Golden Son (The Red Rising Trilogy, Book 2)

Friendships take minutes to make, moments to break, years to repair

I float on my gravBoots, pausing to say, “Tell all who will hear, the Reaper sails to Mars. And he calls for an Iron Rain.”

These Peerless thump their chests in salute to me. The monsters. They go with the wind, chasing power. But they don’t realize power doesn’t shift. Power is resolute. It is the mountain, not the wind. To shift so easily is to lose trust. And trust is what has kept me alive.

Better to go into that other world in the full glory of some passion than to fade and wither with age. Live fast. Die young, my wayward friend.

“You meet a man, you know him. You meet a woman, she knows you.”

“To think about what hands feel,” Lorn mutters. “These have felt the lifeblood of my sons as their hearts pumped it out of their bodies. They’ve felt the cold of a razor’s hilt as they stole the dreams of youth. They’ve worn the love of a girl and a woman and then felt those heartbeats fade to silence. All for my glory. All because I chose to ride the sea. All because I do not die easily as most.” He frowns. “Hands, I think, were not meant to feel so much.”

“I never told you, but I was not raised in a palace or in a city like many of the Peerless you know. My father thought there to be two evils in the world. Technology and culture. He was a hard man. A killer, like the rest of them. But his hardness was found not in what he could do, but in what he wouldn’t do, in his restraint. In the pleasures he denied himself, and his sons. He lived to a hundred and sixty-three without the help of cell rejuvenation. Somehow he lived through eight Iron Rains. But still he never valued life, because he took it too often. He was not a man to be happy.”

“They say you can hear the dead stormsons whooping in the wind,” he mutters. “I say it’s the crying of their mothers.”

“In the end, I believe I’ll enjoy war,” he says. “Gotta toughen my spine a bit. Callous my hands. Bastards tell us it’s all roses and glory.” He looks up. “Don’t you smell the roses, Reaper?”

We are not our station in life. We are us—the sum of what we’ve done, what we want to do, and the people who we keep close. You’re my dearest friend, Darrow. Mind that. No matter what transpires, I will protect you as surely as you would protect me if ever I needed it.