Iron Gold

by Pierce Brown

  What will they do then?

  Not more than three steps behind the breakfasting guards, I stand in the doorway, a rippling translucent shadow in the ghostCloak. From inside the cloak, the guards are distorted like a child’s crayon rendering. For them it’s another tedious day of gloom in a six-month shift. They’re counting down the hours till they can spend their mandatory thirty minutes in the UV beds to get their vitamin D, and smoke burners in the common room and watch porn experientials on their holoVisors. A thick Gray man with a bulldog neck sniffs the air. He’s in a black uniform, a member of their tactical response squad. He should be a lurcher, but we couldn’t spare specialists down here. They’re needed on the front lines.

  He grunts. “Does it smell like wet dog in here?”

  “Warden’s pooch don’t leave the roost no more.”

  “Someone oughta shoot that poor little shit, out of mercy. It smells like it’s inside out.”

  One of the guards looks appraisingly at the contents of his bowl. “Smells like rotten algae to me.”

  The man in the black sniffs the air again. “It’s definitely dog.”

  “Sorry. That’s just me,” Sevro says. The guard turns in his seat, tracking the sound to the door, where the casual eye might think us a fault in his vision or a premonition of a migraine, but his fixed gaze sees us for what we are. His cracked lips part no wider than a finger’s width when two spider rounds hit him in the neck.

  A barrage of puffs and a dozen rounds punch into the flesh of half a dozen men as they try to stand from their chairs. They tremble on the ground as the paralytic agent spreads through their bodies. We deactivate our ghostCloaks and take over the section station, piling the men in a corner. They’ll have a devil’s headache this time tomorrow and might lose their sight for a few days, but they’ll survive. “Six–three,” Sevro says to me. Pebble and Alexandar set up to receive guests if an alarm is raised. The rest of us press into the Omega Level.

  The lion’s share of the prison’s general population is housed in levels high above this one. They have communal cells and labor in crews every day from six A.M. to six P.M., hand-sorting the refuse sucked in by the umbilical tubes for recycling or incineration. There’s sanity in an honest day’s work. I would know.

  But here on the Omega Level, those who were sentenced by the Republic courts for crimes against humanity languish in solitary confinement, never to see another face. Never to hear another voice. Or feel anything but the touch of the cold metal. They are given water and an algae protein gel through a tube in the wall and allowed to exercise in the common area for fifteen minutes every other day. But when they exercise, they do so alone. No prisoners with which to share their burdens. Just an echoing mausoleum of cold, faceless cell doors without window or crack or key. I’ve heard that the guards will sometimes play a holo for them in the center of the floor, but if they do, it is triumphant moments of the Republic.

  The Republic might be above murdering its prisoners, but its morality is not without teeth. It wasn’t what Mustang had in mind when she abolished the death penalty, but Publius cu Caraval has blocked every resolution for prison reform for the past six years. Some say it’s because he’s beholden to campaign contributors. My suspicion is that he lost more to Gold than he lets on. For my part, I agree with him. These men and women chose to put themselves above their fellow men. So let them now be separate. Forever.

  Most of my enemies lie in the ground. The rest I put here. Boneriders fill some of these cells. The Jackal’s own. I only wish we’d been able to throw Lilath in this pit instead of giving her the easy way out by shooting down her destroyer till it crashed into Luna’s surface. In coming down here to free one of them, I wonder if I am becoming the traitor that the newsreels say I am.

  We pause outside a cell door. “Is everyone going to behave themselves?”

  “Are you, bossman?” Clown asks. “You almost cut off his head last time.”

  “Almost,” I say. The sight of the Gold in the dark hall on that Luna night, his bare face covered in Howler blood, has not left me. Sometimes I wake from sleep thinking he’s outside my door, waiting to come in. Waiting to kill my family. “Sevro…are you going to be civil?”

  He shrugs.

  “Good enough.”

  I disengage the lock. The door whines and the blue light encircling the handle goes dark. Steeling myself, I crank the handle and haul back the door, stepping out of the way of my men with their raised rifles. We’re hit with the smell of algae and feces. The cell is a dank concrete box. Empty but for a toilet, a plastic sleeping pallet, and a shirtless, gaunt man. He faces away from us, asleep. His spine like a fossil in dust through sun-starved skin. Greasy white hair spills off the side of the pallet. He turns to look at us with black eyes sunk deep in a tattooed face. I take an involuntary step back, seeing my time with the Jackal in the man’s body.

