Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  “Do you remember our puzzles?” I probe the clone as he watches two destroyers test the Telemanus flank. He frowns as they are repelled.

  “I know they occurred,” he says, giving new orders through his datapad. “Evidence here and there.”

  I glance at Lilath with a smile. The puzzles defined my relationship with my brother. I don’t know how many he gave me over the years, but I know how many I kept. I solved each one, and he’d smile and congratulate me. But sometimes I would follow him, and see him slapping himself and gouging his skin, screaming, “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  If this was his insurance plan, he’d have given his clone all the information he needed to become himself again. The puzzles were a key component of a rivalry that shapes his psyche. He would have included the puzzles. And if he’d included them, he wouldn’t have been surprised I could solve the ones during our volley. The fact that he was surprised is the loose thread I’ve been looking for. I glance up at the fleets as he lures a Telemanus corvette into a trap, and pull on the thread as quickly as I dare.

  “I’m surprised you enjoyed me solving these,” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It used to anger you so.”

  He stares at me. “Did it?”

  “Don’t you remember? Sometimes you would hit yourself and call yourself stupid for failing to fool me.”

  “Did I ever?”

  “No.”

  He puzzles over that for a moment, then looks at Lilath. Is it possible that she redacted some of the information Adrius passed down to his clone? By the look on his face, it isn’t the first time he’s wondered it.

  “She’s lying,” Lilath says, seeing the wedge but not knowing how to blunt it. Killing is more her game. “You are the brightest mind in this Solar System.” Ah, so there’s the difference. This clone has been raised to believe he is a god. My brother was kicked and beaten and left on a rock to die more than once. One earned his victories. The other feels entitled to them.

  “Are you doing this for Lilath?” I ask the clone. “Or is it for Adrius?”

  “I am Adrius,” he says.

  “Do you want to be?”

  He tilts his head to examine me as the Martian fleet withdraws to reassess their strategy after losing two more corvettes.

  “Don’t let her pour poison in your ear, my Emperor. She always thought you were a monster,” Lilath says to him. Turning to me, she says, “You betrayed him to slaves. You abandoned your own brother. You hung him from the gallows yourself. He should have been worshipped by the world. But you just stepped all over him. You hated him. You called him a monster.”

  “If I hated him, why did I pull his feet?” I ask. “If I didn’t love him, why would I keep those puzzles?”

  Lilath goes still. Eat that, bitch. The clone activates, leaning forward. I suspected artifacts from Adrius’s life would be of almost religious importance to him. Practically feeling the evil vibrations from the clone, the Boneriders stop their play and watch in silence.

  Gods, they could just snap him in half, but they’re afraid of him. Not just that. They respect him, worship him. It really runs that deep. I had no idea. I thought it was just Lilath. Did my brother tell them if they lost, he would free them in ten years’ time? Is he a leader? Or a prophet?

  “Where are those puzzles?” the clone asks.

  “My private office.”

  “On Mars?”

  “Here.”

  He remains perfectly still. “Lilath.” She swallows. “Did I not tell you to leave my sister’s quarters as they were?” He waits. And waits. The Boneriders watch with smiles as the ten-year-old spanks maybe the hardest woman on all of Luna, and she just takes it. They all want to be number two. So there’s this pack’s dynamic. “Answer, Lilath.”

  “You did.”

  “So why did you disobey me?” He leans forward. “Did you plan the Day of Red Doves? Did you use the White Guilds to start a war?” What does he mean by that? “You are a blunt instrument, Lilath. You know this. I treat you with respect. And you dare meddle with my designs?”

  “I thought they would prove a distraction, sir.”

  “I pray for your sake they have not been destroyed.”

  “No!” she says. “You made them.”

  “Where are they?” I ask, hoping I’m right.

  The clone stands up. “You heard my sister, Lilath. She may not be our ally, but she is of better blood than you. Answer her with due respect.”

  Lilath looks at me with abject hatred. “In my quarters.”

  The clone looks disgusted, as if he’d found her going through his drawers to smell his underwear. “Have them restored to their original locations. I will view them at once.”

