Golden Son

by Pierce Brown

  The Academy smells of antiseptic and flowers. The rose petals sit in bins off to the side. Ducts above recycle our breaths and purify the air, making a steady hum. Fluorescents piss pale light down from the ceiling, as if to remind us that this is not a kind place for children or fantasies. The light, like the men and women here, is harsh and cold.

  Roque stays at my side as we walk, though his aspect is deathly. I tell him to get some sleep. He’s earned it.

  “And what have you earned?” he asks. “Not a day of sulking. Not a day of self-flagellation. Of all the lancers, you are second. Second! Brother, why not take pride in that?”

  “Not now, Roque.”

  “Come now,” he continues. “It’s not victory that makes a man. It’s his defeats. You think our ancestors never lost? You don’t need to huff and puff about this and make yourself one of those Greek clichés. Drop the hubris. It was just a game.”

  “You think I give a shit about the game?” I wheel on him. “People are dead.”

  “They chose lives of service to the fleet. They knew the danger and died for a cause.”

  “What cause?”

  “To keep our Society strong.”

  I stare at him. Could my friend, my kind friend, be so blind? What choice did these people have? They were conscripted. I shake my head. “You don’t understand a thing, do you?”

  “Of course I don’t understand. You never let anyone in. Not me. Not Sevro. Look how you treated Mustang. You drive friends away as though they were enemies.”

  If he only knew.

  I find the garden abandoned. It sits at the top of the Can, a large vestibule of glass, earth, and greenery designed as a retreat for fluorescent-weary soldiers. Stunted trees sway in a simulated breeze. I take off my shoes, peel off my socks, and sigh as the grass goes between my toes.

  Lamps above the trees make a false sun. I lay beneath them till, with a groan, I pull myself up toward the small hot spring that lies in the center of the glade. Bruises, most faded, stain my body like little ponds of blue and purple ringed with yellowing sands. The water soothes my aches. I’m thinner than I should be, but strung tight like piano wire. Were my arm not broken, I’d say I was healthier than at the Institute. Fighting on Academy bacon and eggs beats the shit out of the half-raw goat meat of that place.

  I find the haemanthus blossom by the side of the pool. It took life where no water laps. It is indigenous to Mars, like me, so I do not pick it. I buried Eo in a place like this. Buried her in the fake forest above Lykos mine, where I last made love to her. We were scrawny, innocent things then. How could such a frail girl as she have such a spirit, such a dream as freedom, when so many strong souls toiled and kept their heads down for fear of looking up?

  I shouted at Roque that I did not care about the defeat. Yet I do, and there’s guilt for caring about that when so many lives should demand all my sorrow. But before today, victory made me full, because with every victory, I’ve come closer to making Eo’s dream real. Now defeat has robbed me of me that. I failed her today.

  As if knowing my thoughts, my datapad tickles my arm. Augustus calls. I peel the hair-thin display off and close my eyes.

  His words echo in memory. “Even if you lose, even if you cannot take the victory for yourself, do not allow a Bellona triumph. Another fleet under their control will tip the scales of power.”

  So much for that. I float in the water, drifting in and out of sleep till my finger wrinkle and I grow bored. I am not meant for these quiet moments. I pull myself from the water to dress. I can’t keep Augustus waiting for long. Time to face the old lion. Then sleep, maybe. I’ll have to stand and watch the damn Victory for Karnus, but after that I’ll be away from this ugly place and headed back to Mars, and maybe Mustang.

  My clothes are gone, as is my razor.

  Then I sense them.

  I hear their military boots behind me. They breathe loudly from excitement. Four of them, I guess. I pick a stone from the ground. No. I turn and find seven blocking the one entrance into the garden. All Golds of House Bellona. All my blood enemies.

  Karnus comes with the Bellona, fresh from his ship. His face is haggard as mine, his shoulders maybe half again as broad. He towers over me—an Obsidian in every way but birth and mind. That laughing mouth of his grins with uncommon intelligence. He rubs a hand over his dimpled chin, muscled forearms looking like they’re carved from smoothed riverwood. There’s something terrifying about being in the presence of someone so large that you can feel the vibrations of their voice in your bones.

  “Looks like we caught the Augustus fish out of water. ’Lo, Reaper.”