  “What the hell? That’s an Obsidian,” Sevro says.

  “Winkle, the package is missing,” I say. “Are you certain he is in cell O-2983?”

  “Positive. I’m looking at the roster now. He’s stated as present in his cell. No medical intake info or labor duty. This is bad, bad, bad, bad.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Then who the hell is this?” Sevro asks. The prisoner stands very slowly. He’s no giant like Sefi. He stands barely six and a half feet and is as thin as Alexandar. He’s past fifty, with a deeply receding hairline, a filthy beard, and more tattoo ink than I’ve ever seen on a man.

  He watches us with intelligent, curious eyes. Not holding himself like a warrior, but as if he were a sinister mathematician studying string theory on a holoboard. A set of tattoo spirit eyes stare at me when he blinks. The only men who wear that ink are shaman of the Ice. And most of them are women.

  Sevro steps toward the Obsidian, gun raised. “Who the hell are you? Answer, shithead.”

  The Obsidian smiles with his eyes, looks at the gun, then to Sevro’s mask, back to the gun, then gestures to his mouth with a single finger. He opens it wide. Sevro shines a light inside. “Gross.” He steps back. “Someone cut off his tongue.” And that’s not all they took. What I first took for a receding hairline I see now is a half-completed scalping. It makes the front of his head look indented, like the bottom of an egg.

  “His hands…” Thraxa says.

  “Let’s see your hands,” I say.

  He cooperates without protest. Embedded in the back of the knotted hands are the crescents of the Obsidian caste. Black. Not the bleached white of a prisoner. “You’re not a prisoner.” He finds my eyes, even through my opaque helmet, wags one finger and then sketches a shield over his heart. “Guard?” He points a finger at me. Yes.

  “You get lost?” Sevro asks.

  The Obsidian thinks, then makes a fist and pounds it into the small of his back, like he’s being stabbed. I watch him with greater interest. Why was a guard stabbed in the back?

  “The prisoner 1126. Did he do this to you?” Thraxa asks. The man wags a finger no. “Do you know where he is?” No.

  “Winkle, can you track 1126’s implant or collar?” I ask, turning back to my task.

  “No. It’s not on the system.”

  “What do you mean it’s not on the system? He can’t have left the damn station. He’s a prisoner of the state. He’s on code black, no transfer. No one in history has escaped from Deepgrave.”

  “Your dad did,” Clown says to Sevro.

  “That wasn’t exactly an escape,” Sevro mutters under his breath. “I swear to the Vale, if that slimy shit has been out in the worlds all this time…”

  “Do we really need him in particular?” Clown asks. “We got our pick of sociopaths.”

  “Boss…” Thraxa says.

  “We’ll have to take a look around,” I say. “We need to find him.”

  “There’s two hundred guards here,” Sevro says. “Can’t sneak around not knowing where we’re going. If the alarm goes, shit will get mortal, fast.”
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  “Boss…” Thraxa says.

  “I know it’s not ideal—” I say.

  “Not ideal?” Clown interrupts. “The alarm goes, the subs will know we’re here and we’ll never get back to the trawler.”

  Underneath my scarabSkin, my son’s key dangles from its chain, cool and heavy. I didn’t leave him to tuck tail and run at the first sign of friction.

  “Do you want to leave empty-handed?” I ask, my tone even, but the implication lacerating. They shake their heads.

  “Boss!” Thraxa shoves me hard from the side, almost knocking me down.

  “What?”

  She jerks her head to the Obsidian. “I think he knows how to find 1126.”

  WE LEAVE THE OMEGA detention block behind and follow the Obsidian guard, now wearing an ill-fitting uniform he pulled off one of the subdued Grays. The pants come only to his lower calf, leaving exposed a strip of runic blue tattoos and pale skin. The jacket is a better fit. I’m wary of the man, despite his claim of being a guard. He was in that cell for a reason. Still, he’s our best option here.

