Red Rising

Sevro tells me the story as he picks through the pockets of our prisoners after the battle. After Pax and I finished one another off, Roque sallied into the glen with Lea and my tribe. Mustang, the crafty girl, escaped into the castle and manages yet to hold it with six fighters. All the prisoners of Mars she captured won’t be hers until she touches them with the tip of her standard. Fat chance. We have eleven of her men and Roque digs up our standard to make them our slaves. We could besiege our own castle—there’s no storming its high walls—but Ceres or the rest of Minerva could come at any time. If they do, Cassius is supposed to ride to give Ceres Minerva’s standard. It also keeps him away while I cement my position as leader.

Roque and Antonia come with me to negotiate with Mustang at the gate. I limp up and favor a cracked rib. It hurts to breathe. Roque takes a step back so that I am most prominent when we reach the gate itself. Antonia wrinkles her nose and eventually does the same. Mustang is bloody from the skirmish and I can’t find a smile on her pretty face.

“The Proctors have been watching all of this,” she says scathingly. “They’ve seen what that happened in that … place. Everything—”

“Was done by Titus,” Antonia drawls tiredly.

“And no one else?” Mustang looks at me. “The girls won’t stop crying.”

“No one died,” Antonia says in annoyance. “Weak as they are, they will repair themselves. Despite what happened, there’s been no depletion of Golden stock.”

“The Golden stock …,” Mustang murmurs. “How can you be so cold?”

“Little girl,” Antonia sighs, “Gold is a cold metal.”

Mustang looks up at Antonia incredulously and then shakes her head. “Mars. A gruesome deity. You’re fit for this, aren’t you lot? Barbarity? Past centuries. Dark ages.”

I don’t have a mind to be lectured by an Aureate about morality.

“We would like you to leave the castle,” I tell her. “Do so with your men and you may have those we captured. We won’t turn them into slaves.”

Down the hill, Sevro stands beside the captives with our standard in hand, he’s tickling a disgruntled Pax with a horse hair.

Mustang jams a finger into my face.

“This is a school. You realize that, yes? No matter the rules your House decides to play by. Be ruthless all you gorywell like. But there are limits. There are slagging limits to what you can do in this school, in the game. The more brutal you are, the more foolish you look to the Proctors, to the adults who will know what you’ve done—what you’re capable of doing. You think they want monsters to lead the Society? Who would want a monster for an apprentice?”

I see a vision of Augustus watching my wife dangle, eyes dead as a pitviper’s. A monster would want a student in his own image.

“They want visionaries. Leaders of men. Not reapers of them. There are limits,” she continues.

I snap. “There are no goddamned limits.”

Mustang’s jaw tightens. She understands how this will play out. In the end, giving us back our horrible castle won’t cost her anything; trying to keep it would. She might even end up like one of the girls in the high tower. She never thought of that before. I can tell she wants to leave. It’s her sense of justice that is killing her. Somehow she thinks we should pay, that the Proctors should come down and interfere. Most of the kids think that about this game; hell, Cassius said it a hundred times as we scouted together. But the game isn’t like that, because life isn’t like that. Gods don’t come down in life to mete out justice. The powerful do it. That’s what they are teaching us, not only the pain in gaining power, but the desperation that comes from not having it, the desperation that comes when you are not a Gold.

“We will keep the Ceres slaves,” Mustang demands.

“No, they are ours,” I drawl. “And we will do with them what we like.”

She watches me for a long moment, thinking.

“Then we get Titus.”

“No.”

Mustang snaps. “We will keep Titus or there are no terms.”

“You will keep no one.”

She’s not used to being told no.

“I want assurances they are safe. I want Titus to pay.”

“It doesn’t matter a flying piss what you want. Here you get what you take. That’s part of the lesson plan.” I pull out my slingBlade and set its tip into the soil. “Titus is of House Mars. He is ours. So please, try and take him.”

“He’ll be brought to justice,” Roque says to Mustang to reassure her.

I turn to him, eyes blazing. “Shut up.”

He looks down, knowing he should not have spoken. It doesn’t matter. Mustang’s eyes don’t look to Antonia or Roque. They don’t look down the slope where Lea and Cipio have her warband on their knees in the glen, and Thistle sits on Pax’s back with Weed, taking their turn tickling him. Her eyes don’t look at the blade. They are only for me. I lean in.

“If Titus raped a little girl who happened to be a Red, how would you feel?”

She doesn’t know how to answer. The Law does. Nothing would happen. It isn’t rape unless she wears the sigil of an elder House like Augustus. Even then, the crime is against her master.

“Now look around,” I say quietly. “There are no Golds here. I’m a Red. You’re a Red. We are all Reds till one of us gets enough power. Then we get rights. Then we make our own law.” I lean back and raise my voice. “That is the point of all this. To make you terrified of a world where you do not rule. Security and justice aren’t given. They are made by the strong.”

“You should hope that is not true,” Mustang says quietly to me.

“Why?”

“Because there is a boy here like you.” Her face takes on a gloomy aspect, as though she regrets what she must say. “My Proctor calls him the Jackal. He is smarter and crueler and stronger than you, and he will win this game and make us his slaves if the rest of us go about acting like animals.” Her eyes implore me. “So please, hurry up and evolve.”

28

My Brother

I pretend the matches came from one of the Minervans when I light our first fire inside castle Mars. June is fetched from her makeshift prison, and soon she has prepared us a feast from the meat of goats and sheep and herbs fetched by my tribe. My tribe pretends it’s the first meal they’ve had in weeks. The others of the House are hungry enough to believe the lie. Minerva and her warband have long since slunk on home.