Morning Star (Red Rising, #3)

by Pierce Brown

We depart three days after my conference with Romulus, making additional repairs as we travel. Welders and repairmen dot hulls like benevolent barnacles. Though we lost more than twenty-five capital ships during the battle, we’ve gained over seventy more. It is one of the greatest military victories in modern history, but victories are less romantic when you’re cleaning your friends off the floor.

I wish he believed as firmly in the afterlife as I once did, as Ragnar did. I’m not sure when I lost my faith. I don’t think it’s something that just happens. Maybe I’ve been worn down bit by bit, pretending to believe in the Vale because it’s easier than the alternative. I wish Roque would have thought he was going to a better world. But he died believing only in Gold, and anything that believes only in itself cannot go happily into the night.

Mustang lingers with me, eyes following Cassius as he’s escorted away. “What are your plans for him?” she asks me when we’re left alone. “I don’t know,” I say, angry she would ask that now. “Darrow, are you all right?” “Fine. I just need to be alone right now.” “OK.” She doesn’t leave me. Instead, she steps closer. “It’s not your fault.” “I said I want to be alone.” “It’s not your fault.” I look over at her, angry she won’t leave, but when I see how gentle her eyes are, how open to me they are, I feel the tension in my ribs release. The tears come unbidden. Streaking down my cheeks. “It’s not your fault,” she says, pulling me close as I feel the first sob rattle my chest. She wraps her arms around my waist and puts her forehead into my chest. “It’s not your fault.”

“If Augustus did not put me with Julian, what do you think would have happened?” “Doesn’t matter.” “Say it does.” “I don’t know,” he says sharply. He downs his whisky and pours himself another, surprisingly agile in his cuffs. He considers the glass in irritation. “You and I aren’t like Roque or Virginia. We’re not nuanced creatures. All you have is thunder. All I have, lightning. Remember that dumb shit we used to say when we would paint our faces and ride about like idiots? It’s the deepspine truth. We can only obey what we are. Without a storm, you and I? We’re just men. But give us this. Give us conflict…how we rattle and roar.”

“All that time among us. Years. You couldn’t talk to anyone, could you?” “No. Too risky. Kind of a conversation killer. Hello, I’m a Red spy.” He doesn’t laugh. “You still can’t. And that’s what kills you. You’re among your own people and you feel a stranger.” “There it is,” I say, raising a glass. I hesitate, wondering how much to confide in him. Then whisky talks for me. “It’s hard to talk to anyone. Everyone is so fragile. Sevro with his father, with the weight of a people he hardly knows. Victra thinks she’s wicked and keeps pretending like she just wants revenge. Like she’s full of poison. They think I know the path here. That I’ve had a vision of the future because of my wife. But I don’t feel her like I used to. And Mustang—” I stop awkwardly. “Go on. What about her? Come on, man. You killed my brothers. I killed Fitchner. It’s already awkward.” I grimace at the weirdness of this little moment. “She’s always watching me,” I say. “Judging. Like she’s keeping a tally of my worth. Whether I’m fit.” “For what?” “For her? For this? I don’t know. I felt like I proved myself on the ice, but it hasn’t gone away.” I shrug. “It’s the same for you, isn’t it? Serving at the Sovereign’s pleasure when Aja killed Quinn. Your mother’s…expectations. Sitting here with the man who took two brothers from you.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’re going to break everything and not be able to put it back together?” he asks sincerely. “Yes,” I say, understanding myself better than I have for a long time. “That’s why I have Mustang.” He stares at me for a long, odd moment before shaking his head and chuckling at himself or me. “I wish it was easier to hate you.” “There’s a toast if I ever heard one.” I raise my glass and he his, and we drink in silence. But before he parts with me that night, I give him a holocube to watch in his cell. I apologize in advance for its contents, but it’s something he needs to see. The irony is not lost on him. He’ll watch it later in his cell, and he will weep and feel lonelier still, but the truth is never easy.

The daughters who raced ahead to find him flank him now and laugh as Kavax bellows a hello to Mustang. She tries to maintain propriety as she rushes to him and tosses her arms around his neck. She kisses him once on his bald head. “Mustang,” he says happily. He pushes her back and lowers his head. “Apologies. Deepest apologies. I cannot stop being captured.” “Just a damsel in distress,” Sevro says. “It seems the case,” Kavax replies. “Just promise me this is the last time, Kavax,” Mustang says. He does. “And you’re injured again!” “A scratch! Just a scratch, my liege. Don’t you know I’ve magic in my veins?”

