Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  Cormac looks up in surprise. “Oh, nothin’ to be done, lass. If there’s ever a reason to hold a gun to someone’s head, it’s a baby. Can’t say I ever heard a quieter birth than that one. She’s one tough Peerless.”

  I look to the cracked door. “I’ve never met anyone like her.”

  “They make them that way,” he says. “Tough. Less nerves than we got.”

  “That ain’t true,” I reply. “It wasn’t easy for her.”

  “Seem to know a fine bit about them,” he says. “Been wonderin’ meself how a Martian mine lass ended up with one of them. Your lilt. Ain’t never heard a highRed with one like that. And your eyes are too muddy for a city shade.”

  “True enough. I’m from Cimmeria.”

  “Which mine?”

  “Casseda,” I lie.

  “Casseda.” He frowns. “You don’t sound like you’re from Casseda.”

  “Know many Cassedans?” I ask.

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “Solves that. How’d you end up here? You’re southern too.”

  “Our clan settled here to fish early on in the war,” Cormac explains. “We was one of the first mines freed. It isn’t easy, but labor’s a fine thing if it’s for yourself. We sell most of our haul to suppliers in Attica. Goes to Olympia, Agea. Even as far as Luna. Imagine that. Came back here after I lost my leg. Figured I’d like to spend more time with my kin than lose the rest of me.”

  I hear Victra call my name from the other room. I glance at Cormac. “Ain’t goin’ anywhere, lass,” he says.

  I get up from the table. Peeking through the doorway, I see Victra half asleep with Ulysses cradled in her arms. “You mind fetching me some snow? Aches like a broken tooth down there.”

  I shut the door and take stock of our hosts. Alred’s still asleep by the fire, and Cormac’s yawning and resting his head on the chair’s back. “Don’t move,” I tell him. “Just grabbing her some ice.” I prop open the door, making sure I can keep an eye on them as I fill a cloth with ice from outside. Volga’s footprints are already being filled in by the snow. They lead around the right of the house toward the old base. Something ticks around the corner. Glancing back inside, I see Cormac with his eyes closed. I leave the doorway to check on the sound.

  It’s coming from a frosted window set in the stone. I clear away some of the snow with my pistol. Cormac’s mute daughter looks out from her dark bedroom. Most of her is in shadow, but her pale face looks like a ghost’s. She taps on the window with her fingers. When she sees me, her eyes implore me. She points back into the house, then lifts a hand and presses it to the window. It is covered in blood from a gash she made down the center.

  A chill that has nothing to do with the wind goes through me.

  A shadow moves behind her. Her face tilts down and her head slams forward into the heavy glass, shattering it into large, jagged shards. I drop the ice and run back to the door with my gun. Cormac is no longer at the table. Alred’s place by the fire is empty. His severed bindings lie on the floor. I shout for Victra and slip on a patch of ice as I try to run through the doorway.

  I fall forward and something passes over my head and goes thunk into the wooden doorframe. I hit the floorboards hard and turn to see Alred struggling to pull a slingBlade out of the doorframe. He jerks it out and turns to chop me in the belly, only to stare down the barrel of my gun. He puts a hand out. “Please…” I fire and his arm becomes a spray of red. He looks quizzically at it. Shattered bones peek through the skin as it hangs from his shoulder socket like a wet rag.

  He screams.

  My second round takes off his head from the chin up. He’s thrown halfway out the door. I scramble to my feet. The world tight and vivid. Something bright screams past and burns a hole through the wall behind me. I drop to my belly as more particle beams lance out from Brea’s bedroom, filling the air with the scent of ozone. I shoot back through the wall. The fire now consumes a corner of the room, spreading from the blanket to the table and the kitchen. Smoke clouds the room and stings my eyes. Victra’s door bursts open and she storms out with her razor, sees me on the floor, Alred dead in the doorway, and the holes from the firefight.

  “Red Hand,” I rasp.

  “Did you get him?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Stay down.” She slinks through the smoke and puts her ear next to one of the holes. Then she bursts through the door. I follow her and find Cormac on the ground holding in his guts. His gun lies across the room. Victra kneels on Cormac’s chest and stabs her razor through his hand. He grunts in pain.

