Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

“Well as I know anything.”

I glance at Tails, who sits in the corner by herself. Freckles is right. She watches the two hens chatting with each other on the far side of the room.

“Make a distraction for me,” I tell Freckles.

“What you gonna do?”

“Fix it.”

She’s about to press for particulars, when Lion, who was eavesdropping, screams at the top of her lungs and runs for the hallway. The hens curse and pursue. I bolt up, only the girls in the room now. I slip toward Tails. She looks up as I approach. I kick her hard as I can in the jaw. Something pops. She sprawls sideways with a cry. I can’t take chances, so I pull back the hands covering her face and try to stomp on her jaw. Finally my heel gets through and her hands go a little slack. I stomp again until I hear the bone crack like wet wood. I wheel back around locking eyes with the staring girls. “I don’t like rats,” I say. The newcomers look away. My girls are horrified. I return to Freckles and sit back down, throbbing all over. Tails sobs through her broken jaw like she’s dying.

“Shit,” Freckles mutters. “What you got against rats?” Her smile sours till her face mirrors mine as we listen to Tails’s moan until the hens come back. They drag a crying Lion by her ears. No one sits within ten meters of Tails. The hens demand to know what happened. After seeing what I did to Tails, the girls greet the question with ominous silence. Tails’s explanation comes out as a pathetic moo. She’ll live, but she won’t be talking for a while.

Stupidity is not a victimless crime.

I won’t let these girls pay for her big mouth.

The hens feed us after the burners and make us each drink a cup of bitter wine, making sure it all goes down. It’s got something in it. I feel the buzz right off, a slow warmth and wooziness. The whole time they’re talking about what an honor we’re about to receive. Freckles glowers as they feed Lion the same size of cup they gave us.

They line us up in a big room like dolls. I think it’s around nighttime. Hard to tell because the mine’s shut off from light. Didn’t feel this as a girl. Days had rhythm in Lagalos. Could tick the clock on paper by the measure of my mother’s sounds and smells. Door creak. Five in the morning. Coffee smell, five-twenty. Click of tin breakfast plates. Five-thirty.

Here there’s no rhythm, because there’s no life.

Just like the cell.

Can already tell there’s too many young men, and not enough to distract them or keep ’em loyal. If the Obsidians are tearing them apart bad as everyone says, then they must be wondering why they’re fighting, why they’re not trying to make it in the city like sane people.

This ain’t the Red Hand we feared. I don’t need the parasite to smell the decay. Is it right to risk these girls? Is it better if they just take it and survive? If I can’t find Volga and Victra, if they can’t somehow help us, I think I just signed the death notes for nearly twenty girls.

But it’s too late to go back.

We wait in the lines in a big cold room where mine tinpots used to practice their shooting. The burning of candles and the carpets they’ve put down on the floor can’t obscure the old purpose of the room or the holes bullets chewed in the far wall. We wait till my lower back starts to ache and Lion starts to whistle, to the annoyance of the hens. One smacks her ear. Lion just grins up at her.

Then Picker comes in with Duncan trailing behind him and tells us to mind our manners. To be polite. To curtsy because we’re about to meet the Red Mother herself. Maker of the Red Hand. Sister of Ares, Narol O’Lykos. But the Reaper’s uncle wasn’t Ares, and all the girls know it. Another ten minutes. Then some mean, mean bastards come in and face us down like a firing squad, but they don’t have that many guns. Most are men, a few women. Not boys like the others, but hard and rangy and evil, with eyes like Picker’s and a quietness about them that’s so inhuman I think all the girls will shit themselves and spill our plans. Good thing I took out the rat.

Then She comes in.

The

woman has filled my nightmares from the bunks of the Telemanus estate to the freezing holes I slept in next to Volga and Victra. The woman who made red butter of Tiran’s head. Who I remembered ruining my family every time Volga taught me to strip down her rifle. My fingers would shake from the cold, from the fear of the pursuing hunters, but all I had to do was picture her face to remember why I wanted to learn Volga’s weapons.

Harmony’s face is half hell, half faded beauty. And she was a beauty. There’s lines there now, sour crow’s-feet. But in her time, she woulda outstripped my sister by a kilometer. She woulda made the boys beg for a twirl of the skirts.

Harmony stalks forward now with a weird, lazy carelessness that I’ve only seen in soldiers. No preening. No boasting. Just a slump of the soldiers and a forward trajectory.

She looks at us.

Then she smiles with her eyes. A brilliant, incandescent loveliness that makes me tilt my head wondering if I got it all wrong. Or am I that drunk?

“Sisters,” Harmony says before rushing forward to greet us, going down the line, cupping our faces, kissing us on the foreheads, on the mouths, on the eyes. “Sisters,” she says. “Sisters. Tonight you receive an honor most Red women only dream of. Tonight you will be chosen as wives by heroes of the Red People.

“How fearful you must be, standing here on the precipice of a life more glorious than you could know. There was life before this. The life you thought you had, that they trained you to be accustomed to. The life you thought was your destiny. That life was a lie. The life of a slave is no life.

“And there is this life. The true life. The second life of liberation. The life not of clan, but of the People. One People united against oppression. United against the cruelty of the slavers who once called us by numbers, and those who still seek to shackle us.” She sees a girl crying, not one of mine. “I know you’re fearful. I feared once. I feared when my children were dying of a cancer of the lung. I prayed to the Reaper for them. The real Reaper who guards the Vale, not the man who turned his back on his people. I prayed to the Reaper to judge them innocent and lovely and keep them in this world. But the Reaper sorts only the just and the pure in the next life. I prayed and prayed, but who was there to answer my prayers in this life? Who was there to save my children? No one. They died.”

She scoops a handful of dirt and lets it trickle out her clenched fist. “I watched them wither. I watched my husband wither after them. I watched the Sons of Ares wither, not to death, but to the temptations of this world.” She discards the dirt. “When I was afraid, I always prayed, as you pray. But no one is there to answer. Our salvation comes in the next world. We must make our own in this one. That is why the Red Hand fights.”

She looks at each one of us, eyes lingering on Lion. She smiles down at her.