Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  “Two fifty,” Atalantia says. “We hid a famine on Venus.”

  That the death of so many could be unknown staggers me. “It may not have been perfect, but it wasn’t this,” I say. “I believe if we quell the Rising, we have a chance to fix what was broken not just by them. But by us.”

  “Gods,” Ajax mutters. “He hasn’t changed a damn bit.”

  “Told you,” Atalantia replies.

  Ajax hauls me up by my jacket. “Still wants to be Marcus Aurelius, I suppose.” He leans close, his voice confiding. “The fact is, my mother spoke for Cassius. You remember. When Octavia questioned his loyalty, my mother begged her to give him a chance. She saw Lorn in his heart, I wager. And he showed his gratitude by feeding her to the wolves. I know you rationalized it away, because you think your emotions are secondary programs or something. But look at what I am. What I have become.” He gestures to the kill marks. His dented armor. The double-thick gray razor on his hip. “Do you think I became this for pleasure?”

  “We understand the war inside you, Lysander. We always have,” Atalantia says. “But that does not change that this is not the return you should have had. Not for you, not for us, not with them. You squandered yourself. You could have come back a god. Think how I could have used that. Think how your high-minded dream could have benefited from that.”

  She sighs and lifts her hand like an opera singer.

  “Of course, the legions will rejoice at your return. If used properly, the return of the Heir of Silenius could still inspire the worlds. I hear the songs even now.

  “But you have much to prove. People will wonder—not me, but others—if you are not a lackey of the Rim.” She flings her hands about. “Is he perhaps the Traitor’s trained monkey? Perhaps even the Slave King’s puppet? They will wonder: Is Lysander really an Iron Gold?”

  Ajax takes offense on my behalf. “He may be an egregiously pretentious quisby, but he’s no puppet of the Slave—”

  She cuts him off with a look.

  “Until the answers are incontrovertible, I fear I cannot allow your return to become known, Lysander.” She makes it seem like it’s for my own good, and succeeds, almost. I go very quiet inside, recognizing Silenius’s Stiletto when I see it. My path will grow very narrow very quickly, and it will certainly cut my feet.

  There is only one way forward.

  I did not come back to be her rival, and so long as I do not have a scar, I could never be. But if I survive what she asks, by the traditions that have guided my people since Silenius, I will earn a scar, and my inheritance, at great cost to her own strength.

  The other Gold families will choose a side if they see but the tiniest crack of daylight between us. She knows that. This is a sign of trust. She could do with my support.

  Or it is a trap.

  I cannot believe that. I will not. Atalantia was there the day I was born. She was the first to set me upon a horse. What she offers is an opportunity to shepherd the alliance and take back the mantle of justice from the Rising, but to do that, I must take the leap.

  I bend again on my knee.

  I was a fool declaring myself an Iron Gold to Dido. And I feel a fool now. “Dictator, I ask your leave for House Lune to fall in the Iron Rain.”

  “Oh, he’s going to pop his cherry!” Ajax purrs.

  Atalantia’s smile is incandescent. “Granted, son of Luna.” She pulls me to my feet and kisses me softly on the mouth. Ice, guilty excitement, and bewilderment race through my veins as she lingers there, her mouth open, lips wrapped around mine longer than appropriate even by Venusian standards.

  When she pulls back, she stares at me in pride.

  “My little Lysander. Today, you will earn your scar. I have no doubts.”

  Ajax has grown quiet. “With whom will he fall?”

  Still a little bewildered, I nod to him. “With you, brother. If you will have me.”

  He considers for a moment, suddenly very internal, and then nods. “About gory time. With a good scar, maybe you will look less like a Pink harlot.”

  With a melancholy smile, Atalantia takes our hands and guides us to the family mural. It is oddly stirring to stand before what we considered our family. I remember the day we all posed for Glirastes. Atalantia had six Pinks fanning her with peacock feathers. My father teased her mercilessly and apparently farted in her general direction. Atlas even cracked a smile. I see him up there, a wan man leaning on the far end of the frame beside Aja and chubby little Ajax. He’s smiling at my father, likely because of the fart. I cannot see my mother. Her face is hidden behind a veil of gray paint.

