Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  Since that bitch of a Brown plunged the syringe into my neck, I’ve heard nothing of jungles or the wind. Last thing I remember was the warm water of the shower falling on my tummy. The cold of the stone against my back. When darkness came, I felt I’d slipped back into my mother’s womb. I dreamt of her, and my sister. Then I woke to the cold of my chamber, a headache pulsing behind the left eye, and bile crusted on my lips.

  How long ago was that again?

  A week?

  A month?

  Five?

  Of my family, only Liam survives. I hold out hope for his father, Varon, my sister’s husband. And for my brothers: cherished Aengus, and even brooding, angry Dagan. But all three are at the front. Who knows if they have gone on to the Vale, if Liam has.

  I wish I could dream of them as I did my mother and sister. But dreams are scarce now. Fragments of sleep crumble through my fingers, shaken away by the noise, the light. Even if I do manage to doze off, the gravity inverts, wrenching my guts as the ceiling becomes the floor and I collide hard enough with the metal to scare me.

  The room is cold, glossy black, ten long paces by ten. There is no bed, only nodules that retract to reveal a tube for my piss. You gotta really seal your squat to the floor or the room will stink something fierce. It’s worse for shit. If I miss, I gotta scoop it up and push it in with my fingers or find myself falling into it the next time I doze.

  I’ve given up shouting through the food delivery nodule. No one is listening. At first I thought the Julii cow might want something from me. But she doesn’t. This is revenge. Took her first and only visit to drive that through my skull.

  A rectangle of light carved the darkness and then she was inside the room staring down at me. Time was, I would have thought her a god. Some warrior maiden pulled from my pa’s savage tales. But there’s no romance to her, to them any longer. Her Gold rage seemed petty. Her glamour vile in the face of the poverty I’ve seen in my family’s assimilation camp on Mars and in Hyperion.

  Still, I told her all I knew, thinking she would be rational. All I told the Sovereign. She said nothing, and it was then I knew the deepspine truth: she doesn’t care two licks ’bout what I know. Only when I crawled to her on my hands and knees and begged her to let me out to see Liam did she finally part those rich lips.

  “I want to be forthright and say I visually enjoy your degradation.” The words seemed to boil, as if drawn up from a black cauldron deep in her belly. “I am aware you are not a member of the Red Hand, nor are you a Gorgon operator. However, stupidity is not a crime without victims. Seeing as how you have deprived me of my daughter, my nephew, whom I love like my own bone and blood, it can only be reckoned fair if I deprive you of something: your ‘sanity.’ Consider it a mercy that I left that blind child out of this. Would that you had the same decency.”

  I choked on sobs knowing Liam was safe somewhere beyond this room. Pathetically, I thought to beseech her.

  “I didn’t mean for this…”

  “I didn’t mean,” she mocked, making her lips quiver like mine. Her eyes flashed as my hand touched her spiked boots. “You carried unauthorized, alien hardware onto a governmental shuttle, despite attending multiple security briefings instructing you against such indiscretion. You are either sinister, careless, or a gibbering idiot. Embrace the consequences of your actions, young lady. In the end, you may not have your freedom, but perhaps you’ll find your dignity. A true woman needs little else.”

  Then the light swallowed the Gold right back up.

  I raced for the shrinking door, but it just disappeared into the wall. I beat at it with my fists and screamed till knuckle bone peeked out my skin.

  I knew it would never open again.

  I wept and curled around my hands and licked my aching knuckles like a sad dog. I hated that woman. I hated her so much, but deep down I knew I’d do anything for her to fill the room again. To see another person once more…

  When my bladder grew tight, I just pissed where I lay. I no longer even tilted my head to look as the food slot opened. What was the point? Everyone knows there’s nothing worse than a Julii scorned.

  I decayed. I am decaying.

  How long since I’ve eaten?

  Are there really butterflies in the room?

  I remember the mad look in Dagan’s eyes when Pa found him three days lost in the deepmines. He swore he saw demons. He was never the same again. His kind heart replaced by a sour doppelgänger’s.

  Am I going mad like he did? I must be.

