“Oh,” he finally says. He pops a gumbubble and then he fishes through his pockets, eventually throwing a ring emblazoned with the wolf of Mars onto the ground. “I’ll make it clear. Only one comes out alive.”
The door slams shut behind him. Julian stares wide-eyed at the ring, tucking his hair behind one ear like he’s trying to brush the notion aside. Cassius knows better though. He’s been prepped for this and already he can pick out Julian’s weak points, the way his throat is wide open, the Adam’s apple bobbing up and down-
His hand is reaching out before he can register what he’s doing and Cassius curses internally, sitting down hard on the traitorous limb before Julian turns to face him.
“Surely, they don’t mean…” he trails off, mouth wide open. And then when he turns to face his brother, Cassius sees fear in his eyes for the first time. He doesn’t see his twin, he doesn’t see the boy who grew up at his side and snuck him extra tarts underneath their aunt’s table–he sees the monster Cassius au Bellona was raised to be.
Cassius is crossing the room before he realizes it and Julian stiffens at his touch, like he’s afraid of being jabbed in the ribs or having his chest caved in by a fist. Cassius squeezes his brother in a bone-crushing embrace though and Julian relaxes at the familiarity of it.
“Of course not,” he says, even though the words taste bitter on his tongue. “If we both refuse to kill each other, they’ll have to let us out eventually.”
Julian nods, eyes wide as they eat up his lie. He’s always been too trusting, too kind for this world and he nods eagerly as he squeezes Cassius’ hand.
They sleep side-by-side for the first time in years. The room is freezing cold and the stone floor digs into his skin but Cassius settles in for the night, eyes fixed on a peeling piece of the ceiling.
Julian falls asleep first, his snores echoing in the small room. Cassius watches his chest heave up and down with the motion, eyes shut as a small smile works its way across his face.
He could do it now. He could snap his neck while he’s sleeping and it would be painless–no worse than drifting off into a dream. His fingers are outstretched before him, crawling closer and closer-
Cassius recoils like he’s been burned, glaring at his hand. He rolls over so his back is facing Julian and sleeps with his arms crushed beneath the rest of his body.
Fitchner has seen more than his fair share of twisted things, but this scene before him is downright horrid. Two bureaucrats sit crowded in front of a monitor, whispering secrets between their perfectly painted gold lips.
Almost all of the fights have finished by now, the victors wandering mutely through the hallways as they seek some sort of consolation in the long hallways. Some find it in others, curled up together on a cot, while some are left to wander throughout the night, eyes fixed upon the sky.
All of the fights have finished except for one. Fitchner has seen so many Gold children today that they’ve practically blurred in his mind but he recognized the two perfectly primped boys in the last room. As if anyone wouldn’t recognize the two Bellona twins, sons of the Imperator himself.
Fitchner doesn’t know whose twisted idea it was to put them through the Passage together but the sight had sent a cold sensation shivering down his spine. He’s not sure if one of the boys had noticed it–the one that was rumored to be a prodigy at the Razor and the favorite of the Imperator himself. The other boy was too busy whimpering at the ground to pay attention to him. He knew in that moment how it would end.
A bureaucrat points at the screen where the two twins are sleeping side-by-side. One of them is curled up into a fetal position, a pleasant smile on his face as he dreams of some land far from the Institute. The other sleeps with his eyes half-lidded, his breathing shallow and his limbs pulled taut, like he’s ready to spring into action at any given moment.
“He’ll break,” the woman with cropped short hair says, tapping the screen. “Give him time and he’ll break.” The man hisses something else in reply but it’s too low for him to hear.
Fitchner pops a gumbubble and they finally turn to face him. He scratches his leg with the hilt of his sword and gets a screwed-up scowl in response.
“Proctor Fitchner,” the woman says, like the words are a bitter pill to swallow. “Put this in their room.”
Fitchner’s eyes go wide but then he eventually nods, dropping into an elegant bow before stalking out of the room.
Cassius wakes to aching bones and pins and needles. He sputters into consciousness, cold and naked, and knocks into whoever is beside him.
His own reflection stares back at him as Julian startles to life and then it all dawns on him again. The Institute. The Passage. The ring.
