Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  “Retinal forger,” Volga mutters. “This is Julii’s personal escape craft?”

  “Does it matter whose it is? Woman’s gonna pop with a baby yesterday and she’s off fighting. The maniac.”

  Volga takes hold of her collar and pushes her through the opening door. It dead-ends in a maintenance closet filled with cleaning robots.

  “Welcome, Madam Barca,” a nasty, manly voice says as Sevro au Barca’s face appears in a hologram. A reinforced door shields above us. Weapons appear on the walls. Expensive weapons. The Julii’s personal stash. Volga looks like she’s gonna faint from joy. “I don’t want an escape craft, she says. Ha! I told you you’d need one. Now scurry home and we’ll hunt whomever you pissed off together.” He waves and disappears. The panel on the far side of the room slides back to reveal a dark tube. I shove Volga to make her stop drooling after the guns.

  “No, no, no,” Volga says as Fig heads to the tube. “I go first.”

  “What if the ship is already gone? And this leads out into space?” I say. “Let her go first.”

  “Or she could get in and shut us out,” Volga says, thinking.

  “Slag it.” I dive into the tube.

  Its gravity seizes me immediately, hurling me up the chute. It twirls a dozen times. My breath seizes in my chest. Metal whips past. My head grows heavy. Then gravity slows. My stomach whirls at the new sensations. The chute’s circular door opens and I fall into a plush leather chair, safe and sound. That was one hell of a slide.

  I give a little whoop.

  I find myself in a lounge, and it is already occupied. More than a dozen heavily armed Sol Guards and several bloodied Golds carrying heavy rifles turn to stare at me. And sitting directly across from me in a leather chair, in green metal armor with a weeping sun on the swollen abdomen, is Victra au Barca.

  She tilts her beautiful head at me in amusement and then punches me in the face.

  * * *

  —

  Reality returns in stuttering frames.

  Not again. Not again.

  The cabin is spinning. My stomach lurches. Sunlight rushes through a hole in the hull. Victra stands there holding on to the wall, firing out of the ship with a huge gun. Something punches two hundred miniature holes in the hull. People around me disappear in a red mist. Two tubes shoot out of my chair and jam into my nostrils. Volga wails somewhere behind me. Wind and light. A great huge roar. Victra is gone. Whipped out the hole in the hull. Trees through the windows. Then a hiss as my chair swallows me up in a cocoon of darkness.

  THUUUUUUUMM.

  We hit the ground. Rolling. Rolling. Rolling. A metal spear pierces through the dark cocoon. It stops an eyelash away from puncturing my eyeball.

  Silence.

  Oxygen comes through the tubes into my nose.

  “Volga!” I murmur. “Volga…”

  My arms are pinned to my body by the cocoon. My legs won’t budge. I feel some sort of knob by my right hand. I jiggle it to see what it does. A great farting sound releases the liquid from the crash pod and the darkness around me sags. Light pours in and I forget to breathe.

  I’m dangling over the edge of a Martian fjord.

  The front of the ship is completely gone. In the day’s last light, shards of it glint in the water hundreds of meters beneath. The rest of the ship is suspended above me at a straight vertical. It sways with the wind. Bits of body parts and fine china sprinkle down.

  Bloodydamn.

  The cocoon that saved me was some sort of black gel insulation from the chair itself. The outside of the cocoon looks like a pincushion. It is studded with three shards of metal the size of my legs. One missed piercing my heart by only a centimeter of insulation. A crash harness secures me to the seat, and keeps me from falling into the fjord. I can’t imagine Julii putting it on me.

  I reach over the crashpod and grip the armrest before unbuckling the harness. I lurch downward, but manage to pull myself up over the seat. The ship sighs on its rocky perch. The movement upsets a half-pulverized corpse and it slides from the back of the ship toward me. I duck. It clips my shoulder and nearly takes me down with it.

  I wince from the pain in my mangled hands and move as carefully as I can. Remains of what were once humans litter the compartment. “Volga? Volga!”

  I feel like I’m looking for my sister amongst the corpses again. Looking for those blue shoes. Most of the crashpods are eviscerated by metal. Strangers fill them. I’m relieved to not find Victra’s other daughters here. Were they on the Pandora? Is their mother now just a wreck of bones on the ground?

