Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

I watch the cold, ancient light of the stars and wonder which of them are already dead out there in the blackness. I miss my sister, my family. And though I speak to them still, all I want in all the worlds is for them to speak, to answer. Some proof that the Vale is real. That they are not simply gone into the dark.

But they do not speak to me.

—

When the Augustuses and Telemanuses have finally had their fill of partying and conspiring, we depart. I slump along with the procession with my head down, crushed with guilt, not just because of how cruel I was, but because I know a little prince with his feelings hurt will go and tell his mother and I’ll be sacked within the day. I feel Bethalia’s eyes on me and know she knows. I’m just as the other servants pegged me: a rusty bitch with mine manners and no place in their fine company.

The valets carry the gifts Quicksilver’s given to our masters into the shuttle’s staff entrance. I follow behind with Sophocles’s kit and my own basket, now almost forgotten, in my arms. I see Pax and a mean-looking Gold girl about the same age, saying farewell to their important mothers. Both the Sovereign and Lady Barca are going back to the Citadel along with most of the staff for more meetings, and I’m bound for Lake Silene with the Telemanuses, Sophocles, and the children for the week.

I wonder if they’ll sack me now or wait till we reach the manor. Probably wait. These Golds hate causing a scene. Pax sullenly says farewell to his mother. She bends to ask him something. He shakes his head and leaves abruptly. On the passenger ramp to our shuttle, his eyes meet mine and he looks down and turns away.

In my seat in the staff cabin, I look back over the frantic rant I typed to Philippe while smoking on the balcony. He hasn’t yet replied. Odd for him to take so long. Did I scare him off with my ranting? You bloody fool. He’s sick of you already. I want to send a message apologizing, but that would look even more desperate. I glance down the aisle up to the passenger cabin. Sophocles sits in Kavax’s lap. Pax takes a seat across from the man.

Where will I go when they cut me? What will I do? Would Kavax send me back to Mars, pull Liam from a school he’s beginning to love, from friends he cares about? The thought of disappointing him crushes me. I should have just kept my mouth shut.

I look back out the window as our ship rises up, signals its lights in a salute to the Sovereign’s more heavily guarded caravan, and banks off to slither through Hyperion’s skyscrapers, heading north to Lake Silene.

The buildings burn with lights and are as dense as the trees of the jungle outside 121. Water slithers along the ship window, distorting the lights and making the night seem like it’s bleeding blue and green. Our escorts’ own lights blink rhythmically to the right of our ship. A strange red light blinks beyond them, against the skyscrapers.

It goes on. Off. On. I squint and then discover it is not outside the shuttle. It’s a reflection. I look down, and through my suit’s jacket, a red light throbs. “What’s that?” one of the valets asks, leaning to get a look from across the aisle. “Lyria…” I pull Philippe’s necklace out from the neck of my jacket. Bacchus’s silver face stares up at me. His gentle mouth pulling upward into a laugh. His face split in a grin. The eyes themselves blink red.

The face of Bacchus begins to shudder and tremble like an animal is inside. Startled, I drop it and the silver splits in half along a tiny seam. From the seam, out of a hidden compartment, a dull metal disk the size of three thumbnails spins up into the air inches from my face. It hisses, then darts away from me, down the aisle fast as a bullet. It reaches the front compartment before I even know what happened.

No one noticed but the servant. “Bomb!” she shouts.

The cabin bursts into chaos. Servants ducking, spilling drinks. Bethalia rising from her seat. Lionguards standing to protect the passenger cabin. I try to stand but my legs are ghosts of themselves. They won’t work. They crumple under me and I fall down into the aisle, head angled toward the front of the ship. Other servants collapse along with me till bodies litter the floor.

“Gas,” someone behind me gurgles. My own voice won’t work.

Lionguards start falling as they rush to the passenger cabin. Lights flash in the ship. Gas masks fall out of overhead compartments. But everyone has breathed it in already. Bodies are falling in the aisle, slumping in chairs.

I’ve lost all feeling. Kavax swings wildly at the disk, smashing apart the walls in a frenzy to destroy it. But he’s slowing, growing lethargic before he becomes the last to fall to the ground. Then there’s a high-pitched scream from the device and a pulse, like air being sucked in. The lights go out. Filtration units silence. Engines tremble no more. The drone falls to the floor.

