Golden Son (Red Rising Trilogy, #2)(140)

I take another step toward her.

“You told me I gave you hope that we could live for more after we won the Institute our way. Then you said I turned my back on that idea when I accepted your father’s patronage and went to the Academy. But I never turned my back. Not for one moment.” Another step.

“You’ll destroy my family, Darrow.”

“It is possible.”

“They are my family!” she shouts, face collapsing into grief. “My father hanged your wife. He hanged her. How can you even look at me?” She shudders out a breath. “What do you want, Darrow? Tell me. Do you want me to help you kill them? Do you want me to help you destroy my people?”

“I don’t want that.”

“You don’t know what you want.”

“I don’t want genocide.”

“You do!” she says. “And why not? After what we’ve done to your people. After what my father did to you.” She unbuttons another catch on her jacket as if it will help her breathe through this. The gun shakes in her hand. Finger tenses on the trigger. “How can I live with this? If I don’t pull the trigger, millions will die.”

“If you pull it, you accept that billions should live as slaves. Imagine all those unborn. If it is not me, someone else will rise. Ten years from now. Fifty. A thousand. We will break the chains, no matter the cost. You cannot stop us. We are the tide. All you can do is pray it is not someone like Titus who rises in my place.”

She levels the scorcher at my right eyeball.

“Pull the trigger, and you die.” Ragnar speaks like the darkness itself.

“Ragnar, no!” I snap. I can’t even see him in the shadows of the tunnel. “Stop! Do not hurt her.” He must not have pursued the tracking signal as I told him to. How long has he listened?

“Stay back.” Mustang shuffles sideways so her back is to the wall. “Does he know too? Do you know what he is, Ragnar?”

“The Reaper trusts me.”

Mustang tosses her light on the ground and pulls free her razor.

“He isn’t here to kill you, Mustang.”

“What else does a Stained do?”

I hold my hands up. “Ragnar isn’t going to do anything. Are you, Ragnar?”

No answer. I swallow hard. Everything is unwinding. “Ragnar, listen to me …”

“You must not die, Reaper. You are too important for the People. Lady Augustus, you have ten breaths left.”

“Ragnar, please!” I beg. “Trust me. Please.”

Nine.

“I trusted you at the river, my brother. You are not always right. That is the cost of mortality.” The voice comes from above. Somewhere near the ceiling of the mine this time. He’s not wrong. He put his trust in me during our siege of Agea, and I led them into a trap. Luck preserved me.

Laughing bitterly, Mustang coils her muscles to strike. “See, Darrow? You start this war, it’ll be beasts like him who finish it and take their revenge.”

Seven.

“This isn’t about revenge!” I try to calm myself. “It’s about justice. It’s about love against an empire built on greed, on cruelty. Remember the Institute. We freed those we were meant to take as slaves. We put our trust in them. That is the lesson. Trust.”

Five.

“Darrow,” she pleads. “How can you be so foolish?”

Her mind is made up.

Four.

“It never foolish to hope.” I strip off my razor, my datapad, and toss them to the ground as I go to my knees. “But if you can’t change, no one can. So shoot me dead and let the worlds be as they may.”

Three.

“You think too much of me, Darrow.”

“Two.”

“Let’s skip the foreplay, Ragnar.” Mustang twirls her razor. Its horrible hum fills the tunnel. “Come at me, dog, and show Darrow what your kind lives for.”

The silence stretches long.

“One,” Mustang growls, stomping out her own lamp. No light, no color but darkness. The silence is deeper than the tunnel. It meanders through the heart of Mars, stretching forever, echoing to places only the lost have ever been.

Ragnar shatters it with his voice.

“I live for my sisters.”

There is no scorcher flash. No scream of the razor. No movement. Just the echoing of the words down and down with the fragments of silence.

“I live for my brother.”

A light blossoms from Ragnar. He steps forward like some wayward pilgrim, white light glowing along the knuckles of his armor. I see no weapons. Mustang tenses, confused.

“I am and always have been son to the people of the Valkyrie Spires. Born free to Alia Snowsparrow on the wild pole of Mars, north of the Dragon’s Spine, south of the Fallen City.”

He walks past Mustang, arms at his side.

“Forty-four scars have I earned for Gold since the slavers of the Weeping Sun came from the stars to take my family to the Chain Islands. Seven scars from others of my kind when they placed me in the nagoge, where I was trained.”

He kneels at my side.

“One from my mother. Five from the talons of the monster who guards Witch Pass. Six from the woman who taught me to love. One from my first master. Fifteen from men and beasts I fought in an arena for the pleasure of the Allmother and her guests. Nine I earned for the Reaper.”