Red Rising(29)

I don’t know how long I sleep. When I wake, my body rejects the carving of my eyes. I’m screaming and sweating. I’ve gnawed my fist bloody in my sleep and scratched the cornea of my left eye a millimeter deep. Not my left eye. My eye is in a container somewhere. I’ve scratched someone else’s eye and it hurts. How could it hurt? It’s not mine. None of this is mine. My skin is too soft, too lustrous, too faultless. I don’t know my body without scars. I don’t know the back of my own hands. Eo would not know me.

Mickey takes my hair next, ripping out the follicles and replacing them with golden strands that itch like little golden weevils burrowing into my scalp. Everything is changed.

It is weeks of physical therapy. Walking slowly around the room with Evey, the winged girl, I’m left to my own thoughts. Neither one of us cares much to speak. She has her demons and I have mine, so we are quiet and calm except when Mickey comes to coo about what pretty children we would make together. Evey sits by my bed when I have fever dreams. I wake and she’s there, always quiet, never speaking.

One day, Mickey even brings an antique zither for me, with a soundboard of wood instead of plastic. It is the kindest thing he’s ever done. I do not sing, but I play the solemn songs of Lykos. The traditional ones of my clan that no one beyond the mine will ever have heard. He and Evey sit with me sometimes, and though I think Mickey a wretched sort of creature, I feel as though he understands the music. Its beauty. Its importance. And afterwards, he says nothing. I like him then, too. At peace. It must be so at odds with the chaos of his childhood. What musics must they have played for him as he ate their candies and they warped his mind?


“Well, you’re a bit sterner than I first measured,” Harmony says to me one morning as I wake.

“Where have you been?” I ask, opening my eyes.

“Finding donors.” She flinches as she sees my irises. “The world does not stop because you are here,” she says. “We had work to do. Mickey says you can walk?”

“I am growing stronger.”

“Not strong enough,” she surmises, looking me over. “You look like a baby giraffe. I’ll fix that.”

Harmony takes me beneath Mickey’s club to a grungy gymnasium lit by sulfurous bulbs. I like the feel of the cold stone on my bare feet. My balance has returned, and it is a good thing, because Harmony does not offer me her arm; instead, she waves to the center of the dark gymnasium.

“We bought these for you,” Harmony says.

She points to two devices in the center of the dark space. The contraptions are silver and remind me of the suits knights wore in past centuries. The armor hangs suspended between two metal wires. “They are concentraction machines.”

I slide my body into the machine. Dry gel hugs my feet, my legs, my torso and arms and neck, till only my head is free. The machine is built to resist my movements, yet it responds even to the tiniest stimuli. If the arch of my foot flexes, resistance builds near the toe, stressing the muscle. It cramps immediately. The idea of building muscle is to exercise it, which is nothing more than using the muscle intensely enough to create miscroscopic tears in the tissue fiber. This is the pain one feels in the days after an intense workout—torn tissue—not lactic acid. When the muscle repairs the tears, it builds on itself. This is the process the concentraction machine is built to facilitate. It is the devil’s own invention.

Harmony slides the device’s faceplate over my eyes.

My body is still in the gym, but I see myself bounding across the rugged landscape of Mars. The concentraction machine can pivot on independent axes, so when I flip off a thirty-meter ledge, I flip in the concentraction machine. Then I’m running again, pumping my legs against the concentraction machine’s resistance, which increases according to Harmony’s mood or the location of the simulation. Sometimes I venture to the jungles of Earth, where I race panthers through the underbrush, or I take to the pocked surface of Luna before it was populated. But always I return home to Mars to run across its red soil and jump over its violent ravines. I learn the planet this way, seeking the terraformed parts of the world where rivers run from the hard red landscape into valleys of vegetation and trees. Seas span thousands of miles, growing as great machines powered by helium-3 thaw underground glaciers. Harmony sometimes accompanies me in the other machine so I have someone to race.

She pushes me hard, and sometimes I wonder if she’s trying to break me. I don’t let her.

“If you’re not vomiting thinking about a workout, you’re not trying,” she says.

The days are excruciating. My body is a misery of aches from the arches of my feet to the back of my neck. Mickey’s Pinks massage me every day. There is no better pleasure in the world, but three days after beginning my training with Harmony, I wake up vomiting in my bed. I shiver and shake and hear cursing.

“There’s a science to this, you wicked little witch,” Mickey is shouting. “He will be a work of art, but not if you pour water on the paint before it’s set. Do not ruin him!”

“He must be perfect,” Harmony says. “Dancer, if he is weak in any way, the other children will butcher him like a freshmade drillboy.”

“You are butchering him!” Mickey whines. “You are ruining him! His body cannot handle the muscle breakdown.”

“He has not objected to the treatment,” Harmony reminds him.