Golden Son (5 page)

I’m scared. They cannot kill me, I cannot kill them. Not here. Not now. All of us know how this dance will end. But dance we do.

Karnus snaps his fingers and they rush toward me all at once. I throw the stone into Cagney’s face.

She goes down. I rush at Karnus, howling like a mad wolf, slipping past his first blow, and rage a flurry of strikes into his nerve centers, driving my elbow into his right bicep, rupturing tissue. He rocks back, and I press into him, using his bulk to shield me from the others and their sticks. I strip a stick away from one of the Bellona cousins, leveling her with an elbow to her temple. Then I turn, spinning the stick toward Karnus’s face. But it’s blocked. Something hits the back of my head. Wood shatters. Splinters dig into the scalp. I don’t stumble. Not until Karnus hits me so hard in my face with his elbow that a tooth pops out.

They don’t take turns coming one by one. They surround me and they punish me with the efficiency of their deadly art,
kravat
. They aim for nerves, organs. I manage to stand, hit a few of my assailants.

But I’m not long on my feet. Someone jams their stick into my skin, impacting the subcostal nerve. I drip down to the ground like melting wax and Karnus kicks me in the head.

I bite through half my tongue.

Warmth fills my mouth.

The ground is the softest thing I feel.

Choking on salt.

Blood and air spray out of my mouth as Karnus puts his foot on my stomach, then throat. He laughs. “In the words of Lorn au Arcos, if you must only wound the man, you better kill his pride.”

I gurgle for breath.

Cagney replaces Karnus, sitting on my chest, knees pinning down my arms. I suck down air. She

smiles in my face and looks at my hairline, lips parted with excitement of dominating another person.

She twists my hair into her grip. Her hot breath smells like spearmint. “What have we here?” she asks, pulling my datapad from its place on my arm. “Dammit. He hailed the Augustans. I’d rather not fight that Julii bitch without my armor.”

“Then stop dawdling,” Karnus growls. “Do it.”

“Shh,” she whispers as I try to speak, tracing a knife over my lips, pushing it into my mouth till the brittle metal clacks against my teeth. “That’s a good little bitch.”

Roughly, she saws off my hair.

“Nice and quiet. Good Reaper. Good.”

Blood stings my eyes as Karnus shoves Cagney off my chest, grabs me and hoists me off the ground with his left hand. He flexes his right arm, cursing about his ruined bicep. He can’t pull it back to swing a punch, so instead he grins toothily at me and head-butts me once in the chest just at the sternum. My world rocks. There’s a crackle. The sound of twigs over a fire. I wheeze out bubbling, inhuman sounds. Karnus head-butts me again and tosses my aching body to the ground.

I feel warmth splash over me and the smell of piss claw into my nostrils. They laugh and Karnus

breathes into my ear.

“Mother bid me to tell you: a pauper can never be a prince. Every time you look in the mirror, remember what we did to you. Remember you breathe because we let you. Remember your heart will

one day be on our table. Rise so high, in mud you lie.”

4

FALLEN

I stand before my master, but he does not care.

The office walls are of paneled wood, and on the floor lies an ancient rug his iron ancestor took from a palace of Earth after the fall of the Indian Empire, one of the last great nations to stand against Gold. What dread those natural-born humans must have felt to see the Conquerors falling from the sky. Man perfected, but bringing chains instead of hope.

I stand in front of Augustus’s desk, a bare thing of wood and iron, just before the seven-hundred-year-old bloodstain where the final Indian emperor had his head parted from his body by a sleek Gold killer.

Idly, Nero au Augustus strokes the lion that lies beside his desk. They look like twin statues. Behind them is space. A viewport peers into the blackness, where the ships of the Scepter Armada lie like giant golems in terrible slumber. We pass them on the last leg of our three-week voyage from Mars.

