Red Rising (36 page)

There is agony.

And claustrophobia.

I am sick and wounded.

The pain is in dreams.

It is in darkness. In the pit of my stomach.

I wake up and scream into a gentle hand.

I glimpse someone.

Eo? I whisper her name and reach up. My muddy hand smears her face. Her angel’s face. She’s come to take me to the vale. Her hair has turned Golden. I always thought she could be Golden. Her Colors are golden wings. No Red sigil on her hands. It took death.

I sweat despite the rains and snows that come. Something shelters me. I shiver. Clutch my scarlet headband. Lost the haemanthus. When was that again? Mud in my hair. Eo washes it away. Tenderly strokes my brow. I love her. Something inside me bleeds. I hear Eo speak to herself, to someone. I haven’t long. Have I time at all? Am I in the vale? There is mist. There is sky and a great tree. Fire. Smoke.

I shiver and sweat. Rot in hell, Cassius. I was your friend. I might have killed your brother, but I had no choice. You did. You arrogant slag. I hate him. I hate Augustus. I see them hanging Eo together.
They mock me. They laugh at me. I hate Antonia. I hate Fitchner. I hate Titus. I hate. I hate. I am burning and mad and sweating. I hate the Jackal. The Proctors. I hate. I hate myself for all I’ve done. All I’ve done. For what? To win a game. To win a game for someone who will never know about anything I do. Eo is dead. It isn’t as if she will ever be coming back to see all I have done for her.

Dead.

Then I wake. The pain is there in my gut. It goes through me. But I no longer sweat. The fever is gone, and the angry red lines of infection have faded. I’m in a cave’s mouth. There’s a small fire and a sleeping girl just inches away. Furs cover her. She breathes softly the smoky air. Her hair is tousled and gold. She isn’t Eo. Mustang.

I cry silently. I want Eo. Why can’t I have her? Why can’t I will her back to life? I want Eo. I don’t want this girl beside me. It aches worse than the wound. I can never fix what happened to Eo. I couldn’t even run my army. I couldn’t win. I couldn’t beat Cassius, not to mention the Jackal. I was the best Helldiver; I’m nothing here. The world is too big and cold. I am too small. The world has forgotten Eo. It has already forgotten her sacrifice. There’s nothing left.

I sleep again.

When I wake, Mustang sits by the fire. She knows I’m awake but lets me pretend otherwise. I lie there with my eyes closed, listening to her hum. It’s a song I know. It is a song I hear in dreams. The echo of my love’s death. The song sung by the one they call Persephone. Hummed by an Aureate, an echo of Eo’s dream.

I weep. If ever I’ve felt there was a God, it is now as I listen to the mournful chords. My wife is dead, but something of hers lingers still.

I speak to Mustang the next morning.

“Where did you hear that song?” I ask her without sitting up.

“From the HC,” she says, blushing. “A little girl sang it. It’s soothing.”

“It’s sad.”

“Most things are.”

It has been four weeks, Mustang tells me. Cassius is Primus. Winter has come. Ceres is no longer under siege. Jupiter’s soldiers sometimes
come into the woods. There are sounds of battle between the two superpowers of the North, Jupiter and Mars. Jupiter to the west, Mars to the east. Since the river froze, they’ve been able to cross and raid one another. Our buzzards have risen out of their winter gulches. Hungry wolves howl at night. Crows flock from the south. But Mustang really knows very little, and I grow impatient with her.

“Keeping you breathing was a little distracting,” she reminds me. Her standard lies underneath a blanket near my feet. She’s the last of House Minerva. Yet unbridled. And she didn’t enslave me.

“Slaves are stupid,” she says. “And you’re already a gimp. Why make you stupid too?”

It is days before I’m able to walk. I wonder where those nifty medBots are now. Tending someone the Proctors like, no doubt. I won Primus and they never gave it to me. Now I know why the Jackal will win. They are getting rid of his competition.

Mustang stalks with me through the woods during the next weeks. I move stiffly through the thick snow but my strength is returning. She credits medicine she found lying conspicuously under a bush. A friendly Proctor placed it there. We pause when we spot the deer. I draw the bow, but I can’t get the string to my ear. My wound aches. Mustang watches me. I try again. Pain deep inside. I let the arrow fly. I miss. We eat leftover rabbit that night. It tastes funny and gives me cramps. I always have cramps now. It’s the water too. We have nothing to boil it in. No iodine. Just snow and a little creek to drink from. Sometimes we can’t have fire.

