Red Rising(10)

Seeing a bloody-red haemanthus bulb peaking out from the wall, I snatch it up and hand it to her. “My gift,” I said. “I did intend to surprise you.”

She giggles. “Well then. This inner half is mine. This outer half is yours. No! Don’t pull at it. I’m keeping your half.” I smell the haemanthus in her hand. It stinks like rust and Mother’s meager stews.

Inside the Webbery, thigh-thick spiderworms of brown and black fur, with long skeletal legs, knit silk around us. They crawl along the girders, thin legs disproportionate to their corpulent abdomens. Eo leads me into the Webbery’s highest level. The old metal girders are laced with silk. I shiver in looking at the creatures above and below; pitvipers I understand, spiderworms I do not. The Society’s Carvers made the creatures. Laughing, Eo guides me to a wall and pulls back a thick curtain of webbing, revealing a rusted metal duct.

“Ventilation,” she says. “Mortar on the walls gave way to reveal it about a week ago. An old tube too.”

“Eo, they’ll lash us if they find us. We’re not allowed …”

“I’m not going to let them ruin this gift too.” She kisses me on the nose. “Come on, Helldiver. There’s not even a molten drill in this tunnel.”

I follow her through a long series of turns in the small shaft till we exit out a grate into a world of inhuman sounds. A buzz murmurs in the darkness. She takes my hand. It’s the only familiar thing.

“What is that?” I ask of the sound.

“Animals,” she says, and leads me into the strange night. Something soft is beneath my feet. I nervously let her pull me forward. “Grass. Trees. Darrow, trees. We’re in a forest.”

The scent of flowers. Then lights in the darkness. Flickering animals with green abdomens flutter through the black. Great bugs with iridescent wings rising from the shadows. They pulse with color and life. My breath catches and Eo laughs as a butterfly passes so close I can touch it.

They’re in our songs, all these things, but we’ve only ever seen them on the HC. Their colors are unlike any I could believe. My eyes have seen nothing but soil, the flare of the drill, Reds, and the gray of concrete and metal. The HC has been the window through which I’ve seen color. But this is a different spectacle.

The colors of the floating animals scald my eyes. I shiver and laugh and reach out and touch the creatures floating before me in the darkness. I cup them and look up at the room’s clear ceiling. It is a transparent bubble that peers at the sky.

Sky. Once it was just a word.

I cannot see Mars’s face, but I can see its view. Stars glow soft and graceful in the slick black sky, like the lights that dangle above our township. Eo looks as though she could join them. Her face is aglow as she watches me, laughing as I fall to my knees and suck in the scent of the grass. It is a strange smell, sweet and nostalgic, though I have no memories of grass. As the animals buzz near in the brush, in the trees, I pull her down, I kiss her with my eyes open for the first time. The trees and their leaves sway gently from the air that comes through the vents. And I drink the sounds, the smells, the sight as my wife and I make love in a bed of grass beneath a roof of stars.

“That is Andromeda Galaxy,” she tells me later as we lie on our backs. The animals make chirping noises in the darkness. The sky above me is a frightening thing. If I stare too intently, I forget gravity’s pull and feel as though I am going to fall into it. Shivers trickle down my spine. I am a creature of nooks and tunnels and shafts. The mine is my home, and part of me wants to run to safety, run from this alien room of living things and vast spaces.

Eo rolls to look at me and traces the steam scars that run like rivers down my chest. Further down she’d find scars from the pitviper along my belly. “Mum used to tell me stories of Andromeda. She’d draw with inks given to her by that Tinpot, Bridge. He always liked her, you know.”

As we lie together, she takes a deep breath and I know she has planned something, saved something to talk about in this moment. This place is leverage.

“You won the Laurel, we all know,” she says to me.

“You needn’t coddle me. I’m not angry any longer. It doesn’t matter,” I say. “After seeing this, none of that matters.”

“What are you talking about?” she asks sharply. “It matters more than ever. You won the Laurel, but they didn’t let you keep it.”

“It doesn’t matter. This place …”

“This place exists, but they don’t let us come here, Darrow. The Grays must use it for themselves. They don’t share.”

“Why should they?” I ask, confused.

“Because we made it. Because it’s ours!”

“Is it?” The thought is foreign. All I possess is my family and myself. Everything else is the Society’s. We didn’t spend the money to send the pioneers here. Without them, we’d be on the dying Earth like the rest of humanity.

“Darrow! Are you so Red that you don’t see what they’ve done to us?”

“Watch your tone,” I say tightly.

Her jaw flexes. “I’m sorry. It’s just … we are in chains, Darrow. We are not colonists. Well, sure we are. But it’s more on the spot to call us slaves. We beg for food. Beg for Laurels like dogs begging for scraps from the master’s table.”