Iron Gold - 50 Page Friday

#I NEW YORK TIMES
BESTSELLING AUTHOR
A
RED RISING
NOVEL
THE FALL OF MERCURY
T HE F U RY
S ilent, she waits for the sky to fall, standing upon an island
of volcanic rock amidst a black sea. The long moonless night
yawns before her. The only sounds, a flapping banner of war held in
her lover’s hand and the warm waves that kiss her steel boots. Her
heart is heavy. Her spirit wild. Peerless knights tower behind her. Salt
spray beads on their family crests—emerald centaurs, screaming ea-
gles, gold sphinxes, and the crowned skull of her father’s grim house.
Her Golden eyes look to the heavens. Waiting. The water heaves in.
Out. The heartbeat of her silence.
T HE C I T Y
Tyche, the jewel of Mercury, hunches in fear between the mountains

and the sun. Her famed glass and limestone spires are dark. The An-
cestor Bridge is empty. Here, Lorn au Arcos wept as a young man
when he saw the messenger planet at sunset for the first time. Now,
trash rolls through her streets, pushed by salty summer wind. Gone
are the calls of the fishmongers at the wharf. Gone are the patter of
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pedestrian feet on the cobbles and the rumble of aircars and the
laughter of the lowColor children who jump from the bridges into
the waves on scorching summer days when the Trasmian sea winds
are still. The city is quiet, its wealthy already gone to desert mountain
retreats or government bunkers, its soldiers on its rooftops watching
the sky, its poor having left for the desert or upon cramped boats
destined for the Ismere Islands.
But the city is not empty.
Huddled masses fill the public transit systems that wend beneath
the waves. And in the upstairs window of a tenement complex on the
ugly fringes of the city, far from the water, where the working poor
are kept, a little girl with Orange eyes fogs the window with her
breath. The night sky sparks. Flashing and flaring with spurts of light
like the fireworks her brother sometimes buys at the corner shop.
She’s been told there is a battle between big fleets high up there. She
has never seen a starship. Her mother lies sick in the bedroom, un-
able to travel. Her father, who builds parts for engines, sits at the
little plastic dinner table with his sons, knowing he cannot protect
them. The holoCan washes them in pale light. Government news
programs tell them to seek shelter. In her pocket the girl carries a
folded piece of paper that she found in the gutter. On it is a little
curved sword. She’s seen it before on the cube. Her teachers at the
government school say it brings chaos. War. It has set the spheres on
fire. But now she secretly draws the blade in the fog her breath has
made on the window, and she feels brave.
Then the bombs begin to fall.
T H E BOM BS
They come from high-orbit Thor-class bombers piloted by farmboys

from Earth and miners from Mars of the Twelfth Sunshine Squad-
ron. Curses and prayers and tribal dragons and curved scythes have
been sprayed upon them in aerosol paint. They dip through the
clouds and fall over the sea, outracing their own sound. Their guid-
ance chips are made by freeColors on Phobos. Their steel is mined
xvi | T H E FA L L O F M E R C U R Y

and smelted by entrepreneurs in the Belt. Their ion propulsion en-
gines are stamped with the winged heel of a company that makes
consumer electronics and toiletries and weapons. Down and down
they go to race shadowless over the desert, then the sea, carrying the
weight of the newest empire under the sun.
The first bomb destroys the Hall of Justice on Tyche’s Vespasian
Island. Then it burrows a hundred meters into the earth before deto-
nating against the bunker buried there, killing all inside. The second
lands in the sea, fifteen kilometers from a fleet of refugees, where it
sinks a Society warship, hiding under the chop. The third races over
a spine of mountains north of Tyche when it is struck with a railgun
round fired from a defense installation by a Gray teenager with acne
scars and the charm of a sweetheart around his neck. It careens off its
course and sputters across the sky before falling to the earth.
It detonates on the fringes of the city, far from the water, where it
turns four blocks of tenement housing to dust.
T HE R E A PER
Silent, he lies encased in mankilling metal in the belly of a starship

called the Morning Star. The fear swallows him now as it has done
time and time before. The only sound is the whir of his armor’s air
filtration unit and the radio chatter of distant men and women.
Around him lie his friends, they too cocooned in metal. Waiting.
Eyes Red and Gold and Gray and Obsidian. Wolfheads mark their
pauldrons. Tattoos their necks and arms. Wild empire breakers from
Mars and Luna and Earth. Beyond them fly ships with names like
Spirit of Lykos, Hope of Tinos, and Echo of Ragnar. They are painted
white and led by a woman with onyx-dark skin. The Lion Sovereign
said the white was for spring. For a new beginning. But the ships are
stained. Smeared with char and patched wounds and mismatched
panels. They broke the Sword Armada and the martyr Fabii. They
conquered the heart of the Gold empire. They battled back the Ash
Lord to the Core and have kept the dragons of the Rim at bay.
How could they ever stay clean?
T H E FA L L O F M E R C U R Y | xvii

Alone in his armor, waiting to fall from the sky, he remembers the
girl who began it all. He remembers how her Red hair fell over her
eyes. How her mouth danced with laughter. How she breathed as she
lay atop him, so warm and fragile in a world far too cold. She has
been dead longer than she was ever alive. And now that her dream
has spread, he wonders if she would recognize it. And he wonders too
if he were to die today, would he recognize the echo of his own life?
What sort of man would his son become in this world he has made?
He thinks of his son’s face and how soon he will become a man. And
he thinks of his Golden wife. How she stood on the landing pad,
looking up at him, wondering if he’d ever return home again.
More than anything, he wants this to end.
Then the machine takes hold.
He feels the tug on his body. The pounding of his heart. The mad
cackling of the Goblin and the howls of his friends as they try to
forget their children, their loves, and be brave. Nausea in his gut rises
as the magnetic rails charge behind him. With a shudder of metal,
they fire him forward through the launch tube out into silent space
at six times the speed of sound.
Men call him father, liberator, warlord, Slave King, Reaper. But he
feels a boy as he falls toward the war-torn planet, his armor red, his
army vast, his heart heavy.
It is the tenth year of war and the thirty-third of his life.
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PA RT I
W IND
There is a poor, blind Samson in this land,
Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel,
Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,
And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,
Till the vast Temple of our liberties
A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

1
DARROW
Hero of the Republic
W eary, I walk upon flowers at the head of an army. Pet-

als carpet the last of the stone road before me. Thrown by
children from windows, they twirl lazily down from the steel towers
that grow to either side of the Luna boulevard. In the sky, the sun
dies its slow, weeklong death, staining the tattered clouds and gath-
ered crowd in bloody hues. Waves of humanity lap against security
barricades, pressing inward on our parade as Hyperion City Watch-
men in gray uniforms and cyan berets guard the route, shoving
drunken revelers back into the crowd. Behind them, antiterrorism
units prowl up and down the pavement, their fly-eyed goggles scan-
ning irises, hands resting on energy weapons.
My own eyes rove the crowd.
After ten years of war, I no longer believe in moments of peace.
It’s a sea of Colors that line the twelve-kilometer Via Triumphia.
Built by my people, the Red slaves of the Golds, hundreds of years
ago, the Triumphia is the avenue by which the Conquerors who
tamed Earth held their own processions as they claimed continent
after continent. Iron-spined murderers with eyes of gold and haughty
I ron G old | 3

menace once consecrated these same stones. Now, nearly a millen-
nium later, we sully the Triumphia’s sacred white marble by honoring
Liberators with eyes of jet and ash and rust and soil.
Once, this would have filled me with pride. Jubilant crowds cele-
brating the Free Legions returned from vanquishing yet another
threat to our fledgling Republic. But today I see holosigns of my
head with a bloody crown atop it, hear the jeers from the Vox Populi
as they wave banners emblazoned with their upside-down pyramid,
and feel nothing but the weight of an endless war and a desperate
longing to be once again in the embrace of my family. It has been a
year since I’ve seen my wife and son. After the long voyage back from
Mercury, all I want is to be with them, to fall into a bed, and to sleep
for a dreamless month.
The last of my journey home lies before me. As the Triumphia
widens and abuts the stairs that lead up to the New Forum, I face one
final summit.
Faces drunk on jubilation and new commercial spirits gape up at
me as I reach the stairs. Hands sticky with sweets wave in the air. And
tongues, loose from those same commercial spirits and delights, cry
out, shouting my name, or cursing it. Not the name my mother gave
me, but the name my deeds have built. The name the fallen Peerless
Scarred now whisper as a curse.
“Reaper, Reaper, Reaper,” they cry, not in unison, but in frenzy.
The clamor suffocates, squeezing with a billion-fingered hand: all the
hopes, all the dreams, all the pain constricting around me. But so
close to the end, I can put one foot after the other. I begin to climb
the stairs.
Clunk.
My metal boots grind on stone with the weight of loss: Eo, Rag-
nar, Fitchner, and all the others who’ve fought and fallen at my side
while somehow I have remained alive.
I am tall and broad. Thicker at my age of thirty-three than I was in
my youth. Stronger and more brutal in my build and movement.
Born Red, made Gold, I have kept what Mickey the Carver gave me.
These Gold eyes and hair feel more my own than those of that boy
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who lived in the mines of Lykos. That boy grew, loved, and dug the
earth, but he lost so much it often feels like it happened to another
soul.
Clunk. Another step.
Sometimes I fear that this war is killing that boy inside. I ache to
remember him, his raw, pure heart. To forget this city moon, this
Solar War, and return to the bosom of the planet that gave birth to
me before the boy inside is dead forever. Before my son loses the
chance to ever know him. But the worlds, it seems, have plans of
their own.
Clunk.
I feel the weight of the chaos I’ve unleashed: famines and genocide
on Mars, Obsidian piracy in the Belt, terrorism, radiation sickness
and disease spreading through the lower reaches of Luna, and the two
hundred million lives lost in my war.
I force a smile. Today is our fourth Liberation Day. After two years
of siege, Mercury has joined the free worlds of Luna, Earth, and
Mars. Bars stand open. War-weary citizens rove the streets, looking
for reason to celebrate. Fireworks crackle and blaze across the sky,
shot from the roofs of skyscraper and tenement complex alike.
With our victory on the first planet from the sun, the Ash Lord has
been pushed back to his last bastion, the fortress planet Venus, where
his battered fleet guards precious docks and the remaining loyalists. I
have come home to convince the Senate to requisition ships and men
of the war-impoverished Republic for one final campaign. One last
push on Venus to put this bloodydamn war to rest. So I can set down
the sword and go home to my family for good.
Clunk.
I take a moment to glance behind me. Waiting at the foot of the
stairs is my Seventh Legion, or the remnants of it. Twenty-eight
thousand men and women where once there were fifty. They stand in
casual order around a fourteen-pointed ivory star with a pegasus gal-
loping at its center—held aloft by the famous Thraxa au Telemanus.
The Hammer. After losing her left arm to Atalantia au Grimmus’s
razor, she had it replaced by a metal prototype appendage from Sun
I ron G old | 5

