Dark Age (Red Rising Saga #5)

by Pierce Brown

Now I stand without him, wondering if he should be my compass when he could not even follow his own needle—and the roar of the distant ocean fills my ears.

I glimpse a Society bastion—a mobile operations command city—upon the desert sands. A jamField covers Heliopolis, where my husband licks his wounds. What hell does he suffer? What greater hell does he prepare for his enemies?

I hope he knows we have not abandoned him. That I still love his heart, despite its weight and anger and complications. I love him so much I cannot bear to think of him.

Muttering to himself, Sevro humors the old man and leaves the Sphere. He appears a moment later. “I’ll know if you talk about me.” He leaves again.

“There are things I doubt in this world,” he replies in his luxurious private tone. Intelligence radiates from eyes usually misted by his lifelong ruse. “The constitution of Obsidian virtues, the ramifications of universal suffrage, Sevro’s personal hygiene, my violence on behalf of your father, my wife’s mental perspicacity for selecting me for life”—he adopts his public face—“to join in union a doddering madman! Weird woman! Addled in the wits! Madness! Absolute madness!” His internal cleverness reclaims his face. “But never Virginia au Augustus.”

“Nah, prolly a bad idea,” Sevro says. “You know, clones are creepy and all. Always something wrong with the human ones.” Daxo is lost, peering at the ceiling in thought. Behind his back, Sevro makes a big X with arms at the cloning idea.

Get in. Get out. And bring me that Queen’s head.” “Attached?” “If possible. If not, permission to cauterize.

“I have thought it over. I think I would be a good father,” Daxo says at last. “After all, I have a fine example to follow.”

Dancer eases to his feet. The rugged man in brilliant white looks at me with a soft smile of reassurance as I wait for Sevro’s message.

this how you know everything is about to hit the fan

Daxo kills and maims in a tyrannical whirlwind like the kind Darrow and only few others still living have ever seen in person, much less produced.

“If he were coming by tunnel, he’d be here by now.” “I know.” “Then you know we have to collapse the tunnel. It would be difficult to explain to my brother why I did it on his daughter’s head.”

“What’s the final refugee count?” I ask the centurion. “Eighty-three thousand four hundred and twenty-six souls, sir.” “Eighty-three thousand four hundred and twenty-six souls,” I say to Rhonna. “Not many are lucky enough to know how much their life is worth.” She gives a small nod of appreciation.

I wish for one small moment that I were a young man again who could charge forward nourished by his own righteousness. That man would damn the danger and search for Alexandar as Colloway searched for Orion. But that man would have died in the desert and taken all his men with him. That man isn’t what my army needs.

I can only hope that my wife has found him by now. That they are together and that the fleet is coming for us. Hope. Hope won’t bring back Orion or my men. But my wife deserves it. And here, shorn of everything else, I am sustained only by her strength.

“At least Orion’s villainy can be traced to anger. Yours is just cold blood.” “Cold blood wins wars,” Thraxa says.

I would have to make a mistake I have not made in fifteen years: fool myself into believing slavery is better than death. I will not do that.”

“IT’S DISAPPOINTING WE DIDN’T get to meet in person,” I say to Atalantia. “I had such plans for you.” “Yes, well, I’m not terribly fond of having conversations when I’m on the back foot. And I will admit, you put me there.” “Lady, I fucked you up.”

“Don’t you find it peculiar? The human conviction that we are the heirs of history instead of paragraphs that are almost over.

It is beautiful in a way to see a man struggle against natural law. To see what human will can accomplish. And then to see your face now.” She shudders with pure pleasure. “No betraying inflections. No microexpressions of grief. Simply obduracy, despite the dread clawing at the back of your eyes—a doomed army, a lost child, a dead wife.” She wags a finger heavy with rings at me. “That is a Peerless Scarred.

The Republic is in turmoil, you could drive a nail through it if you could just use your ships. Yet they’re stuck here guarding me like two-bit tinpots. Is it because I put the Minotaur on Venus? Is it something else? Or maybe it’s just that no matter how many strapping young Golds you send after me, all you get back is piles of meat.

A cavernous solitude makes a home in my chest, where once there was only purpose that made far too little room for my boy and my wife.

“The tragedy of the gifted is the belief they are entitled to greatness, Lysander. As a human, you are entitled only to death.”

Weary bands trudge toward their imagined salvation. But we are all just burnt shadows of war.

