The Red Rising: Golden Son Part 8

"Dancer found you," Harmony says. "I found t.i.tus. Though his name was Arlus when we pulled him from Thebos mines. He didn't care about keeping it."

It's fitting that Harmony would find t.i.tus. Birds of a feather.

"What happened to him?" she asks. "We know he died."

What happened to him? I let a Gold put him in the b.l.o.o.d.y ground.

I look stonily at the three of them, thankful they cannot read my thoughts. They know nothing. I can barely conceive of what they must think of me. They've such small perspectives on what I've done, on what I've become. I thought there was a plan, a long, large reason for all my toil. But there was nothing. I know that now. Even Dancer was just waiting to see what happened. Hoping.

I expected to be welcomed back with open arms. I expected an army waiting. A grand plan. For Ares to take off his infamous helm and dazzle me with his brilliance and prove all my faith warranted. h.e.l.l, all I wanted was to find them again so I would not feel alone. But I feel more alone than ever sitting here in a concrete room with these three pale people on rickety plastic chairs.

"A Gold named Ca.s.sius au Bellona killed him," I say.

"Was it a good death?"

"By now, you should know there's no such thing."

"Ca.s.sius. The same one you have a bloodfeud with. Is that why?" Evey asks eagerly. "Is that why the Bellona want to kill you?"

I run a hand through my hair. "No. I killed Ca.s.sius's brother. It's one of the reasons they hate me."

"Blood for blood," Evey murmurs like she knows what the h.e.l.l she's talking about.

"We hit them hard today, Darrow. Twelve blasts across Luna and Mars. Dancer and t.i.tus have been avenged," Harmony says. "And we'll hit them harder in the days to come. This cell is just one of many."

She waves her hand at the desk and scenes rise as the holoDisplay comes to life. Violet news anchors drone on about the carnage.

"Am I supposed to be impressed?" I ask. "You're as bad as them. You know that, yes? Never mind the strategy of it. Never mind you're taunting a sleeping dragon. Evey herself killed over a hundred lowColors just hours ago."

"There weren't Reds," Harmony says, and then adds, in an amazingly insincere afterthought, "or Pinks."

"Yes, there were!"

"Then their sacrifice will be remembered," Harmony says solemnly.

"Vox clamantis in deserto," I exclaim.

Mickey sits quiet, but he allows himself a small smile.

"Trying to impress us with your Gold fancy talk?" Harmony asks.

"He feels like a voice crying out in the desert. Shouting all in vain," Mickey explains. "It's simple Latin."

"So you know what's what," Harmony says. "Become a Gold and suddenly you have all the answers."

"Wasn't that the point of me becoming a Gold? So we could see how they think?"

"No. It was to position you to strike at their jugular." She b.a.l.l.s her fist and strikes the palm of her metal hand in emphasis. "Don't act like you were born better than I. Remember, I know what you are inside. Just a scared boy who tried to kill himself when he was too weak to save his wife from hanging."

I sit speechless.

"Harmony, he's just trying to help," Evey says softly. "I know it must be hard, Darrow. You've spent years with them. But we have to hurt them. See, that's all they understand. Pain. Pain is how they control us."

She continues slowly.

"The first day I served a Gold was the greatest pleasure I felt in all my life. I can't explain it to you. It was like meeting G.o.d. Now I know that it wasn't pleasure I felt. It was the absence of pain.

"That is how they train Pinks to live a life of slavery, Darrow. They raise us in the Gardens with implants in our bodies that fill our lives with pain. They call the device Cupid's Kiss-the burn along the spine, the ache in the head. It never stops. Not even when you close your eyes. Not when you cry. It only stops when you obey. They take the Kiss away eventually. When we're twelve. But ... you can't know what it's like, the fear that it'll come back, Darrow."

Evey plays with her nails. "Gold needs to feel pain. They need to fear it. And they need to learn they may not hurt us without consequences. That's what Harmony means."

And I thought the Golds were broken. We're all just wounded souls stumbling about in the dark, desperately trying to st.i.tch ourselves together, hoping to fill the holes they ripped in us. Eo kept me from this end. Without her, I'd be like them. Lost.