  Demons visit me as my body wastes away, specters made from the light of the place. The scarred woman of the Red Hand who shot my brother’s head off. The liar, Ephraim, who saw I was broken, and put me back together only so he could use me. His Obsidian henchwoman who shot Kavax. That Brown bitch with the needle. The lean, sweaty boy-men who cut my family and clan to pieces with curved iron, and gnawed the innocence out of a hundred Gamma girls.

  They mock me in the chaos of light.

  But they also bring their victims. Those I love, my brothers, my family, little blind Liam, Kavax who took us from the mud and brought us to Luna, who alone could make Liam’s face shine when his mother lay in the dirt.

  What did I ever do to protect them? What did I ever do to save them?

  All I did was run or hide.

  As the light spasms above me and my body grows light with exhaustion, I sense a calm clarity that turns my life into a tapestry. A story told by someone else.

  Here’s little Lyria. She watched herself be freed. She watched herself put in a camp. Others watched her complain. She watched her family die. She watched big bad Hyperion chew her up and spit her out. She watched as she decayed in her cell.

  Is that all I am? A watcher? A victim?

  Disgust seeps up through the cracks in the bottom of my heart.

  How many times did I blame the Reaper? How many times did I roll my eyes when Red legionnaires would visit our camp and spin those yarns of Darrow and the Vanguard. Darrow and the undead Goblin. Darrow, the Julii, and Valkyrie at Ilium. Darrow and the Jackal and the Two Hundred Seventy Days our messiah spent in the monster’s table.

  “The Second Birth, they call it, lass,” the young Red legionnaire said, swiveling on the water drum when he saw I wasn’t swallowing the hook like my brothers. His hand touched his chest as he looked around, his voice barely a whisper. “From Mars to Mercury, all know that’s when he became the Reaper. When the man became something more. I’ve seen him in the flesh. At Echo City. He’s got something in him, I’ll tell you that. Something like thunder in a bottle.” He waved his hands at the potential recruits, his voice rising. “And that’s in all of us. Each clanfolk with Red in their eyes. Lambda to Gamma. We may not be big. No. We may not be rich. But we got what he got. Wrath. Seven hundred years of it thundering in our veins.”

  Forty-five lined up to give their lives to the Free Legions that day, including two of my brothers. They were just a lot of fools worshipping some jumped-up Helldiver with a Gold wife and a Gold spawn. He wasn’t one of us any longer. I blamed him for taking my brothers, for leaving us mired in the camp, for all that’d gone wrong. But one person couldn’t do all that. He freed us, and then we stayed in the camp and waited for him to do all the rest.

  Waiting. Waiting.

  Waiting while the tales that made us big began to make us feel small, because we didn’t make the choice like those brave boys and girls did.

  We didn’t choose to fight.

  Well, fuck me if I’m gonna wait any longer. Survival is my fight.

  When the synth food shoots through the tube some hours later, I make a choice. My body is weak, my pants crusted with my own filth as I crawl. But I make it there and I choke down the tasteless fiber cubes and protein and wash them down with water from the tube. When food comes again, I jam it down. Soon the hallucinations disappear. The
dread loneliness grows smaller, dwarfed by the anger at my own eagerness to surrender.

  Despair robbed me my mind. With my despair numbed, I find a way to sleep by tearing a strip of cloth from my jumpsuit and tying myself to the vent duct when gravity makes it the floor. Soon as I doze off, the floor becomes the ceiling again, and I hang there like a deepmine bat, bits of jumpsuit shoved in my ears and wearing a blindfold fashioned from my pant leg.

  Sleep is the Vale itself. I eat again. I sleep. I eat. I sleep. I grow bored and make the dancing lights my playmate, racing to touch the tips of the light as it morphs and expands. It reacts to my touch, turning crimson or purple. There’s pattern to it, a code maybe, but I just can’t crack it.

  One day or night or afternoon, I fasten myself to the duct to sleep again, and notice a rolled ball of cloth in the vent. Making a little hook with a piece of rubber gnawed off from my prisoner slippers, I hook the cloth and draw it toward me.

  The light illuminates brown letters in a blocky, flaking print. It is a message written in blood.

