Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

Not quite. The words are true, verbatim to the ones he spoke when he first saw me an hour ago.

Incredible, the brain’s consistency.

I’ve planned this meeting for some time, and prayed it would happen before Sevro found this chief prize. On the day my son disappeared, the master thief had already vanished into the city when my Lionguard arrived at his Endymion highrise, leaving only his blood behind. It’d been sprayed with an agent to destroy its DNA markers. Seeking him has been like catching smoke.

“When I was a child…” I begin.

“Oh Jove, a story.”

I smile at the déjà vu. What a peculiar feeling this is. Does he not notice the ache at the back of his skull?

“—my father took me to visit the gens Votum. He was keen on impressing upon me the vagaries of gens Votum diplomacy. But I was a young girl and easily bored. I looked at Mercury and I did not see iron or political intrigue. I saw a strange, violent little planet with a Master Maker who carved desert mountains into wonders, and jungles so deep and dark you’d think you’d lost the sun and ended up on Pluto.

“I begged Father to let me see the jungles. Simply begged. Till at last even he could not do anything but send me off. It was a ridiculous procession. Votum botanists and scientists accompanied me and Lionguard and my father’s politico, Pliny, into the heart of the jungle. There were many odd sights there, as you can imagine. But there was one that arrested me. One that reminds me of you.

“It was a scene I witnessed at dusk not far from our camp. I was watching a zebracore drink from the banks of a river when suddenly the jungle moved and a bush hydra struck from the treeline. It choked the zebracore to death and then unhinged its jaw to swallow it whole. I’d never seen anything like it. There it lay, perversely gorged and supine. Right there, on the bank of the river. Couldn’t believe my eyes. But it gets better. As it digested its meal, a single sarissa ant discovered it. You know of them, of course. We found them in your highrise. Soon there were two ants. Then ten. Then a million floating like water across the jungle. And, as the hydra lay glutted on the ground, too full to escape, I watched them devour it till all that was left was a skeleton around another skeleton.”

He’s been excreting pheromones at a phenomenal rate. “Don’t you think we’d be better without all those eyes watching us?” he purrs. His eyelashes flutter. “I wither under lights. Wouldn’t you like to turn off the cameras?” he asks. “So much stress on those shoulders of yours. Wouldn’t you like release?” His tongue wets his upper lip. “I can do that. You’ll believe you’ve ascended into the clouds of Jupiter.”

I lean forward, as if drawn to his magnetism, then squeeze his nose and make a farting sound.

His eyes go rancid. “Cold bitch.”

“Waste of hair.”

He sneers because my insult was better, and leans back. “They all say you’re the brightest star in all the heavens, a face to make angels weep and a mind to make a shadow of the sun, but you’re just withering meat like all the rest. Aren’t you?” He sniffs. “I can smell the decay. Your tits already stretch and sag from childbearing, your mind murmurs of the madness that ate your psychotic brother and wanders to the fate of your marooned husband and your little boy, and slowly you begin to wonder if you’re not a tragedy instead of a triumph.” He laughs so sweetly you’d think he was massaging my feet. “I suppose those maladies give you allowance to make such opera out of your childhood.” He bats his eyes and leans forward, mouth open seductively. “Honestly—”

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; “Do I look a hydra?” I finish for him. He pauses in confusion as I steal the words right out of his mouth. I keep going with what he’s going to say, because he said it just forty minutes ago. Not that he remembers it. “My bones are brittle as porcelain. My nerves tender and tight. Why, with one swat of your hand, you could shatter this frail anatomy. No. I am no hydra. I am the ant, and you are the fat snake who has swallowed what you cannot digest. And we surround you, devouring bite by bite by bite.”

He’s dumbstruck. Not understanding how I could possibly predict his little soliloquy. “Perhaps,” I say in reply to myself. “Perhaps you are right. Time will tell. But insects have short life expectancy. So I guess time kills too. Tough metaphor for you.”

He swallows, seeking confidence, some semblance of control. All my life, I’ve tamed myself to not frighten others. Sometimes it is fun to let the lion out.

“Have we met before?” he asks.

I lean forward. “Wouldn’t you remember?”

He considers the question, his mind stumbling over the gaps I made in his memory. He shakes his head. The tweaks I made to the psychoSpike implanted in the back of his skull have improved results drastically. Octavia was so close to perfection with her Pandemonium Chair. The device was stored in her Crescent Vault. It has the capacity to shift through and edit memories. But while the chair is a blunt-force instrument, my psychoSpikes are scalpels.

“You really look so thin on the holos,” the Duke of Hands says, eyes tracing my legs, “but you must have me by fifty kilos for the chair to sag like that. The bone density is startling. I would ask if it is hard to swim, but I suppose everything is proportionate. I wonder…” His eyes settle on my knuckles. “Could you shatter my skull with one punch?”

“Like a soft-boiled egg.”

“It must be…intoxicating. Godlike.” He admires it. He craves it. He knows he’ll never have it. Like my brother with Father’s love. I’d feel bad if I didn’t know the dangerous pressure that puts on a naturally cruel soul. “But of course you do not notice.” He licks his lips, nervously, off his game. He’s gotten used to owning the conversation. “What do you think would happen if I were you and you were me? If I was given that warborn body of yours, and you were given this frail vessel of mine? Do you think you would have the courage to do as I have done? To wait behind a door, no older than fifteen, wondering who your master has sold your body to?”

He’s said this before, but I let him say it again. No one should steal these words from him. It is immoral.

“And then to see them enter, and look at you like a meal without conscience or soul? Could you stomach it once? Twice? Satiating them. A thousand times watching yourself be devoured, feeling them throbbing inside of your body, violating the only possession you were given in this world until they shudder in ecstasy and at last withdraw and look at you with contempt. Are you that strong?”

“No,” I continue his train of thought, now allowed to steal the very words that he said from our earlier conversation. For the speeches to be so similar, he must have rehearsed this meeting many times. “How could you ever sit where I sit now and face you down, never having been the stronger party in a fight? I daresay it would have broken you. But it did not break me. If I were given your body, your life, why, your hardest day would be a mean meal, and I”—I touch my chest—“would be king of all things.”

He’s given up confusion for horror. “Cat got your tongue?” I say with a toothy smile. “Now is where I offer you a reward for the Queen. You spit in my face. You tell me you need no trinkets, you’ve gained them yourself. You are not my whore. What you have, you’ve taken. What you want, you will take. You are a man, not a rat. And a man must have a code. But it seems we are two apes dancing around fire. Shall we poke the blaze? You want to ask about your little boy, don’t you?”

His unspoken words from my mouth incite a frenzy in him. But I keep going, torturing him, making him tiny. “He’s been raped and fed to dogs,” I sneer. “Piece by piece. They started with the legs, and saved the eyes for last. Not even a twitch? Iceheart would have fit better. Don’t you care about your son?”

Words have deserted him. He’s trapped in a nightmare.