Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

“Darrow…” I hear Mustang’s voice behind me. She stands weaponless at the edge of the fray. She drifts slowly toward me. “What have you done…”

This death will reach beyond this small plot of earth and rattle the Republic to its foundations. Wulfgar carried the luster of Ragnar’s legend with him. He was a hero. More than that. He was a symbol, and not just to the Vox Populi. The people will hate me. Especially the Obsidians. I’ve taken one of their favorite sons, one of their great bridges to the Republic, and cut him down in the grass.

What did I think would happen?

Sevro looks back at me, his eyes red. “Darrow, more will be coming.” He grabs me when my own legs won’t move. “It’s time to go. Reap. Come on.” I look over at him and see the fear in his eyes.

Amidst the bodies, Mustang looks a ghost of herself. Ten years of building, and one night has broken it all. “I’m sorry,” I say. She stares at me, finding no words for her horror, and I let Sevro pull me away.

As we lift off from the landing pad, I stand looking out from the closing passenger ramp and see my wife standing amidst the ruin I’ve left behind, and beyond her, in the shadow of a conifer pine, my son watches me leave the killing field behind.

A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.

—LORN AU ARCOS

WE HURTLE LIKE A black thunderbolt over a pale waste of silicate dust and sulfur dioxide frost in a starship adorned with electric dragons. Out the breath-fogged window, a yellow-green sulfur plain stretches toward the dark side of the moon, broken only by lava floes, volcanoes, ash plumes, and mountains. They do not rise in chains according to the humors of tectonic activity, but in isolated, violent surges out of the moon’s crust, so that they look like leprous old giants wading through the stained sea.

Each day, 3600 rems of radiation—enough to wither a man’s DNA in hours—bombard the moon that was once one of the driest objects in the Solar System. But now, six hundred years after the first ice was carved from Europa and transported to Io, she has become the breadbasket of Ilium—as the Jovian Moon Lords prefer to call their cluster of moons.

Despite the fear I feel at my incarceration, I can’t help but be enamored by the testament to human will.

The Conquerors were not daunted by Io’s temperament. Wise as they were, they did not try to change her face, but instead created bold bubbles of life upon her surface. Out the small dirty window on the other side of the passenger aisle, I glimpse a chain of agricultural domes, docks, and skeletal tramways. There, botanical enterprises manned by lowColor slaves produce enough food to feed Ilium and, with Titan, feed the rest of the Rim.

Io is a contradiction, and so, I know, are its inhabitants. Something I must keep in mind if I am to find some means of escape for my friends.

The ship jerks against sudden turbulence. I lose hold of the plastic cup that I’ve brought up to the edge of the metal muzzle that’s affixed to my head. It drops to the floor, spilling the water across the deck. The guard stares at the water running along the floor planking with dull, mole eyes. He is disgusted by the waste and my noises as I lick the mesh of my muzzle, desperate for any last drop of moisture for my swollen mouth. He moves on, the magnets in his boots securing his rangy legs to the deck despite the turbulence from the atmospheric entry.

“May I…” My dry throat closes around the words. “May I have another cup?” I rasp out, eyes on the man’s boots, trying and failing to keep the desperation from my voice. This one’s name is Bollov. He has an unyielding disposition, a tremor in his right hand. He likes power and teaching lessons to spoiled Corish Pixies like myself and Cassius. I wish I knew why; perhaps then I could dismantle him. My grandmother once told me, “A new wound can take a body. Opening an old one can claim a soul.”

I observe the small exchanges between the guards, the idle chatter in halls or as the watch changes; but these Rim dwellers hoard their emotions. Better to guess the thoughts of a lizard than those of Bollov. My head pounds from the dehydration headache that I’ve been nursing for thirty-four days. My sleep has been restless, filled with visions of the crew I abandoned.

The water deprivation is civilized torture, and I know deep down Pandora yearns for something more barbaric. It seems only Diomedes’s protection has staved off that course. Could he be a potential ally? Pandora is certainly not. She’s a savage. Two days into my capture, the old woman visited my cell. For an hour she sat cross-legged on the floor and watched me, saying nothing until she asked if Seraphina brought a datacube onto the Archimedes. I told her I didn’t know of such a cube. She left without a word and I’ve been unable to discern just what the datacube could contain.

Since that day I’ve been given just enough water to survive, but no more. My muscles ache like they’ve seen hard gravity. My gums are swollen, mouth like chalk. Every day she would return, watch me like an old, evil owl, and make the same request. I’d give her the damn datacube if I’d seen one. It doesn’t matter to Castor au Janus, the persona supported by our ship’s logs. Cassius is Regulus au Janus. We’re Martian traders from New Thebes who were on the Rim ferrying water to blackmarket ore miners.

The fact that I still have my skin must mean they haven’t found our vault yet.

“Please,” I implore Bollov. “Just one more cup.”

“That was your cup, gahja.” Their word for outsider. Derived from the original Japanese language that was the native tongue of the Raa, before the arrival of a South African strain of Golds. “Waste not. Want not.” Bollov moves on.

Beside me, Cassius hunches in his seat, his arms sealed in metal cuffs and locked to his chest, with just enough room to bring his cup to the steel mesh muzzle that’s wrapped around his head. He’d share with me, but he’s already gulped his down. A thin chain connects the jaw of his muzzle to a belt around his waist, so he’s hunched in permanent supplication, even when he walks. Together in the tan prisoner uniforms, we look like a pair of pre-Neanderthal hominids. But my friend is alive, and that is all that matters.

This is the first I’ve seen him in the month voyage from the asteroid belt to Io. Based on Jupiter’s current orbit, these new ships of theirs are faster than they have any right to be. I crave to see their designs, their new engines, but my world has been a steel cube three meters by three by three. I almost wept when I saw Cassius waddling toward me in the hall before we boarded this shuttle, his face still as ugly and bulbous as the day we escaped the Ascomanni.

Despite the joy of our reunion, a pall hangs over us. We don’t know if Pytha is alive. If this is how they treat Golds, it makes my heart ache to think what misery her life has become. I’ve not stopped thinking about how I could have averted t

his. How I could have done better. What action would I adjust? What different move would I make?

“Give him another cup,” a voice tells Bollov from behind me. Coming up from the storage hold of the dropship through the prisoner section is Diomedes au Raa. His hair is loose and falls around the shoulders of a gray scorosuit, a hooded body-fitting polymer suit with electromagnetic radiation shielding and water reclamation pockets. His storm cloak flows behind him and seems alive with mutations in the color.

“If you’re so afraid of Pandora, set it there and go on.” The guard does just that, leaving the plastic jug on an empty seat. I nearly pitch sideways to steal the whole thing, but I wait patiently as Diomedes opens the jug and pours me another portion, hoping to impress upon him that we are of the same breed. He gives me just one cup to replace the one lost. There’s little mercy here, but even amongst the guards, there’s been less callous cruelty than in the Interior since our imprisonment.

“Thank you,” I manage. The lukewarm water gives new life to my throat.

He looks down at me without a smile and then moves away toward the main cabin.

“Why was she in the Gulf?” I ask. He stops and I wish I had read his psychological profile in Moira’s SIB database when I was younger. I remember he was secondary heir to his older brother Aeneas, who died at the Battle of Ilium. He’s risen to the challenge of being an heir, it seems. No easy task. I would know.