Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising Trilogy (60 page)

“Property is a funny thing these days,” Sevro says. “Tends to have opinions.” Victra bristles at the challenge.

Mustang inserts herself. “I think Sevro means to say: now that you have your revenge, do you still intend to come with us to the Core?”

“I don’t have my revenge,” Victra says. “Antonia still breathes.”

“And when she does not?” Mustang asks.

Victra shrugs. “I’m not good with commitment.”

Sevro’s mood sours even more.

—

Dozens of prisoners fill the ward’s cells. Most Gold. Some Blue and Gray. All high ranking and loyal to Antonia. A canyon of enemies who glare out at me from the bars. I walk alone down the hall, enjoying the feeling of so many Golds knowing I’m their captor.

I find Antonia in the second to last cell. She sits against the bars of the cell that separates her from the adjacent one. Aside from a bruised cheek, she’s as beautiful as ever. Mouth sensual, eyes smoldering behind thick eyelashes as she broods under the brig’s pale lights. Her willowy legs are folded under her, black-nailed hands picking at a blister on her big toe.

“I thought I heard the Reaper swing,” she says with a seductive little smile. Her eyes drift slowly up

the length of me, eating every centimeter up. “You’ve been downing your protein, haven’t you, darling? All big again. Don’t fret. I’ll always remember you as a weeping little worm.”

“You’re the only Boneriders left alive in the fleet,” I say looking at the cell adjacent hers. “I want to know what the Jackal’s planning. I want to know his troop positions, his supply routes, his garrison strengths. I want to know what information he has on the Sons of Ares. I want to know what his plans are with the Sovereign. Are they colluding? Is there tension? Is he making a move against her? I want to know how to beat him. And most of all, I want to know where the bloodydamn nuclear weapons are. If you give me this, you live. If you do not, you die. Am I clear?”

She didn’t flinch at the mention of the weapons. Neither did the woman in the adjacent cell.

“Crystal clear,” Antonia says. “I’m more than willing to cooperate.”

“You’re a survivor, Antonia. But I wasn’t just talking to you.” I slam my hand on the bars of the cell next to hers where a shorter, dark-faced Gold sits watching me with raw eyes. Her face is sharp, like her tongue used to be. Hair curly and more golden than last time I saw her—artificially lightened, same with her eyes. “I’m talking to you too, Thistle. Whichever of you gives us more information gets to live.”

“Devilish ultimatum.” Antonia applauds from the ground. “And you call yourself a Red. I think you

were more at home with us than you are with them. Isn’t that right?” She laughs. “It is isn’t it?”

“You have an hour to think it over.”

I walk away from them, letting them stew in it. “Darrow,” Thistle calls after me. “Tell Sevro I’m

sorry. Darrow, please!” I turn and walk back to her slowly.

“You dyed your hair,” I say.

“Little Bronzie just wanted to fit in,” Antonia purrs, stretching her long legs. She’s more than a head and a half taller than Thistle. “Don’t blame the runt, unrealistic expectations.”

Thistle stares out at me, hands clutching the bars. “I’m sorry, Darrow. I didn’t know it would go so far. I couldn’t have…”

“Yes, you did. You’re not an idiot. And don’t be pathetic and claim to be one. I understand how you could do it to me,” I say slowly. “But Sevro was supposed to be there. So were the Howlers.” She looks at the ground, unable to meet my gaze. “How could you do that to him? To them?”

She has no answer. I touch her hair with my hand. “We liked you the way you were.”

I join Sevro, Mustang, and Victra in the brig’s monitoring room. Two techs lean back in ergonomic

chairs, several dozen holos floating around them at once. “They said anything yet?” I ask.

“Not yet,” Victra answers. “But pot’s stirred and I’ve cranked the heat.”

Sevro’s watching Thistle on the holoDisplay. “Did you want to talk with Thistle?” I ask.

