Red Rising (Red Rising Saga, #1)

by Pierce Brown

Only five souls have been buried in three generations—someone

someone always hangs for it.

This is the ultimate act of love. Eo’s s...

My people sing, we dance, we love. That is our strength. But we also dig. And then we die. Seldom do we get to choose why. That choice is power. That choice has been our only weapon. But it is not enough.

But Eo was right, I don’t understand this. This is not my victory. This is selfish. She told me to live for more. She wanted me to fight. But here I am, dying despite what she wanted. Giving up because of the pain.

lumbar.

There is a festival where we wear the faces of demons to ward evil spirits from our dead in the vale. The faces sparkle with fool’s gold.

vale.

“And you’re Lazarus,” she says. I find her voice cold, lazy; it plays with the ears as a cat plays with a caught mouse.

She laughs and strips away her mask. Her face is day and night—the right side a ragged and distended mess of skin running and folding together in smooth scar rivers. A steam burn. A familiar sight, but not on women. Rare for a woman to be on a drillteam.

“We have a passcode. No brains in slaves. Mine Tinpots are idiots. It’s the Grey elites, or the Obsidian monsters you watch out for. But they don’t waste their time down here.”

runt

I’m surprised you’re standing.

sullied.

“Why not?” I repeat. I glare up at him, glare at his followers and hiss the words one by one. “You saved me. You could have saved her. She is the one you would have wanted. The bloodydamn martyr. She cared about all this. Or does Ares only need Sons, not Daughters?”

“Martyrs are a dime a dozen.”

“Your girl was a dreamer, boy,” Harmony spits at me from Dancer’s other side. “As worthless as a flame over water …”

Dancer goes to Harmony and whispers something, likely telling her that we’re to be friends. We won’t be. But I promise not to choke her and she promises not to stab me.

“Dreamers like your wife are limited, little Helldiver.” She makes sure I don’t speak. “Understand that. The only power they have is in death. The harder they die, the louder their voice, the deeper the echoes. But your wife served her purpose.”

“The same as yours, little Helldiver. To make the dream come true.”

cots,

“The best thing he ever did was tell us about you. And he should have done that when you were a boy, but he kept you a secret. He’s worked for us since before your father’s death as an informer, you know.”

“Our informants exist to feed us information and to help us find the outliers so we can extract the best of Red from the mines.”

scythe

“Do you know why we call ourselves Sons of Ares, Darrow? To the Romans, Mars was the god of war—a god of military glory, defense of the hearth and home. Honorable and all. But Mars is a fraud. He is a romanticized version of the Greek god Ares.”

“Ares was a bastard, an evil patron of rage, violence, bloodlust, and massacre,” he says. “So by naming yourselves after him, you’re pointing to the truth of things within the Society. Cute.”

But I know how Gold rose to power hundreds of years ago. They call it the Conquering. They butchered any who contested them. Massacred cities, continents. Not many years ago, they reduced an entire world to ash—Rhea. The Ash Lord nuked it to oblivion. It was with Ares’s wrath that they acted. And now we are the sons of that wrath.”

“You should know that your wife didn’t die in vain, Darrow. The Greens who help us hijacked the broadcast. We hacked in and played the true version over every HC on our planet. The planet, the clans of the hundred thousand mining colonies and those in the cities, have heard your wife’s song.”

“They heard her song and they call her Persephone already.”

“Her name is Eo,” I sneer. “And she belongs to Lykos.”

“She belongs to her people now, Darrow. And they remember the old tales of a goddess stolen from her family by the god of death. Yet even when she was stolen, death could not forever keep her. She was the Maiden, the goddess of spring destined to return after each winter. Beauty incarnate can touch life even from the grave; that’s how they think of your wife.”