  “Goliath,” I mutter, using his call sign.

  Goliath the breaker. Goliath the son killer. Goliath the savage. Mustang says he once broke the spine of a fancy Luneborn Gold over his knee after the brat thought to splash a drink in his face at a Pearl club. His mother then bribed the Judiciar to let him off with a fine.

  The list of fines he’s paid for murder stretches longer than my arm. Grays, Pinks, even a Violet. But his true reputation comes from killing Claudius au Augustus, the ArchGovernor’s favorite son and heir. Mustang’s brother.

  Karnus’s cousins orbit around him. All Bellona. All born under the blue and silver sigil of the conquering eagle. Brothers, sisters, cousins to Cassius. Their hair is curly and thick, faces all beauty. Their influence stretches across the Society. As does the reputation of their arms.

  One is much older than I, shorter but more powerfully built, like a tree stump with blond moss covering his head. He is a man in his thirties. Kellan, I remember now. A full Legate, a knight of the Society. And he came here with his brothers and cousins for me. Arrogance drips off that one. He feigns a yawn as he plays these schoolyard games.

  Fear thunders into my chest.

  I find it difficult to breathe. Yet I smile, fingers grazing the datapad’s com functions behind my back.

  “Seven Bellona,” I chuckle. “What need have you of seven, Karnus?”

  “You had seven ships against my one,” Karnus says. “I’ve come to continue our game.” He cocks his head. “Did you think it ended with your ship dying?”

  “The game is over,” I say. “You won.”

  “Did I win, Reaper?” Karnus asks.

  “At the cost of eight hundred and thirty-three people.”

  “Whining because you lost?” asks Cagney. She’s the smallest of his cousins, a twenty-something lancer to Karnus’s father. She’s the one cradling my razor, the one Mustang gave me. She swishes it through the air. “I think I’ll keep this. I don’t think I’ve even heard of you using it. Not that I judge. Razors are tricky. The perils of an uneducated upbringing, I fear.”

  “Go stick your fist up your cousin,” I sneer. “Must be a reason you curly-haired shits all look alike.”

  “Must we listen to him bark, Karnus?” Cagney whines.

  “I taught Julian to fish, Reaper,” Kellan, the Legate, says suddenly. “As a boy, he didn’t like it because he thought it hurt the fish too much. Thought it was cruel. That’s the boy your master had you kill. That is the measure of his cruelty. So how big do you feel? How brave do you fashion yourself?”

  “I did not want to kill him.”

  “Oh, but we want to kill you,” Karnus rumbles. He nods to his cousins. Two of the Bellona break branches off the trees and toss them to their kin. They have razors, but apparently, they want to take their time.

  “If you kill me, there will be consequences,” I say, touching my datapad behind my back. “This is not a sanctioned duel, and I am Peerless. I am protected by the Compact. This will be murder. The Olympic Knights will hunt you. Try you. Execute you.”

  “Who said anything of murder?” Karnus asks.

  “You belong to Cassius,” Cagney says. Her foxlike face splits with a smile.

  “Today, you are protected by Augustus,” Karnus says. “His chosen boy. To kill you would mean war. But no one goes to war over a little beating.”
r />   Cagney favors her left leg. Knee injury. A cousin of hers leans on his heels. Frightened of me. Big one, Karnus, squares up, meaning he doesn’t give a piss about whatever damage I can deal. Kellan smiles and stands relaxed. I hate those sort of men. Hard to judge. I calculate my chances. Then I remember my broken arm, my injured ribs, and the contusion over my eye, cut those chances in half.

  I’m scared. They cannot kill me, I cannot kill them. Not here. Not now. All of us know how this dance will end. But dance we do.

  Karnus snaps his fingers and they rush toward me all at once. I throw the stone into Cagney’s face. She goes down. I rush at Karnus, howling like a mad wolf, slipping past his first blow, and rage a flurry of strikes into his nerve centers, driving my elbow into his right bicep, rupturing tissue. He rocks back, and I press into him, using his bulk to shield me from the others and their sticks. I strip a stick away from one of the Bellona cousins, leveling her with an elbow to her temple. Then I turn, spinning the stick toward Karnus’s face. But it’s blocked. Something hits the back of my head. Wood shatters. Splinters dig into the scalp. I don’t stumble. Not until Karnus hits me so hard with his elbow in my face that a tooth pops out.