Industries. Wild gold hair flutters behind her head, garlanded with
white feathers given to her by Obsidian admirers.
In her mid-thirties, a stout woman with thighs thick as water
drums and a freckled, bluff face. She grins past the shoulders of the
Obsidians and Golds around her. Blue and Red and Orange pilots
wave to the crowd. Red, Gray, and Brown infantry smile and laugh
as pretty young Pinks and Reds duck under barriers and rush to
drape necklaces of flowers around their necks, push bottles of liquor
into their hands and kisses onto their mouths. They are the only full
legion in today’s parade. The rest remain on Mercury with Orion and
Harnassus, battling with the Ash Lord’s legions stranded there when
his fleet retreated.
Clunk.
“Remember, you are but mortal,” Sevro’s bored voice drawls in my
ear as white-haired Wulfgar and the Republic Wardens descend to
greet us midway up the Forum stairs. Sevro sniffs my neck and makes
a noise of distaste. “By Jove. You wretch. Did you dip yourself in piss
before the occasion?”
“It’s cologne,” I say. “Mustang bought it for me last Solstice.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Is it made out of piss?”
I scowl back at him, wrinkling my nose at the heaviness of liquor
on his breath, and eye the ragged wolfcloak he wears over his ceremo-
nial armor. He claims he hasn’t washed it since the Institute. “You’re
really lecturing me about stenches? Just shut up and behave like an
Imperator,” I say with a grin.
Snorting, Sevro drops back to where the legendary Obsidian, Sefi
Volarus, stands in her customary silence. He feigns an air of domes-
ticity, but next to the giant woman, he looks a little like some sort of
gutter dog an alcoholic father might ill-advisedly bring home to play
with the children—washed and rid of fleas, but still possessing that
weird mania behind the eyes. Pinched, thin lipped, with a nose
crooked as an old knifefighter’s fingers. He eyes the crowd with re-
signed distaste.
Behind him lope the pack of mangy Howlers he brought with us
to Mercury. My bodyguards, now drunk as gallants at a Lykos Lau-
6 | P ierce B rown

reltide. Stalwart Holiday walks at their center, the snub-nosed woman
doing her best to keep them in line.
There used to be more of them. So many more.
I smile as Wulfgar descends the stairs to meet me. A favorite son of
the Rising, the Obsidian is a tree root of a man, gnarled and narrow,
armored all in pale blue. He’s in his early forties. His face angular as
a raptor’s, his beard braided like that of his hero, Ragnar.
One of the Obsidians to fight alongside Ragnar at the walls of
Agea, Wulfgar was with the Sons of Ares that freed me from the
Jackal in Attica. Now ArchWarden of the Republic, he smiles down
at me from the step above, his black eyes crinkling at the corners.
“Hail libertas,” I say with a smile.
“Hail libertas,” he echoes.
“Wulfgar. Fancy meeting you here. You missed the Rain,” I say.
“You did not wait for me to return, did you?” Wulfgar clucks his
tongue. “My children will ask where I was when the Rain fell upon
Mercury, and you know what I will have to tell them?” He leans for-
ward with a conspiratorial smile. “I was making night soil, wiping
my ass when I heard Barca had taken Mount Caloris.” He rumbles
out a laugh.
“I told you not to leave,” Sevro says. “You’d miss out on all the fun,
I said. You should have seen the Ashies route. Trails of piss all the way
to Venus. You’d have loved it.” Sevro grins at the Obsidian. It was
Sevro who put a razor in his hand in the river mud of Agea. Wulfgar
has his own razor now. Its hilt made from the fang of an ice dragon
from Earth’s South Pole.
“My blade would have sung that day were I not summoned by the
Senate,” he says.
Sevro sneers. “That’s right. You ran home like a good little dog.”
“A dog? I am a servant of the People, my friend. As are we all.” His
eyes find me with mild accusation and I understand the true mean-
ing to his words. Wulfgar is a believer, like all Wardens. Not in me,
but in the Republic, in the principles for which it stands, and the
orders that the Senate gives. Two days before the Iron Rain over Mer-
cury, the Senate, led by my old friend Dancer, voted against my pro-
I ron G old | 7

posal. They told me to maintain the siege. To not waste men,
resources, on an assault.
I disobeyed and let the Rain fall.
Now a million of my men lie in the sands of Mercury and we have
our Liberation Day.
Were Wulfgar with me on Mercury, he would not have joined our
Rain against the Senate’s permission. In fact, he might have tried to
stop me. He’s one of the few men alive who might manage. For a
spell at least.
He spares a nod for Sefi. “Njar ga hae, svester.” A rough translation
is “Respect to you, sister” in nagal.
“Njar ga hir, bruder,” she replies. No love lost between them. They
have different priorities.
“Your weapons.” Wulfgar gestures to my razor.
Sefi and I hand his Wardens our weapons. Muttering under his
breath, Sevro hands over his as well. “Did you forget your toothpick?”
Wulfgar asks, looking at Sevro’s left boot.
“Treasonous yeti,” Sevro mutters, and pulls a wicked blade long as
a baby’s body from his boot. The Warden who takes it looks terrified.
“Odin’s fortune with the togas, Darrow,” Wulfgar says to me as he
motions for us to continue upward. “You will need it.”
Arrayed at the top of the steps of the New Forum are the 140 Sena-
tors of the Republic. Ten per Color, all draped in white togas that
flutter in the breeze. They peer down at me like a row of haughty
pigeons on a wire. Red and Gold, mortal enemies in the Senate,
bookend the row to either side. Dancer is missing. But I have eyes
only for the lonely bird of prey that stands at the center of all the silly,
vain, power-hungry little pigeons.
Her golden hair is bound tight behind her head. Her tunic is pure
white, without the ribbons of their Color the others wear. And in her
hand, she carries the Dawn Scepter—now a multi-hued gold baton
half a meter long, with the pyramid of the Society recast into the
fourteen-pointed star of the Republic at its tip. Her face is elegant
and distant. A small nose, piercing eyes behind thick eyelashes, and a
mischievous cat’s smile growing on her face. The Sovereign of our
Republic. Here at the summit of the stairs, her eyes shed the weight
8 | P ierce B rown

from my shoulders, the fear from my heart that I would never see her
again. Through war and space and this damnable parade, I have trav-
eled to find her again, my life, my love, my home.
I bend to my knee and look up into the eyes of the mother of my
child.
“ ’Lo, wife,” I say with a smile.
“ ’Lo, husband. Welcome home.”
I ron G old | 9

2
DARROW
Father
S ilene Manor, the Sovereign’s traditional Luna country re-

treat, is nestled five hundred kilometers north of Hyperion at the
base of the Atlas Mountains on a small lake. The northern hemi-
sphere of the moon, comprised of mountains and seas, is less popu-
lous than the belt of cities that girdle the equator. Though Mustang
governs from the Palace of Light in the Citadel, Silene is the true
home of my family, at least until we return to Mars. Built to resemble
one of the papal villas on Earth’s Lake Como, the stone house sits
along the edge of a rocky cove, and spills down to the lake by means
of switchbacked stairs cut into the rock.
Here the thin conifers whisper to heights four times those possible
on Earth. They sway nearly two hundred meters in the air around the
raised concrete landing pad where the steward of House Augustus,
Cedric cu Platuu, waits with my wife’s Lionguards as our shuttle
lands. The small Copper greets Sevro and me with great alacrity,
bowing deeply and flourishing his hand. Thraxa runs past him with-
out even a greeting, eager to find her mother.
“ArchImperator,” he gushes, plump cheeks flushing with delight.
He’s a short but ample man, built a bit like a plum with knobby arms
10 | P ierce B rown

and legs added as an afterthought. A whisper of a mustache, nearly as
thin as the graying copper hair upon his head, wavers in the wind.
“What gladness to see you again!”
“Cedric,” I say, greeting the short man warmly. “I hear you’ve just
had a birthday.”
“Yes, my lord! My seventy-first. Though I do maintain one should
stop counting after sixty.”
“Prime work,” Sevro says. “You look positively prepubescent.”
“Thank you, my lord!”
Few know the secrets of the Citadel as well as Cedric; he was one
of the gems of the Sovereign’s court. Mustang, having thought highly
of him during her time with Octavia, saw no need to dismiss a man
so knowledgeable and dedicated to his duty.
“Where’s the welcoming party?” Sevro asks, looking for his wife,
Victra. Mustang and Daxo remained behind in Hyperion to deal
with their unruly Senate, but promised to rejoin by dinnertime.
“Oh, the children are recently returned from a three-day adven-
ture,” Cedric says. “The Lady Telemanus took them to the ruins of the
USS Davy Crockett in the Atlas Mountains. Merrywater’s own! I hear
they had quite a time around that old wreck. Quite. A. Time, yes.
Learned many lessons and expanded their individual initiative. As your
curriculum requested, dominu—” Cedric’s eyes nearly pop out of his
head before he corrects himself. “As your curriculum requested, sir.”
“Is my wife here yet?” Sevro asks gruffly.
“Not yet, sir. Her valet said she would be late to dinner. I believe
there were labor strikes in her warehouses in Endymion and Echo
City. It’s all over the holoNews.”
“She didn’t even show to the Triumph,” Sevro mutters. “I looked
fabulous.”
“She has missed you at your most prime, sir.”
“Right. See, Darrow? Cedric agrees.” What he hasn’t noticed is
Cedric shuffling away from the odious stench of his wolfcloak.
“Cedric, where is my son?” I ask the man.
He smiles. “I think you can guess, sir.”
I ron G old | 11

The sounds of neoPlast swords knocking together and boots on stone
greet Sevro and me as we enter the dueling grotto. There, vines crawl
over granite fountains and along the damp stone floor. Evergreen
needles drift in cumulous shapes from the top of the trees. And in the
center of the grotto, under the watching eyes of the gargoyles adorn-
ing the fountains, a young boy and girl circle each other at the center
of a chalk circle. The seven other children of their pack watch on,
along with two Gold women. Sevro pulls me to the side so we remain
unseen and sit out of sight on the edge of a granite fountain to watch.
The boy at the center of the circle is ten, lean and proud. He laughs
like his mother and broods like his father. His hair is the color of
straw, his face round and flushed with youth. Rose-gold eyes burn
from under long lashes. He’s larger than I remember, older, and it
feels so impossible that he could have come from me. That he could
have thoughts of his own. That he’ll love, smile, die like the rest of us.
His brow is furrowed now in concentration. Sweat pours down his
face, matting his hair as his opponent strikes his knee a glancing blow.
The girl is nine and narrow-faced like a sleek hunting dog. Electra,
the eldest of Sevro’s three daughters, is taller than my son and twice
as thin. But while Pax radiates an inner joy that makes adults’ eyes
twinkle, there’s a deep grimness to the girl. Her eyes are dusky gold
and hidden behind heavy lids. Sometimes when they look at me, I
feel them judging with an aloofness that reminds me of her mother.
Sevro leans forward eagerly. “I’ll wager Aja’s razor against Apollo-
nius’s helm that my wee monster beats the piss out of your boy.”
“I’m not going to bet on our children,” I whisper in indignation.
“I’ll throw Aja’s Institute ring in as well.”
“Have some decency, Sevro. They’re our children.”
“And Octavia’s cape.”
“I want the Falthe Ivory Tree.”
Sevro gasps. “I love the Ivory Tree. Where else will I hang my tro-
phies?”
I shrug. “No Ivory Tree, no bet.”
“Bloodydamn savage,” he says, sticking out a hand to shake. “You
have a deal.” Sevro’s become quite the collector—acquiring a hoard
of trophies from Gold Imperators, knights, and would-be kings. He
12 | P ierce B rown

hangs their rings and weapons and crests from the boughs of the
ivory tree he uprooted from the House Falthe compound on Earth
and moved to his home on Luna.
We watch as Electra redoubles her onslaught against Pax. My son
continues to back away, to sidestep, allowing her to overextend. Once
she does, he twirls his plastic razor toward her rib cage. It connects
lightly. “Point!” he shouts.
“I’m counting, Pax. Not you,” Niobe au Telemanus says. Kavax’s
wife is a serene woman with a bird’s nest of untamable graying hair
and skin the color of cherrywood. The tribal tattoos of her Pacific
Islander ancestors cover her arms. “Three to two, for Pax.”
“Mind your balance, and stop overextending, Electra,” says Th raxa.
“You’ll lose your footing if you’re on an unstable surface, like a ship
deck or ice.” She sits on the edge of a fountain, miraculously already
having found a bottle of beer.
Brow furrowed in anger, Electra rushes Pax again. They move fast
for children, but since they’re still shy of puberty, their movements
are not yet graceful. Electra feints high, then twists her wrist to slash
savagely down, hitting Pax’s shoulder. “Point for Electra,” Niobe says.
Sevro has to stop himself from clapping. Pax tries to recover, but
Electra is on him. Three more quick blows knock his razor from his
hand. He falls down and Electra lifts her razor to smash him hard on
the head.
Thraxa slips forward and catches the blade mid-swing with her
metal hand. “Temper, temper, little lady.” She pours a little beer on
her head.
Electra glares up at her.
Sevro can’t contain himself any longer. “My little harpy!” He lunges
up off the bench and I follow through to the grotto. “Daddy’s home!”
A smile slashes across Electra’s dour face as she turns to see her father.
She runs to him and lets him scoop her up off the ground. Looks
rather like he’s hugging a limp fish. Some of the children flinch back
when they see Sevro. And when they see me emerge from behind the
vines, they stiffen and bow with perfect manners. Not one born since
the fall of House Lune has the sigils implanted on their hands.
We raise them in packs of nine now, setting children of disparate
I ron G old | 13

