by Pierce Brown
“Rise, children of Gold, warriors of Earth, and take with you your ancestors’ might.”
A chill spreads through me as one hundred thousand legionnaires from the Grimmus lands of Africa and the Americas come to their feet. Not a man or woman amongst them has seen their home in over five years. They do not know when they will see Earth again. But they know their path home goes through the Free Legions.
Kalindora moans as Ajax activates his gravBoots and articulates himself into the air. “Here he goes again.”
In his storm armor, with its thunderhead shoulders, Ajax looks like Jupiter reborn with snowy teeth and inky skin. He bathes in the roars of his men as can only a man who thinks himself entitled to worship, yet earned it anyway.
Beside me, I see envy creep over Seraphina’s face.
I feel the human flaw in myself, but I resist its dark waters, and allow myself to bathe in my friend’s risen stature.
He is young wrath manifest.
“My brothers! My sisters! My Iron Leopards! The battle today is to decide the fate of our Society. Whether we cave to the tide of anarchy, the despoiling mob!” He points his arm. “Or whether we carve our own destiny and build a second Age of Order upon the bodies of the slave horde. We have shattered their fleet! But soon more ships will come from their infernal, restless factories to rescue the Slave King and his horde. When they come, what will they find?”
“Ash,” the legion booms.
The skin on Seraphina’s neck prickles with goosebumps.
“Sevro au Barca, Orion xe Aquarii, Cadus Harnassus, Thraxa au Telemanus, Alexandar au Arcos, Felix au Daan, Colloway xe Char, Darrow of Lykos!” Kalindora fingers the flame-etched hilt of her razor. “These are wanted lives! Bring them to me! Bring them to me! Bring them to me!”
The legions roar and Ajax’s dark face splits into a death’s-head smile.
A golem of a Gold man takes over. He sighs his simian shoulders back and stomps before the cadres of elite Gold knights, smiling like a bulldog chewing a hornet.
“We are Legio X Pardus! We are the vanguard! Ours is a place of honor! Ante mortem!” he bellows to the Golds.
“Gloria!” they roar.
He wheels on the Grays. “Ante mortem!”
“Gloria!”
He turns to the Obsidians. “Ante mortem!”
“GLORIA!”
Ajax lands beside the golem. With the man at his hip, he sways over to his clustering officers. They are a crusty, tight-knit breed. Seraphina and I are total outsiders. Kalindora conditionally so. They give us no room near the front, except for Kalindora. She declines and stays at my side.
“You all know our objective. We’re to lend rear-guard support to the Votum as they press for Tyche from the east. I’m here to tell you that’s all bullshit. Scorpio can fuck off to Tyche on his own.” Through armored shoulders, I see Ajax grin. “We’re going to take Heliopolis, my goodmen.”
There are murmurs of excitement. But not from me. Instead I feel a sinking disappointment. Scorpio au Votum was right. Atalantia does want his planet. Or parts of it. Seraphina glances my way with a sneer.
“So this is how Atalantia treats her allies.”
“Heliopolis is their lone fallback bastion in the south. We take it, they’re trapped in the desert.” And Atalantia gets the coveted factories and the mines of the south. “Now, the Yellows are squawking about weather, but it’s Mercury, and our timetable is set in stone. So it may get choppy. Any questions?”
Kalindora raises her voice. “Atalantia promised Scorpio—”
“When Atalantia has Heliopolis, she won’t need to promise Scorpio anything,” Ajax says. “Since you are sworn to her, you should welcome that future, Love Knight.”
Kalindora stares gloomily ahead.
Meanwhile the monstrous man beside Ajax glares over at me through slitted eyes. “Who the fuck are you?” Three of his front teeth are missing. That is the least of the cosmetic damage. “That’s expensive armor for a Pixie wastrel.”
“Olympic Knight business,” Kalindora replies.
The big man wheels on Seraphina. “Who the fuck is she?”
“Olympic Knight business, Seneca,” Kalindora says.
He does not look like a Seneca. He looks like a human boar. He winks at Kalindora. “Oy, Love. Figure Reaper will be anything but atoms before we get down there?”
