Red Rising

7
Other Things

I do not see Eo in death. My kin believe we see our loved ones when we pass on. They wait for us in a green vale where woodfire smoke and the scent of stews thicken the air. It is the Waiting Place. There is an Old Man with dew on his cap who makes safe the vale, and he stands with our kin waiting for us along a stone road beside which sheep graze. They say the mist there is fresh and the flowers sweet, and those who are buried pass along the stone road faster.

But I do not see my love. I do not see the vale. I see nothing but phantom lights in darkness. I feel pressure, and I know, as would any miner, that I am buried beneath the earth. I loose a soundless scream. Dirt enters my mouth. Panic fills me. I cannot breathe, cannot move. The earth hugs me till finally I claw my way free, feel air, gasp oxygen, pant and spit dirt.

It is minutes before I look up from my knees. I crouch in an abandoned mine, an old tunnel long deserted but still connected to the ventilation system. It smells of dirt. A single flare burns beside my grave, splaying weird shadows over the walls. It singes my sight like the sun did as it rose over Eo’s grave.

I’m not dead. The realization takes longer in coming than I thought it would. But there’s a bloody wound around my neck where the rope cut the skin. My spine hurts so bad I can’t look sideways without moving my torso. And there’s dirt in the lashes on my back.

Still, I’m not dead.

Uncle Narol didn’t pull my feet hard enough. But surely the Tinpots would have checked, unless they were lazy. Not a stretch to think that, but something else is at play. I was too woozy when I walked to the gallows. I feel something in my veins even now, a lethargy as though I’ve been drugged. Narol did this. He drugged me. He buried me. But why? And how would he escape being caught when he pulled my body down?

When a low rumbling comes from the darkness beyond the flare, I know I will have answers. A tumbler, like a metal beetle on six wheels, crawls over the crest of a long tunnel. Its front grille hisses steam as it comes to a stop in front of me. Eighteen lights singe my vision; shapes exit the sides of the vehicle, cutting across the glare of the headlights to grab me. I’m too stunned to resist. Their hands are calloused like miners’ and their faces are covered with Octobernacht demon masks. Yet they move me gently, guiding instead of forcing me into the tumbler’s hatch.

Inside the tumbler, the globe light is red and bloody. I sit in a worn metal bucket seat across from the two figures that fetched me from my grave. The female’s mask is pale white and horned like a cacodemon. Her eyes glitter darkly out from the eyeholes. The other figure is a timid man. He’s willowy and quiet, seemingly frightened of me. His snarling batface mask can’t conceal his shy glances or the way in which he hides his hands—a trait of the frightened, as Uncle Narol always claimed when he taught me to dance.

“You’re Sons of Ares, aren’t you?” I guess.

The weakling flinches, while the woman’s eyes are mocking.

“And you’re Lazarus,” she says. I find her voice cold, lazy; it plays with the ears as a cat plays with a caught mouse.

“I am Darrow.”

“Oh, we know who you are.”

“Don’t tell him anything, Harmony!” the weakling gibbers. “Dancer didn’t tell us to discuss anything with him till we get home.”

“Thank you, Ralph.” Harmony sighs at the weakling and shakes her head.

Another masked figure drives the tumbler through the abandoned tunnels. The interior shakes and rattles as we roll down a jagged run. After realizing his error, the weakling shifts uncomfortably in his bucket seat, but I’ve stopped paying him any mind. Here, the woman is king. Unlike the weakling’s, her mask is made of a digital material. It shifts and could as easily mimick the face of a man or woman as it does a demon. Fancy stuff. At first it reminded me of a story I’d once heard of the pale demons in the deep, forgotten tunnels of Mars; now it is like that of an old crone, one of the witches of Earth’s fallen cities who made soup from the marrow of children’s bones.

“You’re a mess.” Harmony reaches to touch my neck. I grab her hand and squeeze. Her bones are brittle as hollow plastic in a Helldiver’s hand. The weakling reaches for his thumper, but Harmony motions him to calm down.

“Why am I not dead?” I ask. After the hanging, my voice is like gravel dragged over metal.

“Because Ares has a mission for you, little Helldiver.”

She winces as I squeeze her hand.

“Ares…” My mind flashes to images of bomb blasts, disembodied limbs, chaos. Ares. I know what sort of mission he’ll want. I’m too numb to even know what I’ll say when he asks. My mind is on Eo, not this life. I am a shell. Why could I not have stayed in the ground?

“May I have my hand back now?” Harmony asks.

“If you take off your mask. Otherwise, I’m keeping it.”

She laughs and strips away her mask. Her face is day and night—the right side a ragged and distended mess of skin running and folding together in smooth scar rivers. A steam burn. A familiar sight, but not on women. Rare for a woman to be on a drillteam.

Yet it is the unburned side of her face that startles. She is beautiful, more beautiful even than Eo. Skin soft, pale as milk, bones prominent and delicate. Yet she looks so cold, so angry and cruel. Her bottom teeth are uneven and her nails poorly maintained. She has knives in her boots. I can tell by the way she flinched down when I grabbed her hand.

The weakling, Ralph, is unremarkably ugly—dark face like a hatchet, teeth all ajar and grimy like the tubes in the Flush. He stares out the tumbler’s window hatch as we rattle and roll through abandoned tunnels till we reach lit paved tunnelroads meant for fast driving. I do not know these Reds, and though they have the Red Sigil emblazoned on their hands, I do not trust them. They are not of Lambda or Lykos. Might as well be Silvers.

Eventually I glimpse other utility vehicles and tumblers out the hatch. I don’t know where we are, yet that bothers me less than the swelling sadness in my chest. The further we ride and the more time I’m given to my thoughts, the worse the pain becomes. I finger my wedding band. Eo is still dead. She’s not waiting for me at the end of this ride. Why did I survive when she did not? Why did I pull her feet so hard? Could she have lived too? My guts feel like a black hole. A terrible weight compresses my chest, and I ache to just jump from the tumbler into the path of a utility vehicle. Death is easy when you’ve already tried to find it. But I don’t jump; I sit with Harmony and Ralph. Eo wanted more for me. She died so I could be more than another martyr, and then I killed myself. Or tried. The shame eats at me. I clench the scarlet headband in my fist.

The tunnelroad widens slightly when we come to a checkpoint manned by dirty Tinpots in worn-down gear. The electric gate isn’t even charged. They let the tumbler ahead of us through after scanning a panel on its side. Then it’s our turn and I’m shifting uncomfortably in my seat right along with Ralph. Harmony chuckles disdainfully as the grey hairedTinpot scans the side of the tumbler and waves us through the gate.

“We have a passcode. There’s no brains in slaves. Mine Tinpots are idiots. It’s the Grey elites, or the Obsidian monsters you watch out for. But they don’t waste their time down here.”

I am trying to convince myself that this all is not some Gold trick, that Harmony and Ralph are not enemies, when we pull off the main tunnelroad into a cul-de-sac of utility warehouses not much larger than the Common. Harsh sulfur lights hang down from utility fixtures. Half the bulbs are burned out. One flickers on and off above a garage near a warehouse marked with a queer symbol done in strange paint. We steer into the garage. The door closes and Harmony motions for me to get out of the tumbler.

“Home sweet home,” she says. “Now time to meet Dancer.”

8
Dancer

Dancer looks through me. He’s near enough my height, which is rare. But he’s thick and terribly old, maybe in his forties. White swirls from his temples. A dozen twin scars mark his neck. I’ve seen their sort before. Pitviper bites. The arm on the left side of his body hangs limp. Nerve damage. But his eyes arrest me; they are brighter than most, swirling with patterns of true red, not rust red. He has a fatherly smile.

“You must be wondering who we are,” Dancer says gently. He’s big but his voice is easy. Eight Reds are with him, all men except for Harmony, and they watch him with adoring eyes. All miners, I think, each with the scarred, strong hands of our kind. They move with the grace of our people. No doubt some were jumpers and boasters, as we call those who run along the walls and perform the flips at dances. Any Helldivers?

“He’s not wondering.” Harmony takes time with the words, rolling them along her tongue. She squeezes Dancer’s hand as she passes around him to look at me. “Bloodydamn runt pegged it an hour ago.”

“Ah.” Dancer smiles softly at her. “Of course he did, otherwise Ares wouldn’t have asked us to risk extracting him here. Do you know where here is, Darrow?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I murmur. I look around at the walls, the men, the swaying lights. Everything is so cold, so dirty. “What matters is…” I fail to finish my own sentence. A thought of Eo severs my voice. “What matters is that you want something from me.”

“Yes, that matters,” says Dancer. His hand touches my shoulder. “But that can wait. I’m surprised you’re standing. The wounds on your back are sullied. You’ll need antibac and skinres to stop the scarring.”

“Scars don’t matter,” I say. I stare at the two blood drops that trickle from my shirttail to the floor. My wounds reopened when I climbed from the grave. “Eo is… dead, yes?”

“Yes. She is. We couldn’t save her, Darrow.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“We just couldn’t.”

“Why not?” I repeat. I glare up at him, glare at his followers and hiss the words one by one. “You saved me. You could have saved her. She is the one you would have wanted. The bloodydamn martyr. She cared about all this. Or does Ares only need Sons, not Daughters?”

“Martyrs are a dime a dozen,” Harmony yawns.

I slip forward like a serpent and grab her around the throat; waves of anger ripple through my face till it goes numb and I feel tears welling behind my eyes. Scorchers whine as they’re primed around me. One jams into the back of my neck. I feel its cold muzzle.

“Let her go!” someone shouts. “Do it, boy!”

I spit at them, shake Harmony once and toss her aside. She crouches on the floor, hacking, and then a knife glimmers in her hand as she rises.

Dancer stumbles between us. “Stop it! Both of you! Darrow, please!”

“Your girl was a dreamer, boy,” Harmony spits at me from Dancer’s other side. “As worthless as a flame over water…”

“Harmony, shut your bloodydamn gob,” Dancer barks. “Put those damn things away.” The scorchers go quiet. A tense silence follows and he leans in close to speak with me. His voice lowers. My breath is fast. “Darrow, we’re friends. We’re friends. Now, I can’t answer for Ares—why he couldn’t help us save your girl; I am just one of his hands. I can’t wash away the pain. I can’t bring your wife back to you. But, Darrow, look at me. Look at me, Helldiver.” I do. Right into those blood-red eyes. “I can’t do many things. But I can bring you justice.”

Dancer goes to Harmony and whispers something, likely telling her that we’re to be friends. We won’t be. But I promise not to choke her and she promises not to stab me.

She is quiet as she guides me from the others through cramped metal hallways to a small door opened by twisting a knob. Our feet echo over rusting walkways. The room is small and littered with tables and medical supplies. She has me strip and sit on one of the cold tables so she can clean my wounds. Her hands are not gentle as they scrub dirt from my lacerated back. I try not to scream.

“You’re a fool,” she says as she scrapes rock out of a deep wound. I wheeze in pain and try to say something, but she jams her finger into my back, cutting me short.

“Dreamers like your wife are limited, little Helldiver.” She makes sure I don’t speak. “Understand that. The only power they have is in death. The harder they die, the louder their voice, the deeper the echoes. But your wife served her purpose.”

Her purpose. It sounds so cold, so distant and sad, as though my girl of smiles and laughter was meant for nothing but death. Harmony’s words carve into me and I stare at the metal grating before turning to look into her angry eyes.

“Then what is your purpose?” I ask.

She holds up her hands, caked with dirt and blood.

“The same as yours, little Helldiver. To make the dream come true.”

After Harmony scours my back of dirt and gives me a dose of antibac, she takes me to a room next to humming generators. The squat quarters are lined with cots and a liquid flush. She leaves me to it. The shower is a terrifying thing. Though it’s gentler than the air of the Flush, half the time I feel like I’m drowning, the other half I find a mixture of ecstasy and agony. I turn the heat nozzle till steam rises thick and pain lances my back.

The pain makes my thoughts of Eo seem like silly things. It gives false perspective. I want to like the pain, but I can only handle so much. The mixture of water and blood pools at my pale feet. The thought of Eo’s feet dangling makes me fall sobbing to the floor. I push my back into the side of the shower till the pain stops my thinking and I bite my tongue bloody. I’m not as tough as I thought I was. No Helldiver really is. No man really is.

I’m a man, I remember, not a boy. A man of sixteen. When I married Eo, I felt so strong and wise. When I buried her, all that went away. Sixteen. Almost seventeen. Only nine years younger than my father when he died at twenty and five. It seems a lifetime.

Clean, I dress in the strange garments they’ve set out for me. It’s not a jumpsuit or homespun weave like I’m used to wearing. The material is sleek, elegant, like something someone of a different Color would wear. It is black, much like a short robe, and does not hurt my back as I slide it on. There’s a high collar and epaulets. The pants are black and tight, the shoes soft and strange.

Dancer comes into the room when I’m half dressed. His left foot drags behind him, almost as useless as his left arm. Yet still he’s an impressive man, thicker than Barlow, handsomer than me despite his age and the bite scars on his neck. He carries a tin bowl and sits on one of the cots, which creaks against his weight.

“We saved your life, Darrow. So your life is ours, do you not agree?”

“My uncle saved my life,” I say.

“The drunk?” Dancer snorts. “The best thing he ever did was tell us about you. And he should have done that when you were a boy, but he kept you a secret. He’s worked for us since before your father’s death as an informer, you know.”

“Is he hanged now?”

“Now that he pulled you down? I should hope not. We gave him a jammer to shut off their ancient cameras. He did the work of a ghost.”

Uncle Narol. HeadTalk, but drunk as a fool. I always thought him weak. He still is. No strong man would drink like him or be so bitter. But he never earned the disdain I gave him. Yet why did he not save Eo?

“You act like my uncle bloodydamn owed you,” I say.

“He owes his people.”

“People.” I laugh at the term. “There is family. There is clan. There may even be township and mine, but people? People. And you act as though you’re my representative, as though you have a right to my life. But you are just a fool, all you Sons of Ares.” My voice is withering in its condescension. “Fools who can do nothing but blow things up. Like children kicking pitviper nests in rage.”

That’s what I want to do. I want to kick, to lash out. That’s why I insult him, that’s why I spit on the Sons even though I have no real cause to hate them.

Dancer’s handsome face curls into a tired smile, and it’s only then that I realize how feeble his dead arm really is—thinner than his muscular right arm, bent like a flower’s root. But despite the withered limb, there’s a twisted menace to Dancer, a less obvious sort than that in Harmony. It comes out when I laugh at him, when I scorn him and his dreams.

“Our informants exist to feed us information and to help us find us the outliers so we can extract the best of Red from the mines.”

“So you can use us.”

Dancer smiles tightly and picks the bowl up from the cot. “We will play a game to see if you are one of these outliers, Darrow. If you win, I will take you to see something few lowReds have seen.”

LowReds. I’ve never heard the term before.

“And If I lose?”

“Then you are not an outlier and the Golds win yet again.”

I flinch at the notion.

He holds out a bowl and explains the rules. “There are two cards in the bowl. One bears the reaper’s scythe. The other bears a lamb. Pick the scythe and you lose. Pick the lamb and you win.”

Except I notice his voice fluctuate when he says this last bit. This is a test. Which means there is no element of luck to it. It must then be measuring my intelligence, which means there is a kink. The only way the game could test my intelligence is if the cards are both scythes; that’s the singular variable that could be altered. Simple. I stare into Dancer’s handsome eyes. It is a rigged game; I’m used to these, and usually I follow the rules. Just not this time.

“I’ll play.”

I reach into the bowl and pull free a card, taking care that only I can see its face. It is a scythe. Dancer’s eyes never leave mine.

“I win,” I say.

He reaches for the card to see its face, but I shove it in my mouth before he can take hold of it. He never sees what I drew. Dancer watches me chew on the paper. I swallow and pull the remaining card from the bowl and toss it at him. A scythe.

“The lamb card simply looked too good not to eat,” I say.

“Perfectly understandable.”

The red in his eyes twinkles and he sets the bowl aside. Warmth of character returns to him, as if he’d never been a menace. “Do you know why we call ourselves Sons of Ares, Darrow? To the Romans, Mars was the god of war—a god of military glory, defense of the hearth and home. Honorable and all. But Mars is a fraud. He is a romanticized version of the Greek god Ares.”

Dancer lights a burner and hands a second one to me. The generators buzz freshly and the burner fills me with a similar haze as its smoke curls through my lungs.

“Ares was a bastard, an evil patron of rage, violence, bloodlust, and massacre,” he says.

“So by naming yourselves after him, you’re pointing to the truth of things within the Society. Cute.”

“Something like that. The Golds would prefer for us to forget history. And most of us have, or were never taught it. But I know how Gold rose to power hundreds of years ago. They call it the Conquering. They butchered any who contested them. Massacred cities, continents. Not many years ago, they reduced an entire world to ash—Rhea. Nuked it to oblivion. It was with Ares’s wrath that they acted. And now we are the sons of that wrath.”

“Are you Ares?” I ask, voice hushed. Worlds. They’ve destroyed worlds. But Rhea is so much farther out from Earth than Mars. It’s one of Saturn’s moons, I think. Why would they nuke a world all the way out there?

“No. I’m not Ares,” he answers.