  Tight behind him, our heavily armed pack ascends up exposed switchbacked stairwells with precipitous drops to either side. Beyond the stairwell is a dingy coliseum where the central processing facility sprawls. Prisoners toil at conveyor belts, sorting the trash from the seafloor. Guards patrol through their ranks with stun batons. High above this, hanging in clusters from the ceiling like the rusted eggs of some giant metallic spider race, are the cellblocks.

  On a newer level, we glide over metal floors buffed smooth as glass. We pass myopic cameras and closed doors and the echoing coughing of prison guards abed in their barracks. The sound of a morning news program from Old Tokyo drifts through the halls. I miss a step when I hear my wife’s voice. Just the holos.

  We snuff out somnolent guards without breaking pace. The Reds and Grays don’t stand much of a chance, but the rare Obsidian guard is taken down with extreme caution. Some can fight for a minute with three rounds of spider venom in their veins. In passing, I muse how it would be easier to kill them, but then shudder afterward at my own reptilian coldness. These are my people.

  The guard certainly has no qualms as we lay waste to his colleagues.

  What did he do to end up tongueless and imprisoned? Something either very good or very bad.

  True to his word, the Obsidian leads us to the warden’s quarters. The door is locked from the inside, beyond Winkle’s control. Sevro kneels to melt through the lock with a plasma charge. As he lays out the components to his charge, the Obsidian sighs impatiently, steps past him, knocks on the door, then steps back. Inside, a dog begins to bark.

  “Shut up!” Someone on the other side of the door screams in vain at the dog. There’s a thump and a yelp. The barking stops. Behind me, Thraxa grunts. I look at the Obsidian and he motions for me to wait. Metal unlatches and the door pivots backward into the room, leaving me standing sternum to nose with a cadaverous, gecko-eyed Copper with a long-slack mouth, a cup of coffee in one hand, and the bunched folds of his black and gold silk robe clutched closed at his waist with the other. Sevro grumbles and disarms the plasma charge.

  Staring at the asp-black sternum of my scarabSkin, the warden gibbers something unintelligible. His mug shatters on the metal floor and spatters coffee over his bare calves and the festive brocade of the Venusian rug that he now backs onto. I jab two rigid fingers into his right brachial plexus and then his femoral nerve to stop him from running. He stumbles back from the nerve strikes and I bend to fit under the door and follow him into the room.

  A dog, some kind of terrier, barks and growls at our approach, backing away and leaving a trail of urine across the floor. Following my team in, the Obsidian walks toward the dog, crouches down, and holds out his hand. The dog approaches with its tail between its legs. When the man makes a whistling sound, the dog spurts timidly forward to lick his bony hand.

  “Warden Videli cu Yancra, I presume?” My helmet’s speakers distort my voice to a gravelly rumble. The door clicks shut behind my men.

  “Yes…” he says, shaking from the pain of my light assault. But he’s not a stupid man. He looks up with quick, adaptable eyes at our combat gear, at the Obsidian, where his eyes linger in fear and confusion before returning to me. “Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

  “We’re wearing masks for a reason, dumbass,” Sevro says. He walks behind the warden and pulls out a chair for the man. “Sit. Hands where we can see them, my goodman.” The warden fumbles to find a chair and sits down. Sevro takes a seat behind him on the edge of the table and puts a hand on his shoulder.

  I sit across from the warden and pour him a glass of water from a decanter as Thraxa spins her hammer at the door and Alexandar waltzes about the room thumbing the warden’s possessions with a practiced eye. The warden looks to his bedside several times. The Obsidian fetches the warden’s datapad and gives it to Sevro.

  “Your men aren’t coming, pleb,” I say. “And lucky they are for that.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Surely you haven’t forgotten how to speak to your masters.” Sevro slaps him hard on the ear. “You will address us as dominus, you quivering whelp.”

  The warden looks over at the Obsidian, then back to me. I’m not sure who he is more afraid of. “I can help you, dominus. It would be my honor. Just tell me how.”

  “You have a man in your charge. Prisoner 1126. He is not in his cell, even though his collar places him there. If the prisoner had been there, cuprum, we would be gone from this place and you would still be lord of your little fiefdom. But he is gone, and so I am here wondering whether to make your crown out of your toes or your fingers.” I lean forward. “Where is prisoner 1126?”

