Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

“Not the bloody point. I’m the man of the house,” he says, and I snort. “Remember what happened to Vanna, Torron’s daughter? Girls shouldn’t wander the township at night. Especially not us.” He means Gamma, and he’s right. I knew Vanna since I was a child. She was tattered flesh when they found her, hands cut off. We buried her by the treeline of the jungle south of the camp. “Besides, if I’m wrong, you gotta to be here to help Ava and the little ones. I’ll go take a look and I’ll be back fastlike. I promise.” He leaves without another word. Ava closes the door behind him. She wrings her hands and sits at the kitchen table. I sit down with her, picking at the scratches on the plastic top in irritation. Man of the house.

“Slag this.” I stand up. “I’m gonna go have a look.”

“Tiran’s already gone!”

“Please. His balls have barely dropped. I’ll be back in a tick.” I head to the door.

“Lyria…”

“What?”

She grabs our lone frying pan from the kitchen. “At least take this.”

“In case I find eggs? Fine. Fine.” I take the pan. “Might want to get water and food ready just in case.” She nods and I leave her behind.

The night is grim and humid as air in a smoker’s mouth. By the time I’ve made it out of Gamma township and into the main camp, a tongue of sweat licks down the small of my back. It’s quiet but for the hissing insects. A withered gaboon lizard watches me from the roof of a refugee domicile as it chews on a night moth. Lights glow from the far end of the camp where the landing pads lie. Eyes glint out from plastic doorways as I pass, peering out from behind mosquito netting. The streets are empty. I’m afraid in a way I never was in the mines. Feeling smaller now than I did in our hut.

There’s men’s voices arguing ahead. I creep carefully forward till I’m crouched behind a stack of discarded cargo containers. Two rusty pelican transport vessels have landed on the concrete pads. One is painted with the face of a lithe Pink model drinking a bottle of Ambrosia, a sweet pepper cola beverage that’s given half the camp cavities. She smiles and winks at me, her mouth full of white, gleaming teeth. The lights of the ships blaze in the predawn, silhouetting the group of men from our camp who’ve woken and gone out to inspect the landed ships. My brother is amongst them, loitering in the back self-consciously. I suddenly feel guilt for snorting when he said “man of the house.” He’s just a boy. My boy, my little brother trying to be big. The clansmen are exchanging words with another group of men who’ve come down the ships’ ramps. These ones are Reds too, but they carry weapons and long bandoliers stocked with ammunition across their bare chests.

The new men are asking where to find the Gammas. There’s an argument amongst the men from our camp, then one of them is pointing toward our township. Another shoves him, but soon several other men begin to point not just at our homes, but toward Tiran and several others amongst their group. The other men drift away from my brother and the three other Gammas. The smallest of the men from the ship says something, but I don’t catch it. One of the Gammas rushes him just as the man lifts a long dark object from his side. Acid-green light churns in the ammunition globe of his plasma rifle, then lunges from the muzzle in a rippling ball that gashes the darkness. It cleaves clean through the center of the man. He teeters to the ground like a township drunk. I’m frozen to the spot. My brother flees with the other pair of Gammas. One of the outsiders raises his rifle.

Metal chatters like a broken silk-threading machine.

My brother’s chest erupts. The other gunmen shatter the quiet night, flashing and bleeding fire from their weapons. Tiran spasms, jerks. Not falling quickly. But stumbling one step, two steps, then another gunshot cracks the air and he is tumbling. Half his head is gone. A wailing cry rises from my belly. The whole world rushes past and goes silent as I stare at that shadowy mound in the mud.

Tiran…

The first man to fire walks over to my brother’s body and rakes the corpse with the plasma weapon. Then he looks up at me, the acid-green fire illuminating a face like a demon’s. It’s not a man. It’s a Red woman with terrible scars covering half of her face.

“Justice to Gamma!” Synced to the speakers on both of the ships behind her, her voice bellows out into the night. “Death to the collaborators! Justice to Gamma!”