“But you belong to him.”

“I belong to no one but Harmony and my people. I am like you, Darrow, born to a clan of earth diggers, miners from the colony Tyros. Only I know more of the world.” He frowns at my impatient expression. “You think me a terrorist. I am not.”

“No?” I ask.

He leans back and takes a drag on his burner.

“Imagine there was a table covered with fleas,” he explains. “The fleas would jump and jump to heights unknown. Then a man came along and upturned a glass jar over the fleas. The fleas jumped and hit the top of the jar and could go no farther. Then the man removed the jar and yet the fleas did not jump higher than they had grown accustomed, because they believed there to still be a glass ceiling.” He breathes out smoke. I see his eyes glow through it like the ember tip of his burner. “We are the fleas who jump high. Now let me show you just how high.”

Dancer takes me down a rickety corridor to a cylindrical metal lift. It’s a rusty thing, heavy, and it squeals as we rise steadily upward.

“You should know that your wife didn’t die in vain, Darrow. The Greens who help us hijacked the broadcast. We hacked in and played the true version over every HC on our planet. The planet, the clans of the hundred thousand mining colonies and those in the cities, have heard your wife’s song.”

“You tell tall tales,” I grumble. “There aren’t half that many colonies.”

He ignores me. “They heard her song and they call her Persephone already.”

I flinch and look over at him. No. That is not her name. She is not their symbol. She doesn’t belong to these brigands with trumped-up names.

“Her name is Eo,” I sneer. “And she belongs to Lykos.”

“She belongs to her people now, Darrow. And they remember the old tales of a goddess stolen from her family by the god of death. Yet even when she was stolen, death could not forever keep her. She was the Maiden, the goddess of spring destined to return after each winter. Beauty incarnate can touch life even from the grave; that’s how they think of your wife.”

“She’s not coming back,” I say to end the conversation. It is futile debating with this man. He just rolls on.

Our lift comes to a halt and we exit into a small tunnel. Following it, we come to another lift of sleeker metal, better maintained. Two Sons guard it with scorchers. Soon we’re going upward again.

“She will not come back, but her beauty, her voice, will echo until the end of time. She believed in something beyond herself, and her death gave her voice power it didn’t have in life. She was pure, like your father. We, you and I”—he touches my chest with the back of his index finger—“are dirty. We are made for blood. Rough hands. Dirty hearts. We are lesser creatures in the grand scheme of things, but without us men of war, no one except those of Lykos would hear Eo’s song. Without our rough hands, the dreams of the pure hearts would never be built.”

“Cut to the point,” I interrupt. “You want me for something.”

“You tried to die before,” Dancer says. “Do you want to do so again?”

“I want…” What do I want? “I want to kill Augustus,” I say, remembering the cold Golden face as it commanded my wife’s death. It was so distant, so uncaring. “He will not live while Eo lies dead.” I think of Magistrate Podginus and Ugly Dan. I will kill them too.

“Vengeance then,” he sighs.

“You said you could give it to me.”

“I said I would give you justice. Vengeance is an empty thing, Darrow.”

“It will fill me. Help me kill the ArchGovernor.”

“Darrow, you set your sights too low.” The lift picks up speed. My ears pop. Up and up and up. How far does this lift rise? “The ArchGovernor is merely one of the most important Golds on Mars.” Dancer hands me a pair of tinted glasses. I put them on tentatively as my heart thuds in my chest. We’re going to the surface. “You must widen your gaze.”

The lift stops. The doors open. And I am blind.

Behind the glasses, my pupils constrict to adjust to the light. When at last I’m able to open my eyes, I expect to see a massive glowing bulb or a flare, some source to the light. But I see nothing. The light is ambient, from some distant, impossible source. Some human instinct in me knows this power, knows this primal origin of life. The sun. Daylight. My hands tremble and I step with Dancer from the elevator. He does not speak. I doubt I would hear him even if he did.

We stand in a room of strange makings, unlike any I’ve imagined. There is a substance underfoot, hard but neither metal nor rock. Wood. I know it from the HC pictures of Earth. A carpet of a thousand hues spreads over it, soft under my feet. The walls around are of red wood, carved with trees and deer. Soft music plays in the distance. I follow the tune deeper into the room, toward the light.

I find a bank of glass, a large wall that lets the sun in to shine across the length of a squat black instrument with white keys, which plays itself in a tall room with three walls and a long bank of glass windows. Everything is so smooth. Beyond the instrument, beyond the glass, lies something I don’t understand. I stumble toward the window, toward the light, and fall to my knees, pressing my hands against the barrier. I moan one long note.

“Now you understand,” Dancer says. “We are deceived.”

Beyond the glass sprawls a city.

9
The Lie

The city is one of spires, parks, rivers, gardens, and fountains. It is a city of dreams, a city of blue water and green life on a red planet that is supposed to be as barren as the cruelest desert. This is not the Mars they show us on the HC. This is not a place unfit for man. It is a place of lies, wealth, and immense abundance.

I gasp at the grotesquerie.

Men and women fly. They shimmer Gold and Silver. Those are the only Colors I see in the sky. Their gravBoots carry them about like gods, the technology so much more graceful than the clumsy gravBoots our keepers wear in the mines. A young man soars past my window, his skin burnished, his hair fluttering loosely behind him as he carries two bottles of wine toward a nearby garden spire; he’s drunk and his wobbling through the air reminds me of a time I saw a drillBoy’s air system break down in his frysuit; he gasped for oxygen as he died, twitching and dancing. This Gold laughs like a fool and does a mirthful spin. Four girls, not at all older than me, fly after him in a merry hunt, giddy and giggling. Their tight dresses seem to be made of liquid and drip around their young curves. They look my age, in a way, but seem so bloody foolish.

I do not understand.

Beyond them, ships flit through the air along beacon-lit avenues. Small ships, ripWings, as Dancer calls them, escort the most intricate of air yachts. On the ground, I see men and women moving through wide avenues. There are automobiles, Color-coded lamps along the lower levels—Yellow, Blue, Orange, Green, Pink, a hundred shades of a dozen Colors to form a hierarchy so complex, so alien, I scarcely think it a human concept. The buildings through which the paths wind are huge, some of glass, some of stone. But many remind me of those I’ve seen on the HC, those buildings of the Romans, made this time for gods instead of man.

Beyond the city, which stretches nearly as far as I can see, Mars’s red and barren surface is scarred with the green of grass and struggling woods. A queer bubble envelopes the city. It shimmers like some sort of magical barrier. The sky above is blue, stained with stars. The terraforming is complete.

This is the future. It should not be this way for generations.

My life is a lie.

So many times has Octavia au Lune told us of Lykos that we are the pioneers of Mars, that we are the brave souls who sacrifice for the race, that soon our toils for humanity will be over. Soon the softer Colors will join us, once Mars is habitable. But they have already joined us. Earth has come to Mars and we pioneers were left below, slaving, toiling, suffering to create and maintain the foundation of this… this empire. We are as Eo always said—the Society’s slaves.

Dancer sits in a chair behind me and waits till I can speak. He says a word and the windows darken. I can still see the city, but the sun no longer blinds my eyes. Beside us, the squat instrument, called a piano, whispers a dreary melody.

“They told us we were man’s only hope,” I say quietly. “That Earth was overcrowded, that all the pain, all the sacrifice, was for mankind. Sacrifice is good. Obedience the highest virtue…”

The laughing Gold has reached the nearby spire; he surrenders to the girls and their kisses. Soon they will drink their wine and have their amusement.

Dancer tells me how it is.

“Earth ain’t overcrowded, Darrow. Seven hundred years back, they expanded to their moon, Luna. Because it is so difficult to launch spacecraft through Earth’s gravity and atmosphere, Luna became Earth’s port through which it colonized the moons and planets of the Solar System.”

“Seven hundred years?” I gasp, feeling suddenly very stupid.

“On Luna, efficiency and order became the chief concern. In space, every set of lungs must have a purpose. So the first Colors were gradually instituted and the Reds were sent to Mars to gather the fuel for mankind. The mining colonies were established there since Mars has the highest concentration of helium-3, which is used to terraform the other worlds and moons.”

At least that wasn’t a lie.

“Are they terraformed, the other moons and worlds?”

“The small moons, yes. Most of the planets. Obviously not the gas giants.” He sits in a chair. “It was in the early stages of the Colonization when the wealthy of Luna began to realize Earth was nothing more than a drain on their profits. Even as Luna colonized the Solar System, they were taxed and owned by corporations and countries on Earth, but those same entities could not enforce their ownership. So Luna rebelled—the Golds and their Society against the countries of Earth. Earth fought back and Earth lost. That was the Conquering. Economics turned Luna into the power and port of the Solar System. And the Society began to change into what it is today—an empire built on Red backs.”

I watch the Colors move about below. They are small, hard to distinguish from our height—and my eyes are not used to seeing so far or seeing so much light.

“Reds were sent to Mars five hundred years ago. The other Colors came to Mars about three hundred years back, while our ancestors still toiled beneath the surface. They lived in these paraterraformed cities—cities with bubbles of atmosphere over them—while the rest of the world terraformed slowly. Now the bubbles are coming down and the world is fit for any man.

“HighReds live as maintenance workers, sanitation, grain harvesters, assembly workers. LowReds are those of us born beneath the surface—the truest slaves. In the cities, the Reds who dance disappear. Those who voice their thoughts vanish. Those who bow their heads and accept the rule of the Society and their place in Society, as all Colors do, live on with relative freedom.”

He exhales a cloud of smoke. I didn’t even see the burner in his hand.

I feel outside my body, as though I’m watching the colonization of worlds, the transformation of the human species, through eyes that are not my own. The gravity of history drew my people into slavery. We are the bottom of the Society, the dirt. Eo always preached something of the like, though she never knew the truth. If she had known this, how much more passionately would she have spoken? This existence is worse than she ever could have imagined. It is not hard to understand the conviction with which the Sons of Ares fight.

“Five hundred years.” I shake my head. “This is our bloodydamn planet.”

“Through sweat and toil it was made so,” he agrees.

“Then what will it take to take it back?”

“Blood.” Dancer smiles at me like a township alleycat. There’s a beast behind this man’s fatherly smiles.

Eo was right. It comes to violence.

She was the voice, like my father. So what am I to be? The avenging hand? I cannot grasp that someone so pure, so full of love, would want me to play this part. But she did. I think of my father’s last dance. I think of my mum, Leanna, Kieran, Loran, Eo’s parents, Uncle Narol, Barlow, everyone I love. I know hard how they will live and how quickly they will die. And I now know why.

I look down at my hands. They are what Dancer called them—cut, scarred, burned things. When Eo kissed them, they grew gentle for love. Now that she is gone, they grow hard for hate. I clench them into fists till my knuckles are white as icecaps.

“What is my mission?”

10
The Carver

I grew up with a quicksmiling girl of fifteen so in love with her young husband that when he was burned in the mines and his wound festered, she sold her body to a Gamma in return for antibiotics. She was stronger than her husband. When he grew well and discovered what had been done on his behalf, he killed the Gamma with a slingBlade snuck from the mines. Easy to guess what happened after that. Her name was Lana and she was Uncle Narol’s daughter. She lives no longer.

I think of her as I watch the HC in what Harmony called the penthouse as Dancer makes preparations. I flip through the many channels with the twitch of my finger. Even that Gamma had a family. He dug like me. He was born like me, went through the Flush like me, and he never saw the sun either. He was just given a little packet of medicine by the Society, and look at the effect. How clever of them. How much hate they create between people who should be kin. But if the clans knew what luxury exists on the surface, if they knew how much had been stolen from them, they would feel the hatred I feel, they would unite. My clan is a hot-tempered breed. What would a rebellion of theirs look like? Probably like Dago’s burner—burning hot but fast, till it was all ash.

I asked Dancer why the Sons streamed my wife’s death to the mines. Why not instead show the lowReds the wealth of the surface? That would sow anger.

“Because a rebellion now would be crushed in days,” Dancer explained. “We must take a different path. A nation cannot be destroyed from without till it is destroyed from within. Remember that. We’re nation-breakers, not terrorists.”

When Dancer told me what I am to do, I laughed. I do not know if I can do it. I am a speck. A thousand cities span the face of Mars. Metal behemoths sail between the planets in fleets carrying weapons that can crack the mantle of a moon. On distant Luna, buildings rise seven miles high; there the Sovereign Consul, Octavia au Lune, rules with her Imperators and Praetors. The Ash Lord, who made the world of Rhea cinders, is her minion. She controls the twelve Olympic Knights, legions of Peerless Scarred, and Obsidians as innumerable as the stars. And those Obsidians are only the elite. The Gray soldiers prowl the cities ensuring order, ensuring obedience to the hierarchy. The Whites arbitrate their justice and push their philosophy. Pinks pleasure and serve in highColor homes. Silvers count and manipulate currency and logistics. Yellows study the medicines and sciences. Greens develop technology. Blues navigate the stars. Coppers run the bureaucracy. Every Color has a purpose. Every Color props up the Golds.

The HC shows me Colors I did not know existed. It shows me fashion. Ludicrous and seductive. There are biomodifications and flesh implants—women with skin so smooth and polished, breasts so round, hair so glossed that they appear a different species from Eo and all the women I’ve ever known. The men are freakishly muscular and tall. Their arms and chests bulge with artificial strength, and they flaunt their muscle like girls showing off new toys.

I am a Lambda Helldiver of Lykos, but what is that compared with all this?

“Harmony is here. Time to go,” Dancer says from the door.

“I want to fight,” I tell him as we ride the gravLift down with Harmony. They’ve doctored my Sigils so that they are brighter to match the highReds. I wear the loose garb of a highRed and carry a pack of street-scrubbing equipment. There’s dye in my hair and contacts in my eyes, all so that I look a brighter shade of red. Less dirty. “I don’t want this mission. Worse, I can’t do it. Who could?”

“You said you would do anything that needed to be done,” Dancer says.

“But this…” The mission he has given me is madness, yet that’s not why I’m frightened. My fear is that I will become something Eo would not recognize. I’ll become a demon from our Octobernacht stories.

“Give me a scorcher or a bomb. Let someone else do this.”

“We brought you out for this,” Harmony sighs. “And only this. It has been Ares’s greatest goal since the Sons were born.”

“How many others have you brought out? How many others have tried what you’re asking me to try?”

Harmony looks over at Dancer. He says nothing, so she answers impatiently on his behalf. “Ninety-seven have failed the Carving… that we know of.”

“Bloodydamn,” I curse. “And what happened to them?”

“They died,” she says blandly. “Or they asked for death.”

“Maybe Narol should have let me hang.” I try to laugh.

“Darrow. Come here. Come.” He grabs my shoulder and pulls me in. “Others may have failed. But you’ll be different, Darrow. I feel it in my bones.”

My legs go shaky when I first look up at the night sky and the buildings stretching around me. I slip into vertigo. I feel like I am falling, like the world is off its axis. Everything is too open, so much so that it seems as though the city should tumble into the sky. I look at my feet, look at the street, and try to imagine that I am in the tunnelroads from the townships to the Common.

The streets of Yorkton, the city, are a strange place at night. Luminescent balls of light line the sidewalks and streets. HC videos run like liquid streams along parts of the avenue in this hi-tech sector of the city, so most walk upon the moving pathways or ride in public transportation with their heads crooked down like cane handles. Garish lights make the night almost as bright as day. I see even more Colors. This sector of the city is clean. Teams of Red sanitation workers scour the streets. Its roads and walking paths stretch in perfect order.

There’s a faint ribbon of red where we are to walk, a narrow ribbon in a broad street. Our path does not move like the others. A Copper woman walks along her wider path; her favorite programs play wherever she walks, unless she strides beside a Gold, in which case all the HCs go quiet. But most Golds do not walk; they are permitted gravBoots and coaches, as are any of the Coppers, Obsidians, Grays, and Silvers with the proper license, though the licensed boots are horribly shoddy things.

An advertisement for a blister cream appears on the ground in front of me. A woman of strangely slender proportions slinks out of a red lace robe. Suitably naked, she then applies the cream to a place on her body where no woman has ever before gotten a blister. I blush and look away in disgust because I’ve only ever seen one woman naked.

“You’ll want to forget your modesty,” Harmony advises. “It’ll mark you worse than your Color.”

“It is disgusting,” I say.

“It’s advertising, darling,” Harmony purrs condescendingly. She shares a chuckle with Dancer.

An elderly Gold soars overhead, older than any human I’ve ever seen. We lower our heads as she passes.

“Reds up here have to get paid,” Dancer explains when we are alone. “Not much. But they’re given money and enough treats to make them dependent. What money they have, they spend on goods they’re made to think they need.”

“Same with all the drones,” Harmony hisses.

“So they’re not slaves,” I say.

“Oh, they’re slaves,” Harmony says. “Enslaved by their suckling on the teats of those bastards.”

Dancer struggles to keep up, so I slow down as he speaks. Harmony makes an irritated noise.

“Golds structure everything to make their own lives easier. They have shows produced to entertain and placate the masses. They give monies and handouts to make generations dependent on the seventh day of each new Earth month. They create goods to grant us a semblance of liberty. If violence is the Gold sport, manipulation is their art form.”