"It's not about hurting them, Evey," I say. "It's about beating them, Eo taught me that, Dancer too. We're swinging at the apples when we should be digging at the roots. What will bombing them do? What will a.s.sa.s.sination accomplish? We need to undermine their Society as a whole, erode their way of life, not this."

"You've lost sight of your mission, Darrow," Harmony says.

"You say that to me?" I ask. "How could you possibly understand what I've seen?"

"Exactly. What you've seen. Dine with the masters and forget the slaves. You can afford to live a life of theories. What about what I've seen? We're down in the s.h.i.+t. We're dying. And what are you doing? Philosophizing. Living the plush life. Bedding Pinks. I had to listen as Dancer died. I had to hear the b.l.o.o.d.yd.a.m.n screams rattle over the coms as the lurchers came to kill. And I could do nothing to save them. If you had lived through that, you would know fire can only be fought with fire."

I know where these words lead. They gave me a hole in my gut. Put me weeping in the mud, Ca.s.sius standing over me. That is how this will end.

"You may have lost all you love, Harmony. I'm sorry for that. But my family is still in a mine. They will not suffer because you are angry. My wife's dream was about a better world. Not a bloodier one." I stand. "Now, I want to talk to Ares."

Silence lies heavy upon the room.

"Give us a moment." Harmony looks at Mickey and Evey. She watches Mickey stand reluctantly. He pauses, as if to say something to me, but, feeling Harmony's eyes on him, thinks better of it.

"Good luck, my darling," he says simply, patting my shoulder.

"Let me stay," Evey says, drawing close to Harmony. "I can help with him."

Harmony touches her hip. "Ares wouldn't allow it."

"After what I did today ... don't you trust me? I'm not like the rest."

"I trust you, as much as any Red. But this is something I can't share with you." She kisses Evey softly on the lips. "Go."

Evey pauses at the door, looking back at me. "We're not your enemies, Darrow. You have to know that."

The door clicks shut behind her and we're left alone in Mickey's office.

"Does she know?" I ask.

"Know what?"

"That you sent her on a suicide mission."

"No. She's not like us. She trusts."

"And you'd sacrifice her?"

"I'd sacrifice any of us to kill a Peerless Scarred. All we get are worthless Pixies and Bronzies. I want the real tyrants."

"You're using her worse than Mickey ever did."

"She has a choice," Harmony mutters.

"Does she?"

"Enough." Harmony sits and gestures for me to do the same. "Dancer may be dead, but Ares has a plan for you."

"No. No. I'm done listening to his plans through others. I've sacrificed three years of my life for him. I want to see his face."

"Impossible."

"Then I'm done."

"How can you be done, eh? You're trapped. You b.l.o.o.d.ywell can't go home to Lykos, can you? One way out. Buckle tight and stay the course."

Her words strike hard. I can't go back. The loneliness in that is inexpressible. Where is my home? Where will I go even if this all ends with Gold falling to ashes?

"You won't meet Ares. Even I've never even seen his face, h.e.l.ldiver."

"You haven't? You've worked for him almost as long as Dancer. Years. How can you of all people trust him?"

"Because he put the first gun in my hand. He wore his helmet and pushed a mark IV scorcher with a full ion clip into my palm."

"Is Ares a man?" I ask.

"Who cares?" She pulls up a holoDisplay The electrons swirl in the air, coalescing into a series of maps. I recognize the topography. Mars. Venus. Luna, I think. Dozens of red dots blink throughout blueprints of cities, dockyards, and a dozen other vital organs. Bombs, I realize. Harmony looks tiredly at the map. "This is Ares's plan. Four hundred bombings. Six hundred a.s.saults on weapons depots, government facilities, electric companies, communications grids. It is the sum of the Sons of Ares. Years of planning. Years of sc.r.a.ping up resources."

I had no idea we could carry out such action. I stare at the map in awe.

"The bombings today were meant to provoke a response. Get them all hot and bothered. We want them mobilizing. If they mobilize, they condense. Easiest to burn pitvipers when they are packed tight."

"When will this take place?"

"Three nights from now."