  “Octavia, Aja, Moira, Anastasia, Brutus, my father…all gone,” Atalantia whispers. She grips our hands as if she never wanted to let them go. “Only we and Atlas remain. But where there were three there are now four. Let the slaves tremble.” She pauses. Then she rips her hands away from ours as if we were the ones who pulled us all together. “Right! Well, off to war now, boys. I’ll meet you in Tyche.” She smiles at Ajax. “Or somewhere a bit…warmer.”

  THE SUN HANGS LOW and swollen over the desert as I roar out the garage ramp. More engines whine behind me as Rhonna and twenty bodyguards follow. Guided by Colloway, fist-sized drones careen through the sky to feed data into my helmet. They sight gravBike signatures winding through the sand like rectilinear snake tracks. In their troughs are small depressions. Telltale sign of Gorgon skipper boots.

  “Skip trace,” I say. “Stick tight.”

  We abandon the tracks and push toward a string of axeblade mountains. Following Alexandar’s coordinates, we ditch the bikes at the base of the mountains and use our gravBoots to scale the escarpments, careful to not fly too high for fear of ground-to-air missiles.

  In short order, we find Alexandar sitting with his helmet off in the shadows of an arroyo. He wears lizardSkin light armor, thinner and more sustainable long-term in the desert than my pulseArmor. His looks to be held together more by field patches and dirt than nanofiber. Only his iron lancer badge—a sword against a flying pegasus—is clean.

  Four weeks tracking the Fear Knight with Thraxa seem to have worn him down to his essential elements. He is even thinner, and taller, than his grandfather. His sunburnt skin is drawn tight and flakes around patrician cheekbones. On his neck a wretched scab weeps puss. His warhawk is smashed flat and dark with helmet sweat.

  He looks up as we scramble down. I recall my helmet into its catch and wince at the heat, squinting hard until I step into the shadows where it is fifty degrees cooler. Alexandar bolts to his feet. Beneath his chrome desert contacts, his eyes are haunted.

  “Bloodyhell, just sprawled out Fury-may-care,” Rhonna says, her multiRifle on her shoulder. Her eyes scan the rocks. “Fear Knight’s gonna gut you while you have your picnic, Princess.”

  His face is too haunted to feign a smile. “We have pathfinders.”

  She half-lowers her rifle. “You look a ghost. You prime?”

  Not long ago he would have bitten her head clean off with a classist retort. Now he stares at her as if trying to remember who she is. What has he seen out here?

  “Thraxa is this way, sir.”

  I find Thraxa lying belly-down on a ridge overlooking a plain stretching from the mountains to Angelia. She props herself up on her elbows. One is made of flesh. The other is unpolished asteroid metal, etched with Obsidian runes by Valdir Unshorn, Sefi’s mate, after Thraxa saved his life in the running skirmishes over the Bay of Bengal.

  The mountain ridge is littered with boulders and spiked ephedra, but empty of Howlers. I toggle my right ocular implant. Throbbing red embers from the quantum ID dots in their skulls fleck the ridgeline. Sevro’s little monsters. They don’t feel whole without him. The army may miss its mascot, but the pack misses its big brother. I’ve been too much a distant father of late.

  “Reap.” The large Telemanus acknowledges
me without looking. Her wolfcloak has taken on the color of the desert, thanks to its chameleon properties. The two Obsidian pathfinders move for me, and I crawl even with her as my own cloak turns brown. Thraxa squints through a pair of optics. Freckles form a mask over her face. She hands me her optics set.

  Knowing what I’ll see, I put the optics to my eyes. An all-too-familiar forest has been erected in front of the city. I feel nothing, but then again I don’t smell it yet.

  “He did this while you slept?” I ask. “He would have needed hours.”

  “I shit the pot,” Thraxa mutters. I lower the optics. “We lost him in the Buonides Range when he left the shield shadow to cross a death valley.” She means the narrow gaps exposed to Atalantia’s guns between our shield chain.

  “I told you not to let him out of your sight.”