We pass into a lowColor district where there are no designated walking paths. The storefronts are lined with electronic Green ribbons. Some stores peddle a month of alternate reality in an hour’s time for a week’s wages. Two small men with quick green eyes and bald heads studded with metal spikes and tattoed with shifting digital code suggest for me a trip to someplace called Osgiliath. Other stores offer banking services or biomodifications or simple personal hygiene products. They shout things I don’t understand, speaking in numbers and acronyms. I have never seen such commotion.

Brothels lined with Pink ribbon make me blush, as do the women and men in the windows. Each has a flashing price tag playfully hanging from a thread; it’s a moving number that suits demand. A lusty girl calls to me. Her voice is sweet and raspy all at once. Along with the men and women are machines covered in growFlesh. They are cheaper company and their operators try to solicit me as Dancer explains the idea of money. In Lykos, we traded only in goods and swill and burners and services.

Some blocks of the city are reserved for the use of high colors. Access to these districts depends on badges of warrant. I cannot simply walk or ride into a Gold or Copper district. But a Copper can always slum in a Red district, frequenting a bar or brothel. Never the other way around, even in the wild, free-for-all that is the Bazaar—a riotous place of commerce and noise and air heavy with the scents of bodies and food and automobile exhaust.

We walk deep into the Bazaar. I feel safer in the back alleys here than I did in the open avenues in the high-tech sectors. I do not yet like vast spaces, and seeing the stars above frightened me. The Bazaar is darker, though lights still shine and people still bustle. The buildings seem to pinch together. A hundred balconies form ribs in the alleyway’s heights. Walkways crisscross above, and all around us, lights blink from devices. Smells rise up like a palpable noise. It is more humid here, dirty. And I see fewer Tinpots patrolling. Dancer says there are places in the Bazaar where even an Obsidian should not go. “In the densest places of man, humanity most easily breaks down,” he says.

It is strange being in a crowd where no one knows your face or cares for your purpose. In Lykos, I would have been jostled by men I’d grown up with, run across girls I’d chased and wrestled with as a child. Here, other Colors slam into me and offer not even a faint apology. This is a city, and I do not like it. I feel alone.

“This is us,” Dancer says, gesturing me into a dark doorway where an electronic flying dragon shimmers on the surface of the stone. A massive Brown with a modjob for a nose stops us. We wait for the metal nose to snort and sniff. He’s bigger than Dancer.

“Dye in his hair,” he growls at me, taking a whiff of my hair. “A Ruster, this one be.”

A scorcher peaks out from his belt. He’s got a shiv behind his wrist—I can tell by the way his hand moves. Another thug joins him on the stoop. He’s got jewelry processors on his eyeballs, little red rubies that flicker when light catches them just right. I stare at the jewelry and the brown eyes.

“What’s what with this one? He want a go?” the thug spits. “Keep eyein’ me, and I’ll take your liver to sell at market.”

Thinks I’m challenging him. I’m actually just curious about the rubies, but when he threatens me I smile at him and give a little wink like I would in the mines. A knife flips into his hand. Rules are different up here.

“Boy, keep playin’. Dare ya. Keep playin’.”

“Mickey is expectin’ us,” Dancer tells the man.

I watch Modjob’s friend as he tries to stare me down like I’m some sort of child. Modjob smirks and leers at Dancer’s leg and arm. “Don’t know a Mickey, cripple.” He looks to his friend. “You know a Mickey?”

“Nah. Ain’t got no Mickey here.”

“What a relief.” Dancer sets a hand on the scorcher under his jacket. “Since you don’t know Mickey, you won’t have to explain to Mickey why my… generous friend couldn’t reach him.” He moves his jacket so they can see a glyph etched on the butt of his gun. The helmet of Ares.

When he sees the glyph, Modjob gulps and says, “Squab,” then they fall over each other to open the door. “G-g-gotta take your shooters.” Three others move toward us, scorchers half up. Harmony opens her vest and shows them a bomb strapped to her stomach. She rolls a blinking detonator over her nimble Red fingers.

“Nah. We’re good.”

Modjob swallows, nods. “You’re good.”

The interior of the building is dark. It is a darkness thick with smoke and throbbing lights—much like my mine. Music pulses. Glass cylinders stand as pillars amongst chairs and tables where men drink and smoke. Inside the glass, women dance. Some writhe in water, their strange webbed toes and sleek thighs moving to the music. Others gyrate to the thudding melody in environs of golden smoke or silver paint. I blush as I stare at a naked woman wreathed in blue and orange fire. Her smooth skin does not burn. And I think I see wings on her back. She looks so young, younger still when I see the men sitting around her on couches with little datapads. I cock my head.

“They’re bidding on her,” Harmony says darkly. “Come on.”

More thugs guide us to a back table that seems to be made of iridescent water. A slim man reclines there with several creatures of the strangest sort. I thought them monsters at first, but the closer I look, the more confused I become. They are humans. But they’ve been made differently. Carved differently. A pretty young girl, no older than Eo, sits looking at me with emerald eyes. The wings of a white eagle sprout from the flesh of her back. She’s like something torn from a fever dream, except she should have been left there. Others like her lounge in the smoke and strange lights.

Mickey the Carver is a scalpel of a man with a crooked smile and black hair that hangs like a puddle of oil down one side of his head. A facial tattoo of an amethyst mask wreathed in smoke winds around his left eye. It is the Sigil of a Violet—the creatives—so it is always shifting Other violet symbols stain his hands. He’s playing with a little electronic puzzle cube that has changing faces. His fingers are fast, thinner and longer than they should be; and there are twelve of them. Fascinating. I’ve never seen an artist before, not even on the HC. They’re as rare as Whites.

“Ah, Dancer,” he sighs without looking up from his cube. “I could hear you from the drag in your step.” He squints at the cube in his hands. “And Harmony. I could smell you from the door, my darling. Terrible bomb, by the bye. Next time you need real sneaky craftsmanship, look Mickey up, yes?”

“Mick,” Dancer says, and seats himself at the table of dreamthings. I can tell Harmony is growing a bit dizzy from the smoke. I’m used to breathing worse stuff.

“Now, Harmony, my lovely love,” Mickey purrs. “Have you given up on this cripple yet? Come to join my family, perhaps? Yes? Get yourself a pair of wings? Claws on your hands? A tail? Horns—you would look fierce in horns. Especially wrapped in my silken bedsheets.”

“Carve yourself a soul and you might get a shot,” Harmony sneers.

“Ah, if it takes being a Red to have a soul, on this I shall pass.”

“Then to business.”

“So abrupt, my darling. Conversation should be considered an art form, or like a grand dinner. Each course in its own time.” His fingers fly over the cube. He’s matching them based on their electronic frequency, but he’s a bit too slow to match them before they change. He still hasn’t looked up.

“We have a proposition for you, Mickey,” Dancer says impatiently. He glances down at the cube.

Mickey’s smile is long and crooked. He does not look up. Dancer repeats himself.

“Straight to the main course then, eh, cripple? Well, propose away.”

Dancer swats the cube out of Mickey’s hands. The table goes silent. The thugs bristle behind us and the music continues to pound. My heart is steady and I eye the scorcher on the thigh of the nearest thug. Slowly, Mickey looks up and cuts the tension with a crooked smile. “What’s what, my friend?”

Dancer nods to Harmony and she slips a small box over to Mickey.

“A present? You shouldn’t have.” Mickey examines the box. “Cheap stuff. Such a tasteless Color, Red.” Then he slides the box open and gasps in horror. He recoils from the table, slamming the box shut. “You stupid sodding bastards. What is this?”

“You know what they are.”

Mickey leans forward and his voice becomes one lone hiss. “You brought them here? How did you get them? Are you insane?” Mickey glances at his followers, who peer down at the box wondering what has so unbalanced their master.

“Insane? We’re bloodydamn manic.” Dancer smiles. “And we need them attached. Soon.”

“Attached?” Mickey starts laughing.

“To him.” Dancer points at me.

“Leave!” Mickey screams at his entourage. “Leave, you simpering sycophantic miscreants! I’m talking to you… you freaks! Get out!” When his entourage has scurried away, he opens the box and dumps the contents onto the table. Two golden wings, the Sigils of a Gold, clatter onto the table.

Dancer sits. “We want you to make our boy here into a Gold.”

11
The Carved

“You’re mad.”

“Thank you.” Harmony smiles.

“I assume you misspoke; pray repeat yourself,” Mickey says to Dancer.

“Ares will pay you more money than you’ve ever seen if you can successfully attach those to my young friend here.”

“Impossible,” Mickey declares. He looks over to me, measuring me for the first time. He is unimpressed despite my height. I don’t blame him. Once, I thought myself a handsome man of the clans. Strong. Muscular. Up here, I am pale and wiry, young and scarred. He spits onto the table. “Impossible.”

Harmony shrugs. “It’s been done before.”

“By whom? I ask.” He turns his head. “No. You cannot bait me.”

“Someone talented,” Harmony taunts.

“Impossible.” Mickey leans even farther forward; his thin face has not a single pore. “Do you need a dictionary? I can have one installed in your brain if you do. It is impossible. There’s DNA matching him with the wings, cerebral extraction. Did you know they have subdermal markings in their skulls? Of course you didn’t—datachips attached to their frontal cortexes to substantiate their caste? Then there’s synapse linkage, molecular bonding, tracking devices, the Quality Control Board. Then there’s the trauma and the associative reasoning. Say we make his body perfect, there’s still one problem: we cannot make him smarter. One cannot make a mouse a lion.”

“He can think like a lion,” Dancer says plainly.

“Oho! He can think like a lion,” Mickey snickers.

“And Ares wants it done.” Dancer’s voice is cold.

“Ares. Ares. Ares. It doesn’t matter what Ares wants, you baboon. Never mind the science. His physical and mental dexterity is probably daft as a damn bowl cleaner’s. And his tangibles won’t match. He’s not their species! He’s a Ruster!”

“I’m a Helldiver of Lykos,” I say.

Mickey raises his eyebrows. “Oho! A Helldiver! Clear the halls! A Helldiver, you say!” He mocks me, but he squints suddenly as if he’s seen me before. My whipping was televised. Many know my face. But if I’m a Gold, carved in their august likeness and not that of my father? I will hardly recognize myself. “Bugger me,” he mutters.

“You recognize my face,” I confirm.

He pulls up the viral video and watches it, looking back and forth between it and me. “Aren’t you dead with that girlfriend of yours?”

“Wife,” I snap.

Mickey’s jaw muscles flicker under his skin as he ignores me. “You’re making a savior,” he accuses, looking over at Dancer. “Dancer, you bastard. You’re making a messiah for your gorydamn cause.”

I never looked at it that way. My skin prickles uneasily.

“Yes” is Dancer’s answer.

“If I make him a Gold, what will you do with him?”

“He will apply to the Institute. He will be accepted. There, he will excel well enough to reach the ranks of the Peerless Scarred; as a Scarred, he can train to be a Praetor, a Legate, a Politico, a Quaestor. Anything. He will advance to a prime position, the primer the better. From there, he will be in a position to do as Ares requires for the Cause.”

“Mother of God,” Mickey murmurs. He stares at Harmony, then at Dancer. “You want him to be a bona fide Peerless Scarred. Not a Bronzey?”

A Bronze is a faded Gold. Of the same class, but looked down on for inferior appearance, lineage, and capabilities. “Not a Bronze,” Dancer confirms.

“Or a Pixie?”

“We don’t want him to go to nightclubs and eat caviar like the rest of those worthless Golds. We want him to command fleets.”

“Fleets. You lot are mad. Mad.” Mickey’s violet eyes settle on mine after a long moment. “My boy, they are murdering you. You are not a Gold. You cannot do what a Gold can do. They are killers, born to dominate us; have you ever met one of the Aureate? Sure, they may look all pretty and peaceful now. But do you know what happened in the Conquering? They are monsters.”

He shakes his head and laughs wickedly. “The Institute is not a school, it is a culling ground where the Golds go to hack at one another till the strongest in mind and body is found. You. Will. Die.”

Mickey’s cube lies at the opposite end of the table. I walk over to it without saying a word. I don’t know how it works, but I know the puzzles of the earth.

“My boy, what are you doing?” Mickey sighs in pity. “That is not a toy.”

“Have you ever been in a mine?” I ask him. “Ever used your fingers to dig through a faultline at a twelve-degree angle while doing the math to accommodate eighty percent rotation power and fifty-five percent thrust so you don’t set off a gas-pocket reaction while sitting in your own piss and sweat and worrying about pitvipers that want to burrow into your gut to lay their eggs?”

“This is…”

His voice fades as he sees how the clawDrill taught my fingers to move, how the grace with which my uncle taught me to dance is converted into my hands. I hum as I work. It takes a moment, maybe a minute or three. But I learn the puzzle and then solve it easily according to frequency. There seems another level to it, mathematical riddles. I don’t know the math, but I know the pattern. I solve it and four more puzzles, then it changes once more in my hands, becoming a circle. Mickey’s eyes widen. I complete the circle’s puzzles and then toss him back the device. He stares at my hands while working his own twelve fingers.

“Impossible,” he murmurs.

“Evolution,” Harmony replies.

Dancer smiles. “We will need to discuss price.”

12
Change

My life becomes agony.

My Sigils are attached to the metacarpus in each hand. Mickey removes the old Red Sigils and cultivates new skin and bone over the wounds. Then he sets to installing a stolen subdermal datachip into my frontal lobe. I am told the trauma killed me and they had to restart my heart. I’ve died twice then. They say I was in a coma for two weeks, but to me it was nothing but a dream. I was in the vale with Eo. She kissed me on the forehead and then I woke and felt the stitches and the pain.

I lie in bed as Mickey tests me. He has me move marbles from one container into other containers coded by colors. I do this for what seems a lifetime.

“We are forming synapses, my darling.”

He tests me with word puzzles and tries to make me read, but I don’t know how to read. “You will have to learn that for the Institute,” he giggles.

My dreams are cruel things to wake from. In them, Eo comforts me, but when I wake, she is nothing but a fleeting memory. I am hollow as I lie in Mickey’s makeshift medical cell. An ion germ killer buzzes next to my bed. Everything is white, yet I can hear the thumping of music from his club. His girls change my diapers and empty my piss bags. A girl who never speaks bathes me three times a day. Her arms are willowy, her face soft and sad as when I first saw her sitting with Mickey at his liquid table. The wings that curl outward from her back are bound with a crimson ribbon. She never meets my eyes.

Mickey continues to make me develop synapse connections as he repairs the scar tissue from my neural surgery. He’s all laughs and smiles and lingering touches on my forehead as he calls me his darling. I feel like one of his girls, one of the angels he sculpted for his own pleasure.

“But we must not be satisfied only with the brain,” he says. “There is much work to be done on this Ruster body of yours if we want to make to an iron Gold.”

“And that is?”

“The golden ancestors, they call them the iron Golds. They were hard men. They stood lean and fierce upon their battlecruisers as they laid waste to the armies and republic fleets of Earth. What creatures they were.” His eyes go distant. “It took generations of eugenics and biological tampering to make them. Forced Darwinianism.”

He’s quiet for a moment, and it seems an anger builds in him.

“They say Carvers will never duplicate the beauty of the Golden Man. The Board of Quality Control taunts us. Personally, I do not want to make you a man. Men are so very frail. Men break. Men die. No, I’ve always wished to make a god.” He smiles mischeviously as he does some sketches on a digital pad. He spins it around and shows me the killer I will become. “So why not carve you to be the god of war?”

The scarred tissue on my back is peeled away with a laser and then the raw flesh is sown with cultures of my own skin grown in tubes, which is then irradiated to promote molecular bonding. It grows fast on my body, like some sort of living creature apart from myself. It itches like a demon. Mickey replaces the skin of my back and the skin of my hands where Eo applied bandages to my burns. This, he says, is not to be my real skin. It is only a homogeneous baselayer.

“Your skeleton is weak because Mars gravity is zero point three of Earth’s, my delicate little bird. Also, you have a diet deficient in calcium. Gold Standard bone density is five times stronger than naturally occurring bone density on Earth. So we will have to make your skeleton six times stronger; you must be of iron if you want to last the Institute. This will be fun! For me. Not you.”

Mickey carves me again. The agony is beyond language or comprehension. I watch videos of it afterwards to distract me from the residual pain. He uses a vibroScalpel to slice the flesh of my thigh down the middle. He parts my muscle and skin with clamps to expose the bones of my legs. Then he peels off layers of the bone with a bonepeeler and paints new layers with his improved-bone recipe.

“Someone has to dot God’s i’s.”

The next day, he opens my arms. Then he does my ribs, my spine, my shoulders, my feet, my pelvis, and my face. He also alters the tensile qualities of my tendons and inserts biocultures to increase the density of my muscle tissue Mercifully, he does not let me wake from this last surgery for several weeks. When I do wake, I see his girls around me applying new cultures of flesh and kneading my muscles with their thumbs. I wonder what will happen to them when we have finished with me. Then I fall back asleep.

I sleep in a tubular machine in which a specialized blue light crosses my body to solidify the calcium formula beneath my flesh. Slowly, my skin begins to heal. I am a patchwork fleshquilt. They begin feeding me synthesized protein, creatine, and growth hormone to promote muscle growth and tendon regeneration. My body trembles in the nights and itches as I sweat through new, smaller pores. I cannot use pain medication sufficient enough to numb the agony, because the altered nerves must learn to function with the new tissue and my altered brain.