“To avoid you, Seneca, I believe he just might.”
The beast chuckles and Ajax returns to his brief.
“Seneca au Cern, Ajax’s Dux,” Kalindora whispers after I quietly inquire about the man. His right hand of authority, then. Probably started as a bodyguard. They often do.“Unremarkable, except when he goes Blood Red.” The term is unfamiliar. “Radio code for a Red suicide wave.” She looks back to Ajax. “It’s really not like anything you’ve ever seen.”
Ajax concludes his brief. “To your shells, goodmen. We have termites to kill.”
As Ajax and I walk to the starShell ladders with Kalindora shadowing from behind, he glances at her in irritation, then clasps my shoulder.
“This is what you’ve been missing, little brother. The greatest show ever staged. But you look like you’re about to fall asleep. Not nervous, are you?” He leans forward. “Or are you already in that Brain’s Hole?”
“The Mind’s Eye,” I correct. He knows what it’s called. “And no, not yet.”
He laughs. “Stick close down there. If we get separated, try to link up. If you hear wolves, find me. It’s no jest. Only a legion accompanying the Slave King is permitted the howl. If you hear it, he’s coming. I’ve seen that man carve through a platoon of Ash Guard like a shark through tuna. You’ll want me there.”
“Will he be in Heliopolis?”
“No,” he says in disappointment. “But fate is not without a sense of humor. Where the din of battle is the loudest, he will come. And today I plan on making such noise.” He steps close to me. “We will avenge our family together, then sort the rest of this shit out. Hear?”
“Thank you,” I say. “For letting me—”
He smacks my head. “You’re not forgiven yet, Pixie. But what you do today will make them forget all the rest. Let’s have you return properly.” He puts his head to mine, as we did as children before walking the Line. “The blood of giants fills our veins: honor the valiant dead with your deeds.”
“Honor the living with your might,” I recite.
He departs.
Seraphina stands at the foot of her own ladder, eclipsed by her Grimmus-painted starShell. Techs mill around its feet making last-minute adjustments. She spits on the death’s-head sigil and examines the traction claws on the starShell.
“Good fortune down there,” I say to her.
She checks the hydraulics in the knees. “Keep your fortune. Every scar I have earned has led me here. This war is my destiny.” She turns. “Cheer up, gahja. The courage of a soldier is heightened by her knowledge of her profession.” She looks me up and down. “Go do your duty.”
I suspected it before, but I feel it now as I see the excitement on her face as she turns back to the war machine.
She didn’t betray her father because she loves her mother. There was another, hidden reason, which was the source of the guilt I saw in her eyes as she watched Romulus walk to his death. It is the source of the anger she feels toward him, toward me. Anger that should be for herself, because deep down she knows that it wasn’t loyalty to the Rim or her mother that incited her to ferry evidence of Darrow’s crimes against the Rim back to the council.
It was her hunger for war.
Now, after weeks of starvation, she is about to be fed.
THE FEAR KNIGHT IS a sadist.
Unlike the vain Golds of the Core, he appreciates guerrilla warfare and its effect on armies. Though I met him only once in my days of service
to Nero, I saw enough in him to know he put no stock in glory. When I squeezed his hand, eager to impress my strength on what then would have been a superior of stratospheric heights, he let his go limp. It embarrassed me. Little did I know then that the wan, plain-dressed man would someday skin, melt, castrate, rape, blind, and mutilate my legionnaires by the thousands.
Atlas’s reputation was meager before the start of the Solar War. He was known primarily for three things: His patronage of the Great Library of Delphi. His inglorious position as a ward of the Sovereign. And his abrupt disappearance, one that was clarified when he returned after the fall of Earth from nearly a decade of banishment fighting threats at the edge of the system.
Born after the failed First Moon Lord’s Rebellion, he was raised on Io with his more famous brother, Romulus. When he turned ten, his parents said their farewells and sent him to Luna to live in the court of the Sovereign as yet another noble hostage to ensure the Rim’s obedience.
Amongst the Core Golds he was privileged and educated, yet derided for being the spawn of a traitor. It was there he met Atalantia, and there that Octavia made him an extension of her will, turning him against his traitor family and planting the seeds that would make him into the man behind the Pale Mask. Of all my enemies, I loathe him the most.
