Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  Then it’s celebration. Women hug me. Men hug me. I’m passed about like one of the clan. Like I’m not a sow whore they stole from her people. Then there’s dancing. Duncan is popular with the men. He twirls me and probes my body like he owns it. Nausea comes in a tide. Fearing I’ll retch, I pat Duncan on the chest and stumble over to a table and sit hunched and feeling the world swooping around me. A blur of faces flicker past. All laughing and gay. I want to crawl under the table. I want to hide until the world doesn’t feel like some spinning kaleidoscope of horror. But a stone-cold realization sets on me that if I do that, if I curl up, if I stay seated, I’ll end up waking in a tangle of sheets in a stone home like the one I grew tall in, except I won’t be hearing my mother in the morning. I’ll be hearing Duncan snoring drunkenly and feeling the taste of stale liquor in my mouth like old plums and the sore ache of my maidenhead split.

  It ain’t the parasite telling me I gotta move. I gotta be smart. I gotta find Volga and Victra. The parasite is quiet, though no longer contained to just my head. I feel its tendrils inside me, like roots along my bones. What does it want? If it weren’t damaged, what could it do?

  Wondering that won’t save me here.

  What would Ephraim do? How would he find the big girls?

  I force myself to stand. Am I standing? I’m numb, but my feet are on the ground. Duncan’s on his knees taking swill from a big gourd as men chant. I stumble to him. He coughs liquor as I pull at him and he puts his hands on my ass. “Dance with me,” I think I say. Soon we’re dancing, so I must have said it. Colors and hair and tassels flicker past. Amongst the laughing faces, I see a girl, is it Freckles? She stares at the ground as her husband twirls her and laughs.

  Duncan’s hot against me. I feel his rank breath on my neck. The sweat from his forehead against mine. He grinds against me, and I feel his manhood hard against my thigh. “It ain’t that big a wedding,” I say.

  “What you mean?” he asks. “My darlin’ disappointed?”

  “I thought the Red Hand was an army.”

  “It is an army!” he cries. “Legions deep. We’re all over Cimmeria, doncha know? No war talk for my wife’s lips. Dance with me.” I let him twirl me and I hold back a surge of vomit that squirrels up my throat. He pins me against him as the music slows.

  “It’s not an army,” I say all spoiled-like. “Just a gaggle.”

  “A gaggle!” he crows. “We’s been hard hit, sure, but there’s more brothers deep here and two more mines.”

  “Doing what? Drinking?”

  “Naw, some’s mining. Some’s training. Some’s guarding the prisoners. You know the Gold hiding in your village?”

  “I thought there was an Obsidian too.”

  “Huge one! Wouldn’t believe your eyes. Big as the Reaper himself.” She’s not. “Got her with the others.” I prod him a little. “Caught some coldies in the plains. Harmony put them to work in the deeptunnels clearing pitvipers and hauling ore.”

  “Tamed Obsidians. I heard it all now. I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Prove it then.” He’s drunk enough to consider it. I grind my hips against his manhood. “I’ll let you show me something else if you show me the coldies. Never seen one before.” I play with the whiskers of his beard. “I thought you’d show me a whole new life…”

  That does it.

  Duncan steers me through the throng and grabs a growler of swill for the trip. I paw at him, a new notion coming to me. “Shouldn’t we bring the lads some?”

  “What lads?”

  “The lads guarding the coldies.”

  He grins. “That’s a fine consideration.” Grabbing a couple growlers of swill, we stumble away from the party.

  I’m glad I asked for the tour, despite the toll. The trip is not short, nor is it innocent. Duncan paws me drunkenly and pins me twice against a tunnel wall as we go down. Each time, I roll the back of my knuckles against his manhood and say, “Soon, my love.” I make sure to remember each of the turns. Twenty steps down the third tunnel, first right. A hundred steps, down the ladder.

  Gods, the drug they put in the wine is strong.

  I feel like I’m wading through melting butter by the time we hit the gravLift down to the mines. Duncan pukes in the corner and wipes his lips, laughing as he washes his mouth out with swill from the growler. As he retches again, I quickly strip the haemanthus he pinned to my dress and grind it into the mouths of the open growlers we carry for the boys. By the time he’s wiping his mouth, I’ve put the corks back in. I don’t think he saw.