"Three nights," I repeat. "At the conclusion of the Summit. He can't want me to do th-"

"He does. Three nights from now, the Summit finishes up nice with a gala. Wine, Pinks, silks, whatever the h.e.l.l you Goldbrows do. All the b.l.o.o.d.yd.a.m.n Governors, all the Senators, Praetors, Imperators, Judiciars from across the Society will be here. A Solar System of monsters brought by the power of the Sovereign to one place. It'll be ten more years before we see this. There's no way for the Sons to get in, but you can go where we can't. You can strike the blow that we cannot."

I feel the words coming like a train down a tunnel.

"When they have all gathered nice and tightlike. When the Sovereign stands to give her speech, you kill the Goldbrow b.a.s.t.a.r.ds with a radium bomb we hide on you. Mickey and a crew of gizmos built the tech. Once we see the bomb has detonated via the dataRecorder we'll plant on you, we unleash h.e.l.l across the system. Burn them out."

This is the sum of all I've done?

"There has to be another way."

"There were always two plans, h.e.l.ldiver. This, and you. Ares and Dancer said you were our hope, our chance at another path. They boasted like boys that you could destroy Gold from inside. But you failed, like I said you would. You're gonna claim blood is on Evey's hands. Well, it's on yours too."

"You don't even know the blood I have on my hands, Harmony. I'm not some b.l.o.o.d.yd.a.m.n saint. But Evey's attack was a crime."

"The only crime is if we lose."

I shatter. "There's more at play here than you understand. We cannot face Gold. No matter the blow we strike, they will eradicate us like this." I snap my fingers.

"So you won't do it."

"No, I won't do it, Harmony."

"Then the war begins without your help," she says. "We had two Sons ready to try to enter the gala. They are not Gold, so bets are higher they'll get caught and cut to ribbons in a Praetorian torture cell before completing their mission. Means the leaders of Gold will live on, and our tiny chances of winning this s.h.i.+tstorm shrink, because you don't trust Ares."

"Slag this. Ares should have told me this himself if he wanted my help!"

"How? He is on Mars preparing the revolution. There is no way to communicate. They monitor everything. How could he contact you without exposing your cover?" She leans forward, lower teeth exposed ferally. "Tell me, Darrow. Do you even know how much they've stolen from you?"

It's something in her tone. "What do you mean?"

"Here's what I mean." She jams a series of orders into the holoCube and an image appears of Lykos mines. My blood goes cold. "The recording of Eo's death, the one we pirated and broadcast ..."

My heart thuds in my throat.

"It wasn't complete." She presses play and the room around us becomes the mine. We're a part of the three-dimensional holo. It's the raw footage, not the stuff on the newsreels, not the stuff I've seen a hundred times. It shows the hanging without a soundtrack.

I hear my own cries of pain as the Grays beat the boy I used to be. Weeping in the crowd. The awkward silence of unedited footage. My mother hangs her head and Uncle Narol spits in the dust. Kieran, my brother, covers his children's eyes. Feet shuffle. Dio, Eo's sister, stumbles up the metal scaffold. Shoes sc.r.a.ping over rust. Sobbing. Then Dio leans toward my wife. Eo stands small, so pale and thin, little more than the smoke of the burning girl I remember. Her lips move. Again, I don't hear it, just as I didn't hear it that day. Suddenly Dio sobs uncontrollably and clings to Eo. What was said?

"Use the equipment. That's what it's there for, eh?"

I've wondered it a thousand times but never had access to this footage. I never knew how I'd find it without raising suspicion. And the thought scared me, as it scares me now-what was I not strong enough to hear? What could Dio bear that I could not?

In the news footage that was pirated, they don't even show Dio. But here, with the raw footage, I can rewind. I do so. I can amplify the sound. I do so. I watch it happen again: My mother hangs her head. Narol spits. Kieran covers the children's eyes. Feet shuffle. Dio goes up the scaffold. All the sound is magnified. I sort out the white noise with the controls, and I hear what my wife said to Dio.

"In our bedroom, there is a crib I made. Hide it before Darrow returns."

"A crib ...," Dio murmurs.

"He must never know. It would break him."

"Don't say it, Eo. Don't."

"I am with child."