  “How many are in the village?” she asks. She puts a thumb in his eye. “How many!”

  “Hundreds.” He laughs. “In the old base. You’re dead, Gold. They’ll have heard the shots. They’ll have your Obsidian. You’re worm food, slaver. You and your spawn.”

  “Do you have a vehicle?”

  He just laughs. She digs her finger into his eye, but he won’t say any more. She kills him with a punch that crumples the right side of his skull. I hear a gurgling from behind a dresser and find Brea there. The crochet in his bedroom was hers. She’s not his daughter. His wife isn’t out on the boats. This child is his wife. A piece of glass is embedded in her neck. Blood gurgles from the wound and out her mouth as she stares up at me.

  Victra’s no longer in the room. I hear her coming back. She appears at the bedroom doorway with Ulysses wrapped in a quilt. She’s barefoot and dizzy from the smoke. “Lyria, on me.”

  I look down at the bleeding girl. “We can’t leave her!”

  Victra looks down at the girl, up at me, and gives a look of apology before tucking Ulysses tight, wheeling away, and disappearing out the door. I gasp for air as I drag Brea out of the burning house and lay her down in the snow.

  “It’s all right, lass,” I say between coughs. “I’ve got you now. It’s just a scratch. I’ve got you.” Her blood slicks my hands and stains the snow. There’s so much of it. She can’t die here. Not this poor girl. Not after surviving that man, if it’s what I think. Not like this. She can’t die.

  I press my hands against the wound to try and stop the bleeding, but the glass cut so deep, all I can do is watch her until she becomes as pale as the snow and her eyes stare up at me with the flames of the burning house reflected in them. I didn’t know her, but I felt she could be me, or my sister.

  There’s shouts from the village. Having heard the gunfire from their own homes, Red men rush toward the burning house. There’s twenty, fifty coming. Could all be the Red Hand? A woman in the doorway of a nearby house waves for me to run from them. Victra’s already gone, her tracks leading back into the highlands. I chase after her, away from the shouting men.

  I lose the tracks twice in the storm. Try as I might, I cannot summon the parasite at will. Wind bites my face and my fingers are already numb. I don’t think I’ll catch Victra. Her strides are easily twice the length of mine. But I keep running. My side’s got a stitch. My lungs ache from the cold. Something roars in the sky, deeper than the sound of the wind. Several ships glow through the swirling snow as they pass overhead. I trudge through frozen creek beds, through a wood of lonely aspen, and into an evergreen forest before I’m hopelessly lost. I run in circles trying to find Victra’s tracks, but they’ve disappeared, as if she suddenly grew wings. She must have taken to the trees. I search them before realizing I might be leading them to her. What could I even do to help her? I’d slow her down. Part of me knows this is my fault, but she wanted ice. Volga needed to go to the old base. None of them thought Cormac was Red Hand. None of them saw through him. I suspected. I kept close watch, until I didn’t.

  How did they cut through the ropes?

  The wind dies down not long after morning comes. Snow falls in large flakes. The world takes on the color of gunmetal. I’ve carried my pistol with me, but it’s got only three r
ounds left. I stay in the forest not knowing what to do, listening for sounds of hunting men, dogs, or ships. I hear nothing. Just the silence of a world turning.

  Knowing I can’t go anywhere without finding out what happened to Volga, I make my way back to the town, sticking to ravines when possible and running quick as I can through open fields. Climbing over a fence, I see a splash of color amidst another copse of trees.

  On the edge of the treeline, blood paints snow churned by boots. It splashes the white bark of the trees, many of which are fallen or shattered from a gunfight. A few are cut cleanly, probably from Victra’s razor. Something lies in the snow. As I bend to pick it up, I flinch away. It’s a hand with Red sigils on it. More than a dozen trails of blood lead to a patch of earth where the snow melted away. Must be where their shuttle landed. I don’t see any tracks leading off.

  They’ve got her. They’ve got her and Ulysses.

  A stone lodges in my throat.