  I’ve no love for the Julii, but I grow nauseous all the same.

  I flinch as another crashpod deflates with a hiss. Rigid gel becomes elastic, like a stick of black butter melting, and my friend’s face emerges from it. Her eyes wide and terrified as she sees the fjord beneath. She jerks sideways, causing the ship to rock.

  “Volga, don’t move.”

  We both freeze until the ship grows still again. Carefully, I pull my way over to her and help her with the crash harness. It takes us nearly five minutes to climb up out of the cabin toward the hole in the end of the ship. Once we reach daylight, we’re able to slide down the broken wing to the rocky ground below. Volga falls to her knees and kisses the frosted earth.

  “No more ships,” she stammers. “No more ships.”

  “Agreed,” I mutter.

  The top of the fjord is littered with ship parts, and not just ours. The remains of several ripWings burn amongst coarse grass and frozen ponds. A fighter’s cockpit has part of an armored man hanging out. How did he get there? On a hill at the edge of a forest, another section of our ship smolders. Huge clouds consume most of the twilight sky. There’s flashes in orbit that I see between their gaps.

  “Where are we?” Volga asks.

  The sun sets behind mountains to the west. An expanse of fjords stretches to the east and north out to sea. “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe the Daedalus Mountains. Or…” I search the mountains to the west and see the triple peaks of the Hydra’s Neck. I laugh in dismay. “We’re in the Cimmerian Highlands. Far north. These must be the Pyrrian Fjords.” I look south. A forest stretches across a misty land riddled with more fjords and jagged mounds of rock. Thousands of kilometers from here, the highlands taper away into endless plains and jungle belts.

  “Cimmeria! You are home,” Volga says.

  Home?

  I shiver as frigid wind sweeps down from the north and cuts through my thin jacket easy as a knife. It is my planet. Yet I’ve never even seen snow before. And not a single person I love breathes its air—they are scattered across the system or buried beneath its dirt. It is a lonely feeling.

  Mars does not feel like home.

  “You need something to wear,” Volga says, taking a step toward our ship. Her foot dislodges a rock, which rolls and clicks against another, which rolls against the ship’s hull. There’s a sigh of metal and the ship tilts forward, losing its battle against gravity. With a groan, it slips over the edge of the fjord. Volga and I watch it crash into the water far below.

  “Scary,” she mutters, and points toward the hillside where the back third of the ship lies in ruins. “We will go over there. There may be supplies and people who need help.”

  I follow, but only because I don’t have a better idea.

  By the time we make it to the second crash site, night has come in full, and my Julii-given shoes slosh with freezing water.

  I can see better in the gloom than Volga, so I lead. The inside of the ship is a slaughterhouse. Dozens of crashpods were skewered with hunks of bent metal. Blood leaks from them to form a soup on the floor that thickens as it cools. There’s about squat-all chance anyone lived through this. Still, seems the human thing to look for survivors.

  I check the back as Volga checks the front of the ship. Ea
ch pod I open reveals a new scene to fill my nightmares. By the sixth corpse, I’m right numb, and starting to wonder how the hell civilization plods on with all this going on behind the scenes.

  Is this what war is? It’s so bloody…jarring. I always thought by watching the holos and the parades that it was more sophisticated, organized. But it’s just so…blunt, clumsy even. Is this what my brothers see every day? Even if they come back, is this what’s behind their eyes?

  I keep looking despite the dread and find a treasure trove of emergency supplies: medkits, thermals, water packs, survival boxes with a thermal stove, and protein cubes. I stack these outside the ship after giving up on finding anyone alive.

  Then, toward the back of the wreckage, something moves.

  At first I think it’s a rat. Then I see fingers and realize they belong to someone in a half-deflated crashpod. I pull it open. The woman’s face is pale. She is unwounded—except for the shard of metal that has nearly sliced her body in two. “Fig.” Her eyes flutter open. The tracework of her white tattoos is queerly bright in the darkness. She doesn’t recognize me. “Fig,” I say quietly. I touch her hand. It’s cold. “Oy, freelancer.”

  “Psappha?” she says. “Thought I’d…have more time. It’s not fair. I had more…to do.”

