“Five hundred years.” I shake my head. “This is our bloodydamn planet.”

“Through sweat and toil it was made so,” he agrees.

“Then what will it take to take it back?”

“Blood.” Dancer smiles at me like a township alleycat. There’s a beast behind this man’s fatherly smiles.

Eo was right. It comes to violence.

She was the voice, like my father. So what am I to be? The avenging hand? I cannot grasp that someone so pure, so full of love, would want me to play this part. But she did. I think of my father’s last dance. I think of my mum, Leanna, Kieran, Loran, Eo’s parents, Uncle Narol, Barlow, everyone I love. I know hard how they will live and how quickly they will die. And I now know why.

I look down at my hands. They are what Dancer called them—cut, scarred, burned things. When Eo kissed them, they grew gentle for love. Now that she is gone, they grow hard for hate. I clench them into fists till my knuckles are white as icecaps.

“What is my mission?”

10

The Carver

I grew up with a quicksmiling girl of fifteen so in love with her young husband that when he was burned in the mines and his wound festered, she sold her body to a Gamma in return for antibiotics. She was stronger than her husband. When he grew well and discovered what had been done on his behalf, he killed the Gamma with a slingBlade snuck from the mines. Easy to guess what happened after that. Her name was Lana and she was Uncle Narol’s daughter. She lives no longer.

I think of her as I watch the HC in what Harmony called the penthouse as Dancer makes preparations. I flip through the many channels with the twitch of my finger. Even that Gamma had a family. He dug like me. He was born like me, went through the Flush like me, and he never saw the sun either. He was just given a little packet of medicine by the Society, and look at the effect. How clever of them. How much hate they create between people who should be kin. But if the clans knew what luxury exists on the surface, if they knew how much had been stolen from them, they would feel the hatred I feel, they would unite. My clan is a hot-tempered breed. What would a rebellion of theirs look like? Probably like Dago’s burner—burning hot but fast, till it was all ash.

I asked Dancer why the Sons streamed my wife’s death to the mines. Why not instead show the lowReds the wealth of the surface? That would sow anger.

“Because a rebellion now would be crushed in days,” Dancer explained. “We must take a different path. A nation cannot be destroyed from without till it is destroyed from within. Remember that. We’re nation-breakers, not terrorists.”

When Dancer told me what I am to do, I laughed. I do not know if I can do it. I am a speck. A thousand cities span the face of Mars. Metal behemoths sail between the planets in fleets carrying weapons that can crack the mantle of a moon. On distant Luna, buildings rise seven miles high; there the Sovereign Consul, Octavia au Lune, rules with her Imperators and Praetors. The Ash Lord, who made the world of Rhea cinders, is her minion. She controls the twelve Olympic Knights, legions of Peerless Scarred, and Obsidians as innumerable as the stars. And those Obsidians are only the elite. The Gray soldiers prowl the cities ensuring order, ensuring obedience to the hierarchy. The Whites arbitrate their justice and push their philosophy. Pinks pleasure and serve in highColor homes. Silvers count and manipulate currency and logistics. Yellows study the medicines and sciences. Greens develop technology. Blues navigate the stars. Coppers run the beauracracy. Every Color has a purpose. Every Color props up the Golds.

The HC shows me Colors I did not know existed. It shows me fashion. Ludicrous and seductive. There are biomodifications and flesh implants—women with skin so smooth and polished, br**sts so round, hair so glossed that they appear a different species from Eo and all the women I’ve ever known. The men are freakishly muscular and tall. Their arms and chests bulge with artificial strength, and they flaunt their muscle like girls showing off new toys.

I am a Lambda Helldiver of Lykos, but what is that compared with all this?

“Harmony is here. Time to go,” Dancer says from the door.

“I want to fight,” I tell him as we ride the gravLift down with Harmony. They’ve doctored my Sigils so that they are brighter to match the highReds. I wear the loose garb of a highRed and carry a pack of street-scrubbing equipment. There’s dye in my hair and contacts in my eyes, all so that I look a brighter shade of red. Less dirty. “I don’t want this mission. “Worse, I can’t do it. Who could?”

“You said you would do anything that needed to be done,” Dancer says.

“But this …” The mission he has given me is madness, yet that’s not why I’m frightened. My fear is that I will become something Eo would not recognize. I’ll become a demon from our Octobernacht stories.

“Give me a scorcher or a bomb. Let someone else do this.”

“We brought you out for this,” Harmony sighs. “And only this. It has been Ares’s greatest goal since the Sons were born.”

“How many others have you brought out? How many others have tried what you’re asking me to try?”

Harmony looks over at Dancer. He says nothing, so she answers impatiently on his behalf. “Ninety-seven have failed the Carving … that we know of.”

“Bloodydamn,” I curse. “And what happened to them?”

“They died,” she says blandly. “Or they asked for death.”

“Maybe Narol should have let me hang.” I try to laugh.

“Darrow. Come here. Come.” He grabs my shoulder and pulls me in. “Others may have failed. But you’ll be different, Darrow. I feel it in my bones.”

My legs go shaky when I first look up at the night sky and the buildings stretching around me. I slip into vertigo. I feel like I am falling, like the world is off its axis. Everything is too open, so much so that it seems as though the city should tumble into the sky. I look at my feet, look at the street, and try to imagine that I am in the tunnelroads from the townships to the Common.

The streets of Yorkton, the city, are a strange place at night. Luminescent balls of light line the sidewalks and streets. HC videos run like liquid streams along parts of the avenue in this hi-tech sector of the city, so most walk upon the moving pathways or ride in public transportation with their heads crooked down like cane handles. Garish lights make the night almost as bright as day. I see even more Colors. This sector of the city is clean. Teams of Red sanitation workers scour the streets. Its roads and walking paths stretch in perfect order.