14
Andromedus
Matteo cannot teach me to dance. He shows me what each of the five form dances of the Aureate looks like and we are through. More emphasis is put on your partner in Gold dances than the dances my uncle taught me, but the movements are similar. I perform all five with greater skill than he can manage. To show off, I blindfold myself and perform each dance again in succession without music, by memory. Uncle Narol taught me to dance, and with a thousand nights of filling time with nothing but dance and song, I am masterful in recording the motions of my body, even this new body. It can do things my old one could not. The muscle fibers contract differently, the tendons stretch further, the nerves fire faster. There’s a sweet burn in the muscles as I flow through the movements.
One dance, the Polemides, has a nostalgic feel. Matteo has me hold a baton as I move about in swirling steps, baton arm outstretched as though fighting with a razor. Even as my body moves, I hear the echoes of the past. I feel the vibrations of the mine, the scent of my clan. I have seen this dance before, and I perform it better than all the others. It is a dance my body is made for, one so very similar to the illegal Reaping Dance.
When I finish, Matteo is angry.
“Is this some sort of game?” he snarls.
“What do you mean?”
He glares at me and taps his foot. “You have never been beyond the mines?”
“You know that answer,” I reply.
“You have never fought with a sword or shield?”
“Yes. I have. I’ve also captained starcruisers and dined with Praetors.” I laugh and ask what this is about.
“This is no game, Darrow.”
“Did I say it was?” I’m confused. What did I do to provoke him? I make a mistake in laughing to relieve the tension.
“You laugh? Boy, this is the Society with which you tangle. And you laugh? They are not some distant idea. They are cold reality. If they find out who you are, they will not hang you.” His face looks lost as he says it. As though he knows only too well.
“I know this.”
He ignores me. “The Obsidians will catch you and give you to the Whites and they will take you to their dark cells and they will torture you. They will pull out your eyes and cut away anything that makes you a man. They have more sophisticated methods, but I wager information won’t be their only aim; they have chemicals for that if they want. Soon after you tell them everything, they will kill me, Harmony, Dancer. And they will kill your family with fleshPeelers and stomp on the heads of your nieces and nephews. These are the things they don’t put on the HC. These are the consequences when the rulers of planets are your enemies. Planets, boy.”
I feel a chill creep into my bones. I know these things. Why does he keep hammering me with them? I’m already frightened. I don’t want to be, but I am. My task is swallowing me whole.
“So I ask you again, are you who Dancer says you are?”
I pause. Ah. I assumed that trust ran deep with the Sons of Ares, that they were of one mind. Here is a crack, a division. Matteo is Dancer’s ally, but not a friend. Something in my dancing made him think twice. Then I realize it. He did not see Mickey carve me. He is taking this all on faith that I was once a Red, and how difficult that must be. Something in my dancing made him think I was born to this. Something to do with that last dance, the one called the Polemides.
“I am Darrow, son of Dale, Lambda’s Helldiver of Lykos. I have never been anyone else, Matteo.”
He crosses his arms. “If you are lying to me …”
“I do not lie to Reds.”
Later that evening, I research the dances I performed. Polemides is Greek for “child of war.” It is the dance that reminded me so much of Uncle Narol’s dances. It is the Gold’s dance of war, the one they teach children when they are young to prepare them for the motions of martial warfare and the use of the razor. I watch a holo of Golds in battle, and my heart falls into my stomach. They fight like a summer song. Not like the thunderous, monstrous Obsidians. But like birds banking into a fresh wind. They fight in pairs, swerving, dancing, killing, ripping through a field of Obsidian and Gray as though they were at play with scythes and all the bodies that fell to them were like stalks of grain that sprayed blood instead of sallow chaff. Their golden armor shines. Their razors flash. They are gods, not men.
And I mean to destroy them?
I sleep poorly in my bed of silk that night. Long after kissing Eo’s haemanthus blossom, I fall asleep and dream of my father and what it would have been like to have known him into manhood, to have learned to dance from him instead of from his drunken brother. I clutch the scarlet headband in my hand as I wake. Holding it as dearly as I clutch my wedding band. All those things that remind me of home.
Yet they are not enough.
I am afraid.
Dancer finds me at my morning breakfast.
