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Then Titus reminds them of the shame that will forever mark their names if they do not obey; they swing harder; they aim for the girl’s golden head. They hit her and hit her till her shouts have long faded and blood mats her blonde hair. When Titus grows bored, he drags the wounded girl back to his camp by her hair. She slides limply over the earth.
Then he had one of his female followers shriek during the night to pretend she was the slave at the camp. She screamed of rape and violations.
She never returns. Still the Proctors do not interfere. I’m not sure why they even exist.
House Ceres does not come out after dark anymore, and their high walls are guarded. The trees outside the wall have all been cut down, but there are crops and more orchards inside their long walls. Bread still bakes and the river still flows within their ramparts.
Titus can do nothing but savage their land and steal what remains of their apples. Most have been sown with needles and stingers from wasps. Titus has failed. And so, as do those of any tyrant after a failed war, his eyes turn inward.
hovel.
If the test is to unite a fractious House, I am failing.
“What he’s doing to the girls …,” Cassius hisses to me as we slink away from the castle as night descends. “He’s a beast.”
“If he is treating them like Pinks, then it is because they merited no better in this little world than Pinks do in our big world.”
“That’s a lie,” I tell him. I’ll never be healed of Eo. That pain will last forever. “Some things do not fade. Some things can never be made right.”
Cassius was on watch and as the others slept he snuck away to the castle to challenge Titus. Somehow the brilliant young man was arrogant enough to think hundreds of years of Aureate honor and tradition would survive the sickness that has consumed Titus’s tribe in only a few weeks. The Imperator’s son was wrong. And he is also unused to having his heritage be of such little consequence. In the real world, he would have been safe. In this small one, he is not.
“Of course he is, he wants to be one of the Sovereign’s knights,” Roque mutters. “And all they do is duel.” He shakes his long hair. Dirt crusts the leather band that holds it in a ponytail. “You should have waited for us.”
sigils
swell.”
She leans forward in the saddle sardonically. “You don’t have crops. You just fought those who do, and you don’t have any better weapons, clearly, or you would be carrying them with you. So Ceres is in these parts as well. Likely in the lowlands near the woods for crops. Or near that big river everyone is talking about.”
Cassius should have remembered her the way he looks at girls, but maybe he can only think of Quinn and her missing ear.
“I knew you wanted to roll me in the mud.” Her lips smirk. Then they purse as if she wants a kiss. I recoil. Instead, she whistles and the plan becomes a bit more complicated. I hear hooves.
“Reaper, Handsome, I must leave you now!” Mustang calls to us. “Try not to drown before I return with your standard. You can be my pretty bodyguards. And you can have matching hats! But we’ll have to teach you to think better!”
“M-mustang is a s-sexp-p-pot,” Cassius manages to shiver out. “She’s s-s-scary.”
“W-w-why are you asking m-me like I’m your P-praetor?” I laugh. “You know what’s what.”
“If the Minervans get to the keep, they will destroy Titus and take our territory.”
Virginia
Their castle is different—drier, cleaner, and less oppressive. They have gardens and olive trees that wend between the sandstone columns of the bottom level.
“The big bastard? Yes, Pax laid him low.” She gestures to the monster of a boy beside her. Pax’s hair is shorn short, his eyes small, chin like a heel with a dent in it. Beneath him, his horse looks like a dog. His bare arms are flesh stretched over boulders.
“Pax au Telemanus”
“Was done by Titus,” Antonia drawls tiredly. “And no one else?” Mustang looks at me. “The girls won’t stop crying.”
“Mars. A gruesome deity. You’re fit for this, aren’t you lot? Barbarity? Past centuries. Dark ages.”
“This is a school. You realize that, yes? No matter the rules your House decides to play by. Be ruthless all you gorywell like. But there are limits. There are slagging limits to what you can do in this school, in the game. The more brutal you are, the more foolish you look to the Proctors, to the adults who will know what you’ve done—what you’re capable of doing. You think they want monsters to lead the Society? Who would want a monster for an apprentice?”
“They want visionaries. Leaders of men. Not reapers of them. There are limits,” she continues.
“There are no goddamned limits.”