He sits beside me on my worst nights telling me stories. It’s only then that I like him, only then that I think he is not some monster cooked up by this perverted Society.

“My profession is to create, little bird,” he says one night as we sit together in the darkness. The blue light dances over my body, bathing his face in queer shadows. “When I was young, I lived in a place they call the Grove. It was what you might think of as a circus culture. We had spectacles every night. Celebrations of color and sound and dance.”

“Sounds terrible,” I mutter sarcastically. “Just like the mines.”

He smiles softly and his eyes find that distant place. “I suppose it may seem a plush life to you. Yet there was a madness to the Grove. They made us take candies. Candies that would take us on journeys to hell, on pilgrimages to heaven. Pills that could make us fly between the planets on wings of dust to visit the faerie kings of Jupiter and the deep mermaids of Europa. There was no escape to the journeys, no end to the trips of childhood, my darling. There I drooled on the grass as the festivals swung about. My mind always separate from body. No peace to it. No end to the madness.” He clapped his hands then. “And now I Carve the things I saw in my fever dreams, just as they always wished. I dreamed of you, I think. In they end, I suppose they’ll wish I hadn’t dreamed at all.”

“Was it a good dream?” I ask.

“What?”

“The one with me.”

“No. No, it was a nightmare. One of a man from hell, lover of fire.” He’s silent for a spell.

“Why is it so horrible?” I ask him. “Life. All this. Why do they need to make us do this? Why do they treat us like we’re their slaves?”

“Power.”

“Power isn’t real. It’s just a word.”

Mickey ponders silently. Then he shrugs his thin shoulders. “Mankind was always enslaved, they’ll say. Freedom enslaves us to lust, to greed. Take freedom away, and they give me a life of dreaming. They gave you a life of sacrifice, family, community. And society is stable. There is no famine. No genocide. No great wars. And when the Golds fight, they obey rules. They are… noble about it when the great houses bicker.”

“Noble? They lied to me. Said I was a pioneer.”

“And would you have been happier if you knew you were a slave?” Mickey asks. “No. None of the billion lowReds beneath Mars would be happy if they knew what the highReds knew—that they are slaves. So is it not better to lie?”

“It is better to not make slaves.”

When I am ready, he inserts a forceGenerator into my sleeping tube to simulate increased gravity on my frame. I’ve never known pain like this. My body aches. My bones and skin and muscles scream against the pressure and the change till I’m on medication that turns the scream into a dull forever-moan. Before my skeleton is finished, Mickey replaces my teeth with straight ones taken from some lab or corpse; I don’t know. My tongue plays over them. They are so slippery. Like cold tiles in my mouth.

I sleep for days. I dream of home and family. Every night I wake after seeing Eo hang yet again. She sways across my mind. I miss her warmth in bed beside me, even though they give me an HC immersion mask for distraction.

Gradually, I am weaned from the pain medication. My muscles still aren’t used to the density of my bones, so my existence becomes a melodic ache. They begin to feed me real food. Mickey sits on the edge of my cot stroking my hair well into the nights. I don’t care that his fingers feel like spider legs. I don’t care that he thinks I am some piece of art, his art. He gives me something called a hamburger. I love it. Red meats and thick creams and breads and fruits and vegetables make my diet. I have never eaten so well.

“You need the calories,” Mickey coos. “You have been so strong for me; eat well. You deserve this food.”

“How am I doing?” I ask.

“Oh, the hard parts are over, my darling. You are a brilliant boy, you know. They have shown me the tapes from the other procedures where other Carvers tried this. Oh, how clumsy the other Carvers were, how weak the other subjects. But you are strong and I am brilliant.” He taps my chest. “Your heart is like that of a stallion’s. I’ve never glimpsed one like it before. You may not know this, but its so large because you were bitten by a pitviper when you were young, I assume?”

“I was. Yes.”

“I thought so. Your heart had to adjust to counteract the effects of the poison.”

“My uncle sucked most of the poison out when I was bitten,” I say.

“No,” Mickey laughs. “That’s a myth. The poison cannot be sucked out. It still runs through your veins, forcing your heart to be strong if you want to continue to live. You are something special, just like me.”

“Then I will not die in here?” I manage.

Mickey laughs. “No! No! We are beyond that now. There will be pain. But we are past the threat of mortality. Soon we will have made man into god. Red into Gold. Even your wife would not recognize you.”

That is all I’ve ever feared.

When they take my eyes and give me ones of gold, I feel dead inside. It’s a simple matter of reconnecting the optic nerve to the “donor’s” eyes, Mickey says. A simple thing he’s done a dozen times for cosmetic purposes; the hard part was the frontal lobe surgery, he says. I disagree. There is the pain, yes. But with the new eyes, I see things I once could not. Elements are clearer, sharper, and more painful to bear. I hate this process. All it is is a confirmation of the superiority of the Golds. It takes all this to make me their physical equal, all this to correct what nature got wrong. Perhaps we should serve them.

I don’t know how long I sleep. When I wake, my body rejects the carving of my eyes. I’m screaming and sweating. I’ve gnawed my fist bloody in my sleep and scratched the cornea of my left eye a millimeter deep. Not my left eye. My eye is in a container somewhere. I’ve scratched someone else’s eye and it hurts. How could it hurt? It’s not mine. None of this is mine. My skin is too soft, too lustrous, too faultless. I don’t know my body without scars. I don’t know the back of my own hands. Eo would not know me.

Mickey takes my hair next, ripping out the follicles and replacing them with golden strands that itch like little golden weevils burrowing into my scalp. Everything is changed.

It is weeks of physical therapy. Walking slowly around the room with Evey, the winged girl, I’m left to my own thoughts. Neither one of us cares much to speak. She has her demons and I have mine, so we are quiet and calm except when Mickey comes to coo about what pretty children we would make together. Evey sits by my bed when I have fever dreams. I wake and she’s there, always quiet, never speaking.

One day, Mickey even brings an antique zither for me, with a soundboard of wood instead of plastic. It is the kindest thing he’s ever done. I do not sing, but I play the solemn songs of Lykos. The traditional ones of my clan that no one beyond the mine will ever have heard. He and Evey sit with me sometimes, and though I think Mickey a wretched sort of creature, I feel as though he understands the music. Its beauty. Its importance. And afterwards, he says nothing. I like him then, too. At peace. It must be so at odds with the chaos of his childhood. What musics must they have played for him as he ate their candies and they warped his mind?

“Well, you’re a bit sterner than I first measured,” Harmony says to me one morning as I wake.

“Where have you been?” I ask, opening my eyes.

“Finding donors.” She flinches as she sees my irises. “The world does not stop because you are here,” she says. “We had work to do. Mickey says you can walk?”

“I am growing stronger.”

“Not strong enough,” she surmises, looking me over. “You look like a baby giraffe. I’ll fix that.”

Harmony takes me beneath Mickey’s club to a grungy gymnasium lit by sulfurous bulbs. I like the feel of the cold stone on my bare feet. My balance has returned, and it is a good thing, because Harmony does not offer me her arm; instead, she waves to the center of the dark gymnasium.

“We bought these for you,” Harmony says.

She points to two devices in the center of the dark space. The contraptions are silver and remind me of the suits knights wore in past centuries. The armor hangs suspended between two metal wires. “They are concentraction machines.”

I slide my body into the machine. Dry gel hugs my feet, my legs, my torso and arms and neck, till only my head is free. The machine is built to resist my movements, yet it responds even to the tiniest stimuli. If the arch of my foot flexes, resistance builds near the toe, stressing the muscle. It cramps immediately. The idea of building muscle is to exercise it, which is nothing more than using the muscle intensely enough to create microscopic tears in the tissue fiber. This is the pain one feels in the days after an intense workout—torn tissue—not lactic acid. When the muscle repairs the tears, it builds on itself. This is the process the concentraction machine is built to facilitate. It is the devil’s own invention.

Harmony slides the device’s faceplate over my eyes.

My body is still in the gym, but I see myself bounding across the rugged landscape of Mars. The concentraction machine can pivot on independent axes, so when I flip off a thirty-meter ledge, I flip in the concentraction machine. Then I’m running again, pumping my legs against the concentraction machine’s resistance, which increases according to Harmony’s mood or the location of the simulation. Sometimes I venture to the jungles of Earth, where I race panthers through the underbrush, or I take to the pocked surface of Luna before it was populated. But always I return home to Mars to run across its red soil and jump over its violent ravines. I learn the planet this way, seeking the terraformed parts of the world where rivers run from the hard red landscape into valleys of vegetation and trees. Seas span thousands of miles, growing as great machines powered by helium-3 thaw underground glaciers. Harmony sometimes accompanies me in the other machine so I have someone to race.

She pushes me hard, and sometimes I wonder if she’s trying to break me. I don’t let her.

“If you’re not vomiting thinking about a workout, you’re not trying,” she says.

The days are excruciating. My body is a misery of aches from the arches of my feet to the back of my neck. Mickey’s Pinks massage me every day. There is no better pleasure in the world, but three days after beginning my training with Harmony, I wake up vomiting in my bed. I shiver and shake and hear cursing.

“There’s a science to this, you wicked little witch,” Mickey is shouting. “He will be a work of art, but not if you pour water on the paint before it’s set. Do not ruin him!”

“He must be perfect,” Harmony says. “Dancer, if he is weak in any way, the other children will butcher him like a freshmade drillboy.”

“You are butchering him!” Mickey whines. “You are ruining him! His body cannot handle the muscle breakdown.”

“He has not objected to the treatment,” Harmony reminds him.

“Because he does not know he can object!” Mickey says. “Dancer, she has no understanding of the biomechanics involved in this. Do not let her ruin my boy.”

“He is not your boy!” Harmony sneers.

Mickey’s voice becomes softer. “Dancer, Darrow is like a stallion, one of the old stallions of Earth. Beautiful beasts that will run as hard as you push them. They will run. And run. And run. Until they don’t. Until their hearts explode.”

There is silence for a moment, then Dancer’s voice.

“Ares once told me that it is the hottest fire that forms the sternest steel. Keep pushing the boy.”

I resent two of my teachers after overhearing their words: Mickey for thinking me weak; Dancer for thinking me his tool. Only Harmony doesn’t anger me. Her voice, her eyes, seethe with an anger I feel in my own soul. She may have Dancer now, but she lost someone. The unscarred part of her face tells me that. It is as cold as space. She is no schemer like Dancer or his master, Ares. She is like me—brimming with a rage that makes all else so inconsequential.

That night I cry.

Over the next days, they feed me drugs to expedite the protein synthesis and muscle regeneration. After my muscle tissue has recovered from the initial trauma, they train me harder than before, even Mickey—though his eyes are underlined with dark rings and his thin face is sallow, he does not object. He has grown distant these last weeks, no longer telling me stories—as though he fears what he has created, now that I’m taking fuller shape.

Harmony and I speak very little to one another, but there is a subtle shift in our relationship, some sort of primal understanding that we are the same sort of creature. But as my body grows stronger, Harmony can no longer keep up even though she is a hardened woman of the mines. That is after only two weeks. The distance between our capabilities continues to grow. After another month, she is like a child to me. Graceful, but a child. Small. Weak. Quick, still. Very quick. But that is all. Even then I do not plateau.

My body begins to change. I thicken. My muscles become strong and corded in the concentraction machine, which I now supplement with weight workouts in highGrav. At first it’s like I’m being crushed by the new gravity and I can hardly move the free weights from one side of the room to the other. Gradually, strength builds. My shoulders grow broader, rounded; I see tendons emerge in my forearms; a tense mass of hard muscles bind my torso, like armor. Even my hands, which were always stronger than the rest of me, grow more powerful in the concentraction machines. With a simple squeeze, I can pulverize rock. Mickey jumped up and down when he saw that. No one shakes my hand any longer.

I sleep in highGrav, so that when I move about on Mars, I feel fast, quick, more agile than ever before. My fasttwitch fibers form. My hands move like lightning, and when they hit the gymnasium’s human-shaped punching bag, it leaps like it’s been struck by a scorcher. I can punch through it now. It is difficult to exert myself, so fit do I become. Sometimes it takes thirty minutes to sweat through my scarlet headband.

My body is becoming that of a Gold, one of the prime stock, not a Pixie, not a Bronze. This is the body of the race that conquered the Solar System. My hands are freaks. They are smooth, tanned, and dexterous, as any Gold’s should be. But there is a power in them out of proportion with the rest of me. If I am a blade, they are my edge.

My body is not all that changes. Before I sleep, I drink a tonic laden with processing enhancers and speed-listen to The Colors, The Iliad, Ulysses, Metamorphosis, the Theban plays, The Draconic Labels, and restricted works like The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies, Lady Casterly’s Penance, 1984, and The Great Gatsby. I wake knowing three thousand years of literature and legal code and history. The side effect is that I sometimes go spasmodic from “brain shock” when I pass a strong electromagnetic signal. Mickey says that will go away. All Golds go through the process as children. There are no long-term cognition improvements. Only short-term processing.

My last day at Mickey’s comes two months after my last surgery. Harmony smiles with me after our workout as she drops me off in my room. Music thuds in the background. Mickey’s dancers are going full tilt tonight.

“I’ll get you your clothing, Darrow. Dancer and I want to have dinner with you to celebrate. Evey will clean you up.”

She leaves me alone with Evey. Today, as always, her face is as quiet as the snow I’ve seen on the HC. I watch her in the mirror as she cuts my hair. The room is dark but for the light over the mirror. It shines from above, so she looks like an angel. Innocent and pure. But she’s not innocent, not pure. She’s a Pink. They breed them for pleasure, for the curves of their breasts and hips, for the tautness of their stomachs and the plump folds of their lips. Yet she is a girl and her spark has not yet gone out. I remember the last time I failed to protect one like her.

And me? It’s hard to look at myself in the mirror. I’m what I know the devil to be. I am arrogance and cruelty, the sort of man who killed my wife. I am Gold. And I am as cold as it.

My eyes shine like ingots. My skin is soft and rich. My bones are stronger. I feel the density in my lean torso. When Evey is done cutting the golden hair, she stands back and stares at me. I can feel her fear, and I suffer it in myself. I am no longer a human. Physically, I’ve become something more.

“You’re beautiful,” Evey says quietly, touching my golden Sigils. They’re much smaller than her feather wings. The circle is set in the center of each hand’s backside. Wings swoop back along the flesh, curving like scythes up the sides of my wristbones.

I look at Evey’s white wings and know how ugly she must think them to be on her back, how she must hate them. I want to say something kind to her. I want to make her smile, if she can. I would tell her that she is beautiful, but she’s lived a life of men saying that for some gain or another. She wouldn’t believe a boy like me. And I don’t believe her words to me. Eo was beautiful. I still remember the flush of blood in her cheeks as she danced. She had all the raw colors of life, the crude beauty of nature. I am the human concept of beauty. Gold made soft and supple into man’s form.

Evey kisses the top of my head before darting away and leaving me alone to watch the HC in the mirror’s reflection. I did not notice her slip a feather from her wings into my breast pocket.

I’m tired of watching the HC. I know their history now and I’m learning more every day. But I’m tired of being inside, tired of listening to Mickey’s club thump its music and smelling the minty leaves he smokes. Tired of seeing the girls he brings into his family only to sell away when someone bids high enough. Tired of seeing all the full eyes go hollow. This is not Lykos. There is no love, no family or trust. This place is sick.

“My boy, you look fit to captain a fleet of torchShips,” Mickey says from the door. He slides in, smelling like his burners. His spindly fingers take Evey’s feather from my breast pocket and roll it back and forth over his knuckles. He taps the feather to each of my golden Sigils. “Wings are my favorite. Aren’t they yours? They go to mankind’s better aspirations.”

He comes up behind me as I sit staring into the mirror. His hands go to my shoulders and he speaks down at my head, resting his chin upon it as though I am his property. It’s easy to see he thinks I am. My left hand goes to the Sigil on my right, lingering there.

“I told you you were brilliant. Now it’s your time to fly.”

“You give the girls wings, but you don’t let them fly. Do you?” I ask.

“It’s impossible to make them fly. They are simpler things than you. And I can’t afford to buy a license to have gravBoots. So they dance for me. Their bones aren’t hollow like birdies’, you see,” Mickey explains. “There was one I made hollow, Navia. But you know what’s what? Didn’t fly. Don’t have the physics for it. But you, you’ll fly, won’t you, my brilliant boy?”

I stare at him but say nothing. His lips slice into a smile because I unnerve him. I always have. “You’re frightened of me,” I tell him.

He laughs. “Am I? Oho! Am I now, my boy?”

“Yes. You’re used to knowing what’s what. You think like the rest of them.” I nod to the HC’s reflection. “Things are set in stone. Things are well ordered. Reds at the bottom, everyone else standing on our backs. Now you’re looking at me and you’re realizing that we don’t bloodydamn like it down there. Red is rising, Mickey.”