  “My name is Volga. I am a prisoner. I do not know for how long. Am I alone?”

  I stare down at the piece of cloth as if it were a message from an alien race. A weird numbness prickles across my face. The same numbness I felt when Vanna of Omicron spit in my eye and called my pa a tinsucker when I was eight.

  Pure rage.

  Volga was the name of Ephraim’s Obsidian. The Hyperionin lowlife who shot great Kavax in the chest so that his skin melted from his rib cage. I ball the cloth in my fist.

  Yet I do not drop it.

  Suddenly, all I can remember of the woman is the hollowness in her eyes as she looked down at me in the back of their aircar. That was a soul ripping itself to pieces. I know because I felt it too, because I wore those eyes when I knew what Ephraim had used me to do.

  Was that Volga’s truth? Did she feel the same shame I did? Could it be I wasn’t the only one used by Ephraim fucking Horn? Maybe…or maybe I just want to talk to someone. Maybe I just want to prove I’m alive.

  I bite my thumb till it bleeds and tear the edge of a nail away. I dip it in the blood and begin to write on the back of the piece of cloth: “My name is Lyria. You might remember me…”

  COMMUNICATION ON EAGLE REST has been cut off to all but high-ranking Alltribe personnel. Sefi doesn’t want information getting out, or possibly in. HoloNet access severed. Several of my skuggi, including Freihild, were called away for service to the Queen before a scheduled run-through of a highrise infiltration down in Olympia, which was summarily canceled and all passes to the city general revoked.

  Pax and I gossip audibly in case of listening devices, and arrange the peas on our plates in the code he developed for us. Having recently gone through Xenophon to acquire fiberwire for the skuggi, I set out six peas. Pax, having built the harnesses I requested, sets out two, then seven in query of the ship Sefi promised me. I squash the peas. No ship. Still a flight risk.

  The door bursts open. Electra stalks in.

  “Hatchetface! We saved you some peas.” I gesture to the ones I smashed. At first I think she’s jealous of our little suppers, until she throws open the windows and goes out onto the terrace. Pax frowns and we follow. Beyond the pulseBubble encasing my suite, something is happening in Olympia.

  Down in the city, candles flicker from broken windows and atop crumbling towers. A sea of them move through the street. The Forbidden Song drifts ominously in the wind.

  She looks over at Pax.

  Has Mercury fallen?

  Before anyone can put words to the fear, the door to my suite opens again. Ozgard comes out onto the terrace. “The Queen has summoned you. All of you.”

  * * *

  —

  Instead of being taken to the throne room, we’re led through the night to an armored military shuttle. “You got a bead on this?” I ask them as we board. Electra ignores me.

  Pax shakes his head. “You?”

  “I’ve got a few ideas.”

  “Thank Jove for the mercenary and his professional opinion,” Electra snaps, but her teeth are dull today. Is it her parents or Pax’s that have gone down? Is it Mercury or Luna, or something else?

  The military shuttle has no view windows in the bunkrooms or mess we’re sequestered within for the three-day voyage, but all of us can feel the calm before the storm. Pax devotes his days to a sort of waking slumber—a meditation practice Ozgard has taught him. Together they recite obscure prayers while Electra drives all mad by pacing the deck like a pissed-off alley cat.

  “What kind of Nagal is that?” I ask Pax before we bunk down for the evening. “Didn’t sound familiar.”

  He glances at Ozgard. Finding the shaman sleeping, he explains in a low voice, “It isn’t Nagal. It’s Tetkjr. Some of the old prayers survived. Ozgard found remnants of them in old temples on Mercury. He’s been teaching me. Hasn’t been spoken inside the Belt since the Dark Revolt.”

  The Dark Revolt was a myth in the legions, believed only by conspiracy theorists and drunks. But after the Fall, the Republic published the history that the Society did their best to scrub out of existence. Read like fiction. Five hundred years before the Reds rebelled, the Obsidians nearly toppled the Society, led by a shadowy figure known as King Kuthul. Of course, Pax is only too eager to explain in excruciating detail.