“You’ll be happy to know, our hackers have spent two weeks hacking into the Board of Quality Control’s cloud to change Caius au Andromedus’s name to Darrow au Andromedus.”
“Good.”
“That’s all you have to say? Do you know how much … never mind.” He shakes his head and gives a chuckle. “Darrow. It is so offColor. There will be raised eyebrows.”
I shrug to conceal my fear. “So I’ll butcher their gorydamn test and they’ll care less than a lick.”
“Spoken like a Gold.”
The next day, Matteo takes me by ship to the stables of Ishtar, not far from Yorkton. It’s a place by the sea, where green fields stretch over rolling hills.. I’ve never been in so wide a place. I’ve never seen the land curve away from me. Never seen a true horizon or animals so terrifying as the beasts Matteo arranged for our lesson. They stomp and stamp and snort, flicking their tails and baring their monstrous yellow teeth. Horses. I’ve always been scared of horses, despite Eo’s story of Andromeda.
“They’re monsters,” I whisper to Matteo.
“Nevertheless,” he whispers back, “it is the gentleman’s way. You must ride well, lest you find yourself embarrassed in some formal situation.”
I look at the other Golds riding past. There are only three at the stables today, each accompanied by a servant like Matteo, Pinks and Browns.
“A situation like this one?” I hiss at him. “Fine. Fine.” I point to a massive black stallion with hooves that paw the ground. “I’ll take that beast.”
Matteo smiles. “This one is more your speed.”
Matteo gives me a pony. A big pony, but a pony. There is no social interaction here; the other riders trot past and tip their heads to say good day, but that is all. So their smiles are enough for me to know how ridiculous I look. I do not take to riding well. And I take to it even more poorly when my pony bolts as Matteo and I navigate a path into a copse of trees. Out the other side of the copse, I jump off the creature and land deftly in the grass. Someone laughs in the distance, a girl with long hair. She rides the stallion I pointed to earlier.
“Maybe you ought to stick to the city, Pixie,” she shouts at me, then kicks her horse away. I rise from my knee and watch her ride into the distance. Her hair spills out behind her, more golden than the setting sun.
15
The Testing
My test comes after two months of training my mind with Dancer. I do not memorize. I do not even really learn when with him. Instead, his training is designed to help my mind adapt to paradigm shifts. For instance, if gravity were suddenly reversed, most brains would be unable to comprehend or adjust to the shift in paradigms. Mine processes, digests, and calculates. Another example: If a fish has 3,453 scales on its left side and 3,453 on its right side, which side of the fish has the most scales? The outside. They call it extrapolational thinking. It was how I knew that I should eat the scythe card when I first met Dancer. I am very good at it.
I find it ironic that Dancer and his friends can create a fake history for me, a fake family, a fake life, but they cannot fake my admittance test. So, three months after my training begins, I take the test in a bright room next to a noisy mouse of a Goldbrow girl who incessantly taps her stylus on a jade bracelet. She may be part of the test for all I know. When she’s not looking, I snatch the stylus from her fingers and hide it down my sleeve. I am a Helldiver of Lykos. So yes, I can steal a stupid girl’s stylus without her knowing anything about it. She gawks around as if magic has been done. Then she begins to whine. They don’t give her another stylus, so she runs out in tears. Afterwards, the Penny Proctor looks at his datapad and rewinds a video from a nanoCamera. He looks at me and smiles. Such traits are apparently admirable.
A Golden razor blade of a girl disagrees and sneers “Cutter” in my ear as she slices past me in the hall outside. Matteo told me not to speak to anyone because I am not yet ready to socialize, so I barely bite back a very Red reply. Her words linger. Cutter. Cutthroat. Machiavellian. Ruthless. They all describe what she thinks of me. Funny thing is, most Golds would see the term as an accolade.
A musical voice addresses me.
“I think she actually just paid you a compliment. So don’t mind her. She’s pretty as a peach, but she’s all rotten inside. I took a bite once, if you catch my flow. Tasty, then putrid. Fantastic grab in there, by the bye. I was about to rip that ninny’s eyes from her skull myself. Damnable tapping!”
The shining voice comes from a young man torn from Greek verse. Arrogance and beauty drip off of him. Impeccable breeding. I’ve never seen a smile so wide and white, skin so smooth and lustrous. He’s all I despise.
