Red Rising (49 page)

I catch myself in the snow. I manage to stand. I can’t see him. I think I hear his grunt in the distance. We’re both muddled in the clouds. I crouch and listen, but my hearing still hasn’t recovered from Apollo.

“You’ll die for this, little boy,” Jupiter says. It comes as if from underwater. Where is he? “Should have learned your place. Everything has an order. You’re near the top. But you are not the top, little boy.”

I say something pithy about merit not meaning much.

“You can’t spend merit.”

“So the Governor is paying you to do this?”

I hear a howl in the distance. My shadow.

“What do you think you’re going to do, little boy? Going to kill all us Proctors? Going to make us let you win? It’s not the way things work, little boy.” Jupiter looks for me. “Soon the Governor’s Crows will come in their ships, with their swords and guns. The real soldiers, little boy. The ones who have scars you can’t dream of. The Obsidians led by Golden Legates and knights. You’re just playing. But they’ll think you’ve gone mad. And they will take you and hurt you and kill you.”

“Not if I win before they get here.” That is the key to everything. “There may be a delay on the holos before the Drafters see them, but how long a delay? Who is editing the gorydamn holos while you fight? We’ll make sure the right message gets out.”

I take my red sweatband off of my head and dab away the sweat on my face, then wrap it around my head once more.

Jupiter is silent.

“So the Drafters will see this conversation. They will see that the Governor is paying you to cheat. They will see that I am the first student to invade Olympus in history. And they will see me cut you down and take your armor and parade you naked through the snow, if you surrender. If not, I will throw your corpse from Olympus and piss golden showers down after you.”

The clouds clear and Jupiter stands before me in the white. Red drips from his golden armor. He is tall, lean, violent. This place is his home. It is his playground. The children his playthings till they get their scars. He is like any other petty tyrant of history. A slave to his own whims. A master of nothing but selfishness. He is the Society—a monster dripping in decadence, yet seeing none of his own hypocrisy. He views all this wealth, all this power, as his right. He is deluded. They all are. But I cannot cut him down from the front. No, no matter how well I fight. He is too strong.

His razor hangs from his hand like a snake. With the press of a button it will go rigid, a meter in length. His armor shines. Morning breaks as we face one another. A smile splits his lips.

“You would have been something in my House. But you are a little stupid boy, angry and of House Mars. You cannot yet kill like I can, yet you challenge me. Pure rage. Pure stupidity.”

“No. I can’t challenge you.” I toss my slingBlade down at his feet and throw my razor with it. I can barely use the razor anyway. “So I’ll cheat.” I nod. “Go ahead, Sevro.”

The razor slithers up from the ground, stiffens, and goes through Jupiter’s hamstrings as he wheels about. His slash goes two feet too high. He’s used to fighting men. Invisible, Sevro wounds Jupiter’s arms and takes the man’s weapons. The recoilArmor flows into the wounds to stop their bleeding, but the tendons will need real work.

When Jupiter is silent, Sevro winks off Apollo’s ghostCloak. We take Jupiter’s weapons. His armor wouldn’t have fit anyone except Pax. Poor Pax. He would have looked dashing in all this finery. We drag Jupiter back up the slope.

Inside, the tide of the battle has shifted. My scouts, it seems, have found what I told them to seek. Milia runs up to me, a content grin on her long face. Her voice, as ever, is a low drawl when she tells me the good news.

“We found their armory.”

A host of Venus Housemembers, only just freed from slavery, thunders past. Their pulseFists and recoilArmor shimmer. Olympus is ours and Mustang has been found.

Now
we have all the axes.

I find her asleep in a suite beside Jupiter’s own. Her golden hair is wild. Her cloak dirtier than my own. It hangs brown and gray, not white. She smells like smoke and hunger. She’s destroyed the room, upturned a dish of food, buried her dagger into the door. The Brown and Pink servants are scared of her, and me. I watch them skitter away. My distant cousins. I see them move, alien things. Like ants. So void of emotion. I feel a pang. Perspective is a wicked creature. This is how Augustus saw Eo as he killed her. An ant. No. He called her a “Red bitch.” She was like a dog in his eyes.

