Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  “Told you we should have called ahead,” Rhonna says. She smiles apologetically at me. “Sorry, lad, entitlement is one habit the man can’t break.”

  “A book is hardly as interesting company as are we!” Alexandar says. He grins with his new teeth. “Fear not, goodman. I know better than to insult local customs. I brought a bribe.” He tosses me a bottle and winks. “I hear Erebians simply adore Venusian brandy.”

  FEAR STARES AT ME through the glass. It does not seem as if he has moved since I resisted cutting off his hands. “Hasn’t talked a lick, despite the cocktails,” Screwface says from beside me.

  “Neurological conditioning?” I ask.

  “If it is, it ain’t like any I’ve ever seen.”

  Atlas’s side of the wall is blank, but I feel his eyes on me. I move left, and they follow. “He can sense us.”

  Screwface believes it. “I noticed that too. Should we up the dosage?”

  “No.”

  “Darrow, we need to know when Atalantia will attack.”

  “She’s in no hurry,” I say. “But if we kill him before we get him to my wife—” I stop as I realize what I’m doing. It’s always easier to plan on hope. “If she’s alive, she can crack him. When we get what’s in there, we’ll have a chance. Till then, let’s not push our luck by melting his cerebellum.”

  We’re about to leave the cell behind when Atlas speaks.

  “Pedicabere, fur, semel; sed idem

  si deprensus eris bis, irrumabo.

  quod si tertia furta molieris,

  ut poenam patiare et hanc et illam,

  pedicaberis irrumaberisque.”

  “What does it mean?” Screwface asks.

  “Fear is on the job.”

  “Come on. My family was full of Pixies. Didn’t ever bother with Latin.”

  I sigh, and translate:

  “Thief, for first thieving shalt be swived, but an

  Again arrested shalt be irrumate;

  And, shouldst attempt to plunder time the third,

  This and that penalty thou shalt endure,

  Being both pedicate and irrumate.”

  “I am going to kill that man,” Screw says quietly.

  “Get in line.”

  Back in the Mound, the final preparations for departure are under way. Despite Screwface’s effective efforts against Atalantia’s spy rings, it is best to assume she still has agents within the city. Tomorrow’s evacuation to the ships will come as a surprise to all but those within my inner circle. Until then, my army plays the part of occupying force. Patrols continue. Garages rattle with industry. Barracks swell with music and snoring and gambling.

  Yet something feels wrong. The Fear Knight’s poem has haunted me.

  Did I miss something?

  To allay my concerns, I took a tour of the mountain fortifications for signs of Atalantia’s forward elements after visiting Atlas. All was still. Too still. Thraxa and Harnassus think my ill-ease to be general paranoia. Glirastes’s work is completed. The Morning Star and the remaining ships are repaired for combat. Morale is high. My confidants dwell on the coming fray, and debate our chances of slipping the noose. But in my quarters inside the Mound, my mind roves restlessly as I inspect datapackets from Atlas’s interrogation, surveillance of known loyalists, and Glirastes’s charge, Cato.

  The five-minute gap from his detour to the wine cellar is explainable yet cloying. In secret, my men bugged the cellar after that surveillance failure, and faulted it on interference from the Lady Beatrice’s reactor. Harnassus himself has vouched for the integrity of Glirastes’s EMP. So why do I linger over this insubstantial creature’s idle days?

  Is it simply the seeds of Fear?

  He has done nothing suspicious, not even left the Lady Beatrice, yet something is off about Cato au Vitruvius’s nature, if not his actions. Perhaps it is latent sociopathic tendencies that set the hairs on my back standing on end. I watch him sit in the library reading his book, and shift back through the moments where my Greens flagged peculiar activity. Much is class-based misunderstanding. They divine malign intent from his reading selections and his ambivalence toward the names of the servants. False positives perfectly in keeping with his nature.

  I should let it alone and not squander my time, but I find myself idiosyncratically flipping through his hours, unwilling to get out of my chair. I watch him walk the garden, laugh at old vids, converse with the guards, sketch idly the shadows of a lone flower, eat breakfast, yawn over evening drinks with Glirastes, retire to bed at a drunkard’s hour.

  A knock comes at the door. I let the video continue playing and answer.

