Iron Gold

by Pierce Brown

  Sevro chuckles to himself. “Then it was well aged.”

  Daxo shakes his head and continues sketching angels for Diana, who sits on his lap admiring the man’s work. He’s no fool with a razor, but his true art is made with a stylus. Victra looks helplessly at Mustang over her juice, despairing of her husband. “Proof, my dear, that love is blind.”

  “Mickey can fix that face if you’re tired of looking at it,” I say.

  “Good luck. You’d have to pry the decadent sprite away from his laboratory,” Daxo says. The bald man considers Diana’s addition of a cruelly barbed trident to the angel he’s drawn. “Not to mention his admirers. He brought quite the menagerie to the Opera last September. It was a bit like a Hieronymus Bosch painting come alive. One of them was even an actress. Can you imagine?” he asks Mustang. “Your father would have chewed through his cheek to see lowColors sitting in the Elorian.”

  “He’s not the only one,” Victra says. “Too much new money these days. Quicksilver’s friends.” She shivers.

  “Well, money doesn’t buy culture, does it?” Daxo replies.

  “Not at all, my goodman. Not at all.”

  As the night deepens, the orange fingers of the slow sunset thread their way through the trees. I let go of the strain in my shoulders and sink deeper into my cup, listening to my friends chatter and joke while little blue bugs flicker and stab violent light into the late summer twilight. The trees rustle beyond the terrace; the shouts of children come from the grounds as they play night games. The blistering sand seas of Mercury seem so far away now. The stench of war so remote in my mind they are little more than shards of half-forgotten dreams.

  This is how life should be.

  This peace. This laughter.

  But even now I feel it slipping through my fingers like that faraway sand. I sense the House Augustus Lionguards out in the darkness of the forest, watching the sky, the shadows, helping us stay inside the fantasy a moment longer. Mustang catches my eye and nods toward the door.

  Forcing myself to part ways from my friends as the Telemanuses give a rousing, drunken rendition of their family’s song, “The Fox of Summerfall,” I follow several minutes after Mustang disappears into the main house. The manor halls here are older even than those of the Citadel of Light. History is the mortar of the place. Relics from older ages adorn walls, festoon shelves. Octavia called this place home as a child. Her essence lingers in the rafters and the attic and the gardens, as do those of her ancestors and child. It is where Lysander would have played long before his path crossed mine. I feel the imprint the Lunes have left on the home. At first I thought it strange living in the house of my greatest enemy, but in all humanity, who knew the burdens Mustang and I face as well as Octavia? In life, I loathed her. In death, I understand her.

  The scent of my wife reaches me before the sight of her. Our room is warm and the door shudders shut behind me on a rusted metal latch. A bottle of wine is open on the table beside the fireplace, where eagles and crescent moons of House Lune are carved into the stone corbels. Mustang’s slippers lie discarded on the floor. The ring of her father and my House Mars ring rest on the table beside her datapad, which flashes away with new messages.

  She’s spooled herself into a chair on our veranda like a bit of golden yarn, reading the dog-eared book of Shelley’s poetry Roque gave her years ago during their summer of opera and art in Agea, after the Institute. She doesn’t look up as I approach. I stand behind her, considering better of speaking, and slide a hand through her hair. I knead my thumbs into the muscles of her neck and back. Her proud shoulders relent against my fingers and she turns her book over in her lap. Sharing a life threads more than flesh and blood together. It weaves her memories in and around and through mine.

  The more I know of her, the more I share of her, the more I love her in a way the boy I used to be never knew how to love. Eo was a flame, dancing against the wind. I tried to catch her. Tried to hold her. But she was never meant to be held.

  My wife is not as fickle as a flame. She is an ocean. I knew from the first that I cannot own her, cannot tame her, but I am the only storm that moves her depths and stirs her tides. And that is more than enough.

  I lower my lips to her neck and taste the alcohol and sandalwood of her perfume. I breathe slow and easy, feeling the lightness of love and the wordless unspooling of the sea of space that kept us apart. Impossible, it seems, that we were ever so distant. That there was ever a time where she existed and I was not with her. Everything that she is, every scent, taste, touch, makes me know I am home. She reaches up, dragging her slender fingers through my hair. “I missed you,” I say.

