Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising Trilogy (71 page)

Seeing their Sovereign stumbling backward, gut ripped open, the Truth Knight and the Joy Knight both wheel on Cassius, pulling their razors from their hips, their shields thrumming to life.

Unarmored, wearing only his blood-spattered prison greens, Cassius flashes forward, skewering the

surprised Truth Knight through his eye socket up through the roof of his skull.

The Jackal pulls my razor from his hip and slashes at me. I sidestep, coming at him. He swings again, screaming in rage, but I catch his arm and head butt him in the face before sweeping his legs and tackling him to the floor. I take my razor and stake his left arm to the floor so that he has no free hand. He screams. His spit spattering my face. Thrashing at me with his legs. I drop a knee into his forehead and leave him stunned and pinned to the floor.

“Darrow!” Cassius calls to me as he duels the Joy Knight. “Behind!”

Behind me, Aja’s rising from the shattered remains of the table. Eyes wide with rage. I run from her to help Cassius and Mustang, knowing she’d kill me in seconds with my right hand gone. Blood

darkens Cassius’s green jumpsuit. His left leg has been slashed badly by the better-armored Joy Knight, who is using his weight and the pulsing aegis shield on his left arm to overwhelm Cassius.

Mustang grabs two razors from the dead Praetorian and tosses one to me. I catch it on the run with my left hand. Toggle the hilt. Razor leaps to killing length. Cassius takes another slash to the leg and stumbles over a body, going down, blocking the second strike with the pulseFist, ruining the weapon.

The Joy Knight’s back is to me. He feels me coming, but it’s too late. Silently, I jump through the air and swing a huge looping strike down at him from behind, left arm slowing as it meets the throbbing resistance of the pulseShield centimeters from the armor, then jerking as it cleaves into his sky-blue plate and through muscle and bone. Carrying from left shoulder to the right pelvis, parting his body at a diagonal. His body drips to the ground.

Silence in the room as the bodies hit the floor.

Mustang rushes to my side. She sweeps her golden mess of hair back, a fevered grin splitting her

face. I help Cassius up from the ground.

“How was my acting?” he asks, wincing.

“Not quite as good as your swordwork,” I say, looking at the bodies around him. He grins, more

alive in battle than anywhere else. I feel a pang, knowing this is always how it should have been.

Missing the days where we rode together in the highlands pretending we were lords of the earth. I grin back at him, wounded, bleeding, but almost whole for the first time I can remember.

“Will you two save the flirting for later,” Mustang says.

Side by side with her, we turn together to face the deadliest human being in the Solar System. She’s crouched over a terribly wounded Octavia, who has crawled to the edge of the holodeck and pants on her back, holding her stomach together with both hands. Octavia is pale and shivering. Tears stream down Aja’s face and Lysander ’s, who has rushed into the pit to help his grandmother.

“Aja!” the Jackal screams from the floor. “Kill them! Open the door or kill them!” He’s lost his mind. Thrashing about, trying to reach the whip toggle on the razor with his stump. It’s three and a half feet above him and he just can’t quite reach. “Open it!” he says through gnashing teeth.

But to open the door she must reach it. And to reach it, she must go through me and my friends then present her back to us while she enters the code. She’s trapped in here till we’re dead or she is.

“Aja, give us the Sovereign. Her justice is due,” I say, knowing what Aja’s reply to that will be, but minding the holodeck is still active. Still broadcasting as Gold blood wets the floor. Aja does not turn to look at us. Not yet. Her huge hands caress Octavia’s face. She cradles the older woman like a mother holding her own child. “Stay alive,” she tells her. “I will get you out of here. I promise. Just stay alive, Octavia.”

Octavia nods weakly. Lysander touches Aja’s arm. “Hurry. Please.”

“Wear her down,” Mustang whispers. “She’s the one with the ticking clock.”

“Don’t let her pin you in a corner,” I say. “Move laterally like we planned. Cassius, you can still take point?”