Colors together early in their schooling with hopes of creating the
bonds that I found at the Institute, but without the murder and star-
vation. Pax’s best friend, Baldur, a quiet gap-toothed Obsidian boy
who is already nearly as tall as Sevro, helps Pax up. He tries to dust
Pax off before Pax shoos him away and looks over at us.
I expected him to rush to me like Electra, but he doesn’t. And in
that moment, a very sharp spasm of pain goes through the deeper
part of me. When I left him, he was a boy, brimming with reckless
life, but the hesitation, the coldness in him now, is from the world of
men. Minding his pack, he walks forward very calmly and bows at
the waist, no deeper than manners require. “Hello, Father.”
“My boy,” I say with a smile. “You’ve grown like a weed.”
“That’s what happens when you age,” he says, an edge to his words.
I always thought when I became a man, I’d feel more confident, but
towering over this boy, I feel so very small. I lost my own father to a
cause; have I doomed Pax to the same fate?
“He’s not generally such a snot,” Niobe says later as we stand to the
side after the children are dismissed from the day’s practice. Pax leaves
quickly and in a mood. Baldur rushes to keep up.
“Take the angst as a compliment, Darrow,” Thraxa mumbles. “He
just misses his father. I felt the same way anytime the old man was
away on one of Augustus’s errands.” She pulls a slim burner from her
pocket and lights it in the coals of one of the copper braziers that line
the crumbling walls of the grotto. Niobe plucks it from her fingers
and puts it out on her daughter’s metal arm.
“Was Daxo ever like that?” I ask.
“Daxo?” Niobe laughs. “Daxo was born stoic as a stone.”
“Plotting in the womb from conception,” Thraxa mutters, and sips
her beer. “We used to make owl hoots at him. Always watching the
rest of us out the window. Big brother never wanted to play our
games. Only his own.”
“And you were such a paragon?” Niobe asks. “You used to eat cow
pies.”
Thraxa shrugs. “Better than your cooking.” She steps out of range
14 | P ierce B rown

of her mother’s reach and lights a replacement burner. “Thank Jove
we had Browns.”
Niobe rolls her eyes and touches my arm. “The miscreant is right,
Darrow. Pax just missed you. You’ve time to make up.”
I smile at her but watch Sevro walking away toward the water with
Electra. “You know you’re Daddy’s favorite, don’t you?” he’s saying to
her. I fight back my jealousy. He always seems able to pick right back
up where he left off with his family. I wish I had that same gift.
I seek my mother out in the garden that runs along the side of one of
the stone storage sheds. She’s hunched in the black dirt with two
other Red servant women and a Red man, her bare feet sticking out
behind her as she plants bulbs in the ground in tidy rows. I pause a
moment at the edge of the garden to watch her, just as I used to
watch from the stairwell in our little home in Lykos as she made her
night tea. I was afraid of her after Father died. She was always quick
with a swat or a barbed word. I thought I deserved the treatment.
How much easier the love between us would have been if I’d known
as a child that her anger and my fear came from a pain neither one of
us deserved. The love in me wells up for her as I remember what she’s
endured, and for a brief flicker, I ache to see my father again. For him
to see my mother free.
“Are you just going to watch like a wastrel or are you going to help
us plant?” she asks without looking up.
“I’m not sure I’d be a good farmer,” I say.
She stands with the help of one of her companions, dusts the dirt
from her pants, and takes her time setting her tools away before com-
ing to say hello. She’s only eighteen years older than I am, but she
wears the years hard. Still, she is stronger by leagues than when she
lived below. Her joints are worn from years in the mines. But her
cheeks are ruddy with life now. Our physicians have helped relieve
most of the symptoms of the stroke and heart condition that ravaged
her. I know she feels guilty for this life. This luxury, when my father
and so many others wait for us in the Vale. Her work in the garden
and on the grounds is a penance for surviving.
I ron G old | 15

My mother gives me a hard hug. “My son.” She breathes me in
before pulling back to look all the way up to my face. “You put the
death in me when I heard of that damn Iron Rain. You put the death
in all of us.”
“I’m sorry. They shouldn’t have told you before that I was unac-
counted for.”
She nods and says nothing, and I realize how deep her worry went.
How they must have huddled in the living room here or in the Cita-
del and listened to the holoNews just like everyone else. The Red
man shuffles to join us, his bad leg dragging behind.
“’Lo, Dancer,” I say past my mother. My old mentor wears labor-
er’s garments instead of his senatorial robes. His hair is gray, his face
fatherly and creased from hard years. But there’s still mischief in his
rebel eyes. “Given up the Senate for gardening, have you?”
“I’m a man of the people,” he says with a shrug. “Good to have dirt
under the nails again. The gardeners in that museum the Senate gave
me won’t let me touch a damn weed. ’Lo, Sevro.”
“Politician,” Sevro says, joining me from behind. Heedless of the
mood, he pretends like he’s going to scoop my mother up into the
air, but she scowls at him and he turns the scoop into a gentle hug.
“Better,” she says. “You nearly broke my hip the last time.”
“Oh, don’t be such a Pixie,” he mutters.
“Say that again?”
He steps back. “Nothing, ma’am.”
“What word from Leanna?” I ask.
“They’re well. Was hoping to visit them soon. Maybe take Pax
along to Icaria in the winter. This place gets too cold for these old
bones.”
“All the way to Mars?” I ask.
“It’s his home,” she says sharply. “You want him to forget where he
came from? Red’s as deep in his blood as Gold. Not that he’s ever
reminded it, ’cept by me.”
Dancer looks away, as if to give us privacy.
“He’ll go to Mars,” I say. “We all will when it’s safe.”
We might control Mars, but that’s a far cry from it being a world
of harmony. The Sirenian continent is still infested by a Gold army
16 | P ierce B rown

of iron-skinned veterans, just like the battleground of South Pacifica
on Earth. The Ash Lord hasn’t risked putting a major fleet in orbit in
years, but ground wars are decidedly more stubborn than their astral
counterparts.
“And when will it be safe, according to you?” my mother asks.
“Soon.”
Neither Dancer nor my mother is impressed by that answer. “And
how long are you staying here?” she asks.
“A month, at least. Rhonna and Kieran will be coming, like you
asked.”
“About bloody time. Thought Mercury had stolen them.”
“Victra and the girls will come up for a spell too. Though I do have
business in Hyperion at the end of the week.”
“With the Senate. Asking for more men.” Her tone’s as sour as her
eyes.
I sigh and look at Dancer. “Infecting my mother with your politics
now?”
He laughs. “Deanna most certainly has a mind of her own.”
“With both of you in my ears I’ll go deaf,” she says.
“Plug your ears,” Sevro replies. “It’s what I do when they jabber
about politics.”
Dancer snorts. “If only your wife did the same.”
“Careful, boyo. She’s got ears everywhere. She could be listening
now.”
“Why weren’t you at the Triumph?” I ask Dancer.
He grimaces. “Please. We both know I’ve got no stomach for
pomp. Especially on this damn moon. Give me dirt and air and
friends.” He looks fondly at the trees around. A shadow passes over
his face at the thought of returning to Hyperion. “But I must be
heading back to the mechanized Babylon. Deanna, thank you for
letting me garden with you. It’s just what I needed.”
“You’re not staying for supper?” my mother asks.
“Unfortunately, there are other gardens that need tending. Speak-
ing of which . . . Darrow, could I have a moment?”
I ron G old | 17

Dancer and I leave my mother and Sevro bickering about the smell
of his wolfcloak to walk along a dirt footpath leading into the trees
toward the lake. A patrol skiff skims the water on the far shore. “How
are you?” he asks me. “None of that patriotic hero shit. Remember, I
know all your tells.”
“Tired,” I admit. “You’d think a month’s journey back would let
me catch up on sleep. But there’s always something.”
“Can you sleep?” he asks.
“Sometimes.”
“Lucky bastard. I piss the bed,” he admits. “Probably twice a
month. I don’t ever remember the bloodydamn dreams, but my body
sure as hell does.” He was in the thick of the fighting to free Mars.
The tunnel wars there were even nastier than the block fighting on
Luna. Even the Obsidians don’t sing songs of their victories in the
tunnels. The Rat War, they call it. Over the course of three years,
Dancer personally liberated over a hundred mines with the Sons of
Ares. If Fitchner is the father of the Rising, it’d be fair to call Dancer
the favorite uncle, despite the dissolution of the Sons of Ares.
“You can take meds,” I say. “Most of the vets do.”
“Psych meds? I don’t need Yellow synthetics. I’m a Red of Faran. My
wits are damn sure more important than a dry bed.” On that we
agree. Even though he’s my wife’s main opposition in the Senate, and
thereby mine, he’s still as dear to me as my own family. Only when
Mars and her moons were declared free did Dancer give up the gun
and take up the senatorial toga to found the Vox Populi, the “Voice
of the People,” a socialist lowColor party to counter what he saw as
undue Gold influence over the Republic. It’s a bloodydamn thorn in
my boots every time he gives a speech on proportional representa-
tion. If he had his way, there’d be five hundred lowColor senators to
every Gold senator. Good math. Bad reality.
“Still, must be good to feel grass under your boots instead of sand
and metal,” he says softly. “Must be good to be home.”
“It is.” I hesitate and look out at the rocky shore below. “Gets
harder every time. To come back. You’d think I look forward to it,
but . . . I don’t know. I dread it in a way. Every time Pax grows a cen-
timeter, it feels like an indictment against me for not being there to
18 | P i e r c e B r o w n
Brow_9780425285916_4p_all_r5.indd 18 2/23/18 8:10 AM

see it.” I pick a loose thread impatiently. “Not to mention the longer
I spend here, the more time the Ash Lord has to prepare Venus, and
the longer this all stretches out.”
His face hardens at the mention of the war. “And how long do you
think this will . . . stretch out?”
“That depends, doesn’t it?” I ask. “You’re the only thing standing in
my way of getting the men I need to end this.”
“That’s always your answer. Isn’t it? More men.” He sighs. “I’m the
mouth of the Vox Populi, not the brain.”
“You know, Dancer, humility isn’t always a virtue.”
“You disobeyed the Senate,” he says flatly. “We did not give you
permission to launch an Iron Rain. We preached caution and—”
“I won, didn’t I?”
“This isn’t the Sons of Ares any longer, much as you and I both
wish it were. Virginia and her Optimates were content to let you run
roughshod over the Senate, but the people are learning just how
strong their voice is.” He steps close to me. “Still, they revere you.”
“Not all of them.”
“Please. You’ve got cults that say prayers in your name. Who else
has that?”
“Ragnar.” I hesitate. “And Lysander au Lune.”
“The line of Silenius died with Octavia. You were a fool to let that
boy go, but if he was alive we’d know it. He got swallowed up by the
war just like the rest of them. That leaves only you. The people love
you, Darrow. You can’t abuse that love. Whatever you do, you set an
example. So if you don’t follow the law, why should our Imperators,
our Governors? Why should anyone else? How are we supposed to
govern if you go off and do whatever you damn well please, like
you’re a—” He catches himself.
“A Gold.”
“You know what I mean. The Senate was elected. You were not.”
“I do what’s necessary. You and I always have. But the rest of them,
they do what gets them reelected. Why should I listen to them?” I
smile at him. “Maybe you want an apology. Will that get me the men
I need?”
“It may be too late for apologies.”
I ron G old | 19