We stand before his newest forest of corpses.
Bodies hang impaled on vertical poles. There are more than two hundred. Each with the Fear brand on their bare chests—a fleshy wound in the shape of a child’s face ringed with hair of serpents.
A grisly promenade strewn with Republic flags leads through the impaled bodies to Angelia. The white fabric of the flags is tattered and fouled with boot prints and blood. It will be booby-trapped.
I look at the bodies, at their faces. This is why I left Luna. Those glossy peacocks in the Senate read our reports. But the further you are away from it, the more war reads like arithmetic, and past that it reads like fiction, past that it’s just an annoying video on your info stream. How could they possibly imagine the anguish on the faces of the dead? How could the mob in the street demanding handouts ever know on a sensory level that when a human rots, it isn’t just the skin that stinks, but the intestines, the stomach, the liver?
How could they know that weird tremble of the soul when you realize there is no civilization? There’s just a lock on a box. And inside the box is this. Virginia wanted me to reason with the senators. What common language would we speak, I wonder, when they have not seen inside the box and I am its lock?
It drives me fucking mad that they refuse to understand how sick and dogged and obsessed with our destruction our enemies are. Yet they live in a fantasy built on the bodies of my friends.
The chatter of the carrion birds serrates the air, along with the cries of the dying. Of the impaled soldiers, many still live, writhing like worms on a hook. Our four Obsidians stare up at the bodies and make a sign to their gods.
The horror reaches deepest into the heart of Alexandar and pulls him forward. “Arcos, heels down,” I bark.
He stops but turns to me, face ghostly vacant. “They are still alive…”
“And they’re all booby-trapped,” I say, though he knows it. Rhonna swallows as she watches Alexandar blink at the result of his error. Fall asleep in the Ladon, you wake up to this.
I walk up to him. “We all carry weight. I need you to carry this. Can you?”
The eyes of his grandfather blink back at me as the impaled cry for help. “Yes, sir.”
“Goodman.”
I turn back to the Howlers. They stand in a ragged line. Colloway brings the Necromancer in for fire support. “It’s theatrics. He’s buying time to distract us from his objective,” I tell them. “We can’t help them. Go to air. Packs of three. Use your thermals and sensors to scan for traps. Walk fast but soft. And for Jove’s sake keep your chrome in. I need your eyes.”
I designate the teams to search potential targets. Dust billows as nearly two score of Howlers jolt upward over their writhing comrades to disperse through the city.
I wait behind with Thraxa and Felix. I raise my voice so the impaled can hear me.
“How many of you saw Gorgons around your feet? Raise your right hand.” A sea of right hands. Some lie and keep theirs down. Could be a false positive. Atlas might have booby-trapped none of them. Or all of them. “You may be booby-trapped,” I say. “Medships are on the way. Hold out for them, and soon it’ll be six weeks of pretty medici and ice frizeé. We’ll be back.”
I cast a dour look to Thraxa and Felix and we lift off for the city’s communications center. I shoot a hole in the bronze dome with my pulseFist, scan, and drop through to the marble floor.
As sunlight washes in through the open door, we see them. Bodies strewn on the floor. Ripped apart and chewed up. Heads caved in with all manner of improvised weapons. Bodies chewed upon as if by animals. Atlas didn’t do this. They butchered one another. The features of the dead are mottled and monstrously warped by some pathogen.
Gods, what did Atalantia’s warlocks cook up now?
They were collaborator civilians we relocated to Angelia, far from any military facility. Put them out of harm’s way, I said. If Sevro had been there, he would have laughed. “Where do you put a chickenshit officer if you need him to expire?” he once asked me. “Out of harm’s way!”
Pax was out of harm’s way too.
“You ever seen anything like this?” I ask Thraxa.
She shakes her head. “Maybe he was testing a new bioweapon.”