  “What’s not to miss?” she asks, giving me a sly smile. I move to sit with her on the chaise, but she clucks her tongue. “You’re not done yet. Keep rubbing, Imperator. Your Sovereign commands it.”

  “I think power’s gone to your head.” She glances up at me. “Yes, ma’am.” I continue massaging her neck.

  “I’m drunk,” she mutters. “I can already feel the hangover.”

  “Thraxa’s good at making it feel like a moral obligation to keep pace.”

  “Ten credits says we have to scrape Sevro off the patio tomorrow.”

  “Poor Goblin. All spirit, no body mass.”

  She laughs. “I put him and Victra in the west wing so we can actually get some sleep. Last time, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking a coyote was caught in the air recycler. I swear, at the pace they’re going they’ll be able to single-handedly populate Pluto in a few years.”

  She pats the cushion beside her. I join her on the chaise and wrap my arms around her. The lake breeze sighs through the trees. In the silence we share, I feel her heartbeat and wonder what her eyes see as they look out over the tops of the trees to the orange sky.

  “Dancer was here,” I say.

  She makes a small noise of acknowledgment, to let me know she resents my reminder of the world beyond our balcony. “He’s not happy with you.”

  “Half the Senate looked like they wanted to poison my wine.”

  “I warned you. Luna’s changed since you were gone. The Vox Populi can’t be ignored any longer.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Yet when they passed a resolution, you spat in their eye.”

  “And now they’ll spit in mine.”

  “Seems that’s the bed you made.”

  “Do they have the votes to block my request?”

  “They might.”

  “Even if you apply pressure?”

  “You mean even if I clean up your mess.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I made the right decision,” I say. “I know I did. You know I did. They don’t know war. They were afraid of being held responsible for failure. What was I supposed to do? Comb my hair while they protected their reputations?”

  “Maybe you should learn from them.”

  “I’m not going to hold a poll in the middle of a war. You could have vetoed them.”

  “I could have. But then they’d cry that I was protecting my husband, and the Vox would gain more even supporters.”

  “Copper and Obsidian are still in play?”

  “No. Caraval says the Coppers will back you. As goes Sefi, so goes Obsidian. What will she choose? You’d know better than I.”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “She was against the Rain, but she came with me.”

  She’s silent at that.

  “You think I’ve shot us in the foot, don’t you?”

  “Does Dancer have anything else he can use against you?”

  “No,” I say. I know she doesn’t believe me. And she knows I know, but she can’t ask any more. Though I want to tell her about the emissaries, it would incriminate her as well. Sevro and I agreed it was a secret that must stay within the Howlers. She would be bound by oath to tell the Senate. And she tried so hard to honor her new oaths.

  “Dancer’s not the only one angry with me,” I say. “Pax would hardly look at me at dinner.”


  “I saw.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I think you do.” She goes quiet. “We’re missing this,” she says eventually. “Life. The dinner tonight, I’ll remember forever. The lightning bugs. The children in the yard. The smell of rain on its way.” She looks over at me. “Just seeing you laughing. I shouldn’t remember it. It should be one of thousands.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that when my term of office ends in two years, maybe I won’t run again. Maybe I let the torch pass to someone else. You hand the reins to Orion or Harnassus. Maybe the rest of this isn’t our responsibility.” A tiny, hopeful smile crosses her lips. “We will go back to Mars and live in my estate. We’ll raise our children with your brother and sister’s and put our lives into helping our family, our planet. And each night we’d have a dinner like this one. Friends could come and go in our house whenever they passed through. The door would always be open….”

  And an army would always have to guard it.

  Her words carry away into the night, into the arms of the swaying trees, along with the current of the wind, up and up into the sky, where it seems all fantasies go. But I sit cold as a stone beside her, because I know she doesn’t believe any of this. We’ve played the game far too long to walk away. I take her hand. And as my wife is quiet and the fantasy drifts away, our familiar friend, dread, creeps onto the balcony with us, because deep inside, in the shadowy chasms of ourselves, we know Lorn was right. For those who dine with war and empire, the bill always comes at the end.

