Morning Star (Red Rising Saga 3)

“Why did you not take this to the leader of your tribe?” Loki asks.

“Or to your shaman?” Freya adds suspiciously. “The Way of Stains is long and hard. To climb all this way just to bring this to us…”

“We are wanderers,” Mustang says as Freya bends to look at the blade. “No tribe. No shaman.”

“Are you, little one?” Loki asks above Sefi, voice hardening. “Then why are there blue tattoos of the Valkyrie on the ankles of that one?” His hand drifts to the razor on his hip.

“She was cast out from her tribe,” I say. “For breaking an oath.”

“Is it marked with a house Sigil?” Loki asks Freya. She reaches for the weapon’s hilt in front of me when Mustang laughs bitterly, drawing her attention.

“On the handle, my goodlady,” Mustang says in Aureate lingo, remaining on her knees as she strips off her ma

sk and tosses it onto the ground. “You will find a Pegasus in flight. Sigil of the House Andromedus.”

“Augustus?” Loki sputters, knowing Mustang’s face.

I use their surprise and slip forward. By the time they turn back to me I’ve snatched the razor out from under Freya’s hand and activated the toggle so it is the curved question-mark shape that has burned on hillsides, been cut into foreheads, and killed so many of their kind. The same they would have seen on the holoDisplays as I made my speech.

“Reaper…” Freya manages, pulling up her pulseFist. I hack her arm off at the shoulder, then her head at the jaw before hurling my razor straight into Loki’s chest. The blade slows as it hits his pulseShield, frozen in midair for half a second as the shield resists. Finally the blade slips through. But it’s slowed and the armor beneath holds. It embeds itself in the pulseArmor plate. Harmless. Until Mustang steps forward and swivel-kicks the hilt of the razor. The blade punches through the armor and impales Loki.

Both gods fall. Freya to her back. Loki to his knees.

“Mask off,” Mustang barks as Loki’s hands wrap around the blade sticking from his chest. She slaps his hands away from his datapad. “No coms.” Holiday strips the razor from the man’s hip as his pulseShield shorts. I take Freya’s razor from her corpse. “Do it.”

Sefi and her Valkyrie stare wide-eyed from their knees at the blood pooling beneath Freya. I remove Freya’s helmet from her head to reveal the mangled face of a middle-aged Peerless Scarred woman with dark skin and almond-shaped eyes.

“Does this look like a god to you, Sefi?” I ask.

Mustang snorts a dark little laugh when Loki removes his mask. “Darrow. Look who it is. Proctor Mercury!” The pudgy, cherub-faced Peerless Scarred who endeavored to recruit me into his own house at the Institute before Fitchner stole me away. When last we saw each other five years ago, he tried to duel me in the halls as my Howlers stormed Olympus. I shot him in the chest with a pulseFist. He smiled all the while. He’s not smiling now as he stares at the metal in his chest. I feel a pang of pity.

“Proctor Mercury,” I say. “You have to be the least lucky Gold I’ve ever met. Two mountains lost to a Red.”

“Reaper. You have to be shitting me.” He shudders in pain and laughs at his own surprise. “But you’re on Phobos.”

“Negative, my goodman. That’d be my diminutive psychotic accomplice.”

“Gorydammit. Gorydammit.” He looks at the blade in his chest, grunting as he sits on his haunches and wheezes out breaths. “How…did we not see you…”

“Quicksilver hacked your system,” I say.

“You’re…here for…” His voice trails away as he looks at the Valkyrie rising to gather around the dead god. Sefi bends over Freya. The pale warrior traces her fingers over the woman’s face as Holiday strips off her armor.

“For them,” I say. “Bloodydamn right I am.”

“Oh, goryhell. Augustus,” our old proctor says turning to Mustang with a bitter laugh. “You can’t do this…it’s madness. They’re monsters! You can’t let them out! Do you know what will happen? Don’t open Pandora’s box.”

“If they are monsters, we should ask ourselves who made them that way,” Mustang says in the Obsidian tongue so Sefi can understand. “Now, what are the codes to Asgard’s armory?”

He spits. “You’ll have to ask nicer than that, traitor.”

Mustang is deadly cold. “Treason is a matter of the date, Proctor. Must I ask again? Or must I begin trimming your ears?”

Beside Freya’s body, Sefi dips her finger into the blood and tastes it.

“Just blood,” I say, crouching beside her. “Not ichor. Not divine. Human.”

I hold out Freya’s razor for her to take. She flinches at the idea, but forces herself to wrap her fingers around the hilt, hand trembling, expecting to be struck by lightning or electrocuted like men are who touch pulseShields with bare hands. “This button here retracts the whip. This one controls the shape.”