Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

“Do you have a vehicle?”

He just laughs. She digs her finger into his eye, but he won’t say any more. She kills him with a punch that crumples the right side of his skull. I hear a gurgling from behind a dresser and find Brea there. The crochet in his bedroom was hers. She’s not his daughter. His wife isn’t out on the boats. This child is his wife. A piece of glass is embedded in her neck. Blood gurgles from the wound and out her mouth as she stares up at me.

Victra’s no longer in the room. I hear her coming back. She appears at the bedroom doorway with Ulysses wrapped in a quilt. She’s barefoot and dizzy from the smoke. “Lyria, on me.”

I look down at the bleeding girl. “We can’t leave her!”

Victra looks down at the girl, up at me, and gives a look of apology before tucking Ulysses tight, wheeling away, and disappearing out the door. I gasp for air as I drag Brea out of the burning house and lay her down in the snow.

“It’s all right, lass,” I say between coughs. “I’ve got you now. It’s just a scratch. I’ve got you.” Her blood slicks my hands and stains the snow. There’s so much of it. She can’t die here. Not this poor girl. Not after surviving that man, if it’s what I think. Not like this. She can’t die.

I press my hands against the wound to try and stop the bleeding, but the glass cut so deep, all I can do is watch her until she becomes as pale as the snow and her eyes stare up at me with the flames of the burning house reflected in them. I didn’t know her, but I felt she could be me, or my sister.

There’s shouts from the village. Having heard the gunfire from their own homes, Red men rush toward the burning house. There’s twenty, fifty coming. Could all be the Red Hand? A woman in the doorway of a nearby house waves for me to run from them. Victra’s already gone, her tracks leading back into the highlands. I chase after her, away from the shouting men.

I lose the tracks twice in the storm. Try as I might, I cannot summon the parasite at will. Wind bites my face and my fingers are already numb. I don’t think I’ll catch Victra. Her strides are easily twice the length of mine. But I keep running. My side’s got a stitch. My lungs ache from the cold. Something roars in the sky, deeper than the sound of the wind. Several ships glow through the swirling snow as they pass overhead. I trudge through frozen creek beds, through a wood of lonely aspen, and into an evergreen forest before I’m hopelessly lost. I run in circles trying to find Victra’s tracks, but they’ve disappeared, as if she suddenly grew wings. She must have taken to the trees. I search them before realizing I might be leading them to her. What could I even do to help her? I’d slow her down. Part of me knows this is my fault, but she wanted ice. Volga needed to go to the old base. None of them thought Cormac was Red Hand. None of them saw through him. I suspected. I kept close watch, until I didn’t.

How did they cut through the ropes?

The wind dies down not long after morning comes. Snow falls in large flakes. The world takes on the color of gunmetal. I’ve carried my pistol with me, but it’s got only three r

ounds left. I stay in the forest not knowing what to do, listening for sounds of hunting men, dogs, or ships. I hear nothing. Just the silence of a world turning.

Knowing I can’t go anywhere without finding out what happened to Volga, I make my way back to the town, sticking to ravines when possible and running quick as I can through open fields. Climbing over a fence, I see a splash of color amidst another copse of trees.

On the edge of the treeline, blood paints snow churned by boots. It splashes the white bark of the trees, many of which are fallen or shattered from a gunfight. A few are cut cleanly, probably from Victra’s razor. Something lies in the snow. As I bend to pick it up, I flinch away. It’s a hand with Red sigils on it. More than a dozen trails of blood lead to a patch of earth where the snow melted away. Must be where their shuttle landed. I don’t see any tracks leading off.

They’ve got her. They’ve got her and Ulysses.

A stone lodges in my throat.

Then I see crows fluttering around an odd-shaped tree.

Something is wrong with that tree.

I stumble toward it, my heart knowing before my head, pulled along by the dread weaving its fingers through me. The crows scatter away. My shadow darkens the tree. My legs tremble. My knees buckle. I fall to the ground, unable to accept it, unable to look away from the small trickles of blood that wind down the bark, unable to understand why they nailed the baby upside down to the trunk of the tree.

ULYSSES IS DEAD.

I sit watching the snow fall and feel nothing.

I see but don’t feel myself moving as I take Ulysses down and wrap him in my coat. It is not easy or clean.

I try to dig a grave with my hands, but the earth is frozen. I don’t realize it is too hard to dig through until I notice my fingers bleeding.

When I look back at the lifeless infant in my jacket, I break down.

I don’t know what to do with him. I can’t bury him here in the dirt as if he’s a part of this world. He didn’t even get to spend a day in it. I won’t leave him here to be eaten by scavengers. Scavengers have done enough to him already.

All I can do is take him with me.

I shake as I walk. I’ll die if I don’t put my jacket on. But I can’t let him be cold. His newborn flesh is so thin. So very thin. I walk. I’m not sure where, or why, but I find myself back at the edge of the village, looking down at it. There’s a commotion outside the base. Half a dozen new ships sit there, including the one with the Ambrosia advert. More than fifty men with guns mill about. How many helped kill my family? How many of them raped my sister before they cut her throat to the bone? How many nailed this baby to the tree after smashing its skull?

They’re surrounding something, kicking it.

I feel my legs carrying me down the hill. My hand on the cold grip of the pistol. Three shots left. Three left for Harmony. At the edge of the town as I’m waylaid by a thicket of dead brush, I see the crowd part and Harmony giving orders to her men. She looks the same as she did two weeks before. The same as when she killed my brother, except now she’s wearing a winter coat and carrying Victra’s bloody razor. Her men follow her orders and drag what they were kicking onto their ships. It’s Victra, and Volga.

I break into a jog. I reach the burned-out house where we thought to find shelter. Go past it through narrow lanes leading between several other houses. I’m still a hundred meters off by the time the ship lifts off, some Red Hand men on the ground, cheering them. The ships head north and I stand there with my jacket around Ulysses. My pistol useless in my hand.