Golden Son (Red Rising Trilogy, #2)(27)

I feel the words coming like a train down a tunnel.

“When they have all gathered nice and tightlike. When the Sovereign stands to give her speech, you kill the Goldbrow bastards with a radium bomb we hide on you. Mickey and a crew of gizmos built the tech. Once we see the bomb has detonated via the dataRecorder we’ll plant on you, we unleash hell across the system. Burn them out.”

This is the sum of all I’ve done?

“There has to be another way.”

“There were always two plans, Helldiver. This, and you. Ares and Dancer said you were our hope, our chance at another path. They boasted like boys that you could destroy Gold from inside. But you failed, like I said you would. You’re gonna claim blood is on Evey’s hands. Well, it’s on yours too.”

“You don’t even know the blood I have on my hands, Harmony. I’m not some bloodydamn saint. But Evey’s attack was a crime.”

“The only crime is if we lose.”

I shatter. “There’s more at play here than you understand. We cannot face Gold. No matter the blow we strike, they will eradicate us like this.” I snap my fingers.

“So you won’t do it.”

“No, I won’t do it, Harmony.”

“Then the war begins without your help,” she says. “We had two Sons ready to try to enter the gala. They are not Gold, so bets are higher they’ll get caught and cut to ribbons in a Praetorian torture cell before completing their mission. Means the leaders of Gold will live on, and our tiny chances of winning this shitstorm shrink, because you don’t trust Ares.”

“Slag this. Ares should have told me this himself if he wanted my help!”

“How? He is on Mars preparing the revolution. There is no way to communicate. They monitor everything. How could he contact you without exposing your cover?” She leans forward, lower teeth exposed ferally. “Tell me, Darrow. Do you even know how much they’ve stolen from you?”

It’s something in her tone. “What do you mean?”

“Here’s what I mean.” She jams a series of orders into the holoCube and an image appears of Lykos mines. My blood goes cold. “The recording of Eo’s death, the one we pirated and broadcast …”

My heart thuds in my throat.

“It wasn’t complete.” She presses play and the room around us becomes the mine. We’re a part of the three-dimensional holo. It’s the raw footage, not the stuff on the newsreels, not the stuff I’ve seen a hundred times. It shows the hanging without a soundtrack.

I hear my own cries of pain as the Grays beat the boy I used to be. Weeping in the crowd. The awkward silence of unedited footage. My mother hangs her head and Uncle Narol spits in the dust. Kieran, my brother, covers his children’s eyes. Feet shuffle. Dio, Eo’s sister, stumbles up the metal scaffold. Shoes scraping over rust. Sobbing. Then Dio leans toward my wife. Eo stands small, so pale and thin, little more than the smoke of the burning girl I remember. Her lips move. Again, I don’t hear it, just as I didn’t hear it that day. Suddenly Dio sobs uncontrollably and clings to Eo. What was said?

“Use the equipment. That’s what it’s there for, eh?”

I’ve wondered it a thousand times but never had access to this footage. I never knew how I’d find it without raising suspicion. And the thought scared me, as it scares me now—what was I not strong enough to hear? What could Dio bear that I could not?

In the news footage that was pirated, they don’t even show Dio. But here, with the raw footage, I can rewind. I do so. I can amplify the sound. I do so. I watch it happen again: My mother hangs her head. Narol spits. Kieran covers the children’s eyes. Feet shuffle. Dio goes up the scaffold. All the sound is magnified. I sort out the white noise with the controls, and I hear what my wife said to Dio.

“In our bedroom, there is a crib I made. Hide it before Darrow returns.”

“A crib …,” Dio murmurs.

“He must never know. It would break him.”

“Don’t say it, Eo. Don’t.”

“I am with child.”





10

Broken

I break.

Sitting in a void. Staring at my hands. The hands that could not save my wife, my child. She was right. I wasn’t strong enough to bear the truth of Eo’s second sacrifice. Eo could have lived. Eo could have given us the child we always wanted. That future wasn’t worth her silence. I wasn’t worth it …

I feel something deep in my chest, a hollow raw ache. Like blackness has opened in the pit of my soul even as my body tightens and coils around grief. I weigh a million pounds. Shoulders slump. Chest compressed. My fingers clutch together. Funny to think these hands have been with me this whole time. They helped pull her ankles. They buried her in the soil. But they didn’t just bury her, did they?

No. They buried another life. One unborn. Our child, dead before it lived. And I never even knew. I failed them both. The amplified video replays again.

“I am with child,” she tells Dio on the scaffold. “I am with child.”

I replay it a dozen times, feeling myself shrink into a corridor of grief.

The Golds didn’t just kill her. They killed what I’ve always wanted to be—a husband and a father. If only I had stopped her. If only I had not pouted like a child when we lost the Laurel, she wouldn’t have thought to take me to the garden. If only I had the strength to pretend losing the Laurel didn’t bother me.