I raise an eyebrow. I wish I could say his coldness is alien to me,
but that bond between us has never been the same since he learned
how I bought my peace with Romulus. I gave Romulus the Sons of
Ares. Those were Dancer’s men I left to die on the Rim. The guilt I
felt for that defined our relationship for years, made me desperate for
his approval. I thought if I could destroy the Ash Lord, I could amend
the horror I consigned those men and women to. Nothing has been
amended. Nothing will be. And it breaks my heart to know Dancer
will never love me again the way I love him.
“Are we threatening each other now, Dancer? Thought you and I
were beyond that. We started this together.”
“Aye. We did. I care for you as if you were my own blood. Have
ever since you came to me covered in dirt, no taller than my nose.
But even you have to follow the laws of the Republic you helped
build. Because when the law is not obeyed, the ground is fertile for
tyrants.”
I sigh. “You’ve been reading again.”
“Damn right. The Golds hoarded our history so they could pre-
tend they owned it. It’s my duty as a free man to read so I’m not
blind, being led around by my nose.”
“No one is leading you around by your nose.”
He snorts his disagreement. “When I was a soldier, I watched as
your wife gave pardons to murderers, to slavers, and I bore it because
I was told it was necessary to win the war. I watch now as our people
live fifteen to a room with scraps for food, rags for healthcare, while
the highColor aristocracy live in towers, and I bear it because I’m
told it is necessary to win the war. I’ll be damned if I sit back and
watch another tyrant replace the one we left behind because it is nec-
essary to win the fucking war.”
“Spare me the speeches, man. My wife’s no tyrant. It was her idea
to diminish the strength of the Sovereign in the New Compact. Her
choice to give that strength to the Senate. She helped give our people
a voice. You think that was convenient for her? You think that’s what
a tyrant would do?”
He fixes me with hard eyes. “I wasn’t talking about her.”
I see.
20 | P ierce B rown

“I remember when you told me I was a good man who’d have to
do bad things,” I say. “Your stomach go soft? Or have you spent so
much time with politicians that you’ve forgotten what the enemy
looks like? Usually they’re about seven foot tall, wear a big Pyramid
badge, oh, and they’ve got Red blood all over their hands.”
“And so do you,” he says. “One million was the total loss, wasn’t it?
One million for Mercury. You might be willing to bear that. But the
rest of us tire of the weight. I know the Obsidians do. I know I do.”
“So that leaves us at an impasse.”
“It does. You’re my friend,” he says, voice heavy with emotion.
“You will always be my friend. I won’t put a dagger in your back. But
I will stand up to you. I will do what is right.”
“And so will I.” I put out my hand. He takes it and lingers for a
moment before walking down the path. He turns before it bends into
the trees. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Darrow? If there
is, now is the time. When it’s between just us friends.”
“I’ve no secrets from you,” I say, wishing it were true, wishing he
believed me. Wishing he were still the leader of the Sons of Ares, so
we could bear our secrets together like we once did. Sadly, not all
adversaries are enemies.
He turns and limps back to the garden to say farewell to my
mother. They embrace and he makes his way to the southern landing
pads where his Warden escorts wait. He takes a white wool toga from
one and puts it on over his shirt before he goes up the ramp.
“What did he want?” Sevro asks.
“What do all politicians want?”
“Prostitutes.”
“Control.”
“He knows about the emissaries?”
“He couldn’t.”
Sevro watches Dancer’s wool toga billow in the wind as he boards
his shuttle. “I liked the bastard better in armor.”
“So did I.”
I ron G old | 21

3
DARROW
The Fantasy
D inner is served shortly after Daxo and Mustang arrive

from Hyperion with my brother Kieran and niece, Rhonna.
We eat at a long wooden table covered with candles and hearty pro-
vincial Martian dishes spiced with curry and cardamom. Sevro,
swarmed by his daughters, makes faces at them as they eat. But when
the air cracks with a sonic boom, he bolts upright, looks at the sky,
and runs off into the house, urging his children to stay put. He re-
turns a whole half an hour later arm in arm with his wife, hair a mess,
two jacket buttons missing, touching a white napkin to a bloodied,
split lip. My old friend Victra, immaculate in a high-collared green
jacket threaded with gemstones, beams devilishly across the patio at
me. She’s seven months pregnant with their fourth daughter. “Well,
if it isn’t the Reaper in the leathery flesh. Apologies, my goodman.
I’m dreadfully late.”
Her long legs cover the distance in three strides.
I greet her with a hug. She squeezes my butt hard enough to make
me jump. She kisses Mustang on the head and slides into a chair,
dominating the table. “Hello, gloomy one,” she says to Electra. She
looks at young Pax and Baldur, who’ve been huddled conspiratorially
22 | P ierce B rown

at the far end of the table. Both boys blush furiously. “Will one of
you handsome lads pour Aunty Victra some juice? She’s had a hellish
day.” They scramble over one another to be the first to grab the
pitcher. Baldur wins, and, pleased as a peacock, the quiet Obsidian
lad solemnly pours Victra a towering glass. “Damnable mechanics
union is on strike again. I’ve got docks full of freight that’s ready to
move, but the little bastards got all spiced up by a Vox Populi mouth-
piece and took the power couplings out of more than half the ships
in my Luna food haulers and hid them.”
“What do they want?” Mustang asks.
“Aside from the moon to starve? Higher wages, better living condi-
tions . . . the usual tripe. They say it’s too expensive to live on Luna
with their wages. Well, there’s plenty of room on Earth!”
“How ungrateful of the unwashed peasants,” my mother says.
“I detect your sarcasm, Deanna, and I’m choosing to ignore it in
honor of our recently returned heroes. There will be enough debate
later in the week. Anyway, I’m practically a saint. Mother would have
sent Grays in to crack their ungrateful skulls. Thank Jove the tinmen
still bloody any Vox they see.”
“It’s their right to bargain collectively,” Mustang says, reaching
down to wipe a bit of hummus off the face of Sevro’s youngest, Diana.
“Written in ink in the New Compact.”
“Yes, of course it is. Unions are the heart of fair labor,” Victra mut-
ters. “It’s the only thing Quicksilver and I agree upon.”
Mustang smiles. “Better. You’re a paragon of the Republic once
again.”
“You only just missed Dancer,” Sevro says.
“I thought it reeked of self-righteousness.” Victra goes to sip her
juice and jumps in surprise. Baldur still stands at her side, smiling a
bit too earnestly. “Oh, you’re still here. Begone, creature.” She kisses
her fingers and then presses them to Baldur’s cheek, pushing him
away. He goes, drifting on air back to my envious son.
Afterwards, as the children go off into the vineyard to play, we re-
tire to the back grotto. My family, those by blood and by choice,
surround me. For the first time in over a year, I feel peace settling into
me. My wife puts her feet in my lap and instructs me to rub them.
I ron G old | 23

“I think Pax is in love with you, Victra,” Mustang laughs as Daxo
pours her a glass of wine. His hands dwarf the bottle. A taller man
than I am, he has difficulty sitting in his chair and keeps accidentally
kicking my shins under the table. Kieran and his wife, Dio, hold
hands on a bench by the fire. When I was younger, I remember
thinking how much she looked like Eo. But now, as time passes, the
shadow of my wife’s face fades and I see only the woman who is the
center of my brother’s being. She lurches forward suddenly, away
from a shower of embers as Niobe dumps another log on the flames.
Thraxa sits off in the corner, furtively lighting a burner.
“Well, Pax could have worse an idol than his godmother,” Victra
says, eyeing her husband, who is picking his teeth with a splinter of
wood he’s pried from the outdoor table. She pushes him with her
foot. “That’s grotesque. Stop.”
“Sorry.”
“Yet you’re not stopping.”
“Bit of gristle, my love.” He turns like he’s throwing the splinter
away, but keeps picking. “Got it,” he says gloomily. Instead of throw-
ing the salvaged gristle to the side, he chews on it and swallows.
“Beef.”
“Beef?” Mustang looks back at the table. “We had chicken and
lamb.”
Sevro frowns. “Odd. Kieran, when did we last have beef?”
“At the Howler dinner, three days ago.” Noses wrinkle around the
table.
Sevro chuckles to himself. “Then it was well aged.”
Daxo shakes his head and continues sketching angels for Diana,
who sits on his lap admiring the man’s work. He’s no fool with a
razor, but his true art is made with a stylus. Victra looks helplessly at
Mustang over her juice, despairing of her husband. “Proof, my dear,
that love is blind.”
“Mickey can fix that face if you’re tired of looking at it,” I say.
“Good luck. You’d have to pry the decadent sprite away from his
laboratory,” Daxo says. The bald man considers Diana’s addition of a
cruelly barbed trident to the angel he’s drawn. “Not to mention his
24 | P ierce B rown

admirers. He brought quite the menagerie to the Opera last Septem-
ber. It was a bit like a Hieronymus Bosch painting come alive. One
of them was even an actress. Can you imagine?” he asks Mustang.
“Your father would have chewed through his cheek to see lowColors
sitting in the Elorian.”
“He’s not the only one,” Victra says. “Too much new money these
days. Quicksilver’s friends.” She shivers.
“Well, money doesn’t buy culture, does it?” Daxo replies.
“Not at all, my goodman. Not at all.”
As the night deepens, the orange fingers of the slow sunset thread
their way through the trees. I let go of the strain in my shoulders and
sink deeper into my cup, listening to my friends chatter and joke
while little blue bugs flicker and stab violent light into the late sum-
mer twilight. The trees rustle beyond the terrace; the shouts of chil-
dren come from the grounds as they play night games. The blistering
sand seas of Mercury seem so far away now. The stench of war so re-
mote in my mind they are little more than shards of half-forgotten
dreams.
This is how life should be.
This peace. This laughter.
But even now I feel it slipping through my fingers like that faraway
sand. I sense the House Augustus Lionguards out in the darkness of
the forest, watching the sky, the shadows, helping us stay inside the
fantasy a moment longer. Mustang catches my eye and nods toward
the door.
Forcing myself to part ways from my friends as the Telemanuses
give a rousing, drunken rendition of their family’s song, “The Fox of
Summerfall,” I follow several minutes after Mustang disappears into
the main house. The manor halls here are older even than those of the
Citadel of Light. History is the mortar of the place. Relics from older
ages adorn walls, festoon shelves. Octavia called this place home as a
child. Her essence lingers in the rafters and the attic and the gardens,
as do those of her ancestors and child. It is where Lysander would
have played long before his path crossed mine. I feel the imprint the
Lunes have left on the home. At first I thought it strange living in the
I ron G old | 25

house of my greatest enemy, but in all humanity, who knew the bur-
dens Mustang and I face as well as Octavia? In life, I loathed her. In
death, I understand her.
The scent of my wife reaches me before the sight of her. Our room
is warm and the door shudders shut behind me on a rusted metal
latch. A bottle of wine is open on the table beside the fireplace, where
eagles and crescent moons of House Lune are carved into the stone
corbels. Mustang’s slippers lie discarded on the floor. The ring of her
father and my House Mars ring rest on the table beside her datapad,
which flashes away with new messages.
She’s spooled herself into a chair on our veranda like a bit of golden
yarn, reading the dog-eared book of Shelley’s poetry Roque gave her
years ago during their summer of opera and art in Agea, after the
Institute. She doesn’t look up as I approach. I stand behind her, con-
sidering better of speaking, and slide a hand through her hair. I knead
my thumbs into the muscles of her neck and back. Her proud shoul-
ders relent against my fingers and she turns her book over in her lap.
Sharing a life threads more than flesh and blood together. It weaves
her memories in and around and through mine.
The more I know of her, the more I share of her, the more I love
her in a way the boy I used to be never knew how to love. Eo was a
flame, dancing against the wind. I tried to catch her. Tried to hold
her. But she was never meant to be held.
My wife is not as fickle as a flame. She is an ocean. I knew from the
first that I cannot own her, cannot tame her, but I am the only storm
that moves her depths and stirs her tides. And that is more than
enough.
I lower my lips to her neck and taste the alcohol and sandalwood
of her perfume. I breathe slow and easy, feeling the lightness of love
and the wordless unspooling of the sea of space that kept us apart.
Impossible, it seems, that we were ever so distant. That there was ever
a time where she existed and I was not with her. Everything that she
is, every scent, taste, touch, makes me know I am home. She reaches
up, dragging her slender fingers through my hair. “I missed you,” I
say.
26 | P ierce B rown