  “Fig, can you hear me?” Might hate her, but hard to hold on to hate for someone who’s in two pieces. “Fig, it’s Lyria. The Red.”

  “The Red.” Her eyes come into focus. “Oh,” she says in disappointment. “You? ’Course I don’t get a better heir.” She snorts. “It should have been someone with some skill. A freelancer.” Her eyes close. “Get the Obsidian.” Blood bubbles on her lips. “Get the…crow.” Frowning, I call for Volga. She doesn’t answer. “I feel it unsyncing. Moisture wicking off the tendril root. Just like she said.”

  She’s babbling. Seen it before when people go.

  “Figment said,” she says, talking in third person now. “Where is the bloody crow? She can use it. With that blue blood, she’ll carve an empire.”

  “Just hang on. Help’s coming.”

  “Idiot. I escaped. Was gonna be the greatest freelancer who ever lived. Still had that bitch Bonerider to…”

  Her mouth contorts. Eyes go all crazy. She screams into my face. I rear back, but her hands dig into my wrists with insane strength. She makes a hacking, vomiting sound, like an old engine dying. Her eyes strain from her head. Her body starts to seize and her mouth froths. A lump moves along her face, like a snail trapped beneath the surface. It goes from the top of her nose, swells a nostril, and then it bursts forth.

  It looks like a tiny metal squid with hundreds of hairlike arms tipped with little fibers. I scream as it springs at my face. But her hands won’t. Let. Go. I thrash as the squid thing crawls over my eyes. Intense pressure in my nostril. It’s cramming its way into my nasal passage. I struggle to breathe. Then there’s pain unlike anything I’ve ever felt. A hundred needles between my brain and my nostril. A cascade of fire on every nerve ending. Raw pain down my spine. Spasms of light explode. Fig becomes a pulsing red thermal monster. Then she goes shock white. I see her bones. Her organs. Her blood moving through the network of vessels like the map of Hyperion’s tram lines. Even the food in her belly. A pulse thunders in my brain. Still Fig has not let me go. The pain comes again like a huge tidal wave, and then it rolls back, leaving my brain leeched of sense. When it subsides I shake in stupid horror.

  Fig’s eyes roll back into her head. A voice comes from her mouth that belongs to no human.

  “O my mountain hyacinth,

  what shepherds trod upon you

  with clumsy, rustic foot?

  Now you are a broken seal:

  a scarlet stain upon the earth.

  Figmentum es

  Figmentum es Figmentum es

  FIGMENTUM ES FIGMENTUM ES FIGMENTUM ES”

  Accolades, sister. You have killed Figment. You are Figment. Do not report for duty, a soft female voice says within my head. My wrath be thine.

  Then it is quiet and Fig is dead.

  VOLGA CROUCHES OVER A man in the gloom, pumping at his chest. She gives up, sits back on her heels, and looks at me in weariness. “Lyria, what is it?”

  “I…I don’t know.” I shake my head, unable to find the words. Did it really happen? I’d think myself mad if my nostril wasn’t all cut up and bloody. Is the squid thing in my brain? What does it mean that I’m the Figment? What duty am I not to report for? How do I explain that a little monster just exploded out of Fig into my nostril? It’s inside me. Whatever it is. It spoke to me. It’s silent now. There’s no pain. Just the sound of the wind and the creaking of metal and huge trees all around us. The world itself feels evil.

  “Fig’s dead,” I finally say.

  “Impossible.”

  I take her to Fig. Volga hunches over her body, feeling for the woman’s pulse. She puts her ear to her heart. Flicks her nose. Pulls up her eyelids. Slaps her. “She is dead.”

  “Yeah, good thing you checked.”

  “Nothing is obvious with Fig.” Before I can say anything, Volga takes a knife she must have found in the wreckage and sticks it into Fig’s eye.

  “What are you doing? Stop that.” I say, shoving at her. Volga looks offended.

  “Quicksilver put a huge bounty on Fig,” she says, going back to her grisly work. “She stole something from him. But the contract is Amani. It requires ocular proof.” She digs out the eyeball and sets to work on the other. “Have you seen the orb she had or the bag?” I shake my head. “Her pistol?”

  I don’t reply.