  Thraxa stands there with her hands behind her back. “Did you eat dinner? Ration bars don’t count.” She produces two fish pies.

  “Come on in.”

  She tosses them on the table and looks around for plates. “We’re both just going to eat them all anyway,” I say. She shrugs and plops down in a chair, digging into hers with a utility knife. She waves the knife at the holo.

  “That’s a little creepy. Watching the Pixie sleep. If you’re so fond of him, you should have gone with the kids.”

  “The kids?”

  “Alexandar and Rhonna went up to the Beatrice not long ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Something about a gift.” That troubles me. I wouldn’t have stopped it. I have no valid reason. Yet Thraxa senses my unease. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  “Something’s not been sitting right,” I say. “There’s something about him…”

  “Then let’s bring him in.”

  “Harnassus says the EMP is flawless, and we’re jamming any signal that leaves the peninsula just as much as Atalantia is. If he’s a spy, I don’t know what the hell he’s doing.”

  She forks a piece of fish into her mouth. “You want to talk about it?”

  “It?”

  “Your wife. My brother. Maybe the rest of my family.”

  “No.” I watch her. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Naw. Not my bag. But it ain’t fun. Is it?”

  “No. It ain’t fun.” There’s an indistinct murmur from the holo. Wait. I fix on the holo as Thraxa frowns.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Quiet.”

  I amplify the sound and replay the murmur Cato made as he slept. “Did you hear that?” I ask.

  “Sounds like ‘something over all.’ ”

  “ ‘Truth over all,’ ” I say. I’ve heard that before. But when. When? I can’t pin my finger on it until a slippery sensation works its way up my arm. I bolt upright and run to the door.

  “Your pie!” Thraxa calls after me.

  * * *

  —

  I stand over the science team as they shake their heads at my request for a DNA check. “We’ve been under constant attack since we got to Mercury, sir. There’s no DNA census without a re-upload from Skyhall. And we ran him against all the Gold POWs.”

  “Run it against this.” I thrust Sevro’s trophy at them. The tech looks down at the bloody robes in confusion. “Now.” I pace behind the techs as they work. It does not take long. The computer beeps and before I look up, I know.

  The DNA is related.

  “Oh shit,” I hear the techs say as I bolt out of the room so fast I send Thraxa tumbling over a chair. I call Screwface at full sprint. He answers, covering his yawn with his Heliopolitan scarf, having just returned from a patrol in the mountains. “Iron up. Full pack.”

  His face falls as he knows he failed. “They’re coming.”

  “They’re coming.” Next I call Harnassus. He answers peevishly from the Morning Star. “Are you with Glirastes?”

  His weariness vanishes. “No. His shuttle is having maintenance difficulties.”

  “Te
ll him I want to speak with him in the hangar. Once he’s away from the machine, stun him, strip him naked, scan him for embeds, and put him in a cell with a full century standing guard. No one is to speak with him until I get there. If he tries to touch anything unusual between this moment and then, shoot him in the head. Then order an evacuation of all support personnel to the ships. I want everyone except combat ready to go.” I take a breath. “Then get a particle beam pointed at the Spirit of Faran and blow that EMP to hell.”

  There’s a pause.

  “Copy that. What’s what?”

  “Patching a pool.” I use my master controls over my Howlers’ network as I run, cutting out Alexandar and Rhonna. Colloway joins from the confines of his isolation chamber. Thraxa storms down the hall to link up with me. Harnassus joins as he walks a complaining Glirastes out to the hangar. When the rest of the pool has joined from all across Heliopolis, I inform them and my private horror becomes real: “An omega-level enemy asset has been discovered inside the city. Glirastes has flipped. That EMP is for us. I’ve ordered its destruction. But it will be coordinated with an outside assault. Prepare for heavy enemy contact. Attack is imminent.”

  Should I call Rhonna and Alexandar? Will it tip my enemy off? If I don’t, he could take either of them hostage, or kill them if he hears us coming. I have to risk it and trust their discretion. Even then, if anyone could take down a single man, it’s Alexandar. I use my master command to turn on both of their cochlear implants. Rhonna is laughing and admiring the Water Colossus. “Do not react. A Howler strike team is on its way to your location. The man you are sitting across from is not named Cato au Vitruvius. He is Lysander au Lune. Wait for us. Do not engage him on your own.”

  “WHEN I FIRST SAW the Water Colossus, I thought nothing could be that big.” Rhonna admires the ten-meter-tall model inside Glirastes’s museum to himself. “But then I thought I’d never seen anything as big as Tinos, or the Citadel of Light, or the Morning Star. That shit nearly dropped my jaw. There’s always something bigger, ain’t there?” She is much like her name, which means “rough island” in ancient Gaelic. I doubt she knows how apt a name it is. The young Red wants to be inviting, but just can’t help being jagged around the edges.

  Alexandar does not notice the jaggedness one bit.

  Starlight filters through the glass dome, the light of certain stars amplified to cast columns of light over the models. From his recline on a bench, Alexandar sips his sherry and gazes at the rough island as if she were the monument itself.

  Their unspoken tenderness seems already so frail to me.

  Before the Ash Rain, it wouldn’t have.

  “Nothing is as big as the Morning Star, my goodlady, except the ego of a Valii-Rath,” Alexandar says, enjoying his role as tour guide. It seems his education stumbled during his house’s sojourn from Mars to Io to Luna to rebels. Even in my anxiousness to depart, I remind myself to be civil and correct none of his errors. “It took seven years to build. Dozens of asteroids. But most of its metal came from the mines of Mercury.”

  Wrong.

  Gods, how long do they intend to loiter? I hide my vexation. My men will already be in motion. Glirastes preparing his program. I must get to the Hippodrome. But most galling of all, my two guests are becoming rude in their lingering. If this is what passes for Martian manners, I shudder to think of what Virginia has done to the Palatine.

  My cousin’s enthusiasm for seeing me again has made it impossible to extract myself from their company. Something must be done. And soon. Yet a fresh variable rears its ugly head. I’ve unfortunately noticed Alexandar no longer tongues his new teeth as he did when he arrived.

  “From the mines here? No shit. Shipping fees must have put Octavia in her early grave,” Rhonna says with a folksy whistle. “Costs me half a month’s pay just to send a kilogram of loot back to Mars. How’m I supposed to get my cigars home?” She glances at me with a grin. “Raided the Votum vault, I did. You’re looking at the only purveyor of Heliopolitan cigars in all Agea. Well, soon as we skip this rock and make like pups for home, that is.”

  She downs her glass, leaving fingerprints all over the bulb. Darrow’s stock, indeed. Her other hand hangs idle at her side, no longer exhibiting the tic of playing with the leather thong of her sidearm’s holster. This, along with Alexandar’s diminished self-dentistry, has turned me cold. I probe with the Mind’s Eye.

  “Octavia made the people of Mars subsidize it,” Alexandar explains. “She wanted the Rim to build a flagship paid for by Mars just to mock us. Especially after Darrow purloined the Pax.”

  “Not exactly true,” I say. “Octavia commissioned it four years before the Vanguard was stolen. She paid the Julii trading company the shipping fees using the tariff revenues levied on Nero au Augustus’s helium exports from his mines, which your grandfather, Alexandar, watched him steal from his sworn ArchGovernor. The Rising plutocrats were willing beneficiaries of the Society before they tired of it. In fact.” I look at Rhonna. “How many mines did your family own, Alexandar?”

  He smiles pleasantly back. “Oh, far fewer than yours, I assume.”

  I affect a yawn, and then resort to violence.

  I seize Rhonna’s left wrist and jerk her toward me, so that my tight jab shatters her jaw. In the same movement, I pull her slack body to me, strip her sidearm, and put it to her temple. The tip of Alexandar’s whip stops taut less than a centimeter from my right eye.

  He recalls it in a beautiful maneuver that has him poised for the Falling Leaf, a winding corkscrew of a downward slash. He shows remarkable mastery of one of the Willow Way’s more complicated strikes by freezing halfway into the third motion.

  His eyes stare at the gun I hold to Rhonna’s head.

  In the moment, there is no rage for me in my cousin’s eyes. Only fear for her.

  I do not want to shoot Alexandar. I found no fault with him in the mountains. Nor with his valor in the chase, nor his humble heroism at Tyche. But the man he serves is a plague. And he is just a noble symptom far too loyal for his own good.

