Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising Trilogy (26 page)

“Dumb…son of a bitch…” I mutter, stumbling back. He’s gripping his own head in pain.

“Stupid lanky ass…”

He aims a kick at my midsection. I take the blow, catching the leg with my left arm, and exchange it for a haymaker right that crashes into his skull with all my weight behind it. He goes down hard, like I’m a hammer driving a nail into the floor. He tries to rise, but I push him down with a boot. He lies under it, heaving breaths. I’m dizzy and panting. Body hating me for what I’m doing to it.

“Are you done?” I ask him. He nods. I pull back my boot and extend a hand to help him up. He rolls to his back and reaches for it, then lurches up with his left boot heel straight into my groin. I fall and dry-heave beside him. Crippling nausea swells from my lower back into my balls and my stomach.

Beside me, he’s panting like a dog. At first I think he’s laughing, but when I look up I’m shocked to see tears in his eyes. He lies on his back. Huge sobs make his rib cage shudder. He turns away, tries to hide from me to stop the tears from coming, but it makes it worse.

“Sevro…”

I sit up, feeling ripped apart by the sight of him. I don’t hold him, but I put a hand on his head. And he surprises me by not flinching away, but instead crawling up to put his head on my knee. I put my other hand on his shoulder. In time the sobs slow and he blows the snot from his nose. But he doesn’t move. It’s like the moment after a lightning storm. The air kinetic and vibrating. After several minutes, he clears his throat and pushes himself up to sit with his legs folded under him in the center of the hall. His eyes are puffy, ashamed. He plays with his hands, the tattoos and Mohawk making him look like something pulled from a deranged children’s book.

“You tell anyone I cried, I’ll find a dead fish, put it in a sock, hide it in your room, and let it putrefy.”

“Fair enough.”

The detonator lies off to the side. Close enough so we can both reach for it. Neither of us do. “I hate this,” he says weakly. “People like that.” He glances up at me. “I don’t want him to be a Son. I don’t want to be like Quicksilver.”

“You aren’t.”

He doesn’t believe that. “At the Institute, I’d wake up in the morning. And I think I was still in my dreams. Then I’d feel the cold. And I’d slowly start remembering where I was, and there’s dirt and blood under my nails. And all I want to do was go back to sleep. To be warm. But I knew I had to get up and face a world that didn’t give a shit.” He grimaces. “That’s how I feel every morning now. I’m afraid all the time. I don’t want to lose anyone. I don’t want to let them down.”

“You haven’t,” I say. “If anything, I let you down.” He tries to interrupt me. “You were right. We both know it. It’s my fault your father ’s dead. It’s my fault that whole night happened.”

“Was still a shit thing of me to say.” He raps his knuckles on the ground. “I’m always saying shit things.”

“I’m glad you said it.”

“Why?”

“Because we’ve both forgotten we didn’t get here on our own. You and I should be able to say anything to each other. That’s how this works. It’s how we work. We don’t walk on eggshells. We talk to each other. Even if we say shit that’s hard to hear.” I see how alone he feels. How much weight he carried. It’s how I felt when Cassius stabbed me and left me for dead at the Institute. He needs to share the weight. I don’t know how else to tell him that. This stubbornness, this intransigence, looks insane from the outside, but inside he felt just as I did when Roque questioned me.

“Do you know why I helped you at the Institute when you and Cassius were gonna drown in that loch?” he asks. “It’s cause of how they look at you. It wasn’t like I thought you were a good primus.

You were as smart as a bag of wet farts. But I saw them. Pebble. Clown. Quinn….Roque.” He almost trips over that last name. “I’d watch you at your fires in the gulches when Titus was in the castle. Saw you teach Lea how to cut a goat’s throat even when she was afraid to do it. I wanted to do that too. To join.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He shrugs. “Was afraid you wouldn’t want me.”

“They look at you that way now,” I say. “Don’t you see that?”

He snorts. “Nah, they don’t. The whole time, I tried to be you. Tried to be Pops. Didn’t work. I could tell everyone just wished it was me that the Jackal captured. Not you.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“It is,” he says intensely, leaning forward. “You’re better than I am. I saw you. When you looked down at Tinos. Saw your eyes. The love in them. The urge to protect those people. I tried feeling it.

But every time I looked down at the refugees, I just hated them. For being weak. For hurting each other. For being stupid and not knowing what we’ve gone through to help them.” He swallows and picks at the cuticles of his stubby fingers. “I know it’s nasty, but it’s what it is.”

He seems so vulnerable here in this hall, the rage taken out of us from the fight. He’s not looking for a lecture. Leadership has worn him down, alienated him from even his Howlers. Right now he’s

looking to feel like he’s not like Quicksilver or the Jackal or any of the Golds we fight against. He’s mistakenly assumed I’m something better than he is. And part of that is my fault.

“I hate them too,” I say.

He shakes his head. “Don’t…”

“I do. At least, I hate that they remind me of what I was, or could have been. Shit, I was a little idiot.

You would have hated me. I was comfortable and arrogant and selfish on my knees. I liked being blind to everything because I was in love. And I thought for some reason that living for love was the most valiant thing in all the worlds. Even made Eo into something in my head that she wasn’t.

Romanticized her and the life we had—probably because I saw my father die for some cause. And I

saw all he left behind, so I tried to cling to the life he abandoned.”

I trace the lines on my palm.

“It makes me feel small to think I started doing all this for her. She was everything to me, but I was just a piece of her life. When the Jackal had me, that’s all I could think about. That I wasn’t enough.

That our child wasn’t enough. Part of me hates her for that. She didn’t know all this would happen, wasn’t even aware that the worlds had been terraformed. All she could have known was that she was

making a point to the couple thousand people in Lykos. And was that worth dying for? Was that worth killing a child for?”