  Then I see crows fluttering around an odd-shaped tree.

  Something is wrong with that tree.

  I stumble toward it, my heart knowing before my head, pulled along by the dread weaving its fingers through me. The crows scatter away. My shadow darkens the tree. My legs tremble. My knees buckle. I fall to the ground, unable to accept it, unable to look away from the small trickles of blood that wind down the bark, unable to understand why they nailed the baby upside down to the trunk of the tree.

  ULYSSES IS DEAD.

  I sit watching the snow fall and feel nothing.

  I see but don’t feel myself moving as I take Ulysses down and wrap him in my coat. It is not easy or clean.

  I try to dig a grave with my hands, but the earth is frozen. I don’t realize it is too hard to dig through until I notice my fingers bleeding.

  When I look back at the lifeless infant in my jacket, I break down.

  I don’t know what to do with him. I can’t bury him here in the dirt as if he’s a part of this world. He didn’t even get to spend a day in it. I won’t leave him here to be eaten by scavengers. Scavengers have done enough to him already.

  All I can do is take him with me.

  I shake as I walk. I’ll die if I don’t put my jacket on. But I can’t let him be cold. His newborn flesh is so thin. So very thin. I walk. I’m not sure where, or why, but I find myself back at the edge of the village, looking down at it. There’s a commotion outside the base. Half a dozen new ships sit there, including the one with the Ambrosia advert. More than fifty men with guns mill about. How many helped kill my family? How many of them raped my sister before they cut her throat to the bone? How many nailed this baby to the tree after smashing its skull?

  They’re surrounding something, kicking it.

  I feel my legs carrying me down the hill. My hand on the cold grip of the pistol. Three shots left. Three left for Harmony. At the edge of the town as I’m waylaid by a thicket of dead brush, I see the crowd part and Harmony giving orders to her men. She looks the same as she did two weeks before. The same as when she killed my brother, except now she’s wearing a winter coat and carrying Victra’s bloody razor. Her men follow her orders and drag what they were kicking onto their ships. It’s Victra, and Volga.

  I break into a jog. I reach the burned-out house where we thought to find shelter. Go past it through narrow lanes leading between several other houses. I’m still a hundred meters off by the time the ship lifts off, some Red Hand men on the ground, cheering them. The ships head north and I stand there with my jacket around Ulysses. My pistol useless in my hand.

  “Girl,” someone whispers. “Girl.” A woman stares at me from a cracked door. She opens it more. And I see it was the woman who watched me run from the burning house. She motions me toward her. I’m not sure why or how, but I find myself inside her house. I pull out my gun and point it at her. She flinches away. A man on the far side of the room looks away from his HC to see me. Then looks back as it shows bodies falling over a city. Brea lies on their kitchen table. Her blood has been cleaned away, and she’s wearing a dress, her face surrounded by winter berries. It looks as if she is asleep.

  She is their daughter.

  * * *

  —

  “Red Hand came a year ago,” Brea’s mother says as I warm myself by their fire. Her name is Maeve. A young boy watches from a back room. “Moved into the mine north of town. Started using the old base for transmissions and the mine up the coast as a redoubt. It was fine at first. Our Gammas had already fled. But then the Obsidians came and things got bad. More Hands started showing up as the Obsidians chased them north. So many hangin’ on by the thread of their bones.

  “They’ve got a field outside the mine where they’ve done and buried thousands. Their men started fightin’. Started killin’ each other. Guess they thought they had nothin’ to live for. So then we was told they’d be takin’ wives of our clan.” She stifles a sob. “They took me baby. She was not on thirteen. Too shy of wedAge, but they took her still. Said Mora was too young yet. But…” Her lips quiver. “But they took her to the base anyway. They’ll take her away.”

  I sit in the chair feeling exhausted as Maeve tells me her tragedy. The rag I used to clean the blood from my arms languishes in a tepid bowl of water. The old soup she gave me doesn’t steam anymore. I’ve not even lifted the spoon. Outside, there’s occasional gunfire or shouts. I cradle Ulysses in my arms.