He looks for the cursed ring with the mark of Mars and finds it laying on the ground a few feet from him. Beside it lies a rusty knife that must have been placed in the night. Cassius feels himself awash with cold anger, ice coursing through his veins.
The proctors are sending a message and he doesn’t know what will happen if he refuses to listen.
“A knife?” Julian asks and the words are soft and innocent in the bare room. Cassius’ head snaps over at the noise, at where his twin is gaping at the blade.
“A tool to escape,” Cassius says, although he knows that refusing an invite to the Institute is illegal and actively leaving has to be at least ten times worse. He scrapes it against the walls, but it hardly makes a dent.
They spend the day taking turns chipping away at the wall.
“This reminds me of that one time with the stables,” Julian says, huffing as he takes a break.
“Where you kept begging me for one more ride until it was so late that all the servants were asleep and we got locked out?” Cassius asks, watching as Julian nods and smiles, even in the freezing cold room.
“And Tatania found us the next morning curled up on the doorstep,” Julian finishes, hacking away at the stone again.
“At least we had clothes then,” Cassius grumbles and his brother laughs in reply. He wonders how he could have ever even considered killing him and robbing the world of his musical laugh.
That night, Cassius closes his eyes but he does not sleep. The proctors have failed with their rusty knife so they will be back and he lies on the cold floor as he waits, listening to the sound of Julian’s steady breathing.
The door creaks open a couple hours later. Cassius hears heavy footfalls and then the distinct pop of a gumbubble. Fitchner, then .
The footsteps come to a halt. There’s a creaking noise that sounds like Fitchner’s bending over and Cassius takes it as his opportunity to strike. His eyes pop open as he pushes himself up with his arms, feet straight up in the air. His legs scissor around Fitchner’s neck and then he jerks to snap his bones.
Fitchner stares back at him, unimpressed. Bastard must be wearing skin-tight armor under his clothes. Plan B, then.
Cassius’s right hand is still gripping the rusty knife so he uses the tip to pop Fitchner’s Mars ring free. He releases Fitchner’s neck, rolling on the ground to pick up the other Mars ring.
“We have two rings,” he growls. Julian blinks blearily at him as he slips one of the rings onto his hand. He puts the other one, grossly oversized, on his middle finger and flips him the crux. “Let us out.”
Fitchner stares back at him, the bored expression having slipped off his face. He shakes his head and pops another gumbubble, except it doesn’t look jeering or even condescending this time. Fitchner looks… almost sad as he glances between the two of them.
“That’s not how this works, boyo,” he says quietly and then pulls out a device from his back pocket. He flicks a button on it and tosses it to the center of the room, blue gas hissing out from it.
Cassius holds his breath and charges him but a day of hunger–or maybe it’s this whole damn twisted trial–have made him weak and Fitchner bats him to the side easily. His spine slams into the wall and he involuntarily takes a breath, choking on the smoke spreading through the room. Julian is already knocked back unconscious and the last thing Cassius sees before he blacks out is Fitchner reaching down to pull the ring off his finger.
Darrow makes his way to the table on Roque’s arm. When he closes his eyes, he still sees the girl from the Passage, the way her eyes had narrowed as the door slammed shut behind Fitchner. She had ducked low, barely giving him time to process before diving up for his throat. He’d towered over her by nearly a head but she was fast and spindly, jabbing at him with her fingers whenever he let his guard down.
He’d tried to do it quickly and quietly but she kept struggling and at the end of the fight he’d been left with bloody, broken fingers and a pile of mangled flesh. He’d tried to shut her eyes as best as he could and then stole into the hallway, the ring cold around his finger.
It’s been a day and two nights by the time Fitchner finally comes to fetch them, corralling them all into a room with a giant table. There’s a feast prepared on it, a welcome sight after a day of wandering hungrily, but Darrow feels his stomach churn coldly with guilt.
Sevro is the first to start eating, ripping the skin off a drumstick with his teeth the second he sits down. Antonia–with her perfect, cold Golden beauty–sits across from him, looking up from her nails to send him a withering glare. Roque the poet is still stuck to his side, and he sees the large brute of a boy who’d nearly broken his hand earlier lingering in a corner.