Augustus peers at his desk as a stream of data runs over the wood. It seems so long ago that he took me on a tour of Mars to show me our domains—from the latfundias where highReds toil over crops

to the great polar reaches where Obsidians live in medieval isolation. He favored me then, bringing me close, teaching me the things his father taught him. I was his favorite, second only to Leto. Now he is a stranger, and I, an embarrassment.

It’s been two months since the day Karnus beat me at the Academy. Though my hair has grown back

and my broken bones have mended, my reputation has not. And because of that, my tenure in ArchGovernor Augustus’s employ is tenuous, at best. My enemies grow by the day. But these new ones prefer whispers to razors.

More and more do I believe the Sons of Ares chose the wrong man. I am not made for the cold war

of politics. Not made for subtlety. Hell, I’d hide a boy in the gut of a horse any day, but I wouldn’t know how to bribe someone properly if my life depended on it.

A gentle, warm voice made for half-truths drifts through the ArchGovernor ’s office. “Three refineries. Two nightclubs. And two Gray police outposts. All bombed since we left Mars. Seven attacks, my liege. Fifty-nine Gold fatalities.”

Pliny. Slender as a salamander, with skin as smooth as a Pink’s. The Politico is no Peerless Scarred, never even went to the Institute. His glittering eyes peer out from eyelashes that would put peacock plumage to shame. Muted lipstick coats thin lips. His hair is coiled and scented. His body thin but muscular in a pleasing but utterly facile way beneath a too-tight embroidered silk tunic. A child could beat the living hell out of this beautiful kitten of a man. Yet he’s ended families with a rumor here, a joke there. His power is of a different breed. Where I am kinetic energy, he is potential.

I’ve heard he’s also responsible for ruining my reputation. Tactus even hinted that Pliny might have put Karnus up to the violence in the garden, or at the very least, arranged a holoCam to record my proud moment.

Beside Pliny stands the fourth man in the room, Leto. He’s a bright lancer ten years my senior with braided hair and a half-moon grin. He’s also a poet with the razor, a younger Lorn au Arcos, according to some. It’s likely he’ll inherit Augustus’s estate instead of the ArchGovernor ’s blood heirs—Mustang and the Jackal. Truth be told, I rather like the man.

“The Sons of Ares grow too bold,” Augustus mutters.

“Yes, my liege.” Pliny squints. “If it is indeed they who perpetrate the acts.”

“What other ant bites us?”

“None that we know of. But there are spiders, ticks, rats in the worlds. The bombings are crude for Ares, indiscriminate, uncharacteristically violent. Discontiguous from the pattern of technological sabotage and propaganda in his profile. Ares is not capricious, so I struggle believing these acts originate from him.”

Augustus frowns. “Then what do you suggest?”

“Perhaps there is another terrorist group, my liege. With eighteen billion souls on the census, I hardly think one man has a monopoly on terrorism. Perhaps even a criminal syndicate. I’ve been creating a database I can share.…”

Pliny is right. The terror attacks that have plagued Mars and other planets make little sense. Dancer spoke of justice, not revenge. These attacks are petty and gruesome—the bombing of barracks, fashion outlets, bazaars, highColor coffee shops, and restaurants. Ares would never condone them.

They draw too many eyes for too little result, daring the Golds to act, to crush the Sons.

I’ve sent messages to Dancer via the holoBox. Nothing. Just silence. Could he be dead? Or has Ares abandoned me for this new strategy of bombing?

Pliny yawns. “Perhaps Ares has changed his tactics. He’s a deuced one.”

“If Ares is a man,” Leto says.

“Interesting.” Augustus swivels abruptly. “What makes you think Ares isn’t a man?”

“Why do we assume Ares is a man? He could be a woman. Could be a group of individuals for all

we know, which would go a long way toward explaining the discordant nature of these new attacks.”

Leto turns to me, eyes inclusive. “Darrow, what do you think?”

“Don’t befuddle Darrow with complex questions!” Pliny crows defensively. “Make it a yes or no so he can understand.” Pliny flashes me the most pitying of smiles and squeezes my shoulder in sympathy. “Behind his lepid smiles, he’s an honest, simple beast. You should know that.”

