“We have to bind the House together somehow,” Cassius tells me as we scout the northern highlands. “The Institute is with us for the rest of our lives. If we lose, we may never gain position, ever.”
“And if we’re enslaved during the course of the game?” I ask.
He looks worriedly over at me. “What worse loss could there be?”
As if I needed more motivation.
“Your father won his year, I wager. He was Primus?” I ask. To be an Imperator, he’d have to have won his year.
“Right. Always knew he won his year, though I had no slagging idea what that meant till we got here.”
We both agree that in order to bind our House back together, Titus must go. But it is futile to fight him outright; that chance passed after the first day. His tribe has grown too large.
“I say we kill him in his sleep,” Cassius suggests. “You and I could do it.”
His words chill me. We make no decision, yet the proposition serves to remind me that he and I are different creatures. Or are we really? His wrath is a cruel, cold thing. Yet I never see the anger again, not even around Titus. He’s all smiles and laughter and challenging members of Titus’s pack to races and wrestling when they aren’t going out on raids—just as I am around my enemies.
Yet while I’m regarded warily by most, Cassius is loved by all except Titus’s pack. He’s even started sneaking off with Quinn. I like her. She killed a deer with a trap, then told a story about how she killed the thing with her teeth. Even showed us evidence—hair between her teeth and gums along with bitemarks on the deer. We thought we had a prettier Sevro on our hands till she laughed too hard to go on with the tall tale. Cassius helped her get the deer hair out of her teeth. I like a committed liar.
Conditions worsen in the first few days. People remain hungry because we’ve yet to build a fire in the castle, and hygiene is quickly forgotten when two of our girls are snatched up by Ceres horsemen as they bathe in the river just beneath our gate. The Golds are confused when even their fine pores begin clogging and they gain pimples.
“Looks like a beesting!” Roque laughs to Cassius and me. “Or a radial, distant sun!”
I pretend to be fascinated by it, as though I didn’t have them all my Red life.
Cassius leans forward to inspect it. “Brotherman, that is just—” Then Roque pops the pimple right into Cassius’s face, causing him to reel back and gag from disgust. Quinn falls over giggling.
“I do wonder sometimes,” Roque begins after Cassius has recovered, “as to the purpose of all this. How can this be the most efficient method of testing our merit, of making us into beings who can rule the Society?”
“And do you ever come to a conclusion?” Cassius asks warily. He keeps his distance now.
“Poets never do,” I say.
Roque chuckles. “Unlike most poets, I sometimes manage. And I have our answer to this.”
“Spit it out,” Cassius urges.
“As though I wasn’t going to without instruction from our resident primadonna.” Roque sighs. “They have us here because this valley was humanity before Gold ruled. Fractured. Disunited even in our very own tribe. They want us to go through the process that our forefathers went through. Step by step, this game will evolve to teach us new lessons. Hierarchies within the game will develop. We’ll have Reds, Golds, Coppers.”
“Pinks?” Cassius asks hopefully.
“Makes sense,” I say.
“Oh, that would be ripe strange,” Cassius laughs, twisting his wolf ring on his finger. “Mothers and fathers would be throwing fits if that went on. Probably why Titus leers at the girls. He likely wants a toy. Speaking of toys, where did he send Vixus?”
I laugh. Vixus, likely the most dangerous of Titus’s followers, and the others departed nearly two hours ago on Titus’s orders to use Phobos Tower’s height advantage to scout the plains in preparation for a raid on House Ceres.
“It’d be best to have Vixus on our side if we make a play,” I say. “He’s Titus’s right hand.”
Roque continues on a different train of thought.
“I … don’t know about Pinks,” Roque says. The idea of a Gold being a Pink offends him. “But … the rest is simple. This is a microcosm of the Solar System.”
“Seems like capture the flag, if you recall that game, with swords to me,” I reply. I never played the sport, but my studying with Matteo brought me up to speed on the games these children played in their parents’ gardens.
“Mhm.” Cassius nods. He shoves a mock-serious finger in Roque’s chest. “Agreed. So you can take your quick talk and put it where the sun dare not shine, Roque. We two great minds have decided. It’s a game of capture the flag.”
“I see.” Roque laughs. “Not all men can understand metaphor and stubtlty like I. But do not fear, muscular friends, I will be here to guide you through the mind-bending things. For instance, I can tell you that our first test will be to piece the House back together again before an enemy comes a-knocking.”
“Hell,” I mutter, looking out over the edge of the parapet.
“Something in your bum?” Cassius asks.
“Looks like the game just started.” I point downward.
Across the glen, just where the forest meets the grass plain, Vixus drags a girl by her hair. The first slave of House Mars. And far from being revolted, I’m jealous. Jealous that I did not capture her. Titus’s minion did, and that means that Titus now wields credibility.
23
Fracture
Though we all still sleep under the same roof, it only took four days for the House to dissolve into four tribes. Antonia, apparently the scion of a family that owns a sizable asteroid belt, gets the midDrafters: the talkers, the whiners, the brains, the dependents, the wimps, the snobs, and the politicos.
Titus draws mostly highDrafts or midDrafts—the physical specimens, the violent, the fast, the intrepid, the prototypically intelligent, the ambitious, the opportunists, the obvious selection for House Mars. The prodigy pianist, quiet Cassandra, is his. So is raspy Pollux and the psychotic Vixus, who shivers with pleasure at the mere idea of putting metal into flesh.
If Cassius and I had been more political, we might have managed to steal the highDrafts from Titus. Hell, we might have had everyone ready to follow if we just told them they had to obey. After all, Cassius and I were the strongest for a brief moment, but then we gave Titus time to intimidate and Antonia time to manipulate.