Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

He lives in a fiction, espousing a moral code to justify killing his Sovereign, turning his back on our Society, but I know why he really did it—because she let the Jackal kill his family. The sanctimonious morality came long afterwards. This noble Morning Knight is built on a foundation of self-interest. And now, because he trusts no Golds, he decides we will anger our hosts in hopes they will want our services, when instead he should swallow his pride and see if their hospitality is genuine, as I do.

He has little faith in our Color. I’m losing all mine in him.

I feel a despicable little creature, thinking all this of Cassius. Whatever his motives, I know his love for me is genuine. The nights of listening to music in the rec room of the Archimedes as he falls asleep holding his drink can’t be washed away. Neither can the protective warmth I felt all those times when Pytha and I helped him back to his bunk when he was so drunk he could not even stand but he could murmur Virginia’s name.

“I miss home,” I say in an attempt to find some common ground to ease the tension that’s grown between us these last months, before the Vindabona even.

“Mars?” he asks, and I know he means Luna. And I do miss that place, the libraries, the Esqualine Gardens, the warmth of Aja, the approval of my grandmother, stark and sparse though it was, the love of my parents. But most of all, I miss sitting in the sun, eyes closed, listening to the pachelbel in the trees. That was peace for me. That is where I feel safe.

“But I was thinking of the Archi. I’ve never had to miss her before. Two days on Ceres. Three on Lacrimosa…”

“She’s a good ship,” he says. “I’d give two years’ haul to be under way in the rec room with a tumbler of whiskey right now and a good concerto on the holo.”

“Playing chess?”

“Karachi,” he corrects. “We played chess all last year.”

“More like I taught you to play all last year…”

He rolls his eyes. “He wins five in a row and suddenly he’s Arastoo in the flesh.”

“It was seven, my good man. But I’ll relent and let you play Karachi, even though it’s a game entirely devoid of reason and mathematical skill.”

“It’s called reading people, Castor. Intuition.”

I make a face. “My only condition is we listen to Vivaldi and not Wagner.”

“My goodman, are you trying to kill me? You know I abhor Vivaldi.” He laughs. “Not that it matters. Won’t be able to hear a note over the sound of Pytha whining about immersion games or how it’s not her turn to cook.”

We grin at each other, indulging the fantasy that once seemed so commonplace, but now so nostalgic and impossible.

“Oh, don’t look so maudlin,” he says. “We’ll return to the Archi with Pytha in surly tow. We’ll be sharing a whiskey and burning black matter once this is sorted.” We both know it is a promise he cannot keep.

I see by the melancholy look in his eyes that we are united in understanding that something between us is breaking and neither one of us knows how to stop it. Even if we leave Io behind, we can never go back to the way things were, to the private world we shared.

I have outgrown it. I have even outgrown him.

I’M DEPOSITED IN MY ROOM to change for dinner with the Raa family. The room, like all Ionian rooms, was made with attention to geometrical energy. It is perfectly square, without frivolous comfort and with no furniture except for a thin sleeping mat on a slightly raised platform. A small window looks out onto the heavy darkness of a night nearly a billion kilometers from the sun. I doff my robe and stand naked before the window, pressing my nose to it, appreciating the chill of the rock on my bare skin, and imagine I am floating in the cool waves of Lake Silene. I wonder if the Reaper’s child now climbs the stone stairs there from the shore to Silene Manor and his waiting parents. Do they warm themselves by the fire pit? Sleep in the room I slept in when I was a boy, where all Lunes have slept since the children of Silenius? A deep anger fills me, but I push it into the void.

All is silent in the room.

Not the busy silence of space, where air purifiers hum and engines tremble through the metal. It is the silence of stone and the silence of darkness that stretches into an unseen, unending frozen landscape. A cavernous, alien silence.

Those crewmembers on the Vindabona will be dead by now. It’s the only mercy I know to hope for. How long did they last?

Two lonely lights glide across the plain in the distance, too low to be aircraft. Hoverbikes? Where are those two souls going? What errand do they attend? Are they lovers? Friends? Then a score of lights burns out of the blackness behind them, chasing them across the expanse. I lean forward in excitement as bright orange tongues of flame lick out from the pursuers and the two leading lights vanish in blossoms of white fire.

Two more fall to the coup. It seems it is not as peaceful as Dido would like us to believe. Cassius is right, yet again.

All across the city men will be dying. Silent squads will arrest loyal members of Romulus’s faction. The cells will fill. Guns may rattle. Razors drip with blood. All balanced and gambled on the promise of the evidence Seraphina brought back.

I know coups, and am little impressed by them. They’re more common than weddings in my family. These Rim rustics hold their noses at Golds of the Interior, at my family and the “bitch on Luna.” But they’re little better.

Then I remember Seraphina. How she stood before her father, and the sadness I saw upon her face when she realized his intent. Torn between the love of her people and mother, and the love of her father. What choice would I make?

I see my own father in my mind’s eye and try again in vain to summon my mother. I reach for her, but my fingers rake nothing but shadow, and I feel, in no small way, that her absence is my fault. I did not study her enough. Did not love her enough. And so, she will never hold me in her arms, never kiss me upon the brow. As if she never existed.

My thoughts are interrupted when a jammer activates with a static pop behind me.