“Who?” he asks, raising his eyebrows. “Never heard of her.” I can tell he’s wounded by seeing her

again. Wounded even more because he tells himself to be hard, but this betrayal—by one of his own

Howlers—cuts at his core. Still he plays it off. Not sure if it’s for Victra, for me, or for himself.

Probably all three.

After several minutes, Antonia and Thistle drip with sweat. Per my recommendation, we’ve made

the cells forty degrees Celsius to amp up their irritability. Gravity is jacked up a fraction too. Just outside the realm of perception. So far, Thistle’s done nothing but weep and Antonia has been touching the bruise on her cheek to see if any lasting damage has been done to her face. “You need to come up with a plan,” Antonia says idly through the bars.

“What plan?” Thistle asks from the far corner of her own cell. “They’re going to kill us even if we give them information.”

“You weeping little cow. Pick your chin up. You’re embarrassing your scar. You’re House Mars, aren’t you?”

“They know we’re listening,” Sevro says. “Least, Antonia does.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t matter,” Mustang replies. “Highly intelligent prisoners often play games with their captors. It’s the self-confidence that can make them even more vulnerable to psychological manipulation because they think they’re still in control.”

“You know this from your own extensive personal experience being tortured?” Victra asks. “Do tell me about that.”

“Quiet,” I say, turning up the holo’s volume.

“I’m going to tell them everything,” Thistle’s saying to Antonia. “I don’t give a shit about this anymore.”

“Everything?” Antonia asks. “You don’t know everything.”

“I know enough.”

“I know more,” Antonia says.

“Who would ever trust you?” Thistle snaps. “Matricidal psychopath! If you even knew what people

really thought about you…”

“Oh, darling, you can’t really be so stupid.” Antonia sighs sympathetically. “You are. So sad to watch.”

“What do you mean?”

“Use your head, you little simpleton. Just try, please.”

“Slag you, bitch.”

“I’m sorry, Thistle,” Antonia says, arching her back against the bars. “It’s the heat.”

“Or syphilitic madness,” Thistle mutters, now pacing, arms wrapped around herself.

“How…base. It’s in the upbringing really.”

I consider pulling Thistle out, extracting the information she’s willing to give. “Could be a ruse,”

Mustang says. “Something Antonia designed in case they were captured. Or maybe my brother ’s play.

That’d be like him to sow misinformation. Especially if they just let themselves be captured.”

“Let themselves be captured?” Victra asks. “There’s over fifty dead Golds in the morgues of this

ship who would disagree with that statement.”

“She’s right,” Sevro says. “Let it play. Might make Antonia open up more when we get her in a room.”

Antonia closes her eyes, resting her head against the bars, knowing Thistle will ask what she meant by “use her head.” And sure enough, Thistle does. “What did you mean when you said if I tell them

everything, I’d have no more use?”

Antonia looks back at her through the bars. “Darling. You really haven’t thought this through. I’m dead. You said it yourself. I can try to deny it, but…my sister makes me look like the village cat. I shot her in the spine and played acid drip with her back for almost a year. She’s going to peel me like an onion.”

“Darrow wouldn’t let her do that.”

“He’s Red, we’re just devils in crowns to him.”

“He wouldn’t
do
that.”

“I know a Goblin that would.”

“His name’s Sevro.”

“Is it?” Antonia couldn’t care less. “Point’s the same. I’m dead. You might have a chance. But they only need one of us alive for information. The question you have to ask yourself is if you tell them everything, will they still keep you alive? You need a strategy. Something to hold back. To barter incrementally.”

Thistle approaches the bars that separate the women. “You’re not fooling me.” Her voice becomes

brave. “But you know what, you
are
done. Darrow is going to win and maybe he should. And you know what? I’m going to help him.” Thistle looks up at the camera in the corner of her cell, taking her eyes off Antonia. “I’ll tell you what he’s planning, Darrow. Let me make…”

“Get her out,” Mustang says. “Get her out now.”

