Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

But the sky wasn’t a shield. It was a lid. A cage.

I was sixteen years of knobby knees and freckles when I first saw the true sky. Took six years from the death of the Sovereign on Luna for the Rising to push the last of the Golds off our continent of Cimmeria. Two more years for them to finally free our mine from the Gray warlord who set up his own little kingdom in their absence.

Then the Rising came to Lagalos.

Our saviors looked more like manic Laureltide jesters than soldiers draped with trophies of gray and blond hair and iron pyramid badges. SlingBlades and spiked red helmets were painted on their chests. And standing at their front was a weary, bearded Red man old enough to be a grandfather. He had a large gun in one hand and in the other a tattered white flag with the fourteen-pointed morning star. He wept when he saw the bloated bellies and skeletal evidence of our starvation under the Gray warlord. His gun dropped to the floor, and though he was a stranger to us, he came forward and hugged me. “Sister,” he said. Then he hugged the man beside me. “Brother.”

Four weeks later, kind-faced men and women wearing white helmets and fourteen-pointed stars on their chests took us to the surface. I’ll never forget their eyes. They were Yellow and Brown and Pink. They had bottles of water, sparkling sweet drinks and candy for the children. And they gave us clunky goggles marked with winged feet to cover our cave eyes from the sun. I didn’t want to wear the goggles. Rather look at the true sky and its sun with my own eyes. But a kind Yellow nurse told me I might lose my sight. So on they went.

When the doors of the lift opened, we walked from a basin littered with ships, up metal stairs and out onto an endless plain of tall grass vibrating with the sound of insects, and I saw it: blue and vast, so large I felt I was falling up into it. The true sky. And there, hanging like a sullen coal on the impossible horizon, was the sun. Giving us warmth. Filling my eyes with tears. So small I could block it with a thumb. Our sun. My sun.

The Republic’s relief ships arrived the next morning to bawdy choruses hurled out from the throats of young gallants and lasses. The ships were cleaner than anything I’d ever seen. White as my nephew’s baby teeth as they coasted down. On their bellies blazed the star of the Republic. To us, then, the star meant hope.

“Reaper’s compliments,” a young soldier said as he handed me a chocolate bar. “Welcome to the worlds, lass.”

Welcome to the worlds.

On the shuttle away from our mine, a video appeared before each of us, the hologram so lifelike I thought my fingers would touch the Gold face that sprung into the air. I’d seen her before, but here above ground on one of her ships, she seemed like a goddess from one of our songs. Virginia the Lionheart. Her eyes a terrifying gold. Her hair like spun silk held back from her poreless face. She shone brighter than that little coal of a sun. Making me feel little more than a shadow of a girl.

“Child of Mars, welcome to the worlds…” the young Sovereign began gently. “You are about to embark upon a great journey to your rightful place upon the surface of the planet your ancestors built. Your sweat, your blood, and that of your kin, gave this planet life. Now it is your turn to share in the bounty of mankind, to live and prosper in this new Solar Republic and pave a way for the next generation. My heart is with you. The hopes and dreams of people everywhere rise with you. Good luck and may you and yours find joy under the stars.”

That was two years and a thousand broken promises ago.

Now, under a boiling sun, I hunch over the scant, piddling river beyond Assimilation Camp 121. My back bent and fingers crooked as I rub an abrasive brush into a pair of pants soiled by Ava’s work in the slaughter yards where she kills cattle to fill our pot.

My arms, once ashen brown like most from Lagalos, are wiry and now baked dark by the sun and bitten ragged by the bugs that rise up out of the riverbed mud. The summers of the Cimmerian Plains are humid and thick with mosquitoes. I swat three away that’ve found a gap in the lyder flower paste.

I’m eighteen now with stubborn baby fat in my cheeks. My hair leaps from my head at a thick tangle. Like a rabid animal trying to escape my skull. I don’t blame it. Eyes never rest long on me. The boys on Da’s drillteam used to call me Mudbug for the color of my eyes. Da always said Ava’s got the looks in our family. I’ve just got the temper.

