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there the Sovereign Consul, Octavia au Lune, rules with her Imperators and Praetors. The Ash Lord, who made the world of Rhea cinders, is her minion. She controls the twelve Olympic Knights, legions of Peerless Scarred, and Obsidians as innumerable as the stars. And those Obsidians are only the elite.
The Gray soldiers prowl the cities ensuring order, ensuring obedience to the hierarchy. The Whites arbitrate their justice and push their philosophy. Pinks pleasure and serve in highColor homes. Silvers count and manipulate currency and logistics. Yellows study the medicines and sciences. Greens develop technology. Blues navigate the stars. Coppers run the bureaucracy. Every Color has a purpose. Every Color props up the Golds.
Yorkton,
Like Yorktown in Star Trek and the Battle of Yorktown
Garish
I blush and look away in disgust because I’ve only ever seen one woman naked. “You’ll want to forget your modesty,” Harmony advises. “It’ll mark you worse than your Color.” “It is disgusting,” I say. “It’s advertising, darling,” Harmony purrs condescendingly. She shares a chuckle with Dancer.
“Golds structure everything to make their own lives easier. They have shows produced to entertain and placate the masses. They give monies and handouts to make generations dependent on the seventh day of each new Earth month. They create goods to grant us a semblance of liberty. If violence is the Gold sport, manipulation is their art form.”
I cannot simply walk or ride into a Gold or Copper district. But a Copper can always slum in a Red district, frequenting a bar or brothel.
“In the densest places of man, humanity most easily breaks down,” he says.
Here, other Colors slam into me and offer not even a faint apology. This is a city, and I do not like it. I feel alone.
writhe
gyrate
simpering
Two golden wings, the Sigils of a Gold, clatter onto the table.
“There’s DNA matching him with the wings, cerebral extraction. Did you know they have subdermal markings in their skulls? Of course you didn’t—datachips attached to their frontal cortexes to substantiate their caste? Then there’s synapse linkage, molecular bonding, tracking devices, the Quality Control Board. And there’s the trauma and the associative reasoning. Say we make his body perfect, there’s still one problem:
we cannot make him smarter. One cannot make a mouse a lion.”
Mickey’s jaw muscles flicker under his skin as he ignores me. “You’re making a savior,” he accuses, looking over at Dancer. “Dancer, you bastard. You’re making a messiah for your gorydamn cause.”
“He will apply to the Institute. He will be accepted. There, he will excel well enough to reach the ranks of the Peerless Scarred; as a Scarred, he can train to be a Praetor, a Legate, a Politico, a Quaestor. Anything. He will advance to a prime position, the primer the better. From there, he will be in a position to do as Ares requires for the Cause.”
“You want him to be a bona fide Peerless Scarred. Not a Bronzie?”
“Fleets. You lot are mad. Mad.” Mickey’s violet eyes settle on mine after a long moment. “My boy, they are murdering you. You are not a Gold. You cannot do what a Gold can do. They are killers, born to dominate us; have you ever met one of the Aureate? Sure, they may look all pretty and peaceful now. But do you know what happened in the Conquering? They are monsters.”
“The Institute is not a school, it is a culling ground where the Golds go to hack at one another till the strongest in mind and body is found. You. Will. Die.”
“Have you ever been in a mine?” I ask him. “Ever used your fingers to dig through a faultline at a twelve-degree angle while doing the math to accommodate eighty percent rotation power and fifty-five percent thrust so you don’t set off a gas-pocket reaction while sitting in your own piss and sweat and worrying about pitvipers that want to burrow into your gut to lay their eggs?”
I am told the trauma killed me and they had to restart my heart. I’ve died twice then. They say I was in a coma for two weeks, but to me it was nothing but a dream. I was in the vale with Eo. She kissed me on the forehead and then I woke and felt the stitches and the pain.
“But we must not be satisfied only with the brain,” he says. “There is much work to be done on this Ruster body of yours if we want to make you into an iron Gold.”
