Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  I take her hand and surprise her by kissing it.

  “Nothing you can say will make me hate you.”

  She swallows. “Your mother…”

  I go cold. “What about my mother?”

  “She was a Reformer. Did you know that?”

  “No…” Did I? Do I?

  “No. Of course you didn’t. She…saw what Octavia was. How her grip was squeezing tighter and tighter till it would choke our world. She thought the burning of Rhea was an abomination. And she saw how slowly her mother was trying to corrupt you. So with Romulus’s father, Revus, and Nero au Augustus, she planned a coup. Lysander, it wasn’t Outriders or terrorists who killed your mother. It was Octavia who gave the order.”

  “How do you—”

  “Because Atalantia and I planted the bomb on their shuttle.”

  I stare at her, unable to comprehend.

  “You and Atalantia.”

  “Yes.”

  “You…were her closest friends.”

  “Yes. Though it broke my heart, I did as my Sovereign commanded.”

  My hand slips away from hers.

  The world shrinks to a very small, very quiet place as memories and all their weight fall upon me. All the times I sat with my grandmother, dined with her, flew with her, tried to impress her, and she sat there, the old crone, pretending she didn’t send my father and my mother smoldering into the sea. All the times Atalantia took me to Heliopolis, held my hand at the opera, squeezed me between her sweating legs…

  A dark glass slides over the world.

  I will never be the same.

  “Why can I not remember my mother’s face?” I ask.

  “Do you remember a chair?” I say nothing. “Octavia had many monstrous machines. But none so cruel as the chair. She called it Pandemonium. With it, she could…pervert the mind. When she discovered Anastasia’s treason, she swore she would erase her from history. She did not succeed in that. But she did steal her from you. Lysander, after your mother died, you were inconsolable. She was a good mother. She loved you more than anything in the worlds. Octavia grew jealous. After two weeks in the chair, her work was done, and you didn’t cry anymore.”

  I wish I did not believe it, but I do. What else could erase the face of a mother from the memory of her only son? I feel myself struggling to breathe. It was not enough to rob me of my childhood, not enough to rob me of my parents. She robbed me of the one thing that is mine. The one thing that no one should ever be able to take away.

  “Did Aja know?”

  “Know? She nearly broke her oath to Octavia over it. Atalantia didn’t bat an eye. She is a monster. Yet I swore an oath to serve Magnus, and when he found he was dying, he made me swear an oath to her.” Kalindora swallows. “I am a monster. I know that. I turned my back on the covenants of the Olympics, on my own heart. But I will not die a monster. I won’t let her devour you. She cannot sit upon the Morning Chair. She must not. She would burn the worlds so long as the ashes kneel.”

  I stand, unable to look at Kalindora.

  “I wasn’t strong enough to make a stand. But when you came back…I knew it was time. That is why I called the Praetorians.” She reaches for my hand. “You are the Sovereign, the last heir of Silenius, the last hope of Gold, and you are good. What are the chances? You can repair what Darrow and Octavia broke. Make all this horror be for something. Fix what is broken in our people, Lysander. I know it won’t be easy. And I am sorry I cannot be there to help you. Keep Rhone and Atlas close. He loved your father and mother too much for Octavia to ever tell him the truth, so she sent him to the Kuiper, thinking he would never return. He will protect you with his life.”

  I can’t take any more. I head for the door.

  “Do your duty!” she says. “Do your duty or the worlds will burn.”

  I leave the room, a hollow avatar of myself, and find Atalantia smiling at me from amidst the Golds, waiting to say farewell to the hero. She motions me to come to her, and I do. I smile and laugh beside my lover, the killer of my mother, and later that night as I sit across from her at supper as she gloats over the wreck her creatures have made of the Republic’s Senate, and Darrow’s heart. We receive word that Kalindora has died.

  We attend the spectacle of her sunburial on the Annihilo. The honor guard of Praetorians, led by White ceremonial virgins, carries her casket to a burial gun set in the main hangar, which fires her toward the sun. Rhone stands at attention, Atalantia weeps, Atlas does not speak, Ajax wavers in rage, almost too drunk to stand as he glares at me with such hatred it is a wonder he does not call me out then and there as Atalantia gives the benediction with glassy eyes.

