Golden Son (Red Rising Saga 2)

He just stares at me. “Thank you,” Mustang says. He mumbles something inaudible and backs away bowing.

“I think the Ash Lord was a bit different from us,” I say. Mustang pushes the fruit toward me. “Thought you didn’t like bacon,” I say.

She shrugs. “I h

ad it every morning on Luna.” She delicately butters her waffles. “Reminded me of you.” She avoids my eyes. “Why can’t you sleep?”

“Not much good at it.”

“You never were. Except when you have a hole in your stomach. You slept like a baby then.”

I laugh. “I think comas don’t count.”

We talk about anything but the things we should. Innocent and quiet, like two moths dancing around the same flame. “Amazing how big the beds are, even on a starship,” Mustang says. “Mine’s monstrous. Too big, really.”

“Finally! Someone else agrees. Half the time, I sleep on the floor.”

“You too?” she shakes her head. “Sometimes I hear noises and sleep in the closet, thinking if someone’s coming for me they won’t look there.”

“I’ve done that. Really does help.”

“Except when the closet is big enough to fit a family of Obsidians. Then its just as bad. She frowns suddenly. “I wonder if Obsidians cuddle.”

“They don’t.”

Her eyebrows rise. “Have you researched it?”

I finish a handful of strawberries, shrugging as Mustang frowns at my manners. “Obsidians believe in three types of touch. The Touch of Spring. The Touch of Summer. The Touch of Winter. After the Dark Revolt, where the Obsidians rose in arms against the iron ancestors, the Board of Quality Control debated destroying the entire Color. You know how they gave them religion, stole their technology. But what they wished to kill most of all was the incredible kinship the Obsidians then possessed. So they instructed the shaman of the tribes, bought and paid for liars, to warn against touch, saying it weakened the spirit. So now the Obsidians touch one another in sex. They touch each other to prevent death. And they touch each other to kill. No cuddling.” I notice her watching me with a small smirk. “But of course you knew all that.”

“I did.” She smiles. “But sometimes it’s nice to remember all that’s going on inside you.”

“Oh.” I redden for some reason.

“I forgot you can blush!” She watches me for a moment. “You probably don’t know this, but one of my dissertations on Luna concentrated on mistakes in the sociological manipulation theorems used by the Board of Quality Control.” She cuts a sausage delicately. “I deemed them shortsighted. The chemical sexual sterilization of the Pink genus, for instance, has led to a tragically high suicide rate within the Gardens.”

Tragically. Most would have said “inefficient.”

“The rigidity of laws maintaining the hierarchy are so strict they’ll one day break. Fifty years from now? A hundred? Who knows? There was this one case we studied where a Gold woman fell in love with an Obsidian. They had a blackmarket Carver alter their reproductive organs so his seed was compatible with her eggs. They were found out and both were executed, their Carvers killed. But things like this have happened a hundred times. A thousand. They’re just scrubbed from the record books.”

“It’s terrible,” I say.

“And beautiful.”

“Beautiful?” I ask, repulsed.

“No one knows of these people,” she says. “No one but a handful of Golds with access. The human spirit tries to break free, again and again, not in hate like the Dark Revolt. But for love. They don’t mimic each other. They aren’t inspired by others who come before them. Each is willing to take the leap, thinking they are the first. That’s bravery. And that means it’s a part of who we are as people.”

Bravery. Would she say that if she knew one of those people sat across from her? Does she live in the world of theories Harmony spoke of? Or could she really understand …

“So how long, I wonder,” she continues, “till a group like the Sons of Ares finds the records, broadcasts them? They did it with Persephone. The girl who sang. It’s only a matter of time.” She pauses, squinting at me as I react involuntarily to the mention of Eo. “What’s wrong?”

I can’t tell her what I’m thinking, so I lie. “Dissertations. Sociology. You and I specialize in very different things. I always wondered what your life was like on Luna.”

Mustang eyes me playfully. “Oh? So you thought about me?”

“Maybe.”

“Day and night? What is Mustang wearing? What is she dreaming about? What boy is she kiss—?”