I gesture down the hall. “Now all these people think she was divine or something. A perfect martyr.

But she was just a girl. And she was brave, but she was stupid and selfish and selfless and romantic; but she died before she could ever be more. Think how much she could have done with her life.

Maybe we could have done this together.” I laugh bitterly and lean my head against the wall. “I think the shittiest part about getting old is now we’re smart enough to see the cracks in everything.”

“We’re twenty-three, dipshit.”

“Well, I feel eighty.”

“You look it.” I flip him the crux, earning a smile. “Do you…” He almost doesn’t finish the thought. “Do you think she watches you? From the Vale? Does your father?”

I’m about to say I don’t know when I catch the intentness of his gaze. He’s not asking about my family as much as he’s asking about his own, maybe even Quinn, who he always loved but never had

the courage to tell. With all his savagery it’s hard to remember just how vulnerable he is. He’s adrift.

Alienated from Red and Gold. No home. No family. No view of a world after war. Right now I’d say

anything to make him feel like he’s loved.

“Yes. I believe she watches me,” I say with more confidence than I feel. “And my father. And yours too.”

“So they have beer in the Vale.”

“Don’t be sacrilegious,” I say, kicking his foot. “Only whiskey. Streams of it as far as the eye can see.”

His laughter stitches more of me together. Bit by bit, I feel like my friends are coming back to me.

Or maybe I’m coming back to them. Suppose it’s the same thing, really. I always told Victra to let people in. I could never take my own advice because I knew one day I’d have to betray them, that the foundation of our friendship was a lie. Now I’m with people who know who I am, and I’m afraid to

let them in because I’m afraid of losing them, disappointing them. But it’s this bond that Sevro and I share that makes us stronger than we were before. It’s what we have that the Jackal doesn’t.

“Do you know what happens after this?” I ask. “If we kill Octavia, the Jackal? If we somehow win?”

“No,” Sevro says.

“That right there is a problem. I don’t have the answer. I won’t pretend to. But I won’t let Augustus be right. I won’t bring chaos into this world without at least a plan for something better. For that we need allies like Quicksilver. We need to stop playing terrorist. And we need a real army.”

Sevro picks the detonator back up and breaks it in two. “What are your orders, Reap?”

Sevro and I stalk back into the ready room where the Howlers are packed and prepared to depart the station. Rollo and a dozen of his people watch us tensely from their side of the room. They know they’re about to be abandoned. Quicksilver follows behind me, restraints left behind in his cell. He’s agreed to our plan, with a few adjustments. “Well, look at this….” Victra says, seeing our bruises and bloody knuckles. “You two finally talked.” She looks to Ragnar. “See?”

“Shit’s sorted,” Sevro says.

“And the rich man?”
Ragnar asks curiously.
“He wears no manacles.”

“That’s because he’s a Son of Ares, Rags,” Sevro says. “Didn’t you know?”

“Quicksilver ’s a Son?” Victra explodes into laughter. “And I’m secretly a Helldiver.” She looks back and forth at our faces. “Wait…you’re serious. Do you have proof?”

“I’m sorry to hear of your mother, Victra,” Quicksilver says hoarsely. “But it is a pleasure to see you walking, truly. I’ve been with the Sons for over twenty years. I have hundreds of hours of conversations with Fitchner to prove it.”

“He’s a Son,” Sevro says. “Can we move on?”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Victra shakes her head. “Mother was right about you. Always said you had

secrets. I thought it was something sexual. That you liked horses or something.” Sevro shifts uncomfortably.

“So you find us a way off this rock, rich man?” Holiday asks Quicksilver.

“Not quite,” he says. “Darrow…”

“We’re not leaving,” I announce. Rollo and his men stir in the corner. The Howlers exchange confused looks.

“Maybe you wanna tell us what’s going on?” Screwface asks gruffly. “Let’s start with who’s in charge. Is it you?”

“Howler One,” Sevro says, punching my shoulder.

“Howler Two,” I say, patting his in turn.

“Prime?” Sevro asks. The Howlers nod in concert.

“First order of business, policy change,” I say. “Who has pliers?” I look around until Holiday pulls hers from her bomb kit and tosses them to me. I open my mouth and stick the pliers to the back right molar where the achlys-9 suicide tooth was implanted. With a grunt I tear it out and set the tooth on the table. “I’ve been captured before. I will not be captured again. So this is worthless to me. I don’t plan on dying, but if I do, I die with my friends. Not in a cell. Not on a podium. With you.” I hand the

pliers to Sevro. He jerks out his own back tooth. Spitting the blood on the table.

“I die with my friends.”

Ragnar does not wait for the pliers. He pulls out his back tooth with his bare fingers, eyes wide with delight as he sets the huge bloody thing on the table.
“I die with my friends.”
One by one, they pass around the pliers, pulling out their teeth and tossing them down. Quicksilver watches all the while, staring at us like we’re a pack of mad hooligans, no doubt wondering about what he’s gotten himself into. But I need my men to lose this heavy mantle they wear. With that poison in their skulls, they felt the death sentences had already been read, and they were just waiting for the hangman to come knocking. Slag that. Death’ll have to earn its bounty. I want them to believe in this. In each other. In the idea that we might actually win and live.

For the first time, I do.

—

After I’ve detailed my instructions to my men and they depart to execute the orders, I return with Sevro to the Sons of Ares control room and ask for them to prepare a direct link. “To the Citadel in Agea, please.” The Sons of Ares turn to look at me to see if they’ve misheard. “On the double, friends. We don’t have all day.”

I stand in front of the holo camera with Sevro. “Think they already know we’re here?”

“Probably not quite yet,” I reply.

“Think he’s going to piss himself?”

“Let’s hope. Remember, nothing about Mustang and Cassius being here. We’re keeping that one in