  The gravLift spits us out into a dark cavern lit by glowlamps. The grinding racket of drills mauls my ears as we stumble together toward the mining teams.

  When I visited my father’s drillteam, I remember feeling wonder as I saw how important he was. A provider. A real man that I got to bring lunch to. It seemed so exciting back then. But this pit is infernal. Wet heat suffocates everything. The noise is unbearable. Men mill about the top of a tunnel where down deep a clawDrill burrows into Mars. Red, evil light glows up from the pit. HaulBacks dump hissing haultubes of helium-3 on the lip of the mine and rappel back down. Chain gangs of slaves heft the loads in metal backpacks and take them down another tunnel. There must be hundreds of them. Red Hand men rove along the chain gang lines with scorchers and pikes that glisten with electricity at the tips.

  “Darran!” my husband calls to a sweating Red man with a gut the size of Cimmeria. The man shoves a boy with a hairless face out of the way and comes to give Duncan a hug.

  “A man now, I hear!” Darran rumbles. “Is this the wee lass who’s done the deed?”

  “I scored well!” Duncan mumbles. “All the other blossoms are stumbling drunk, and me sweetheart here wanted to bring you poor nightshifters some evening swill!” He leans in. “And get a look at the coldies.”

  “That’s a lass!” Darran says. “You did well.” He thumps him on the shoulder and we hand over our growlers. I hope they can’t taste the haemanthus. With the heat down here, I doubt they’ll gainsay anything cold. Darran asks me a question. I mumble a sweet reply and curtsy. I tip over and the men help me up, laughing.

  Dusting my skirts, I pout and scan the line of slaves. There’s Oranges, Reds, Browns, a half-dead Blue, Grays, but no Obsidians. “Duncan promised me coldies.”

  “Can’t let Duncan fall flat already,” Darran says. He bellows at his men to bring up one of the ice bitch teams. Several minutes pass. Then I hear a clattering. A team of twelve Obsidians locked together with heavy iron chains shuffles forward, driven by several men with stunpikes.

  “Warrior race, my ass,” Darran says. “They even got a queen now. But who’s your king, bitch?” He pokes one of the Obsidians with his pike. The tall woman grunts and glares at him. Her body is covered with winged symbols. “Duncan, there’s the one you got yourself.” Darran points to a hunched woman covered in grime and stunpike burns.

  Volga. It’s barely been two days since I’ve seen her. But she looks as if it’s been five years. Her bare feet are bloody and shaking against the cavern floor. Her face is obscured by her hair, but her eyes stare distantly at the feet of Darran.

  “Oh, they’re so dreadful, like idiot bears,” I say. At the sound of my voice, Volga looks up. She allows only a bare glimmer of recognition. I touch my head as though faint. “Oh, there’s evil in those bottles, Duncan.” Volga’s eyes dart to the growlers Darran has passed to his men. “I feel faint, take me out of this heat.”

  “All right, coldies, back to work. Zoo’s over.” Darran shouts at her and sticks her in the side with his pike. She grunts and trudges on. One foot after the other. Before she disappears back into the mouth of the tunnel, she glances back at me and gives the barest of nods.

  * * *

  —

  The party is still in full swing by the time Duncan and I s
tumble back. Some hard-eyed Reds loiter around the fringes. They’ve got pistols on their hips. That’s not good. I smile at one, and he doesn’t smile back. Soon they’ll start taking the girls back. I wanna be first, else I might not get as free a roam of the place. I still have to find Victra.

  “I don’t want to dance anymore,” I say to Duncan.

  “But the lads will wonder where I’ve gone!” he says. “Did I marry a dead stone?”

  I reach my hand to his manhood and feel a minor swell. “I don’t want to dance anymore.”

  Duncan’s home is not grand. I might have thought it so had I not seen Hyperion, and he thinks it so because he hasn’t. He proudly shows it off, like it wasn’t abandoned by the people that did live here. It’s big enough for a family of six. A small kitchen with trophies on the wall—which he boasts on about until I pull him toward a bedroom. He sits on the edge of the bed and looks at me nervously. The music from the party is a whisper through the stone. “It’s too dark,” I say. So he searches for a glowlamp. When he finally finds it, he turns back, nervous, and pats the bed beside him. I sit.

