Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

I try to speak to the Wardens, who are standing in small groups along the sides of the room, talking amongst themselves. A cowlike moo comes out of my mouth. Hilarious. The psychotechs have hijacked the Broca’s area of my brain, disabling my language abilities even though I maintain the motor skills to form sounds.

Lilath, you clever girl.

“Sorry, lass. Say again?” a Gray Warden says, laughing. So my angular gyrus and Wernicke’s area are intact. I can understand words and concepts. He was being an asshole. That Warden is really quite handsome. I would kill him if I could, naturally, yet I still wonder if his manhood is sufficient to please me. Probably not. I have high standards.

No. Don’t be distracted. My supposition was correct.

I will sit in silence as they accuse me of heinous crimes before billions of confused, frightened citizens who will be waiting for some clarity on the dreadfully violent massacre. They will have been waiting for days, perhaps weeks, for my account, and I will sit in silence as they accuse me of murdering Dancer.

In my silence, my people will proscribe condescension and guilt. If this were a time of peace, there would be a rebellion and anarchy, but in a time of war, they will swallow it just to have a leader, and I will be executed. My son will watch. Atalantia will lift the communication blockade on Mercury and let Darrow watch. And Lilath will rule through Publius.

It’s masterful.

I’m distracted. That Gray warden really does have fine…

Oh no.

I can feel the scores of wounds the crowd gave me during the massacre, but not well. They are dull, distant, and deep beneath the pleasure.They’ve hijacked the dopamine and oxytocin levels of my brain. I’m happy when I should be furious. I can process and understand, but feel nothing but amplified postcoital joy.

Lilath, that bitch.

A hologram appears before me. It grows from a small blue embryo to consume half the room.

The daylight hologram of a funeral procession enters the Moonhall courtyard, the one outside the building in which I currently sit. It is led by blue-cloaked Wardens on white horses. Blackchains walk with heavy guns. Skiffs follow, the same that are used in the washing of highrise windows, now laden with victims of Publius’s purge: members of my Lionguard and my household, senators, Skyhall officers, businessmen, and politicos of the required hue.

And on the front of the skiff, sitting with rigid dignity, is Theodora.

The poor woman. I was nothing but hard on her. I should have brought her closer. The distrust created gaps, and now she will die. What a horrible world, I think with a smile.

Publius stands with the leaders of the Vox’s radical wing on the steps of the Moonhall. They wear their unwashed senatorial robes stained with old blood. Ashes mark his face for mourning.

How dramatic.

The crowd teems against barricades and soldiers, jeering as the procession draws to a halt before the Obelisk of Ares. It floats ten meters above the ground. Commissioned by Victra to commemorate Sevro’s father, it bears images of the birth of the Sons of Ares along its one-hundred-meter length. Darrow’s image, which by tradition always faces north, has been turned south. The hallowed sight of his first wife now holds the place of honor. Eo of Lykos sings in stone before the gallows that would claim her life.

I always felt jealousy toward the dead girl. She knew Darrow back when all he wanted was to love and be loved. Darrow has loved me. Truly loved me in a way that cannot exist outside of wartime, yet that love reflects a Gold love, not the Red love that consumes the self, a love I could never feel. My brain has always been too far ahead of my heart. But even then, I cannot help but think that Eo loved him less than he deserved.

Will he watch me die from Mercury as the enemy engines of doom stalk ever closer?

The procession has come to a stop.

How did it work? Did Atalantia sponsor Lilath? She must have.

Soldiers unload the prisoners at the tip of the Obelisk’s shadow and lead them along its path to the base of the Obelisk. There is no struggle. Many walk with a determined step. Some few dance a little jig. Theodora lifts her eyes to behold the last rays of the sun as light glints off the bronze dome of the Moonhall, where blindfolded Liberty stands with her scales. Pigeons watch from her bronze shoulders.

When the victims all have been brought to the base of the Obelisk, Publius recites the charges of which Theodora has been found guilty by the new power of the land—the People’s Tribunal.

“…conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to wrest legal authority from the Senate, conspiracy to commit treason against the Republic…”

Each charge is met with a jeer from the crowd. The transparent partitions are lowered around the base of the Obelisk and Theodora is taken under and secured to a hook of metal set in the stone. The Vox have made their mark. Grooves have been lasered into the stone for liquid to run into troughs beyond the partitions.

Publius completes the reading of the charges.

Theodora lifts her chin and stares straight ahead, a woman of worth underneath the shadow of ten thousand tons of stone. A woman who was grown in a tank, who was raised with Cupid’s Kiss to understand that pain is relieved only by sexual obedience, who was made to learn the art of pleasing the men who would one day rape her body, a woman who survived decades of sexual humiliation to become a glorified maid, and then chose to follow a young man at war with the world, not because she believed he would win, but because he was the first man to fight for her.

She fought for him, and as the stone comes down she is flattened by a marble monument dedicated to the dream she lived for.

I close my eyes.