Morning Star (Red Rising Saga 3)

“Where is it?” I search his body for the detonator. “Sevro…”

He scissor-kicks my legs. Tangling them. Dropping me to the ground so we’re grappling instead of trading punches. He’s the better wrestler. And it’s all I can do to keep him from choking me out from behind as his legs form a triangle, heels locked in front of my face, legs pressing in on both sides of my neck. I lift him off the ground, but I can’t dislodge him. He’s dangling upside down behind me, spine to my spine, heels still in my face, trying to elbow my balls through my legs from behind. I can’t reach for him. I can’t breathe. So I grab his calves on my neck and spin my body. He slams into the metal. Once. Twice. Then he finally lets go, scrambling off. I’m on him in a flash, throwing a tight series of kravat elbows into his face. He catches my chin with the crown of his head accidentally.

“Dumb…son of a bitch…” I mutter, stumbling back. He’s gripping his own head in pain.

“Stupid lanky ass…”

He aims a kick at my midsection. I take the blow, catching the leg with my left arm, and exchange it for a haymaker right that crashes into his skull with all my weight behind it. He goes down hard, like I’m a hammer driving a nail into the floor. He tries to rise, but I push him down with a boot. He lies under it, heaving breaths. I’m dizzy and panting. Body hating me for what I’m doing to it.

“Are you done?” I ask him. He nods. I pull back my boot and extend a hand to help him up. He rolls to his back and reaches for it, then lurches up with his left boot heel straight into my groin. I fall and dry-heave beside him. Crippling nausea swells from my lower back into my balls and my stomach. Beside me, he’s panting like a dog. At first I think he’s laughing, but when I look up I’m shocked to see tears in his eyes. He lies on his back. Huge sobs make his rib cage shudder. He turns away, tries to hide from me to stop the tears from coming, but it makes it worse.

“Sevro…”

I sit up, feeling ripped apart by the sight of him. I don’t hold him, but I put a hand on his head. And he surprises me by not flinching away, but instead crawling up to put his head on my knee. I put my other hand on his shoulder. In time the sobs slow and he blows the snot from his nose. But he doesn’t move. It’s like the moment after a lightning storm. The air kinetic and vibrating. After several minutes, he clears his throat and pushes himself up to sit with his legs folded under him in the center of the hall. His eyes are puffy, ashamed. He plays with his hands, the tattoos and Mohawk making him look like something pulled from a deranged children’s book.

“You tell anyone I cried, I’ll find a dead fish, put it in a sock, hide it in your room, and let it putrefy.”

“Fair enough.”

The detonator lies off to the side. Close enough so we can both reach for it. Neither of us do. “I hate this,” he says weakly. “People like that.” He glances up at me. “I don’t want him to be a Son. I don’t want to be like Quicksilver.”

“You aren’t.”

He doesn’t believe that. “At the Institute, I’d wake up in the morning. And I think I was still in my dreams. Then I’d feel the cold. And I’d slowly start remembering where I was, and there’s dirt and blood under my nails. And all I want to do was go back to sleep. To be warm. But I knew I had to get up and face a world that didn’t give a shit.” He grimaces. “That’s how I feel every morning now. I’m afraid all the time. I don’t want to lose anyone. I don’t want to let them down.”

“You haven’t,” I say. “If anything, I let you down.” He tries to interrupt me. “You were right. We both know it. It’s my fault your father’s dead. It’s my fault that whole night happened.”

“Was still a shit thing of me to say.” He raps his knuckles on the ground. “I’m always saying shit things.”

“I’m glad you said it.”

“Why?”

“Because we’ve both forgotten we didn’t get here on our own. You and I should be able to say anything to each other. That’s how this works. It’s how we work. We don’t walk on eggshells. We talk to each other. Even if we say shit that’s hard to hear.” I see how alone he feels. How much weight he carried. It’s how I felt when Cassius stabbed me and left me for dead at the Institute. He needs to share the weight. I don’t know how else to tell him that. This stubbornness, this intransigence, looks insane from the outside, but inside he felt just as I did when Roque questioned me.

“Do you know why I helped you at the Institute when you and Cassius were gonna drown in that loch?” he asks. “It’s cause of how they look at you. It wasn’t like I thought you were a good primus. You were as smart as a bag of wet farts. But I saw them. Pebble. Clown. Quinn….Roque.” He almost trips over that last name. “I’d watch you at your fires in the gulches when Titus was in the castle. Saw you teach Lea how to cut a goat’s throat even when she was afraid to do it. I wanted to do that too. To join.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He shrugs. “Was afraid you wouldn’t want me.”

“They look at you that way now,” I say. “Don’t you see that?”

He snorts. “Nah, they don’t. The whole time, I tried to be you. Tried to be Pops. Didn’t work. I could tell everyone just wished it was me that the Jackal captured. Not you.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“It is,” he says intensely, leaning forward. “You’re better than I am. I saw you. When you looked down at Tinos. Saw your eyes. The love in them. The urge to protect those people. I tried feeling it. But every time I looked down at the refugees, I just hated them. For being weak. For hurting each other. For being stupid and not knowing what we’ve gone through to help them.” He swallows and picks at the cuticles of his stubby fingers. “I know it’s nasty, but it’s what it is.”

He seems so vulnerable here in this hall, the rage taken out of us from the fight. He’s not looking for a lecture. Leadership has worn him down, alienated him from even his Howlers. Right now

he’s looking to feel like he’s not like Quicksilver or the Jackal or any of the Golds we fight against. He’s mistakenly assumed I’m something better than he is. And part of that is my fault.

“I hate them too,” I say.

He shakes his head. “Don’t…”

“I do. At least, I hate that they remind me of what I was, or could have been. Shit, I was a little idiot. You would have hated me. I was comfortable and arrogant and selfish on my knees. I liked being blind to everything because I was in love. And I thought for some reason that living for love was the most valiant thing in all the worlds. Even made Eo into something in my head that she wasn’t. Romanticized her and the life we had—probably because I saw my father die for some cause. And I saw all he left behind, so I tried to cling to the life he abandoned.”