  I point the gun at him and let Rhonna fall unconscious to the floor.

  “Lune,” he says.

  “Arcos. I see Lorn gifted you the Willow after all.”

  “Bold of you to say my grandfather’s name after what Octavia did to him. You recall, yes? How she had Lilath au Faran saw through his spine? From behind, like this…” He slowly moves his blade back and forth. “All my life I was compared to you. Cousin Lysander. Perfect Lysander.” He looks me up and down. “You must be more than meets the eye.”

  “Put down the blade and get on your knees,” I say.

  “Perish the thought.” He levels his blade at me. “How about you pull that big iron from your boot, and we settle who’s the Heir of Arcos.”

  “Who is your favorite poet?” When he does not answer, I choose for him:

  “Ye labour for your fall

  With your own hands! Not by surprise

  Nor yet by stealth, but with clear eyes,

  Knowing the thing ye do.”

  He sneers at the gun. “No honor.”

  “No time.”

  I shoot Alexandar in the head.

  THE LADY BEATRICE LIES in darkness except for the faint twinkling of lights through the windows of her west wing. My Howlers land in force, Screwface taking a platoon through the top windows, as I shoot a hole through the front door and thunder in with Thraxa and her warhammer.

  “Lune!” I shout.

  “Come out, come out, you dumb little cur.” Thraxa slams her hammer through a pillar. “Come out and face the Wee Lass!”

  There is no answer. No sound except the stomping of my Howlers upstairs and the faint warbling from the rotating crystal orb in the foyer. Its fractal light casts white snowflakes on the stone floor as we rush into the home. There’s a shout from the west wing.


  “Goryhell,” Thraxa mutters as we enter Glirastes’s museum.

  I feel a tremor inside.

  There is a body on the floor.

  I stare down at it, and a maw of grief opens inside. The boy who entered my life as an arrogant lancer and through hardship became hero to an army lies in a pool of his own blood. He has been mutilated. Half his head is missing. Sightless eyes stare at the ceiling. Mouth half open in surprise, as if he were wondering, Really? Like this? There’s a low moan. Rhonna limps from behind a model of the Water Colossus. Her face is nearly unrecognizable, her jaw shattered. She falls to her knees in Alexandar’s blood. Her scream tears me to tatters. How many years did they stand apart from each other behind me? How many precious few moments were they honest with each other? They were robbed of so much joy, promised it, then robbed again.

  “Rhonna, where is he?” I whisper. “Rhonna, where is Lune?”

  She looks up at me with empty eyes and points up.

  I motion a Howler forward. “Get her to the Morning Star.”

  Rhonna thrashes as the Howler manhandles her off Alexandar and drags her to the door. The house rumbles. Weapons fire upstairs from Screwface’s platoon.

  His voice crackles through: “Eyes on—”

  “—shit.”

  “—slagger dodged a bullet…”

  “Shoot—”

  “—homing mines on our six.”

  Something detonates.

  We leap to the second level, bypassing the stairs. Screwface and his men fire down a hallway. Two Howlers are down. There’s a sucking sound. Screwface’s platoon scatters, taking cover as a quarter of the house disintegrates. My armor absorbs the shockwave, but the wall does not. I stand as debris and dust swirl around me. A shape moves through a distant room and then disappears upward. Thraxa bursts after him.

  “He’s got boots!” Screwface shouts.

  The pack follows. Clearing the debris cloud, my optics pick up a tiny shape racing for the city at incredible velocity. New boots. His lead is already half a kilometer. We rocket off in pursuit. I radio other elements held back from the evacuation to cut him off. Response teams rise from distant skyscrapers. RipWings drop from the flier layer. My army constricts around him. He banks left to avoid running into a Rat Legion squad from the Mound. Mini-missiles streak after him and detonate against the sides of skyscrapers as he threads his way through the business district. Glass rains on us as we follow in his wake. We bank left to cut him off when he passes through the eye of a circular tower. He sees our intent, and shoots straight upward, firing a hole through the glass side of the building. He disappears inside. We hover around the building, forming a perimeter. I send four Howlers in after him. Then I understand as Screwface banks down.