“The food was laced with something?” I ask one of the Pinks.

The beautiful boy murmurs something, looking at the ground.

“Speak like a man,” I bark.

“Sedatives, lord.”
He does not look at me. I don’t blame him. I’m a Gold. A foot taller. Worlds stronger. And I look positively insane. How wicked he must think me. I tell him to go away. “Hide. My army does not always listen when I tell them not to toy with lowColors.”

The bed is grand. Sheets of silk. Mattress of feathers. Posts of ivory, ebony, and gold. Mustang sleeps on the floor in the corner. For so long we have had to hide where we sleep. It must have felt so
wrong lying in perfect comfort, even with sedatives in her. She tried breaking the windows too. I’m glad she didn’t. It’s a far drop.

I sit beside her. The breath from her nose stirs a single coil of hair. How many times I’ve watched her sleep with a fever. How many times she’s done the same. But there’s no fever now. No cold. No pain in my stomach. Cassius’s wound has healed. Winter is ended. Outside, I saw the first of the flowers blossoming. I picked one on the mountainside. It’s in the hidden compartment of my cloak. I want to give it to Mustang. Want her to wake with the haemanthus by her lips. But when I take it out, a dagger slips into my heart. Worse than any metal blade. Eo. The pain will never go away. I don’t know if it is supposed to. And I don’t know if this guilt I feel is owed. I kiss the haemanthus and tuck it away. Not yet. Not yet.

I wake Mustang gently.

Her smile spreads before she even opens her eyes, as though she knows I am beside her. I say her name and brush the hair from her face. Her eyes flutter open. Golden flakes spiral there in the irises. So strange next to my callused, dirty fingers with their cracked nails. She nuzzles my hand and manages to sit up. A yawn. She looks around. I almost laugh as I see her digest what has happened.

“Well, I was going to tell you about a dream I had about dragons. They were purple and pretty and liked to sing songs.” She flicks my armor with a finger. It rings. “Way to upstage me. Jerk. What happened?”

“I got mad.”

She groans. “I’ve become the maiden in distress, haven’t I? Slag! I hate those girls.”

I tell her the news. The Jackal is split. His forces besiege Mars as he and Lilath hide in the deep mountains. We’ll be able to find him easily.

“If you want, you can take our army and root the bastard out.”

“Done,” she smirks, and raises an eyebrow. “But can you trust me? Maybe I’ll want to be big Primus of this weird army.”

“I can trust you.”

“How do you know?” she says again.

This is when I kiss her. I cannot give her the haemanthus. That is my heart, and it is of Mars—one of the only things born from the red soil. And it is still Eo’s. But this girl, when they took her … I would have done anything to see her smirking again. Perhaps one day I’ll have two hearts to give.

She tastes how she smells. Smoke and hunger. We do not pull apart. My fingers wend through her hair. Hers trace along my jaw, my neck, and scrape along the back of my scalp. There is a bed. There is time. And there’s a hunger different from when I first kissed Eo. But I remember when the Gamma Helldiver, Dago, took a deep pull from his burner, turning it bright but dead in a few quick moments. He said,
This is you
.

I know I am impetuous. Rash. I process that. And I am full of many things—passion, regret, guilt, sorrow, longing, rage. At times they rule me, but not now. Not here. I wound up hanging on a scaffold because of my passion and sorrow. I ended up in the mud because of my guilt. I would have killed Augustus at first sight because of my rage. But now I am here. I know nothing of the Institute’s history. But I know I have taken what no one else has taken. I took it with anger and cunning, with passion and rage. I won’t take Mustang the same way. Love and war are two different battlefields.

So despite the hunger, I pull away from Mustang. Without a word, she knows my mind, and that’s how I know it’s in the right. She darts one more kiss into me. It lingers longer than it should, and then we stand together and leave. We hold hands till the door, then I turn to her.

