Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

Then she brings both hands back around onto her thighs and crouches a little lower for the final effort. The baby’s whole head is hanging out. With another sustained push, its shoulders slip through and a purple mass of flesh spurts out.

She brings her arms down and catches the baby at the base of its skull, supporting it as she sweeps it upright while falling to her knees in a motion both complex and instinctive. She sorts the lifestring from the baby’s neck as it begins to gurgle, and then cups it in her arms. Victra brings her mouth to her baby’s face, sucks to clear the mouth and nose, and then spits on the floor. The baby is blotched and viscous and alive. Its eyes are clamped shut against the dim light of the room. It cries until it finds her nipple, then takes it in its mouth and, cocooned in the arms of its wet, scared mother, grows still.

Victra sways there, in a world of two, rocking the baby so tenderly, so intimately, with such encompassing love that I am unable to look away. They begin to pulse, to throb with color, the warmth inside them or maybe the emotions in me triggering the parasite so that their thermal heat glows in the coolness of the room.

“It’s a boy, Sevro,” Victra’s glowing mouth whispers. “You guessed right.”

And for a moment, as I watch, as I see the heat that makes their bodies, the vibrations that form her words, I believe the hero of my brothers can hear his wife, wherever he might be. Just as I believe deep down I could feel the death of Aengus and Dagan and Liam, the last of my family. Neither time nor space can sever the strands of life between those we love, not really. It is not the parasite telling me this. It is my heart. In the room, I feel my father and mother, my sister and my brothers. The joy we had is no lesser for having ended in horror. It is not gone, as I thought it was. It is here. In these moments that are larger than the world itself. They were alive. They lived. They were loved.

“Come say hello,” Victra says.

I am startled back into the room. “Me?”

“I thought you weren’t an idiot.”

She leans the baby close to me as he snuffles at her breast. I take his little hand and smile as his fingers curl around mine. He is slightly larger than my brothers were, but those eyes that will mark him different from them are closed. The winged sigils on his hands are bone, not yet coated with gold. He is just a child.

“Hello, little haemanthus,” I say, just as I once said to my sister’s children as they took their first breaths, “welcome to the worlds.”

I leave Victra alone. The door bumps against Volga, who waits outside with a blank look on her face. I close the door behind me and nod. She breaks into a smile, as confused as I am to find herself celebrating the birth of Julii’s child.

Through the cracked door I hear Victra whisper a benediction to her child: “My son…” Her voice falters. “My son, you are of the gens Julii. Your ancestors looked to the night sky when there was nothing but drips of light in the darkness. Roads they built to stitch that light together. You are also of the gens Barca, guardians of the human race. You will be hated and you will hate. You will love and be loved. You will fall and you will rise. Never will you know peace, but you will know joy. You may even sail the dark seas in ships and lie beside nymphs in alien woods. You are your father’s son. Forever my boy. Forever our Ulysses.”

VICTRA EATS WHAT’S LEFT of the soup and bread at the kitchen table. Ulysses is swaddled in her arms. The storm’s still howling outside, having lasted through the night. In a few hours it’ll be daylight. Volga and I stay awake on coffee. We all know we can’t stay here long. If we keep Cormac and his family inside after the storm dies, it’ll arouse suspicion from the townfolk, and there’s no telling which of them will call the Red Hand. We have to be gone as soon as possible.

Volga and I want to wait, fearing Victra isn’t strong enough. She looks paler than I’ve ever seen her, and even if Golds are Golds, they’re still human. She needs to rest. We manage to convince her to let Volga go to the transmitter now. Cormac offers to take her, but Victra doesn’t want the man out in the village. His son volunteers. But that’s just the same. Volga can find it on her own. Better they stay tied at the table.

I stand with her in the open doorway. Volga squints into the swirling snow, then back at Ulysses in the crook of Victra’s arm as his mother finishes off a heel of bread. Volga’s left Fig’s black orb by the fire. “I wish I could have watched,” she says, mildly jealous. “Why did she let you?”

“Think she wanted to teach me a lesson.”

“I’ve never seen a baby born.”

“Never?”

She shakes her head.

I pat her arm. “You’ll get your chance one day if you like. It is something.”

“No,” Volga says. “They made me without a womb.?

? She sets her hand on her rifle.

“You know with enough money, bet they can change that now.”

“Twenty million,” Volga says. “Twenty million is what it takes.” I tilt my head. Is that why she’s been doing all this? Is that what Fig’s bounty means to her? I feel a sudden heaviness in my heart for the big woman. Not just because of the confession, but because she chose to trust me with it. She smiles and pats my shoulder, closer than we were even the night before. “I will be back soon. Guard them well.”

I watch Volga disappear into the snow and close the door.

She is a good person. Well, maybe not good. But what is good? She was raised by a bastard, but my father was a bastard too. Not always, and not to me, but I know how he hoarded our Laureltide boxes. How other families perished while ours grew strong. All my family’s joy grew in the shadow of that truth, whether I want to admit it or not.

Maybe it wasn’t my mother’s death that broke the man. Maybe it was his conscience.

Victra tries her best to stay awake after Volga leaves, but after the pace she set through the highlands, and the labor, it seems even a Gold has limits. She keeps falling asleep at the table. I convince her to go rest with Ulysses, telling her I’ll keep watch. By the time she wakes, her men will be on their way here. She smiles at that, no doubt thinking of her daughters, her husband.

I sit at the table with my gun in my lap and glance sideways at the orb. The flames from the hearth fire bend along its glossy surface. I pick it up and run my hands over the smooth metal. Its whispers tickle the back of my mind. What’s inside you?

Across the table, Cormac yawns, tied to his chair by Volga’s knots. His son, Alred, sleeps on a blanket by the fire, his hands bound in front of him.