“You should have killed Cassius or sent him away,” Mustang tells me.

“Would have thought you nobler than that,” I say.

“I like to win. Family trait. And sometimes cheating is in the rule-book.” She smiles. “You get a merit bar every time you recapture your standard. So I arranged for it to be lost to House Diana by someone else several times. Then rode out to capture it. Got to Primus in a week.”

“Tricky. Yet your army liked you,” I say.

“Everyone likes me. Now eat your damn rabbit. You’re skinny as a razor.”

The winter grows colder. We live in the deep north woods, far north of Ceres, northwest of my former highlands. I have not yet seen a soldier of Mars. I don’t know what I would do if I did.

“I’ve hidden from everyone but you,” Mustang says. “It keeps me alive and ticking.”

“What’s your plan?” I ask.

She laughs at herself. “To be alive and ticking.”

“You’re better at it than I am.”

“How do you mean?”

“No one in your House would have betrayed you.”

“Because I didn’t rule like you,” she says. “You have to remember, people don’t like being told what to do. You can treat your friends like servants and they’ll love you, but you tell them they’re servants and they’ll kill you. Anyway, you put too much stock in hierarchy and fear.”

“Me?”

“Who else? I could spot it a mile away. All you cared about was your mission, whatever it is. You’re like a driven arrow with a very depressing shadow. First time I met you, I knew you’d cut my throat to get whatever it is you want.” She waits for a moment. “What is it that you want, by the way?”

“To win,” I say.

“Oh, please. You’re not that simple.”

“You think you know me?” The coals crackle in our small fire.

“I know you cry in your sleep for a girl named Eo. Sister? Or a girl you loved? It is a very off Color name. Like yours.”

“I’m a farplanet hayseed. Didn’t they tell you?”

“They wouldn’t tell me anything. I don’t get out much. Strict father.” She waves a hand. “Anyway, doesn’t matter. All that matters is that no one trusts you because it’s obvious you care more about your goal than you do about them.”

“And you’re something different?”

“Oh, very much so, Sir Reaper. I like people more than you do.
You are the wolf that howls and bites. I am the mustang that nuzzles the hand. People know they can work with me. With you? Hell, kill or be killed.”

She’s right.

When I had a tribe, I did it right. I made every boy and every girl love me. Made them earn their keep. I taught them how to kill a goat as if I knew how. I gave them fire as if I had created the matches. I shared a secret with them—that we had food and Titus didn’t. They saw me as their father. I remember it in their eyes. When Titus was alive, I was a symbol of goodness and hope. Then when he died … I became him.

“Sometimes I forget that the Institute is meant to teach me things,” I say to Mustang.

The golden girl tilts her head at me. “Like how we must live for more?”

Her words strike my heart. They echo through time from another’s lips. Live for more. More than power. More than vengeance. More than what we’re given.

I must learn better than them, not simply
beat
them.
That
is how I will help Reds. I am a boy. I am foolish. But if I learn to become a leader, I can be more than an agent of the Sons of Ares. I can give my people a future. That is what Eo wanted.

Deep winter. The wolves are hungry now. They howl in the night. When Mustang and I make a kill, we sometimes have to scare them off. But when we kill a caribou at dusk, a pack descends from the northlands. They come from the trees like dark specters. Shadows. The biggest of them is my size. His fur is white. The fur of the others is gray, no longer black. These wolves change with the season. I watch how they surround us. Each moves with individual cunning. Yet each moves as part of the pack.

“This is how we should fight,” I whisper to Mustang as we watch the wolves approach.

“Could we talk about this later?”

We take down the pack leader with three arrows. The rest flee.
Mustang and I set to skinning the big white brute. As she slips her knife along beneath the fur, she looks up, nose red from the cold.

“Slaves aren’t part of the pack, so we can’t fight like them. Not that it matters. The wolves don’t have it right either. They take too much from their pack leader. Cut off the head, the body retreats.”

“So the answer is autonomy,” I say.

“Maybe.” She bites her lip.

