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 to me like capture the flag with swords, if you recall that game,” 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 subtlety like me. 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 took only 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.

“Damned Antonia,” I say.

Cassius laughs and shakes his golden head as we bound east along the highlands in search of more hidden caches of supplies. My long legs can cover a kilometer in just over a minute.

“Oh, you come to expect these things from her. If our families hadn’t spent holidays together when we were little things, I might have called her out as a demokrat on the first day. But she’s hardly that. More like Caesar or … what did they call them, Presidents?—a tyrant in necessity’s clothing.”

“She’s a turd in the swillbowl,” I say.

“What the gory slag does that mean?” Cassius laughs.

Uncle Narol could have told him.

“Sorry? Oh. Heard it in Yorkton once from a highRed. Means she’s a fly in the wine.”

“A highRed?” Cassius snorts. “One of my nannies was a highRed. I know. Odd. Should have been a Brown. But the woman would tell me stories as I tried to go to sleep.”

“That’s nice,” I say.

“I thought her an uppity bugger. Tried to tell Mother to make her shut up and leave me alone, because all she wanted to do was talk about vales and dreary romances that always end in some sort of sadness. Depressing creature.”

“What did your mother do when you complained?”

“Mother? Ha! She clapped me on the head and said there’s always something to learn from anybody. Even a highRed. She and Father like to pretend they’re progressives. Confuses me.” He shakes his head. “But Yorkton. Julian couldn’t believe you were from Yorkton.”

The darkness returns in me. Even thinking of Eo doesn’t dispel it. Even thinking of my noble mission and all the license it gives me doesn’t banish the guilt. I’m the only one who shouldn’t feel guilty for the Passage, yet besides Roque, I think I am the only one who does. I look at my hands and remember Julian’s blood.

Cassius points up suddenly to the sky southwest of us. “What the gory hell?”

Dozens of blinking medBots pour from floating Olympus’s castle. We hear their distant whine. Proctors flicker after them like flaming arrows toward the distant southern mountains. Whatever has happened, one thing is certain: chaos reigns in the South.

Although my tribe continues to sleep in the castle, we’ve moved from the high tower to the gatehouse so we don’t have to rub shoulders with Titus’s lot. To keep safe, we leave our cooking a secret.

We meet our tribe for supper by a loch in the northern highlands. They are not all highDrafts. We have some—Cassius and Roque. But then no one above seventeenth pick. We’ve some midDrafts—Quinn and Lea—but the rest are the dregs, the lowDrafts—Clown, Screwface, Weed, Pebble, and Thistle. This bothers Cassius even though the dregs of the Institute are still certifiably superhuman compared with the rest of the Colors. They are athletic. They are resilient. They never ask you to repeat yourself unless they are making a point. And they accept my orders, even anticipating what next I’ll ask them to do. I credit their less privileged upbringings.

Most are smarter than I. But I have that unique thing they call slangsmarts, proven by my high score in the extrapolational intelligence test. Not that it matters, I have sulfur matches and that makes me the god Prometheus. Neither Antonia nor Titus have fire as far as I know. So I’m the only one who can fill bellies. I make each of my tribe kill goats or sheep. No one is allowed to freeload, even though Screwface tries his best. They don’t notice my hands trembling when I cut my first goat’s throat with a knife. There’s so much trust in the beast’s eyes, followed by confusion as it dies, still thinking me its friend. The blood is warm, like Julian’s. The neck muscle tough. I have to saw with the dull knife, just as Lea does when she kills her first sheep, squealing as she does it. I make her skin it too with Thistle’s help. And when she cannot, I take her hands into my own and guide her along, giving her my strength.