Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

Muttering to herself, he grips the activation knob on the side of the mask. “On you.”

“Do it.”

Pytha twists the activation knob on the mask. There’s a sibilant hiss as the three hundred needles built into the plastic of the scrambler mask spring forward into the skin, bone, and cartilage of Cassius’s face. He jerks once. Twice. And then a gurgling scream escapes from beneath the mask like seething steam from a kettle. His muscles knot and clench rock-hard as he thrashes back into me, twisting so viciously with his arms that I think my own will break. He screams babbling, incomprehensible curses as he rolls, kicking out and almost catching Pytha in the shin. She jumps back. The mask mercilessly pumps artificial filler into his face, grafting imitation bone onto his jaw and forehead and eye sockets. In twenty seconds, the mask’s indicator blinks from red to yellow and the worst of Cassius’s convulsions begin to fade. We’re on our sides breathing heavily. He mewls and drifts into shallow insentience. The indicator blinks green. I disentangle myself from his arms. There’s a stabbing line of pain down my forearm that insinuates a stress fracture.

Pytha rushes to Cassius and gingerly unlatches the mask. His face is a bubbling mass of angry, swollen flesh. Like a wax figure strayed too close to flame. Bit by bit the swelling subsides under the anti-inflammation pack that Pytha applies.

When she pulls the pack away, our handsome friend is gone, replaced by a thuggish visage with a primitive forehead, a bulbous, veiny nose, chipped ears, and a slack mouth with engorged, lazy lips. The Peerless Scar is gone, recessed into this new Bronzie visage. Pytha wipes tears from her eyes.

She looks up at me in recrimination and jerks the smelling salts out of my hands to crack them under his nose. “You’re prime, dominus,” she says to him, cradling his head and wiping the vomit from his face as he comes to. “Easy as sin. It’s all over now. It’s all over.” He sits up with her help and together we watch out the viewport to see the destroyer opening its docking bay to swallow us whole.

I STAND UPON MY TOWER as a hard rain falls.

Before me, the steel skin of the Eternal City yawns into the night. Amidst the reaching towers and bloated stadiums and buzzing complexes lie dark pools of shadow where the Jackal, and the years of war that followed, left their mark. Now, with the radiation scrubbed and pulsedomes removed, arthropodal construction ships from Sun Industries drift with lazy purpose there, hauling and ferrying workers and metal.

Hyperion may be rebuilding itself, but the southern cities were all but destroyed by the Ash Lord’s forces under his mad Minotaur, Apollonius au Valii-Rath, before the latter’s capture and imprisonment in Deepgrave.

My people do suffer. But Dancer’s false peace is not the answer. In my youth I was consumed with the fever of war. I don’t feel that fever now. I only feel the cold weight of duty, and the fear of what it will do to my family. A ship glows as it approaches the top of my tower and sets down on the landing pad.

A thickset Silver man with a bald pate walks down the ramp. He wears a high-collared white velvet jacket. The eyeball of a Gold glints from a ring on his heavy hand.

“Quicksilver,” I say. “Thank you for coming.”

He grunts and shakes my hand. His lone companion, a Sentinel drone no larger than a child’s skull, floats behind him, chrome hull shimmering in the rain. A red eye pulses in its center. I watch it warily.

“I watched the socialists tear off your crown. That was an embarrassing spectacle,” he sneers. “Matteo’s men tell me they’ve concluded the debate. The Obsidians abstained. Just sat there. Caraval and the Coppers went with the Vox. Your arrest warrant will be issued within the hour. They’re voting on the armistice soon.”

“Then you know what happens next.”

“History is a wheel. And all mobs are the same. Full of small men with big appetites. Only way they grow is by eating men like us.” He squints at me. “You could end the Vox Populi tonight. Storm the Senate. Put them in irons.”

“They’re still my people,” I say defensively.

“Do they know that?” I don’t answer. “The Vox Populi are a cancer. There’s only one way to deal with cancer. Cut it out. I told your wife that years ago.”

“We agreed to demokracy.”

“Yet you’re here. Aren’t you?” he asks with a laugh. I haven’t missed the hypocrisy. “Change isn’t made by mobs that envy, but by men who dare. Fitchner knew that. And so do we. Even if they spit on us.”

I look down at the bald man, remembering the first time we met on Phobos, how much I hated him. He’s a strange creature. Full of malice and selfishness and rigid ideology. Not a man I thought I’d ever trust. But he pulled himself up from obscurity on sheer will. He founded the Sons of Ares with Fitchner. He rebuilt the Republic from my wars. Without him, Luna would be a land of craters and ash.

“You’re leaving. Aren’t you? Good,” he says.

“Good?”

“What help is the Reaper in a cage?” he asks, nodding up to the sky. “We need you in the wild.” I didn’t ask his advice, but it reinforces my conviction all the same. He was Fitchner’s friend. I wish I could talk to the man now. Just once. Would he agree with what I plan?

“I need your help.”

“You know I always help my friends. Probably why I keep so few of them.”

“You might want to hear what it is first.”

“You’ll never make it to your ships in orbit with the Wardens after you,” he guesses. “You need one of mine.”

“I need the Nessus.” He flinches. “And I need it to look as if it’s been stolen.”

“Why the Nessus? What are you planning?” He grunts at my silence. “Never mind. I’ll put it in dry dock for repairs. You know where it is.”