  And almost as if the world was listening to my thoughts, a knock comes at the door. Mustang answers it, and when she returns her face belongs to the Sovereign, not my wife. “It was Daxo. Dancer’s called an emergency session of the Senate. They’ve moved your hearing up to tomorrow night.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing good.”

  SKY.

  That’s what my da would call the roof of stone and metal that stretched over our home in the mine of Lagalos. It’s what we all used to call it, going back generations of our clan to the first Pioneers. The sky be crumbling. The sky needs reinforcing.

  It stretched over us like a great shield, keeping us safe from the fabled Martian storms raging outside. There were dances for the sky, songs wishing it luck and blessings. I even knew two lasses named for it.

  But the sky wasn’t a shield. It was a lid. A cage.

  I was sixteen years of knobby knees and freckles when I first saw the true sky. Took six years from the death of the Sovereign on Luna for the Rising to push the last of the Golds off our continent of Cimmeria. Two more years for them to finally free our mine from the Gray warlord who set up his own little kingdom in their absence.

  Then the Rising came to Lagalos.

  Our saviors looked more like manic Laureltide jesters than soldiers draped with trophies of gray and blond hair and iron pyramid badges. SlingBlades and spiked red helmets were painted on their chests. And standing at their front was a weary, bearded Red man old enough to be a grandfather. He had a large gun in one hand and in the other a tattered white flag with the fourteen-pointed morning star. He wept when he saw the bloated bellies and skeletal evidence of our starvation under the Gray warlord. His gun dropped to the floor, and though he was a stranger to us, he came forward and hugged me. “Sister,” he said. Then he hugged the man beside me. “Brother.”

  Four weeks later, kind-faced men and women wearing white helmets and fourteen-pointed stars on their chests took us to the surface. I’ll never forget their eyes. They were Yellow and Brown and Pink. They had bottles of water, sparkling sweet drinks and candy for the children. And they gave us clunky goggles marked with winged feet to cover our cave eyes from the sun. I didn’t want to wear the goggles. Rather look at the true sky and its sun with my own eyes. But a kind Yellow nurse told me I might lose my sight. So on they went.

  When the doors of the lift opened, we walked from a basin littered with ships, up metal stairs and out onto an endless plain of tall grass vibrating with the sound of insects, and I saw it: blue and vast, so large I felt I was falling up into it. The true sky. And there, hanging like a sullen coal on the impossible horizon, was the sun. Giving us warmth. Filling my eyes with tears. So small I could block it with a thumb. Our sun. My sun.

  The Republic’s relief ships arrived the next morning to bawdy choruses hurled out from the throats of young gallants and lasses. The ships were cleaner than anything I’d ever seen. White as my nephew’s baby teeth as they coasted down. On their bellies blazed the star of the Republic. To us, then, the star meant hope.

  “Reaper’s compliments,” a young soldier said as he handed me a chocolate bar. “Welcome to the worlds, lass.”

  Welcome to the worlds.

  On the shuttle away from our mine, a video appeared before each of us, the hologram so lifelike I thought my fingers would touch the Gold face that sprung into the air. I’d seen her before, but here above ground on one of her ships, she seemed like a goddess from one of our songs. Virginia the Lionheart. Her eyes a terrifying gold. Her hair like spun silk held back from her poreless face. She shone brighter than that little coal of a sun. Making me feel little more than a shadow of a girl.

  “Child of Mars, welcome to the worlds…” the young Sovereign began gently. “You are about to embark upon a great journey to your rightful place upon the surface of the planet your ancestors built. Your sweat, your blood, and that of your kin, gave this planet life. Now it is your turn to share in the bounty of mankind, to live and prosper in this new Solar Republic and pave a way for the next generation. My heart is with you. The hopes and dreams of people everywhere rise with you. Good luck and may you and yours find joy under the stars.”

  That was two years and a thousand broken promises ago.

