Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

The memory evaporates as I open my eyes.

The room is quiet, and so far from home.

Cassius’s blood has dried on my hands and begun to itch. I wash them in the basin in the corner till the spigot tells me I’ve reached my daily ration of water. I pump the spigot once more. “Daily ration exceeded,” it drones again. My hands are still pink. I sit back on the sleeping pallet and wait, focusing on slowing my breath till I slip into a shallow slumber.

I wake at the sound of my door opening, hoping instinctively that it is Seraphina. But why would it be?

The Pink, Aurae, stands there nervously, her hands clutched together, her eyes on the ground. There’s blood under her nails.

“Dominus.” She bows. “The Storm Knight sent me.”

“Is Cassius alive?”

She shifts on the soles of her gray slippers.

“Is he? Be plain.”

“No.” Her eyes flutter up to meet mine. “He has passed.”

I say nothing for a full minute. “When?”

“Not long ago. I am sorry, dominus.”

I drift to the window. The darkness and cold outside creep in. “That long? I didn’t even feel him go.” It was while I was sleeping.

The roar of my crumbling world drowns out the woman’s voice. This is not how it was supposed to end. I thought I had saved him. That I would have a chance to show him that he was wrong. To help him realize the mistake he’d made choosing Darrow and convince him that there was still good he could do in the world. Still peace he could bring. Somehow I thought our lives would go on together, and one day he would follow me as I follow him.

Instead, he’s gone into the void.

His last moments spent thinking I betrayed him and stole his redemption.

I’m weightless there against the stone, floating and, at the same time, crushed by the weight of my choices and the impossible question I ask myself: what would I have done differently? In some other world, the Pink is still talking. “I was told that he died of exsanguination.”

“I understand,” I hear myself saying. Stand astride the sorrow. Do not let it touch you. “Thank you, Aurae,” I say. “May I see him?”

She looks back at my guards, and I realize they are not the same Diomedes left. These are Dido’s men. “I’m afraid that is impossible, dominus.”

“Why?” She looks at the ground. “Answer me.”

“His body was taken by schoolmates of Bellerephon to…desecrate in the Waste. Diomedes went to pursue them.”

“So he sent you.”

“I have his trust.”

“I see. Is there anything else?”

“No, dominus.”

When the door closes, the composure shivers. First a crack, like a plate of glass struck by an errant pebble. The crack stretches and spreads and proliferates till the whole plate of dignity shatters all at once. My legs cave from under me as I think of how Pytha will suffer from this news. A single sob escapes. It is alone in the room. No sound follows it to give it company or comfort. Just one long lament of a wounded animal and I am quiet, rocking there on the cold floor with my knees hugged to my chest like that distant child who heard from Aja that his parents had perished. Her dark arms held that boy as he trembled. Her whispers soothed his heart. This stone is cold like that stone. This pain is deep like that pain. This moment like that moment. Only now, with the passing of Cassius, there is no one left to hold the boy; all that was left of him is dead, and the life of the man must begin.

THE BARCA BOARDERS ABANDONED their attack on the shuttle soon as the Telemanus and Augustus forces from the Citadel threatened to overwhelm them. Now the knights guide us to an elevated landing pad atop a spire in the Citadel of Light. The soldiers drag me from the assault ship out into the rain.

I lower my head, afraid to meet anyone’s gaze. These are not the Grays who guarded my mine, or the Reds who came to 121, or the ones who pulled their guns on me in the Promenade. They’re colder, harder creatures. I look up at the night sky and glimpse the stars through a break in the cloud layer. The air is cool, wet with rain. I try to feel it all, to mark these sensations, knowing a cell is where I’ll spend the rest of my days. In the mine, I thought sky was stone. And after a month in Camp 121, I forgot the stars were there. But now as I know it is the last time I will see and feel them, I wonder how I ever survived without them.

I’m escorted deep within the Citadel till we reach a pale wood door. Obsidians larger than any of the Telemanuses stand to either side. Holiday drags me through the doors into the room and shoves me into a chair in front of a long table made from a single slab of black wood. Across the table, under the golden angels on his bald head, Daxo au Telemanus’s huge eyes dissect me. He wears a violet tunic with a golden fox lapel. Next to him on the table sits a small aquarium filled with water and a maggot-colored animal. A carved creature with spindly legs and a gelatinous torso that reminds me of the mud leeches in the river outside 121. I shudder.

A spoon clicks on china. I tear my eyes from the monster to look at Daxo’s companion, the elderly Pink woman I saw with the Sovereign at Quicksilver’s. Elegance in beige robes. Her gray hair is spun up above her head like a frosted rose and held together by a simple silver clasp. Her motherly eyes, set in an old, distinguished face, watch me with a more human interest than Daxo has ever looked at anything.