Along the riverbank are hardpacked men and women—two score Gammas of my clan humming “The Ballad of Bloody Mary the Fool.” My mother used to hum it as she worked. Rust-red hair bursts from under broad-brimmed hats and headwraps of bright cloth. Off the bank, fishermen laze on boats smoking tobacco as they drag their nets farther into the river.

Lambda doesn’t let us use the Solar Republic washers in the center of the camp anymore. Bastards think they have the right, since they are the same clan as the Reaper. Never mind that they’re as related to him as I am to bats that come out of the jungle at night to hunt for the camp’s mosquitoes.

The Solar Republic ships don’t come much anymore without a full military escort, what with the Red Hand marauders running mad in the South. Those that do come drop the supplies in little parachute crates from the sky. And the soldiers who actually land in the camp now cradle weapons instead of candy.

We see it on the HC news every day. Red Hand raids on helpless camps. Sons kidnapped, fathers killed, and the rest savaged. They claim they’re bringing justice to my clan, the Gammas, for being the pets of our former oppressors. In every camp they raid, they purge us like a strain of diseased rats.

Ava believes the Republic will stop the Hand. That the Reaper will come with his howling legions and

smite the bastards right and good. Or somesuch. She’s always been a pretty fool. The Sovereign brought us out of the dirt and forgot us in the mud. The Reaper hasn’t even been to Mars in years. Got more to worry about than his own Color, it seems.

Bitten ragged by the mosquitoes, I haul the basket up onto my head and make my way back to the camp. The pawing electricity of a coming storm fills the air. In the distance, across the green-stained savannah, huge thunderheads begin to bruise the sky purple and black. They’re forming fast.

Heaps of trash hump the violent green landscape closer to the camp. Here and there range slim burner boys blackened dark with soot. They wear rags tied over their faces as they douse heaps of clothing and trash infected by the malaria outbreak with engine oil. The blazes choke the sky with cancerous black veins.

My brother, Tiran, is out there amidst the stacks, face wrapped like the rest, squinting into a blaze for one token an hour. In the mine, all he wanted to be was a Helldiver. It’s all any of us wanted to be. I used to sneak downstairs late at night and don my father’s workboots and his helmet and sit at the dinner table with forks and spoons pinched between my fingers, acting as if I were running a clawDrill.

But then my da fell into a pitviper nest and lost his legs. Soon after, Mum died and the rest of Da went with her. I used to think my world permanent. That clansmen and women would always tip their heads to my father, that my mother would always be there to wake me and give me a spot of syrup before school. But that life is gone. More miners are lured up every day by the promise of freedom. And in their wake, the mines are bought by big companies from big cities and manned by robots stamped with a silver heel. Just like ours was. They say we’re to receive a share soon as it makes a profit. We’ve yet to see so much as a half-credit chit.

A throaty din rises from Assimilation Camp 121 as I enter its open gates. It’s a muck-soaked town of plastic, tin, and dog shit. Fifty thousand of us now in a place meant for twenty, with more coming every day. Gloomy squadrons of mosquitoes buzz low over the soup of the streets, searching for meat to suck. All the lads old enough for the Free Legions have gone to war. And those boys and girls who stay behind work shit jobs for food tokens so the old don’t starve. No child dreams of being a Helldiver anymore, because in this new world there are no Helldivers left.

I MAKE IT TO MY FAMILY’S hut using the sheeting and wood planks that serve as roads through the mud. I slip under the mosquito netting just as thunder cracks open the sky overhead. Rain pours down, hammering the thin plastic roofs all down the narrow lane. Inside the dry hut, I’m greeted with the thick smell of stew. I set the basket down inside the door. Our home is five meters by seven, made of neoPlast stamped with the star of the Republic and a tiny little winged heel where the plastic meets the ground. It’s separated into two small rooms by opaque plastic dividers that fall from the ceiling. The kitchen and living room in the front. The bunks in the back. My sister Ava is hunched over a little solar stove stirring a pot. She glances back at me as I stand panting.

“Either you’re getting faster or the clouds are getting slower.”

“Bit of both, I’d say.” I rub the stitch in my side and sit down at the little plastic dinner table. “Tiran still burnin’?”

“That he is.”