Red Rising (22 page)

Nothing is silent about the boys’ curses. I feel no pity for these
students. They all murdered someone the night before, just like me. There are no innocents in this game. The only thing that worries me is seeing how Cassius dispatched his victims. He is grace and finesse. I am rage and momentum. He could kill me in a second, if he knew my secret.

“What a lark!” he croons. “You were gory terrifying! You just took his weapon! Gory fast! Glad we weren’t paired earlier. Prime stuff! What have you to say for yourselves, you sneaking fools?”

The captured Golds just swear at us.

I stand over them and cock my head. “Is this the first time you’ve lost at something?” No answer. I frown. “Well, that must be embarrassing.”

Cassius’s face shines—for a moment he’s forgotten his brother’s death. I haven’t. I feel darkness. Hollow. Evil when the adrenaline fades. Is this what Eo wanted? For me to play games? Fitchner arrives in the air above us, clapping his hands. His gravBoots glimmer golden. He’s got his ham slice between his teeth.

“Reinforcements come!” he laughs.

Titus and a half dozen of the faster boys and girls run toward us from the highlands. Opposite, a golden shape rises from the distant river fortress and flies toward us. A beautiful woman with short-cropped hair settles next to Fitchner in the air. The Proctor of House Ceres. She carries a bottle of wine and two glasses.

“Mars! A picnic!” she calls, referring to him by his House’s deity.

“So who arranged for this drama, Ceres?” Fitchner asks.

“Oh, Apollo, I suppose. He’s lonely up in his mountain estates. Here, this is zinfandel from his vines. Much better than last year’s varietal.”

“Delicious!” Fitchner proclaims. “But your boys were squatting in the grass. Almost as if they expected the picnic to spontaneously manifest. Suspicious, no?”

“Details!” Proctor Ceres laughs. “Pedantic details!”

“Well, here’s a detail. It seems two of mine are worth five of yours this year, my dear.”

“These pretty boys?” Ceres snickers. “I thought the vain ones went to Apollo and Venus.”

“Oho! Well, yours certainly fight like housewives and farmers. Well placed, they were.”

“Don’t judge them yet, you cad. They are midDraft picks. My highDrafts are elsewhere, earning their first calluses!”

“Learning the ovens? Huzzah,” Fitchner declares ironically. “Bakers do make the best rulers, so I’ve heard.”

She nudges him. “Oh, you
devil
. No wonder you interviewed for the Rage Knight post. Such a scoundrel!”

They clink their glasses together as we watch from the ground.

“How I love orientation day,” Ceres titters. “Mercury just let a hundred thousand rats loose in Jupiter’s citadel. But Jupiter was ready because Diana tattled and arranged the delivery of a thousand cats. Jupiter’s boys won’t go hungry like last year. Cats will be as fat as Bacchus.”

“Diana is a harlot,” Fitchner declares.

“Be kind!”

“I was. I sent her a great phallic cake filled with live woodpeckers.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did.”

“You beast!” Ceres caresses his arm and I note the free-loving demeanor these people have. I wonder if other Proctors are lovers as well. “Her fortress will be riddled with holes. Oh, the sound must be horrible. Well played, Mars. They say Mercury is the trickster, but your japes always have a certain … 
flair
!”

“Flair, eh? Well, I’m sure I could rustle up some tricks for you on Olympus …”

“Huzzah,”
she coos suggestively.

They toast again, floating above their sweating and bloody students. I can’t help but laugh. These people are mad. Bloodydamn crazy in their empty Golden heads. How are they my rulers?

“
Oy!
Fitch! If you don’t mind. What are we supposed to do with these farmers?” Cassius calls up. He pokes one of our injured captives on the nose. “What are the rules?”

“Eat them!” Fitchner cries. “And Darrow, put down that gory scythe. You look like a grain reaper.”

I don’t drop it. It is close to the shape of my slingBlade from home. Not as sharp, because it isn’t meant to kill, but the balance is no different.

“You know you
could
let my children go and give them back the reaping scythe,” Ceres suggests to us.

“Give me a kiss and you have a deal,” Cassius calls up.