  “But the battle…”

  He glances at the Telemanus fleet, which makes no new movements toward the planet. “They have little appetite for blood. They’re trying to break through our jammers to broadcast to the people. We have time.”

  * * *

  —

  The clone stands in my private office staring at the puzzles Lilath took from the room to hide for herself. He has not spoken for five minutes. I am surprised Lilath found the hidden vestibule behind the wall. It seems, however, she did not find the hidden passage within it.

  “Must that low blood watch us like this?” I ask him. “She looks like a jealous vulture.”

  “Leave us,” he says almost in a whisper. Lilath’s cold eyes dart to me.

  “My Emperor…it would not be wise.” I flop down in a chair near a coffee table covered with books and a vase of night lilies.

  “Paralyze my legs if you’re so afraid.”

  The clone eyes the table behind me with suspicion. “There were defense-related systems located in the table,” Lilath reports. “We deactivated them, my Emperor.”

  “And the dining table?”

  “Deactivated as well.” The clone points to a different chair at the small dining table and another vase of assorted flowers, almost all of which are dead. I sit in the chair and he paralyzes my legs via the psychoSpike.

  “See, that wasn’t so hard,” I say.

  He turns to Lilath. “If she kills me, she kills Sevro and the others. If she’ll pay that price, she’s earned it.”

  Lilath lowers herself into a wary bow, and backs with our two sober Bonerider escorts toward the door. The clone looks back at the puzzles. I was hoping it wouldn’t be paralysis, but nothing is easy.

  “I know you are playing a game,” the clone says as the door closes. “But I don’t fault you for it. This all started as a game. It wasn’t until four years ago I heard my recording to myself. Lilath had instructions to follow, a psychological profile of the proper puppet to sponsor for a Senate run. Publius fit my specifications perfectly. She did take control of the Syndicate on her own, but the underworld wasn’t prepared for her level of violence. She is possibly one of the most effective soldiers I have ever seen. That’s both of me talking. But she only goes in one direction at a time.”

  He walks down the line of puzzles, passing very near to the idle night lilies. The flowers, uncared for, droop in their vases. Many are dead.

  “She would tell it to me all like a story at first. Then presented it to me as a problem set. Given the variables, which gang to kill, which product to sell. I liked it better when it was stories. I was a hero in them, or he was.” He stops in front of a maze. “But we’re not. And I know why. Lilath took me to a slaughterhouse on Earth when I was young. And I saw how they would kill the cows and then make them into food for us to eat. Tell me: why are cows different from people? Cows have dreams. Cows have affection for their friends and family. If you are going to say it is because cows are less intelligent than people, it is acceptable to slaughter them, why is not acceptable for me to slaughter people who are proportionately le
ss intelligent to me than cows are to them? And if you say it is because people feel more, then I invite you to stab a cow and a human in the throat and see how very similar they are.”

  As he speaks, my eyes search the vase of flowers, looking for a live one.

  “That’s false equivalency. Logical fallacies are beneath you,” I say.

  “You know it’s true,” he replies. I look back to him from the flowers just before he glances back. “Deep down. That’s what I care about. Because I can talk to you and I know you hear me. I was promised that with the Boneriders. But they are…aberrant monkeys. From Lilath’s lips you would have believed they were Seraphs.”

  “You hated them before too,” I say.

  “Did I?” he asks, sounding almost relieved.

  “You thought them ridiculous.”

  “They are venal. And did I hate Father?”

  “No.”

  “I shot him in the head.”

  “You loved Father as a father should be loved, but he didn’t love you back. That was the problem. You thought it was your fault. There were many things that were your fault. But not that. I think…I think what I’ve realized is that every father makes a mess of things. It’s just a matter of if he cared when he did it. Our father didn’t, and I think you spotted that.”

  “Then why are you…you, and why am I me?” he asks, turning around completely.

  “Because I gave up trying to please him, and you never did. I honestly don’t think you ever cared about any of this.” I wave to the walls around us. “With every new endeavor, there’s always the hope that you will find happiness, be less lonely. Let me tell you what I’ve learned: the moment you become Sovereign, you become loneliest person in all the worlds, because there is no new endeavor, no new height to which you can ascend. Whatever loneliness is already inside you is magnified, because if you were lucky enough to have anyone understand you before, they won’t understand you after you sit in the Morning Chair. Only one person alive at a time knows what it means to be Sovereign.”

  He traces the lines in the marble floor with his toe as if it were a puzzle. I glance back at the flowers. There could be one alive on the other side of the vase.

  “Do you know why I did this?” he asks. “I did it because Lilath told me it was the only way I could see you. You would kill me if you were not at my mercy, I know. You think I am a freak. And I am. But thank you for speaking to me as if I weren’t. I recognize the gesture, even if it isn’t a kindness.”

  “Do you hate her?” I ask him. “Lilath.”

  He replies with a slight pause and no inflection in his voice. “On the day she took me to see the cows die, I had a thought. I asked Lilath to build me an iron cow. She built me the iron wolf instead, as I knew she would. One day soon, I will melt her inside it.”

  I forget the flowers and stare at him. “Why?”

  “Because she doesn’t understand irony.”

  He means it, and he doesn’t sound upset, proud, or even excited about it. “And doing that would make you feel happy?” I ask.

  “It doesn’t make me feel anything. It is just an opportunity for novelty.”

  To do that to Lilath, who gave birth to him, who breastfed him, and woke in the middle of the night when he cried as a baby, who trained him to walk, to speak, to read, seems in the moment to be the cruelest act I have ever heard. My brother was many things, but even his evil led with the heart. This thing is just bored.

  “Just like making the Republic eat itself?” I ask.

  “Indeed.” He smiles, pleased. “I knew if anyone could understand me, it would be you. I only wish Father were here. Cruel though he may have been. So I could see this cruelness. Look in the eye. Smell its ugly breath. To see if I felt it.”

  “Felt what?”

  “Evil. What precipice of the mind could conjure anything more terrifying than a cruel father?”

  “I think,” I say slowly, “perhaps you have spent too much childhood indoors, young man.”

  He reels back, annoyed that I dare try to pull out of the discussion with affected rhetoric. In his mind it is disrespectful. “You don’t think I’m Adrius at all, do you?” he asks. His mood darkens. “I suppose to you this must all feel as if you are with a voyeur.” He gestures to the puzzles. “I am not real to you. I am an interruption. At very best, an imposter.” His lips pull upward as his eyes narrow. “Am I wrong?”

  “Naw, kid, you’re not wrong. If Adrius were here, he would be eating lobster as he gave this lecture on a table containing the body of a conquered foe. If Adrius were here, he’d have sex slaves brought to him after the battle and fuck them on Octavia au Lune’s bed. And it would make him so very happy to dilute the most expensive liquor bottles with piss and then give them to his Boneriders to share. And then, after all that, he’d tell it all to no one. His war on the world was a joke built around a central need to prove he didn’t yearn for the approval from the only man who wouldn’t give it. You, on the other hand, are just a joke built around me. A visitor to this world who doesn’t belong. A ghost.” He looks stricken. I finish it. “And what Father was to Adrius, I am now to you.”

  He steps closer as if to confess. “It would appear so.” Emotion leaks into his voice. “It must end in your death then, I suppose.”

  I spot the flower I need. It’s moments like this I sympathize with Darrow.

  There is a patient, longer scheme available, where I earn the clone’s trust over days, even weeks. I could fix more things then, perhaps. I could ensure the rescue of Sevro, Pebble, and Clown. But if I wait so long, how much of the Republic will be left by the time I am in a position to save it? The fleets will be at it again soon if they aren’t already. Both navies were built to protect us from the Golds. The prospect of their destruction at the hands of each other is more urgent a calamity than the safety of my friends.

  I make the same choice my husband had to make.

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” I say to the clone. “I am not like Father, because I do care about you. Even if I don’t love you. You killed my friends when you didn’t have to. Lilath put that in you. What I said, it was in reaction to that. I don’t want to be your enemy. There are things Lilath is wrong about. Things that will jeopardize your life. For instance, the Pandemonium Chair. Did you know Octavia only used it twice? It is dangerous.”