  Sickened, I leave the ship and stand outside, touching the small gash Fig’s metal squid thing opened under my nostril when it went into my nose. Quicksilver was hunting Fig. Why? Is it in the bag, the case? Or inside me? Would Volga cut it out of me if she knew I had it? Does she even know it exists?

  A dangerous customer. That’s what Fig called Volga. She wasn’t lying. Just because Volga helped me escape doesn’t mean she’s a friend. All those letters were just a way for her to pass the time. She’s a right savage when there’s money lying on the ground, or in someone’s eye sockets.

  Volga soon joins me with Fig’s bag over her shoulder, carrying Fig’s black orb. “It is just business,” she says, not understanding my mood. “She was already dead.”

  I don’t say anything as she tries to open the case. Finding the effort futile, she finds a pistol on one of the bodies and shoots the orb. The metal is left without a scratch. Volga frowns. But an unusual ringing fills the air, morphing over time until it seems the orb whispers to me.

  “What’s in there?” I ask.

  “I do not know. Maybe what she stole. It might be very valuable.”

  Dozens are dead around us, and she’s after something valuable. I have to get away from her. I have to get away from this crash, from these people. I have to get back to Liam.

  There’s a high-pitched humming sound in my head that I can’t shake. Not the whispering of the orb. Something else. At first I thought it was hearing damage. I dig a finger in my ear to clear it. If anything, the humming grows louder. It’s not coming from my head. It’s coming from the forest.

  “You hear that?” I ask. Volga shakes her head. “You’re supposed to have predator ears. You don’t hear that at all?”

  She pries at the case with her knife. “Maybe you hit your head?”

  I wander toward the treeline. The sound is coming from the forest. Volga calls after me, and jogs to keep up as I start to follow it.

  The humming grows louder the deeper I go, and I can see a faint rippling in the air. Sort of like hot air above a stove. There’s broken branches now. Trees shattered high above our heads. A ripWing must have crashed here. Entering a shadowy thicket, where the trees have exploded from impact, I find a fallen tree trunk with a pair of gre
en metal feet sticking out from under it. The humming is so loud I have to plug my ears.

  “Fig?” a woman calls. The humming dies. “Took you long enough. Been calling for half a gory hour.”

  On the other side of the tree, Victra lies on her back pushing at the tree trunk with both hands. It’s trapped both her legs under it. Had it fallen just a quarter meter higher, it would have crushed the baby in her belly.

  The trapped Gold glares up at us from under a mess of short golden hair. Her eyes flash with anger. I jump back in fright so hard I smash into Volga and fall to the ground. When I scramble up, Victra is laughing.

  “Just my gory luck. Sevro’s right. Cockroaches will inherit the worlds.”

  “Julii!” Volga exclaims.

  “It’s Barca! Gods, can no one get it right? It makes him so sensitive. Where’s Fig? Where are my men?”

  I grab a tree branch from the ground as if I’m going to hit her on the head with it. Then I see Victra’s pulseFist a ways off in the snow. I rush to it and insert my hand into the huge metal glove. Vwoooooon. It powers on and I point it at her head. The energy it holds shakes my arm. Gods, its heavy.

  “Go on, little girl. Vox, Syndicate, Atalantia, those freaks. Everyone wants a piece of me. Take a bite. See if you don’t choke.”

  “Lyria, don’t,” Volga says, stepping in my path. “You can’t shoot her.”

  “Move.”

  “This is not you.”

  “How the hell would you know? Because of a few letters?”

  “Lyria, I know. You do not want to shoot her.”

  My arm is aching from holding the heavy pulseFist. “She tortured you and me, put us in a dungeon, right? Let’s make sure—”

  Victra laughs from the ground. “Dungeon? You mean Electra’s playroom?” We’re just under one millimeter tall to her. “I gave those rooms to Electra when she turned four. She said our sophists were boring, and my mother did it to me, and look how I turned out.” She makes a small face. “Though there was Antonia, wasn’t there? But we sorted that.” Her smile is one part satisfaction, another part pride. “Electra solved the puzzle in thirteen days. Slower than me, of course, but far faster than her father, and, a little secret between us girls, part of me thinks she liked that a bit. The little harpy. Anyway, if I were really torturing you, you’d go mad. Just ask my husband.”