Red Rising

“If you’re not vomiting thinking about a workout, you’re not trying,” she says.

The days are excruciating. My body is a misery of aches from the arches of my feet to the back of my neck. Mickey’s Pinks massage me every day. There is no better pleasure in the world, but three days after beginning my training with Harmony, I wake up vomiting in my bed. I shiver and shake and hear cursing.

“There’s a science to this, you wicked little witch,” Mickey is shouting. “He will be a work of art, but not if you pour water on the paint before it’s set. Do not ruin him!”

“He must be perfect,” Harmony says. “Dancer, if he is weak in any way, the other children will butcher him like a freshmade drillboy.”

“You are butchering him!” Mickey whines. “You are ruining him! His body cannot handle the muscle breakdown.”

“He has not objected to the treatment,” Harmony reminds him.

“Because he does not know he can object!” Mickey says. “Dancer, she has no understanding of the biomechanics involved in this. Do not let her ruin my boy.”

“He is not your boy!” Harmony sneers.

Mickey’s voice becomes softer. “Dancer, Darrow is like a stallion, one of the old stallions of Earth. Beautiful beasts that will run as hard as you push them. They will run. And run. And run. Until they don’t. Until their hearts explode.”

There is silence for a moment, then Dancer’s voice.

“Ares once told me that it is the hottest fire that forms the sternest steel. Keep pushing the boy.”

I resent two of my teachers after overhearing their words: Mickey for thinking me weak; Dancer for thinking me his tool. Only Harmony doesn’t anger me. Her voice, her eyes, seethe with an anger I feel in my own soul. She may have Dancer now, but she lost someone. The unscarred part of her face tells me that. It is as cold as space. She is no schemer like Dancer or his master, Ares. She is like me—brimming with a rage that makes all else so inconsequential.

That night I cry.

Over the next days, they feed me drugs to expedite the protein synthesis and muscle regeneration. After my muscle tissue has recovered from the initial trauma, they train me harder than before, even Mickey—though his eyes are underlined with dark rings and his thin face is sallow, he does not object. He has grown distant these last weeks, no longer telling me stories—as though he fears what he has created, now that I’m taking fuller shape.

Harmony and I speak very little to one another, but there is a subtle shift in our relationship, some sort of primal understanding that we are the same sort of creature. But as my body grows stronger, Harmony can no longer keep up even though she is a hardened woman of the mines. That is after only two weeks. The distance between our capabilities continues to grow. After another month, she is like a child to me. Graceful, but a child. Small. Weak. Quick, still. Very quick. But that is all. Even then I do not plateau.

My body begins to change. I thicken. My muscles become strong and corded in the concentraction machine, which I now supplement with weight workouts in highGrav. At first it’s like I’m being crushed by the new gravity and I can hardly move the free weights from one side of the room to the other. Gradually, strength builds. My shoulders grow broader, rounded; I see tendons emerge in my forearms; a tense mass of hard muscles bind my torso, like armor. Even my hands, which were always stronger than the rest of me, grow more powerful in the concentraction machines. With a simple squeeze, I can pulverize rock. Mickey jumped up and down when he saw that. No one shakes my hand any longer.

I sleep in highGrav, so that when I move about on Mars, I feel fast, quick, more agile than ever before. My fasttwitch fibers form. My hands move like lightning, and when they hit the gymnasium’s human-shaped punching bag, it leaps like it’s been struck by a scorcher. I can punch through it now. It is difficult to exert myself, so fit do I become. Sometimes it takes thirty minutes to sweat through my scarlet headband.

My body is becoming that of a Gold, one of the prime stock, not a Pixie, not a Bronze. This is the body of the race that conquered the Solar System. My hands are freaks. They are smooth, tanned, and dexterous, as any Gold’s should be. But there is a power in them out of proportion with the rest of me. If I am a blade, they are my edge.

My body is not all that changes. Before I sleep, I drink a tonic laden with processing enhancers and speed-listen to The Colors, The Iliad, Ulysses, Metamorphosis, the Theban plays, The Draconic Labels, and restricted works like The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies, Lady Casterly’s Penance, 1984, and The Great Gatsby. I wake knowing three thousand years of literature and legal code and history. The side effect is that I sometimes go spasmodic from “brain shock” when I pass a strong electromagnetic signal. Mickey says that will go away. All Golds go through the process as children. There are no long-term cognition improvements. Only short-term processing.

My last day at Mickey’s comes two months after my last surgery. Harmony smiles with me after our workout as she drops me off in my room. Music thuds in the background. Mickey’s dancers are going full tilt tonight.

“I’ll get you your clothing, Darrow. Dancer and I want to have dinner with you to celebrate. Evey will clean you up.”

She leaves me alone with Evey. Today, as always, her face is as quiet as the snow I’ve seen on the HC. I watch her in the mirror as she cuts my hair. The room is dark but for the light over the mirror. It shines from above, so she looks like an angel. Innocent and pure. But she’s not innocent, not pure. She’s a Pink. They breed them for pleasure, for the curves of their br**sts and hips, for the tautness of their stomachs and the plump folds of their lips. Yet she is a girl and her spark has not yet gone out. I remember the last time I failed to protect one like her.

And me? It’s hard to look at myself in the mirror. I’m what I know the devil to be. I am arrogance and cruelty, the sort of man who killed my wife. I am Gold. And I am as cold as it.

My eyes shine like ingots. My skin is soft and rich. My bones are stronger. I feel the density in my lean torso. When Evey is done cutting the golden hair, she stands back and stares at me. I can feel her fear, and I suffer it in myself. I am no longer a human. Physically, I’ve become something more.

“You’re beautiful,” Evey says quietly, touching my golden Sigils. They’re much smaller than her feather wings. The circle is set in the center of each hand’s backside. Wings swoop back along the flesh, curving like scythes up the sides of my wristbones.