Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  Thraxa nods. The tension releases from Screw. He’s afraid of Atalantia. More afraid than he’ll ever admit. Harnassus says nothing. He disagrees.

  “I was ready to sacrifice this army to break theirs, because I did not believe the Republic would come. Because I thought killing them would give the Republic the best hope in this war. In that moment of choice, I listened to you, Harnassus. If we save this army, it will be a victory to inspire the worlds.

  “We will save this army by having faith in our Republic, in our Sovereign. There will be no surrender, no escape plan that exposes the army so Atalantia can drive a stake through our hearts. My wife said the ships would come. So they will come. Until then, we share what we have with the civilians.”

  “It won’t last the week,” Thraxa objects.

  “We share what we have with the civilians.”

  A knock comes at the door and Rhonna steps through looking frightened. “Sir, we’ve received a tightbeam from the Annihilo.” Screwface’s head snaps in her direction. “Atalantia has requested an audience.” Her eyes dart to the floor. “She says it concerns your wife.”

  “IT’S DISAPPOINTING WE DIDN’T get to meet in person,” I say to Atalantia. “I had such plans for you.”

  “Yes, well, I’m not terribly fond of having conversations when I’m on the back foot. And I will admit, you put me there.”

  “Lady, I fucked you up.”

  She grimaces. “Indeed, but that is the nature of you and me. Gamblers both. I won the first hand. You won the last. Though I must admit, I am surprised you had the temerity to use those machines. What devious designs freedom requires. One must worry about the strength of a principle when it must compromise itself so often to survive. At least we’re consistent, eh?”

  I do not tell her it was Orion’s decision. More the monster I appear, more hesitant will she be in encroaching upon Heliopolis. Today she is in a playful mood, which worries me. I know I hurt her worse than she’s letting on. Her eyes are of warm gold and her mouth sensuous in a way that reminds me of Nidhogg, the serpent of Obsidian myth who gnaws at the root of the world tree. She walks around her absurd gold throne, tracing her nails along its spikes. The snake that she customarily wears around her neck coils around the throne’s arms.

  She laughs at a private joke, then makes it public. “Don’t you find it peculiar? The human conviction that we are the heirs of history instead of paragraphs that are almost over. A survival mechanism, no doubt.

  “My father knew otherwise, of course,” she continues. “He was even more avid an historian than Atlas with his little library. That’s what made them fond of each other, you know. My father could read Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Hurrian, Hittite, Ugaritic, First Chinese, and thirty-two other dead languages. And all he learned from them was an aversion to risk. He was never fond of betting it all on a roll of the dice, like we do. But one story did stick. He told it to me when as a girl I had it in my mind to brawl with Aja when she rode my favorite sunblood stallion without asking.”

  She pulls the snake from the arm of her chair and lets it coil around her neck.

  “In the years between 280 and 275 BC, a young king dared to resist the expanding Roman Republic.” Her finger traces along the snake as it moves. “This king was beloved by his men, shrewd in the ways of battle. Much like you. To the surprise of the known world, he enjoyed initial successes against the legions. Appalling them with fearsome beasts from barbarous lands.” The snake lifts its head toward Atalantia’s face. “War elephants and the like. But these battles cost the king. He could not call up more men from his lands. And elephants are so few. In contrast, the Romans could draw from an immeasurable well of manpower.” The snake’s mouth slowly opens before Atalantia. “The king soon realized this and when congratulated for a victory, he cried out, ‘If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.’ ” Atalantia extends her tongue to take the smallest prick from the right fang of the snake. She shudders as the microdose of poison races through her bloodstream. Her voice creeps toward sensuous as she slinks toward her chair and sinks into its embrace. “I measure you know this king’s name?”

  “Pyrrhus,” I answer. “Don’t fret. I didn’t waste your tax dollars to get a bad education.”

  “I presume you know, then, what happened next?”