I YAWN IN THE HUMID DARK, craving a burner because the vapor inhaler I’m sucking on is about as satisfying as fucking through a tarpaulin sheet. My left foot is numb and sweating through the sock in its rubber shoe, and my right arm is bent so awkwardly into the stone that my knock-off Valenti chronometer is drilling into the bone of my wrist with every. Arterial. Pulse.

The only thing that has kept me sane over the past nine hours has been the holocontacts I bought off the rack from that lemur-looking bastard, Kobachi, on 198th, 56th, and 17th in Old Town. But the contacts shorted out, and now I’ve got a corneal abrasion and worse, plenty of time to kill. Perfect.

I try in vain to stretch. The stone box doesn’t give me much room to wriggle my 1.75-meter frame. My main grudge against ancient Egyptians isn’t that they pioneered the institution of mass slavery for public works, it’s that they were all so damn tiny. Still smells like the old raisin we dragged out of it late last night before the delivery.

I check my watch. It was a gift from my late fiancé. One of the cheap silvery types cobbled together by half-blind immigrant lowColors in sweatshops deep in the armpits of Luna. Probably Tycho City. Maybe Endymion or the Mass. Somewhere half a world away from the beating heart of Hyperion—where I am currently entombed. He didn’t know it was a knockoff, so he paid nearly sixty percent market value, half his quarterly pay. His face glowed when he gave it to me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he could have bought it for the price of a decent bottle of vodka. Poor kid.

Check the watch again. Almost time.

Two minutes to midnight, only several hours left of dusk before Hyp

erion is plunged into the last dark month of summer. Dark or light, a day in Hyperion never truly ends. The caretakers of the day just lock their doors and hand the reins of the town over to the nocturnal creatures. Under Gold it wasn’t exactly a Pink’s paradise. But now, it’s the law of the jungle when the lights go out. Outside the museum, the hot city will be stretching and crooning in the sweaty dusk, readying to make some trouble. On the lamplit Promenade, decent citizens will skitter to their private housing complexes, fleeing the yapping of young music and the roar of hoverbike gangs echoing up from Lost City.

Hyperion. Jewel of Luna. The Eternal City. She’s a beautiful wartime mess. So much to look at, you can only afford to see what you want to see. If you plan on staying sane, that is.

But here, in the Hyperion Museum of Antiquities, behind thick walls of marble is a world with a different set of rules. During day hours, packs of drooling lowColor schoolchildren and Martian and Terran immigrants waddle their way through the marble corridors, rubbing snotty noses against glass containment boxes. At night, though, the museum is a fortress crypt. Impenetrable from the outside, occupied only by a contingent of pale night guards and the dead residents of crypts, statues, and paintings. The only way in was to become a resident. So we bribed a docker and snuck aboard a freighter from Earth as it landed at Atlas Interplanetary. A freighter that happened to hold numerous relics liberated from the private stash of some exiled Gold overlord dead or fled to Venus. Probably old Scorpio. Whole slew of goodies. Fourteen paintings from neoclassical Europe, a crate of Phoenician urns, twenty-five crates of Roman scrolls, and four sarcophagi.

What was yesterday filled with mummified Egyptians is tonight filled with freelancers.

By now the janitorial technicians will be herding up their robot charges and moving to the east wing. A team of security guards occupies a headquarters in the basement.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

I’m sick of waiting. Sick of the carousel of thoughts in my brain. I stare at the watch, willing the hands forward on their cheap gears that lose seconds every day. Can’t think of anything but a ghost and how each tick, each tock, takes me farther from him. Farther from the ridiculous slicked-back hair he wore because he thought it made him look like a holostar I liked, or the knockoff Duverchi jackets he’d wear thinking it hid the farmboy underneath. That was his problem—always trying to be something he wasn’t. Always trying to be more. Ate him up in the end and spat him out.

I pull my zoladone dispenser from my pack. I thumb the silver cylinder and it dispenses a black pill the size of a rat’s pupil into my hand. Particularly wicked new designer drug. Absurdly illegal. Jacks up your dopamine and suppresses activity in the bit of gray matter responsible for empathy. Spec ops teams ate Zs like candy during the Battle of Luna. If you have to melt a city block, it’s better to save the tears till you’re back in your bunk.