Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

Freihild shrugs. “Come. The Queen awaits.”

I know this ship all too well. I thought the Heart was destroyed in the war. Instead, it is as if the cruise ship has gone schizoid. The halls, long ago looted, are cluttered with refuse. Automated doors to staterooms and spas open and close at random. The lights inside flicker, with climate zones oscillating between freezing and swamplike. And everywhere there are Obsidian bedrolls, meal stations, stacked arms of a bivouacking army, and dust, so much Mercurian dust, from their gear, the engines of their ships, even their boots.

So that’s how she smuggled them under the nose of the Republic. They must have left when the Senate recalled half the fleet. Pax and Electra watch them with contempt. Left the Reaper in quite a lurch.

To leave the VIP zone, we take an eccentric gravLift upward. The glass tube rises through an aquarium in the heart of the ship. Once, it treated tourists to a view of the rainbow life beneath the Venusian waves. Now the glass is crusted with barnacles and smeared with algae. Without her caretakers to maintain balance, the ecosystem seems to have been hijacked by predators. They lurk under coral reefs and lumber through unfiltered murk. Ozgard chews his walnuts and watches as an ebony tentacle ripples through the shadows.

He murmurs something reverential in Nagal. Eyes wide and delighted, he points toward the shapes and murmurs to the children: “It is battle of strength. They eat each other. Soon one will remain…” He looks out at the water, the word a song on his tongue: “…victorious.”

I pick the threads of my Alltribe uniform. “Then he’ll starve. Or eat himself. King of a kingdom of one.” They all stare at me. Ozgard and Electra in annoyance, Freihild in amusement. Pax in agreement.

The mezzanine level fares no better than the aquarium.

The central playground where tourists would throng to restaurants and ballrooms and pleasure palaces has become a parlor of ghosts. As if a fine old party was in full narcotic-fueled bloom, and everyone suddenly vanished, leaving their glasses on the table and their jokes half told. The air is freezing. A thunderstorm rumbles through the halls. Fizzling here and there from dead speakers.

“Trapped in echo,” Ozgard explains reverently.

It ain’t the only one.

Some decade and a half ago, I vacationed here for the month round-trip to Venus. I walked its seafoam green carpets, martini in one hand, designer burner in the other, pockets weighed down by casino chips purloined from Silver tycoons mystified at how they could lose to a Gray. Karachi has the tendency to humble those used to playing life with a stacked deck.

Cost me half a year’s wages to rub shoulders with the highColors here, but Trigg let me pretend. It mattered to me. I was an uppity idiot desperate to prove I could spend money too. He tried his best to make me happy. He really did. That first night we danced to Venusian wave, then bit by bit he withdrew into himself until all he did was sit in his room and watch the news.

I know the Obsidians see what he saw.

How we drank as they froze and killed and sold off their men to gods to eke out another season in the poles. How the Gray phalanxes stood in orderly ranks to form the chain to their collar. Gray. So frail on our own. So impregnable when we lock arms.

Been a long time since that happened.

“What happened here?” I ask.

“War,” Freihild says. “Sons of Ares released achlys-9 years ago. Left the ship to drift in the Ink. Scavengers, looters, thieves, all come in seasons. Time passes. Servants of our Queen found and put to purpose for tribe.”

“Sounds more like Gorgons than the Sons of Ares,” Electra says.

Freihild shrugs. “All trees bear bad seeds, some bloody in bloom.”

“The Red Hand,” Pax clarifies. “Or its early form. Harmony, one of Ares’s more violent agents, composed it from radicalized Sons who believed Ares’s Gold origins was my mother’s propaganda. They claim her brother killed Ares. And that Ares’s true identity was Narol, my father’s uncle, instead of Electra’s grandfather.”

“You have a fucked-up family,” I say.

He frowns. “Yes.”

I feel half frozen and haunted all the way through by the time we reach the rococo entrance to the Heart’s Starboard Theater.

We follow Freihild into the dilapidated theater to the sound of a soprano delivering her aria. The impossibly thin Violet—a girl the color of a rainy street with a neck twice the length of mine—sings on a star-backed stage beneath an ivory mermaid. The theater is a sea of mouldering green silk, with a lone island of life near the front row. We draw closer down the aisle. Each step taking me deeper into the dream.

The Queen of the Valkyrie sits watching Wagner.

I would laugh if it all weren’t so damn haunting. A dozen Valkyrie veterans lounge in the rows behind their Queen. Valdir lies on the floor, giving an exaggerated yawn to Freihild as she sweeps in with us. She hides a smile. Xenophon sits rigid several rows behind the Valkyrie.

Onstage, the giraffe-necked Isolde now cradles the body of Tristan, her lover. The audio snags. The soprano begins to crackle, distort, and then dissolve.

Holograms.

Amel, Sefi’s Pink, sweeps onto the stage, tapping his datapad. “The file is corrupted, Your Majesty.” Sefi waves a hand for silence. She greets me with a nod and motions for the children and me to sit beside her.

“Welcome to the Heart of Venus,” she says. “You are just in time for the show.” She gestures to Amel, who looks suddenly confused standing in the center of the stage. “Amel here was a whore of the Aphrodite House, before I killed his owner. He was no more than the well of pleasure he could provide his clients. They would dip into it and sip. But there was always less in the well. Age comes for us all.” She glances at Valdir, who frowns, then back to Amel. “The Silvers would call this a well of diminishing returns. Soon he would have no purpose. I offered Amel aeta. He receives one hundred thousand credits per year. Less than a whore of his pedigree would earn in a L