Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

I have never seen Sevro afraid like this. He glances at me, knowing full well what we did to the Duke of Hands. And now that it is his turn, all the blood rushes from his face. His hands tremble at his sides as if he had been electrocuted. His girls are his everything. With an animal scream, he lunges for Adrius, and gets just far enough for Lilath to personally beat him to the ground. He gets up, and she nails him in the head with the hilt of her hatchet. He stands again, bleeding everywhere, and another Bonerider kicks him in the kidneys. Time and again, he stands up and takes a step toward the clone until Lilath kicks him in the head two steps short.

Sevro goes limp on the ground.

And I can do nothing.

My confidence, my proud intellect, are dormant in the face of this. I am paralyzed inside and out with horror.

“Just kill us and end this ridiculous show,” I snap. The clone’s face is blank for me as Boneriders drag Sevro away. “You are not Adrius. You’re just playing the role she taught you.” I point at Lilath.

The clone walks down from his perch to cup my face.

“The blood that runs through your veins runs through mine. You are my sister, Virginia. My only blood. How could I ever kill you?” He strokes my hair. “You are family. Too long you have been weighed down by fools and insects. You deserve a second chance.” Behind him, Lilath sucks on her teeth. “You deserve true dominion over the sheep.”

I AM THE GUEST OF HONOR at a banquet for jackals. My brother’s creatures could never have been accused of sanity before their imprisonment, but after so long robbed of power, they have become mad with the taste of it. As night sets, Sunhall turns to orgiastic bedlam. Niobe’s fleet has arrived with the ships of my house, House Telemanus, House Arcos, and almost all the lesser Gold houses of the Republic. The Vox fleet over Luna gathers in formation to block their way to the planet. The hologram of the pending space battle floats over the room.

While the Republic eats itself, the Boneriders party.

Safe behind Citadel walls and puppet legions, they indulge in yellow and green mountain ranges of narcotics. They have emptied the Citadel cellars of my husband’s whiskey and chug down bottles of wine that have been in my family for generations. Their Syndicate servants ferry them supplies of Pinks and political enemies. On them, they indulge their most depraved appetites. Some poor souls are fetched from the deep cells to be used for fencing practice, or made to fight each other naked in gladiatorial bouts to the death. The bodies fall to the floor to die, and thorns drag them out and bring new ones in. The prisons, brimming as they are with the Vox’s enemies, have an unlimited supply. When I have to watch the Silver senator Britannia ag Krieg face down an unarmed, drunk Bonerider, I turn away. She no longer seems an adversary, or even a rich woman. To them, she’s just the lower species.

Britannia dies with the sound of wet towels slapping stone.

I have seen almost all there is to see, so it is not the barbarity that irks me. It is the shallowness of their cause. There is no cause. There is no religion, no delusion of honor, only some vague notion of retribution and domination, which means little more to them than the degradation of their enemies. To me, these ten years have felt like a hundred, full of texture and trials and triumphs. But these savages were frozen in time in Deepgrave. They did not evolve. They only want to live in the past. In that fleeting moment of youth, where even the Sovereign feared the House Pluto of Mars’s Institute. They were barely past twenty years old and all worlds were laid out before them. Now in their ecstasy, they don’t realize how far behind everyone else they are. Or maybe that is the reason for the ecstasy. Maybe they all know they are doomed because of their own nature, and they want to live in the sun while it shines.

How long can this ruse really last?

I stayed quiet to assess the situation well after my initial shock wore off. I have learned much. My real brother loathed the Boneriders. He mocked them behind their backs. But the best soldiers are often the hollow ones, whom you can fill with your own purpose. This clone doesn’t know he’s supposed to hate the Boneriders. He was raised by a woman who worshipped the Jackal and the Boneriders, and thought the two inseparable. How disappointed the clone must be in the legends he was raised on.

I sit at his left hand, a place of secondary honor. Lilath eats her hummingbird eggs across the table from me. She feeds like a pelican, head down, eyes up, slurp, slurp, slurp.

Like clockwork, her eyes flick to the clone to make sure he has everything he needs. When he stops drawing with his stylus on a datapad after a Pink screams from a Bonerider arrow, Lilath bolts to attention. It is almost grotesque to see how quickly the dead-eyed killer melts into suffocating sycophant. “What is it, my Emperor? Do you possess everything you need?”

Lilath loved my brother. I’ve always known it. But now that love is something wrong. She would have been his lover, but he liked pretty harpies like Antonia. So instead, Lilath gave birth to his clone. I do not believe I understand psychology enough to try to unravel that.

But I wager the clone has.

And that is the vulnerability of this little cabal. I glance up at the arrayed fleets.

In reply to Lilath’s query, the clone forms a simple three-dimensional puzzle on his data

pad and flicks the floating image to her off his datapad. “Can you solve that?” Sitting up straighter, she peers at it. Slowly her eyes lose their gleam as she realizes she doesn’t even know there is a puzzle. He looks at me to make a joke of her. I never thought I’d see Lilath squirm from shame.

Her influence is slipping. She did fail him with the abduction of Pax and Electra. Now she is frightened I will steal him away. And he is afraid that I will let him down like these Boneriders have. How long did it take for his mind to be useful to her, I wonder. Has it been four years, five? She did much on her own. But how long will he need her now that he has his other Boneriders? Now that he has the Vox legions through his puppets? She must wonder. She must be afraid. And he must be annoyed that he is still so small.

I know where to drive the wedge.

“If he had all he needed, Lilath, I would already be a blank slate, wouldn’t I?” She says nothing. The clone watches intently as I solve the puzzle, add two new polygons, and spin it back to him. He looks at it for a moment and then smiles in delight. He adds a fresh twist to the puzzle and hurls it back. This volley lasts the better part of thirty excruciating minutes as the fleets probe one another over our heads.

I have a strange feeling inside as he pauses the game to spend several minutes on a separate datapad making adjustments to his battleplan. The ships above move according to his wishes after a slight delay.

His last volley was an oddity. He did not try to beat me with it. In fact, he seemed surprised and then delighted to see I could solve his puzzles. After that, he was just having fun. By the third puzzle, so was I. I would have given fingers off my hand for my twin to sigh like that when we were children. All my life, I thought my brother was born broken. He wasn’t. Perhaps he was just born with an incompatible father.

“Do you remember our puzzles?” I probe the clone as he watches two destroyers test the Telemanus flank. He frowns as they are repelled.

“I know they occurred,” he says, giving new orders through his datapad. “Evidence here and there.”

I glance at Lilath with a smile. The puzzles defined my relationship with my brother. I don’t know how many he gave me over the years, but I know how many I kept. I solved each one, and he’d smile and congratulate me. But sometimes I would follow him, and see him slapping himself and gouging his skin, screaming, “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

If this was his insurance plan, he’d have given his clone all the information he needed to become himself again. The puzzles were a key component of a rivalry that shapes his psyche. He would have included the puzzles. And if he’d included them, he wouldn’t have been surprised I could solve the ones during our volley. The fact that he was surprised is the loose thread I’ve been looking for. I glance up at the fleets as he lures a Telemanus corvette into a trap, and pull on the thread as quickly as I dare.