Red Rising Read Free Page A

ours. Send your sisters to my township for sugar this time.” My friends laugh and slap their frysuit lids on their thighs.
    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.
    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. 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. 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 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 wedance 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