11
The Carved
“You’re mad.”
“Thank you.” Harmony smiles.
“I assume you misspoke; pray repeat yourself,” Mickey says to
Dancer.
“Ares will pay you more money than you’ve ever seen if you can
successfully attach those to my young friend here.”
“Impossible,” Mickey declares. He looks over to me, measuring
me for the rst time. He is unimpressed despite my height. I don’t
blame him. Once, I thought myself a handsome man of the clans.
Strong. Muscular. Up here, I am pale and wiry, young and scarred.
He spits onto the table. “Impossible.”
Harmony shrugs. “It’s been done before.”
“By whom? I ask.” He turns his head. “No. You cannot bait me.”
“Someone talented,” Harmony taunts.
“Impossible.” Mickey leans even farther forward; his thin face has
not a single pore. “Do you need a dictionary? I can have one
installed in your brain if you do. It is impossible. There’s DNA
matching him with the wings, cerebral extraction. Did you know
they have subdermal markings in their skulls? Of course you didn’t
—datachips attached to their frontal cortexes to substantiate their
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caste? Then there’s synapse linkage, molecular bonding, tracking
devices, the Quality Control Board. Then there’s the trauma and the
associative reasoning. Say we make his body perfect, there’s still one
problem: we cannot make him smarter. One cannot make a mouse a
lion.”
“He can think like a lion,” Dancer says plainly.
“Oho! He can think like a lion,” Mickey snickers.
“And Ares wants it done.” Dancer’s voice is cold.
“Ares. Ares. Ares. It doesn’t matter what Ares wants, you baboon.
Never mind the science. His physical and mental dexterity is
probably daft as a damn bowl cleaner’s. And his tangibles won’t
match. He’s not their species! He’s a Ruster!”
“I’m a Helldiver of Lykos,” I say.
Mickey raises his eyebrows. “Oho! A Helldiver! Clear the halls! A
Helldiver, you say!” He mocks me, but he squints suddenly as if he’s
seen me before. My whipping was televised. Many know my face.
But if I’m a Gold, carved in their august likeness and not that of my
father? I will hardly recognize myself. “Bugger me,” he mutters.
“You recognize my face,” I conrm.
He pulls up the viral video and watches it, looking back and forth
between it and me. “Aren’t you dead with that girlfriend of yours?”
“Wife,” I snap.
Mickey’s jaw muscles icker under his skin as he ignores me.
“You’re making a savior,” he accuses, looking over at Dancer.
“Dancer, you bastard. You’re making a messiah for your gorydamn
cause.”
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I never looked at it that way. My skin prickles uneasily.
“Yes” is Dancer’s answer.
“If I make him a Gold, what will you do with him?”
“He will apply to the Institute. He will be accepted. There, he will
excel well enough to reach the ranks of the Peerless Scarred; as a
Scarred, he can train to be a Praetor, a Legate, a Politico, a
Quaestor. Anything. He will advance to a prime position, the primer
the better. From there, he will be in a position to do as Ares requires
for the Cause.”
“Mother of God,” Mickey murmurs. He stares at Harmony, then at
Dancer. “You want him to be a bona de Peerless Scarred. Not a
Bronzey?”
A Bronze is a faded Gold. Of the same class, but looked down on
for inferior appearance, lineage, and capabilities. “Not a Bronze,”
Dancer conrms.
“Or a Pixie?”
“We don’t want him to go to nightclubs and eat caviar like the
rest of those worthless Golds. We want him to command eets.”
“Fleets. You lot are mad. Mad.” Mickey’s violet eyes settle on mine
after a long moment. “My boy, they are murdering you. You are not
a Gold. You cannot do what a Gold can do. They are killers, born to
dominate us; have you ever met one of the Aureate? Sure, they may
look all pretty and peaceful now. But do you know what happened
in the Conquering? They are monsters.”
He shakes his head and laughs wickedly. “The Institute is not a
school, it is a culling ground where the Golds go to hack at one
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another till the strongest in mind and body is found. You. Will. Die.”
Mickey’s cube lies at the opposite end of the table. I walk over to
it without saying a word. I don’t know how it works, but I know the
puzzles of the earth.
“My boy, what are you doing?” Mickey sighs in pity. “That is not
a toy.”
“Have you ever been in a mine?” I ask him. “Ever used your
ngers to dig through a faultline at a twelve-degree angle while
doing the math to accomodate eighty percent rotation power and
fty-ve percent thrust so you don’t set o a gas-pocket reaction
while sitting in your own piss and sweat and worrying about
pitvipers that want to burrow into your gut to lay their eggs?”
“This is …”
His voice fades as he sees how the clawDrill taught my ngers to
move, how the grace with which my uncle taught me to dance is
converted into my hands. I hum as I work. It takes a moment,
maybe a minute or three. But I learn the puzzle and then solve it
easily according to frequency. There seems another level to it,
mathematical riddles. I don’t know the math, but I know the
pattern. I solve it and four more puzzles, then it changes once more
in my hands, becoming a circle. Mickey’s eyes widen. I complete the
circle’s puzzles and then toss him back the device. He stares at my
hands while working his own twelve ngers.
“Impossible,” he murmurs.
“Evolution,” Harmony replies.
Dancer smiles. “We will need to discuss price.”
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