“Oh, you’ve got far to go…”

I reach up and grab his wrists so that he cannot move. He stares at me in the mirror’s reflection, struggling against my hold. Nothing is stronger than a Helldiver’s grip. I smile into the mirror, locking my golden eyes with his violet ones. He smells like fear. Primal terror. Like a mouse cornered by a lion.

“Be kind to Evey, Mickey. Don’t make her dance. Give her a plush life or I’ll come back to pull your hands off your body.”

13
Bad Things

Matteo is tall wisp of a Pink with long limbs and a lean, beautiful face. He is a slave. Or was a slave for carnal pleasures. Yet he walks like a water lord. Beauty in his step. Manners and grace in the wave of his hand. He has a penchant for wearing gloves and sniffing at even the smallest bit of dirt. Body maintenance has been his life’s purpose. So he doesn’t find it strange when he helps me apply a hair follicle killer to my arms, legs, torso, and privates. But I do. When we’re done, we’re both cursing—me from the sting, him from the punch I threw at his shoulder. I accidentally dislocated it just by punching it. I still don’t know my own strength. And they do make their Pinks fragile. If he is the rose, I am the thorns.

“Bald as a toddler, you frenetic little baby,” Matteo sighs as properly as one can say such a thing. “Just as the newest Luna fashion requires. Now, with a bit of eyebrow sculpting—oh, how your brows are like fungus-nibbling caterpillars—and nose-hair eradication, cuticle readjustment, teeth whitening on those slick new chompers—which, if I may say, are yellow as mustard dappled with dandelions… tell me, have you ever brushed your new teeth?—and blackhead removal (which shall be like probing for helium-3), toner adjustment, and melatonin injections, and you’ll be prim and rose proper–ish.”

I snort at the foolishness of it all. “I already look like a Gold.”

“You look like a Bronze! A fool’s Gold! One of the lowbred bastards who looks more khaki than Gold. You must be perfect.”

“You’re a bloodydamn odd lark, Matteo.”

He smacks me. “Mind yourself! A Golden would rather die than use that slithering mineslang. ‘Gorydamn’ or ‘gory’; and ‘slag’ instead of ‘squab.’ Every time you say ‘bloody’ or ‘bloodydamn,’ I will smack not your gob, but your mouth. And if you say ‘squab’ or ‘gob,’ I will kick you in the scrotum—which I do know my way around—as I will do if you do not get rid of that horrible accent. You sound like you were born in a gorydamn dumpster.”

He frowns and sets his hands on his narrow hips.

“And then we’ll have to teach you manners. And culture, culture, goodman.”

“I have manners.”

“By the maker, we are so, so going to have to make you forswear that brogue as well as the cursing.”

He pokes me as he lists out my flaws.

“Might try adopting some manners of your own, buttboy,” I growl.

He pulls off one of my gloves and slaps me across the face and takes bottle in hand and holds it to my throat. I laugh.

“You’ll have to get your Helldiver reflexes back soon to go with that gawky new body.”

I eye the bottle.

“Going to poke me to death?”

“It is a polyenne sword, goodman. A razor, in other words. One moment it is soft as hair, but with an organic impulse, it turns harder than diamond. It is the only thing that will cut through a pulseShield. One moment a whip, the next moment a perfect sword. It is the weapon of a gentleman. A Gold. For any other Color to carry it is death.”

“It is a bottle, you daft—”

He jams me in the throat so that I gag.

“And it was your manners that forced me to draw my razor and challenge you, thereby precipitously ending your impudent life. You may have fought with fists for honor in that hovel you called home. You were a bug then. An ant. An Aureate fights with a blade at the slightest provocation. They have honor the likes of which you know nothing about. Your honor was personal; theirs is personal, familial, and planetary. That is all. They fight for higher stakes, and they do not forgive when the bloodletting is done. Least of all the Peerless Scarred. Manners, goodman. Manners will protect you until you can protect yourself from my shampoo bottle.”

“Matteo…,” I say, rubbing my throat.

“Yes?” he sighs.

“What is shampoo?”

Another stint in Mickey’s carving room might have been preferable to Matteo’s tutelage. At least Mickey was afraid of me. Matteo is all insults and jibes, which I wouldn’t mind if I could hit the scrawny man, but if I did, I know I might break him. Yet for all his insults, I don’t dislike him. He reminds me of Loran, what with his wit and energy, only supplied with Uncle Narol’s grumbling attitude. I miss them both.

The next morning Dancer tries to rename me.

“You will be the son of a relatively unknown family from the far asteroid clusters. Soon, the family will be dead in a shipping accident. You will be the lone survivor and the only heir to their debts and poor status. His name, your name, will be Caius au Andromedus.”

“Slag that,” I reply. “I will be Darrow or I will be nothing.”

He scratches his head. “Darrow is an… odd name.”

“You have made me give up the hair Father gave me, the eyes Mother left me, the Color I was born to, so I will keep the name they granted me, and you can make it work.”

“I liked it better when you didn’t act like a Gold,” Dancer grumbles.

“Now, the key to dining like an Aureate is to eat slowly,” Matteo says as we sit together at a table in the penthouse where Dancer first showed me the world. “You will find yourself subjected to many Trimalchian feasts. On such occasions, there will be seven courses—appetizer, soup, fish, meat, salad, dessert, and libations.”

He gestures to a small tray laden with silverware and explains the various methods for eating with each.

Then he tells me, “If you must urinate or defecate during the meal, you hold it in. Controlling one’s bodily functions is expected of an Aureate.”

“So these namby-pamby Goldbrows aren’t allowed to shit? And when they do, I wonder, does it come out gold?”

Matteo slaps my cheek with his glove. “If you’re so eager to see red again, let your tongue slip in their presence, goodman, and they’ll be happy to remind you what color all men bleed. Manners and control! You have neither.” He shakes his head. “Now, tell me what this fork is used for.”

I want to tell him it’s used for picking his arse, but I sigh and give him the correct answer. “Fish, but only if the bones are still in the dish.”

“And how much of this fish are you to eat?”

“All of it,” I guess.

“No!” he cries. “Were you even listening?” His small hands clutch his hair and he takes a deep breath. “Must I remind you? There are Bronzies, There are Golds. And there are Pixies.”

He leaves the rest for me to finish.

“Pixies have no self-control,” I remember aloud. “They take in all the treats of power, but do pissall to merit them. They are born and they chase pleasure. Righto?”

“Prime, not righto. Now what is expected of a Gold? Of a Peerless Scarred?”

“Perfection.”

“Which means?”

My voice is cold as I mimic a Gold’s accent. “It means control, goodman. Self-control. I am permitted to indulge in vices so long as I never permit them to usurp control. If there is a key to understanding Aureates, it is found in understanding control in all its forms. Eat the fish, leave twenty percent to indicate its deliciousness did not overpower my resolve or make slaves of my tastebuds.”

“So you were listening after all.”

Dancer finds me the next day as I practice my Aureate accent in the penthouse’s holomirror. I can see a three-dimensional depiction of my head in front of me. The teeth move strangely, catching my tongue as I try to roll my words. I am still becoming used to my body, even months after the last of the surgeries. My teeth are larger than I initially thought them. It also doesn’t help that the Goldbrows speak as though they’ve had golden shovels stuck up their bloodydamn stinkholes. So I find it easier to speak like one if I see that I am one. The arrogance comes easier.

“Soften your r’s,” Dancer tells me. He sits attentively as I read from a datapad. “Pretend as though there is an h in front of each one.” His burner reminds me of home and I remember how ArchGovernor Augustus seemed in Lykos. I remember the man’s serenity. His patient condescension. His smirk. “Elongate the l’s.”

“Is that all the strength you have?” I say into the mirror.

“Perfect,” Dancer praises with a humorous shiver. He claps his good hand on his knee.

“Soon I’ll be dreaming like I’m a bloodydamn Goldbrow too,” I say in disgust.

“You shouldn’t say ‘bloodydamn.’ Say ‘gory’ or ‘gorydamn’ instead.”

I glare at him. “If I saw myself on the street, I would hate me. I would want to take a slingBlade and carve me from pucker to stinker and then burn the remains. Eo would puke to look at me.”

“You’re young still,” Dancer laughs. “God, I sometimes forget how young.” He takes a flask out of his boot and downs some before tossing it to me.

I laugh. “Last time I drank, Uncle Narol drugged me.” I take a drink. “Maybe you’ve forgotten what the mines are like. I’m not young.”

Dancer frowns. “I didn’t mean to insult, Darrow. It’s just you understand what you’re to do. You understand why you’re to do it. But you still lose perspective and judge yourself. Right now you probably get sick looking at your golden self. Righto?”

“Righto there.” I drink deep from the flask.

“But you’re only playing a part, Darrow.” He twitches his finger and a hooked blade slips from the ring on his finger. My reflexes are back and quick enough that I might have shoved it up into his throat if I thought he meant me harm, but I let him swipe the blade across my index finger. Blood wells out. Red blood. “Just in case you need reminding what you really are.”

“Smells like home,” I say, sucking on the finger. “Mum used to make blood soup out of the pitvipers. Not half bad to the truth of it.”

“You dip flaxbread in it and sprinkle in okrablossom?”

“How’d you know?” I ask.

“My mum did the same,” Dancer laughs. “We’d have it at Dancetide, or before the Laureltide when they’d announce the winner. Always squabbing Gamma.”

“Here’s to Gamma.” I laugh and finish another swig.

Dancer watches me. The smile eventually slips from his face and his eyes grow cold. “Matteo’s to teach you to dance tomorrow.”

“Thought you’d be the one doing that,” I say.

He thumps his bad leg. “Been a while since I’ve done that. Best dancer in Oikos. I could move like a deeptunnel draft. All our best dancers were Helldivers. I was one for several years, you know.”

“I figured.”

“Did you, now?”

I gesture to his scars. “Only a Helldiver would be bit so many times without drillBoys around to help pull the vipers off. Been bitten too. Got a bigger heart for it, at least.”

He nods and his eyes go distant. “Fell into a nest when fixing to repair a nodule on the clawDrill. They were up in one of the ducts and I didn’t see them. They were the dangerous kind.”

I see where he’s going with this. “They were babies,” I say.

He nods.

“They have less venom. Much less than their parents, so they weren’t burrowers bent on laying eggs inside of me. But when they bit, they used all the evil in them. Fortunately, we had antivenom with us. Traded some Gammas for it.” In Lykos we had no antivenom.

He leans toward me.

“We’re tossing you into a nest of baby vipers, Darrow. Mark that. Admissions testing is three months from now. I will be tutoring you in conjunction with your lessons from Matteo now. But if you do not quit judging yourself, if you continue to hate your guise, then you will fail the test or worse—you will pass it and then slip up and be found out while at the Institute. And everything will be squabbed.”

I shift in my seat. For once, there’s another fear in me—not of becoming something Eo would not recognize, but a more primal fear, a mortal fear of my enemies. What will they be like? I already see their sneers, their contempt.

“Doesn’t matter if they find me out.” I clap Dancer’s knee. “They’ve taken what they can from me already. That is why I am a weapon you can use.”

“Wrong,” Dancer snaps. “You’re of use because you’re more than a weapon. When your wife died, she didn’t just give you a vendetta. She gave you her dream. You’re its keeper. It’s maker. So don’t be spitting anger and hate. You’re not fighting against them, no matter what Harmony says. You’re fighting for Eo’s dream, for your family that is still alive, your people.”

“Is that Ares’s opinion? I mean, is it yours?”

“I am not Ares,” Dancer repeats. I don’t believe him. I’ve seen the way his men look at him, how even Harmony pays him deference. “Look into yourself, Darrow, and you’ll realize that you are a good man who will have to do bad things.”

My hands are unscarred and feel strange when I clench them till the knuckles turn that familiar shade of white.

“See. That’s what I don’t get. If I am a good man, then why do I want to do bad things?”

14
Andromedus

Matteo cannot teach me to dance. He shows me what each of the five form dances of the Aureate looks like and we are through. More emphasis is put on your partner in Gold dances than the dances my uncle taught me, but the movements are similar. I perform all five with greater skill than he can manage. To show off, I blindfold myself and perform each dance again in succession without music, by memory. Uncle Narol taught me to dance, and with a thousand nights of filling time with nothing but dance and song, I am masterful in recording the motions of my body, even this new body. It can do things my old one could not. The muscle fibers contract differently, the tendons stretch further, the nerves fire faster. There’s a sweet burn in the muscles as I flow through the movements.

One dance, the Polemides, has a nostalgic feel. Matteo has me hold a baton as I move about in swirling steps, baton arm outstretched as though fighting with a razor. Even as my body moves, I hear the echoes of the past. I feel the vibrations of the mine, the scent of my clan. I have seen this dance before, and I perform it better than all the others. It is a dance my body is made for, one so very similar to the illegal Reaping Dance.

When I finish, Matteo is angry.

“Is this some sort of game?” he snarls.

“What do you mean?”

He glares at me and taps his foot. “You have never been beyond the mines?”

“You know that answer,” I reply.

“You have never fought with a sword or shield?”

“Yes. I have. I’ve also captained starcruisers and dined with Praetors.” I laugh and ask what this is about.

“This is no game, Darrow.”

“Did I say it was?” I’m confused. What did I do to provoke him? I make a mistake in laughing to relieve the tension.

“You laugh? Boy, this is the Society with which you tangle. And you laugh? They are not some distant idea. They are cold reality. If they find out who you are, they will not hang you.” His face looks lost as he says it. As though he knows only too well.

“I know this.”

He ignores me. “The Obsidians will catch you and give you to the Whites and they will take you to their dark cells and they will torture you. They will pull out your eyes and cut away anything that makes you a man. They have more sophisticated methods, but I wager information won’t be their only aim; they have chemicals for that if they want. Soon after you tell them everything, they will kill me, Harmony, Dancer. And they will kill your family with fleshPeelers and stomp on the heads of your nieces and nephews. These are the things they don’t put on the HC. These are the consequences when the rulers of planets are your enemies. Planets, boy.”

I feel a chill creep into my bones. I know these things. Why does he keep hammering me with them? I’m already frightened. I don’t want to be, but I am. My task is swallowing me whole.

“So I ask you again, are you who Dancer says you are?”

I pause. Ah. I assumed that trust ran deep with the Sons of Ares, that they were of one mind. Here is a crack, a division. Matteo is Dancer’s ally, but not a friend. Something in my dancing made him think twice. Then I realize it. He did not see Mickey carve me. He is taking this all on faith that I was once a Red, and how difficult that must be. Something in my dancing made him think I was born to this. Something to do with that last dance, the one called the Polemides.

“I am Darrow, son of Dale, Lambda’s Helldiver of Lykos. I have never been anyone else, Matteo.”

He crosses his arms. “If you are lying to me…”

“I do not lie to Reds.”

Later that evening, I research the dances I performed. Polemides is Greek for “child of war.” It is the dance that reminded me so much of Uncle Narol’s dances. It is the Gold’s dance of war, the one they teach children when they are young to prepare them for the motions of martial warfare and the use of the razor. I watch a holo of Golds in battle, and my heart falls into my stomach. They fight like a summer song. Not like the thunderous, monstrous Obsidians. But like birds banking into a fresh wind. They fight in pairs, swerving, dancing, killing, ripping through a field of Obsidian and Gray as though they were at play with scythes and all the bodies that fell to them were like stalks of grain that sprayed blood instead of sallow chaff. Their golden armor shines. Their razors flash. They are gods, not men.

And I mean to destroy them?

I sleep poorly in my bed of silk that night. Long after kissing Eo’s haemanthus blossom, I fall asleep and dream of my father and what it would have been like to have known him into manhood, to have learned to dance from him instead of from his drunken brother. I clutch the scarlet headband in my hand as I wake. Holding it as dearly as I clutch my wedding band. All those things that remind me of home.

Yet they are not enough.

I am afraid.

Dancer finds me at my morning breakfast.

“You’ll be happy to know, our hackers have spent two weeks hacking into the Board of Quality Control’s cloud to change Caius au Andromedus’s name to Darrow au Andromedus.”

“Good.”

“That’s all you have to say? Do you know how much… never mind.” He shakes his head and gives a chuckle. “Darrow. It is so offColor. There will be raised eyebrows.”

I shrug to conceal my fear. “So I’ll butcher their gorydamn test and they’ll care less than a lick.”

“Spoken like a Gold.”

The next day, Matteo takes me by ship to the stables of Ishtar, not far from Yorkton. It’s a place by the sea, where green fields stretch over rolling hills. I’ve never been in so wide a place. I’ve never seen the land curve away from me. Never seen a true horizon or animals so terrifying as the beasts Matteo arranged for our lesson. They stomp and stamp and snort, flicking their tails and baring their monstrous yellow teeth. Horses. I’ve always been scared of horses, despite Eo’s story of Andromeda.

“They’re monsters,” I whisper to Matteo.

“Nevertheless,” he whispers back, “it is the gentleman’s way. You must ride well, lest you find yourself embarrassed in some formal situation.”

I look at the other Golds riding past. There are only three at the stables today, each accompanied by a servant like Matteo, Pinks and Browns.

“A situation like this one?” I hiss at him. “Fine. Fine.” I point to a massive black stallion with hooves that paw the ground. “I’ll take that beast.”

Matteo smiles. “This one is more your speed.”

Matteo gives me a pony. A big pony, but a pony. There is no social interaction here; the other riders trot past and tip their heads to say good day, but that is all. So their smiles are enough for me to know how ridiculous I look. I do not take to riding well. And I take to it even more poorly when my pony bolts as Matteo and I navigate a path into a copse of trees. Out the other side of the copse, I jump off the creature and land deftly in the grass. Someone laughs in the distance, a girl with long hair. She rides the stallion I pointed to earlier.

“Maybe you ought to stick to the city, Pixie,” she shouts at me, then kicks her horse away. I rise from my knee and watch her ride into the distance. Her hair spills out behind her, more golden than the setting sun.

15
The Testing

My test comes after two months of training my mind with Dancer. I do not memorize. I do not even really learn when with him. Instead, his training is designed to help my mind adapt to paradigm shifts. For instance, if gravity were suddenly reversed, most brains would be unable to comprehend or adjust to the shift in paradigms. Mine processes, digests, and calculates. Another example: If a fish has 3,453 scales on its left side and 3,453 on its right side, which side of the fish has the most scales? The outside. They call it extrapolational thinking. It was how I knew that I should eat the scythe card when I first met Dancer. I am very good at it.

I find it ironic that Dancer and his friends can create a fake history for me, a fake family, a fake life, but they cannot fake my admittance test. So, three months after my training begins, I take the test in a bright room next to a noisy mouse of a Goldbrow girl who incessantly taps her stylus on a jade bracelet. She may be part of the test for all I know. When she’s not looking, I snatch the stylus from her fingers and hide it down my sleeve. I am a Helldiver of Lykos. So yes, I can steal a stupid girl’s stylus without her knowing anything about it. She gawks around as if magic has been done. Then she begins to whine. They don’t give her another stylus, so she runs out in tears. Afterwards, the Penny Proctor looks at his datapad and rewinds a video from a nanoCamera. He looks at me and smiles. Such traits are apparently admirable.

A Golden razor blade of a girl disagrees and sneers “Cutter” in my ear as she slices past me in the hall outside. Matteo told me not to speak to anyone because I am not yet ready to socialize, so I barely bite back a very Red reply. Her words linger. Cutter. Cutthroat. Machiavellian. Ruthless. They all describe what she thinks of me. Funny thing is, most Golds would see the term as an accolade.

A musical voice addresses me.

“I think she actually just paid you a compliment. So don’t mind her. She’s pretty as a peach, but she’s all rotten inside. I took a bite once, if you catch my flow. Tasty, then putrid. Fantastic grab in there, by the bye. I was about to rip that ninny’s eyes from her skull myself. Damnable tapping!”

The shining voice comes from a young man torn from Greek verse. Arrogance and beauty drip off of him. Impeccable breeding. I’ve never seen a smile so wide and white, skin so smooth and lustrous. He’s all I despise.

He claps me on the shoulder and grasps my hand in one of the several ways of semiformal introduction. I squeeze slightly. He has a firm grip too, but when he tries to establish dominance, I squeeze his hand till he jerks it back. A flash of worry in his eyes.

“By God, your hand is like a vise!” he chuckles. He calls himself Cassius very quickly, and I’m lucky he gives me little time to speak, because his brow wrinkles when I do. My accent is still not perfect.

“Darrow,” he repeats. “Well, that’s quite the offColor name. Ah…” He looks at his datapad, pulling up my personal history. “Well, you come from no one at all. A farplanet hayseed. No wonder Antonia sneered your way. But listen, I’ll forgive you for it if you tell me how you fared on the test.”

“Oh, you’ll forgive me?”

His brows knit together. “I’m trying to be kind here. We Bellonas aren’t reformers, but we know that good men can come from low origins. Work with me, mate.”

Because of the way he looks, I feel a need to provoke him.

“Well, I daresay I expected the test to be more difficult. I might have missed the one about the candle, but besides that…”

Cassius watches me with a forgiving grin. His lively eyes dance over my face as I wonder if his mother coils his hair with golden irons in the morning.

“With hands like yours, you must be a terror with the razor,” he says leadingly.

“I’m fair,” I lie. Matteo won’t let me touch the thing.

“Modesty! Were you raised by the Whitecowls, man? Never mind, I’m off to Agea after the physical tests. Join me? I hear the Carvers have done some splendid work with the new ladies at Temptation. And they just had gravfloors installed at Tryst; we can float about without gravBoots. What say you, man? Does that interest you?” He taps one of his wings and winks. “Plenty of peaches there. None of them rotten.”

“Unfortunately, I cannot.”

“Oh.” He jumps as if just remembering I’m a farplanet hayseed. “Don’t worry about it, my goodman, I’ll pay and all that.”

I politely decline, but he’s already moving on. He taps my datapad before he leaves. The holoscreen cast over the inside my left arm flickers. The dimensions of his face and information about our conversation are left behind—the address for the clubs he spoke of, the encyclopedic reference for Agea, and his family’s information. Cassius au Bellona, it reads. Son of Praetor Tiberius au Bellona, Imperator of the Society’s Sixth Fleet and perhaps the only man on Mars to rival ArchGovernor Augustus in power. Apparently the families hate one another. Seems like they have a nasty habit of killing each other off. Baby pitvipers indeed.

I thought I would be frightened of these people. I thought they would be little godlings. But aside from Cassius and Antonia, many are unimpressive. There are only seventy in my testing room. Some look like Cassius. But not all are beautiful. Not all are tall and imperious. And very few strike me as men and women. For all their physical stature, they are children with exaggerated senses of self-worth; they don’t know hardship. Babies. Pixies and Bronzies, mostly.

They test my physical properties next. I sit naked in an airchair in a white room as the Copper testers of the Quality Control Board watch me through nanoCams. “Hope you’re getting a good look,” I say.

A Brown worker comes in and applies a pinch to my nose. His eyes are blank. No fight in this one, no contempt for me. His skin is pallid and his movements awkward and clumsy.

I am instructed to hold my breath as long as my lungs will allow. Ten minutes. Afterwards, the Red removes the clamp and leaves. Next, I’m to take a breath and exhale. I do and realize there is suddenly no oxygen in the chamber. When I start to tilt in my seat, the oxygen returns. They freeze the room and measure how long it takes for me to shiver uncontrollably. Then they heat it to see when my heart begins to struggle. They amplify the grav in the room till my heart can’t push sufficient blood and oxygen to my brain. Then they see how much motion I can take till I vomit. I’m used to riding a ninety-meter drill, so they have to give up.

Once I’m good and ready to kill whoever is at the switch of this little hell chamber, they send in Brown attendants to slip me into a biometric suit and guide me to a gymnasium. There they measure the flow of oxygen to my muscles, the beats of my heart, the density and length of my muscle fibers, the tensile ratings of my bones. All this after I’ve sprinted a few laps and climbed a rock wall against highGrav. It’s like a walk in the park after my hell with Harmony.

They have me throw balls, then line me up against a wall and ask me to stop small balls that they shoot at me with a circular machine. My Helldiver hands are faster than their machine, so they bring in a Green techie to adjust the thing till it’s shooting veritable rockets. Eventually, I’m hit with a ball in the forehead. I black out briefly. They measure that too.

An eye, ear, nose, and mouth test later and I am done. I feel vaguely distant from myself after the test. Like they measured my body and my brain but not me. I’ve had no personal interactions except that one with Cassius. The whole thing felt very cold, very institutionalized.

I stumble into the locker rooms, sore and confused. There’s a couple others changing, so I take my clothes and move along to a more discreet section of the long rows of plastic lockers. Then I hear a strange whistling. A tune I know. One that echoes through my dreams. The one Eo died to. I follow the sound and come upon a girl changing in the corner of the locker room. Her back is to me, muscles lean as she dons her shirt. I make a noise. She turns suddenly, and for an awkward moment, I stand there blushing. Golds are not supposed to care about nudity. But I can’t help my reaction. She’s beautiful—heart-shaped face, full lips, eyes that laugh at you. They laugh like they did as she rode away on the horse. It’s the same girl who called me a Pixie when I rode the pony.

One of her eyebrows arches upward. I don’t know what to say, so, in a panic, I turn and walk fast as I can out of the locker rooms.

A Gold wouldn’t have done that. But as I sit with Matteo on the shuttle as it ferries us from Yorkton back home to Towton, I remember the girl’s face. She blushed too.

It is a short flight, not long enough. I watch Mars through the duroglass floor. Though the planet is terraformed, vegetation is sparse along our flightplath. The planet’s surface is streaked with ribbons of green in its valleys and around her equator. The vegetation looking like green scars that cut across her pocked surface. I’ve taken virtual tours of the planet nearly every day since I received my golden eyes.

Water fills her impact craters, creating grand lakes. And the Borealis basin, which stretches across the northern hemisphere, brims with fresh water and teams with bizarre marine life. Great plains where dust devils gather cloaks of topsoil and tear through croplands. Storms and ice rule the poles where the Obsidians train and live. The weather there is said to be brutal and cold, though temperate climes are prevalent throughout much of Mars’s surface now.

There are one thousand cities on Mars, each ruled by a Governor, the ArchGovernor presiding over all. Each city is set in the center of a hundred mining colonies. The Governors manages these colonies, with the individual MineMagistrates like Podginus managing the day-to-day. The citadel of the ArchGovernor is located in Agea, in the Valles Marineris—the largest canyon in the Solar System.

With so many mines and so many cities, it was chance, I suppose, that brought the ArchGovernor to my home with his camera crew. Chance and my position as a Helldiver. They wanted to make an example out of me; Eo was an afterthought. And she would not have sung if the ArchGovernor had not been there. Life’s ironies are not charming.

“What will the Institute be like if I get in?” I ask Matteo as I peer out the window.

“Full of classes, I imagine. How should I know?”

“Is there no intel?”

“No.”

“No?” I ask.

“Well, some, I suppose,” Matteo admits. “Three sorts of people graduate: the Peerless Scarred, the Graduates, and the Shamed. The Peerless can ascend in society; the Graduates can as well, but their prospects are relatively limited and they still must earn their scars; and the Shamed are sent to the distant, hard colonies like Pluto to oversee the first years of terraforming.”

“How does one become a Peerless?”

“I imagine there is some sort of ranking system; perhaps a competition. I do not know. But the Golds are a species of built upon conquest. It would make sense if that were to be part of your competition.”

“How vague.” I sigh. “You’re as helpful as a legless dog sometimes.”

“I will explain.”

“No one is gorywell stopping you.”

“The game, goodman, in Gold society is patronage. Your actions in the Institute will serve as an extended audition for that patronage. You need an apprenticeship. You need a powerful benefactor.” He grins. “So if you want to help our cause, you’ll do as bloodydamn well as you can. Imagine if you became an apprentice to a Praetor. In ten years time, you could be a Praetor yourself. You could have a fleet! Imagine what you could do with a fleet, my goodman. Just imagine.”

Matteo never speaks about such flights of fancy, so the excitement in his eyes in contagious. It makes me imagine.

16
The Institute

My test results come when I am practicing my cultural recognition and accent modulation with Matteo in our high-rise penthouse. We have a view of the city, the setting sun behind. I’m midway through a clever retort about the Yorkton Supernova fauxWar sports club when my datapad beeps with a priority message sent to my datapad stream. I almost spill my coffee.

“My datapad has been slaved by another,” I said. “It’s the Board of Quality Control.”

Matteo shoots up from his chair. “We have perhaps four minutes.” He runs into the suite’s library, where Harmony is reading on an ergocouch. She jumps up and is down and out of the suite in less than three breaths. I make sure that the holopictures of me with my fake family are arranged in my bedroom and throughout the penthouse. Four hired servants—Browns and a Pink—go about domestic tasks in the penthouse. They wear the Pegasus livery of my fake family.

One of the Browns goes to the kitchen. The other, a Pink woman, massages my shoulders. Matteo shines my shoes in my room. Of course there are machines to do these things, but an Aureate would never use a machine for something a person could do. There is no power in that.

The towncraft appears like a distant dragonfly. It grows as it buzzes closer and hovers outside my penthouse window. Its boarding door slides open and a man in a Copper suit gives a bow of formality. I let my datapad open the duroglass window and the man floats in. Three Whites are with him. Each has a white Sigil upon their hands. Members of the Academians and a Copper bureaucrat.

“Do I have the pleasure of addressing one Darrow au Andromedus, son of the recently deceased Linus au Andromedus and Lexus au Andromedus?”

“You have the honor.”

The bureaucrat looks me up and down in a very deferential, but impatient manner. “I am Bondilus cu Tancrus of the Institute’s Board of Quality Control. There are some questions we must beg to ask of you.”

We sit across from one another at my oak kitchen table. There, they hook my finger to a machine and one of the Whites dons a pair of glasses that will analyze my pupils and other physiological reactions. They will be able to tell if I am lying.

“We will start with a control question to assess your normal reaction when telling truths. Are you of the Family Andromedus?”

“Yes.”

“Are you of the Aureate genus?”

“Yes.” I lie through my teeth, ruining their control questions.

“Did you cheat in your admissions test two months prior?”

“No.”

“Did you use nervenucleic to stimulate high comprehension and analytical functions during the test itself?”

“No.”

“Did you use a networkWidget to aggregate or synthesize outside resources in real time?”

“No.” I sigh impatiently. “There was a jammer in the room, ergo it would have been impossible. I’m glad you’ve done your research and are not wasting my time, Copper.”

His smile is bureaucratic.

“Did you have prior knowledge of the questions?”

“No.” I deem an angry response proper at this point. “And what is this about? I’m not accustomed to being called a liar by someone of your ilk.”

“It is procedure with all elite scorers, lord Aureate. I beg your understanding,” the bureaucrat drones. “Any upward outlier far removed from the standard deviation is subject to inquiry. Did you slave your widget to that of another individual during the test?”

“No. As I said, there was a jammer. Thank you for keeping up, pennyhead.”

They take a sample of my blood and scan my brain. The results are instantaneous, but the bureaucrat will not share them. “Protocol,” he reminds me. “You will have your results in two weeks.”

We receive them in four. I pass the Quality Control examination. I did not cheat. Then comes my exam score, two months after I took the damn thing, and I realize why they thought I did cheat. I missed one question. Just one. Out of hundreds. When I share the results with Dancer, Harmony, and Matteo, they simply stare at me. Dancer falls into a chair and begins to laugh; it’s an hysterical sort.

“Bloodyhell,” he swears. “We’ve done it.”

“He did it,” Matteo corrects.

It takes Dancer a minute before he has wits enough to fetch a bottle of champagne, but I still feel his eyes watching me as though I am something different, something strange. It’s like they suddenly don’t understand what it is they have created. I touch the haemanthus blossom in my pocket and feel the wedding band around my neck. They didn’t create me. She did.

It is when a valet arrives to escort me to the Institute that I say my goodbyes to Dancer inside the penthouse. He holds tight to my hand as we shake and gives me the look my father gave me before he was hanged. It’s one of reassurance. But behind that is worry and doubt. Did he prepare me for the world? Did he do his duty? My father was twenty-five when he looked at me like that. Dancer is forty-one. It makes no difference. I chuckle. Uncle Narol never gave me such a look, not even when he let me cut Eo down. Probably because he’d taken enough of my right hooks to know the answer. But if I think about my teachers, my fathers, Uncle Narol shaped me the most. He taught me to dance; he taught me how to be a man, perhaps because he knew this would be my future. And though he tried to stop me from being a Helldiver, it was his lessons that kept me alive. I’ve learned new lessons now. Let’s hope they do the trick.

Dancer gives me the knifeRing he used to slice my finger months before. But he’s reshaped it to look like an L.

“They will think it the chevron the Spartans bore on their shields,” he said. “L for Lacadaemonia.” But it is for Lykos. For Lambda.

Harmony surprises me by taking my right hand, kissing where once my Red Sigil was emblazoned. She’s got tears in one eye, the cold, unscarred eye. The other cannot cry.

“Evey will be coming to live with us,” she tells me. She smiles before I can ask why. It looks strange on her face. “You think you’re the only one who notices things? We’ll give her a better life than Mickey would.”

Matteo and I share a smile and a bow. We exchange proper honorifics and he extends his hand. It doesn’t grasp mine. Instead, it snatches the flower from my pocket. I reach after it, but he’s still the only man I’ve ever met who is faster than me.

“You cannot take this with you, goodman The wedding band on your hand is queer enough. The flower is too much.”

“Give me a petal then,” I say.

“I thought you would ask for that.” He pulls out a necklace. It is the Sigil of Andromedus. My Sigil, I remember. It is golden. He drops it in my hand. “Whisper her name.” I do and the Pegasus unfurls like a haemanthus bud. He sets a petal in the center. It closes again. “This is your heart. Then guard it with metal.”

“Thank you, Matteo,” I say, tears in my eyes. I pick him up and hug him despite his protests. “If I live more than a week, I’ll have you to thank, my goodman.” He blushes when I set him down.

“Manage your temper,” he reminds me, his small voice darkening. “Manners, manners, then burn their bloodydamn house to the ground.”

I clutch the Pegasus in my hand as the shuttle crosses over the Martian countryside. Fingers of green stretch over the earth I’ve lived to dig. I wonder who the Helldiver of Lambda is now. Loran is too young. Barlow is too old. Kieran? He’s too responsible. He’s got children to love, and he’s seen enough of our family die. There’s no fire in his belly. Leanna’s got enough, but women aren’t allowed to dig. It is probably Dain, Eo’s brother. Wild, but not bright. The typical Helldiver. He’ll die fast. The thought makes me nauseous.

It’s not just the thought. I’m nervous. I realize it slowly as I look around the shuttle’s interior. Six other youths sit quietly. One, a slender boy with an open gaze and pretty smile, catches my eye. He’s the sort who still laughs at butterflies.

“Julian,” he declares properly, and takes my forearm. We have no data to offer each other through our datapads; they took them when we boarded the shuttle. So instead I offer him the seat across from me. “Darrow, a very interesting name.”

“Have you ever been to Agea?” I ask Julian.

“Course,” he says, smiling. He always smiles. “What, you mean you haven’t? It’s strange. I thought I knew so many Golds, but hardly any of them managed to get past the entrance exams. It’s a brave new world of faces, I fear. Anyway, I envy you the fact you haven’t been to Agea. It’s a strange place. Beautiful, no doubt, but life there is fast, and cheap, so they say.”

“But not for us.”

He chuckles. “I suppose not. Not unless you play at politics.”

“I don’t much like playing.” I notice his reaction, so I laugh my seriousness off with a wink. “Not unless there’s a wager, man. You hear?”

“I hear! What’s your game? Bloodchess? Gravcross?”

“Oh, bloodchess is all right. But fauxWar takes the prize,” I say with a Golden grin.

“Especially if you’re a Nortown fan!” he agrees.

“Oh… Nortown. I don’t know if we’ll get along,” I say, wincing. I jab myself with a thumb. “Yorkton.”

“Yorkton! I don’t know if we’ll ever get along!” he laughs.

And though I smile, he doesn’t know how cold I am inside; the conversation, the jibes, the smiles, are all a pattern of sociality. Matteo’s done me well, but to Julian’s credit, he doesn’t seem a monster.

He should be a monster.

“My brother must already have arrived at the Institute. He was already in Agea at our family’s estate, causing trouble no doubt!” Julian shakes his head proudly. “Best man I know. He’ll be the Primus, just you watch. Our father’s pride and joy, and that’s saying something with how many family members I have!” Not a flicker of jealousy in his voice, just love.

“Primus?” I ask.

“Oh, Institute talk; it means leader of his House.”

The Houses. I know these. There are twelve loosely based on underlying personality traits. Each is named for one of the gods of the Roman pantheon. The SchoolHouses are networking tools and social clubs outside of school. Do well, and they’ll find you a powerful family to serve. The families are the true powers in the Society. They have their own armies and fleets and contribute to the Sovereign’s forces. Loyalty begins with them. There is little love for the denizens of one’s own planet. If anything, they are the competition.

“You sobs done beating each other off yet?” an impish kid sneers from the corner of the shuttle. He’s so drab he is khaki instead of Gold. His lips are thin and his face like a cruel hawk just as it spies a mouse. A Bronzie.

“Are we bothering you?” My sarcasm has a polite nip.

“Does two dogs humping bother me? Likely, yes. If they are noisy.”

Julian stands. “Apologize, cur.”

“Go slag yourself,” the small kid says. In half a second, Julian has drawn a white glove from nowhere. “That to wipe my ass, you golden pricklick?”

“What? You little heathen!” Julian says in shock. “Who raised you?”

“Wolves, after your mother’s cootch spat me out.”

“You beast!”

Julian throws the glove at the small kid. I’m watching thinking this is the height of comedy. The kid seems pulled straight from Lykos crop, Beta maybe. He’s like an ugly, tiny, irritable Loran. Julian doesn’t know what to do, so he makes a challenge.

“A challenge, goodman.”

“A duel? You’re that offended?” The ugly kid snorts at the princeling. “Fine. I’ll stitch your family pride together after the Passage, pricklick.” He blows his nose into the glove.

“Why not now, coward?” Julian calls. His slender chest is puffed out just as his father must have taught him. No one insults his family.

“Are you stupid? Do you see razors about? Idiot. Go away. We’ll duel after the Passage.”

“Passage…?” Julian finally asks what I’m thinking.

The scrawny kid grins wickedly. Even his teeth are khaki.

“It’s the last test, idiot. And the best secret this side of the rings around Octavia au Lune’s cootch.”

“Then how do you know about it?” I ask.

“Inside track,” the kid says. “And I don’t know about it. I know of it, you giant pisshead.”

His name is Sevro, and I like his angle.

But the talk of a Passage worries me. There is so little I know, I realize as I listen in as Julian strikes up a conversation with the last member of our shuttle. They talk about their test scores. There is a severe disparity between their low scores and mine. I notice Sevro snort as they say theirs aloud. How did applicants with such low scores get in? I’ve got an ill feeling in my gut. And what did Sevro score?

We come to the Valles Marineris in darkness. It is a great strip of light across Mars’s black surface, going as far as eyes can see. At the center of it, the capital city of my planet rises in the night like a garden of jewelswords. Nightclubs flicker on rooftops, dancefloors made of condensed air. Scanty girls and foolish boys rise and fall as gravMixers play with physics. NoiseBubbles separate city blocks. We cut through them and hear worlds of different sounds.

The Institute is beyond Agea’s night districts and is built into the side of the eight-kilometer-high walls of the Valles Marineris. The walls rise like tidal waves of green stone cradling civilization with flora. The Institute itself is made of white stone—a place of columns and sculpture, Roman to its core.

I have not been here before. But I have seen the columns. Seen the destination of our voyage. Bitterness wells in me like bile rising from stomach to throat as I think of his face. Think of his words. His eyes as they scanned the crowd. I watched on the HC as the ArchGovernor gave his speech time and again to the classes before my own. Soon I’ll hear it from his lips myself. Soon I’ll suffer the rage. Feel the fire lick over my heart as I see him in person once again.

We land on a drop pad and are shepherded into an open-aired marble square looking over the vast valley. The night air is crisp. Agea sprawls behind and the gates of the Institute stretch before us. I stand with over a thousand Goldbrows, all glancing about with the cocksureness of their race. Many clump together, friends from beyond the white walls of the school. I did not think their classes so large.

A tall Golden man flanked by Obsidians and a coterie of Gold advisors rises on a pair of gravBoots before the gate. My heart goes cold as I recognize his face and hear his voice and see the glimmer in his ingot eyes.

“Welcome, children of Aureate,” ArchGovernor Nero au Augustus says in a voice as smooth as Eo’s skin. It is preternaturally loud. “I assume you understand the gravity of your presence here. Of the thousand cities of Mars. Of all the Great Families, you are the chosen few. You are the peak of the human pyramid. Today, you will begin your campaign to join the best caste of our race. Your fellows stand like you in the Institutes of Venus, of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres of Earth, of Luna, of the Gas Giant Moons, of Europa, of the Astrodian Greek Cluster and the Astrodian Trojan Cluster, of Mercury, of Callisto, of the joint venture Enceladus and Ceres, and of the farpioneers of Hildas.”

It seems only a day ago that I knew I was a pioneer of Mars. Only a day ago that I suffered so that humanity, desperate to leave a dying Earth, could spread to the red planet. Oh, how well my rulers lied.

Behind Augustus, in the stars, there’s movement but it is not the stars that move. Nor is it asteroids or comets. It is the Sixth and Fifth Fleets. The Armada of Mars. My breath catches in my chest. The Sixth Fleet is commanded by Cassius’s father, while the smaller Fifth Fleet is under the ArchGovernor’s direct control. Most of the ships are owned by families who owe allegiance to either Augustus or Bellona.

Augustus shows us why we, they, rule. My flesh tingles. I am so small. A billion tons of durosteel and nanometal move through the heavens, and I have never been beyond Mars’s atmosphere. They are like specks of silver in an ocean of ink. And I am so much less. But those specks could ravage Mars. They could destroy a moon. Those specks rule the ink. An Imperator commands each fleet; a Praetor commands squadrons within that fleet. What I could do with that power…

Augustus is haughty as he gives his speech. I swallow the bile in my throat. Because of the impossible distance of my enemies, my anger was once a cold, quiet sort. Now it burns in me.

“Society has three stages: Savagery, Ascendance, Decadence. The great rise because of Savagery. They rule in Ascendance. They fall because of their own Decadence.”

He tells us how the Persians were felled, how the Romans collapsed because their rulers forgot how their parents gained them an empire. He prattles about Muslim dynasties and European effeminacy and Chinese regionalism and American self-loathing and self-neutering. All the ancient names.

“Our Savagery began when our capital, Luna, rebelled against the tyranny of Earth and freed herself from the shackles of Demokracy, from the Noble Lie—the idea that men are brothers and are created equal.”

Augustus weaves lies of his own with that golden tongue of his. He tells of the Goldens’ suffering. The Masses sat on the wagon and expected the great to pull, he reminds. They sat whipping the great until we could no longer take it.

I remember a different whipping.

“Men are not created equal; we all know this. There are averages. There are outliers. There are the ugly. There are the beautiful. This would not be if we were all equal. A Red can no more command a starship than a Green can serve as a doctor!”

There’s more laughter across the square as he tells us to look at pathetic Athens, the birthplace of the cancer they call demokracy. Look how it fell to Sparta. The Noble Lie made Athens weak. It made their citizens turn on their best general, Alcibiades, because of jealousy.

“Even the nations of Earth grew jealous of one another. The United States of America exacted this idea of equality through force. And when the nations united, the Americans were surprised to find that they were disliked! The Masses are jealous! How wonderful a dream it would be if all men were created equal! But we are not.

“It is against the Noble Lie that we fight. But as I said before, as I say to you now, there is another evil against which we war. It is a more pernicious evil. It is a subversive, slow evil. It is not a wildfire. It is a cancer. And that cancer is Decadence. Our Society has passed from Savagery to Ascendance. But like our spiritual ancestors, the Romans, we too can fall into Decadence.”

He speaks of the Pixies.

“You are the best of humanity. But you have been coddled. You have been treated like children. Were you born to a different Color, you would have calluses. You would have scars. You would know pain.”

He smiles as if he knows pain. I hate this man.

“You think you know pain. You think the Society is an inevitable force of history. You think Her the end of history. But many have thought that before. Many ruling classes have believed theirs to be the last, the pinnacle. They grew soft. Fat. They forgot that calluses, wounds, scars, hardship, preserve all those fine pleasure clubs you young boys love to frequent and all those fine silks and diamonds and unicorns you girls ask for on birthdays.

“Many Aureates have not sacrificed. That is why they do not wear this.” He shows a long scar on his right cheek. Octavia au Lune has the same scar. “The Scar of a Peer. We are not the masters of the Solar System because we are born. We are the masters because we, the Peerless Scarred, the iron Golds, made it that way.”

He touches the scar on his cheek. I’d give him another if I were closer. The children around me suck down this man’s garbage like oxygen.

“Right now, the Colors who mine this planet are harder than you. They are born with calluses. Born with scars and hatred. They are tough as nanosteel. Fortunately, they are also very stupid. For instance, this Persephone you have no doubt heard of is nothing more than a dim girl who thought singing a song was worth a hanging.”

I bite a bloody hole in my cheek. My skin shivers from the emotion that seems to shoot over my body as I find out that my wife is part of this bastard’s speech.

“The girl did not even know the video would be leaked. Yet it is her willingness to suffer hardship that gave her power. Martyrs, you see, are like bees. Their only power comes in death. How many of you would sacrifice yourself to not kill, but merely hurt your enemy? Not one of you, I wager.”

I taste blood in my mouth. I have the knifeRing Dancer gave me. But I breathe the fury down. I am no martyr. I am not vengeance. I am Eo’s dream. Still, doing nothing while her murderer gloats feels like a betrayal.

“In time you will receive your Scars from my sword,” Augustus closes. “But first you must earn them.”

17
The Draft

“Son of Linus and Lexus au Andromedus, both of the House Apollo. Would you prefer to mark yourself as requesting House Apollo preferentiality?” a tedious Aureate administrator asks me.

Goldbrows’ first loyalty is to Color, then family, then planet, then House. Most Houses are dominated by one or two powerful families. On Mars, the Family Augustus, the Family Bellona, and the Family Arcos influence all others.

“No,” I reply.

He shuffles over his datapad. “Very well. How do you believe you performed on the slangSmarts test? That is the extrapolational test,” he clarifies.

“I think my results speak for themselves.”

“You were not paying attention, Darrow. I shall mark that against you. I’m asking for you to speak for your results.”

“I think I took a gory piss on your test, sir.”

“Ah.” He smiles. “Well, you did. You did. House Minerva for brains might be right for you. Perhaps Pluto, for the deviousness. Apollo for the pride. Yes. Hmm. Well, I have a test for you. Please complete it to the best of your ability. Interviews will commence when you have finished.”

The test is quick and it is in the form of an immersion game. There is a goblet on a hill that I need to acquire. Many obstacles stand in my way. I pass them as rationally as possible, trying to hide my anger when a little elf steals a key I acquire. But every step of the way, there’s some damn setback, some inconvenience. And it is always unforeseen. It is always something beyond the bound of extrapolation. In the end, I reach the goblet, but only after killing an annoying wizard and cruelly enslaving the race of elves by means of said wizard’s magic wand. I could have left the elves be. But they annoyed me.

Soon, the interviewers come in intervals. I learn they are called Proctors. Each one of them is a Peerless Scarred. They are chosen by the ArchGovernor to teach and represent the students of the House within the Institute.

All said, the Proctors are impressive. There’s a huge Scarred man with hair like a lion and a lightning bolt on his collar for Jupiter, a matronly woman with gentle golden eyes, and a quick-witted man with winged feet on his collar. He can’t sit still and his baby face seems immensely fascinated by my hands. He makes me play a game with him in which he puts out both hands flat and facing up and I put mine atop facing down. He tries slapping my hands, but never quite manages. He leaves after clapping his hands together in joy.

Another strange encounter comes when a beautiful man with coiled hair interviews me. A bow marks his collar. Apollo. He asks me how attractive I believe myself to be and is displeased when I undershoot his estimate. Still, I think he likes me, because he asks me what I would like to be one day.

“An Imperator of a fleet,” I say.

“You could do great things with a fleet. But a lofty notion,” he sighs, accenting every word with a feline purr. “Perhaps too lofty for your family. Maybe if you had a benefactor of better familial origin. Yes, maybe then.” He looks at his datapad. “But unlikely due to your birth. Hm. Best of luck.”

I sit alone for an hour or more till a sullen man comes to join me. His unfortunate face is pinched like a hatchet, but he has the Scar and a razor hilt hangs on his hip. His name is Fitchner. A wad of gum fills his mouth. The uniform he wears is black with gold, and it nearly conceals the slight belly paunch that sticks outward despite the faint smell of metabolizers. Like many of the others, he wears badges about his personage. A golden wolf with two heads decorates his collar. And a strange hand marks his cuff.

“They give me the mad dogs,” he says. “They give me the killers of our race, the ones full of piss and napalm and vinegar.” He sniffs the air. “You smell full of shit.”

I say nothing. He leans against the door and frowns at it as though it offended him in some way. Then back to me, sniffing improperly.

“Problem is, we of House Mars always burn out. Kids rule the Institute at first. Then they find out that napalm lasts about…” He snaps his fingers. I have no reply. He sighs and plops down in a chair. After a while of watching me, he stands and punches me in the face. “If you punch me back, you will be sent home, Pixie.”

I kick him in the shin.

He limps away, laughing like a drunk Uncle Narol.

I’m not sent home. Instead, I find myself escorted with one hundred others into a large room with floatChairs and a large wall dominated by ivory gridwork. The gridwork forms a checkerboard square on the wall, ten rows high, ten rows across. I’m taken on a lift to the middle row, some fifty feet off the ground. Ninety-nine other students are ushered in till each box is filled. This is the prime crop, the best of the students. I look out from my box, peering up above me. A girl’s feet dangle out of the box above my head. Numbers and letters appear in front of my box. My statistics. Supposedly I am very rash and have upper-outlier characteristics in intuition and loyalty and, most noticeably, rage.

There are twelve groups in the audience. Each group sits close together in floatChairs around vertical golden standards. I see an archer, a lightning bolt, an owl, a wolf with two heads, an upside-down crown, and a trident, amongst others. One of the Proctors accompanies each group. They alone do not have their faces covered. The others wear ceremonial masks, featureless and golden and slightly like the animals of their Houses. If only I had known this was going to happen. I might have brought a nuke. These are the Drafters, the men and women of highest prestige. Praetors and Imperators and Tribunes and Adjudicators and Governors sit there watching me, trying to choose the new students for their House, trying to find young men and women they can test and offer apprenticeships. With one bomb, I could have destroyed the best and the brightest of their Golden rule. Maybe that’s the rashness speaking.

The Draft begins when a titan of a genAlt boy is chosen first to the House of the lightning bolt. House Jupiter. Then go more girls and boys of unnatural beauty and physical prowess. I can only guess they are geniuses as well. The fifth pick comes. The baby-faced interviewer with the winged feet floats up to me on golden boots. Several of the Drafters of House Mercury float along with him. They speak quietly amongst themselves before asking me questions.

“Who are your parents? What are their family’s accomplishments?”

I tell them about my modest false family. One of them seems to think highly of a relative of mine who has long since passed away. But despite the Proctor’s objections, they pass me over for another student from a family with the ownership of ninety mines and a stake on one of Mars’s southern continents.

The Mercury Proctor curses and shoots me a quick smile.

“Hope you’re available next round,” he says.

Next goes a delicate girl with a mocking smile. I can barely pay attention, and, at times, it is difficult to see who else is being selected. We’re arrayed in an odd way. With the tenth pick, the Proctor who struck me in the interviews floats my way. There is disagreement amongst the Drafters. I have two ardent advocates: one is as tall as Augustus, but her hair flows down to her spine in three golden braids. And the second is broader, not very tall. He’s old. Can tell by the scars and wrinkles on his thick hands. Hands that bear the signet ring of an Olympic Knight. I know him immediately even without seeing his face. Lorn au Arcos. The Rage Knight, the third-greatest man on Mars, who chose to serve the Society by safeguarding the Society’s Compact, instead of reaching for crowns in politics. When he points to me, Fitchner grins.

I am chosen tenth. Tenth out of one thousand.

18
Classmates

I feel a sinking in my stomach as I walk with the chattering mass into the dining hall. It is overgrand—white marble floors, columns, a holosky displaying birds in flight at sunset. The Institute is not what I expected. According to Augustus, the classes are to be hard on these little godlings. I snort down a laugh. Let the lot of them spend a year in a mine.

There are twelve tables, each with one hundred place settings. Our names float above the chairs in golden letters. Mine floats to the right of a table’s head. It is a place of distinction. The firstDraft. A single bar floats to right of my name. A -1 is to the left. The first to get five bars becomes Primus of his House. Each bar is bounty for an act of merit. Apparently my high score on the test was the first bit of merit.

“Wonderful, a cutter in the lead for Primus,” a familiar voice says. The girl from the exam. I read her name. Antonia au Severus. She has cruel good looks—high cheekbones, a smirking smile, scorn in her eyes. Her hair is long, full, and golden as Midas’s touch. She was born to be hated and to hate. A -5 floats beside her name. It is the second-closest score to mine at the table. Cassius, the boy I met at testing, sits diagonal from me. A -6 shimmers by his broad smile. He runs a hand back through his curls.

Another boy sits directly across from me; -1 and a golden bar float by his name. While Cassius lounges, this other boy, Priam, sits as straight as a blade. His face is celestial. His eyes alert. His hair coiffed. He’s tall as me, but broad in the shoulders. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more perfect human being. A bloodydamn statue. He wasn’t in the Draft, I discover. He is what they call a Premier; they cannot be drafted. His parents choose his House. Then I discover why. His scandalous mother, a bannerwoman of the House Bellona, owns our planet’s two moons.

“Fate brings us together again,” Cassius chuckles to me. “And Antonia. My love! It seems our fathers conspired to place us side by side.”

Antonia replies with a sneer, “Remind me to beam him a thank-you.”

“Toni! No need for nastiness.” He wags a finger. “Now toss me a smile like a good doll.”

She flips him the crux with her fingers. “Rather toss you out a window, Cassi.”

“Rawr.” Cassius blows her a kiss. She ignores it. “So, Priam, I suppose you and I will have to play gently with these fools, eh?”

“Oh, they look like swell sorts to me,” Priam replies primly. “I fancy we’ll do very well as a group.”

They talk in highLingo.

“If the dregs of the Draft don’t weigh us down, my good man!” He gestures to the end of the table and starts naming them: “Screwface, for obvious reasons. Clown because of that ridiculous puffy hair. Weed because, well, he’s thin. Oy! You, you’re Thistle because your nose looks hooked as one. And… that itty-bitty one right there next to the Bronzie-looking fellow, that’s little Pebble.”

“I think they will rather surprise you,” Priam says in defense of the far end of the table. “They may not be as tall or as athletic or even as intelligent as you or myself, if intelligence really can be measured by that test, but I do not think it charity to say that they will be the spine of our group. Salt of the earth, if you will. Good sorts.”

I see the small kid from the shuttle, Sevro, at the very bottom of the table. The salt of the earth is not making friends. And neither am I. Cassius glances at my -1. I see him concede that Priam might have scored better than he, but Cassius makes a point in saying he’s never heard of my parents.

“So, dear Darrow, how did you cheat?” he asks. Antonia glances over from her conversation with Arria, a small girl made of curling hair and dimples.

“Oh, come now, man.” I laugh. “They sent Quality Control after me. How could I have cheated? Impossible. Did you cheat? Your score is high.”

I speak the midLingo. It’s more comfortable than that highLingo fartdust Priam jabbers on in.

“Me? Cheat! No. Just didn’t try enough, apparently,” Cassius replies. “If I had my wits, I’d have spent less time with the girls and more on studying, like you.”

He’s trying to tell me if he tried he could have done just as well. But he’s too busy to put in as much effort. If I wanted him as a friend, I’d let him get away with it.

“You studied?” I ask. I feel a sudden urge to embarrass him. “I didn’t study at all.”

A chill goes through the air.

I shouldn’t have said it. My stomach plummets. Manners.

Cassius’s face sours and Antonia smirks. I’ve insulted him. Priam frowns. If I want a career in the fleet, then I likely need Cassius au Bellona’s father’s patronage. Son of an Imperator. Matteo drilled this into me. How easy it is to forget. The fleet is where the power is. Fleet or government or army. And I don’t like government, not to mention, this sort of insult is how duels begin. Fear trickles down my spine as I realize how thin a line there is to tread. Cassius knows how to duel. I, for all my new skills, do not. He would rip me to pieces, and he looks like he wants to do just that.

“I joke.” I tilt my head to Cassius. “Come on, man. How could I score so high and not have studied till my eyes were bleeding? Wish I’d spent more time fooling off like you—we’re in the same spot now, after all. Fat lot that studying did for me.”

Priam nods his approval at the peace offering.

“I bet it was a slog!” Cassius crows, tipping his head to acknowledge my peculiar breed of apology. I expected the play to go over his head. Thought his pride would blind him to my sudden apology; the Gold may be proud, but he isn’t stupid. None of them are. Have to remember that.

After that, I do Matteo proud. I flirt with a girl named Quinn, befriend and joke with Cassius and Priam—who has probably never sworn in his life—throw my hand out to a tall brute named Titus whose neck is as thick as my thigh. He squeezes too hard on purpose. He’s surprised when I nearly break his hand, but damn is his grip strong. The boy is even taller than Cassius and I, and he’s got a voice like a titan, but he grins when he realizes that my grip, if nothing else, is stronger than his. Something strange about his voice, though. Something decidedly disdainful. There’s also a feather of a boy named Roque who looks and speaks like a poet. His smiles are slow, few, but genuine. Rare.

“Cassius!” Julian calls. Cassius stands and throws an arm around his thinner, prettier twin. I didn’t piece it together before, but they are brothers. Twins. Not identical. Julian did say his brother was already in Agea.

“Darrow here is not what he seems,” Julian tells the table with a very grave face. He has a knack for theatrics.

“You don’t mean…” Cassius puts a hand to his mouth.

My finger grazes my steak knife.

“Yes.” Julian nods solemnly.

“No.” Cassius shakes his head. “He’s not a Yorkton supporter? Julian, tell me it isn’t so! Darrow! Darrow, how could you be? They never win fauxWar! Priam, are you hearing this?”

I throw my hands up in apology. “A curse of birth, I suppose. I am a product of my upbringing. I cheer for the underdog.” I manage not to sneer the words.

“He confessed it to me on the shuttle.”

Julian is proud to know me. Proud his brother knows he knows me. He looks for Cassius’s approval. Cassius isn’t oblivious to this either; he gently doles out a compliment and Julian leaves the highDrafts and returns to his midDraft seat halfway down the table with a content smile and squared shoulders. I didn’t think Cassius would be the kind sort.

Of those I meet, only Antonia openly dislikes me. She doesn’t watch me like the others at the table. From her, I feel only a distant breed of contempt. One moment she is laughing, flirting with Roque, and then she feels my gaze and becomes ice. The feeling is mutual.

Director Clintus of the Institute is a woman. Thin and drab, she commands the room only by virtue of her voice. It is cultured but terrifying, like an eagle’s scream. I don’t know why. She gives us a brief welcome, reiterates the same points that Augustus made earlier, and is as bored as I am by what she has to say. She doesn’t care about us.

“You are the highest percentile of your Color.” Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The ill feeling is still there in my stomach. “The Passage will begin tomorrow. Until then, sleep well, students.”

My dormitory is from a dream. Gold trim lines a window that looks out into the valley. A bed is laden with silks and quilts and satins. I lie in it when a Pink masseur comes in and stays for an hour kneading my muscles. Later, three lithe Pinks file through to tend to my needs. I send them to Cassius’s room instead. To calm the temptation, I take a cold shower and immerse myself in a holoexperience of a digger in the mining colony Corinth. The helldiver in the holoexperience is less talented than I was, but the rattling, the simulated heat, the darkness and the vipers, they comfort me so much that I wrap my old scarlet rag around my head.

More food comes. Augustus was all talk. Gob full of exaggerations. This is their version of hardship. I feel guilty as I fall asleep with a full stomach, clutching the locket with Eo’s flower inside. My family will go to bed hungry tonight. I whisper her name. I take the wedding band from my pocket and kiss it. Feel the ache. They stole her. But she let them. She left me. She left me tears and pain and longing. She left me to give me anger, and I cannot help but hate her for a moment even though beyond that moment there is only love.

“Eo,” I whisper, and the locket closes.

19
The Passage

I vomit as I wake. A second fist strikes my full stomach. Then a third. I’m empty and gasping for air. Drowning in my sick. Coughing. Hacking. I try to scramble away. A man’s hand grabs me by the hair and throws me into the wall. God, he’s bloody strong. And he’s got extra fingers. I reach for my knifeRing, but they’ve already dragged me into the hall. I’ve never been so manhandled; even my new body can’t recover from their strikes. There’s four of them in black—Crows, the killers. They’ve discovered me. They know what I am. It’s over. All over. Their faces are expressionless skulls. Masks. I pull the knife I took from dinner from my waist and am about to stab one of them in the groin. Then I see the flash of gold on their wrists and they hit me till I drop the knife. It’s a test. Their strikes against a higher Color are sanctioned by the issuer of the bracelets. They haven’t found me out at all. A test. That is what this is. It is a test.

They could have used stunners. There’s a purpose to the beating. It’s something most Golds have never experienced. So I wait. I curl up and let them beat me. When I don’t resist, they think they’ve done their job. They sort of do; I’m raggedshit by the time they’re satisfied.

I’m dragged through the hallway by men nearly three meters tall. A bag is shoved over my head. They’re staying away from technology to scare me. I wonder how many of these kids have felt physical force like this? How many have been so dehumanized? The bag smells like death and piss as they drag me along. I start laughing. It’s like my bloodydamn frysuit. Then a fist hits my chest and I crumple, gasping.

The hood also has a sound device installed. I’m not breathing hard, but my breaths come back louder than they should. There are over a thousand students. Dozens at a time must suffer this same fate, yet I hear nothing. They don’t want me to hear the others. I’m supposed to think I’m alone, that my Color means nothing. Surprisingly, I find myself offended that they dare strike me. Don’t they know I’m a bloodydamn Gold? Then I snort back a laugh. Effective tricks.

I’m lifted up and thrown hard onto a floor. I feel a vibration, the smell of exhaust. Soon we’re in the air. Something in the bag covering my head disorients me. I can’t tell which direction we’re flying, how high we’ve risen. The sound of my own raspy breath has become terrible. I think the bag also filters out the oxygen, because I’m hyperventilating. Still, it’s not worse than a frysuit.

Later. An hour? Two? We land. They drag me by my heels. Head bumps on stone, jarring me. It’s not till much later that they take the bag off of my head in a barren stone room lit by a single light. Another person is already here. The Crows strip away my clothing, rip away the precious Pegasus pendant. They leave.

“Cold in here, Julian?” I chuckle as I stand, the red headband still around my forehead. My voice echoes. We’re both naked. I fake a limp with my right leg. I know what this is.

“Darrow, is that you?” Julian asks. “Are you well?”

“I’m prime. They busted up my right leg, though,” I lie.

He stands too, pushing himself up with his left hand. That’s his dominant one. He looks tall and feeble in the light. Like bent hay. I caught more kicks and punches than him, though, loads more. My ribs might be cracked.

“What do you think this is?” he asks. He’s covering his privates.

“The Passage, obviously.”

“But they lied. They said it would be tomorrow.”

The thick wooden door squeals on rusted hinges and Proctor Fitchner saunters in popping a gumbubble.

“Proctor! Sir, you lied to us,” Julian protests. He brushes his pretty hair back out of his eyes.

Fitchner’s movement is sluggish but his eyes are like a cat’s. “Lying takes too much effort,” he grunts idly.

“Well… how dare you treat us like this!” Julian snaps. “You must know who my father is. And my mother is a Legate! I can have you up on charges for assault in a moment’s notice. And you hurt Darrow’s leg!”

“It’s one A.M., dipstick. It’s tomorrow.” Fitchner pops another gumbubble. “There are also two of you. Alas, only one spot is available in your class.” He tosses a golden ring emblazoned with the wolf of Mars and a star shield of the Institute onto the dirty stone ground. “I could make it ambiguous, but you look like rusty-headed lads. Only one comes out alive.”

He leaves the way he came. The door squeals and then slams shut. Julian flinches at the sound. I do not. We both stare at the ring and I have a sick feeling in my gut that I’m the only one in the room who knows what just happened.

“What do they think they are doing?” Julian asks me. “Do they expect us to…”

“Kill each other?” I finish. “Yes. That’s what they expect.” Despite the knot in my throat. I ball my fists, Eo’s wedding band tight on my finger. “I intend to wear that ring, Julian. Will you let me have it?”

I am bigger than he. Not quite as tall. But that doesn’t matter. He doesn’t stand a chance.

“I have to have it, Darrow,” he murmurs. He looks up. “I am of the Family Bellona. I can’t go home without it. Do you know who we are? You can go home without shame. I can’t. I need it more than you!”

“We’re not going home, Julian. One person comes out alive. You heard him.”

“They wouldn’t do that…” he tries.

“No?”

“Please. Please, Darrow. Just go home. You don’t need it like I do. You don’t. Cassius… he would be so ashamed if I didn’t make it. I wouldn’t be able to look at him. Every member of my family is Scarred. My father is an Imperator. An Imperator! If his son did not even make it through the Passage… what would his soldiers think?”

“He would still love you. Mine would.”

Julian shakes his head. He takes a breath and stands tall.

“I am Julian au Bellona of the Family Bellona, my goodman.”

I don’t want to do this. I can’t explain how badly I don’t want to hurt Julian. But when has what I wanted ever mattered? My people need this. Eo sacrificed happiness and her life. I can sacrifice my wants. I can sacrifice this slender princeling. I can even sacrifice my soul.

I make the first move toward Julian.

“Darrow…,” he murmurs.

Darrow was kind in Lykos.

I am not. I hate myself for it. I think I’m crying, because my vision is unclear.

The rules and manners and morals of society are pulled away. All it takes is a stone room and two people needing the same scarce thing. Yet the shift isn’t instantaneous. Even when I punch Julian in the face and his blood smears my knuckles, it doesn’t seem a fight. The room is quiet. Awkward. I feel rude punching him. Like I’m acting. The stone is cold on my feet. My skin prickles. Breath echoes.

They want me to kill him because he didn’t do well on their tests. This is a mismatch. I am Darwin’s scythe. Nature scrapping away the chaff. I don’t know how to kill. I’ve never killed a man. I have no blade, no thumper, no scorcher. It seems impossible that I could make this boy of meat and muscle bleed dry just with my hands. I want to laugh and Julian does. I am a naked child slapping at another naked child in a cold room. His hesitancy is obvious. His feet move like he’s trying to remember a dance. But when his elbows come to eye level, I panic. I don’t know how he is fighting. He strikes halfheartedly at me in a foreign, artistic way. He’s tentative, slow, but his timid fist gets my nose.

Rage overtakes me.

My face goes numb. My heart thunders. It’s in my throat. My veins prickle.

I break his nose with a straight. God, my hands are strong.

He wails and ducks into me, grappling my arm into an odd angle. It pops. I use my forehead. It takes him just at the bridge of his nose. I grab the back of his neck and hit him again with my forehead. He can’t break away. I do it again. Something cracks. Blood and spit lather my hair. His teeth cut my scalp. I drop back like I’m dancing, reverse off my left foot, weave forward and hit him with all my weight behind my right fist in his chest. My Helldiver knuckles shatter his reinforced sternum.

There’s a great wheezing gasp. And a crackling noise like snapping twigs.

He tips backward onto the ground. I’m dazed from striking him with my forehead. Seeing red. Seeing double. I stumble toward him. Tears stream down my cheeks. He’s twitching. When I grab his golden hair, I find him already limp. Like a wet golden feather. Blood pulses from his nose. He is quiet. He no longer moves. No longer smiles.

I mutter my wife’s name as I fall to cradle his head. His face has become like a blood blossom.