Daggermouth

Chapter one

Mercy Is Dead

The first thing you'll learn in New Found Haven is mercy no longer exists. Showing mercy is a weakness, and weakness will get you killed.

The second thing is this—the Veyra are always watching. From the highest glass atrium in the Heart to the windowless slum dens of the Boundary, no movement goes unseen.

The last lesson is the hardest. You must remember it, as Greyson Serel did now, standing in the center of the plaza's monolithic platform behind two bound and kneeling rebels.

Love outside of your ring was a death sentence.

The Heart was home to the elite of New Found Haven, the one percent. The rich, and they wore masks to hide their faces.

The square slowly filled with those who resided in the Heart, coming not for belief in justice, but for proximity—proximity to power.

To witness the suffering, the result of enforcing that power upon those they claimed as less than.

They came for the satisfaction of seeing blood spilled at someone else's expense.

The elite pressed shoulder to shoulder, obediently silent beneath the evening sky, as the live stream flickered to life against the mirrored surface of the twin towers erected at Greyson's back.

The towers stood in the middle of the Heart, the very center point of New Found Haven, where all corruption spilled from.

A buzz of energy filled the air, saturating through every ring of the city as billboards—usually spewing endless streams of propaganda—switched to the live feed. It was law in New Found Haven, that any person who betrays the Heart is executed publicly.

The raised platform where Greyson stood had been constructed in the absolute center of the plaza, where the veins of the city's four main boulevards crossed.

The two condemned rebels knelt, with their hands bound in red cord and beside them, in a tight formation, the Veyra enforcers stood in ceremonial red, boots shining, helmets on, their batons held at precise right angles, with guns strapped to their backs.

Greyson stayed unmoving, his mask covering his face, gloved hands folded over his militant, onyx garb. He looked neither left nor right, nor at the condemned, only straight ahead—watching, observing.

The platform was illuminated not just by the Heart's orbital lamps, but by the harsh blue spotlight of the media drones as they circled, their lenses feeding every gesture, every tremor of the rebels, to the rest of New Found Haven.

On monitors across the Cardinal and Boundary rings, the event was broadcast live, in high-definition clarity.

The crowd's attention was absolute. The masked elite looked up toward the rebels, like deadly flowers soaking in a poisonous sun, and waited for the carnage to begin.

Greyson let the silence ferment.

He waited until he felt the nervous pulse of the crowd sync with his own breathing, until the two on their knees began to twitch from the weight of attention. Only then did he step forward, moving his arms behind his back as the thud of his boots echoed against the marble dais.

He did not read from the script; he didn't need to.

His father had beaten the lines into him.

"For crimes against the motherland," Greyson started, his voice perfectly modulated, "and for violation of the sacred laws of New Found Haven, these criminals stand judged by the Heart."

Greyson glanced at the crowd. The mask hid the micro-twitches of his jaw, the bloodlessness of his lips, but not the flatness of his gaze.

"By order of President Maximus Serel, justice will be enacted in the manner most befitting the crime. Death. The charges are as follows: conspiracy against the Heart, illegal communication between the rings, fornication, and love across faction lines."

A ripple of approval sounded from the masked crowd, as if a liturgy had been completed.

Greyson raised a hand, silencing them.

The man was from the Boundary, the outer ring of the city. A nobody, with a face scarred by acid runoff from the industrial plants and poor nutrition. His clothing had been stripped of all rebel markings. He stared at Greyson with the intensity of someone who had nothing left to lose.

The woman kneeling next to him was a teacher from the Cardinal, the middle ring of New Found Haven.

She was small and trembling, her hands mottled with burn scars from just proximity to the Cardinal ring's chemical plants that turned even the air into poison.

Even kneeling, she attempted to maintain her dignity, lips pressed tight.

Greyson regarded the couple, and allowed himself to feel nothing.

He didn't believe in the necessity of this act, but as he stood there, words from his childhood scraped at the back of his mind.

A lesson in biology, an anecdote about wolves and culling, taught not in the classroom, but in the den at night by his father's voice.

Mercy is weakness, Grey. Weakness is the end of all things.'

Greyson shook the thought off.

