Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  I made a mistake.

  The moment the video started to play, Dancer thought this was a shakedown. He’s kept this secret his entire life, because the only people left in mankind to look at homosexuality as an aberration just happen to be his own. While the one that embraces fluidity is the one he’s warred against for most of his life. The one that sculpted his culture as they saw fit.

  Mine.

  He thought I was threatening to expose his inner life.

  Knowing he thought me that cruel is a jarring blow. Sevro is there to pick up the slack. “You really ain’t got a clue,” he mutters. “It ain’t about that, boyo.”

  Dancer looks ready to kill. “Then. What. Is. It. About?”

  “Just that the man you were…you know…playing hide the viper with is third in the line to the throne of the Syndicate. That’s all, I swear.”

  Dancer goes sheet white. Anger vaporized in a snap of the fingers, replaced by sheer bafflement. His mouth opens and closes. “What?”

  “The Syndicate…black coats, prostitution, child slavery, narcotics, hired murder, kidnapping…you know the lot. Sort of the worst people on the moon.”

  “That…” He looks at the datadrop. “…was the Duke of Hands?” He sits motionless. “Shit.” He rocks his head back. “Shiiiiiit.”

  Sevro and I exchange a glance.

  Dancer eases out a breath. “You two thought I knew. That I was his accomplice?”

  “She didn’t,” Sevro says. “I did. Sorry.” He backs away to the counter as if distance will erase the memory of Dancer wanting to rip his throat out. Forget malice or anger. All should beware the wrath of an offended soul. “She insisted we talk before…you know. So…”

  “His name is Faustus. Or I thought it was. Found me in the park. You know I can’t stand all these buildings. He told me he was a painter. Face like that, you’d believe anything. But I know the games. I don’t keep intel at my home. Or talk in my sleep, even for someone like that.” He nods to me. “Your father’s agents were cruel teachers. We learned to be careful.”

  “Got sloppy, though, eh?” Sevro says. “He that good in the sack?”

  Dancer doesn’t speak for a moment. “Guess I thought I deserved something good. Was off and on for a couple months. I told him I wanted it to stay on. Then he disappeared.” He plays with his knuckles. “Do you think I put Pax in jeopardy?”

  “No,” I say. “You didn’t have our flight plan. He might not have wanted anything from you,” I say. “It might just have been the association. I believe you were the fall man. Steal the children, release this to me. Or to the public.”

  “Bet your DNA is all over that little love crib,” Sevro says. Dancer looks at him in irritation. “Hey, you did the deed. Syndicate probably took video too. All the good angles.” We both look at him. “He literally fucked a terrorist. I can say what I want.”

  “What does the Syndicate want with the children?” Dancer asks.

  “They don’t have them.” I tell him all I know, including how the Obsidian must have reached the downed shuttle before my men did. And Sefi’s intended plan. When I have finished, he leans back and rubs his jaw. In the wake of the revelation, he’s demure.

  “Gods, letting them take the mines is a risk. What if they use blunt force?” he asks. “A storm on Mercury is one thing but warbands of Obsidian on Mars…”

  “Sefi has seen what insurrections do to militaries. She won’t alienate the populace.”

  “I hope not…but you’re right about one thing. We need the Obsidian. You want me to convince the Reds of Cimmeria to get on with Sefi, I take it?”

  “Not for free,” I say. “I need you to convince the Reds to do it in return for Sefi giving them the share of the mine profits Quicksilver stole. It will be a partnership.”

  “And if I vote to let the Reaper die on Mercury, I won’t be able to convince them of anything. The Reds of Mars will think I’ve become a Lunese.”

  “Correct.”

  “Question,” Sevro says. “If Dancer’s the Red herring then who do you think the Queen’s partner is? Who are they trying to protect?”

  It could only be one man.

  “If Dancer was set up to fall, if Pax was meant to get leverage over me…” I say. “Cui bono? The most immediate effect is a power vacuum in the Forum. So it must be a senator. With my son out for ransom, I’d be compromised. So the Tribunes would vote for a new—”

  “Daxo,” Sevro sneers.

  “Oh, shut up,” I say.