And we plummet from the sky.

Buildings and lights and moving advertisement screens and avenues of ships flash past out the window. Our dead vessel spins sideways. Limp bodies flop and fly around the cabin. I slam against the sidewall, nose to the window, and see us passing through a layer of smog. We tilt again and I’m thrown back into the aisle. Glasses and datapads and gift baskets whirl around the cabin. Then the ship jerks to a stop and gravity reverses. Debris and people float through the ship. There’s buildings outside the windows, half-constructed and missing their façades.

My body hovers upward along with cracked datapads and the gift baskets. Then the suspension of gravity vanishes. Everything slams back down. The ship jerks downward again and crashes into the ground. Out the cracked window, I see a retracting door closing over the ship, shutting us off from the light of the city.

We lie in graveyard silence.

Then a metallic sound echoes outside the hull, coming from the servants’ passenger door. Something whirs and a stone-on-bone reverberation goes through the ship. A teardrop in the door begins to glow.

WE ARRIVE FOR DINNER after the Raa family has been seated around the low-lying table in a warm stone room that looks out through a glass wall over the plains and an escarpment of uncarved mountain. Oxygen-making ivy creeps along the walls and the domed ceiling, emitting a pale luminescence from white floral bulbs. More than a dozen Raa are in attendance. Rangy and austere even in their own home, they wear handmade rough fabrics of earth tones and sit rigidly on thin cushions around an ovular stone table, at the center of which is a single floating orb of blue light. The table is the only furniture in the room, and the ivy the only decoration.

Cassius and I join, both wearing dark Ionian kimonos and cloth slippers. There were no mirrors in my room to see how the clothing hangs. Ionian Golds believe mirrors promote vanity and obsession with the self. It’s a crime for even a lowColor to possess one. “Of course they don’t want mirrors,” Aja would say. “I’ve dogs handsomer than those Rim dusteaters.”

To be fair, the Raa family is not beautiful by Luna standards. Their faces are too long in the jaw, as though someone took the clay of their visages and pressed them between a vise. Except for Dido, their skin is incredibly pale, their eyes slightly larger than desirable, their hair darker. On Luna they would seem dour, cold creatures without proper refinement. But Seraphina’s words ring true. The absence of courtly behavior and affectation has a brutal purity to it. Grandmother despised most of the fops at court, and while I know she was not fond of Rim Golds, she did respect their stubborn fidelity to the old ways. It is the reason why she had my godfather obliterate Rhea: the hardest iron cannot be bent, only broken.

The serenity in the Raa’s movement and the dignity in their conversation are more impressive to me than all the carver-enhanced visages and pompous exchanges of Luna’s upper echelons. The family is not eviscerating the work of a new artist or lampooning a socialite for some faux pas. Instead, as we join, a quiet conversation debating the moral high ground between the Cyclops Polyphemus and the warrior Odysseus is under way.

“Poor Polyphemus,” says a young girl with wispy hair and dark-ringed eyes. “All he wanted to do was to eat his supper, but Odysseus had to come in and put out his one eye. He didn’t even have one to spare like Father!”

“To be fair, Polyphemus did eat two of Odysseus’s men,” Seraphina says, sparing a smile for me as I sit. “He’s a lesson on how not to be a bad host.”

There’s an empty space at the table beside her where a silver flower rests in place of a table setting. Probably for her sister, eleven years dead but still remembered every dinner. It is not the only empty seat. Though their patriarch is missing, we’re joined by the rest of Romulus’s brood. I’m introduced to them. Young Paleron, a thirteen-year-old silent boy. His laughing delight of a sister, Thalia, the Polyphemus sympathizer, who can’t be more than nine, and is utterly besotted with the color of my eyes. And Romulus’s mother, Gaia, a desiccated old harridan with larva-pale skin who drinks heavily and smokes bitter-smelling weed from a long pipe, which she clutches with spider-l

eg fingers. She does not touch her food and speaks only to the children in a wandering, frivolous voice.