“The Imperator’s boy?” she asks Fitchner. He nods. “Come ask for one when you’re Scarred, little prince.” She looks over her shoulder. “Until then, I would advise you and the reaper to run.”

We hear the hooves before we see the painted horses galloping at us across the plain. They come from the opened gates of House Ceres’s castle. The girls on the horses’ backs carry nets.

“They gave you horses! Horses!” Fitchner complains. “That is so unfair!”

We run and barely make it to the woods. I didn’t like my first encounter with horses. They still scare the piss out of me. All snorting and stomping. Cassius and I gasp for breath. My shoulder aches. Two of Titus’s reinforcements are captured as they find themselves stranded in open ground. Bold Titus knocks a horse over and is laughing as he’s about to lay waste to one of the girls with his boot. Ceres zaps him with a stunfist and makes peace with Fitchner. The stunfist causes Titus to piss himself. Only Sevro is careless enough to laugh. Cassius says something about bad manners, but he snickers quietly. Titus notices.

“Are we allowed to kill them or not?” Titus growls that night at dinner. We eat the leftovers from Bacchus’s feast. “Or am I going to get stunned every time?”

“Well, the point isn’t to kill them,” Fitchner says. “So no. Let’s not go around massacring your classmates, you mad ape.”

“But we did before!” Titus protests.

“What is wrong with you?” Fitchner asks. “The Passage was where the culling is done. It’s no longer survival of the fittest, you mad, stupid, colossal sack of muscle. What would be the point if we
now had the fittest just murder each other till only a few are left? There are new tests to pass now.”

“Ruthlessness.” Antonia crosses her arms. “So now it’s not acceptable? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Oh, it better be acceptable.” Titus grins broadly. He’s been boasting all night about knocking over the horse, as if it’d make everyone forget the piss that stained his pants. Some have. He’s already gathered a pack of hounds. Only Cassius and I seem to have an ounce of his respect, but even we’re smirked at. So is Fitchner.

Fitchner sets down his honeyed ham.

“Let us clarify, children, so this water buffalo doesn’t go around stomping on skulls. Ruthlessness
is
acceptable, dear Antonia. If someone dies by accident, that is understandable. Accidents happen to the best of us. But you will not murder each other with scorchers. You will not hang people from your ramparts unless they’re already dead. MedBots are on standby in case any medical attention is direly needed. They are fast enough to save lives, most of the time.”

“
Remember, though
, the point is not to kill. We don’t care if you’re as ruthless as Vlad Dracula. He still lost. The point is to win. That’s what we want.”

And that simple test of cruelty is already past.

“We want you to show us your brilliance. Like Alexander. Like Caesar, Napoleon, and Merrywater. We want you to manage an army, distribute justice, arrange for provisions of food and armor. Any fool can stick a blade into another’s belly. The school’s role is to find the
leaders
of men, not the
killers
of men. So the point, you silly little children, is not to kill, but to conquer. And how do you conquer in a game where there are eleven enemy tribes?”

“Take them out one at a time,” Titus answers knowingly.

“No, ogre.”

“Dumbass,”
Sevro snickers to himself. Titus’s pack quietly watches the smallest boy in the Institute. No threats are snarled. No faces twitch. Just a silent promise. It’s hard to remember that they are all geniuses. They look too pretty. Too athletic. Too cruel to be geniuses.

“Anyone besides Ogre have a guess?” Fitchner asks.

No one answers.

“You make one tribe out of twelve,” I finally say. “By taking slaves.”

Just like the Society. Build on the backs of others. It isn’t cruel. It is practical.

Fitchner claps mockingly. “Prime, Reaper. Prime. Looks like someone is bucking for Primus.” Everyone shifts in agitation at that last bit. Fitchner pulls a long box from under the table. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is what you use to make the slaves.” He pulls out our standard. “Protect this. Protect your castle. And conquer all the others.”