  “The valley was too exposed. We had drones, and I sent a man. By the time we found his trail, he’d abandoned his course for Eleusis and had already reached Angelia.” The wrong city.

  She swats pointlessly at a scrill on her neck. More of the two-headed bloodsuckers make homes in her wolfcloak.

  “And your man lost them. Which?”

  “Alexandar.”

  I can’t hide my surprise. “How?”

  “He crashed his bike into a hoodoo. Fell asleep at the stick.”

  “One is none. Two is one, Thraxa…”

  “We were a hundred forty hours without sleep. Even with the nazopran, the lows were hallucinating—had to rest ’em in the cargo bins as we rode, even the Grays. Golds were barely upright. Had to run solo. Alex’s the best soldier I’ve ever seen at his age, including you. Still…” She spits in the dirt. “We’re all blood and bone.”

  I pushed them too hard. I thought Alex invulnerable. We all did. But even with the proper gear, this desert eats men. “Where is Atlas now?”

  “Gone. Tracks lead north, bearing for Angelia.” She nods to the Fear Knight’s display before the city. “Should I call medships?”

  “No. He came here for a reason, and it wasn’t to torture. Get ’em ready. We’re pushing in.” She rallies the Howlers as I raise my helmet and hail Orion. She’s only just made it back to BlueReach One.

  “Trouble?” she asks.

  “Is there a way to spool up the Storm Gods without showing our hand?”

  “The blackslag you think these things are? They aren’t a grunt’s hair trigger. We can’t cool as fast as we can heat. Once we ramp up it’s a runaway to primary horizon.”

  “What’s the lag on cloud coverage?”

  “I’m told soon as the pressure systems activate, an hour. Electrical in two. What happened?”

  “Unclear.”

  “Orders?”

  I hesitate. If it’s activated too early, Atalantia will notice the unnatural nature of the storm and call off the invasion. Activated too late, the storm won’t matter. “Watch how a pitviper strikes, my son,” Father said once as he clutched my wrist and made me play his game. “Watch it coil upward and upward till it reaches its crest. Don’t move before then. Don’t strike out with your slingBlade. If you do, then it’ll get you. Move just when it’s coming down….”

  I look down at the city the Fear Knight killed.

  “Initiate Operation Tartarus. Give me a storm.”

  “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE,” Pytha says.

  It is easy to believe her. To be ingested by the military machine is to see the last hidden gear of the world. All is loud yet lonely, chaos yet order, functional yet dirty, fast yet slow.

  All is big. Except you.

  I am thrust into an assembly line of muscled predators. There is little jocularity amongst the lines of Golds as they are given injections for Mercurian diseases, chemical weapons, and flight sickness followed by conditioning enhancement cocktails. Then comes implantation of coms and overwatch. Mission debriefing and caloric ingestion. Measurements for gear. Fitting for gear.

  Without my name, I am no one. There goes another fresh-faced sacrifice, the veterans think. No. They don’t even see me. Their eyes are focused two hours from now. I do not matter. I am chaff.

  Atlas’s countdown has begun.

  “You’re going to perish. Die in a ball of fire,” Pytha says as one of the four Orange techs seals the greaves of the pulseArmor around my shins. On either side, hundreds of Golds iron up in fitting bays. I didn’t even see this many Peerless Scarred assemble for the defense of Luna against the Rising. It was seen as somewhat of a farce. They don’t underestimate the Reaper any longer. But it makes me wonder: If the Golds are this scary, how bad has Darrow become?

  “Are you always this familiar with your superiors, pilot?” Kalindora says from the wall. Atalantia has sent her to watch over me in the Rain.

  “No, domina.”

  Kalindora does not buy the formality. “I recommend reminding your retainer of her place, and yours.” She glances at the techs. “This is not the Belt. Now, if you will excuse me, I must tend to a pressing matter. If you lose your way to the tubes, just follow the stench of big humans.”

  I’m sorry to see her go. Yet I’m pleased to have a moment alone with Pytha.

  “Bloody terrifying woman,” Pytha mutters after her.