  That night, she sends for me.

  I have no choice but to go.

  I find her weeping in her meditation chamber. I console her, and we stare at the mural of our family, at the blurred face of my mother, as Atalantia kisses my neck and whispers in my ear for me to take her pain away and take her to bed.

  When she is done with me, she turns over to sleep, and I lie there staring at the ceiling feeling dead inside.

  “DEJAH THORIS, THIS IS PHOBOS COMMAND. Your approach vector is prime. Welcome home, our Sovereign.”

  There is a small vault in my heart where certain words are guarded like fragile artifacts. Family, home, love, son, husband, brother. My enemies have cracked the vault open, ransacked it, and defecated on its floor.

  Home. I don’t recognize that word anymore. It has been violated. I have been violated.

  A corner of my heart was always reserved for my twin, despite all his failings. Now, the existence of Lilath’s Abomination eats at me. The Abomination has Sevro, Mercury has fallen, my husband is still missing with Cassius, and I have fled to Mars. It was the only choice; our failure to come together until too late robbed us of any alternatives.

  I left Sevro and Clown and Pebble.

  I left my husband to die.

  It was Cassius Kavax sent for him. The man was found in his deepspace corvette. The communications equipment had been destroyed and his ship barely managed to limp back to Mars. The details of his escape from his Rim imprisonment are fuzzy at best. But it seems he was spared from execution by one of Romulus’s sons. He was secluded in a private estate on Europa to be released when the war ended. He broke out, and stole his ship back to escape. After delivering the news to Kavax, he offered his service to the Republic.

  I never thought I’d hear that in all my life.

  I watch out the viewport of the Dejah Thoris as forty nimble corvettes form an honor lotus before our fleet and head back to the outer picket line. I don’t deserve it. While Cassius plunged into the heart of the enemy for Darrow with only a small strike team, I had an armada and I ran away. It was the right choice. But those are the ones that age you.

  Ahead, the blue ion tails of our honor guard await. Thirty crimson Ecliptic Guard torchShips guide us toward Mars’s defensive sphere. First through roving patrols, then a ten-thousand-meter gulf followed by thickets of minefields and light cannon array, then the hunting grounds for attack squadrons of destroyers and torchShips, and finally into the realm of the apex predators—the defense platforms, the dreadnoughts and their battle groups.

  Mars has rallied for its Sovereign.

  “The loyal stand ready, ma’am,” Holiday says from my shoulder.

  “But will they be enough, Nakamura?”

  She is not used to hearing doubt in my voice. Nor do I often allow it to intrude. But I feel a kinship with the commando that has deepened these last days as our shared dream crumbles around us. She took the news of Ephraim’s death stoically, but I know it eats at her. Just as I may be free from the Abomination’s grasp, but I am yet enslaved by the work undone, the enemies unvanquished, the friends unsaved, and the mistakes I made.

  Could I have gone for Darrow? Or was the Rim waiting to clo
se the trap and pin me against the Ash Armada?

  As ever, Holiday senses my mood. “Ma’am, I know you’ll think you were only one hundred meters away. Not gonna lie. That’ll haunt you sure as a fold against a single comet bluff. But they taught in the ludus the surest path between two points ain’t always the shortest.”

  I turn on her. “You think there’s a chance we’ll get Sevro back?”

  She gives me a grim smile. “It’s been done before.”

  “Victra found my son. I lost her husband. No amount of calculus will fix that arithmetic.”

  “Yet Victra did not sail on Luna. She respected your orders.” She gives a curt nod out the viewport where Mars’s moons are coming into sight. I step forward. The full might of the Julii fleet roves around the pincushion city moon of Phobos and the battle moon of Deimos. The Pandora’s comforting mass is sorely missed, but Victra’s personal fleet is larger even than my own. With her lost child, and Sevro in captivity, I feared she would run wild. Instead, her trade armada readies for war.

