Advance Readers Copy — Not for Sale
GOLDEN SON
Book II of the Red Rising Trilogy
Pierce Brown
Del Rey
This is an uncorrected eBook file.
Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book.
Tentative On-Sale Date: January 6, 2015
Tentative Publication Month: January 2015
Tentative Print Price: $25.00
Tentative eBook Price: $12.99
Please note that books will not be available in stores until the above on-sale date.
All reviews should be scheduled to run after that date.
Publicity Contact:
Ballantine Publicity
(212) 782-8678
www.delreybooks.com
Del Rey
An imprint of Random House
1745 Broadway • New York, NY • 10019
By Pierce Brown
Red Rising
Golden Son
This is an uncorrected eBook file. Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book.
Golden Son is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Pierce Brown
Map copyright © by Joel Daniel Phillips
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
ISBN 978-0-345-53981-6
eBook ISBN 978-0-345-53982-3
[insert CIP information here]
www.delreybooks.com
Book Design by Caroline Cunningham
To mother, who taught me to speak.
Contents
Cover
eBook Information
By Pierce Brown
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Map
Acknowledgments
Prologue
PART I: BOW
1: Warlords
2: The Breech
3: Blood and Piss
4: Fallen
5: Supper
6: Icarus
7: The Afterbirth
8: Alliance
9: The Darkness
10: Broken
11: Red
PART II: BREAK
12: The Willow
13: Mad Dogs
14: The Sovereign
15: Truth
16: The Game
17: What the Storm Brings
18: Bloodstains
19: Stork
20: Helldiver
21: Stains
22: Fire Blossom
23: Trust
24: Bacon and Eggs
PART III: CONQUER
25: Praetors
26: Puppet Master
27: Jelly Beans
28: The Stormsons
29: Old Man’s Wrath
30: Gathering Storm
31: Coup
32: Die Young
33: A Dance
34: Blood Brothers
35: Teatime
36: Lord of War
37: War
38: The Iron Rain
39: At the Wall
PART IV: RUIN
40: Mud
41: Achilles
42: Death of a Gold
43: The Sea
44: The Poet
45: Helldivers
46: Brotherhood
47: Free
48: The Magistrate
49: Why We Sing
50: The Deep
51: Golden Son
About the Author
Map TK
Acknowledgments TK
Once upon a time, a man came from the sky and killed my wife. Beside him now, I walk on a mountain that floats over our world. Snow falls. Battlements of white stone and shimmering glass yawn out of the rock.
Around us swirls a chaos of greed. All the great Golds of Mars descend upon the Institute to lay claim to the best and brightest of our year. Their ships swarm the morning sky, cutting over a world of snow and smoking castles for Olympus, which I stormed only hours before.
“Take a last look,” he tells me as we near his shuttle. “All that came before was but a whisper of our world. When you leave this mountain, all bonds are broken, all oaths dust. You are not prepared. No one ever is.”
Across the crowd, I see Cassius with his father and siblings as they make their way to their shuttle. Their eyes burn at us over the white, and I remember the sound of his brother’s heart as it beat its last. A rough hand with bony fingers lays claim to my shoulder, clutching possessively.
Augustus stares at his enemies.
“Bellonas do not forgive or forget. They are many. But they cannot harm you.” His cold eyes peer down at me, his fresh prize. “For you belong to me, Darrow, and I protect what is mine.”
As do I.
For seven hundred years, my people have been enslaved without voice, without hope. Now I am their sword. And I do not forgive. I do not forget. So let him lead me onto his shuttle. Let him think he owns me. Let him welcome me into his house, so I might burn it down.
But then his daughter takes my hand, and I feel all the lies fall heavy on my shoulders. They say a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. They made no mention of the heart.
PART I
BOW
Hic sunt leones. “Here be lions.”
—Nero au Augustus
1
Warlords
My silence thunders. I stand on the bridge of my starship, arm broken and held in a gelcast, ion burns still raw on my neck. I’m bloodydamn tired. My razor coils around my good right arm like a cold metal snake. Before me, space opens, vast and terrible. Small fragments of light prick the darkness, and primordial shadows move to block those stars on the fringes of my vision. Asteroids. They float slowly around my man-of-war, Quietus, as I search the blackness for my quarry.
“Win,” my master told me. “Win as my children cannot, and you will bring honor to the name Augustus. Win at the Academy and you earn yourself a fleet.” He likes dramatic repetition. It suits most statesmen.
He’d have me win for him, but I’d win for the Red girl with a dream bigger than she ever could be. I’d win so that he dies, and her message burns across the ages. Small order.
I am twenty. Tall and broad in the shoulders. My uniform, all sable, now wrinkled. Hair long and eyes Golden, bloodshot. Mustang once said I have a sharp face, with cheeks and nose seemingly carved from angry marble. I avoid mirrors myself. Better to forget the mask I wear, the mask that bears the angled scar of the Golds who rule the worlds from Mercury to Pluto. I am of the Peerless Scarred. Cruelest and brightest of all humankind. But I miss the kindest of them. The one who asked me to stay as I bid her and Mars goodbye on her balcony almost a year ago. Mustang. I gave her a horse-crested gold ring as a parting gift, and she gave me a razor. Fitting.
The taste of her tears grows stale in memory. I have not heard from her since I left Mars. Worse, I have not heard from the Sons of Ares since I won at Mars’s Institute more than two years ago. Dancer said he would contact me once I graduated, but I have been cast adrift amongst a sea of Golden faces.
This is so far from the future I imagined for myself as a boy. So far from the future I wanted to make for my people when I let the Sons carve me. I thought I would change the worlds. What young fool doesn’t? Instead, I have been swallowed by the machine of this vast empire as it rumbles inexorably on.