Later that night, she elaborates. “It’s like a hand.” She sits close and cozy, leg touching mine. Close enough for guilt to crawl along my spine. The caribou roasts, filling the cave with a cozy, thick aroma. A blizzard rages outside and the wolf fur dries over the fire.

“Give me your hand,” she says. “Which is your best finger?”

“They are all better at different things.”

“Don’t be obstinate.”

I tell her my thumb. She has me try to hold a stick with only my thumb. She easily pulls it from my grasp. Then she has me hold it without my thumb and only the other fingers. With a twist, the stick is free.

“Imagine that your thumb is your Housemembers. The fingers are all the slaves you have conquered. The Primus or whoever is the brain. It all works pretty gory seamlessly. Yeah?”

She can’t pull the stick from my grip. I set it down and ask her the point.

“Now try to do something beyond simply grabbing the standard. Just move your thumb counterclockwise and your fingers clockwise except your middle.”

I do it. She stares at my hands and laughs incredulously. “Ass.” I ruined her demonstration. Helldivers are dexterous. I watch her hands as she tries to do it too. Of course she fails. I understand.

“A hand is like the Society,” I say.

It is the structure of the armies at the Institute. The hierarchy is good for simple tasks. Some fingers are more important than others. Some are better at certain things. All fingers are controlled by the highest order, the brain. The brain’s control is effective. It makes your thumb and fingers work together. But the single brain’s control is limited. Imagine each one of the fingers had a brain of its own
that interacted with the main brain. The fingers obey, but they function independently. What could the hand do then? What could an army do? I twirl the stick along my fingers in intricate patterns. Exactly.

Her eyes linger on mine, and her fingers trace along my palm as she explains. I know she wants me to react to her touch, but I force my mind to be lost on other things.

This idea of hers isn’t part of the Proctors’ lesson.

Their lesson is about the evolution from anarchy to order. It is about control. About the systematic accumulation of power, the structure of that power, and then its preservation. It is a model to show that the Rule of Hierarchies is the best. The Society is the final evolution, the only answer. She just slagged that rule, or at least showed its limitations.

If I could earn the voluntary allegiance of the slaves, the army created would look nothing like the Society. It would be better. Like if the Reds of Lykos thought they could actually win the Laurel, they would be so much more productive. Or if a Praetor on board his starcruiser could utilize not only his own genius, but that of his crew of Blues.

Mustang’s strategy is Eo’s dream.

It’s like an electric shock jolts through me.

“Why didn’t you try it with the slaves you captured?”

She pulls her hand away from mine after I don’t respond to her touch.

“I tried.”

She’s quiet the rest of the night. Near morning, she develops a cough.

Mustang takes sick over the next few days. I hear fluid in her lungs and feed her broth made from marrow and wolf and leaves boiled in a helmet I found. She looks like she will die. I don’t know what to do. We’re low on food, so I hunt. But the game is scarce and the wolves are hungry. Prey has fled these woods, so we survive on small hares. All I can do is keep her warm and pray a medBot descends from the clouds. The Proctors know where we are. They always know where we are.

I find human tracks in the woods the next week. A set of two. I follow them to an abandoned campsite, hoping they might have food I can steal. There are animal bones and embers still hot. No horses, though. Probably not scouts then. Oathbreakers, the Shamed who have broken their vows after being enslaved. There’s plenty of them now.

I follow their tracks through the woods for an hour before I grow worried. They circle back around, leading somewhere familiar, leading to our cave. It is night by the time I return. I hear laughter from the home I share with Mustang. The arrow feels thin in my fingers as I nock it on the bowstring. I should kneel to gather my breath. My wound aches. I pant. But I can’t give them more time. Not if they have Mustang.

They cannot see me as I stand at the edge of the frozen caribou skin and hardpacked snow that walls off our cave from sight and elements. The fire crackles inside. Smoke seeps out through vents Mustang and I took a day in making. Two boys sit together eating what’s left of our meat, drinking our water.

They are dirty and ragged. Hair like greased weeds. Stained complexions. Blackheads. Once beautiful, I’m sure. One boy sits on Mustang’s chest. The girl who saved my life is gagged and in her undergarments. She shivers from the cold. One of the boys bleeds from a bite wound on his neck. They are planning on making her pay for that wound. Knives heat till red in the fire. One boy obviously enjoys the sight of her nakedness. He reaches to touch her skin as though she’s a toy meant for his pleasure.