“Property is a funny thing these days,” Sevro says. “Tends to have opinions.” Victra bristles at the challenge. Mustang inserts herself. “I think Sevro means to say: now that you have your revenge, do you still intend to come with us to the Core?” “I don’t have my revenge,” Victra says. “Antonia still breathes.” “And when she does not?” Mustang asks. Victra shrugs. “I’m not good with commitment.” Sevro’s mood sours even more.

“Remember when you had her fight Lea when Lea couldn’t skin the sheep? Trying to make her tough,” Pebble says with a little laugh. Sevro laughs too. “Why are you laughing?” Clown asks. “You were still off eating mushrooms and howling at the moon back then.” “I was watching,” Sevro says. “I was always watching.” “That’s creepy, boss,” Screwface says drolly. “What were you doing while you were watching?” “Wanking in the bushes, obviously,” I say. Sevro grunts. “Only when everyone was asleep.”

She wiggles off her boots. “You mind?” “Go on.” I sip the coffee. “This is whiskey.” “You catch on quick.” She winks at me boyishly.

“Wasn’t much to do in Lykos, ’cept sit around and watch the darkness in Lykos.” “Watch the darkness. That’s so badass sounding.” Smoke jets out of her nose. “We grew up near corn. Bit less dramatic. Shitloads of it far as you could see. I’d go stand in the middle of it at night sometimes and pretend it was an ocean. You can hear it whispering. It’s not peaceful. Not like you’d think. It’s malevolent. I always wanted to be somewhere else. Not like Trigg. He loved Goodhope. Wanted to enlist at the local precinct for policing duty or be a game warden. He’d be happy kicking it in the backwater till he was old, drinking with those idiots at Lou’s, going hunting in early morning frost. I was the one who wanted out. Who wanted to hear the ocean, see the stars. Twenty years of service to the Legion. Cheap price.” She mocks herself, but it’s curious to me that she’s choosing to open up now. She found me here. At first I thought it was because she came to console me. But there’s already whiskey on the squat woman’s breath. She didn’t want to be alone. And I’m the only one who knew Trigg even a little. I set my datapad down.

There’s moments in life where you’re walking ahead so intent on your task that you forget to look down until you feel knee-deep in quicksand. I’m right there now. Surrounded by an unpredictable mob, looking up at a woman with the blood of Alia Snowsparrow running through her veins. My only defense a small circle of Sons of Ares and Golds. Holiday’s pulling a scorcher. Victra’s razor moves beneath her sleeve. I was too brash in storming in here. All this could go so wrong so quickly.

“Did you kill my father?” Sevro flicks him on his broad chest. “Did you kill my father?” Cassius looks down at him. No measure of humor to the man, just pride, not the vain sort I’ve seen in him over the years. War and life have drained that vigorous spirit from him. This is the face, the bearing of a man who wants nothing more than to die with a little dignity. “Yes,” he says loudly. “I did.” “Glad we cleared that up. He’s a murderer,” Sevro shouts to the crowd. “And what do we do to murderers?” The crowd roars for Cassius’s life. And Sevro, after making a show of cupping his ear, gives it to them. He shoves Cassius off the edge of the walkway. The Gold plummets till the cable around his neck snaps taut, arresting his fall. He gags. Feet kick. Face reddens. The crowd roars hungrily, chanting Ares’s name.

“My name is Sevro au Barca,” my friend cries out. “I am Ares!” He thumps his chest. “I have killed forty-four Golds. Fifteen Obsidian. One hundred and thirteen Grays with my razor.” The crowd roars in approval, even the Obsidians. “Jove knows who else with ships, railguns, and pulseFists. With nukes, knives, sharp sticks…” He trails off dramatically. They slam their feet. He beats his chest again. “I am Ares! I am a murderer too!” He puts his hands on his hips. “And what do we do to murderers?” This time no one answers. He never expected them to. He grabs the cable from the neck of one of the kneeling Golds, wraps it around his own neck, and looking to Sefi with a demented little smile, winks and backflips off the railing. The crowd screams, but Victra’s stunned gasp is the loudest. Sevro’s rope snaps taut. He kicks, choking beside Cassius. Feet scrambling. Silent and horrible. Face turning red, on its way to purple like Cassius’s. They swing together, the Goblin and the Gold,

Victra’s about to launch herself into the air on her gravBoots to save him. I hold her down. “Wait.” “He’s dying!” she says frantically. “That’s the point.” It is not a boy who dangles on that line. It is not a brokenhearted orphan who needs me to pick him up. It’s a man who has been through hell and now believes in the dream of his father, in the dream of my wife. It’s a man I would die to protect even as he dies to save the soul of this rebellion.