“What’s not to miss?” she asks, giving me a sly smile. I move to sit
with her on the chaise, but she clucks her tongue. “You’re not done
yet. Keep rubbing, Imperator. Your Sovereign commands it.”
“I think power’s gone to your head.” She glances up at me. “Yes,
ma’am.” I continue massaging her neck.
“I’m drunk,” she mutters. “I can already feel the hangover.”
“Thraxa’s good at making it feel like a moral obligation to keep
pace.”
“Ten credits says we have to scrape Sevro off the patio tomorrow.”
“Poor Goblin. All spirit, no body mass.”
She laughs. “I put him and Victra in the west wing so we can actu-
ally get some sleep. Last time, I woke up in the middle of the night
thinking a coyote was caught in the air recycler. I swear, at the pace
they’re going they’ll be able to single-handedly populate Pluto in a
few years.”
She pats the cushion beside her. I join her on the chaise and wrap
my arms around her. The lake breeze sighs through the trees. In the
silence we share, I feel her heartbeat and wonder what her eyes see as
they look out over the tops of the trees to the orange sky.
“Dancer was here,” I say.
She makes a small noise of acknowledgment, to let me know she
resents my reminder of the world beyond our balcony. “He’s not
happy with you.”
“Half the Senate looked like they wanted to poison my wine.”
“I warned you. Luna’s changed since you were gone. The Vox Pop
uli can’t be ignored any longer.”
“I noticed.”
“Yet when they passed a resolution, you spat in their eye.”
“And now they’ll spit in mine.”
“Seems that’s the bed you made.”
“Do they have the votes to block my request?”
“They might.”
“Even if you apply pressure?”
“You mean even if I clean up your mess.” It wasn’t a question.
“I made the right decision,” I say. “I know I did. You know I did.
I ron G old | 27

They don’t know war. They were afraid of being held responsible for
failure. What was I supposed to do? Comb my hair while they pro-
tected their reputations?”
“Maybe you should learn from them.”
“I’m not going to hold a poll in the middle of a war. You could
have vetoed them.”
“I could have. But then they’d cry that I was protecting my hus-
band, and the Vox would gain more even supporters.”
“Copper and Obsidian are still in play?”
“No. Caraval says the Coppers will back you. As goes Sefi, so goes
Obsidian. What will she choose? You’d know better than I.”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “She was against the Rain, but she came
with me.”
She’s silent at that.
“You think I’ve shot us in the foot, don’t you?”
“Does Dancer have anything else he can use against you?”
“No,” I say. I know she doesn’t believe me. And she knows I know,
but she can’t ask any more. Though I want to tell her about the emis-
saries, it would incriminate her as well. Sevro and I agreed it was a
secret that must stay within the Howlers. She would be bound by
oath to tell the Senate. And she tried so hard to honor her new oaths.
“Dancer’s not the only one angry with me,” I say. “Pax would
hardly look at me at dinner.”
“I saw.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“I think you do.” She goes quiet. “We’re missing this,” she says
eventually. “Life. The dinner tonight, I’ll remember forever. The
lightning bugs. The children in the yard. The smell of rain on its
way.” She looks over at me. “Just seeing you laughing. I shouldn’t
remember it. It should be one of thousands.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that when my term of office ends in two years, maybe
I won’t run again. Maybe I let the torch pass to someone else. You
hand the reins to Orion or Harnassus. Maybe the rest of this isn’t our
responsibility.” A tiny, hopeful smile crosses her lips. “We will go
back to Mars and live in my estate. We’ll raise our children with your
28 | P ierce B rown

brother and sister’s and put our lives into helping our family, our
planet. And each night we’d have a dinner like this one. Friends could
come and go in our house whenever they passed through. The door
would always be open. . . .”
And an army would always have to guard it.
Her words carry away into the night, into the arms of the swaying
trees, along with the current of the wind, up and up into the sky,
where it seems all fantasies go. But I sit cold as a stone beside her,
because I know she doesn’t believe any of this. We’ve played the game
far too long to walk away. I take her hand. And as my wife is quiet
and the fantasy drifts away, our familiar friend, dread, creeps onto
the balcony with us, because deep inside, in the shadowy chasms of
ourselves, we know Lorn was right. For those who dine with war and
empire, the bill always comes at the end.
And almost as if the world was listening to my thoughts, a knock
comes at the door. Mustang answers it, and when she returns her face
belongs to the Sovereign, not my wife. “It was Daxo. Dancer’s called
an emergency session of the Senate. They’ve moved your hearing up
to tomorrow night.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing good.”
I ron G old | 29

4
LYRIA
Welcome to the Worlds
S ky.
That’s what my da would call the roof of stone and metal that
stretched over our home in the mine of Lagalos. It’s what we all used
to call it, going back generations of our clan to the first Pioneers. The
sky be crumbling. The sky needs reinforcing.
It stretched over us like a great shield, keeping us safe from the
fabled Martian storms raging outside. There were dances for the sky,
songs wishing it luck and blessings. I even knew two lasses named
for it.
But the sky wasn’t a shield. It was a lid. A cage.
I was sixteen years of knobby knees and freckles when I first saw
the true sky. Took six years from the death of the Sovereign on Luna
for the Rising to push the last of the Golds off our continent of Cim-
meria. Two more years for them to finally free our mine from the
Gray warlord who set up his own little kingdom in their absence.
Then the Rising came to Lagalos.
Our saviors looked more like manic Laureltide jesters than soldiers
draped with trophies of gray and blond hair and iron pyramid badges.
SlingBlades and spiked red helmets were painted on their chests. And
30 | P ierce B rown

standing at their front was a weary, bearded Red man old enough to
be a grandfather. He had a large gun in one hand and in the other a
tattered white flag with the fourteen-pointed morning star. He wept
when he saw the bloated bellies and skeletal evidence of our starva-
tion under the Gray warlord. His gun dropped to the floor, and
though he was a stranger to us, he came forward and hugged me.
“Sister,” he said. Then he hugged the man beside me. “Brother.”
Four weeks later, kind-faced men and women wearing white hel-
mets and fourteen-pointed stars on their chests took us to the sur-
face. I’ll never forget their eyes. They were Yellow and Brown and
Pink. They had bottles of water, sparkling sweet drinks and candy for
the children. And they gave us clunky goggles marked with winged
feet to cover our cave eyes from the sun. I didn’t want to wear the
goggles. Rather look at the true sky and its sun with my own eyes.
But a kind Yellow nurse told me I might lose my sight. So on they
went.
When the doors of the lift opened, we walked from a basin littered
with ships, up metal stairs and out onto an endless plain of tall grass
vibrating with the sound of insects, and I saw it: blue and vast, so
large I felt I was falling up into it. The true sky. And there, hanging
like a sullen coal on the impossible horizon, was the sun. Giving us
warmth. Filling my eyes with tears. So small I could block it with a
thumb. Our sun. My sun.
The Republic’s relief ships arrived the next morning to bawdy cho-
ruses hurled out from the throats of young gallants and lasses. The
ships were cleaner than anything I’d ever seen. White as my nephew’s
baby teeth as they coasted down. On their bellies blazed the star of
the Republic. To us, then, the star meant hope.
“Reaper’s compliments,” a young soldier said as he handed me a
chocolate bar. “Welcome to the worlds, lass.”
Welcome to the worlds.
On the shuttle away from our mine, a video appeared before each
of us, the hologram so lifelike I thought my fingers would touch the
Gold face that sprung into the air. I’d seen her before, but here above
ground on one of her ships, she seemed like a goddess from one of
our songs. Virginia the Lionheart. Her eyes a terrifying gold. Her
I ron G old | 31

hair like spun silk held back from her poreless face. She shone brighter
than that little coal of a sun. Making me feel little more than a shadow
of a girl.
“Child of Mars, welcome to the worlds . . .” the young Sovereign
began gently. “You are about to embark upon a great journey to your
rightful place upon the surface of the planet your ancestors built.
Your sweat, your blood, and that of your kin, gave this planet life.
Now it is your turn to share in the bounty of mankind, to live and
prosper in this new Solar Republic and pave a way for the next gen-
eration. My heart is with you. The hopes and dreams of people every-
where rise with you. Good luck and may you and yours find joy
under the stars.”
That was two years and a thousand broken promises ago.
Now, under a boiling sun, I hunch over the scant, piddling river
beyond Assimilation Camp 121. My back bent and fingers crooked
as I rub an abrasive brush into a pair of pants soiled by Ava’s work in
the slaughter yards where she kills cattle to fill our pot.
My arms, once ashen brown like most from Lagalos, are wiry and
now baked dark by the sun and bitten ragged by the bugs that rise up
out of the riverbed mud. The summers of the Cimmerian Plains are
humid and thick with mosquitoes. I swat three away that’ve found a
gap in the lyder flower paste.
I’m eighteen now with stubborn baby fat in my cheeks. My hair
leaps from my head at a thick tangle. Like a rabid animal trying to
escape my skull. I don’t blame it. Eyes never rest long on me. The
boys on Da’s drillteam used to call me Mudbug for the color of my
eyes. Da always said Ava’s got the looks in our family. I’ve just got the
temper.
Along the riverbank are hardpacked men and women—two score
Gammas of my clan humming “The Ballad of Bloody Mary the
Fool.” My mother used to hum it as she worked. Rust-red hair bursts
from under broad-brimmed hats and headwraps of bright cloth. Off
the bank, fishermen laze on boats smoking tobacco as they drag their
nets farther into the river.
Lambda doesn’t let us use the Solar Republic washers in the center
of the camp anymore. Bastards think they have the right, since they
32 | P ierce B rown

are the same clan as the Reaper. Never mind that they’re as related to
him as I am to bats that come out of the jungle at night to hunt for
the camp’s mosquitoes.
The Solar Republic ships don’t come much anymore without a full
military escort, what with the Red Hand marauders running mad in
the South. Those that do come drop the supplies in little parachute
crates from the sky. And the soldiers who actually land in the camp
now cradle weapons instead of candy.
We see it on the HC news every day. Red Hand raids on helpless
camps. Sons kidnapped, fathers killed, and the rest savaged. They
claim they’re bringing justice to my clan, the Gammas, for being the
pets of our former oppressors. In every camp they raid, they purge us
like a strain of diseased rats.
Ava believes the Republic will stop the Hand. That the Reaper will
come with his howling legions and smite the bastards right and good.
Or somesuch. She’s always been a pretty fool. The Sovereign brought
us out of the dirt and forgot us in the mud. The Reaper hasn’t even
been to Mars in years. Got more to worry about than his own Color,
it seems.
Bitten ragged by the mosquitoes, I haul the basket up onto my
head and make my way back to the camp. The pawing electricity of
a coming storm fills the air. In the distance, across the green-stained
savannah, huge thunderheads begin to bruise the sky purple and
black. They’re forming fast.
Heaps of trash hump the violent green landscape closer to the
camp. Here and there range slim burner boys blackened dark with
soot. They wear rags tied over their faces as they douse heaps of cloth-
ing and trash infected by the malaria outbreak with engine oil. The
blazes choke the sky with cancerous black veins.
My brother, Tiran, is out there amidst the stacks, face wrapped like
the rest, squinting into a blaze for one token an hour. In the mine, all
he wanted to be was a Helldiver. It’s all any of us wanted to be. I used
to sneak downstairs late at night and don my father’s workboots and
his helmet and sit at the dinner table with forks and spoons pinched
between my fingers, acting as if I were running a clawDrill.
But then my da fell into a pitviper nest and lost his legs. Soon after,
I ron G old | 33