You know what Nero did when the gazelle escaped? He kept running, even when it had him by two kilometers. He was gone the whole night. And then he came back with it on his shoulders while the Browns were laying out breakfast the next morning. All covered in cuts and dirt. I’ll remember what he said till the day I’m shot into the sun.” He takes on a very obnoxious rendition of Augustus’s Martian timbre. “Beasts must stop for water. I carry mine.”

He’s right, and he knows it. Still, it’s the principle. And if I give up that, I’ll have nothing left.

fact

They followed me here, but I do not feel like one of them any longer. These arms and legs that have stripped lives from so many seem all the heavier and more alien here. This height given to me by a mad carver seems like a monstrous feature I wish I could hide and be rid of so that I could stand amongst them, part of them, a man of mines, following someone else.

Inside one of the obelisks, they found a message for me. I rub the datadrop between my fingers, and activate it. “ ’Lo, husband,” my wife says with a gentle smile.

But no matter what the Senate decides, at midnight on the first of May, I will come to Mercury. If fortune favors, it will be as a Sovereign. If not, it will be as a wife.”

Mustang stands ten toes down for her MAN

“You know I believe we all begin equal parts light and dark. I fear you think your strength lies in your darkness. But the measure of a man is not the fear he sows in his enemies. It is the hope he gives his friends.

You have not been abandoned. I will come for you. Sevro will come for you. The Republic will come for you. Until then: endure, my love. Endure.”

“The key is having a long memory for the sweet, and a short one for the bitter.

In his name, First Citizen Publius cu Caraval and the Senate have ordered me to seize command of the army, arrest Darrow as an enemy of the people, and surrender to the enemy, using the terms Atalantia and our Senate have agreed upon.” The officers sit without expression. “In reflection of this body’s consensus, I have sent a reply to Atalantia regarding her terms of surrender: ‘Bloodydamn.’ ” “Bloodydamn?” I ask. They begin to smile

Every man and woman in this army volunteered to fight with the understanding that they would be led by the Reaper of Mars. Behind him, we liberated our homes. Behind him, we found our way from the desert. He will deliver us from this planet. And he will take us home, where we will fix this madness and string Caraval up by his ears.” He tilts his chin upward. “Even if he does not, I would rather follow him to the Vale than abandon him and live to a hundred and fifty.”

I am done with sacrifice. I will get my family home. I will endure.

We may not be big. No. We may not be rich. But we got what he got. Wrath. Seven hundred years of it thundering in our veins.”

“You’re shit at bedtime stories,” I say. “Apologies. Next time I’ll tell you the tale of Sophocles the clone, a creature so noble and so wise he learned to cheat death.”

Gray. So frail on our own. So impregnable when we lock arms.

“How long have you known? Three days? You cold bitch.” Sefi nods. “World is hard. He must be too.”

Perhaps the only comfort which remains Is the unheeded clanking of my chains, The which I make, and call it melody.”

Pytha knew this was coming. But I believed the myth of war. Worse, I thought myself special. Immune to the horrors lesser men face. Diomedes was right. All men are tiny before the storm.

She did something to me. Something I cannot understand. I was a child who needed love in the shadow of his parents’ deaths. Instead, she beat me into the shape of a cup and poured her lessons into me.

Fear of being alone. Fear of proving I am nothing more than my grandmother’s puppet. Fear that I am weak and meant for the maggots. But the Mind’s Eye waits for me like an old glove. I am the last of its acolytes.

I see them in the blindness, and I take on the Winter Whirlwind stance of the Willow Way. Are you awake or asleep, Lysander? I slip forward.

“You little prim bastard! How can you see?” “Rather, how is it you are blind, Seneca?”

“Even if you survive this walk, you can never best Darrow, if that is your intent. He would climb up your blade to chew upon your jugular. To best a living god, it is not enough to survive, nor to eat of the ambrosia of conquest. Who would follow a churlish princeling over that Slave made War?

Say what you want about my da, but don’t ever think he doesn’t notice his men. It’s the best thing about him. When they go, it breaks him.” “Well, he’s the one givin’ the orders.” “Someone has to.”

I hunted Peerless while you were still serving them or pulling your people off the Poles. But you call me a dog? Fair enough. Spit on my honor. I don’t give a damn. But don’t you ever! Ever! Insult my work.”

During war, the laws are silent. —QUINTUS TULLIUS CICERO

Pausing on a ridgeline that leads to a fertile valley, I look back at the desert one last time. It waits there in the distance, patient, eternal, the graveyard of armies. But not me. I turn my back on it, but carry its lessons with me.

“I have tried to end it before. It is a war in here.” She opens her hand over her heart. “Sefi gave me purpose. Valdir…everything else.”