“Darrow’s wife…” Sevro croaks, larynx damaged. “His wife,” he says more deeply. “And my father never met. But they shared a dream. One of a free world. Not built on corpses, but on hope. On the love that binds us, not the hate that divides. We have lost many. But we are not broken. We are not defeated. We fight on. But we do not fight for revenge for those who have died. We fight for each other. We fight for those who live. We fight for those who don’t yet live. “Cassius au Bellona killed my father….” He stands over the man, swallowing before looking back up. “But I forgive him. Why? Because he was protecting the world he knew, because he was afraid.” Victra pushes her way to the front of the circle, watching Sevro who speaks now as if it was meant for her and her alone. “We are the new age. The new world. And if we’re to show the way, then we better damn well make it a better one. I am Sevro au Barca. And I am no longer afraid.”

“I’d rather have been whipped,” he mutters, wincing as he tries to turn his neck. “Be better than this.” “Not being whipped by Pax,” I reply. “I saw the video, he wasn’t swinging that hard.” “Have you ever been whipped? Did you see my back?” “You see my bloodydamn eye at the Institute? Jackal had it plucked out with a knife, didn’t see me whining.” “I had my whole bloodydamn body carved open,” I say as the doors hiss open and Mustang enters. “Twice.” “Oh, it always comes back to the slagging Carving,” Sevro mutters, wiggling his fingers in the air. “I’m so bloodydamn special, I had my bones peeled. My DNA spliced.” “Do they always do this?” Virany asks Mustang. “Seems like,” Mustang says. “Any chance I could bribe you to suture their mouths shut till they learn not to swear so much?”

“So all that out there…was that strategy or was it real?” Mustang asks Sevro. “Dunno.” Sevro shrugs. “I mean, gotta stop the cycle somewhere. Sucks, but dad’s gone. No sense burning down the world to try and bring him back. You know? Cassius didn’t kill dad because he hated him. They were both soldiers doing what soldiers do.” Mustang shakes her head, at a loss for words. So she sets a hand on his shoulder, and he knows how impressed she is. The compliment of silence is as deep a one as she can give, and Sevro favors her with a rare un-ironic smile. One that disappears when the door opens and Victra comes in. She’s red-eyed and agitated. “I need to talk to you,” she says to Sevro. “Get out,” Sevro says when we don’t move. “Everyone.

Sevro and Victra come out, both wearing smiles. “What are you two grinning about?” I ask. “Just this.” Sevro thrusts out a House Jupiter Institute ring. It’s loose on his finger. I squint at it, not understanding right away. His own ring is missing and then I see it awkwardly jammed onto Victra’s pinky. “She proposed,” he says with delight. “What?” I sputter. Mustang’s eyebrows shoot up. “Proposed…as in…” “Yeah, boyo!” Sevro beams. “We’re gettin’ hitched.”

I’ve never seen Sevro so happy. Nor so nervous as he was the hour before the ceremony when he combed his hair in my washroom. Not that you can do much with a Mohawk. “Is this insane? It seemed like a good idea yesterday,” he asked, staring at himself in the mirror. “And it’s a good idea today too,” I told him. “You’re not just saying that. Tell me the truth, man. I feel sick.” “Before I married Eo, I threw up.” “Bullshit.” “Got it all over my uncle’s boots.” A twinge of pain as I remember he’s gone. “Wasn’t that I was afraid of making the wrong decision. I was afraid she was. Afraid of not living up to her expectations…But my uncle told me that it’s women who see us better than we see ourselves. That’s why you love Victra. That’s why you fight with her. And that’s why you deserve this.”

rejoin Mustang as Mickey begins his flowery speech. It’s not half so grandiloquent as I might have expected. The way Mustang nods along to the words, I know she must have helped him edit it down. Reading my mind, she leans over. “You should have heard the first draft. It was a spectacle.” She sniffs me. “Are you drunk?” She looks back at the flushed Howlers and teetering Telemanuses. “Are they all drunk?” “Shhh,” I say and hand her a flask. “You’re too sober.”