She was pure, like your father. We, you and I”—he touches my chest with the back of his index finger—“are dirty. We are made for blood. Rough hands. Dirty hearts. We are lesser creatures in the grand scheme of things, but without us men of war, no one except those of Lykos would hear Eo’s song. Without our rough hands, the dreams of the pure hearts would never be built.”

want to kill Augustus,” I say, remembering the cold Golden face as it commanded my wife’s death. It was so distant, so uncaring. “He will not live while Eo lies dead.” I think of Magistrate Podginus and Ugly Dan. I will kill them too.

“I said I would give you justice. Vengeance is an empty thing, Darrow.”

“It will fill me. Help me kill the ArchGovernor.”

“Now you understand,” Dancer says. “We are deceived.”

The city is one of spires, parks, rivers, gardens, and fountains. It is a city of dreams, a city of blue water and green life on a red planet that is supposed to be as barren as the cruelest desert. This is not the Mars they show us on the HC. This is not a place unfit for man. It is a place of lies, wealth, and immense abundance.

This is the future. It should not be this way for generations.

Octavia au Lune told us of Lykos that we are the pioneers of Mars, that we are the brave souls who sacrifice for the race, that soon our toils for humanity will be over. Soon the softer Colors will join us, once Mars is habitable. But they have already joined us. Earth has come to Mars and we pioneers were left below, slaving, toiling, suffering to create and maintain the foundation of this … this empire. We are as Eo always said—the Society’s slaves.

“Earth ain’t overcrowded, Darrow. Seven hundred years back, they expanded to their moon, Luna. Because it is so difficult to launch spacecraft through Earth’s gravity and atmosphere, Luna became Earth’s port through which it colonized the moons and planets of the Solar System.”

“It was in the early stages of the Colonization when the wealthy of Luna began to realize Earth was nothing more than a drain on their profits. Even as Luna colonized the Solar System, they were taxed and owned by corporations and countries on Earth, but those same entities could not enforce their ownership. So Luna rebelled—the Golds and their Society against the countries of Earth. Earth fought back and Earth lost. That was the Conquering. Economics turned Luna into the power and port of the Solar System. And the Society began to change into what it is today—an empire built on Red backs.”

“Reds were sent to Mars five hundred years ago. The other Colors came to Mars about three hundred years back, while our ancestors still toiled beneath the surface. They lived in the paraterraformed cities—cities with bubbles of atmosphere over them—while the rest of the world terraformed slowly. Now the bubbles are coming down and the world is fit for any man.

“HighReds live as maintenance workers, sanitation, grain harvesters, assembly workers. LowReds are those of us born beneath the surface—the truest slaves. In the cities, the Reds who dance disappear. Those who voice their thoughts vanish. Those who bow their heads and accept the rule of the Society and their place in Society, as all Colors do, live on with relative freedom.”

The gravity of history drew my people into slavery. We are the bottom of the Society, the dirt. Eo always preached something of the like, though she never knew the truth. If she had known this, how much more passionately would she have spoken? This existence is worse than she ever could have imagined. It is not hard to understand the conviction with which the Sons of Ares fight.

“Five hundred years.” I shake my head. “This is our bloodydamn planet.” “Through sweat and toil it was made so,” he agrees.

“Blood.” Dancer smiles at me like a township alleycat. There’s a beast behind this man’s fatherly smiles. Eo was right. It comes to violence.

I grew up with a quicksmiling girl of fifteen so in love with her young husband that when he was burned in the mines and his wound festered, she sold her body to a Gamma in return for antibiotics. She was stronger than her husband. When he grew well and discovered what had been done on his behalf, he killed the Gamma with a slingBlade snuck from the mines. Easy to guess what happened after that. Her name was Lana and she was Uncle Narol’s daughter. She lives no longer.

He was born like me, went through the flush like me, and he never saw the sun either. He was just given a little packet of medicine by the Society, and look at the effect.

How clever of them. How much hate they create between people who should be kin. But if the clans knew what luxury exists on the surface, if they knew how much had been stolen from them, they would feel the hatred I feel, they

“Because a rebellion now would be crushed in days,” Dancer explained. “We must take a different path. An empire cannot be destroyed from without till it is destroyed from within. Remember that. We’re empire-breakers, not terrorists.”