“Fetch me the Jackal’s standard, Mustang.”

“Yes, Lord Reaper.” She gives a mock bow and a little wink. Then she is gone.

The place is a madhouse of looting. In all the chaos, Sevro has found the holoTransmitter. It has our sensorial experiences stored in its hard drives and is queued to send them back to the Drafters wherever they may be. It is not a streaming feed, so the Drafters do not yet have today’s events. There is a half-day delay. That is all it
will take. I give Sevro instructions and have him get to work splicing out the story I want told. I would trust no one else.

I have Fitchner brought up from Castle Apollo’s dungeons. He reclines in a chair in Olympus’s dining hall. His face is purple from when I hit him. The floor is made of condensed air, so we are suspended above a mile vertical drop. His feet are on the table and his mouth twists into a smile.

“There’s the manic boy,” he calls, fingering his chin. “I knew I liked your odds.”

I give him a greeting with my middle finger. “Liar.”

He returns the finger. “Turd.” He reaches for my hand. “Don’t tell me you’re still bitter about the poisoning, the sicknesses, the setup with Cassius, the bears in the woods, the shitty tech, the terrible weather, the assassination attempts, the spy.”

“The spy?”

“Messing with you. Ha! Still a child. Speaking of which, where are your soldiers? Running around, eating themselves stupid, showering, sleeping, screwing, playing with the Pinks? This place is a honey trap, my boy. A honey trap that will make your army worthless.”

“You’re in a better mood.”

“My son is safe,” he says with a wink. “Now what are you up to?”

“I already sent Mustang to deal with the Jackal. And after this, I go to House Mars. Then it will all be over.”

“Ooo. Except it won’t be.” Fitchner pops a familiar gumbubble and winces. I did a number on his jaw. It makes me laugh. I’ve felt like laughing since Sevro took down Jupiter. My leg throbs with pain from that blasted man. Even with the painkillers, I can hardly walk.

“No riddles. Why isn’t it over?”

“Three things,” Fitchner says. His hatchet face examines me for a moment. “You’re a peculiar creature. You and the Jackal both. Everyone always wants to win. But you two stand apart, freaks. Golds
won’t die to win. We value our lives too much. You two don’t. Where did it come from?”

I remind him he’s my prisoner and he should answer my questions.

“Three things are not finished. Here’s what’s what. I’ll tell you what they are if you answer my question: what drives you.” He sighs. “The first thing, good man, is Cassius. He will simply
have
to duel you until one of you little sods keels over and dies.”

I was afraid of that. I answer Fitchner’s question.

I tell him the Jackal wanted to know the same thing. What drives me. The right-off answer is rage. From point to point, it is rage. If something happens, and if I was not anticipating it, I react like an animal—with violence. But the deepspine answer is love. Love drives me. So I must lie a bit to him.

“My mother had a dream that I could be greater than anyone in my family. Greater than the name Andromedus. The name of my father.” Fake father. Fake family. Point still the same. “I am not a Bellona. Not an Augustus. Not an Octavia au Lune.” I smile wickedly, something he can appreciate. “But I want to be able to stand above them and piss on all their gorydamn heads.”

Fitchner likes that. He’s always wanted the same, but he’s found that without the pedigree, merit takes you only so far. That frustration is his condition.

“The second thing that is not finished is
this
.” Fitchner waves his hands about. I got the crust of this deal—he’s making no revelations. I killed a Proctor. I have evidence that the ArchGovernor bribed others and threatened more so that his child could win. Nepotism. Manipulation of the sacred school. This is not idle news. It will shatter something. Perhaps even remove the ArchGovernor from office. Charges. Punishment? The Drafters will want blood. “And the ArchGovernor will want yours. This will embarrass him, and potentially make room for a Bellona ArchGovernor. Maybe Cassius’s father.”

Fitchner asks me why I trust the soldiers in my army who were slaves.

“They trust me because they’ve seen how they would have done
in all this had I not come along. You think they want the Jackal as their master?”