Someone smacks my head lightly from behind.
“Oy, brotherman.”
“Cassius.” I nod.
“Cheers to your victory. I was worried you were all brains,” Cassius laughs. His golden curls are not even touseled. He throws an arm around me and surveys the room with a wrinkled nose. He feigns this nonchalance; I can tell he’s worried.
“Ah. Is there anything more ugly than self-pity? All this crying.” He smirks and points at a girl with a busted nose. “And she just became aggressively unpleasant. Not that she was ever much to sniff at. Eh? Eh?”
I forget to speak.
“Shell-shocked, man? They get your windpipe?”
“Just not much for joking about right now,” I say. “Took some knocks to the head. Shoulder is a bit slagged too. This isn’t my usual scene.”
“Shoulder can be fixed straight off. Let’s get it back in the socket.” He casually grips my dislocated shoulder and jerks it into its socket before I can protest. I gasp in pain. He chuckles. “Prime. Prime.” He slaps me on the same shoulder. “Help me out, won’t you?”
He extends his left hand. His dislocated fingers look like lightning bolts. I pull them straight. He laughs with the pain, not knowing his brother’s blood is under my fingernails. I’m trying not to hyperventilate.
“Spotted Julian yet, man?” he finally asks. He speaks in midLingo now that Priam is nowhere to be seen.
“Not a sight.”
“Meh, the kid is probably trying to be gentle with his fight. Father taught us the Silent Art, Kravat. Julian is a prodigy at it. He thinks I’m better.” Cassius frowns. “Thinks I’m better at everything—which is understandable. Just got to get him going. Speaking of it, who’d you slag?”
My insides knot.
I make up a lie, and it is a good one. Vague and boring. He only wants to talk about himself now anyway. After all, this is what Cassius was bred for. There are roughly fifteen kids who have that same quiet gleam in their eye. Not evil. Just excited. And those are the ones to watch, because they’re the born killers.
Looking around, it’s easy to see that Roque was right. There weren’t many tough fights. This was forced natural selection. Bottom of the heap getting slaughtered by the top. Hardly anyone is severely injured except a couple of small lowDrafts. Natural selection sometimes has its surprises.
Cassius’s fight was easy, he says. He did it right and fair and quick. Crushed the windpipe with a bladejab ten seconds into squaring up. Caught his fingers oddly, though. Prime. I’ve made a corpse of the best killer’s brother. Dread trickles into me.
Cassius grows quieter when Fitchner saunters in and orders us to the table. One by one, the fifty seats fill. And bit by bit, his face darkens as each chance for Julian to join the table disappears. When the last seat fills, he does not move. It is a cold anger that radiates. Not hot as I thought it would be. Antonia sits across from us, opposite me, and watches him. Her mouth works but she says nothing. You don’t comfort his sort. And I didn’t think her the kind to try.
Julian isn’t the only one missing. Arria, all curls and dimples, is lying limp on a cold floor somewhere. And Priam is gone. Perfect Priam the Premier, heir of Mars’s moons. I heard he was the First Sword in the Solar System for his birthyear. A duelist without peer. I guess he wasn’t too lethal with his fists. I look around the tired faces. Who the hell killed him? The Board messed that one up, and I wager his mother will cause hell, because he certainly wasn’t meant to die.
“We’re wasting the best of us,” Cassius murmurs measuredly.
“Hello, you little shiteaters.” Fitchner yawns and kicks his feet up onto the table. “Now, it might have dawned on you that the Passage may as well be called the Culling.” Fitchner scratches his groin with his razor’s hilt.
His manners are worse than mine.
“And you may think it a waste of good Golds, but you’re an idiot if you think fifty children make a dent in our numbers. There are more than one million Golds on Mars. More than one hundred million in the Solar System. Not all get to be Peerless Scarred, though, eh?
Now if you still think this was vile, consider that the Spartans would kill more than ten percent of all children born to them; nature would kill another thirty. We are gory humanitarians in comparison. Of the six hundred students that are left, most were in the top one percent of applicants. Of the six hundred that are dead, most were in the bottom one percent of applicants. 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. It took awhile.”
He puts his hands behind his head.
“Now! This is your new family. House Mars—one of twelve Houses. No, you are not special because you live on Mars and are in House Mars. Those in House Venus on Venus are not special. They merely fit the House. You get the flow. After the Institute, you’re looking for apprenticeships—hopefully with the families Bellona, Augustus, or Arcos, if you want to do me proud. Prior graduates from House Mars may help you find these apprenticeships, may offer you apprenticeships of their own, or maybe you’ll be so successful that you don’t need anyone’s help.
“But let us make it crystal. Right now you are babies. Stupid little babies. Your parents handed you everything. Others wiped your little asses. Cooked your food. Fought your wars. Tucked your little shiny noses in at night. Rusters dig before they get a chance to screw; they build your cities and find your fuel and pick up your shit. Pinks learn the art of getting someone’s jollies off before they even need to shave. Obsidians have the worst gory life you could imagine—nothing but frost and steel and pain. They were bred for their work, trained early for it. All you little princelings and princesses have had to do was look like little versions of Mommy and Daddy and learn your manners and play piano and equestrian and sport. But now you belong to the Institute, to House Mars, to the Prefecture of Mars, to your Color, to the Society. Blah. Blah.”
Fitchner’s smirk is lazy. His veiny hand rests on his paunch.