Red Rising(5)

Dago watches me. After a moment, he drags his burner deep. It glows bright and burns fast. “This is you,” he says to me. In half a minute the burner is a husk.


After disembarking the horizonTram, I funnel into the Flush with the rest of the crews. The place is cold, musty, and smells exactly like what it is: a cramped metal shed where thousands of men strip off frysuits after hours of pissing and sweating to take air showers. So, bad. It’s dark. Grime on the floor. Cracking walls. Fissures in the cement where gather hair and human detritus.

I peel off my suit, put on one of our haircaps, and walk naked to stand in the nearest transparent tube. There are dozens of them lined up in the Flush. The hum of motors and catcalls fills the place as naked men and boys jostle past one another to take turns cleaning off. Here there is no dancing, no boastful flips; the only camaraderie is exhaustion and the soft slapping of hands on thighs, creating a rhythm with the whoosh and shoot of the showers.

The door to my tube hisses closed behind me, muffling the sounds of music. The contraption is decrepit. Dirt and deposits of dead skin and old hair crust the holes at the bottom where the air goes out. I move my feet away from the filth as the machine activates. A familiar hum comes from the motor, followed by a great rush of atmosphere and a sucking resonance as air filled with antibacterial molecules screams from the top of the machine and shoots over my skin to whisk away dead skin and filth down the drain at the bottom of the tube. It hurts.

After, I part with Loran and Kieran as they go to the Common to drink and dance in the taverns before the Laureltide dance officially starts. The Tinpots will be handing out the Allowances of foodstuffs and announcing the Laurel at midnight. There will be dancing before and after for us of the dayshift.

The legends say that the god Mars was the parent of tears, foe to dance and lute. As to the former, I agree. But we of the colony of Lykos, one of the first of the colonies under Mars’s surface, are a people of dance and song and family. We spit on that legend and make our own birthright. It is the one resistance we can manage against the Society that rules us. Gives us a bit of spine. They don’t care that we dance or that we sing, so long as we obediently dig. So long as we prepare the planet for the rest of them. Yet to remind us of our place, they make one song and one dance punishable by death.

My father made that dance his last. I’ve seen it only once, and I’ve heard the song only once as well. I didn’t understand when I was little, one about distant vales, mist, lovers lost, and a reaper meant to guide us to our unseen home. I was small and curious when the woman sang it as her son was hanged for stealing foodstuffs. He would have been a tall boy, but he could never get enough food to put meat on his bones. His mother died next. The people of Lykos did the Fading Dirge for them—a tragic thumping of fists against chests, fading slowly, slowly, till the fists, like her heart, beat no more and all dispersed.

The sound haunted me that night. I cried alone in our small kitchen, wondering why I cried then when I had not for my father. As I lay on the cold floor, I heard a soft scratching at my family’s door. When I opened the door, I found a small haemanthus bud nestled in the red dirt, not a soul to be seen, only Eo’s tiny footprints in the dirt. That is the second time she brought flowers after death.

Since song and dance are in our blood, I suppose it is not surprising that it was in both that I first realized I loved Eo. Not Little Eo. Not as she was. But Eo as she is. She says she loved me before they hanged my father. But it was in a smoky tavern when her rusty hair swirled and her feet moved with the zither and her hips to the drums that my heart forgot a couple of beats. It was not her flips or cartwheels. None of the boastful foolery that so marks the dance of the young. Hers was a graceful, proud movement. Without me, she would not eat. Without her, I would not live.

She may tease me for saying so, but she is the spirit of our people. Life’s dealt us a hard hand. We’re to sacrifice for the good of men and women we don’t know. We’re to dig to ready Mars for others. That makes some of us nastyminded folks. But Eo’s kindness, her laughter, her fierce will, is the best that can come from a home such as ours.

I look for her in my family’s in our offshoot township, just a half mile’s worth of tunnelroad away from the Common. The township is one of two dozen townships surrounding the Common. It is a hivelike cluster of homes carved into the rock walls of the old mines. Stone and earth are our ceilings, our floors, our home. The Clan is a giant family. Eo grew up not a stone’s throw from my house. Her brothers are like my own. Her father like the one I lost.

A mess of electrical wires tangle together along the cavern’s ceiling like a jungle of black and red vines. Lights hang down from the jungle, swaying gently as air from the Common’s central oxygen system circulates. At the center of the township dangles a massive holoCan. It’s a square box with images on each side. Pixels are blacked out and the image is faded and fuzzy, but never has the thing faltered, never has it turned off. It bathes our cluster of homes in its own pale light. Videos from the Society.

My family’s home is carved into the rock a hundred meters from the bottom floor of the township. A steep path leads from it to the ground, though pulleys and ropes can also bear one to the township’s greatest heights. Only the old or infirm use those. And we have few of either.

Our house has few rooms. Eo and I only recently were able to take a room for ourselves. Kieran and his family have two rooms, and my mother and sister take the lone second-story room.