  “Rome consumed Pyrrhus because of his victories. But there is one problem. You are not Rome, are you?” I say.

  “We are greater than Rome. You may have wounded my legions, but my fleet would eviscerate the Scepter Armada of ten years ago. With the reserves on Venus, my legions dwarf Octavia’s standing army. We were a shadow of ourselves in her time. A tiny fraction of Peerless Scarred holding up the morbid obesity of the Pixies. But you have sharpened our edge. Given me a new generation of soldiers who want nothing more than to be the hand that killed the Reaper. The first is already in the fray. In four years’ time, half a million will turn sixteen. You know the breeding protocols my father made law when Luna fell. Six hundred thousand triplets raised with one thing on their mind: subjugation.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the Society, Atalantia. I was talking about you. You are what’s lacking.” She smiles, welcoming the critique. “Just the least-loved daughter of a butcher. I imagine you have convinced yourself it was because you were misunderstood. A survival mechanism, I imagine. But I knew Magnus. I fought him for almost a decade. We had chats like this, he and I. Though he never babbled like you, and we had a mutual understanding to not atomize every plot of ground we couldn’t take.

  “You were not misunderstood by your father, Atalantia. You were simply disliked. Aja was his pride. Moira was his joy. You were just…there with your silk, and your Venusian orgies. Acting out to get attention. And now you’re his last resort. The pitiable last sentence of a family saga that is almost over.” Her mouth takes on a truculent expression. “Even if you beat us here, the world has changed, and there is no place for you in it.”

  “No,” she snaps. “Your civilization is a clumsy design. Given liberty, each man will seek his own delight. Few indeed are the men whose delight is war. Your civilization, then, does not want war. Our civilization is an efficient engine. It wants what I want. And what do you think I want?”

  She smiles. Not because she knows she is right, but because she knows something I don’t. For a woman with such a thin reputation before all this began, she has changed. The frivolity is gone. But the capricious cruelty natural to her spirit remains, emboldened now by her training under her father, by her collaboration with Atlas.

  “You may have won a victory, but your situation is untenable. You are treading water,” she says. “I understand it makes sense, knowing what you know. You believe your wife is coming for you. That she and Sevro will save you as they always have. I have beliefs too. I believe in beauty above all things. And I believe your religion of demokracy to be a disease. A disease that deceives you. That devours itself every time it has infected a civilization—Athens, the American Empire, the Indian. I proposed to my father that exposing this disease would cauterize it far more thoroughly than warfare. He was dubious. A pity he never saw sins of the past come to fruition.”

  Atalantia claps her hands together and her face disappears to reveal my wife speaking on the floor of the Senate. She looks younger than I remember. Pure and dazzling, when my world has become nothing but so much dust. In fact, everything seems absurdly white and clean—the robes of the senators, the marble, the air itself. Daxo rises to speak, and then my old friend Dancer. I sense something is wrong long before the blood spews from his mouth. And with creeping dread that mutates into abject revulsion, I watch the Senate disintegrate into a horror more appalling than I could ever imagine. The mob devours the Optimates.

  They even sing Eo’s song as they bear my dying wife upon a sea of bloody hands. I stare at her, at Daxo’s head tossed about like a rubb
er ball through the crowd. I have felt this once before, when Eo swung upon the gallows. As if the foundation of my being were gone, and I glimpsed for one small moment the reality of my existence. There is no life without that woman. There is just a cold world and the ugly creatures who fight for its scraps.

  I buried my wife in Lykos.

  I took her down from the gallows and placed her remains in the dirt of the garden we found together, knowing it would be my death.

  But that was the boy.

  The man is broken, but he is not allowed to break. I blink as the Senate hall erodes into a flurry of light particles that coalesce into the face of my enemy.

  “Your work?”