  “Are you trying to tempt me into asking for the codes to the Crescent Vault?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “I’m trying to tempt you into asking about my research with the Pandemonium Chair. How the psychoSpike functions…”

  He lifts his datapad and sends tendrils of pain racing along my spine. “I think I have discovered it for myself.”

  “Of course, but you haven’t cracked how to actually erase the memories, have you? They’re quite different functions, viewing and destroying, and more than twenty-four steps to the latter.” I lean forward with a smile. He couldn’t figure out the puzzle. “I’m sorry, rude of me to not put in an easy little button for idiots.” He wants to know how to do it so he can do it to me, and make me his companion. What sort of companion, I can only guess.

  He looks scolded, but walks closer. “And you would just tell me?”

  “In time, all things are possible, brother.” I pick the night lily out from amongst the dead flowers in the vase. And hand it out to him the way Bellona knights did as they returned to loved ones from war.

  His response is a basic human response. When you’re caught off guard and someone reaches to shake your hand in a comfortable setting, you usually shake it. When someone displays a deep and respectful flash of cultural esoterica that you value as well, you respond. He does both. If he had had proper kinesthetic training by a razormaster, he wouldn’t. After all, genius or not, he is still only ten years old. He takes the flower. But he doesn’t take it the way I would, or the way Adrius would. H
e takes it like an entitled child who spends too much time indoors. Violently.

  NIGHT LILIES RESPOND WELL to a gentle touch. They do not abide rough handling. That’s when their necrotic spines come out to play. I had them made that way as my last in a long line of redundant defenses, all of which have either been deactivated or removed, except my bloodydamn flowers. Precisely because it is more in line with something Atalantia would have lying around than Virginia au Augustus.

  The clone flinches as several sets of glistening needles burst from the flower to pierce his thumb. He screams at the sudden, blinding pain. The shaded toxins of the lily trickle slowly down the tip of his thumb, spreading toward his hand. He falls backward, staggered by the intensity of the poison. I feel the agony as well. It seeps from my right index finger up my arm straight to my spinal column. I almost throw up, but I must move. I throw my body forward off the chair to the floor near the clone’s datapad. He dropped it the second after the needles went in. The flower’s spines have retracted. I pick it up very gently. Flower in one hand, pad in the other, I crawl to the puzzle wall trying to turn off the psychoSpike without getting another dose of the spreading poison. The third puzzle at the bottom on the left is a transponder to the escape door. This puzzle had to be on the door for it to open and not hidden in Lilath’s creepy suite. If I press my hand to the wall when the puzzle is present, the door will slide up, and I can escape. If I can just get to it.

  The door to the hall explodes inward as Lilath responds to her Emperor’s cries. She’s carrying two hatchets. She runs toward me. I find the right function on the datapad and return sensation to my legs. I scramble upward and lunge to touch the wall behind the pictures without disturbing the flower in my hands.

  A jarring force hits my back. It almost feels like a punch compared with the searing pain in my index finger. The necrotic poison is spreading for the hand. If it gets to the torso, I’m dead. But by the wrist I’ll be in such agony I won’t be able to move. I slam my other hand into the wall. The wall shoots straight upward to reveal a metal chute at waist height. I duck and drop the flower just as Lilath tries to chop my head off from behind. I try to spin-kick her legs, but she steps over the kick and delivers a slash downward. I catch it on my left forearm. The bone breaks so abruptly that it pierces the skin. I stumble back into the wall beside the chute and reach for the flower with my poisoned hand. Lilath is brutal and effective. She chops me in the left shoulder, takes off my right ear, then buries a crushing blow in the right side of my ribcage. The bones break, and something inside me ruptures. I crumple downward just close enough to the flower. Lilath glances back at her Emperor, knowing I’m mortally wounded, but unable to detect why he’s screaming. Almost blind with pain, I fumble for the flower with my poisoned hand. Another dose of poison goes through two more of my fingers. My vision pulses and I hurl the flower up at Lilath’s face. It’s the only part of her not covered with armor.