Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

I’d do anything to be home. Not in the Citadel. Not in the camp. But in the mine. My family around me before the world started chewing us one by one.

Ava, why did we ever leave?

I speak to her as if she had the answers. But it only raises more doubt. In the Citadel there’s a pair of other mothers desperate to find their children. Children I lost.

My legs burn. Each step harder than the last. It seems a life ago when I thought this gravity easy. Back when Philippe and I walked the whole Promenade. Was all of it a lie? Even the pain I saw in him?

I make it to the next level. Then the next one after that. It’s anger keeps my ass moving. Anger at Philippe for using me, at the men who thought I was their prey, at myself for trusting anyone on this bloodydamn moon.

I’m almost there. The stairwell grows cleaner. The graffiti is covered up by gray paint. There’s more lights. More cars. More sounds of a healthy city—sirens and advertisements. The stray dogs are on their lonesome now and wag their tails at me as I pass. I’m just beneath the smog. I can see the neon stain of holo advertisements through the gray clouds and a checkpoint up guarding the entrance to the Promenade levels above the smog. If I keep going up, I’ll have to pass through it. I could stay a level below—there’s shops, lights, people milling through the streets.

I look out at the city in the rain. My breath clouds in front of me.

I could disappear.

I could find a way to run.

But if I do, then what of it? I’m like Philippe: just another canker. I’d never see Liam again. As the rain seeps through my saturated tuxedo, I keep coming back to my sister’s face the moment we parted in 121—the fear in her eyes, the trust when she begged me to protect her son. It shatters all that’s left of me to know I did that to someone else. Helped a man steal their children. Watched the man who brought me out of hell die on the floor. I lean against the concrete barrier to catch my breath.

The sounds of the city warble all around me. But I feel so very far away. I hear the laughter of my nieces and nephews, I remember the smile on my father’s face when he’d find me wearing his boots. I ache for my mother, who deserved so much more than to wither and die from the inside. I miss my brothers

who went off to war, and I see again my sister perched up on that rusty antenna looking out over the camp and dreaming of stars she would never reach. And I feel anger—a consuming, furious anger—building in my chest at the people who would destroy families, hunt their fellow humans.

The Sovereign didn’t protect my family, but I’m not her.

I force my legs to climb the last stairs to the first Promenade level and walk toward the fenced checkpoint. I swallow my fear of the Grays behind the duroglass. My hands rest atop my head as best they can with my injured shoulder. A weapon-warning siren warbles as a scanner flickers blue light over my body.

“Weapon detected. Weapon detected. Weapon detected.”

Two Watchmen atop the guard posts aim their rifles at me. “Stop, citizen!” a voice says over a speaker. “On your knees or we will shoot!”

I SIT IN A WINDOWLESS GRAY ROOM with an untouched cup of coffee on the table in front of me. The shiny black lens of a camera watches me from the wall. The checkpoint Wardens who confiscated Philippe’s pistol were incredulous when they heard my story. Rightfully so. They say it ain’t on the news. They haven’t gotten a dispatch from central. All they got is the words that tumble out my gob in a chattering mess.

I’ve not seen anyone since they left.

I’m half asleep when the door slams open and a soldier fills the frame. She’s a stocky Gray with exhausted, narrow eyes, wearing black combat armor etched with a pegasus in flight over the Roman numeral VII. A drenched animal pelt hangs from her left shoulder. I stare at it in fear as I remember colliding with her chest in the hallway at the Telemanus estate. She smells like oil and wet dog. Two soldiers with roaring gold lions on their chest armor come in after her, one an Obsidian, the other a Gold, but she’s clearly in charge. “Lyria of Lagalos.” The words are a demand, not a question.

I nod, frightened by the hard-looking group. Their faces look carved of cracked city concrete. The stocky Gray is a Howler. One of the Reaper’s own. And the other men have sworn their lives to the Sovereign. To them, I’m a terrorist.

“I hear you’ve been spinning quite a tale.”

“Who are you?” I manage.

“My name is Holiday ti Nakamura, special envoy of the Sovereign. Muzzle her.” The men come around the table. I push backward instinctively. They grab me. One slams a fist into the side of my neck. My legs turn into a puddle. Black throbs in my vision. Something metal is shoved against my face. The fingers of the device crawl around my head, pulling taut even as a rubber appendage pushes into my mouth and expands till my tongue is pinned to the floor of my mouth. I hyperventilate. “Through the nose,” the Gray woman says. She snaps her fingers in front of my face. “Breathe through your nose, girl, or you’ll pass out. Breathe.”

I listen to her and suck oxygen down through my nose. “Shell her.”

One of the men pulls a plastic vest down over my head. My vision is still spotty as my head emerges out the top of it. He pushes my arms together in front of me and I groan in pain from the pressure on the dislocated shoulder, then the vest inflates, wrapping around my body, pinning my arms to my chest. Once it’s inflated, armor hardens on the outside as the polymer darkens.

“For your protection,” Holiday says. She leads me roughly by my muzzle out the door. A dozen heavily armed Lionguards with the red planet globe on their left shoulders, Martians all, wait in the rain in front of a warship bristling with guns and blazing with lights. Their rifles are up, their mechanized helmets scanning the buildings around. Several shadowy figures circle overhead. The local checkpoint Watchmen eye the Lionguards with awe and glance out the windows at the shadows in the sky. The Watchmen are under guard by more Lionguards and have had their weapons taken away. A Red Watchman with a Vox pyramid sewn onto his uniform nurses a split lip and sits handcuffed. A shattered datapad lies on the ground beside him. Holiday addresses the Watchmen.

“The information you heard tonight is classified. Divulging even a word of it will earn you charges of treason against the Republic. A second shuttle is on its way to collect you for debriefing.” She looks at the bloodied Vox Red. “You ever wanna do anything more than sort trash in Deepgrave, I suggest you comply.” She turns back to me. “When I say run, you close your eyes and run. Understand?”

I nod.

“Package ready for boarding,” Holiday says into her mouthpiece. “Blackfire? Ocelot?” There’s a murmur from the com clipped to her ear. She looks at me and slings her rifle from her shoulder and primes the charge. “Three. Two. One. Run.”

Three strobe lights sizzle white-hot light from the top of the ship, blinding out my vision before I clench shut my eyes. They pull me along at a run. I feel rain, the concrete, then the metal deck of a ship under my shoes. My vision returns, stained green by the shuttle lights as the soldiers funnel into the back with me. The shuttle jumps upward, the back ramp still open. When we’re a hundred meters from the ground, more of the Martians float up on gravBoots and land inside the craft. Only then does the ramp close.