  She touches her chest. “Subcontractor. For the culprit, I suggest you look a little closer to home. Even I couldn’t poison the togas of that many senators. I wonder what they used. Anyway, I call it the Day of Red Doves.” She frowns in pity. “Poor little Sisyphus pushing that boulder uphill for so long. It is beautiful in a way to see a man struggle against natural law. To see what human will can accomplish. And then to see your face now.” She shudders with pure pleasure. “No betraying inflections. No microexpressions of grief. Simply obduracy, despite the dread clawing at the back of your eyes—a doomed army, a lost child, a dead wife.” She wags a finger heavy with rings at me. “That is a Peerless Scarred. How much more gravitas he has than all the squabbling rats of demokracy.”

  “I assume you will be broadcasting this to my army,” an empty voice says from my mouth.

  She shrugs as if to say it is out of her hands. “I would not dare interrupt the demokratic process. Did not Virginia once say that transparency is the heart of the thing? You poor creature. All these years, you must have felt so trapped. Knowing what needed to be done, but unable to do it because of people weaker than you. If you had just marched your legions into the Senate instead of chasing after my father, you could have won this. Once you had the power, you could have remade the world with your wife at your side however you saw fit, and put your son on the throne. But that is the noble lie of demokracy, isn’t it? The belief in humanity, even though humanity is a screaming, selfish mob. I love humans, truly. But humanity…” She shivers. “I wanted, I needed to see your face as you realized we were right all along. It is true beauty.”

  Is my wife dead? If not dead, scheduled to die at the hands of maniacs? Who leads them? Publius? It seems impossible for Dancer to be dead. What then of my son? What then am I? A creature so single-minded that he left his wife and child to be torn apart by a mob? I convinced myself my duty was here, and it would be selfish to return to Luna. I deluded myself into believing in the virtues of a Republic that is nothing but a sham. Was that just an excuse for me to carry on my bloody path?

  “Virginia is not coming,” Atalantia says. Her voice is harsh, done with its play. “Sevro is not coming. No one is coming. Disarm your forces. Assemble your men south of the city. Lower your shields. And submit to your fate with dignity. If you do this, I will behead you and your high command with proper ceremony. The rest of your men will be spared and put to labor according to their nature in rebuilding the planet you have left in tatters. If you commit suicide, this offer for your men is forfeit. If you reject my offer, I will drop atomics on Heliopolis and kill every man, woman, child, and dog for two hundred kilometers. Even the cockroaches won’t survive. This is the only mercy you will receive.”

  “Bluff,” I say robotically.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Rhea was one thing. This is Heliopolis.”

  “Heliopolis, Heliopolis, Heliopolis. It is a sty. A reliquary for the past, no matter how much that traitor Glirastes opines on its virtues. All I need is the metal in those mountains, your life, and those of that Telemanus bitch and that ugly Orange bastard.” She hesitates. “And that beautiful Colloway of yours on a leash. As for Mercury.” She makes a face. “And Mars? Helium can be mined in hell for all I care. As long as my bathwater is warm, I’ll never notice.”

  The horror of an entire generation of Reds slaving in an irradiated wasteland overwhelms me. Mutations. Death by thirty. That cannot be how this ends.

  “You are not a Sovereign,” I say flatly. “You are just glue. Glue that barely holds together the Two Hundred. If you destroy Heliopolis, the Votum will decry you. How many of those Two Hundred will wonder what you’ll do to their cities? How would Julia au Bellona like you atomizing Olympia? How would the Carthii feel about a mushroom cloud over Harmonia?

  “No,” I say with rising anger. “If you nuke us, you will be deposed. But you need to leave. Don’t you? So desperately you can feel it in your bones. The Republic is in turmoil, you could drive a nail through it if you could just use your ships. Yet they’re stuck here guarding me like two-bit tinpots. Is it because I put the Minotaur on Venus? Is it something else? Or maybe it’s just that no matter how many strapping young Golds you send after me, all you get back is piles of meat. You need us to surrender, because you’re afraid of me, and even more afraid of becoming Pyrrhus yourself.”