  Light flares on the Julii-Sun Dockyard halo as we pass. Hundreds of new ships teem with expedited industry as the workers and automatons race against the doomsday clock. And then we are past the dockyard, and the planet itself looms before us.

  On Mars, I was born and rode horses at Ishtar. On Mars, my eldest brother bled to death on the Agean cobbles before Karnus au Bellona, my mother jumped off a cliff, my father and best friend were killed by my twin. On Mars, I met my husband.

  But only my son waits below.

  It seems a lifetime ago that Darrow led my father’s Rain against our planet. I watched the friction trails bloom from this very bridge. How simple the world seemed then in the tunnel of youth. Could I have really been only nineteen? Can it be wrong to feel nostalgic for a day of blood? Or was it the innocence I miss, before we truly knew what turned the world?

  The melancholy is scored away by wrath as the nightside of the planet comes into view. Cimmeria is cloaked in darkness. The Obsidian I allowed to seize the continent in hopes they would call it home and defend it with their lives have ravaged it instead. The central cities of Nike, Phoenicia, and Olympia are dark. I believed in the Obsidians. I believed in Sefi. I was too optimistic. It only took a single man to topple her reign and unleash her people.

  Now, the Obsidian army and fleet are gone, having disappeared mysteriously after Kieran gave Volga over to the father of Ragnar. It seems all this Volsung Fá wanted was Sefi’s army and only half her stores of helium. The rest they left abandoned in containers on the tarmacs as casually as if the containers were filled with surplus dining utensils.

  “What does Mars mean to you, Nakamura?” I ask.

  The Terran hesitates. “Hope. And you, my liege?”

  “War.” I turn on a heel for the hangar.

  * * *

  —

  As pitcrews prepare Pride Two for disembarkation, Kavax sits on the hangar floor. He stares out at Mars floating on the other side of the pulseField. Sophocles spools in his lap, watching his master with concern. I set a hand on Kavax’s shoulder as I approach. He closes his eyes in a moment of warmth, then looks back at the planet.

  “Daxo loved Mars because she never pretended to be a maiden,” he says.

  “ ‘The beautiful scarred,’ he called her,” I reply.

  “The beautiful scarred.” Kavax loses himself for a moment in the echo. “He loved South Pacifica, but he was born here, in Zephyria. Where I was born. When he was as high as my knee, I took him, as my father once took me, through the heartwood, and I showed him the tree that grew from the seed of my father’s heart, and his before him. I showed him where mine would be planted. Where his would be planted beside his brother’s.” His voice trails away. Kavax was not able to recover Daxo’s body. The Vox cremated the slain senators and mixed them into the sewers so they could not be collected by their kin and brought back to Mars. “Pardon me,” he says, collecting himself, “sometimes the indignity…is more than I can bear.”

  Kavax is no longer the indestructible man who helped raise me. His decline started with Volga’s grievous wound to his side, then Thraxa going missing, and finally Daxo’s remains floating through the sewers of a moon Kavax hated. He despairs he will lose his remaining daughters, his wife, and his planet. He looks up at me with wet eyes. “Must it be here?” he asks.

  “It must.”

  I offer a hand to help him rise.

  With a heavy sigh, the weary family man kisses his pet on the brow, takes my hand, rises, and transforms once more into my father’s enforcer—the warrior giant of House Telemanus. Even I feel inclined to shiver. But it is a tragedy to see any man sacrifice his nature for his vocation, much less a man I love so much. To be what we need, what I need, he must go to war again. All his life he waited to pass the reins to his children; now so few are left.

  It is not how he thought it would be, but he endures.

  He puts an arm around my shoulders. “There is evil in us, as there is good. But we do not regret our good as we do our evil. So we know what we are, my daughter. We know what we are.” His voice fades, his conviction exhausted. So I pull him closer.

  “We know what we are,” I reply.

  He hears the certainty in my voice and straightens to his full height and pulls away. “When your father would return to Mars, he would run the Iron Circle to prove who owned the planet.”

  “I am not my father.”

