Free Red Rising by Pierce Brown

power they have is in death. The harder they die, the louder their voice, the deeper the echoes. But your wife served her purpose.”
    Her purpose. It sounds so cold, so distant and sad, as though my girl of smiles and laughter was meant for nothing but death. Harmony’s words carve into me and I stare at the metal grating before turning to look into her angry eyes.
    “Then what is your purpose?” I ask.
    She holds up her hands, caked with dirt and blood.
    “The same as yours, little Helldiver. To make the dream come true.”
    After Harmony scours my back of dirt and gives me a dose of antibac, she takes me to a room next to humming generators. The squat quarters are lined with cots and a liquid flush. She leaves me to it. The shower is a terrifying thing. Though it’s gentler than the air of the Flush, half the time I feel like I’m drowning, the other half I finda mixture of ecstasy and agony. I turn the heat nozzle till steam rises thick and pain lances my back.
    Clean, I dress in the strange garments they’ve set out for me. It’s not a jumpsuit or homespun weave like I’m used to wearing. The material is sleek, elegant, like something someone of a different Color would wear.
    Dancer comes into the room when I’m half dressed. His left foot drags behind him, almost as useless as his left arm. Yet still he’s an impressive man, thicker than Barlow, handsomer than me despite his age and the bite scars on his neck. He carries a tin bowl and sits on one of the cots, which creaks against his weight.
    “We saved your life, Darrow. So your life is ours, do you not agree?”
    “My uncle saved my life,” I say.
    “The drunk?” Dancer snorts. “The best thing he ever did was tell us about you. And he should have done that when you were a boy, but he kept you a secret. He’s worked for us since before your father’s death as an informer, you know.”
    “Is he hanged now?”
    “Now that he pulled you down? I should hope not. We gave him a jammer to shut off their ancient cameras. He did the work of a ghost.”
    Uncle Narol. HeadTalk, but drunk as a fool. I always thought him weak. He still is. No strong man would drink like him or be so bitter. But he never earned the disdain I gave him. Yet why did he not save Eo?
    “You act like my uncle bloodydamn owed you,” I say.
    “He owes his people.”
    “People.”
I laugh at the term. “There is family. There is clan. There may even be township and mine, but people?
People
. And you act as though you’re my representative, as though you have a right to
my
life. But you are just a fool, all you Sons of Ares.” My voice is withering in its condescension. “Fools who can do nothing but blow things up. Like children kicking pitviper nests in rage.”
    That’s what I want to do. I want to kick, to lash out. That’s whyI insult him, that’s why I spit on the Sons even though I have no real cause to hate them.
    Dancer’s handsome face curls into a tired smile, and it’s only then that I realize how feeble his dead arm really is—thinner than his muscular right arm, bent like a flower’s root. But despite the withered limb, there’s a twisted menace to Dancer, a less obvious sort than that in Harmony. It comes out when I laugh at him, when I scorn him and his dreams.
    “Our informants exist to feed us information and to help us find the outliers so we can extract the best of Red from the mines.”
    “So you can use us.”
    Dancer smiles tightly and picks up the bowl from the cot. “We will play a game to see if you are one of these outliers, Darrow. If you win, I will take you to see something few lowReds have seen.”
    LowReds. I’ve never heard the term before.
    “And if I lose?”
    “Then you are not an outlier and the Golds win yet again.”
    I flinch at the notion.
    He holds out a bowl and explains the rules. “There are two cards in the bowl. One bears the reaper’s scythe. The other bears a lamb. Pick the scythe and you lose. Pick the lamb and you