Somehow she thinks we should pay, that the Proctors should come down and interfere. Most of the kids think that about this game; hell, Cassius said it a hundred times as we scouted together. But the game isn’t like that, because life isn’t like that. Gods don’t come down in life to mete out justice.
The powerful do it. That’s what they are teaching us, not only the pain in gaining power, but the desperation that comes from not having it, the desperation that comes when you are not a Gold.
“If Titus raped a little girl who happened to be a Red, how would you feel?” I ask.
It isn’t rape unless she wears the sigil of an elder House like Augustus. Even then, the crime is against her master.
“Now look around,” I say quietly. “There are no Golds here. I’m a Red. You’re a Red. We are all Reds till one of us gets enough power. Then we get rights. Then we make our own law.” I lean back and raise my voice. “That is the point of all this. To make you terrified of a world where you do not rule. Security and justice aren’t given. They are made by the strong.”
“Because there is a boy here like you.” Her face takes on a gloomy aspect, as though she regrets what she must say. “My Proctor calls him the Jackal. He is smarter and crueler and stronger than you, and he will win this game and make us his slaves if the rest of us go about acting like animals.” Her eyes implore me. “So please, hurry up and evolve.”
The division is worse than ever, only now I cannot define it and I think there is only one way to mend it.
“The Proctors aren’t interfering, because they want to see how and if we handle justice, Darrow. It is the deeper trait that this situation probes. How do we manage Law?”
“Cassius cannot lead this House. Not after what happened. Titus’s boys and girls might obey him, but they won’t respect him. They won’t think him stronger than them, even if he is. Darrow, they pissed on him. We are Golds. We do not forget.”
“Doesn’t matter a flying piss how much it means to him,” Roque echoes my words with a smile. His fingers are thin like hay on my bicep. “They’ll never fear him.”
To have an army, you must first have a civilization—you went straight to violence like they wanted us to. Why do you think they gave us of Mars nothing and the other Houses have so many resources? We’re meant to fight like mad, but we’re meant to burn out like you did. But I beat that test. Now I’m the hero. Not the usurper. And you’re just the ogre in the dungeon.”
“Not enough.” He tilts his large head. His hair is greasy and dark with dirt, almost as though he’s tried to black out the gold. He seems to like the dirt. It’s under his fingernails, coats his burnished skin. “I tried to bash their heads in. Kill them before the medBots came. But they were always so fast.”
Titus’s face contorts horribly. “Friends?” he spits. “Friends with them? Those Goldbrows? They are monsters, soulless bastards. Nothing but a bunch of cannibals, all of them. They did the same as I did, but … pfah.”
Suddenly he’s telling me about how they took “her” and raped “her” in front of him. Then the slaggers came back a week later to do it some more. So he killed them; bashed their heads in. “I killed the bloodydamn monsters. Now their daughters bloodywell get what she got.”
If I were a Gold, I might have not noticed, might’ve just been befuddled by the odd word. I’m no Gold. “Darrow?”
The hate. The disgust. The vengeance. Cannibals eat their own. He called them cannibals. Pollux, Cassandra, Vixus—who are their own? Their own. Golden. Bloodydamn. Not gory. Titus said bloodydamn. No Gold says that. Ever. And he called it a slingBlade, not a reaper’s scythe. Oh hell. Titus is a Red.
Titus is what Dancer did not want me to become. He is like Harmony. He is a creature of vengeance. A rebellion with Titus at the helm would fail in weeks. Worse, if Titus continues this way, continues unstably, he puts me at risk. Dancer lied, or else he did not know that there are other Reds who’ve been carved, other Reds who have donned the mask of the Golds. How many more are there? How many has Ares planted here, in the Society? In the Institute? It doesn’t matter if it is a thousand or just one. Titus’s instability puts every Red ever carved into a Gold at risk. He puts Eo’s dream at
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I sob in the armory as I resolve what must be done. More blood will stain these hands, because Titus is a mad dog and must be put down.
I will make a Red die because he killed Golds. He dug the earth like me. He has a soul like mine. In death, it will go to the vale, but in life he was stupid and selfish with his grief. He should have been better than this. Reds are better than him, aren’t we?
He said he did it for justice, for the honor of his family and House. But this is revenge, and how hollow it seems.