Mum died and the rest of Da went with her. I used to think my
world permanent. That clansmen and women would always tip their
heads to my father, that my mother would always be there to wake
me and give me a spot of syrup before school. But that life is gone.
More miners are lured up every day by the promise of freedom. And
in their wake, the mines are bought by big companies from big cities
and manned by robots stamped with a silver heel. Just like ours was.
They say we’re to receive a share soon as it makes a profit. We’ve yet
to see so much as a half-credit chit.
A throaty din rises from Assimilation Camp 121 as I enter its open
gates. It’s a muck-soaked town of plastic, tin, and dog shit. Fifty
thousand of us now in a place meant for twenty, with more coming
every day. Gloomy squadrons of mosquitoes buzz low over the soup
of the streets, searching for meat to suck. All the lads old enough for
the Free Legions have gone to war. And those boys and girls who stay
behind work shit jobs for food tokens so the old don’t starve. No
child dreams of being a Helldiver anymore, because in this new world
there are no Helldivers left.
34 | P ierce B rown

5
LYRIA
Camp 121
I make it to my family’s hut using the sheeting and wood planks

that serve as roads through the mud. I slip under the mosquito
netting just as thunder cracks open the sky overhead. Rain pours
down, hammering the thin plastic roofs all down the narrow lane.
Inside the dry hut, I’m greeted with the thick smell of stew. I set the
basket down inside the door. Our home is five meters by seven, made
of neoPlast stamped with the star of the Republic and a tiny little
winged heel where the plastic meets the ground. It’s separated into
two small rooms by opaque plastic dividers that fall from the ceiling.
The kitchen and living room in the front. The bunks in the back. My
sister Ava is hunched over a little solar stove stirring a pot. She glances
back at me as I stand panting.
“Either you’re getting faster or the clouds are getting slower.”
“Bit of both, I’d say.” I rub the stitch in my side and sit down at the
little plastic dinner table. “Tiran still burnin’?”
“That he is.”
“Poor lad’s gonna get drenched. Bloodydamn, it smells kind in
here.” I inhale the scent of stew.
I ron G old | 35

Ava glows. “A bit of garlic found its way into the pot.”
“Garlic? How’d that sneak through Lambda? They stop hoarding
the new freight?”
“No.” She goes back to stirring the pot. “One of the soldiers gave
it to me.”
“Gave? Out of the goodness of his high heart?”
“And that’s not all.” She hikes up her skirt to show off two brilliant
blue shoes. Not government-issue clogs. Real shoes of leather and
quality rubber.
“Bloodydamn. What you give him in return?” I ask in shock.
“Nothing!” Ava scrunches her nose at the accusation.
“Men don’t give gifts for nothing.”
“I’m married.” She crosses her arms.
“Sorry. Forgot,” I say with bite. Her husband, Varon, is as good a
man as I’ve ever met, and as absent a one. He, along with our two
eldest brothers, Aengus and Dagan, volunteered for the Free Legions
right after we entered the camp. Last we heard from them was from
a Legion com bank on Phobos. Three of them crowded together to
fit into the frame. Said they were sailing with the White Fleet toward
Mercury. Seems just yesterday I was following Aengus through the
vents of Lagalos to look for fungus to fill his still.
“Where’re the boys?” I ask.
“Liam’s at the infirmary.”
“Again?” A pang of pity goes through me.
“Another ear infection,” she says. “Could you go visit him in the
morning? You know how much—”
“Course,” I interrupt. Liam, her second youngest, is just past six
and has been blind from birth. He’s always been my favorite. Sweet
little thing. “I’ll bring him some leftover candy if the other rats don’t
gobble it up.”
“You spoil him.”
“Some lads oughta be spoiled.”
I find my niece, Ella, bundled up in her carriage by the table. She’s
playing with a little mobile of one of her brother’s broken toys sus-
pended above her. “How’s my little haemanthus blossom on this
36 | P ierce B rown

dreadful stormy eve?” I say, poking her nose. She giggles and grabs
my finger, then tries to eat it. “She got a mouth on her.”
“I’ll feed her after dinner. You mind checkin’ Da’s diaper?”
My father sits in his chair watching the HC box I stole from a
Lambda too drunk to mind his tent. His eyes are pearly and distant,
reflecting the static of the dead channel that writhes on the screen.
“Lemme help you with that, Da,” I say. I change the channel till
an image of a gravBike shooting over a Mercurian desert appears.
Bad men pursue the roguish Blue hero, who looks not just a bit like
Colloway xe Char.
“Is this all right?” I ask. Thunder rolls outside.
He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t even look at me, so I bite back the re-
sentment and try to remember him as the man who used to take us
to the deep mines. His rough hands would light the gas fire, and he’d
whisper ghost stories of Golback the Dark Creeper or Old Shuffle-
foot in his hoarse voice. The flames from the fire would saw the air
and he would boom out a hilarious laugh at our terrified faces.
I don’t recognize this man . . . this creature wearing my father’s
skin. It just eats and shits and sits there watching the HC. Still, I
shove the anger away, feeling guilty for it, and kiss him on the fore-
head. I tuck his blanket a little bit under his bearded chin and thank
the Vale there’s no soil in his diaper.
There’s a clatter from the door as my sister’s young sons bowl into
the house, drenched in mud and rain. Next comes our remaining
brother, Tiran, smelling of smoke from the burning stacks. He’s the
tallest in the family, but frighteningly thin. Most nights, he looks like
a curled weed, hunched over the little books he writes for the chil-
dren. Fills them with stories of castles and vales and flying knights.
He whips his wet hair at us and tries to give Ava a hug. My sister
shows off her shoes to her jealous boys with false modesty. They de-
bate what one of the brighter blue colors on the tongues ought to be
called while I set the dishes.
“Cerulean!” they decide. “Like Colloway xe Char’s tattoos.”
“Colloway xe Char. Colloway xe Char,” Tiran mocks.
“Warlock’s the best pilot in the worlds,” Conn says in indignation.
I ron G old | 37

Tiran scoffs. “I’d take the Reaper in a starShell against Char in a
ripWing any day.”
Conn puts his arms on his hips. “You’re stupid. Warlock would
blast him to bloody bits.”
“Well, they’re friends, so they won’t be blasting each other to any-
thing,” my sister says. “They’re too busy protecting your father and
uncles, aren’t they?”
“Do you think Da has met them?” Conn asks. “Char and the
Reaper?”
“And Ares?” Barlow adds. “Or Wulfgar the Whitetooth?” He slams
his hands like he’s a menacing Obsidian. “Or Dancer of Faran! Or
Thraxa au—”
“Aye, they’re probably the best of friends. Now eat.”
We eat dinner huddled around the plastic table as the rain drums
the roof. There’s barely enough room for bowls and elbows, but we
layer around the thin soup and chatter on about the merits of rip-
Wings against starShells in atmosphere. My sister smiles when the
boys say the soup tastes better today.
After dinner, we gather around with Da to watch one of his pro-
grams. I break half of a Cosmos chocolate bar into seven pieces to
share. I pocket my piece for Liam and smile when I see Tiran give his
piece to Ava. No wonder he’s so skinny. The program is a news show.
The host a Violet who reminds me a bit of the helions—a tropical
bird that lives off our trash. He has an incredible shock of white hair
and a jaw you could carve granite with, but pathetically delicate
hands for a man.
The very important man is reporting on the Reaper’s Triumph in
Hyperion City. My nephews all nudge each other as he theorizes that
the next push will be toward Venus to finish off the Ash Lord and his
daughter, the Last Fury, once and for all. My sister watches in silence,
stroking her new shoes. So far our brothers and her husband have not
been named in the casualty report that scrolls along the bottom of
the holo.
Tiran leans toward the far-off world. He’s always been the softest
of our family, and the most eager to prove himself. Soon it’ll be his
turn. He becomes sixteen in just a few months. Then he’ll leave all
38 | P ierce B rown

this mud behind for the stars. I can’t help but resent him already.
None of them should have left their family.
The boys don’t see my sister’s quiet desperation. The images of the
HC dance in their Red eyes. The color. The spectacle of the Triumph
on Luna. The glory of the greatest son of Red standing with his Gold
wife—the Sovereign who promised us so much—lifting his clenched
fist into the air as they howl. They think they could rise like the
Reaper. They’re too young to see our life is the lie behind the lights.
“Reaper! Reaper!” the crowd shouts.
My little nephews join in the chant. And I reach for my sister’s
hand, glaring at the HC, remembering the promises undelivered,
and wonder if I’m the only one who misses the mines.
I wake in the night to a distant roar. The room is still. Sweat slicks my
legs. I sit up in bed, listening. There’s a clamor in the distance. The
snoring of far-off engines. Mosquitoes buzz outside the netting that’s
wrapped around our bunks. “Aunt Lyria,” Conn whispers from be-
side me. “What’s that noise?”
“Quiet, love.” I strain to hear. The engines fade. I push my legs off
the edge of my bunk. Father’s soft breathing comes from below. He’s
still asleep. My sister’s bunk is empty. So is Tiran’s sleeping pallet on
the ground.
I slip past the mosquito netting and out of my bed in shorts and a
cotton shirt soggy from the humidity. “Where are you going?” Conn
asks. “Aunt Lyria . . .” I seal the netting behind me with the adhesive
strip.
“Just going to take a peek, love,” I say. “Go back to sleep.” I slip on
my sandals and leave the room. My sister is already awake, standing
near the door and watching nervously as Tiran puts on his boots.
“What’s what?” I ask quietly. “Thought I heard a ship.”
“Probably just some idiot SR airhead buzzing the camp,” Tiran
says.
“Not bloody likely,” I snap. “We ain’t had a supply ship land in a
month.”
“Lower your voice,” he hisses. “The little ones’ll hear.”
I ron G old | 39