  Maybe I can talk with him. Maybe he can help us. He knows this is wrong. “This ain’t your home,” I say, regarding his search for the lamp. He shakes his head. “Where is your home?”

  “Don’t have one anymore. Rat War made sure of that.” He plays with the edge of my skirt. “And you? You ain’t one of the fish.”

  “Lagalos.” I wait for a sense of recognition. But there ain’t one. “How long you been with the Hand?”

  He rubs his neck, reminded of something he’d rather forget. “Three years, I’d reckon. Take off your dress.” It sounds almost like I have a choice. “Please.”

  I stand up and I go to move the shoulders of my dress. “Three years, eh?”

  I run my tongue against Fig’s molar as he frowns at me.

  “Take it off,” he says more aggressively.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re my wife.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I…” He drunkenly searches for an answer. “I picked you. Listen, I want to be kind about this. But…”

  “Makes two of us.” I sigh. “Sometimes kind just ain’t in the cards.”

  He rises from the bed, quicker than he looks, and grabs the back of my head to stick his tongue in my mouth. I let it worm there until he’s distracted by his own pawing of my body. He looks down at my skirts so he can lift them, and his fingers are trying to find my insides between my legs when I pop the molar. There’s a flood of liquid into my mouth. It is hot at first, but then grows cold as ice.

  DNA calibration complete. V-7 antipersonnel system ready for deployment, the parasite says from within. I wondered how Fig kept it from melting her own flesh.

  I think one thing as I stroke Duncan’s face and he looks up at me, mouth open, eyes closed, tongue wet and probing. This will be loud.

  I shove him in the chest. He stumbles over the edge of the bed and half-falls. I grab a pillow and spit the acid from my mouth, taking care to only get his stomach and legs. It splashes over him. Nothing happens. He frowns in confusion, lunges upward knowing something is wrong, grabs my throat with his metal arm.

  Then the acid activates.

  First go his clothes. He smells the smoke, glances down, and screams bloody murder as the acid eats into his skin. His fingers bruise the muscles of my neck, but I don’t bother trying to breathe. He’ll let go soon enough. I shove the pillow against his face as he goes on screaming. The sound muffles and I push at him to keep the acid from spreading from his gut and legs to me.

  Sure enough, he lets go my throat and scrambles back from me, thrashing as the acid eats into his intestines and thighs. Pools of red muscle bubble and soon I see bone. I keep after him, rushing around him to keep the pillow over his face as he tangles himself in the sheets from his thrashing.

  “There’s a neutralizing agent,” I hiss into his ear. “Tell me where the Gold is, and I’ll use it.” I pull the pillow from his face. He tries to scream out for help, but I shove it back down before he can. “How are they gonna treat you if you got no legs? They don’t got replacements, I wager. You’ll be a freak. A crawling, leaking freak. Talk fast or you’ll have nubs, oldboy.”

  I pull back the pillow.

  “Can. F-f-f-fourth l-l-evel. W-we sealed her in the old jail. M-m-make it stop. Make it STOP….”

  I pat my dress. “Sorry. Musta left it in my pants.” I push the pillow over Duncan’s mouth as the acid eats on. I don’t know why, but I leave his eyes uncovered so he can watch me watch him die. Just feels right.

  The acid is something mean. In less than a minute, it eats through his intestines, then his spinal column as well as his legs.

  Soon he’s dead.

  I’ve got one tooth left.

  I stand over his corpse slapping myself, trying to shake off the stupor of that damn wine. There’s no shaking it off, it seems. They drugged us good. I hope I got the Reds in the mines just as bad. How long will it take for them to start teetering? For Volga to get ahold of one of their pikes? How many of the girls will have had the guts to use the teeth? That’s the real concern. Freckles and Lion, sure. But the rest? I didn’t think of the timing. With as many Red Hand men as I’ve seen around here, they’ll be butchered unless I free Victra.

  I gotta move.