  “I think she is sad, rather. Wasn’t always…” Pytha watches me with unease. “It will probably be safer for you to stay in my quarters while I’m away,” I suggest. The lowColors on the Annihilo are like drones. The mids, barely better. There’s a hierarchical terror in the very air, one that never existed in the Citadel.

  “Can’t believe she’s making you do this,” Pytha mutters.

  “I volunteered.”

  “You little shit!”

  “Hold,” I say to the Oranges crawling over me. They don’t know who I am, but my caste and Kalindora’s presence are enough for them to stop as if controlled by a remote, and stand at the edge of the bay adjusting their tools. I glance at the grizzled Golds fitting up to either side of me. “Lower your voice, Pytha.”

  “You little shit,” she whispers. “If we were on the Archi, I would slap you. What do you even know about Iron Rains?”

  “My studies weren’t isolated to political theory.” It’s an understatement.

  “It’s not like a simulator.” Her voice has softened.

  “And you glean this from your own extensive experience?” I say as I flex my leg to test the fit of the greaves.

  “I’ve been in a Rain.”

  I look up in confusion. “I thought you were expelled from the Academy.”

  “Snakeshit. Before I was a pirate, I was an equites.” Her chin lifts in pride. “First Decurion, Twelfth Squadron of the Bellona light-destroyer Dignitas.”

  “Cassius said—”

  “Cassius didn’t want you to know only warriors.” She sighs. “This isn’t what he would have wanted for you. Ever since he died, something’s woken up in you. A machine in your brain. It’s not you. This isn’t you. Or have you just always been desperate to be an Iron Gold?”

  I nod slowly. “I won’t lie and say that’s not a small part of it. But that’s not why I must do this. Gold hasn’t changed. If anything, the sickness has metastasized. They uphold the wrong virtues.” I lean forward and lower my voice. “If Seraphina dies down there…if Atalantia betrays the Raa…if Darrow wins…mankind will disintegrate.”

  “So what? That’s not your burden.”

  “Look around, Pytha. We teeter upon oblivion. Everything humanity has built. All the sacrifices, the hierarchy, the wars…for what? If Gold loses, the Republic will fracture into kingdoms. The kingdoms to fiefdoms. The fiefdoms to tribes. It will become a dark age of fractured planets and war for three hundred years.”

  “Three hundred years?”

  I nod. “According to precedents, longer, but I’ve run the simulation as many times and ways as I know ho
w.” She knows I don’t say that lightly. “You think this is about me. It isn’t. Darrow thinks this is about good and evil. It isn’t. This is about order and chaos. I have chosen my side. But to have a voice, I must have a scar.”

  “And you think Cassius was arrogant.” She looks at the ground, shaking her head at some unspoken thought. Eventually she looks up. “Fear.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You think if you gain respect, you’ll be able to change them? Nah. It’s about fear. You pretend Lorn au Arcos was the picture of an Iron Gold because he was wise and honorable.” She jams a thin thumb into her sternum. “We know the truth. He boarded our ship. Arcos in a corridor was death incarnate. You want to play the big game? Fine. But you play to win. You make them fear you.”

  “I am not that man.”

  “Then you’re for the worms, dominus, and I’m out my last friend.”

  * * *

  —

  I kneel amongst killers. Seraphina to my left, Kalindora to my right. All is silent but for the children as they perform the Blood Benediction that has been carried down the generations from Silenius to us.

  The voices of children drift through the air.

  “My son, my daughter, now that you bleed, you shall know no fear.”

  A dozen virgin girls with hair and eyes of milky white walk barefoot through the kneeling legions. Iron daggers are clutched in their hands.

  “No defeat. Only victory.”

  Blood drips from my hand as a girl drags the blade across it.

  “Your cowardice seeps from you.”

  Ajax’s eyes are fixed on the floor. His bleeding hand clutched in a fist. Clustered about him are his hungry young friends and the grizzled Gold and Gray officers of the double-strong Tenth Expeditionary Legion, the Terran-born Iron Leopards.

  “Your rage burns bright.”

  I feel every tremor of my muscles, every kilogram of my armor. But I do not feel the words.