Morning Star (Red Rising Saga 3)

“Yes.” I nod gratefully “I am.”

With a tight smile, Mustang pulls a piece of paper from her pocket and slides it to me. “That’s Orion’s com frequency. I don’t know where they are. Probably in the belt. I gave them a simple directive: cause chaos. From what I’ve heard from Gold chatter, they’re doing just that. We’ll need her and her ships if we’re going take down Octavia.”

“Thank you,” I say to them all. “I didn’t think we’d ever have a second chance.”

“Nor did we,” Daxo replies. “Let me be blunt with you, Darrow: there is a matter of concern. It’s your plan. Your design to use clawDrills to allow the Obsidians to invade key cities around Mars…we think it is a mistake.”

“Really?” I ask. “Why? We need to wrest the Jackal’s centers of power away, gain traction with the populace.”

“Father and I do not have the same faith in the Obsidians you seem to have,” Daxo says carefully. “Your intentions will matter little if you let them loose on the populace of Mars.”

“Barbarians,” Kavax says. “They are barbarians.”

“Ragnar’s sister…”

“Is not Ragnar,” Daxo replies. “She’s a stranger. And after hearing what she did to the Gold prisoners…we can’t in good conscience join our forces to a plan that would unleash the Obsidians on the cities of Mars. The Arcos women won’t either.”

“I see.”

“And there’s another reason we think the plan flawed,” Mustang says. “It doesn’t deal properly with my brother. Give my brother credit. He’s smarter than you. Smarter than me.” Even Kavax does not contest this. “Look what he’s done. If he knows how to play the game, if he knows the variables, he’ll sit in a corner for days running through the possible moves, countermoves, externalities, and outcomes. That’s his idea of fun. Before Claudius’s death and before we were sent to live in different homes, he’d stay inside, rain or shine, and piece together puzzles, create mazes on paper and beg me over and over again to try and find the center when I came back from riding with Father or fishing with Claudius and Pax. And when I did find the center, he would laugh and say what a clever sister he had. I never thought much of it until I saw him afterward one day alone in his room when he thought no one was watching. Shrieking and hitting himself in the face, punishing himself for losing to me.

“The next time he asked me to find the center of a maze I pretended I couldn’t, but he wasn’t fooled. It was like he knew I’d seen him in his room. Not the introverted, but pleasant frail boy everyone else saw. The real him.” She gathers her breath, shrugging away the thought. “He made me finish the maze. And when I did, he smiled, said how clever I was, and walked off.

“The next time he drew a maze, I couldn’t find the center. No matter how hard I tried.” She shifts uncomfortably. “He just watched me try from the floor among his pencils. Like an old evil ghost inside a little porcelain doll. That’s how I remember him. It’s how I see him now when I think about him killing Father.”

The Telemanuses listen with a foreboding silence, as afraid of the Jackal as I am.

“Darrow, he’ll never forgive you for beating him at the Institute. For making him cut off his hand. He’ll never forgive me for stripping him naked and delivering him to you. We are his obsession, just as much as Octavia is, as much as Father was. So if you think he’s going to just forget how Sevro waltzed into his citadel with a clawDrill and stole you from under him, you’re going to get a lot of people killed. Your plan to take the cities won’t work. He’ll see it coming a kilometer off. And even if he doesn’t, if we take Mars, this war will last for years. We need to go for the jugular.”

“And not just that,” Daxo says, “we need assurances that you’re not aiming to begin a dictatorship, or a full-demokracy in the case of victory.”

“A dictatorship,” I ask with a smirk. “You really think I want to rule?”

Daxo shrugs. “Someone must.”

A woman clears her throat at the door. We wheel around to see Holiday standing there with her thumbs in her belt loops. “Sorry to interrupt, sir. But the Bellona is asking for you. It seems rather important.”

Cassius lies handcuffed to the rails of the reinforced medical gurney in the center of the Sons of Ares infirmary. The same place I watched my people die from the wounds they suffered to save me from his clutches. Bed after bed of injured rebels from Phobos and other operations on the Thermic fill the expanse. Ventilators whir and beep, men cough. But it’s the weight of the eyes that I feel most. Hands reach for me as I pass through the rows of cots and pallets lying on the floor. Mouths whisper my name. They want to touch my arms, to feel a human without Sigils, without the mark of the masters. I let them as well as I can, but I haven’t time to visit the fringes of the room.

I asked Dancer to give Cassius a private room. Instead, he’s been set smack in the middle of the main infirmary among the amputees, adjacent to the huge plastic tent that covers the burn unit. There he can watch and be watched by the lowColors and feel the weight of this war the same way they do. I sense Dancer’s hand at work here. Giving Cassius equitable treatment. No cruelty, no consideration, just the same as the rest. I feel like buying the old socialist a drink.

Several of Narol’s boys, a Gray and two weathered ex-Helldivers, slump on metal chairs playing cards near Cassius’s bedside. Heavy scorchers slung around their backs. They jump to their feet and salute as I approach.

“Heard he’s been asking for me,” I say.

“Most the night,” the shorter of the Reds answers gruffly, eying Holiday behind me. “Wouldn’t have bothered you…but he’s a bloodydamn Olympic. So thought we should pass the word up the chain.” He leans so close I can smell the menthol of the synth tobacco between his stained teeth. “And the slagger says he’s got information, sir.”

“Can he talk?”

“Yeah,” the soldier grumbles. “Doesn’t say much, but the bolt missed his box.”

“I need to speak with him privately,” I say.

“We got you covered, sir.”

—

The doctor and the guards wheel Cassius’s gurney to the far back of the room to the pharmacy, which they keep guarded under lock and key. Inside, among the rows of plastic medication boxes, Cassius and I are left alone. He watches me from his bed, a white bandage around his neck, the faintest pinprick of blood dilating between his Adam’s apple and the jugular on the right side of his throat. “It’s a miracle you’re not dead,” I say. He shrugs. There’s no tubes in his arms or morphon bracelet. I frown. “They didn’t give you painkillers?”