I stand there and take it.

He turns away. “In any manner, Leto, you’re forgetting we designed Red culture to be highly patriarchal. Their identity as a people centers around the collection of resources to propagate the embryonic terraforming of Mars. Physically strenuous, grueling tasks performed by
men
. Tasks we don’t let their women perform, even if they are capable, pursuant to the Stratification Protocol. So, you see, it can’t be a woman, because no roughneck Ruster would follow a man or a woman who has

never ridden a clawDrill.”

Leto smiles cleverly.
“If
Ares is a Red.”

Pliny and Augustus both laugh. “Maybe he’s a deranged Violet who’s taken his acting to a new stage,” Pliny offers.

“Or a Copper cambist beleaguered by filing provincial tax returns,” Leto adds.

“No! An Obsidian who, dare I say, has finally forsaken his terror of technology and developed the skills to use a holoCamera?” Pliny slaps his leg. “I’d give away one of my Roses just to see—”

“My goodmen. Enough.” Augustus cuts him off, tapping his finger on the desk. Pliny and Leto share a grin and turn back to Augustus. “Your recommendation, Pliny?”

“Of course.” Pliny clears his throat. “Unlike their propaganda and cyber attacks, the brutality is quite simple to counter. Ares or not, issue a reply. Our kill teams are prepared for tactical strikes on several terrorist training grounds beneath Mars’s surface. We should strike now. If we wait, I fear the Sovereign’s Praetorians will take matters into their own hands. Luneborn don’t understand Mars.

They’ll slag it up.”

“A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.” Augustus pauses.

“Something Lorn au Arcos once said to my father. It’s engraved on the Hall of Blades in New Thebes.

Striking training grounds will do nothing except fill the holoNet with pretty explosions. I tire of political plays. Our strategy must change. With every bombing, the Sovereign grows wearier of my administration.”

“You govern
Mars
,” Leto says. “Not Venus or Earth. Ours is not a placid planet. What does she expect?”

“Results.”

“What do you have in mind, my liege?” Pliny asks.

“I intend to poison the Sons of Ares’s roots. I want suicide bombers, not Grays. Find the ugliest, nastiest Reds on Mars, hold their families hostage, and threaten to kill their sons and daughters if the fathers do not do as we command. Focus the suicide bombers on surface areas with high youth density as well as two choice mines. No women bombers. I want social divide. Women against violence.”

How little life costs here. Just words in the air.

“Urban areas too,” he continues. “Not just Browns and Red miners and agriculturalists. I want dead Blue and Green children in schools or arcades next to Sons of Ares glyphs. Then we’ll see if other Colors still sing that girl’s gorydamn song.”

My heart dips a beat. Eo’s song spread further than she dreamed, reaching the holoNet and ripping across the Solar System, shared over a billion times thanks to anarchist hacker groups. Time and again, I fear I’ll be recognized. Perhaps some Gold will search through the records to find that Eo’s husband’s name was also Darrow. But even I hardly recognize that skeletal, pale boy. And as for names? There are no true records for lowRed names. I had a number designation given to me by some officious Copper administrator. L17L6363. And L17L6363 was hanged from his neck until dead, whereupon his body was stolen by an unknown perpetrator and presumably buried in the deep

mines.

“You plan to alienate Red from the other Colors, then alienate the Sons from Red.” Pliny smiles.

“My liege, sometimes I wonder why you even need me.”

“Do not patronize me, Pliny. It’s beneath the both of us.”

Pliny bows. “Indeed. Apologies, my liege.”

Augustus looks back to Leto. “You’re squirming like a pup.”

“I worry this will make matters worse.” Leto frowns to himself. “Presently the Sons are a nuisance, yes. But hardly our chief plight. If we do this, we could be pouring fuel on the flames. And worse, we’d be as guilty as the Sons themselves. Terrorists.”