“There are easier ways.” I bark at my medici to take a sample and evac to Necromancer for transmission. Central Command needs to know. I start to laugh as I realize the game. “It’s all to buy time. Puzzles and pain.” I look around. The facts don’t add up. What is he buying time for? We could get an airdrop and catch up to him, so it wasn’t to extend his lead. Eleusis was ripe for the picking. How does this side trip change the board? Thunder peels to the north. My storm is slowly forming.
“Howler One,” Alexandar says in my ear com. “We’ve got something at the ore refinery.”
* * *
—
Alexandar, Rhonna, and several Howlers are gathered in the control room of the city’s ore refinery when Thraxa and I join them. Disabled spidermines and microwave bombs lie on a table.
Marbles, our Green slicer, and Clown’s best friend, is jacked into the central computer’s input port. A worn black hardwire runs from the computer’s port to a small port on his right temple. His eyes roll back in his head as he travels through a virtual landscape. His fingers tap on the plastic chair. After a moment, he sighs. His dry lips smack together and he reverts.
“Sumn nastyfoul darkpart,” he says in staccato silicon slang, skipping past the words that make sentences intelligible to us carbon bodies so that it sounds like his mouth is full of marbles. “Rickety roads, slipped package uranium dense, destinations easy as 01100001 01100010 01100011.” He stutters the numbers out like a garment needle.
“Alexandar, translate.”
Quick with low and mid tongues, Alexandar steps forward.
“No,” Marbles says, holding up a bony finger. The dark circles under his eyes war with his sunburn. “I do this time. See, boss, like this. Angelia dustyass worktown. Systems all in a web, redundancy protocol to keep hard grip. We cut web in Rain. Didn’t cut shadow web.”
“There are latent systems?” Alexandar asks, first to understand. “Old hardlines?”
“Hardlines.” Thraxa looks amused. “What dullard missed—”
“Quiet,” I snap. “Marbles, you telling me the mining cities are still connected?”
“Only some. Old system. Someone slagged it good, missed shadow somehow. Stupid analog, mostlike. Hardlines under the pan.”
“So he sent a command to other mining cities via this console,” I clarify.
“Yah.”
“What did he send?” Thraxa asks.
“Nulls. Dunno. Mad encryption. Got slicers with Gorgons, right? Slick pricks.” He taps his head. “Give this silicon a week, plus three clicks for sleep, and I got your answer.”
There is only one message worth sending to the other cities. My gut sinks. Rhonna pieces it together. “Could they send signals to the other reactors?”
“Give me diagnostics on the mine’s reactor,” Thraxa says. Marbles turns to the computer just as I jerk the hardwire away from him. As soon as he checked the reactor, I’ve no doubt a neurological attack would fry his brain to jelly. Trap after trap after trap.
“He’s going to overload this reactor and any connected by hardwire,” I explain, and head for the door. “It’s going thermal.” Angelia doesn’t matter, but the cities it’s hardwired to will. Those reactors are what fuel our shield chain. I open my general frequency. “All Howlers, evacuate the city. Buddy flights if you don’t got boots. Colloway, bring the Necro for air hook.”
By the time I make it out the door of the refinery, half the Howlers are already airborne. Those with gravBoots lock the magnetic buddy belts around their waists to the Howlers without them. They take off. Rhonna and Thraxa are the last pair away. Alexandar waits for me. I turn around so he can link the metal coupling at his waist to the one at my tailbone. The magnets snap together. He wraps his arms around my shoulders and pats my chest.
I lift off hard from the ground, my gut wrenching as the boots thrust us up till we’re free of the city. Overhead, Colloway is scooping Howlers into his shuttle’s open garage. Alexandar and I land smoothly and decouple. I look down at the city and shout for Colloway to get us clear.
The logic is sinister.
That forest of bodies and biological weapons were meant to bring medical and science teams. To slow us down as we patched our wounded and scratched our heads, focusing on the small game instead of the grand stage.
The first explosion at Angelia’s nuclear power plant, caused by the meltdown of its reactor, is not like that of an atomic warhead. It stutters outward from the domed building, first as steam, then as fire, lifting the roof of the complex and engulfing the city in a rolling wave. Those impaled soldiers disappear in a cloud, their flesh melted from their bones by the steam, and the rest consumed by the slow rippling tide of fire.