  “Not in all ways. That’s been proved. But sometimes you need to show a little fang.”

  * * *

  —

  The Iron Circle is an old custom popularized by Silenius. To prove the depth of his dominion over a planet or moon, he would fly his shuttle without escort in a ring around it upon arrival, no matter the political tensions or adversaries at large on it: take your shot. It was his fucking planet. The custom has gotten quite a few powerful men killed—sometimes people just can’t resist tossing a stone at Goliath—and fell out of practice with most households. To do it now, in the wake of the violence Mars has seen, despite the threats at large, is saying no more and no less to the worlds than “Look how big my cock is.”

  With my main shuttle, Pride One, in the hands of the Abomination, we leave the hangar of the Dejah Thoris in Pride Two. The war shuttle bucks as it descends through atmosphere without its escort of ripWings. Niobe’s Fox One joins us starboard. As we perform the Iron Circle, I sit rolling my fingers along the rim of my husband’s ring. Cassius sent it back to him, and Darrow gave it to me. He gave everything to me he could give. I wish I could let him know it was enough. Let Cassius have found him. Let me slide into bed with him one last time. Let me feel his warmth again.

  I need him more now than ever. Mars needs him.

  All the ships and gun batteries in the worlds don’t make Mars seem safe without the Reaper. My officers in the cabin do their best not to look nervous as we pass over the Amazonian Sea toward war-torn Cimmeria to complete the Circle.

  What will I say to my son when I see him? Pax is neither stupid nor helpless, especially not with Electra at his side. He would not have woken up every day praying it would finally be the day his mother would save him and make everything right in the world again. No. He would use game theory. He would work the models in his mind until he saw the reasons, the permutations, the tectonic plates in motion. Then he would scheme a way to help me as much as he could.

  I wonder if Pax realizes yet that I raised him to be as much an ally as a son, and if he understands my guilt over that? If he knows could he still grasp how losing him was like losing a limb? How my love for him goes beyond logic, beyond explanation?

  “Virginia…” Kavax whispers at the viewport. “Look.”

  I can’t muster the energy. “Either someone shoots at us or doesn’t,” I say. “The Iron Circle was your idea.”

  “Just look.”


  Holiday tries to join Kavax at the viewport. When he won’t move, she takes the next viewport down and shatters my officers’ grim mood with a throaty laugh. “Ma’am. You’ll wanna see this.”

  Frowning, I slide open my viewport shade and see a line of fire racing across the dark landscape east of Nike, another flaring west of Phoenicia, and yet another southeast of Olympia itself. To be so visible at this height, the lines must be nearly a hundred kilometers long.

  As I watch, the lines of fire curve into the shape of a slingBlade.

  Mars endures.

  * * *

  —

  Despite the recent violence, no surface-fire licks upward at my ship during its passage around the planet. Even I didn’t believe we’d complete the Iron Circle without incident. The mood of the officers has changed. The holoCans in the back of the shuttle rumble with beating drums and singing crowds in cities all across Mars. In my shame, it is not the response I would have expected. Mars’s zealotry has always been reserved for my husband and his first wife. Kavax sits by the door, tapping his heels, eager to set foot on his home soil again. Holiday watches the holos with a look of love for the planet as it hails Lionheart and the Republic.

  Clouds embrace the shuttle, and when they pull back, we see the Valles Marineris gashing the world with its glittering towers and the glowing green parks and forests that sprawl along the cityscape and crawl up its towering walls.

  Millions of civilians line the rim of the great canyon. Hundreds of thousands of new recruits pour onto the grounds outside what was once my Institute but is now the Pegasus Legion barracks. As we approach Agea, the ground becomes lost beneath the shifting tides of humanity that gather in the parks and the courtyards and main avenues. The Via Triumphia is as clogged as it was on Mars’s first Liberation Day. They are all holding something red above their heads.

  My shuttle sets down between the Republic’s Victory Obelisks that lead to the Lion Stairs. The sounds of the sea of humanity that fill the courtyard wash against the shuttle. I see now what they hold above their heads.