“No…” Victra murmurs beside me, seeing what Mustang sees. Sevro and I look at the women in confusion, but Victra’s already halfway to the door. “Open cell 31!” she shouts to the techs before disappearing through into the hall. Realizing what’s happening, Sevro and I rush after her, knocking over a Green who’s adjusting one of the holoscreens. Mustang follows. We break into the hallway and run to the brig security door. Victra’s hammering on the door, shouting to be let in. The door buzzes and we fly in behind her, past the confused security guards who are gathering their gear, and into the cell block.

Prisoners are shouting. But even then I hear the wet
thwop, thwop, thwop
before we make it to

Antonia’s cell and see her hunched over Thistle. Her hands through the bars that separate their cells, drenched in blood. Fingers gripping Thistle’s curly hair. The shattered remnants of the top of the Howler ’s skull bend around the bar as Antonia jerks Thistle’s head toward her and against the bars between them one last time. Victra shoves open the magnetized cell door.

Antonia rises, grisly deed finished, bloody hands held in the air innocently as she bestows a little smirk upon her older sister. “Careful,” she taunts. “Careful, Vicky. You need me. I’m the only one left with information to sell. Unless you want to stumble into the Jackal’s maw you’ll…”

Victra breaks Antonia’s face. I can hear the brittle snap of bone from ten meters away. Antonia reels back, trying to escape. Victra pins her to the wall and beats her. Machinelike and eerily quiet. Elbow pumping back, driving from her legs, just as they teach us. Antonia’s fingers claw at Victra’s muscled arms, then go limp as the sound becomes wet and muddy. Victra doesn’t stop. And I don’t stop her,

because I hate Antonia, and that dark little part of me wants her to feel the pain.

Sevro shoves past me and launches himself at Victra, pinning her right arm back and choking her

with his left. He sweeps her legs and takes her backward to the floor, locking his legs around her waist, immobilizing her. Released from Victra’s hold, Antonia flops sideways. Mustang lunges forward to keep her head from cracking on the sharp edge of the welded metal bed pallet. I kneel and reach through the bars to feel Thistle’s pulse though I don’t know why I bother. Her head is caved in. I stare at it. Wondering why I’m not horrified at the scene.

Some part of me has died. But when did it die? Why did I not notice?

Mustang is shouting for a Yellow. The guards picking up the call.

I shake myself.

Sevro’s letting go of Victra. She coughs from where he restrained her, shoving him away angrily.

Mustang bends over Antonia, who’s now snoring through her shattered nose. Face a ruin. Bits of teeth littering mashed lips. Except for her hair and Sigils, you can’t even tell she’s a Gold. Victra leaves the room without looking at her, pushing through the Gray guards so hard two of them fall down.

“Victra…” I call after her like there’s something to say.

She turns back to me, eyes red, not with rage, but a fathomless sadness. Knuckles frayed open. “I

used to braid her hair,” she says forcefully. “I don’t know why she’s like this. Why I am.” Half of one of her sister ’s broken teeth protrudes from the meat between her middle and ring knuckle. She pulls the tooth from her knuckles, and holds it up to the light like a child discovering sea glass on the beach before shivering in horror and letting it clatter to the steel deck. She looks past me to Sevro. “Told you.”

—

Later that day, as the doctors tend to Antonia, the Sons go through Thistle’s personal effects in her suite aboard the torchShip, the
Typhon.
Under a false bottom in a cabinet, they find the stinking, cured fur of a wolf. Sevro chokes up when Screwface brings it to him.

“Thistle cut her down,” Clown says as the remaining original Howlers loiter around the room.

Mustang gives them space, watching from the wall. Pebble, Screwface, and Sevro are with us. “When

Antonia was crucified by the Jackal at the Institute, Thistle cut her down.”

“I’d forgotten,” I say from her desk.

Sevro snorts. “What a world.”

“Remember when you had her fight Lea when Lea couldn’t skin the sheep? Trying to make her tough,” Pebble says with a little laugh. Sevro laughs too.