“Well, if you weren’t being thick, I wouldn’t have to shout.”
“Stop it, you two.” Ava looks nervous. “What if it’s the Red Hand?”
Tiran brushes his tangled hair from his eyes. “Don’t get your fry-
suit in a twist. The Hand’s hundreds of klicks south. Republic
wouldn’t let anyone in our airspace.”
“Like that means pissall,” I mutter.
“They own the skies,” he replies like he’s a Praetor.
“They don’t even own their own cities,” I say, remembering the
bombings in Agea.
He sighs. “I’ll go take a look. You both mind the house.”
“Mind the house?” I laugh. “Stop acting the maggot. I’m coming
with.”
“No, you’re not,” Tiran replies.
“I’m just as fast as you.”
“Not the bloody point. I’m the man of the house,” he says, and I
snort. “Remember what happened to Vanna, Torron’s daughter? Girls
shouldn’t wander the township at night. Especially not us.” He means
Gamma, and he’s right. I knew Vanna since I was a child. She was
tattered flesh when they found her, hands cut off. We buried her by
the treeline of the jungle south of the camp. “Besides, if I’m wrong,
you gotta to be here to help Ava and the little ones. I’ll go take a look
and I’ll be back fastlike. I promise.” He leaves without another word.
Ava closes the door behind him. She wrings her hands and sits at the
kitchen table. I sit down with her, picking at the scratches on the
plastic top in irritation. Man of the house.
“Slag this.” I stand up. “I’m gonna go have a look.”
“Tiran’s already gone!”
“Please. His balls have barely dropped. I’ll be back in a tick.” I
head to the door.
“Lyria . . .”
“What?”
She grabs our lone frying pan from the kitchen. “At least take
this.”
“In case I find eggs? Fine. Fine.” I take the pan. “Might want to get
water and food ready just in case.” She nods and I leave her behind.
40 | P ierce B rown

The night is grim and humid as air in a smoker’s mouth. By the
time I’ve made it out of Gamma township and into the main camp,
a tongue of sweat licks down the small of my back. It’s quiet but for
the hissing insects. A withered gaboon lizard watches me from the
roof of a refugee domicile as it chews on a night moth. Lights glow
from the far end of the camp where the landing pads lie. Eyes glint
out from plastic doorways as I pass, peering out from behind mos-
quito netting. The streets are empty. I’m afraid in a way I never was
in the mines. Feeling smaller now than I did in our hut.
There’s men’s voices arguing ahead. I creep carefully forward till
I’m crouched behind a stack of discarded cargo containers. Two rusty
pelican transport vessels have landed on the concrete pads. One is
painted with the face of a lithe Pink model drinking a bottle of Am-
brosia, a sweet pepper cola beverage that’s given half the camp cavi-
ties. She smiles and winks at me, her mouth full of white, gleaming
teeth. The lights of the ships blaze in the predawn, silhouetting the
group of men from our camp who’ve woken and gone out to inspect
the landed ships. My brother is amongst them, loitering in the back
self-consciously. I suddenly feel guilt for snorting when he said “man
of the house.” He’s just a boy. My boy, my little brother trying to be
big. The clansmen are exchanging words with another group of men
who’ve come down the ships’ ramps. These ones are Reds too, but
they carry weapons and long bandoliers stocked with ammunition
across their bare chests.
The new men are asking where to find the Gammas. There’s an
argument amongst the men from our camp, then one of them is
pointing toward our township. Another shoves him, but soon several
other men begin to point not just at our homes, but toward Tiran
and several others amongst their group. The other men drift away
from my brother and the three other Gammas. The smallest of the
men from the ship says something, but I don’t catch it. One of the
Gammas rushes him just as the man lifts a long dark object from his
side. Acid-green light churns in the ammunition globe of his plasma
rifle, then lunges from the muzzle in a rippling ball that gashes the
darkness. It cleaves clean through the center of the man. He teeters
I ron G old | 41

to the ground like a township drunk. I’m frozen to the spot. My
brother flees with the other pair of Gammas. One of the outsiders
raises his rifle.
Metal chatters like a broken silk-threading machine.
My brother’s chest erupts. The other gunmen shatter the quiet
night, flashing and bleeding fire from their weapons. Tiran spasms,
jerks. Not falling quickly. But stumbling one step, two steps, then
another gunshot cracks the air and he is tumbling. Half his head is
gone. A wailing cry rises from my belly. The whole world rushes past
and goes silent as I stare at that shadowy mound in the mud.
Tiran . . .
The first man to fire walks over to my brother’s body and rakes the
corpse with the plasma weapon. Then he looks up at me, the acid-
green fire illuminating a face like a demon’s. It’s not a man. It’s a Red
woman with terrible scars covering half of her face.
“Justice to Gamma!” Synced to the speakers on both of the ships
behind her, her voice bellows out into the night. “Death to the col-
laborators! Justice to Gamma!”
42 | P ierce B rown

6
EPHRAIM
Eternal City
I yawn in the humid dark, craving a burner because the vapor

inhaler I’m sucking on is about as satisfying as fucking through a
tarpaulin sheet. My left foot is numb and sweating through the sock
in its rubber shoe, and my right arm is bent so awkwardly into the
stone that my knock-off Valenti chronometer is drilling into the
bone of my wrist with every. Arterial. Pulse.
The only thing that has kept me sane over the past nine hours has
been the holocontacts I bought off the rack from that lemur-looking
bastard, Kobachi, on 198th, 56th, and 17th in Old Town. But the
contacts shorted out, and now I’ve got a corneal abrasion and worse,
plenty of time to kill. Perfect.
I try in vain to stretch. The stone box doesn’t give me much room
to wriggle my 1.75-meter frame. My main grudge against ancient
Egyptians isn’t that they pioneered the institution of mass slavery for
public works, it’s that they were all so damn tiny. Still smells like the
old raisin we dragged out of it late last night before the delivery.
I check my watch. It was a gift from my late fiancé. One of the
cheap silvery types cobbled together by half-blind immigrant low-
Colors in sweatshops deep in the armpits of Luna. Probably Tycho
I ron G old | 43

City. Maybe Endymion or the Mass. Somewhere half a world away
from the beating heart of Hyperion—where I am currently en-
tombed. He didn’t know it was a knockoff, so he paid nearly sixty
percent market value, half his quarterly pay. His face glowed when he
gave it to me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he could have bought
it for the price of a decent bottle of vodka. Poor kid.
Check the watch again. Almost time.
Two minutes to midnight, only several hours left of dusk before
Hyperion is plunged into the last dark month of summer. Dark or
light, a day in Hyperion never truly ends. The caretakers of the day
just lock their doors and hand the reins of the town over to the noc-
turnal creatures. Under Gold it wasn’t exactly a Pink’s paradise. But
now, it’s the law of the jungle when the lights go out. Outside the
museum, the hot city will be stretching and crooning in the sweaty
dusk, readying to make some trouble. On the lamplit Promenade,
decent citizens will skitter to their private housing complexes, fleeing
the yapping of young music and the roar of hoverbike gangs echoing
up from Lost City.
Hyperion. Jewel of Luna. The Eternal City. She’s a beautiful war-
time mess. So much to look at, you can only afford to see what you
want to see. If you plan on staying sane, that is.
But here, in the Hyperion Museum of Antiquities, behind thick
walls of marble is a world with a different set of rules. During day
hours, packs of drooling lowColor schoolchildren and Martian and
Terran immigrants waddle their way through the marble corridors,
rubbing snotty noses against glass containment boxes. At night,
though, the museum is a fortress crypt. Impenetrable from the out-
side, occupied only by a contingent of pale night guards and the dead
residents of crypts, statues, and paintings. The only way in was to
become a resident. So we bribed a docker and snuck aboard a freighter
from Earth as it landed at Atlas Interplanetary. A freighter that hap-
pened to hold numerous relics liberated from the private stash of
some exiled Gold overlord dead or fled to Venus. Probably old Scor-
pio. Whole slew of goodies. Fourteen paintings from neoclassical Eu-
rope, a crate of Phoenician urns, twenty-five crates of Roman scrolls,
and four sarcophagi.
44 | P ierce B rown

What was yesterday filled with mummified Egyptians is tonight
filled with freelancers.
By now the janitorial technicians will be herding up their robot
charges and moving to the east wing. A team of security guards oc-
cupies a headquarters in the basement.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
I’m sick of waiting. Sick of the carousel of thoughts in my brain. I
stare at the watch, willing the hands forward on their cheap gears that
lose seconds every day. Can’t think of anything but a ghost and how
each tick, each tock, takes me farther from him. Farther from the ri-
diculous slicked-back hair he wore because he thought it made him
look like a holostar I liked, or the knockoff Duverchi jackets he’d
wear thinking it hid the farmboy underneath. That was his problem—
always trying to be something he wasn’t. Always trying to be more.
Ate him up in the end and spat him out.
I pull my zoladone dispenser from my pack. I thumb the silver
cylinder and it dispenses a black pill the size of a rat’s pupil into my
hand. Particularly wicked new designer drug. Absurdly illegal. Jacks
up your dopamine and suppresses activity in the bit of gray matter
responsible for empathy. Spec ops teams ate Zs like candy during the
Battle of Luna. If you have to melt a city block, it’s better to save the
tears till you’re back in your bunk.
I keep the dose low. One milligram worth of emotion-numbing
molecules lances through my blood. The thoughts of my fiancé lose
their dimensionality, becoming nothing but flat, monochrome pic-
tures in a faded memory.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
Beep.
Shine time. I click my com once. Three more clicks echo.
Then there’s a grating sound from the stone. It begins to move on
its own. Blue light from the warehouse overheads seeps through the
cracks as the lid of the sarcophagus levitates. A dark mass stands
above me, holding the stone lid in the air as if it were made of neo-
Plast.
“Evening, Volga,” I mouth in gratitude to the giant woman. I sit
up and feel a series of satisfying pops as my spinal cord stretches. Half
I ron G old | 45

my age, my Obsidian accomplice smiles with a mouth mangled by
second-rate dental work. Unlike ice Obsidians, her face is absent the
dense wind calluses that usually hide the sloping of cheekbones. Vol-
ga’s small for an Obsidian, lean and a stunted six and a half feet. It
makes her look less threatening than the average crow. It’s not what
her makers intended. She was born in a lab, courtesy of a Society
breeding program. Poor kid didn’t measure up with the rest of the
crop and was tossed down to Earth for slave labor.
Met her five years back at a loading dock outside Echo City. I had
delivered an item to a collector and had to celebrate with a few cock-
tails. Volga found me ten drinks and two centimeters deep in a pool
of my own blood in an alley, mugged, cut, and left for dead by two
local blackteeth. She carried me to a hospital and I paid her back
with a ride to Luna, the one place she really wanted to go. Been fol-
lowing me around ever since. Teaching her the trade is my own little
pet project.
Like me, she wears a black neoPlast suit to hide her thermal signa-
ture. She’s still holding the lid of the sarcophagus above my head in
the gloom of the museum’s warehouse.
“You can stop showing off now,” I mutter.
“Do not be jealous, tiny man, that I can lift what you cannot lift.”
“Shhh. Don’t bark so damn loud.”
She winces. “Sorry. I thought Cyra turned off the security system.”
“Just shut up,” I say irritably. “Don’t skip in a minefield.” The old
legion adage makes me feel even older than does the old ache in my
right knee.
“Yes, boss.” She makes an embarrassed face and sets the stone
down gently before extending a hand to lift me out. I groan. Even
with the Z, I feel every drink and snort and puff of my forty-six years.
I blame the legion for stealing a good quarter of them. The Rising for
stealing three more before I wised up and split. And then myself for
spending all the rest like there’d be more coming at the end of the
rainbow.
I don’t need a mirror to tell me I’m the secondhand model of my-
self. I’ve got the telltale swollen face of a man who’s gone one too
46 | P ierce B rown