"In accordance with tradition," he started again, "the condemned are allowed a final statement and to choose the method by which they will be executed."

His attention turned to the man and woman kneeling before him.

"Do you understand?" he asked, his voice dropping a decibel.

The woman nodded, tongue darting between chapped lips, eyes not on Greyson but locked somewhere in the far distance.

The man spat onto the platform, barely missing Greyson's boots. "Just get it over with, Veyra scum."

Greyson admired him. Admired that even when there was no hope left, when most would begin to beg for their lives, he stayed true to what he believed, and accepted his fate. For a moment, Greyson wondered, if he were ever to be in the rebel's position, would he show the same resolve?

He turned to the woman. "What would you prefer?"

Her voice was so quiet, it barely registered to his ears, but the drones caught it. With only a second delay, it echoed harsh and loud over the monitors. "Bullet."

The Veyra captain standing to Greyson's left, made note of her answer on a data-slate.

Greyson looked back to the man, waiting for his answer.

"Go fuck yourself," he growled.

Greyson's hand was already pulling his gun from the holster strapped over his shoulders, as the last syllable fell from the man's lips.

He didn't look at the rebel man, instead he looked at the crowd.

He found the mask of his mother, three rows back, perfectly composed.

He saw the blur of his sister moving away from the platform, almost indiscernible behind the anonymity of her own mask.

He looked into the infinite eyes of the Veyra, the drone hovering in front of him at eye level as he aimed his gun at the base of the man's skull, and watched as he tensed, jaw set.

He did not beg as he took his last breath.

"Noted," Greyson said, and pulled the trigger.

The shot was dull in the open air, more a mechanical pop than a thunderclap, but the effect was immediate.

The man's head jerked forward, spattering the white marble platform and the woman with a fine red spray.

For a moment the body knelt upright, still propped by the tension in the muscles.

Then it collapsed sideways, corded hands pinioned behind the back like a trussed animal.

The crowd erupted in applause, like some primordial satisfaction had been delivered as the woman's scream cut through the air with unbridled agony.

She doubled over, head pressed to the marble, sobbing into her knees.

She was begging now, begging to be spared, to be kept alive through a torrent of wails.

Begging for mercy that didn't exist.

Greyson watched her for one beat, then two.

He felt a shallow sickness grow in his throat, and the tremor in his left hand as he aimed the gun at the back of her head.

His mask hid almost everything but not his breathing.

The captain inclined his helmet, a silent prompt for Greyson to finish her off. He nodded, swallowing as his finger tightened on the trigger, but hesitated, again.

A shot rang out beside Greyson in the next breath, and he blinked as the sound reverberated in his ears. The woman's body slumped over beside her lover, blood pouring from the gaping hole in the back of her head. Slowly, Greyson turned toward the captain who was already holstering his own gun.

He'd hesitated, on live stream.

Greyson looked back into the crowd in search of his mother's mask, but she was already gone, had slipped out through the revelry, the celebration of murder.

He'd be punished for this, he knew that.

The President's son was not supposed to hesitate.

He pulled his eyes back to the woman's lifeless body as he shoved his gun back into its holster, and squared his shoulders, waiting for the crowd to exhaust itself. As the applause finally died, Greyson stepped to the edge of the platform.

"Order has been preserved by the swift hand of justice," he said, his voice cutting through the post-elation hush. "The Heart endures."

He turned, not taking another look at the dead rebels, and descended the marble steps now dripping with crimson.

The Veyra soldiers closed ranks behind him, a red ripple of authority as laborers began to remove the bodies and sterilize the plaza.

Above, the drones continued to hover, recording every angle.

Greyson could feel it—the eyes on him, analyzing every step he took away from the platform. He should've felt something, should've felt guilt or shame. But in that deep pit of his stomach, Greyson only felt cold.

He rode the elevator to the seventy-eighth floor of the Serel Tower, alone.

The car was lined with smart glass, which mirrored his mask back at him from every angle, each reflection rendered in harsher contrast by the surgical white light.

It wasn't the face of a man, but the emblem of a system—a system that had worked for five generations to keep the city from eating itself alive.