Red Rising (Red Rising Saga 1)

He’s quiet for a moment, and it seems an anger builds in him.

“They say Carvers will never duplicate the beauty of the Golden Man. The Board of Quality Control taunts us. Personally, I do not want to make you a man. Men are so very frail. Men break. Men die. No, I’ve always wished to make a god.” He smiles mischievously as he does some sketches on a digital pad. He spins it around and shows me the killer I will become. “So why not carve you to be the god of war?”

Mickey replaces the skin of my back and the skin of my hands where Eo applied bandages to my burns. This, he says, is not to be my real skin. It is only a homogeneous baselayer.

“Your skeleton is weak because Mars gravity is zero point three of Earth’s, my delicate little bird. Also, you have a diet deficient in calcium. Gold Standard bone density is five times stronger than naturally occurring bone density on Earth. So we will have to make your skeleton six times stronger; you must be of iron if you want to last the Institute. This will be fun! For me. Not you.”

Mickey carves me again. The agony is beyond language or comprehension.

“Someone has to dot God’s i’s.”

The next day, he reinforces the bones of my arms. Then he does my ribs, my spine, my shoulders, my feet, my pelvis, and my face. He also alters the tensile qualities of my tendons and muscle tissue. Mercifully, he does not let me wake from this last surgery for several weeks. When I do wake, I see his girls around me applying new cultures of flesh and kneading my muscles with their thumbs.

Slowly, my skin begins to heal. I am a patchwork fleshquilt. They begin feeding me synthesized protein, creatine, and growth hormone to promote muscle growth and tendon regeneration. My body trembles in the nights and itches as I sweat through new, smaller pores. I cannot use pain medication strong enough to numb the agony, because the altered nerves must learn to function with the new tissue and my altered brain.

Mickey sits beside me on my worst nights telling me stories. It’s only then that I like him, only then that I think he is not some monster cooked up by this perverted Society.

“My profession is to create, little bird,” he says one night as we sit together in the darkness. Light from the machines bathes his face in queer shadows. “When I was young, I lived in a place they call the Grove. It was what you might think of as a circus culture. We had spectacles every night. Celebrations of color and sound and dance.”

“Sounds terrible,” I mutter sarcastically. “Just like the mines.”

He smiles softly and his eyes find that distant place. “I suppose it may seem a plush life to you. Yet there was a madness to the Grove. They made us take pills. Pills that could make us fly between the planets on wings of dust to visit the faerie kings of Jupiter and the deep mermaids of Europa. My mind always separate from body. No peace to it. No end to the madness.” He clapped his hands then. “And now I Carve the things I saw in my fever dreams, just as they always wished. I dreamed of you, I think. In they end, I suppose they’ll wish I hadn’t dreamed at all.”

“Was it a good dream?” I ask.

“What?”

“The one with me.”

“No. No, it was a nightmare. One of a man from hell, lover of fire.” He’s silent for a spell.

“Why is it so horrible?” I ask him. “Life. All this. Why do they need to make us do this? Why do they treat us like we’re their slaves?”

“Power.”

“Power isn’t real. It’s just a word.”

Mickey ponders silently. Then he shrugs his thin shoulders. “Mankind was always enslaved, they’ll say. Freedom enslaves us to lust, to greed. Take freedom away, and they give me a life of dreaming. They gave you a life of sacrifice, family, community. And society is stable. There is no famine. No genocide. No great wars. And when the Golds fight, they obey rules. They are … noble about it when the great houses bicker.”

“Noble? They lied to me. Said I was a pioneer.”

“And would you have been happier if you knew you were a slave?” Mickey asks. “No. None of the billion lowReds beneath Mars would be happy if they knew what the highReds knew—that they are slaves. So is it not better to lie?”

“It is better to not make slaves.”

When I am ready, he inserts a forceGenerator into my sleeping tube to simulate increased gravity on my frame. I’ve never known pain like this. My body aches. My bones and skin and muscles scream against the pressure and the change till I’m on medication that turns the scream into a dull forever-moan.

I sleep for days. I dream of home and family. Every night I wake after seeing Eo hang yet again. She sways across my mind. I miss her warmth in bed beside me, even though they give me an HC immersion mask for distraction.

Gradually, I am weaned from the pain medication. My muscles still aren’t used to the density of my bones, so my existence becomes a melodic ache. They begin to feed me real food. Mickey sits on the edge of my cot stroking my hair well into the nights. I don’t care that his fingers feel like spider legs. I don’t care that he thinks I am some piece of art, his art. He gives me something called a hamburger. I love it. Red meats and thick creams and breads and fruits and vegetables make my diet. I have never eaten so well.

“You need the calories,” Mickey coos. “You have been so strong for me; eat well. You deserve this food.”

“How am I doing?” I ask.

“Oh, the hard parts are over, my darling. You are a brilliant boy, you know. They have shown me the tapes from the other procedures where other Carvers tried this. Oh, how clumsy the other Carvers were, how weak the other subjects. But you are strong and I am brilliant.” He taps my chest. “Your heart is like that of a stallion’s. I’ve never glimpsed one like it before. You were bitten by a pitviper when you were young, I assume?”

“I was. Yes.”