Fitchner is gone in the morning. In his chair lies the standard. It is a one-foot length of iron tipped with our howling wolf; a serpent coils beneath the wolf’s feet, the star-tipped pyramid of the Society beneath that. A five-foot oak pole connects to the iron end. If the castle is our home, the standard is our honor. With it, we are able to turn enemies into our slaves by pressing it to their foreheads. There a wolf sigil will appear until another standard is pressed to the forehead. Slaves must obey our express commands or forever be Shamed.

I sit across from the standard in the morning dark, eating Apollo’s leftovers. A wolf calls out in the mist. Its howl comes through the keep’s high window. Tall Antonia is the first to join me. She glides in like a lonely tower or a beautiful golden spider. I haven’t decided which way her personality runs. We exchange glances but no greetings. She wants Primus.

Cassius and raspy Pollux saunter in next. Pollux grumbles about having to go to bed without having Pinks to tuck him in.

“A positively hideous standard, don’t you think?” Antonia complains. “They could at least have given it a splash of color. I think it should be draped with red for rage and blood.”

“It’s not too heavy.” Cassius hefts the standard by its pole. “Reckoned it’d be gold.” He admires the golden Primus hand within the block of black stone. He wants it too. “And they gave us a map. Swell.”

A new stone map dominates one of the walls. The detail near our castle is remarkable. The rest less so. The fog of war. Cassius claps me on the back and joins in eating. He doesn’t know I heard him weep again in the night. We shared a new bunk in a barracks in the keep’s high tower. Many others still sleep in the main tower. Titus and his friends have taken the low tower even though they don’t have enough bodies to fill it.

Most of the House has woken by the time Sevro drags in a dead wolf by its legs. It’s already gutted and skinned.

“Goblin has brought victuals!” Cassius applauds daintily. “Hmm. We will need firewood. Does anyone know how to make a fire?” Sevro does. Cassius grins. “Of course you do, Goblin.”

“Found the sheep too easy to kill?” I ask. “Where’d you get the weapon?”

“Born with them.” His fingernails are bloody.

Antonia wrinkles her nose. “Where in the hell were you raised?”

Sevro presents his middle finger to her, the crux.

“Ah,” Antonia sniffs. “Hell, then.”

“So, as I’m sure you’ve all noticed, it will be some time before anyone has enough bars of merit to become Primus,” Cassius declares when we’ve all gathered around the table. “Naturally, I was thinking that we need a leader before Primus is chosen.” He stands and scoots away from Sevro so that his fingers rest on the edge of the standard. “In order for us to function, we must have immediate and coordinated decisions.”

“And which of you two fools do you think it should be?” Antonia asks dryly. Her large eyes glance from him to me. She turns to regard the others, voice sweet like thick syrup. “At this point, what makes any of us better suited to lead than anyone else?”

“They got us dinner … and breakfast,” Lea says meekly from beside Roque. She gestures to the leftover picnic victuals.

“While running right into a trap—” Roque reminds everyone.

Antonia nods sagely. “Yes, yes. A wise point. Rashness can hurt us.”

“—but they did fight free,” Roque finishes, earning a glare from Antonia.

“With table legs against real weapons,” Titus rumbles his approval, with a qualification. “
But
then they fled and left the food behind. So it was Fitchner who gave us the food. They would have given it to the enemy, delivering food like Browns.”

“Yeah, that’s a twist on what happened,” Cassius says.

Titus shrugs. “I only saw you running like a little Pixie.”

Cassius goes cold.

“Watch your manners,
goodman
.”

Titus holds up his hands. “Merely observing; why so angry, little prince?”

“You watch your manners,
goodman
, or we’ll have to trade our words for blades.” Cassius wields his looted pitchfork and points it at Titus. “You heed, Titus au Ladros?”

Titus holds gaze with him, then glances over at me, grouping me with Cassius. Suddenly Cassius and I form a tribe in everyone’s eyes. The paradigm shifts that quickly. Politics. I take my time twirling my looted knife between my fingers. The whole table watches the knife. Sevro especially. My Red right hand has collected a million metric tones of helium-3 with its dexterity. My left, half a million. The dexterity of an average lowRed would startle these Golds. I dazzle them. The knife is like a hummingbird’s wings in my nimble fingers. I look calm but my mind is racing.