  “Mora?” I ask. “Who is she?”

  “Me youngest daughter. Not yet twelve.” She sobs.

  “And you just let them take her,” I say, watching Ulysses’ dead face. “After you knew what they did to Brea?”

  “What were we to do?” the woman says. “They’d kill us. There’s hundreds up there in that mine. That man Cormac…he’s a beast. Killed a boy who tried to…” She shakes her head.

  “He’s dead now. My friend made sure of that.”

  “He ain’t the worst of them. There’s Picker—man that chooses the wives. He chose Brea and now…” She can’t even say her youngest daughter’s name. “And there’s the woman.”

  “Harmony.”

  The woman nods and looks at Brea. “They’re roundin’ up new girls at the base. Gonna take them to the mine to be wives after they been inspected. Said we helped the Gold.”

  “And no one has tried stop them,” I say. “You just watched.”

  She convulses sobbing. She tries to speak. To give another excuse. But then she looks at her girl and just runs back to the bedroom to her other children. Fear lurks over this village.

  Maeve’s husband looks at me now. The light from the HC bathes him sickly green. The color is the only life in his eyes. “You Gamma?”

  “Why? Did Gamma rape your daughter?” I snap.

  His jaw flexes. “Talk about my girl again, I drag you to the Hand meself.”

  “How you gonna do that from your knees?” I ask. He looks back at the HC, swallowing. “Your last daughter ain’t there, old man.” I point out the window to the squat base on promontory. “She’s over there.”

  “You can stay till dark,” he says quietly. “Then you go.”

  In the dim light of the fire, I watch Ulysses’s cold face as I watched that of my sister and her children. I pull the jacket over his face. I’m tired of watching.

  Through the walls I can hear the whispers of the orb.

  * * *

  —

  That night, I dig through the rubble of Cormac’s house as the snow comes down. The north wall has crumbled inward from the heat and the metal roof has warped. Coughing from the soot, I pull blackened timbers off the remains of the kitchen table. There sitting by the stone frame of the hearth lies Fig’s black orb. Wrapping my hands in my sleeves, I pull it out and crouch in the remains of the house.

  Despite the heat of the fire, the orb is undamaged, as I suspected it would be. There is no lock. No hinges o
r any gaps in the metal to show where it opens. I tap it with a naked finger. It’s cool to the touch. Like river stone. I hold the orb in both hands, turning it over to figure out how to open it. Maybe it doesn’t open. I rap it with my knuckles. Whatever is inside was worth Fig risking her life to get. It must contain something that can help me.

  If it’s hollow, I can’t tell. But if it’s not, it should be heavier. I saw Volga break rocks on it, and Victra’s razor slide off without leaving much more than a scratch. Fig seemed to be able to call it with the implants in her fingers. Maybe I need those to open it. But if I need those, why would it call to me? I lower my head to it, hoping the proximity to the parasite in my head will open it. Nothing happens except the blood in my brain thumps louder.

  I lower the orb in frustration and lean back. Flakes of snow flutter down from the sky and gather on my face. I suck on the opened scabs on my hands and think. What do I do? What can I do? There isn’t salvation in this orb. Even if there was, Volga and Victra are already dead.

  I drop my hands to the orb and consider defeat.

  The pressure in my head releases, like a popping bubble. A low hum comes from my lap and I look down to see an emerald-green light appearing underneath a faint blood smear my thumb left on the orb. I sit up and wipe the soot from my eyes. The green light ripples in the black metal, becoming a swirl of tiny arcane mathematical symbols that coalesce into the shape of a woman atop a bull. The image is no larger than my thumb.

  DNA sampling complete, new protocols implemented for Énatos Figment, a soft female voice says in my head, or was it from the orb? Sfaíra access granted. My heart thuds as the orb purrs and its surface begins to unscrew till a thousand millimeter-wide strips around its meridian are turning in alternating clockwise and counterclockwise rotations. They fold in on one another until the orb divides in two and folds over on itself, revealing an interior the color of baby teeth pulsing with soft light. Built into the orb are several hundred small compartments marked with obscure symbols.