  “Gold was seldom generous in victory. The genocide that followed the Battle of Peitho consisted not just of mass culling, but social and cultural reengineering. A domestication of a wild breed into a more…sustainable and predictable stock. Technophobia was introduced as well as other paradigm alterations. Allfather became Allmother. Mongol sociological structure became Norse. Patriarchy became matriarchy, an inversion of the division protocol they used on Reds.”

  My skin begins to crawl. “And now you speak their language. That’s gotta be all sorts of bad luck.”

  He smiles, captivated by the subject. “Some of my mother’s more fanciful theorists think that the Ascomanni speak it. Or at least parts.”

  “Aren’t they just assholes from the ice tribes who didn’t follow Sefi?”

  “Sure, but their correspondences are odd if that’s the case. For instance, they allude to a central figure, a Volsung Fá—it means ‘Volsung the Taker,’ sort of like a king.” He pauses when Ozgard murmurs something in his sleep, and lowers his voice to a whisper. “You know, not all the warlords of the Dark Revolt were captured.”

  I moan. “Gods, now you sound like a legion drunk.”

  “Shh. It’s true. Some hid in the Belt. Some were chased to Neptune, where their fleet was smashed. The stragglers were believed to have been hunted and killed to the last warband. But…about a hundred years preceding the reign of Octarius au Lune, ships began to go missing in the Kuiper Belt. They would simply vanish. Common consensus was pilot error or environmental degradation on equipment. Then one vessel escaped.”

  “Go on.”

  “I thought I sounded like a legion drunk.”

  “Pax.”

  “They reported a loss in artificial gravity, followed by light failure, and sounds from outside the hull. Later welding patterns were found outside. Diamond drill marks.”

  “Creepy.”

  “It wasn’t until Octarius that the first Kuiper Obsidian was spotted, and the name Ascomanni began to circulate. At first, they were of little concern. Further reconnaissance suggested nomadic caravans of ice miners, subterranean dwellings, sparse populations, and fractious tribal dynamics. It seems the Ascomanni even managed to take some carvers with them. Their skin was said to be red, possibly from genetic sculpting with Deinococcus radiodurans, an extremophilic bacterium highly resistant to deepspace radiation, vacuum, dehydration, and cold.

  “Closer to the reign of Octavia, they became bolder and began to raid at will. After the death of her daughter, around fifteen y
ears ago, Octavia sent the Fear Knight on an expeditionary campaign when terraforming on Pluto was threatened by the raids.”

  “Why didn’t Octavia simply send out the Sword Armada and finish them off?” I ask. “Seems like something she’d enjoy.”

  “Cost, benefit.” He looks annoyed by my vacant expression. “At times, it frightens me how little people care about the tiny corner of the galaxy they inhabit. Earth is one AU from the sun. Neptune is thirty. The Kuiper Belt is fifty. It is twenty times as wide and almost two hundred times as massive as the Inner Belt. Moira’s estimates suggested it would take the Sword Armada five thousand years to search half the Kuiper Belt. Octavia had other things on her plate.

  “Back to the Fear Knight. One year in, he reported back that the situation was untenable. He’d been ambushed and lost all but two ships. Octavia told him to go radio silent until the operation was complete. It was an execution. But seven years ago, he returned. And at about the same time that deepspace miners began to suggest the Ascomanni had united under a single ruler. An outlander they called Volsung—‘He Who Walks the Void.’…Obviously, our treaty with the Rim makes further inquiry…difficult.”

  “An outlander from where?” Electra asks. She’s been listening from her little nest in the top bunk above Ozgard’s. The psycho’s eyes gleam at the idea of evil, red-skinned, far-flung Obsidian warlords.

  Pax shrugs. “Could be someone the Fear Knight helped to power. A translation discrepancy. Or maybe Atlas’s ships were damaged and he lost coms for ten years and tucked tail. Whatever the case, if this Volsung Fá exists, it would be highly unlikely Martian or Terran Obsidians who turned raiders would have any interaction with true Ascomanni. They’re years away on the ships they have. People just gave the pirates the name because people like legends. But it makes you wonder, what if they have met with their long lost brethren? What if they are coordinating and Volsung Fá rules not just the far Obsidian, but the pirates too?”