  They don’t take turns coming one by one. They surround me and they punish me with the efficiency of their deadly art, kravat. They aim for nerves, organs. I manage to stand, hit a few of my assailants. But I’m not long on my feet. Someone jams their stick into my spin, impacting the subcostal nerve. I drip down to the ground like melting wax and Karnus kicks me in the head.

  I bite through half my tongue.

  Warmth fills my mouth.

  The ground is the softest thing I feel.

  Choking on salt.

  Blood and air spray out of my mouth as Karnus puts his foot on my stomach, then throat. “In the words of Lorn au Arcos, if you must only wound the man, you better kill his pride.”

  I gurgle for breath.

  Cagney replaces Karnus, sitting on my chest, knees pinning down my arms. I suck down air. She smiles in my face and looks at my hairline, lips parted with excitement of dominating another person. She twists my hair into her grip. Her hot breath smells like spearmint. “What have we here?” she asks, pulling my datapad from its place on my arm. “Dammit. He hailed the Augustans. I’d rather not fight that Julii bitch without my armor.”

  “Then stop dawdling,” Karnus growls. “Do it.”

  “Shh,” she whispers as I try to speak, tracing a knife over my lips, pushing it into my mouth till the brittle metal clacks against my teeth. “That’s a good little bitch.”

  Roughly, she saws off my hair.

  “Nice and quiet. Good Reaper. Good.”

  Blood stings my eyes as Karnus shoves Cagney off my chest, grabs me and hoists me off the ground with his left hand. He flexes his right arm, cursing about his ruined bicep. He can’t pull it back to swing a punch, so instead he grins toothily at me and head-butts me once in the chest just at the sternum. My world rocks. There’s a crackle. The sound of twigs over a fire. I wheeze out bubbling, inhuman sounds. Karnus head-butts me again and tosses my aching body to the ground.

  I feel warmth splash over me and the smell of piss claw into my nostrils. They laugh and Karnus breathes into my ear.

  “Mother bid me to tell you: a pauper can never be a prince. Every time you look in the mirror, remember what we did to you. Remember you breathe because we let you. Remember your heart will one day be on our table. Rise so high, in mud you lie.”

  4

  Fallen

  I stand before my master, but he does not care.

  The office walls are of paneled wood, and on the floor lies an ancient rug his iron ancestor took from a palace of Earth after the fall of the Indian Empire, one of the last great nations to stand against Gold. What dread those natural-born humans must have felt to see the Conquerors falling from the sky. Man perfected, but bringing chains instead of hope.

  I stand in front of Augustus’s desk, a bare thing of wood and iron, just before the seven-hundred-year-old bloodstain where the final Indian emperor had his head parted from his body by a sleek Gold killer.

  Idly, Nero au Augustus strokes the lion that lies beside his desk. They look like twin statues. Behind them is space. A viewport peers into the blackness, where the ships of the Scepter Armada lie like giant golems in terrible slumber. We pass them on the last leg of our three-week voyage from Mars.

  Augustus peers at his desk as a stream of data runs over the wood.

  It seems so long ago that he took me on a tour of Mars to show me our domains—from the latfundias where highReds toil over crops to the great polar reaches where Obsidians live in medieval isolation. He favored me then, bringing me close, teaching me the things his father taught him. I was his favorite, second only to Leto. Now he is a stranger, and I, an embarrassment.

  It’s been two months since the day Karnus beat me at the Academy. Though my hair has grown back and my broken bones have mended, my reputation has not. And because of that, my tenure in ArchGovernor Augustus’s employ is tenuous, at best. My enemies grow by the day. But these new ones prefer whispers to razors.

  More and more do I believe the Sons of Ares chose the wrong man. I am not made for the cold war of politics. Not made for subtlety. Hell, I’d hide a boy in the gut of a horse any day, but I wouldn’t know how to bribe someone properly if my life depended on it.

  A gentle, warm voice made for half-truths drifts through the ArchGovernor’s office. “Three refineries. Two nightclubs. And two Gray police outposts. All bombed since we left Mars. Seven attacks, my liege. Fifty-nine Gold fatalities.”