There are still plenty of people missing. A girl with perfect curls and a bright smile is lying dead in a room somewhere, eyes shut forever. And then… Darrow flicks his head around the room to confirm it… the two Bellona boys are missing. There are still people filing into the room though so Darrow slowly lowers himself into a seat and waits. They’re the sons of the Imperator, after all. They have to be here.
One by one, the chairs fill up. A girl lies weeping on the floor until a boy kicks her in the stomach and she eventually pulls herself into a seat, silently sobbing. The seats fill and fill until only a single one remains unoccupied.
Perfect Priam is gone too. Priam with his rod-like posture and his highLingo remarks. Priam, Cassius and Julian–all gone.
They wait and wait but the seat remains empty. Fitchner calls them to attention by slamming a drumstick against the table. One girl protests that her father will have him flogged for treating her this way but he laughs and flicks her forehead.
“The Institute has only begun,” he snorts and then flips the rest of his drumstick over one shoulder. “Well, you little shiteaters might have realized by now that the Passage may as well be called the Culling…”
He drones on and on about honor and glory. He lays down the rules of the Institute’s next game–one where they must unite as a House, as a family and conquer or be conquered. All throughout his speech, Darrow’s eyes remain fixed on the empty seat, wondering which of the three will come to fill it. Or if someone entirely new will come and take that last sliver of hope.
Antonia is the one to ask the question that’s been on all their minds.
“Why is there an empty chair?” she snaps, looking up from the bread she’s tearing into perfect little shreds. Fitchner sighs and rubs the hilt on his Razor. It is only now that Darrow notices he looks like he’s aged two years in the two nights they’ve been away.
“Because two of you shiteaters decided to be little pricks,” he says and then rips into another drumstick. Antonia stares into the distance for a bit, cold eyes calculating.
“You threw Cassi and Julian in a room together,” she says eventually and Darrow’s eyes widen. The Aureate, the Society are cruel –they make children murder each other with nothing but their bare hands–but something about that seems absurdly horrific. “You threw them in a room together but now they won’t kill each other. And so you’re in trouble.”
She grins with all her blazing white teeth and rips another piece of bread in her hands.
“My dear Antonia,” Fitchner sighs. “Trouble is an overstatement. And all you little children seem to think you’re so unique and special. You’re not. One Gold won’t make a difference–Imperator’s son or not.”
Antonia stares back at him, stunned, and Fitchner stalks out of the room without a glance back.
“There will be consequences for killing both Bellona twins,” one woman hisses. Her golden hair reaches the small of her back and she rakes one hand through it now.
“There will always be consequences. Priam is dead and his mother will raise a hellstorm in retaliation,” a man snaps back, glaring in Fitchner’s direction. The proctor shrugs and pops a gumbubble in response.
“The Bellonas are different,” another woman replies, massaging the space between her eyebrows. “This isn’t some viper with a large land grant–this is the Imperator. Julian au Bellona is dead weight, flak in the system. His grades and performance overall were worse than subpar. But Cassius is different. Cassius is a prodigy, nearly unmatched in intelligence and the Razor but more importantly, he is the Imperator’s favorite.”
“They called Priam a prodigy too. Now he’s a body in a pile of corpses,” the man snaps back. “Kill them both and be done with it. There are always casualties in the Institute.”
“He’ll know,” the first woman wheedles. “The Imperator will suspect foul play and he’ll rip us apart with investigations.”
“Fitchner,” the second woman eventually says after a few more minutes of bickering. “This is your house. You fix it.”
Fitchner grins toothily and salutes with one hand.
When Cassius wakes up, the rusty knife is gone. His head is still pounding from whatever gas they pumped him full of–or maybe it’s the hunger… or the thirst–and his back aches where he was slammed against the wall.
Julian is awake, sitting cross-legged as he watches him push himself up. The skin around his eyes look like sunken hollows but he still manages a smile as he pulls his hand back.
“I waited for you,” he says, revealing a tall cup of water. The sight of it has Cassius nearly tearing up. He looks up at his twin with something between awe and respect and Julian shifts nervously, unused to his gaze.
“There was a catch,” he says slowly, uncurling his fist. “They gave us this too.” Cassius blinks as a white pill with a clear skull marked on it stares back at him.
One of the bureaucrats pokes at the screen suspiciously.