“Just try to keep up,” he says.

Aja rises from her crouch to her full height, a brooding mass of muscle and armor, the greatest student of the greatest razormaster the Society has ever known. Face dark, unreadable. The deep blue Protean armor moving subtly with sea dragons. Shoulders nearly as broad as Ragnar ’s. I wish I could have brought Sefi here. A meter and a half of killing silver slithers out before Aja and she takes the winter stance of the Willow Way, sword raised like a torch off to the side, left foot forward, hips sunken, knees slightly bent. Mustang and I slide apart taking the right and left. Cassius, the best swordsman of us now, takes the middle. Aja’s hungry eyes devour our weaknesses. The drag in Cassius’s step, my missing right hand, Mustang’s size, the arrangement of obstacles on the floor. And she attacks.

There are two strategies when fighting multiple opponents. The first is use them against one another. But Cassius and I have always been of one mind in battle, and Mustang is adaptable. So Aja chooses the second option: an all out attack on me before Cassius or Mustang can come to my aid.

She deems me the weakest enemy. And she is right. Her whip cracks toward my face faster than I can bring my blade up. I flinch back, almost losing my eye. Throwing off my center of balance. She’s on me, blade rigid, poking at me in a poetic frenzy of carefully constructed movements to bring my blade out of position across my body, so she can perform Lorn’s maneuver called the Wing Scalp.

Where she tries to lever her blade atop mine to touch the tip to my sword arm’s shoulder and scrape down to the outside of my wrist to peel off the muscle and tendons along the way. I dance back, robbing her the leverage, navigating the corpses behind me as Cassius and Mustang close on Aja.

Cassius is rushed in his approach, and he overextends, like I almost did.

But Aja doesn’t use her razor. She activates her gravBoots in a quick burst and launches back at him, two hundred kilograms of armor and Peerless Scarred propelled by gravBoots crashes into flesh and bones. You can almost hear his skeleton creak. His body wraps around her, forehead smashing against her armored shoulder. He drips off her and she spikes him to the ground. Mustang

rushes her flank to stop her from finishing Cassius off. But Aja was expecting the rush from Mustang and used Cassius to bait her. She slashes Mustang shallowly across the stomach, nearly opening her lower intestine.

I hurl my razor at Aja from behind. She somehow hears or feels it coming and bends sideways as it

passes and sticks into the wall of the holodeck that separates it from the sitting room above. Aja’s leg shoots out at Mustang, impacting her kneecap and jamming it backward. Can’t tell if it dislocates, but Mustang stumbles back, razor outstretched and Aja turns back toward me, because I have no weapon.

“Shit shit shit shit shit,” I hiss, scrambling toward the Praetorians to pick up one of their razors. I gain a pulseRifle and fire blindly behind me. Aja’s pulseShield absorbs the munitions, throbbing crimson as she sprints at me and slashes the weapon from my hand. I escape again, rolling backward, taking a long burning gash on the back of my hamstrings, but gaining a razor as I jump out of the holodeck ring up to the sitting level several feet above. She picks up a pulseFist and shoots it at me. I dive down so she loses her shot. The steel ceiling above me bubbles and drips down. I roll to the side.

Razors keen on the deck bellow. I scramble back to the lip to get back in the fight. Aja’s cutting us to ribbons and all fleeing does is allow her to turn back to Cassius and Mustang. She bears down on him, using his limp and the new wound in his shoulder against him. Mustang attacks from behind before he’s cut down, but Aja bends when Mustang slashes, moving like she’s studied the fight before

it ever happened.

We’re not going to put her down, I realize. This was our fear. Losing my hand was never part of the plan, either. One by one she’s going to kill us.

I have a brief moment of hope when Mustang and Cassius finally pin Aja between them. I jump down to help the assault. The woman pivots and twirls like a willow caught among three tornadoes.