  Now, under a boiling sun, I hunch over the scant, piddling river beyond Assimilation Camp 121. My back bent and fingers crooked as I rub an abrasive brush into a pair of pants soiled by Ava’s work in the slaughter yards where she kills cattle to fill our pot.

  My arms, once ashen brown like most from Lagalos, are wiry and now baked dark by the sun and bitten ragged by the bugs that rise up out of the riverbed mud. The summers of the Cimmerian Plains are humid and thick with mosquitoes. I swat three away that’ve found a gap in the lyder flower paste.

  I’m eighteen now with stubborn baby fat in my cheeks. My hair leaps from my head at a thick tangle. Like a rabid animal trying to escape my skull. I don’t blame it. Eyes never rest long on me. The boys on Da’s drillteam used to call me Mudbug for the color of my eyes. Da always said Ava’s got the looks in our family. I’ve just got the temper.

  Along the riverbank are hardpacked men and women—two score Gammas of my clan humming “The Ballad of Bloody Mary the Fool.” My mother used to hum it as she worked. Rust-red hair bursts from under broad-brimmed hats and headwraps of bright cloth. Off the bank, fishermen laze on boats smoking tobacco as they drag their nets farther into the river.

  Lambda doesn’t let us use the Solar Republic washers in the center of the camp anymore. Bastards think they have the right, since they are the same clan as the Reaper. Never mind that they’re as related to him as I am to bats that come out of the jungle at night to hunt for the camp’s mosquitoes.

  The Solar Republic ships don’t come much anymore without a full military escort, what with the Red Hand marauders running mad in the South. Those that do come drop the supplies in little parachute crates from the sky. And the soldiers who actually land in the camp now cradle weapons instead of candy.

  We see it on the HC news every day. Red Hand raids on helpless camps. Sons kidnapped, fathers killed, and the rest savaged. They claim they’re bringing justice to my clan, the Gammas, for being the pets of our former oppressors. In every camp they raid, they purge us like a strain of diseased rats.

  Ava believes the Republic will stop the Hand. That the Reaper will come with his howling legions and
smite the bastards right and good. Or somesuch. She’s always been a pretty fool. The Sovereign brought us out of the dirt and forgot us in the mud. The Reaper hasn’t even been to Mars in years. Got more to worry about than his own Color, it seems.

  Bitten ragged by the mosquitoes, I haul the basket up onto my head and make my way back to the camp. The pawing electricity of a coming storm fills the air. In the distance, across the green-stained savannah, huge thunderheads begin to bruise the sky purple and black. They’re forming fast.

  Heaps of trash hump the violent green landscape closer to the camp. Here and there range slim burner boys blackened dark with soot. They wear rags tied over their faces as they douse heaps of clothing and trash infected by the malaria outbreak with engine oil. The blazes choke the sky with cancerous black veins.

  My brother, Tiran, is out there amidst the stacks, face wrapped like the rest, squinting into a blaze for one token an hour. In the mine, all he wanted to be was a Helldiver. It’s all any of us wanted to be. I used to sneak downstairs late at night and don my father’s workboots and his helmet and sit at the dinner table with forks and spoons pinched between my fingers, acting as if I were running a clawDrill.

  But then my da fell into a pitviper nest and lost his legs. Soon after, Mum died and the rest of Da went with her. I used to think my world permanent. That clansmen and women would always tip their heads to my father, that my mother would always be there to wake me and give me a spot of syrup before school. But that life is gone. More miners are lured up every day by the promise of freedom. And in their wake, the mines are bought by big companies from big cities and manned by robots stamped with a silver heel. Just like ours was. They say we’re to receive a share soon as it makes a profit. We’ve yet to see so much as a half-credit chit.

  A throaty din rises from Assimilation Camp 121 as I enter its open gates. It’s a muck-soaked town of plastic, tin, and dog shit. Fifty thousand of us now in a place meant for twenty, with more coming every day. Gloomy squadrons of mosquitoes buzz low over the soup of the streets, searching for meat to suck. All the lads old enough for the Free Legions have gone to war. And those boys and girls who stay behind work shit jobs for food tokens so the old don’t starve. No child dreams of being a Helldiver anymore, because in this new world there are no Helldivers left.