He claps me on the shoulder and grasps my hand in one of the several ways of semiformal introduction. I squeeze slightly. He has a firm grip too, but when he tries to establish dominance, I squeeze his hand till he jerks it back. A flash of worry in his eyes.
“By God, your hand is like a vise!” he chuckles. He calls himself Cassius very quickly, and I’m lucky he gives me little time to speak, because his brow wrinkles when I do. My accent is still not perfect.
“Darrow,” he repeats. “Well, that’s quite the offColor name. Ah …” He looks at his datapad, pulling up my personal history. “Well, you come from no one at all. A farplanet hayseed. No wonder Antonia sneered your way. But listen, I’ll forgive you for it if you tell me how you fared on the test.”
“Oh, you’ll forgive me?”
His brows knit together. “I’m trying to be kind here. We Bellonas aren’t reformers, but we know that good men can come from low origins. Work with me, mate.”
Because of the way he looks, I feel a need to provoke him.
“Well, I daresay I expected the test to be more difficult. I might have missed the one about the candle, but besides that …”
Cassius watches me with a forgiving grin. His lively eyes dance over my face as I wonder if his mother coils his hair with golden irons in the morning.
“With hands like yours, you must be a terror with the razor,” he says leadingly.
“I’m fair,” I lie. Matteo won’t let me touch the thing.
“Modesty! Were you raised by the Whitecowls, man? Never mind, I’m off to Agea after the physical tests. Join me? I hear the Carvers have done some splendid work with the new ladies at Temptation. And they just had gravfloors installed at Tryst; we can float about without gravBoots. What say you, man? Does that interest you?” He taps one of his wings and winks. “Plenty of peaches there. None of them rotten.”
“Unfortunately, I cannot.”
“Oh.” He jumps as if just remembering I’m a farplanet hayseed. “Don’t worry about it, my goodman, I’ll pay and all that.”
I politely decline, but he’s already moving on. He taps my datapad before he leaves. The holoscreen cast over the inside my left arm flickers. The dimensions of his face and information about our conversation are left behind—the address for the clubs he spoke of, the encyclopedic reference for Agea, and his family’s information. Cassius au Bellona, it reads. Son of Praetor Tiberius au Bellona, Imperator of the Society’s Sixth Fleet and perhaps the only man on Mars to rival ArchGovernor Augustus in power. Apparently the families hate one another. Seems like they have a nasty habbit of killing each other off. Baby pitvipers indeed.
I thought I would be frightened of these people. I thought they would be little godlings. But aside from Cassius and Antonia, many are unimpressive. There are only seventy in my testing room. Some look like Cassius. But not all are beautiful. Not all are tall and imperious. And very few strike me as men and women. For all their physical stature, they are children with exaggerated senses of self-worth; they don’t know hardship. Babies. Pixies and Bronzies, mostly.
They test my physical properties next. I sit naked in an airchair in a white room as the Copper testers of the Quality Control Board watch me through nanoCams. “Hope you’re getting a good look,” I say.
A Brown worker comes in and applies a pinch to my nose. His eyes are blank. No fight in this one, no contempt for me. His skin is pallid and his movements awkward and clumsy.
I am instructed to hold my breath as long as my lungs will allow. Ten minutes. Afterwards, the Red removes the clamp and leaves. Next, I’m to take a breath and exhale. I do and realize there is suddenly no oxygen in the chamber. When I start to tilt in my seat, the oxygen returns. They freeze the room and measure how long it takes for me to shiver uncontrollably. Then they heat it to see when my heart begins to struggle. They amplify the grav in the room till my heart can’t push sufficient blood and oxygen to my brain. Then they see how much motion I can take till I vomit. I’m used to riding a ninety-meter drill, so they have to give up.
Once I’m good and ready to kill whoever is at the switch of this little hell chamber, they send in Brown attendants to slip me into a biometric suit and guide me to a gymnasium. There they measure the flow of oxygen to my muscles, the beats of my heart, the density and length of my muscle fibers, the tensile ratings of my bones. All this after I’ve sprinted a few laps and climbed a rock wall against highGrav. It’s like a walk in the park after my hell with Harmony.
