Red Rising (Red Rising Saga, #1)

by Pierce Brown

There was no waste.” He chuckles and looks around the table with a suprising amount of pride. “Except for that idiot, Priam. Yeah. There’s a lesson for you lot. He was a brilliant boy—beautiful, strong, fast, a genius who studied day and night with a dozen tutors. But he was pampered. And someone, I won’t say who, because that’d undermine the fun of this whole curriculum, but someone knocked him down onto the stone and then stomped on his trachea till he died.”