  He pales at the mention of his charge.

  “He’s dead. He died a year ago. Took his own life by starvation.”

  Sevro and I look at the Obsidian. He shakes his head.

  “You trust him?” the warden says. “Him?”

  “Seems you’re the one who took his tongue,” I say. The Obsidian points at me. “So yes. Did he see something you didn’t want him to see? Say something you didn’t want him to say?”

  “No, he—”

  “Liar, liar, prick on fire,” Sevro says into his ear, and lowers his multiRifle to rest on the warden’s groin.

  “Prisoner 1126 is dead!”

  “My goodman, if he had died, then you would have simply entered it into your logs and his cell would be filled with another deviant. So, pray tell, why was his beacon there?” I pat his leg. “I’ll answer for you. It was there in case you were visited by Republic inspectors. It was there to cover up your graft.”

  “No,” the warden says sharply. “I would never…”

  “Be able to afford a carpet like this on a warden’s salary?” Alexandar asks. He toes the carpet. “Venusian silk. Dyed with crustacean extract. Really ties the room together. Perilously fine taste, my goodman.”

  “What’s the price on something like that?” Sevro asks.

  “At least forty thousand credits,” Alexandar answers.

  Sevro coughs. “No shit?” He takes the pot of coffee on the warden’s table and dumps the coffee inside on the carpet. If the man is angered, he hides it well. “Oops.”

  “Warden, warden, make it stop,” Alexandar moans.

  “A little cuprum weasel like you might fancy yourself a special sort of conniving,” I say. “An entrepreneur harvesting an inefficiency in the system. What a waste it must seem to have Aureate sons and daughters locked in little metal coffins, with all their hidden bank accounts and vaults languishing out there in the worlds. What a waste that someone should not profit.”

  The warden looks up at me tactically, searching for some angle. He will see a giant in black armor and stare at a reflection of himself in the pitiless, insectoid eyes of the helmet. Submission is his only option, and it wounds his pride. It’s no backwater bumbler who finds himself warden of Deepgrave. This is a h
igh post.

  “Prisoner 1126 paid you to leave solitary, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” the warden says smoothly. “He made improved arrangements for his incarceration. The Omega Block is…”

  “A dungeon,” Thraxa says.

  “…taxing on the psyche. But he is still here.”

  “Your testicles thank you for that,” Sevro says, nudging his gun deeper into the man’s groin. The warden flinches. “Ya hara,” Sevro coos—Venusian argot for “poor thing.” “Does that hurt?” he adds. The theater is for the warden so there is no doubt in his mind that we are from Venus. That it was Society operatives who broke out one of Deepgrave’s most hated charges. At the very least, I hope it throws a wrench into the peace talks. Mustang may puzzle it out, but if it gets back to the Ash Lord, he can’t know I was here.

  “I wonder, what if we were to report your graft to the noble Republic after our departure?” I ask the warden. “No matter how clever your Copper accounting, your actions will be discovered. Your trial will be a public farce, to set an example of how their Republic is intolerant of corruption.” Sevro snorts at that. “To proclaim the circularity of justice, you will be sent here to serve your sentence.”

  “How long do you think you will last on the other side of the bars, pennyfingers?” Sevro asks. “How will you sleep, how will you shower, how will you eat knowing the monsters you once lorded over are now watching, waiting?”

  I lean forward, allowing his imagination to work its worst magic. His composure falters for a moment and I see my chance: “When they come for you in your cell, I want you to think back on this day when I sat here before you and I want you to wonder if there was not something you could do to erase it all.” I lean forward. “Because, warden, I’m here to tell you that there is something you can do.”

  His eyes light up. “Name it, dominus.”

  “Take us to prisoner 1126, and then, when we escape, carry on with your life. Do not report the escape or our presence here to the Republic. Do this, and it will be our little secret. What do you say?”

  “I’d say yes if I were you, goodman,” Alexandar says, leaning back in a divan. “A life as an Obsidian’s pet is no life at all.” As if on cue, the old Obsidian bends to pet the dog again. I’m beginning to like the skinny man.