“You want to be hated. Don’t you?” I ask. “That’s why you killed my uncle when you didn’t need to. It gives you purpose. That’s why you called me. To feel important. But I don’t hate you.” “Liar.” “I don’t.” “I killed Pax and your uncle and Lorn…” “I pity you.” He recoils. “Pity?” “ArchGovernor of all Mars, one of the most powerful men in all the worlds. With the might to do anything you like. And it’s not enough. Nothing has ever been enough for you, nor will it be. Adrius, you’re not trying to prove yourself to your father, to me, to Virginia, to the Sovereign. You’re trying to matter to yourself. Because you’re broken inside. Because you hate what you are. You wish you were born like Claudius. Like Virginia. You wish you were like me.”

But I know you lost yourself among us. You yearned to be Gold. I saw it in your eyes at the Institute. I saw that fever on Luna when I proposed that we should rule. I saw it when you rode that triumphal chariot up to the steps of the citadel. It’s that hunger that makes us forever alone.” And there he strikes the core of me. That abyssal fear that the darkness made my reality. The fear of being alone. Of never finding love again. But then Mustang steps out to join me. “You’re wrong, brother,” she says. The Jackal leans back at the sight of his sister. “Darrow had a wife. A family he loved. He had just a little bit and he was happy. You had everything, and you were miserable.

“Didn’t expect to start crying like that. Sorry.” “To be fair, I think I cry more. But, forgiven.” She tries a smile. “Do you actually think we can do this, Darrow?” Her eyes are red, the mascara she wore for the wedding stained by the tears. Her running nose is a ruddy pink, but I’ve never seen beauty as deep as hers is now. All the rawness of life flows through her. All the cracks and fears that make her who she is worn in her eyes. So imperfect and rough that I want to hold her and love her as long as I can. And for once, she lets me.

I could breathe her the rest of my life. But I want more. I need more. I tilt her slender jaw up with my hand so that she’s looking at me. I was going to say something important. Something memorable. But I’ve forgotten it in her eyes. That gulf that divided us is still there, filled with questions and recrimination and guilt, but that’s only part of love, part of being human. Everything is cracked, everything is stained except the fragile moments that hang crystalline in time and make life worth living.

My ship throbs with activity. Told only three days ago of our true destination, the men are filled with madcap excitement. There’s something immortal to attacking Luna. Win or lose, we’ve forever stained the legacy of Gold. And in the minds of my men, and in the chatter we pick up over the coms from the Core planets and moons, there is real fear in the air. For the first time in centuries, Gold has shown weakness. Breaking the Sword Armada has spread the rebellion faster than my speeches ever could.

Cassius swallows, searching himself. Not just seeking to understand what he owes honor or duty, but trying to imagine a world without her. I know the horrible loneliness he feels now even as we give him freedom. Life without love is the worst prison of all. But he licks his lips and nods to Mustang, not to me. “On my father, on Julian, I promise not to raise arms against any of you. If you let me go, I will leave. And I will never come back.”

He pauses and turns back to me to extend a hand. I take it, a strange feeling of kinship rising in me. “Goodbye, Darrow.” “Good luck, Cassius.” And for Mustang he pauses, wanting to reach out and wrap his arms around her, but she merely sticks out a hand, cold even now to him. He looks at her hand and shakes his head, not accepting her gesture. “We’ll always have Luna,” he says. “Goodbye, Cassius.” “Goodbye.”

He moves on to me, loosening my muzzle. Even on my knees my physicality dwarfs him. Fifty kilograms heavier. Still, his presence is like the sea: strange and vast and dark and full of hidden depths and power. His silence, his roar. I see his father in him now. He tricked me, guessing my play on Luna, and now I’m afraid all I’ve done is going to unravel.

“Alive, yes. And he will be. But she doesn’t want him coming in to her bunker with his sword arm attached to his body, now does she? We’re to take all his weapons. Neuter the beast and let’s be on our way. Unless…there’s a problem?” “No problem,” Cassius says. Stepping forward, he lifts high the razor, metal throbbing with heat. “Is this what you’ve become?” Mustang asks. Cassius suffers her gaze, shame on his face. “Look at me, Darrow,” Mustang says. “Look at me.” I will myself to forget the blade. To watch her, taking strength from her. But as the superheated metal cleaves through the skin and bone of my right wrist, I forget her. I scream in pain, looking back where my hand was to see a stump