  He’s put off. “If anyone is an insidious mastermind, it is that obelisk of a human. Octavia did want him alive.”

  “She’s right,” Dancer says. “Wouldn’t be Daxo. Wouldn’t be me if they released this. It’d be compromise. They’d need two-thirds vote. Vox would block Daxo. Optimates would block any Vox. It’d have to be someone both parties would agree on. Someone the public would accept. Someone…incorruptible.”

  “That gasbag?” Sevro says. “No way he’s a criminal mastermind.”

  “Publius is allied with the Queen,” I say.

  I feel the certainty forming in me. Ten years ago Publius was no one. Just a public defender for lowColors. How did he rise so high so fast with no benefactors? No campaign donors? Is it so impossible to believe that someone came to him years ago and offered him the world if he would only answer the call when it came? Is it so impossible I could have been fooled by someone so close? No. I make mistakes all the time. And thinking of how he left Daxo’s office, with that comment on the decor, I realize it wasn’t an offhand remark from the mouth of babe. It was a taunt.

  All his years of crafting that incorruptible reputation suddenly make sense. He’s not going to vote with me. It’s a trap. With the Silvers I lost, and no Coppers or followers of Publius, no fleet will sail.

  “The vote is tomorrow,” I say. “Even if we had evidence on him, it wouldn’t matter. He’s too popular. We take steps to gather evidence, isolate him. And, if he is indeed a collaborator with the Queen, with Atalantia”—Dancer’s aspect darkens at that—“we will bring him down with all the proper and legal might of Moonhall. But for now, we must address the issue. The enemies of our Republic expect us to be divided. They found the faultlines between us, and they jammed a wedge in. We must stand together. Dancer, I need your trust, and I need your votes.”

  “You think Atalantia did this through the Queen?” he asks.

  “Her or Atlas must have coordinated with her in some way. I don’t know which, but it is a Gold hand holding the strings. They seek to turn us on one another.”

  Dancer looks at the datadrop. Before I can react, Sevro smashes it to dust. “Far as we’re concerned, boyo.”

  Dancer stares down at the dust of the reverie. “I believed I was dirt once,” he says slowly. “For these.” He tilts up his sigils. “And this.” He traces shapes through the dust and his voice loses the learned words and the sharpened consonants as he sinks back into the mines. “Was my own clan that did me wrong.” His heavy eyes flick up. “Didn’t know that, did ya? They burnt off me what makes a man a man. Ares found me bleeding to death in a tunnel.

  “He knew what they’d done. He fixed me, in more ways than one. But he did one better. He taught me it was Gold that broke us. Taught me Red could matter. Taught me I mattered. Ten years, I never saw his face.” He looks up at Sevro. “When he took that helmet off to you, to me, and I saw Gold, I wept worse than when they gelded me. First man who said I wasn’t broken was the master. The slaver.

  “Hit me good. Right here.” He thumps his chest with a flat hand. “And I saw it hit him. I wasn’t his best. I wasn’t his favorite. But I was the only one who believed like he did. Was me that chose Darrow. Was me that had the keys to Tinos.” He swallows. “Boy…that father of yours never judged me ’cept by what I’d done. Began to understand I owed him the same.

&nbs
p; “Made a choice, then. I’d stand before him. Him that freed me. Him that made me different, made me a force. And I’d tell him what he told me long before: a man is his actions, not his blood.” He looks back at the remains of the datadrop in sorrow that even now he still hides his truth. “The Jackal came before I got that chance. That is the greatest regret of my life. Your pa was my hero then and he is my hero now. I knew I’d never see his like again. I was wrong.”

  Dancer blows the reverie dust from the table and stands to look up at me. Ares dreamed of individual freedom, because of his son and his Red wife. Darrow dreamed of a world without monsters. Dancer’s private dream was more delicate. He believed it was Gold who made his people wicked. And without Gold, they could be good. Bit by bit, he’s seen reality wither that dream on the vine. But now that he knows it was still a Golden hand poisoning the soil, making him indict the very object of his faith, doubt the mission of his life, inside that stalwart chest awakens his holy wrath.

  There is the warrior.

