Red Rising by Pierce Brown Page A

wife flickers onto the giant screen again.
    “Break the chains!” she cries. Then she’s gone and the screen is black. It crackles. The image comes back. She cries it again. Black once more. Standard programming goes up, then it cuts to her screaming one last time and then there’s me pulling her legs. Then static.
    The streets are quiet as I make my way to the Common. The nightshift will be returning soon. Then I hear a noise and a man steps into the street in front of me. My uncle’s face leers at me from the shadows. A single bulb hangs over his head, illuminating the flask in his hand and his tattered red shirt.
    “You are your father’s son, little bastard. Stupid and vain.”
    My hands clench. “Come to stop me, Uncle?”
    He grunts. “Couldn’t stop your father from killing his bloody self. And he was a better bloodyman than you. More restraint in him.”
    I step forward. “I don’t need your permission.”
    “Nay, you little squabber, you don’t.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Don’t do what you’re gonna do, though. It’ll break your mother; you might think she didn’t know you’d slip out. She did. Told me so. Said you were gonna go die like my brother, like your girl.”
    “If Mother knew, she would have stopped me.”
    “Nah. She lets us men make our own mistakes. But this ain’t what your girl would’ve wanted.”
    I point a finger at my uncle. “You don’t know a thing. Not a thing about what she wanted.” Eo said I wouldn’t understand being a martyr. I will show her I do.
    “Righto,” he says with a shrug. “I’ll walk with you, then, since your head is full of rocks.” He chuckles. “We Lambdas do love the noose.”
    He tosses me his flask and I fall into tentative step beside him.
    “I tried to talk your father out of his little protest, you know. Told him words and dance mean as much as dust. Tried squaring up with him. I squabbed that one up. He laid me down cold.” He throws a slow right. “Comes a time in life when you know a man has his mind set and it’s an insult to gainsay.”
    I drink from his flask and hand it back. The swill tastes strange and thicker than usual. Strange. He makes me finish the flask.
    “Your’s set?” he asks, tapping his head. “Course it is. I forget, I taught you how to dance.”
    “Stubborn as a pitviper, wasn’t that how you put it?” I say quietly, allowing a little smile.
    I walk in silence for a moment with my uncle. He puts a hand on my shoulder. A sob wants to come out of my chest. I swallow it.
    “She left me,” I whisper. “Just left me.”
    “Musta had a reason. Not a dumb girl, that one.”
    The tears come as I enter the Common. My uncle takes me in a one-armed hug and kisses the crown of my head. It’s all he can offer. He’s not a man made for affection. His face is pale and ghostly. Thirty-five and so old, so tired. A scar twists his upper lip. Gray streaks his thick hair.
    “Tell them hello for me in the vale,” he says into my ear, his beard coarse against my neck. “Give my brothers a toast and my wife a kiss, specially Dancer.”
    “Dancer?”
    “You’ll know him. And if you see your gramp and gran, tell them we still dance for them. They won’t be long alone.” He walks away, then pauses and without turning says, “Break the chains. Hear?”
    “Hear.”
    He leaves me there in the Common with my swaying wife. I know the cameras watch me from the can as I walk up the gallows. It is metal, so the stairs don’t creak. She hangs like a doll. Her face is pale as chalk and her hair shifts slightly as the ventilators rasp above.
    When the rope has been cut with the slingBlade I stole from the mines, I grab its frayed end and lower her down gently. I take my wife in my arms and together wend our way from the square to the Webbery. A nightshift is working their final hours. The women watch in silence as I carry Eo to the ventilation duct. There I see Leanna, my sister. Tall and quiet like my mother,