She knows her armor will take our glancing blows but our skin can’t take hers. She goes for shallow cuts, bleeding us out methodically, aiming for the tendons in our knees, arms, like Lorn taught us both. A sage digging the roots.

Her blade cuts deep into my forearm, lacerates my knuckles, taking off a corner of my pinky. I roar anger, but anger isn’t enough. My instincts aren’t enough. We’re too spent, too overwhelmed by the monstrosity of her. Lorn trained her too well. Spinning, she delivers a two-handed thrust up into the right side of my rib cage. My world rocks. She lifts me up with a horrible bellow. My feet dangle half a meter above the deck. Cassius charges her and she flings me off the edge of her blade to parry his attack. I crash to the ground, my chest feeling like it is caving in on itself. Gasp for air, barely able to draw breath. Cassius and Mustang put themselves between Aja and me.

“Do not touch him,” Mustang hisses.

The blade missed my organs, wedging itself between two of the reinforced ribs Mickey gave me,

but I’m bleeding all over myself. Trying to stand, scrambling across the deck. The Jackal watches me from his place on the ground, exhausted from trying to free himself. He’s grinning, despite the horror of bodies all around us, knowing Aja is going to kill me. The Sovereign’s face distant and fading she watches too, propped up against the lip of the holodeck as it rises to the rest of the room, Lysander ’s hands holding her together. Aja looks at her in fear, knowing she has not long to live.

“How could you choose him over us?” Aja shouts in rage to Mustang and Cassius.

“Easily,” Mustang replies.

Cassius pulls the syringe from the holster on his leg and tosses it across the room to me. “Do it before she kills us, man.” I stumble to my feet as Aja tries furiously to get at me, but Cassius and Mustang have strength enough to batter her away. She roars in frustration. The three slipping on blood, my friends not long for this world standing toe-to-toe with her. I make it to the edge of the holodeck, opposite the Sovereign, and climb toward Sevro’s body.

“You cannot run!” Aja shouts. “I will carve your eyes out. There’s nowhere to run, you rusty coward!” But I am not running. I fall to my knees beside Sevro. The front of his chest is a chaos of laboratory blood and torn fabric from the entry wounds of Cassius’s execution. I cut open his shirt with my razor. Six holes stare up at me from the combat vest Cyther made him, bits of Carved flesh looking so real. His face is quiet and peaceful. But peace isn’t in his nature, and we haven’t earned it yet. I pop open the syringe filled with Holiday’s snakebite. Enough to wake the dead. Even those faking eternal sleep from Narol’s wicked cocktail of haemanthus extract. I pull off his vest.

“Wakey, wakey, Goblin,” I say as I lift high the syringe, praying the silent prayer than his heart doesn’t fail, and plunge it straight into my best friend’s chest. His eyes burst open.

“Fuuuuuuuuck.”

Exploding upward out of the coma induced by the haemanthus oil in the flask he was drinking from

before we freed Cassius, he flails past me, gaining his feet, looking around with manic, wild eyes, hands vibrating. Holding his heart, gasping in pain as I did when Trigg and Holiday brought me from my prison. The last thing he saw was my face in the brig, now to wake here, to be thrust into the battle, blood and bodies littering the floor. He stares at me with crazed, bloodshot eyes, pointing at my belly.

“You’re bleeding! Darrow! You’re bleeding!”

“I know.”

“Where is your hand? You’re missing a fucking hand!”

“I know!”

“Bloodydamn.” His eyes dart around, seeing the Jackal pinned and Octavia on the ground, Aja beating Cassius and Mustang back. “It worked! It fucking worked! We’ve got to help the Goldbrows,

shithead. Get up!
Get up
!” He hauls me to my feet and shoves my razor back into my hand, rushing into the holopit, howling the hideous battle cry we made as children among the frozen pines. “I’m going to kill you, Aja! I’m going to kill you in your face!”

“It’s Barca!” the Jackal screams from the ground. “Barca’s alive!”