  “Got a lot of hate in me,” he says in a low growl. “Got a lot of fear that you won’t ever understand. But none of it’s for you, Virginia. We’ll disagree again soon, I’m damn sure of that. But if our enemies think we’ll devour each other…Nah. Today my Sovereign is the Lionheart, and tomorrow she will have my votes. We will rescue the Free Legions.”

  “ ’Bout bloodydamn time,” Sevro says.

  TO SEE THEM FROM ABOVE: the roving herds of beasts, the rivers carving stone, the rituals of man in all their varied panoply, to see the clouds roil over the patchwork latifundia of Asian plains, to see the mines of our home, is to remember the patterns of the world, and the majesty and complication and impermeable obscurity of distant lands. It is to remember how few people you know. How many do not know you. How many will soon forget you. How many praise you today to offer contempt tomorrow. Permanence of fame, power, dominion of the individual, are illusions. All that will be measured, all that will last, is your mastery of yourself.

  This is what my father told me. It was his warning about power, though he sought it to his end. I’ve never understood how a man so wise could be so undone by himself. Perhaps I never will, and that is what has always frightened me. Not that I cannot control my own fate—that is impossible—but that I cannot control myself.

  Now I stand without him, wondering if he should be my compass when he could not even follow his own needle—and the roar of the distant ocean fills my ears. I watch the Earth turn from the Ocular Sphere, a glass chamber suspended atop the highest pinnacle of the Citadel of Light. Created by the Master Maker Glirastes, like too many other wonders, it floats like a teardrop escaping upward to heaven from the tip of a bronzed sword. Octavia would often come here for her meditation and solitude. Of course, as an outsider I could not insinuate myself upon her here when she would wrap herself in that psycho-mystic credo she taught lonely Lysander—the Mind’s Eye. I would wait for her, thumbing through intelligence reports in the library below, or discoursing with Moira, or entertaining Atalantia with the newest gossip I’d plucked for her ravenous appetite.

  But Octavia is gone, and Lysander swallowed by the great expanse with Cassius. Though my opinions of Cassius are weighted and complex, and not understood completely even by myself, I hope they found happiness out there. There was so little of it for them here.

  The Sphere is mine now, as are so many of Octavia’s trophies. It is a hollow oddity, that possession. While she lived, these talismans and icons of hers—her Dawn Scepter, Silene Manor, the Sphere, the Pandemonium Chair, the Sovereigncy itself—were wrapped in mystery and portent. As if they held some great secret of life that I was too young, too foolish, to possess. I craved them so much—maybe as much as my father craved for whatever his desire actually was. But now, in possessing them, I see them for what they are; and they all feel lesser for that possession, as does indeed the world itself. The scepter is a hunk of iron. Silene Manor a house. The Sphere a clever device. The Chair a dangerous tool. Cities are measured by cold statistics of consumption and output. Planets by their loyalty and strategic importance.

  All that matters is my son, my husband, and those I love and know, and who know me back.

  Of all the people that lived in these last seven hundred years, none know the minds of the gens Lune as I do now. None know the weight, the fear, the anger, the ambivalence, the pride, the love, the disgust, the disappointment, the hope, and the utter frustration of ruling over billions of souls.

  Octavia lost her husband and daughter. If I lost my son and husband, could I go on?

  Or would I grow to be the villain of someone else’s story?

  Waving my hand at the curved glass wall of the Sphere, I watch the Earth grow until it consumes the entire pane. I fly amongst the peaks of mountains, along the cool fingers of Eurasian rivers running toward the sea. I rotate my hand and find the great mechanical prison, Deepgrave, trundling along beneath the surf. And with a flick of a finger, my sight races to Mercury. Much is white and black, to signify old images. Many telescopes have been destroyed in the war. But through the swirling clouds of the hypercane, I glimpse a Society bastion—a mobile operations command city—upon the desert sands. A jamField covers Heliopolis, where my husband licks his wounds. What hell does he suffer? What greater hell does he prepare for his enemies?

  It is torture to see and not to know.

  But worse still to know and not be able to affect.

  I hope he knows we have not abandoned him.

  That I still love his heart, despite its weight and anger and complications.

  I love him so much I cannot bear to think of him.

