Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

“What about the girl?”

The Sovereign looks down at me. “I will need you to testify. And there will be more questions. For now, my steward will see that you have food and a room.”

Holiday motions me to the door. I’m dismissed. I want to wish the Sovereign well, tell her I’ll be praying for her son. But I doubt the words will be well received. “I hope the gun helps,” I say. “I didn’t think about fingerprints till after. Mind was mud. But maybe some of his are still on there.”

“Gun?” the Sovereign asks, turning around. “What gun?”

Holiday looks as clueless as her master.

“The gun I had when I came to the checkpoint,” I say. “I stole it from Philippe’s car. It’s his.”

The Sovereign wheels on Holiday. “Where are the Watchmen?”

“In holding.”

“Send a team to the checkpoint. Now. Tell them to turn the place upside down.”

“What’s happening?” I ask.

“We weren’t given a gun.”

“I told them it was his.”

“Well, they didn’t tell us,” Holiday says.

The Lionguard teams arrive at the checkpoint by air. We watch via their helmet holoCams as they search the building. They find the pistol stored in a boot bag at the bottom of a Watchman’s locker. “That’s a Vulcan Omnivore,” Holiday says distantly. “They only made one line of them about sixty years back. It’s a collector’s item. Worth tens of thousands. One of them must have nipped it to sell.”

I’m a second behind the Sovereign in noticing the strange tone in Holiday’s voice.

“Running forensics,” one of the Lionguards says over his com. A holo of the gun appears in the center of the Sovereign’s conference table. My fingerprints show up on the barrel, trigger, and hilt. But a second set from larger fingers stands out on the battery pack.

“Filtering through the Index,” Holiday says in a dead pitch. “Match found. Piraeus Insurance company register 741 PCE.” She swallows. “Ephraim ti Horn, claims investigator.” The swarthy face of a man in his thirties appears in the air. His eyes are narrow and mischievous, his mouth pinched in playful derision. He’s much younger than Philippe, his nose smaller and his face thinner.

“Is this your Philippe?” Holiday asks.

“His nose is smaller. His cheeks are different.”

“He might have worn prosthetics.”

I lean forward toward the holo as she plays an interview clip from his personnel file. The man sits with his feet up on his desk, talking to the camera in a bored, Luna lilt. “…it seems the case of the missing Renoir comes down not to the cunning of a cat burglar but to a mere case of bankruptcy due to moral putrescence. This is fraud. Plain. And. Simple. I recommend denying recoupment and throw the fucker in Whitehold.”

“That’s him. That’s the bloodydamn bastard in the flesh.”

Holiday lets out a heavy, wounded sigh.

“Do you know him, Holiday?” the Sovereign asks.

The stocky woman nods and laughs a sad laugh to herself. “You could say so. He’s my brother-in-law.”

IT IS MY LAST DAY on Luna. Still dark cycle, but the sunrise stains the east. I sit watching the fledgling dawn with a glass of vodka from the heated terrace of a hotel suite I’ve rented. Tomorrow Volga and I will take the private shuttle I chartered to Earth, where all enemies of the state go to disappear. Digital monitoring on the old planet hasn’t quite caught up to Luna’s. Mars was an option, but it’s too unstable for my taste. I’ve been drinking since word reached me earlier that one of the Syndicate heavies killed a Red girl near the warehouse. I pour a glass of vodka for the little rabbit. Add a zoladone for myself.

She will have died bloody and scared in an alleyway. Hacked apart by hatchets and blades, just like her family. The ache of it in my chest fades as the zoladone spreads its cool, careless fingers through me.

Over the sprawl of the Mass and the flickering cityscape, I see Hyperion. Beyond her, a faint stain of pink that bleeds into a bruised sky littered with skyhooks and blinking satellites and the vein of starships from the AID that make their way into space.

Soon I’ll be on one of them. Not soon enough.

Lionheart’s killers, Holiday included, will be peeling Hyperion apart.