“The golden ancestors, they call them the iron Golds. They were hard men. They stood lean and fierce upon their battlecruisers as they laid waste to the armies and republic fleets of Earth. What creatures they were.” His eyes go distant. “It took generations of eugenics and biological tampering to make them. Forced Darwinism.”
“So why not carve you to be the god of war?”
only a homogeneous baselayer.
Mickey sits beside me on my worst nights telling me stories. It’s only then that I like him, only then that I think he is not some monster cooked up by this perverted Society.
They made us take pills. Pills that could make us fly between the planets on wings of dust to visit the faerie kings of Jupiter and the
“Power isn’t real. It’s just a word.”
“Mankind was always enslaved, they’ll say. Freedom enslaves us to lust, to greed. Take freedom away, and they give me a life of dreaming. They gave you a life of sacrifice, family, community. And society is stable. There is no famine. No genocide. No great wars. And when the Golds fight, they obey rules. They are … noble about it when the great houses bicker.”
“Your heart is like that of a stallion’s. I’ve never glimpsed one like it before. You were bitten by a pitviper when you were young, I assume?”
“I thought so. Your heart had to adjust to counteract the effects of the poison.”
The poison cannot be sucked out. It still runs through your veins, forcing your heart to be strong if you want to continue to live. You are something special, just like me.”
We are beyond that now. There will be pain. But we are past the threat of mortality. Soon we will have made man into god. Red into Gold. Even your wife would not recognize you.”
zither
concentraction machines.”
“Dancer, Darrow is like a stallion, one of the old stallions of Earth. Beautiful beasts that will run as hard as you push them. They will run. And run. And run. Until they don’t. Until their hearts explode.”
My body is becoming that of a Gold, one of the prime stock, not a Pixie, not a Bronze. This is the body of the race that conquered the Solar System. My hands are freaks. They are smooth, tanned, and dexterous, as any Gold’s should be. But there is a power in them out of proportion with the rest of me. If I am a blade, they are my edge.
She’s a Pink. They breed them for pleasure, for the curves of their breasts and hips, for the tautness of their stomachs and the plump folds of their lips. Yet she is a girl and her spark has not yet gone out. I remember the last time I failed to protect one like her.
ingots.
Eo was beautiful. I still remember the flush of blood in her cheeks as she danced. She had all the raw colors of life, the crude beauty of nature. I am the human concept of beauty. Gold made soft and supple into man’s form.
Tired of seeing the girls he brings into his family only to sell away when someone bids high enough. Tired of seeing all the full eyes go hollow. This is not Lykos. There is no love, no family or trust. This place is sick.
“You give the girls wings, but you don’t let them fly. Do you?” I ask. “It’s impossible for them to fly. They are simpler things than you. And I can’t afford to buy a license to have gravBoots. So they dance for me.” Mickey explains. “But you, you’ll fly, won’t you, my brilliant boy?”
“Yes. You’re used to knowing what’s what. You think like the rest of them.” I nod to the HC’s reflection. “Things are set in stone. Things are well ordered. Reds at the bottom, everyone else standing on our backs. Now you’re looking at me and you’re realizing that we don’t bloodydamn like it down there. Red is rising, Mickey.”
“Be kind to Evey, Mickey. Don’t make her dance. Give her a plush life or I’ll come back to pull your hands off your body.”
“Bald as a toddler, you frenetic little baby,” Matteo sighs as properly as one can say such a thing. “Just as the newest Luna fashion requires. Now, with a bit of eyebrow sculpting—oh, how your brows are like fungus-nibbling caterpillars—and nose-hair eradication, cuticle readjustment, teeth whitening on those slick new chompers—which, if I may say,
A Gold would rather die than use that slithering mineslang. ‘Gorydamn’ or ‘gory’; and ‘slag’ instead of ‘squab.’ Every time you say ‘bloody’ or ‘bloodydamn,’ I will smack not your gob, but your mouth. And if you say ‘squab’ or ‘gob,’ I will kick you in the scrotum—which I do know my way around—as I will do if you do not get rid of that horrible accent. You sound like you were born in a gorydamn dumpster.”
forswear
brogue
polyenne