  I turn the Sphere to look down at the New Forum, where the Senate is soon to assemble. A grand crowd, a million strong, pours through the great Citadel gates beneath the Silenius Arch to witness the vote. According to the Compact, the Tribunes decide if the public should witness. Despite the fever, they are right to include them. It will be beautiful when Dancer and I unite the Vox and the Optimates in common cause. When Publius’s betrayal fails to hijack the vote. It will be a victory for our way of life and our means of governance. In the plaza east of the New Forum, vendors sell sticky sweets and steam swirls up from hot spiced Martian wine. Children hold their parents’ hands. Men carry icons of their political religions. The Vox with upside-down pyramids, broken chains. Some broadcast my head with a bloody crown from holoprojectors on their shoulders. The Optimates stand in small clutches with plastic slingBlades or pegasuses or lions projected into the air.

  “Don’t look too bloodydamn happy,” Sevro mutters behind me. “Dancer still has to prove he’s not a load of steaming shit.”

  “And you have a Queen to kill.”

  I cycle the Sphere until Old Tokyo fills the view. The megacity of Earth sprawls in the night. With the information gleaned from the Duke of Hands’ memories, I have found the Syndicate Queen’s refuge. Fifty thousand of my house troops along with Darrow’s Seventh Legion will move in a coordinated strike against Syndicate operations on Earth, Mars, and Luna, while Sevro and two cohorts pull the chief weed out themselves. They will do it when all eyes are on me and the vote.

  “Looking forward to it,” Sevro says.

  I turn from the central plinth to find him standing behind me in the Sphere with Daxo. Fully armored, wolfcloak on his shoulder, face painted jade green, he is ready for transport. Beside him, Daxo looks the picture of majestic civility in his senatorial toga. His arms are bare beneath the toga, and how mighty those Telemanus limbs look—made for violence, but restrained in favor of words because he trusts me, if not my faith in demokracy. Kavax saunters in to join us. He stands quietly behind his son with a hand on his shoulder and Sophocles threading between his legs.

  Next to Daxo and Sevro, both in their prime, he looks pale and old. Even his genes can’t hide the ravages of war. His beard has gone white. He still blames himself
for Pax’s abduction. It has not been an easy road to recovery for him, but he favors me with a smile. “Niobe is off to Mars to rendezvous with our house fleets and the Ecliptic Guard,” he says. “She sends her love, and she’ll see you through the fires of the Annihilo.”

  “And the bodies,” Sevro says. “Never forget the kindling.”

  “Of course! The bodies,” Kavax says. “Sevro, could you fetch my cane? My legs ache.”

  “Slag off, old man. I’m not a servant. I’m a terrorist war—”

  “Now!” Kavax booms. “It’s just outside the Crescent Vault. Fetch it or Sophocles will bite you!”

  “By myself? That place is creepy shit. Fine. Losing your marbles.” Muttering to himself, Sevro humors the old man and leaves the Sphere. He appears a moment later. “I’ll know if you talk about me.” He leaves again.

  The two Telemanuses wait for him to reappear. When he doesn’t, they join me in the center. “We’ll bring Thraxa home,” I tell Kavax. “I will keep that promise.”

  Kavax glances once more at the door to make sure Sevro is gone. “There are things I doubt in this world,” he replies in his luxurious private tone. Intelligence radiates from eyes usually misted by his lifelong ruse. “The constitution of Obsidian virtues, the ramifications of universal suffrage, Sevro’s personal hygiene, my violence on behalf of your father, my wife’s mental perspicacity for selecting me for life”—he adopts his public face—“to join in union a doddering madman! Weird woman! Addled in the wits! Madness! Absolute madness!” His internal cleverness reclaims his face. “But never Virginia au Augustus.” He cups my face. “Daxo told me what you did with Dancer. What you did with Sevro. You never get the credit you deserve, my dear. Because people are suspect and frightened of what they do not understand. I’ve hidden myself for so many years—from Nero, from the world. But you never have. That is a bravery I cannot understand. You are good, my dear. You are patient when it is not in your nature. You are attentive when you are taken for granted. You are kind when the world insists it is convenient to be cruel. You are good. True good. Victra will bring Pax back. I know this. You will save your husband. You deserve this day.”