Morning Star (Red Rising Saga 3)

“Ares is wise,” Sevro says dismissively.

“And a drama queen,” Victra adds.

At the door to the tram, Ragnar hesitates, eyes lingering on an antiterrorism poster pasted onto a concrete support column in the tram’s waiting area. “See something, say something,” it reads, showing a pale Red with evil crimson eyes and the stereotypical tattered dress of a miner skulking near a door that says “restricted access.” Can’t see the rest. It’s covered in rebel graffiti. But then I realize Ragnar’s not looking at the poster, but at the man I didn’t even notice who’s crumpled on the ground beneath it. His hood’s up. Left leg is an ancient mech replacement. A crusted brown bandage covers half his face. There’s a puff. The release of pressurized gas. And the man leans back from us, shivering, and smiling with perfectly black teeth. A plastic stim cartridge clatters to the floor. Tar dust.

“Why do you not help these people?” Ragnar asks.

“Help them with what?” Rollo asks. He sees the empathy on Ragnar’s face and doesn’t really know how to answer. “Brother, we barely got enough for flesh and kin. No good sharing with that lot, ya know?”

“But that one is Red. They are your family…”

Rollo frowns at the bare truth.

“Save the pity, Ragnar,” Victra says. “That’s Syndicate crank he’s puffing. Most of them would slit your throat for an afternoon high. They’re empty flesh.”

“Empty what?” I say, turning back to her.

She’s caught off guard by the sharpness of my tone, but she’s loath to back off. So she doubles down instinctively. “Empty flesh, darling,” she repeats. “Part of being human is having dignity. They don’t. They carved it out themselves. That was their choice, not Golds’. Even if it’s easy to blame them for everything. So why should they deserve my pity?”

“Because not everyone is you. Or had your birth.”

She doesn’t reply. Rollo clears his throat, skeptical now about our disguises. “Lady’s right about the slit-your-throat part. Most of ’em were imported laborers. Like me. Not counting the wife, I’ve got plus three in New Thebes that I send money back to, but I can’t go home till my contract’s up. Got four years left. These slags have given up on tryin’ to get back.”

“Four years?” Victra asks dubiously. “You said you were already here eight.”

“Gotta pay for my transit.”

She stares at him quizzically.

“Company doesn’t cover it. Shoulda read the fine print. Sure, it was my choice to come up here.” He nods to the vagrants. “Was theirs too. But when the only other choice is starving.” He shrugs as if we all know the answer. “These slags just got unlucky on the job. Lost legs. Arms. Company doesn’t cover prosthetics, least not decent ones….”

“What about Carvers?” I ask.

He scoffs. “And who the hell do you know that can afford flesh work?”

I didn’t even think of the cost. Reminds me of how distant I am from so many of the people I claim to fight for. Here’s a Red, one of my own more or less, and I don’t even know what type of food is popular in his culture.

“What company do you work for?” Victra asks.

“Why, Julii Industries, of course.”

—

I watch the metal jungle pass outside the dirty duroglass window as the tram pulls away from the station. Victra sits down next to me, a troubled look on her face. But I’m a world away from her, my friends. Lost in memory. I’ve been to the Hive before with ArchGovernor Augustus and Mustang. He brought the lancers to meet with Society economic ministers to discuss modernizing the moon’s infrastructure. After the meetings she and I snuck away to the moon’s famous aquarium. I’d rented it out at absurd cost and arranged a meal and wine to be served to us in front of the orca tank. Mustang always liked natural creatures more than Carved ones.

I’ve traded fifty-year-old wines and Pink valets for a grimmer world with rusting bones and rebel thugs. This is the real world. Not the dream the Golds live in. Today I feel the silent screams of a civilization that has been stepped on for hundreds of years.

Our path skirts around the edges of the Hollows, the center of the moon where the latticework of cage slum apartments festers without gravity. To go there would be to risk falling into the middle of the Syndicate street war against the Sons of Ares. And to go any higher into the midColor levels would be to risk Society marines and their security infrastructure of cameras and holoScanners.

Instead, we pass through the hinterlands of maintenance levels between the Hollows and the Needles, where Reds and Oranges keep the moon running. Our tram, driven by a Sons sympathizer, speeds through its stops. The faces of waiting workers blur together as we pass. A pastiche of eyes. But faces all gray. Not the color of metal, but the color of old ash in a campfire. Ash faces. Ash clothes. Ash lives.

But as the tunnel swallows our tram, color erupts around us. Graffiti and years of rage bleeding out from the ribbed and cracking walls of its once gray throat. Profanity in fifteen dialects. Golds ripped open in a dozen dark ways. And to the right of a crude sketch of a reaper’s scythe decapitating Octavia au Lune is an image of Eo hanging from the gallows in digital paint, hair aflame, “Break the Chains” written diagonally. It’s a single glowing flower among the weeds of hate. A knot forms in my throat.

Half an hour after we set out, our tram grinds to a halt outside a deserted lowColor industrial hub where thousands of workers should diverge from their early-morning commute from the Stacks to attend their functions. But now it’s still as a cemetery. Trash litters the metal floors. HoloCans still flash with the Society’s news programs. A cup sits on a table in a café, steam still rising off the top of the beverage. The Sons have cleared the way only a few minutes before. Shows the extent of their influence here.

When we leave, life will return to the place. But after we plant the bombs we’ve brought with us? After we destroy the manufacturing, won’t all the men and women we intend to help be just as unemployed as those poor creatures in the tram station? If work is their reason for being, what happens when we take it away? I’d voice my concerns to Sevro, but he’s a driven arrow. As dogmatic as I once was. And to question him aloud seems a betrayal of our friendship. He’s always trusted me blindly. So am I the worse friend for having doubts in him?

We pass through several gravLifts into a garage for garbage disposal haulers, also owned by Julii Industries. I catch Victra wiping dirt off the family crest on one of the doors. The speared sun is worn and faded. The few dozen Red and Orange workers of the facility pretend not to notice our group as we file into one of the hauler bays. Inside, at the base of two huge haulers, we find a small army of Sons of Ares. More than six hundred.