This moment, this fragment of time is my life in summary. It is my shout into the void. “And I find you guilty of treason against your Society….” But I want no shout. Let that be for Roque. Let that be for the Golds. Give me something more. Something they cannot understand. Give me the rage of my people. The wrath of all people in bondage. As the Sovereign recites her sentence, as the Jackal waits to deliver it, as Mustang kneels on the ground, as Cassius watches me from among the Praetorians and Knights, waiting, and as Aja sees me look to the tall blond knight, she steps forward in trepidation because she knows something is wrong, I throw my head back and I howl. I howl for my wife, for my father. For Ragnar and Quinn and Pax and Narol. For all the people I’ve lost. For all they would take. I howl because I am a Helldiver of Lykos. I am the Reaper of Mars. And I have paid for access to this bunker with my flesh, all so I could come before Octavia, all so that I might either die with my friends or see our enemies brought to justice.

Aja rises from her crouch to her full height, a brooding mass of muscle and armor, the greatest student of the greatest razormaster the Society has ever known. Face dark, unreadable. The deep blue Protean armor moving subtly with sea dragons. Shoulders nearly as broad as Ragnar’s. I wish I could have brought Sefi here. A meter and a half of killing silver slithers out before Aja and she takes the winter stance of the Willow Way,

“Why?” Octavia asks Cassius, shaking from sorrow. “Why?” “Because you lied,” he says. Wordlessly Cassius pulls the small holocube, a thumb-sized triangular prism, from his ammunition belt and sets it in her bloody hands. Images dance across its surfaces before floating into the air above the Sovereign’s hands. The scene of Cassius’s family dying plays, bathing her in blue light. Shadows move through a hall, becoming men in scarabSkin. They cut down his aunt in a hallway and the men move through and appear a moment later dragging children, which they kill with the razors and boots. More bodies are dragged and piled up, then lit on fire so there would be no survivors. More than forty children and non-scarred family members died that night. They thought they could heap the sin upon the shoulders of a fallen man. But it was the Jackal’s work. He finished the war between the Bellona and the Augustuses, and the Sovereign’s cooperation and silence was his price for my Triumph.

“This world is the best we can afford,” Octavia whispers. “Do you really believe that?” Mustang asks. “With all my heart.” “Then I pity you,” Mustang says. And so does Cassius. “My heart was my brother. And I no longer believe in a world that says he was too weak to deserve life. He would have believed in this. In the hope for something new.” Cassius looks over at me. “For Julian, I can believe that too.”

“Sins?” Octavia shakes her head, looking back to the three holos dancing in her hands, these drops in her ocean of sins. “These are sacrifices. What it takes to rule,” she says, her hands closing around them. “I own them as I own my triumphs. You will see. You will be the same, Conqueror.” “No. I will not.” “In the absence of a sun, there can be only darkness.”

Mustang looks at me. This is a moment she never wanted. But she accepts it as her burden just as I have accepted mine as Reaper. I see how it troubles her. How she will need me as I’ve needed her. But I could never stand where she stands or hold what she holds. Not without destroying everyone in this room. They would never accept it. If I am the bridge to the lowColors, she’s the bridge to the high. Only together can we bind these people. Only together can we bring peace.

My own body is in recovery. Mickey and Virany reattached my hand, which I retrieved from the Jackal’s shuttle that set down on Luna. It will be months before I can write again, much less use a blade. Though I hope I have less cause for that in the coming days.

“And the boy?” I asked, nodding to Lysander, who moved into the ship carrying a satchel of belongings. “Sevro thinks it’s a mistake to let him live. What were his words? ‘It’s like leaving a pitviper egg under your seat. Sooner or later it’s gonna hatch.’ ” “And what do you think?” “I think it’s a different world. So we should act like it. He’s got Lorn’s blood in his veins as much as he’s got Octavia’s. Not that blood makes a difference anymore.”

“He reminds me of Julian. He’s a good soul, despite everything. I’ll raise him right. Away from all this.” He extended a hand, not to shake mine, but to give me the ring he took from my finger the night Lorn and Fitchner died. I closed his hand back around it. “That belongs to Julian,” I said. He nodded softly. “Thank you…brother.” And there, on a citadel landing platform in what was once the heart of Gold power, Cassius au Bellona and I shake hands and say farewell, almost six years to the day since we first met.

“Have I passed your test?” “My test?” she asks. “Ever since you blocked my ship from leaving Phobos, you’ve been testing me. I thought I passed on the ice, but it didn’t stop there.” “You noticed,” she says with a mischievous little grin. It fades and she brushes hair from her eyes. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t just follow you. I needed to see if you could build. I needed to see if my people could live in your world.”