They have me throw balls, then line me up against a wall and ask me to stop small balls that they shoot at me with a circular machine. My Helldiver hands are faster than their machine, so they bring in a Green techie to adjust the thing till it’s shooting veritable rockets. Eventually, I’m hit with a ball in the forehead. I black out briefly. They measure that too.
An eye, ear, nose, and mouth test later and I am done. I feel vaguely distant from myself after the test. Like they measured my body and my brain but not me. I’ve had no personal interactions except that one with Cassius. The whole thing felt very cold, very institutionalized.
I stumble into the locker rooms, sore and confused. There’s a couple others changing, so I take my clothes and move along to a more discreet section of the long rows of plastic lockers. Then I hear a strange whistling. A tune I know. One that echoes through my dreams. The one Eo died to. I follow the sound and come upon a girl changing in the corner of the locker room. Her back is to me, muscles lean as she dons her shirt. I make a noise. She turns suddenly, and for an awkward moment, I stand there blushing. Golds are not supposed to care about nudity. But I can’t help my reaction. She’s beautiful—heart-shaped face, full lips, eyes that laugh at you. They laugh like they did as she rode away on the horse. It’s the same girl who called me a Pixie when I rode the pony.
One of her eyebrows arches upward. I don’t know what to say, so, in a panic, I turn and walk fast as I can out of the locker rooms.
A Gold wouldn’t have done that. But as I sit with Matteo on the shuttle as it ferries us from Yorkton back home to Towton, I remember the girl’s face. She blushed too.
It is a short flight, not long enough. I watch Mars through the duroglass floor. Though the planet is terraformed, vegetation is sparse along our flightplath. The planet’s surface is streaked with ribbons of green in its valleys and around her equator. The vegetation looking like green scars that cut across her pocked surface. I’ve taken virtual tours of the planet nearly every day since I received my golden eyes.
Water fills her impact craters, creating grand lakes. And the Borealis basin, which stretches across the northern hemisphere, brims with fresh water and teams with bizarre marine life. Great plains where dust devils gather cloaks of topsoil and tear through croplands. Storms and ice rule the poles where the Obsidians train and live. The weather there is said to be brutal and cold, though temperate climes are prevalent throughout much of Mars’s surface now.
There are one thousand cities on Mars, each ruled by a Governor, the ArchGovernor presiding over all. Each city is set in the center of a hundred mining colonies. The Governors manages these colonies, with the individual MineMagistrates like Podginus managing the day-to-day. The citadel of the ArchGovernor is located in Agea, in the Valles Marineris—the largest canyon in the Solar System.
With so many mines and so many cities, it was chance, I suppose, that brought the ArchGovernor to my home with his camera crew. Chance and my position as a Helldiver. They wanted to make an example out of me; Eo was an afterthought. And she would not have sung if the ArchGovernor had not been there. Life’s ironies are not charming.
“What will the Institute be like if I get in?” I ask Matteo as I peer out the window.
“Full of classes, I imagine. How should I know?”
“Is there no intel?”
“No.”
“No?” I ask.
“Well, some, I suppose,” Matteo admits. “Three sorts of people graduate: the Peerless Scarred, the Graduates, and the Shamed. The Peerless can ascend in society; the Graduates can as well, but their prospects are relatively limited and they still must earn their scars; and the Shamed are sent to the distant, hard colonies like Pluto to oversee the first years of terraforming.”
“How does one become a Peerless?”
“I imagine there is some sort of ranking system; perhaps a competition. I do not know. But the Golds are a species of built upon conquest. It would make sense if that were to be part of your competition.”
“How vague.” I sigh. “You’re as helpful as a legless dog sometimes.”
“I will explain.”
“No one is gorywell stopping you.”
“The game, goodman, in Gold society is patronage. Your actions in the Institute will serve as an extended audition for that patronage. You need an apprenticeship. You need a powerful benefactor.” He grins. “So if you want to help our cause, you’ll do as bloodydamn well as you can. Imagine if you became an apprentice to a Praetor. In ten years time, you could be a Praetor yourself. You could have a fleet! Imagine what you could do with a fleet, my goodman. Just imagine.”
Matteo never speaks about such flights of fancy, so the excitement in his eyes in contagious. It makes me imagine.