“Are you sure this will work?” she asks as the brothers take turns sipping from the cup of water. It’s not nearly enough and they both end up looking even more parched afterwards.
Cassius tries to shatter the cup to make weapons from the shards but it bounces harmlessly off the floor. He curses and kicks it into the wall next. Julian tries to calm him down with gentle smiles and soft words.
“It’ll work,” Fitchner says, staring into the pixels. He watches Cassius take a deep breath and settle back into his corner, and he doesn’t miss the way Julian’s expression folds into a solemn smile. “They said he had an unusual level of empathy, right? He knows this is his last chance before we kill them both.”
The twins do not disappoint. Julian knows that he has been a shade of another person his whole life, an inferior copy that’s kept around as a spare. He knows his brother can and will soar to heights unknown and after two days of mulling it over, he knows that only one of them will leave alive.
At exactly 2:11 in the morning, Julian au Bellona takes his own life with the little poison pill that Fitchner left behind. Staring at the screen where two boys lie motionless–one with a heartbeat and the other without–Ares sheds a single tear.
Cassius wakes to Fitchner pushing the door open. He reaches one arm out to wake… wait. He spins around wildly, looking for the familiar figure of his twin and comes up empty.
Fitchner’s eyes are undeniably sorrowful as he squats down and extends the House of Mars ring out to him. Cassius knocks it aside and spits venom with his words.
“What did you do?” he hisses and Fitchner’s lips pinch together. “WHAT DID YOU DO?!”
“Nothing, boyo,” the proctor replies quietly. He picks the ring up from where it rolled and then grabs Cassius’ hand with enough force so he can’t budge. His fingers twitch but Fitchner eventually manages to jam the ring onto his pinky. “Your brother took his own life last night.”
Cassius’ expression somersaults through sadness, anger and for the briefest moment, relief. It settles on disbelief and he glares at the crooked man in front of him, pulling himself up to his full height.
“Julian would never do that,” he says but as the words leave his mouth, he knows that’s exactly what Julian would do. His brother has half the brain but twice the heart he has, and he’d always told Cassius that he was smarter, stronger, better than him at everything. He’d trade his life for his in a heartbeat.
Cassius’ gaze snaps to the razor on Fitchner’s belt and Fitchner follows his eyes there.
“No,” he says firmly, one hand grasping the hilt. “Don’t be stupid, boyo. Your brother did not give you his life just so you could waste it.”
Cassius scoffs and strides past him without looking back.
Cassius watches his classmates’ expressions shift as he enters the dining hall. One girl pauses from her sobbing to give him a quick wink but instead of flirting back, he glares at the ground and beelines for the last empty seat.
Antonia blocks his path because of course she survived the Passage. She probably enjoyed it while she was at it.
“I didn’t think you had it in you, Cassi,” she says and he stares blankly at her. And then it dawns on him that they must have been missing for at least two days. She probably put two-and-two together and she thinks that he killed Julian. Not only that, but she looks impressed, her stupid teeth flashing a perfect smile.
He punches her as hard as he can and then steps over her body as she falls to cradle her nose. Darrow is the next to greet him, and it feels like a year ago when they were joking about him being a Yorktown fan. The words leave a bitter taste in his mouth that digs the cave in his heart a little deeper.
“I’m sorry,” he stutters, as if it’s his fault. As if he’s anything more than a cog in the Archgovernor’s machine fueled by an age-old bloodfeud that Cassius and Julian weren’t even alive for.
In his wide, gold eyes and the curve of his mouth, Cassius sees just a tiny glimpse of Julian. A little shard of that kindness that his twin was brimming with. He slings an arm around Darrow’s neck and the boy wriggles a bit in his grasp.
“Don’t be sorry, be angry ,” he corrects in a cold voice. It sounds unfamiliar even to him. “I’m going to murder that gorydamn son of a bitch. Are you with me?”
Darrow stares up at him with wide eyes, and it dawns on Cassius that he hasn’t even specified who he’s trying to kill. But Darrow seems to sense the burning rage in him all the same and he nods along, like he’s a familiar friend to that fire.
“Of course,” he says and in the dark room at the bottom of House Mars, Cassius loses one brother and gains another.