  Pliny. Slender as a salamander, with skin as smooth as a Pink’s. The Politico is no Peerless Scarred, never even went to the Institute. His glittering eyes peer out from eyelashes that would put peacock plumage to shame. Muted lipstick coats thin lips. His hair is coiled and scented. His body thin, but muscular in a pleasing but utterly fascile way beneath a too-tight embroidered silk tunic. A child could beat the living hell out of this beautiful kitten of a man. Yet he’s ended families with a rumor here, a joke there. His power is a different breed. Where I am kinetic energy, he is potential.

  I’ve heard he’s also responsible for ruining my reputation. Tactus even hinted that Pliny might have put Karnus up to the violence in the garden, or at the very least, arranged a holoCam to record my proud moment.

  Beside Pliny stands the fourth man in the room, Leto. He’s a bright lancer ten years my senior with braided hair and a half-moon grin. He’s also a poet with the razor, a younger Lorn au Arcos, according to some. It’s likely he’ll inherit Augustus’s estate instead of the ArchGovernor’s blood heirs—Mustang and the Jackal. I rather like the man.

  “The Sons of Ares grow too bold,” Augustus mutters.

  “Yes, my liege.” Pliny squints. “If it is indeed they who perpetrate the acts.”

  “What other ant bites us?”

  “None, that we know of. But there are spiders, ticks, rats in the worlds. The bombings are crude for Ares, indiscriminate, uncharacteristically violent. Discontiguous from the pattern of technological sabotage and propaganda in his profile. Ares is not capricious, so I struggle believing these acts originate from him.”

  Augustus frowns. “Then what do you suggest?”

  “Perhaps there is another terrorist group, my liege. With eighteen billion souls on the census, I hardly think one man has a monopoly on terrorism. Perhaps even a criminal syndicate. I’ve been creating a database I can share.…”

  Pliny is right. The terror attacks that have plagued Mars and other planets make little sense. Dancer spoke of justice, not revenge. These attacks are petty and gruesome—the bombing of barracks, fashion outlets, bazaars, highColor coffee shops and restaurants. Ares would never condone them. They draw too many eyes for too little result, daring the Golds to act, to crush the Sons.

  I’ve sent messages to Dancer via the holoBox. Nothing. Just silence. Could he be dead? Or has Ares abandoned me for this
new strategy of bombing?

  Pliny yawns. “Perhaps Ares has changed his tactics. He’s a deuced one.”

  “If Ares is a man,” Leto says.

  “Interesting.” Augustus swivels abruptly. “What makes you think Ares isn’t a man?”

  “Why do we assume he’s a man? He could be a woman. Could be a group of individuals for all we know, which would go a long way toward explaining the discordant nature of these new attacks.” Leto turns to me, eyes inclusive. “Darrow, what do you think?”

  “Don’t befuddle Darrow with complex questions!” Pliny crows defensively. “Make it a yes or no so he can understand.” Pliny flashes me the most pitying of smiles and squeezes my shoulder in sympathy. “Behind his lepid smiles, he’s an honest, simple beast. You should know that.”

  I stand there and take it.

  He turns away. “In any manner, Leto, you’re forgetting we designed Red culture to be highly patriarchal. Their identity as a people centers around the collection of resources to propagate the embryonic terraforming of Mars. Physically strenuous, grueling tasks performed by men. Tasks we don’t let their women perform, even if they are capable, pursuant to the Stratification Protocol. So, you see, it can’t be a woman, because no roughneck Ruster would follow a man or a woman who has never ridden a clawDrill.”

  Leto smiles cleverly. “If Ares is a Red.”

  Pliny and Augustus both laugh. “Maybe he’s a deranged Violet who’s taken his acting to a new stage,” Pliny offers.

  “Or a Copper cambist beleaguered by filing provincial tax returns,” Leto adds.

  “No! An Obsidian who, dare I say, has finally forsaken his terror of technology and developed the skills to use a holoCamera?” Pliny slaps his leg. “I’d give away one of my Roses just to see—”

  “My goodmen. Enough.” Augustus cuts him off, tapping his finger on the desk. Pliny and Leto share a grin and turn back to Augustus. “Your recommendation, Pliny?”