  I search Duncan’s body and strip his pistol, making sure the railgun’s magazine is fitted right. Scouring the house, I find a well-worn pulseRifle and an Obsidian axe. I leave the axe, and try to recall how Volga taught me to prep a rifle as we schlepped through the highlands. I get it wrong twice before relaxing and letting my hands remember on their own. The rifle makes a droning sound as it signals it is ready. Lovely.

  Rifle shouldered, pistol tucked into my skirts, I head out the front door.

  Six Red Hands stand waiting for me on the walkway outside. Tails shivers amidst them. She points at me with a finger, mumbling something inaudible.

  Shit.

  I STRAIN AGAINST THE ROPE that ties me to the mess hall table as the blood-crusted hammer hits my pinky. Pain explodes in my head. My stupor shatters into a thousand pixels. I reel back, gasping for air. The bone’s busted. The skin’s swelling and trickles of blood are leaking around the dent the hammer made. Harmony twirls the hammer and leans back. Several more of her boys prowl around the old Gray mess hall. They don’t seem to mind Duncan’s dead.

  I could spit the last tooth in her face right now, but it’s not just my life I’d be trading.

  “I’m waiting for your answer, girl,” she says. “You got nine more fingers. Ten toes. Two tits. One cunny. And then we get creative. How’d you kill Duncan?”

  I do nothing, because I’ve been prisoner enough times to know doing something gets you hit again. “I hid a flask of acid in my shoe. Your boys didn’t check my shoes.”

  “Why not?”

  “You tell me. They’re your idiots.”

  “And you just happened to have acid on you?”

  “It’s war, ain’t it? Fun things floatin’ around.”

  “Why’d you kill him?”

  The woman seems to be expecting me to spout some ideology, or whimper about how unfair it is. Harmony’s evil creeps along my spine as I meet eyes with her and shrug. Figure she only likes one kind of person. “Don’t need a husband.”

  She surprises her men with a laugh. A door creaks and she looks up. “Picker,” she says. “Just the man I wanted to see.”

  He goes rigid, glancing at the other men, at the hammer. “What’s what, boss?”

  “What’s what is that upstairs, poor Duncan’s guts are melted through.” She looks at me with a little smirk. “Marriage ain’t for everyone. But when I ask for breeders, it ain’t so I can lose fighters, is it, Picker?”

  “No.”

  “
No, what?”

  “No, Mother. I’ll kill her right—”

  “Picker. You owe me one breathin’ fighter, not a dead breeder.” She twirls her hammer. “Doncha?” He eyes the hammer and nods. “I got this stomach thing, right? This ulcer that just burns all through the night. Hard enough to keep sleep with it gnawing into me. Now I gotta try and sleep fearful my men can’t even sniff out a Gamma.” Her eyes flick to me. So this is it, then. My tongue finds the molar. “I can smell a pet rat through water. The stink…” She breathes deep. “So many old memories. But watch her lie through those rat teeth, boys. Watch her try to slink in with us.” She taps the table with her hammer. “What clan are you, lass?”

  I look her in those eyes, with plans to melt them out of her skull.

  “My name is Lyria. I am the last Gamma of Lagalos.”

  “Lagalos,” Harmony replies, searching for the memory. “Camp 121. It was an easy cleanse. Almost got a Telemanus for the effort.”

  “You killed my family. Their names were—”

  Before I can finish, she slams the hammer down on my left index finger. I see flashes of white from the sudden pain, and hear a scream. But it ain’t mine.

  Harmony looks over my shoulder. I twist my head around. One of her men wobbles in through the open door, half-melted neck and torso leaking blood. He pitches forward onto the other man at the door. The man catches him and then starts to scream, holding up his hand as the acid begins to eat it too.

  “How many of you are there?” Harmony shouts at me. She slaps me so hard I lose track of my efforts to open the molar. By the time I collect myself, she’s up and out of her chair. I missed my chance. Harmony unbuckles her pistol as she hears more screaming from the township. She tosses her hammer to Picker. “Find out how many others there are. Rest of you, with me.”

  Picker stares at the door as it slams behind them, muffling the distant screams. Then he turns with a hateful look twisting his face. “Ya dumb slant. Throwing me under to the boss…” He gets real close to my ear and runs the hammer over my lips. “That’s a bad lass.”