Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

“You crazy? Just use a bloody knife. He’s probably got one in his pocket!”

Picker is still twitching when Freckles searches his pockets and stands back up with a vibroKnife. She mutters apologies as she cuts me free.

Wincing from the two mangled fingers, I pull my hand from the ropes and bolt to my feet. Blood rushes to my head. When I blink the spots away, Freckles stands shivering over Picker. I pull the gun from her loose fingers. She looks over at me as I check the magazine. Twelve rounds left.

“Where are the other girls?” I ask.

She blinks as if coming back to herself. “Don’t know. I saw them take you, out the window.” Her hand rubs at the blood on her dress again. “Came soon as I could. W-what do we do?”

There’s no right answer. Who knows if enough guards drank the swill in the mines? If the girls hid well enough? If I put enough haemanthus in there to do the trick? Or if Volga could convince the others to help her overpower those guards left standing? What should I do?

Even with a pistol, I’m no freelancer. Hell, I’m not even a Red Hand soldier. I can’t help the girls. I need someone built for war.

The township is in turmoil as Freckles and I slip out onto the walkway. Up the town’s tiered stone levels, melting men are stumbling onto walkways and bridges outside their homes. Their friends, many drunk, run to help them, but then push them back in fear that the acid will spread to them. The acid eats through a cable of a bridge and sends six men spiraling through the air to land five levels down on the mine floor. One splits his head open on a table. Several others lie calling for help, unable to move. Drunk men rush to help them.

Several childwives I know are running up the levels toward the mine’s entrance. Red Hand men run to cut them off. I see Lion leading a couple of girls into a tunnel several levels up. Is she carrying a pistol?

Harmony’s two levels above, shoving a man without a face off her and charging into a home. There’s gunshots from inside. Knowing that a girl just died because of me woulda once put me on my heels, but all it does now is make me focus on the Can, the fortress the Grays would have used as barracks back when the mine was operating.

Its metal walls squat over the mine, and it’s connected to the township by cable ladders hammered into the stone four levels up. Freckles and I rush to the ladder and begin to climb. We abandon it on the next level as we see men coming down. I hiss at Freckles to follow me into a house as a man leaves it. His wife stumbles back from the door, clutching a newborn as we shove in. I make a quiet motion, and she doesn’t scream when she sees my pistol. In fact, her whole face changes.

“We gotta get to the next level,” I say.

She leads us to the second floor of the home and gestures out the window to a cable. “Connects with the one above.” She glances at my two mangled fingers. “Can you climb it?”

“We’ll find out.”

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“You should probably stay inside,” I reply before swinging out.

It isn’t easy, but tucking the pistol into my pocket, I scale the cable hand over hand. Aengus would smile to see all that exploring wasn’t in vain. Freckles manages to follow me, a bit slower until she starts using her legs to push off the wall.

“Psst,” a voice whispers as Freckles crawls up to the sixth level. I turn to see Lion’s dark face staring out from a tunnel between two houses. “Is it safe?” A dozen other girls peer out from behind her.

“Not yet,” I say. “Wait here, and we’ll tell you when to come.”

Freckles and I use a stone stairwell to make the seventh level. From there, we cross the cable bridge to the Can. I pull Freckles behind some crates as the door bursts open and a dozen men pour out past the crate and over the sky bridge to help their fellows below.

Seems most of the boys were drawn below by the screams. How do I know that? They’re moving down different stairwells than I am. On opposite sides of the Can. I lean to get a view off the edge and see them going across different sky bridges.

How did I know they were there?

Or that the men were coming through the door?

Or that Freckles is just off my right hip?

It’s not sight or sound, it’s just a sense. A low-frequency humming in my head. A sort of texture of movement. The parasite. Not broken completely after all. I don’t know what it’s doing, but I like it.

The door to the Can is little more than a sheet of plastic. It covers a hole they must have welded into the Can to give it access from the sky bridges. It leads to a dark hall stocked with Republic rations. We pass storerooms filled with boxed electronics, foodstuffs, stolen fur jackets, and helium-3 canisters.

Finally near a stairwell, I see the level signifier. Level seven. We’re three floors down from where Duncan claimed Victra is being kept. About to rush up the stairs, I push Freckles into a room and close the door at the feeling of soldiers coming up.

We wait with our backs pressed against the wall as their boots clatter the metal hall outside. Beside the door, I aim my pistol where the first man will come in. None does. Freckles looks at me afte

r. “How did you know?”

“I heard them,” I lie.