  “Perhaps,” she says. “But it’s your bet.”

  * * *

  —

  I replay the conversation between Atalantia and myself to the officers of my high command. Screwface straddles the balcony outside, his desert shades hiding his eyes. No aides line the warroom, the coffee is forgotten at a side table. The Day of Red Doves has streamed on every screen in Heliopolis that has power. It is the only signal from beyond our cage. They mock us from orbit. But this conversation is what matters. The image dissolves, leaving darkness on the faces of my commanders. Harnassus slumps in the chair to my right. Thraxa stares at a fly hovering over a vine by the window. She has not spoken since she learned Daxo has died. The news has rattled her in a way nothing else ever has. What of her mother, her father, her sisters?

  “Until now…” My voice betrays me. I clear my throat. “Until now our strategy was based upon the belief that the Republic was on its way. I do not believe it…practical to continue in this assumption. I have reason to believe that Publius is an agent of Atalantia’s. Or that the events that took place in the Senate were the product of her designs. The Vox Populi are compromised. I would caution you against recognizing the authority of any element on Luna.” I look at Harnassus, knowing Atalantia will likely beam him a message from Publius and the surviving Senate demanding surrender.

  “We have been given an offer with a twenty-four-hour clock. An offer that we have no reason to believe our enemy would honor.” I pause, knowing what I am about to say is true, but feeling a coward nonetheless. “I do not believe that I can chart an unbiased course given the situation.” I wave a hand as Thraxa and several others rise from their seats in protest. “Just let me get this out.” Colloway and Harnassus remain absolutely still. Of the two, I can’t tell which looks worse, though the ripper pilot is certainly drunk. I hear Screwface had to pull him from a brothel to get him here. “An army is not a demokracy. But given our situation, I do not believe it should be despotism.” I try to look around the table, but find it difficult to meet their eyes. I fell into Atalantia’s trap. I brought them here. I sowed the seeds of my wife’s end, and the end of our Republic. I may not have done it alone, but it hardly matters. “Most of you have been with this army as long as I have. It is your family as much as it is mine. You will decide its fate. I will accept any decision you make. The only plea I offer is that you decide based on what is best for our men, and then the Republic.”

  With that, I leave Thraxa, Harnassus, Colloway, Screwface, and the rest of the high command in the high warroom to decide my fate and that of the Free Legions. I walk along the lower balconies where night mist beads on the stone walls. The waves crash all around the roots of the building. Both were made by man. Perhaps at first in hope, to give our species a new home to live and to love. But in time, I don’t know when, their creation became a vanity of will, and in the shadow
of that vanity, man grew lesser for having more. Lesser for mastering the keys of creation, because he mistook himself for god, and cared less for his people, and more that his works endured.

  Have I done the same?

  With a great sucking sound, the black water pulls back to reveal the work it has done to the roots of the stone after all these years. And then the waves crash back. A cavernous solitude makes a home in my chest, where once there was only purpose that made far too little room for my boy and my wife.

  I return to my room and take Pax’s key from my luggage. I wrap its chain around my neck and hold it as I stare at the ceiling.

  “ARE YOU AWAKE OR ASLEEP, Lysander?”

  I’m not in the desert.

  I am at Lake Silene.

  Snow clings to the evergreens. It makes the stones slippery under my feet. My legs tremble as I haul myself up the stairs that wind up the cliff from the lake to the house. I drop a stone the size of my abdomen atop a cairn. My hands are bloody and shaking. It is the winter after my parents died.

  I look up to see the severe face of my grandmother.

  I am terrified of her, but desperate for her approval. Even now, knowing what she did, the boy in the memory cannot hate her. He is too afraid to hate.

  I thought the week would be just for Aja and me. I never get her to myself. Atalantia had taken Ajax to Echo City to watch the water races. I thought Aja and I would take the horses north, but Grandmother has come back from Hyperion to continue my lessons.