many rounds with the bottle, and a slight body even a decade in le-
gion gravity gymnasiums couldn’t broaden.
I gather the green wrappers from my dinner of sirloin cubes and
Venusian ginger seaweed and spray an aerosol can of blackmarket
DNA into the sarcophagus before stuffing the can and the garbage
into my backpack. Up goes my bodysuit’s facial hood and I motion
to Volga to don hers. We find the other two members of my team
past a stack of crates four meters high, crouched in front of the secu-
rity door leading out of the warehouse.
“Top of the evening,” my team’s cat, Dano, a young, pimply Red,
says without looking back. “Could hear your knees creaking from a
hundred meters, Tinman. Need some street grease in them. I know a
louse at a chop shop who’ll do you good.”
I ignore him and his Terran overfamiliarity.
I need more Lunese associates. Hell, I’d even take a grumpy Mar-
tian. Terrans are all such talkers.
My Green locksmith, Cyra, another Terran, is on a knee working
the interior of the biometric lock. Her gear is set out on the floor near
the door, where she’ll run support. Bit twitchy, that one. She doesn’t
usually like coming to the dancefloor. I’ve hired Cyra sporadically
over the past few years, but we’re not close. She’s like most Limies—
petulant and selfish, with a processor in place of a heart. Especially
nasty to Volga. Doesn’t bother me. I came to the conclusion at the
age of nine that most people are liars, bastards, or just plain stupid.
She’s a good hacker, and that’s all I care about. There’s few enough of
them freelancing these days. Corporations, criminal and reputable
alike, are gobbling up all the talent.
Both Cyra and Dano are short, and the only way to tell them apart
in their hooded black bodysuits is the sizable paunch around Cyra’s
midsection, that and the fact that Dano is doing the splits stretching
for his part in the play, and humming an asinine Red ditty to himself.
I mind Dano less than Cyra. I’ve known him since he was a street
rat fresh off the boat from Earth, pickpocketing on the Promenade
with more acne on his face than hair in his head.
Cyra’s hands work the innards of the door, her left holding an out-
I ron G old | 47

put jack that transmits a wireless signal from the door to the hard-
ware in her head. Two metal crescents packed with hardware and two
hardline uplinks embedded in her skull run from her temples, over
her ears, and back toward the base of her cranium. I see their bulge
from underneath her thermal hood.
“Door alarm?” I ask, when she leans back from the door.
“Off, obviously,” she snaps, voice muffled through the hood. “The
magnetic seal is dead.” She glances over at Volga, who has kneeled to
unfold her compact assault rifle from its black case. “Planning to
break your rule tonight, crow?”
“Wait, are we murder positive?” Dano asks eagerly.
“No. We’re not breaking any rules,” I reply. “But if chance strikes,
the pale lady is my walking, talking insurance policy. You know what
they say. Hell hath no fury like a woman packing a railgun.” Volga’s
gloved hands assemble the black weapon. She pulls free three curved
clips of ammunition and attaches them to the outside of her suit with
bonding tape. Each clip is marked with a colored band coordinating
with the type of projectile—venom paralytic, electrical disrupter,
hallucinogenic round. Never killing rounds. Damn inconvenient
having a killing-machine bodyguard who refuses to kill.
I’ve no such reservations. I touch the pistol on my own hip, mak-
ing sure the leg holster is tight. Muscle reflex by this point. I look
back at Cyra. “You going to make me ask about the rest of the
alarms?”
“Limey couldn’t get all of ’em,” Dano says from the ground where
he contorts his leg behind his head in a bizarre hamstring stretch.
“That right?”
“Yeah,” Cyra mutters.
Dano looks over at me, his face hidden behind the tight black
plastic of his thermal. “Told you we shoulda hired Geratrix.”
“Geratrix is Syndicate now,” I mutter.
Dano bows his head in mock sorrow. “Another one for the bloody
black.”
“It’s not my fault,” Cyra says in a low voice. “They updated their
system. New protocols are government. Would take me near thirty
48 | P ierce B rown

minutes to punch in. Shit, it’d take a team of Republic astral hackers
at least twelve—”
I hold up a hand. “Hear that?” I whisper. They listen. “That’s the
sound of your take getting cut in half.”
“Half?”
“Half a job, half pay.”
Cyra’s got a temper on her as short as a tick’s tooth. Her hand
drops to the multigun on her hip. Still, Volga takes one step toward
her and Cyra looks like a kitten hearing thunder. I bend on a knee in
front of the Green. “It’s not my fault . . .” she says. I take her chin
through the mask and guide it so she’s looking at me.
“Calm down, and tell me the problem.” I snap my fingers. “Today,
pissant.”
“I can’t access the Conquerors Exhibit systems,” she admits.
“At all?”
“It’s on an isolated server. Real relics in there, real security.”
I feel a spasm of annoyance in my left eyelid. Damn. Dano’s
gonna have to do some acrobatics. “You know how I hate sur-
prises, Cyra. . . .”
“Told you we shoulda bought the gravBelts,” Dano says.
“Say ‘I told you we shoulda’ one more time. See what happens.”
He meets my eyes, then glances down at the floor. Thought so. “Spi-
der gloves are good enough,” I say. “Recyclers on.” Dano, Volga, and
I pull our recyclers from our bags and strap them over our thermals’
mouth holes. “I trust you still have the doors figured. . . .”
She nods.
“Thirty seconds in each room,” I remind them as Volga slings her
gun on her back and approaches the door. Dano rolls up from his
stretch and Volga pushes a large flat magnet against the door. It makes
a dull thump as it locks onto the metal. We stare at the magnet as its
sound reverberates. Through the door our voices won’t be heard, but
that might have been. I look to Cyra. She shakes her head. Decibel
levels were too low. Clear, Volga wraps her massive mitts around the
handle.
My body welcomes the adrenaline, sucking it down like water on
I ron G old | 49

cracked asphalt. I look at the watch and feel nothing. My focus nar-
rows to the here and now. I grin.
“No one better sprain their fucking ankle,” I say, warming up my
legs. “Go on, V. Shine time.” Volga heaves on the door, rolling it back
into the wall.
“And grid one is down,” Cyra says quietly into our coms. Dano goes
first into the hall on sound-dampening shoes. I go next and look to
see if Volga’s following. She’s right behind me, freakishly silent de-
spite her size. Cyra stays behind, monitoring the security systems and
the guard level.
Down a narrow staff corridor lies another heavy security door.
“Hold,” Cyra says. “Grid two is down. Twenty-nine, twenty-eight . . .”
Volga puts a mechanical lever under the door and activates it. The
heavy door slides upward, jolting along with the lever. We shimmy
under the door. A painting of a furious warhorse strapped to a char-
iot is suspended mid-stride from the ceiling. In the chariot is an ar-
cher firing at men in bronze armor and horsehair helms. I stand
quickly to look around the vast room. Weeping stone children peer
down from the floral columns. Great frescoes explode with color
along marble walls. Soon the floor pressure sensors, cameras, and la-
sers will come back on.
“Twenty.”
A sense of nostalgia sweeps over me as we run across the floor.
Seems just yesterday I was here as a legion pledge. I remember board-
ing the tram to come to the city center wearing the winged pyramid
pin they give us, puffing my chest out when highColors would nod
to me or lowColors would step out of my path. Stupid kid. He
thought that pin made him a man. It just made him a pet. And
nowadays it’ll get you scalped.
“Eight. Seven . . .”
After three more halls and a stitch in my side later as I try to keep
up with my younger crew, we reach the Conquerors Exhibit, where
we prop open the door with the lever and shimmy under. Carefully,
we stand on a narrow slip of metal, just shy of the marble floor that
has the inbuilt pressure sensors.
The room is as domineering as its subjects. Built by enraptured
50 | P ierce B rown

Golds to honor their psychotic ancestors who conquered Earth, it is
grand and brutal, and unchanged by the Republic except for a few
modifications. They’ve included a list of the conquered amongst the
conquerors. Representations of pre-Color humans stand beside casu-
alty statistics. One hundred and ten million died for Gold to rule.
Then their bombers dropped solocene into the troposphere and neu-
tered an entire race. Didn’t even have to convert them to the Color
hierarchy. Just had to wait a century for them to die out. Bloodless
genocide. Give one thing to the Conquerors. They were efficient.
Pricks.
At the center of the exhibit, under a stone archway with the legend
conquerors exhibit, twenty ancient Ionic columns line an ascend-
ing stairway. At the top, a Delphic temple sits, and inside that, past
priceless relics encased in duroglass, lies the object of my collector’s
desire. It is a sword of the first overlord, a razor belonging to the great
bastard, hero of the Conquerors, Silenius au Lune. The Lightbringer.
“That don’t look so scary,” Dano said when we first got the con-
tract.
I smiled and nodded to Volga. “What if she were holding it?”
“She’d look scary waving a bloodydamn muffin.”
“If I had a muffin, I would eat it,” Volga said.
The blade sits behind two fingers of duroglass and is on loan to the
museum from a private collector for only one week longer. Libera-
tion Day is a perfect time for it to go missing. Volga and I scan the
ceiling of the exhibit, looking for the telltale sign of a drone garage.
We see it in the top left corner of the room, a small titanium flap
built into the marble. I nod to Volga, and she slips on her spider
gloves and jumps onto the wall. They stick to the marble and she
crawls along the wall till she’s hanging beneath the garage door. She
pulls four laser nodes from her pack and puts them on either side of
the door and activates them. Two green lasers crisscross over the door.
She gives me an eager thumbs-up and looks for more garages.
I nudge Dano. He’s up.
The boy does an ironic two-step dance on the narrow slip of the
doorframe, jumps up onto the wall with his spider gloves, then
pushes off with his legs, backflipping onto a glass case holding a Gold
I ron G old | 51

war helmet. He catches himself, turns, then leapfrogs case to case till
he can jump onto one of the Ionic columns. He hits it midway up,
hugs it and shimmies up. As he moves, I summon the autoflier from
its garage five klicks away via my datapad. It drives autonomously
through traffic toward the museum. Dano moves along the columns
like some sort of human flea till he’s picked his way directly above the
glass case. He lets himself fall, turning in the air so he lands on all
fours in a way that makes my knees ache just to watch.
Dano stands and delivers an obnoxious bow before pulling his
laser cutter from his pack. The glass glows as he cuts a circular hole
into it. Then, with a triumphant smile, he plucks up the blade and
holds it aloft.
The alarm goes off on schedule.
A high-pitched frequency screams out of speakers. It would shred
our eardrums if we didn’t have sonic plugs. As it is, it’s little more
than the annoying whine of a hungry dog. A second security door
closes behind us, sealing us in. Two nodes on the ceiling lower and
begin to pump disabling gas into the room. Does nothing with our
recyclers running. Up high on the wall, the drone garage opens and
a metal drone rips out of its hiding place, right into Volga’s laser grid.
It smokes down to the floor in four pieces. A second follows and
meets the same fate as she shoots out the cameras. At the windows,
metal security doors fall to block us in. I stand still like a conductor
at the center of his orchestra. All these variables falling into place just
as I planned. And a deep, formless depression falls on me as the
adrenaline fades.
“Locksmith, find your exit,” I mutter into my com.
Volga drops from her place on the wall to join me. She moves ex-
citably, still young enough to be impressed by this. Dano hops along
the columns back to the arch, where he graffities profanity with his
laser drill. “The razor?” I ask.
He twirls it in his hand. It’s meant for a man twice his size. “A
nasty little dick tickler.”
“The razor,” I say again.
“Course, boss.” He flips it to me casually. I snag it out of the air.
Its handle is too big for my hand. Real ivory exterior and inlaid with
52 | P ierce B rown

gold filigree. The rest is brutally economical. In whip form it coils
like a thin, sleeping snake. Eager to be rid of it, I shove it in a foam
carry case and tuck it into my pack.
“All right, kids.” I open the canister of custom acid and tip it onto
the marble floor. “Time to go.”
I ron G old | 53

Order a copy of
IRON GOLD
By Pierce Brown!
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#I NEW YORK TIMES

Tyche, the jewel of Mercury, hunches in fear between the mountains

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They come from high-­orbit Thor-­class bombers piloted by farmboys

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Silent, he lies encased in mankilling metal in the belly of a starship

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—­Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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W eary, I walk upon flowers at the head of an army. Pet-

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S ilene Manor, the Sovereign’s traditional Luna country re-

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D inner is served shortly after Daxo and Mustang arrive

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I make it to my family’s hut using the sheeting and wood planks

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They come from high-orbit Thor-class bombers piloted by farmboys

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow