Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising Trilogy (68 page)

Anger roars out of me and I try to bite his face, bellowing like a wounded animal, startling Mustang. I strain against the men holding me, trembling with rage as the Jackal watches me squirm.

Cassius stares at the ground, avoiding Mustang’s gaze. My voice croaks out of me, hardly my own.

That deeper demon only the Jackal can summon from me. “I’m going to skin you,” I say.

Bored of me, he rolls his eyes and snaps his fingers. “Put the muzzle back on.” Tharsus binds my

mouth. The Jackal opens his arms as if welcoming two long-lost friends to a party. “Cassius!

Antonia!” he says. “Heroes of the hour. My dear…what happened?” He asks when he sees Antonia’s

face. They were lovers during my imprisonment. Sometimes I’d smell her on him as he came to visit

me before the box. Or she’d drag a nail along his neck as she passed. He goes close to her now, taking her jaw in his hand, tilting her head to examine the damage done to her. “Did Darrow do this?”

“My sister,” she corrects, disliking his examination. She mourned her face in our captivity more than she mourned her own mother ’s death. “The bitch will pay. And I’ll have it fixed, don’t worry.”

She pulls her head back from him.

“Stop,” the Jackal says sharply. “Why fixed?”

“It’s disgusting.”

“Disgusting? My dear, scars are what you are. They tell your story.”

“This is Victra’s story, not mine.”

“You’re still beautiful.” He pulls her down gently by her chin and kisses her lips delicately. He doesn’t care for her. Like Mustang said, we’re just sacks of meat to him. But while Antonia’s as wicked a thing as I’ve ever met, she wants to be loved. To be valued. The Jackal knows how to use

that.

“This was Barca’s,” Antonia says, handing the Jackal Sevro’s pistol. The Jackal runs a thumb over

the howling wolves engraved in the hilt.

“Fine work,” he says. He strips his own gun from his magnetic holster and tosses it to a bodyguard before holstering Sevro’s. Of course he takes my friend’s pistol as a trophy.

His datapad flashes and he holds up a hand for silence. “Yes, Imperator?”

The grotesque Ash Lord appears in the air before the Jackal as a disembodied, gigantic head. Dark

Gold eyes peer out from beneath twin thickets of eyebrows. His jowls hang over the high black collar of his uniform.
“Augustus, the enemy is under way. TorchShips in front.”

“They’re coming for him,” Cassius says.

“How many?” the Jackal asks.

“More than sixty. Half bearing the red fox.”

“Do you wish me to spring the trap?”

“Not yet. I will assume command of your ships.”

“You know the arrangement.”

The Ash Lord’s wide mouth makes a straight line.
“I do.
You are to continue to join the Sovereign
as planned. Escort the Morning Knight and his package to the Citadel. My daughter will take custody
of him there.
Go now, for Gold.”

“For Gold.”

The head disappears.

The Jackal glances over to the Obsidians who pulled me down the cargo ramp. “Slaves, attend to

Praetor Licenus on the bridge. You are no longer needed.” The Obsidians leave without question.

When they are gone, he eyes the thirty Boneriders. “The Morning Knight has given us an opportunity to win this war today. The Telemanuses will come for my sister. The Howlers and the Sons of Ares

will come for the Reaper. They will not have them. It is upon our shoulders to deliver them to our Sovereign and her strategists in the Citadel.”

He addresses Antonia and Cassius. “Set aside your little grievances. Today we are Gold. We can bicker when the Rising is ash. Most of you lived the darkness of the caves with me. You watched by my side as this…creature stole what was ours. They will take everything from us. Our homes. Our slaves. Our right to rule. Today we fight to keep what is ours. Today we fight against the dying of our Age.”

They lean into his words, awaiting his orders hungrily. It’s terrifying to see the cult he’s built around himself. He’s taken bits of me, of my speaking pattern, and transposed it onto his own behavior. He continues to evolve.

The Jackal turns from his men as Lilath brings back my slingBlade, red-hot from engine’s heat, and hands it to him hilt first. “Lilath, you’re to stay with the fleet.”

“You’re sure?”

“You’re my insurance plan.”

“Yes, my liege.”

Antonia’s not sure what they’re talking about, and she doesn’t like it one bit. The Jackal twirls my

razor in his hand. And then looking between me and Mustang’s he’s struck by a thought. “How long were you imprisoned by Darrow, Cassius?”

“Four months.”

“Four months. Then I believe you should do the honors.” He flips the red-hot razor to Cassius, who smoothly catches it by its hilt. “Cut off Darrow’s hand.”

“The Sovereign wants him…”

“Alive, yes. And he will be. But she doesn’t want him coming in to her bunker with his sword arm

attached to his body, now does she? We’re to take all his weapons. Neuter the beast and let’s be on our way. Unless…there’s a problem?”

“No problem,” Cassius says. Stepping forward, he lifts high the razor, metal throbbing with heat.

“Is this what you’ve become?” Mustang asks. Cassius suffers her gaze, shame on his face. “Look at

me, Darrow,” Mustang says. “Look at me.”

I will myself to forget the blade. To watch her, taking strength from her. But as the superheated metal cleaves through the skin and bone of my right wrist, I forget her. I scream in pain, looking back where my hand was to see a stump lazily dripping blood through charred capillaries. Smoke from my

burning flesh slithers into the air. And through the agony I can see the Jackal picking my hand up from the ground and holding it in the air. His newest trophy.

“Hic sunt leones,”
he says.

“Hic sunt leones,”
echo his men.

I think of my uncle as I cradle the charred stump of my right arm, shivering from pain. Is he with my father now? Does he sit with Eo by a woodfire listening to the birds? Do they watch me? Blood weeps through the blackened flesh at my wrist. The pain is blinding. Overtaking my entire body. I’m strapped beside Mustang into a seat in two parallel rows in the back of the military assault craft amidst thirty Boneriders. The overhead light pulses an alien green. The ship shudders from turbulence. Luna is in storm. Huge thunderheads swaddling the cities. Black towers penetrating the murky clouds. All along the rooftops, motes of light dance from the headlamps of Oranges and highReds, my own brethren, who slave under the military yoke, preparing weapons that will fell their Martian kin.

Brighter flood lamps bathe military scenes. Black shapes trimmed with evil red beacons zip and float between towers as squadrons of ripWings patrol the sky and Golds in gravBoots jump between towers kilometers apart, checking on defenses, preparing for the storm above, saying last words to friends, to schoolmates, to lovers.

Passing the Elorian Opera House, I see a line of Golds perched on its highest crenellation, staring up at the sky, their glorious war helms spiked with horns so they look a troupe of gargoyles balanced there, silhouetted by lightning, waiting for hell to rain.

We drive toward the cauldron of clouds that swirls around the highest skyscrapers. Beneath the cloud layer, the interlocked skin of cityscape is quiet. Dark in anticipation of orbital bombardment, except for the veins of flame that bleed across the horizon from riots in Lost City. Flashing emergency vehicles dive toward the blazes. The city has gathered its breath for hours, for days, and, with exhalation bare moments away, her seams strain and her lungs stretch to bursting.

We taxi onto a circular landing pad atop the Sovereign’s spire. There, Aja and a cohort of Praetorians meet us. The Boneriders unload with gravBoots before we land, covering the craft as it settles onto the pad. Cassius comes out, manhandling me along. He drags Sevro with his other hand

like a deer carcass. Antonia shoves Mustang along. The weary winter rain of the city-moon drips down Aja’s dark face. Steam rises from her collar and a brilliant white smile slashes the night.

“Morning Knight, welcome home. The Sovereign awaits.”

—

A kilometer beneath the surface of the moon, the great gravLift known only in military myth as the Dragon Maw stops, hissing open to lead down a dimly lit concrete hall to another door emblazoned

with the pyramid of the Society. There, blue light scans Aja’s irises. The pyramid fractures in half, gears and huge pistons whirring. Technology here older than the Citadel above, ancient, from a time

when Earth stood the only enemy Luna knew, and the great American railguns were the fear of all Luneborn. It’s a testament to the architecture and the discipline of the Praetorians that the great bunker of the Sovereign has not had to change substantially for more than seven hundred years.

I wonder if Fitchner knew its inner workings. Doubtful. Seems a secret Aja would hoard. But I wonder if she even knows all the secrets of this place. Tunnels to the left and right of the narrow hall we pass through are long-ago collapsed, and I can’t help but wonder who once walked through them,

who collapsed them and why.

We pass heavily guarded rooms aglow with holo lights. Synced Blues and Greens lying back in tech beds, IVs hooked into their bodies as data streams through their brains via uplink nodes embedded in their skulls, eyes lost to some distant plane. It’s the central nervous system of the Society.

Octavia can wage a war from here even if the moon falls to ruin around her.

The Obsidians here wear black helmets with draconic shaped skulls and dark purple on their body

armor. Gold letters spelling
cohors nihil
wind along the short-swords at their sides. Zero Legion. I’ve never heard of them, but I see what they guard: one last door of solid, unadorned metal, the deepest refuge of the Society. It dilates open with a groan and only then, a year and a half since I jumped out the back of her assault shuttle, do I see the silhouette of the Sovereign.

Her patrician voice echoes down the hall. “…Janus, who cares about civilian casualties? Does the

sea ever run out of salt? If they manage an Iron Rain, you shoot them down, whatever the cost. The last thing we desire is for the Obsidian Horde to land here and link with the riots in Lost City….”

The ruler of all I’ve ever fought against stands in a depressed circle at the center of a large gray and black room bathed in blue light from the Praetors and Ash Lord who surround her in holographic form. There’s more than forty in a semicircle, the veterans of her wars. Pitiless creatures watching me enter the room with the dark, smug contentment of cathedral statues, as if they always knew it would come to this. As if they earned this end of mine and didn’t luck into it just as they lucked into their birth.

They know what my capture means. They’ve been broadcasting it nonstop to my fleet. Trying to take our coms with hacking attacks to spread the word among my ships. Spreading it to Earth to quell the uprisings there, pimping the signal to the Core to forestall any more civil unrest. They’ll do the same with my execution. The same with Sevro’s dead body. And maybe Mustang, despite the deal Cassius thinks he’s struck. Look what befalls those who rise against, they will say. Look how even these mighty beasts fall before Gold. Who else can stand against them? No one.

Their grip will tighten.

Their reign will strengthen.

If we lose today, a new generation of Gold will rise with vigor unseen since the fall of Earth. They will see the threat to their people and they will breed creatures like Aja and the Jackal by the thousands. They’ll build new Institutes, expand their military, and throttle my people. That is the future that could be. The one Fitchner feared the most. The one I fear is coming as I watch the Jackal move past me into the room.

“His Obsidians are not trained in extraplanetary warfare,” one of the Praetors is saying.

“You want to tell that to Fabii?” the Sovereign asks. “Or perhaps to his mother? She’s with the other Senators who I had to corral in the Chamber before they could flee like little flies and take their ships with them.”

“Politico cravens…” someone murmurs.

Aside from the glowing holographs, the room is occupied by a small host of martial Golds. More

than I expected. Two Olympic Knights, ten Praetorians, and Lysander. Ten years of age now, he has

grown nearly half a foot since last I saw him. He carries a datapad to take copious notes of his grandmother ’s conversation and smiles to Cassius as we enter, watching me with the wary interest you’d watch a tiger through duroglass. His crystal Gold eyes take in my bindings, Aja, and my missing hand. Mentally tapping the glass with a nail to see just how thick it is.