More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
On Mars there is not much gravity. So you have to pull the feet to break the neck. They let the loved ones do it.
The children adore all Helldivers. But the older eyes watch me too, just as Eo always says. I’m their pride, their golden son.
Yet despite the disappointment, some part of us doesn’t blame the Society. We blame Gamma, who receives the gifts. A man’s only got so much hate, I suppose. And when he sees his children’s ribs through their shirts while his neighbors line their bellies with meat stews and sugared tarts, it’s hard for him to hate anyone but them. You think they’d share. They don’t.
But Mars is a fraud. He is a romanticized version of the Greek god Ares.”
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.
“Mankind was always enslaved, they’ll say. Freedom enslaves us to lust, to greed.
“Society has three stages: Savagery, Ascendance, Decadence. The great rise because of Savagery. They rule in Ascendance. They fall because of their own Decadence.”
Others will have lost friends, and so the House will devour itself. The Society did this on purpose; they want chaos. It will be our second test. Tribal strife.
If our families hadn’t spent holidays together when we were little things, I might have called her out as a demokrat on the first day. But she’s hardly that. More like Caesar or … what did they call them, Presidents?—a tyrant in necessity’s clothing.”
Cassius finds me running with June over my shoulder through their gardens. “What the hell?” “She’s a cook!” I explain. He laughs so hard he can barely breathe.
Man cannot be freed by the same injustice that enslaved it.
Everyone gets cloaks, which are smelly things as they dry and we peel away the rot. Everyone except Pax. They haven’t yet made a wolf big enough for him.
“Tactus is an Iron Gold. His blood is as old as the Society. They look at compassion, at reform, as a disease. He is his family. He will not change. He will not learn. He believes in power. Other Colors are not people to him. Lesser Golds are not people to him. He is bound to his fate.”
“Perrrfect!” Tactus picks up the bloodback pelt with a grunt. “Looky look. They found something in Pax’s size.”
He is like any other petty tyrant of history. A slave to his own whims. A master of nothing but selfishness.
Rulers tend to dislike those who break rules.
