Iron Gold

Lyria au Lagalos, one of the four protagonists and narrators of Iron Gold, is a Red who used to work in the mines of Mars with her family. At the beginning of the novel, she lives with her sister Ava, her brother Tiran, her father, and her nieces and nephews. She describes herself as “eighteen now with stubborn baby fat in my cheeks. My hair leaps from my head at a thick tangle” (32), and she is stubborn, quick-tempered, and resourceful. After the enslaved Red people were liberated by the Rising in the earlier Red Rising series, Lyria and her family were brought up to live on the surface of the planet in temporary camps. However, years after the Sovereign’s promises of a better life, things have not improved much for the former miners, who still live in poverty and misery. Lyria has grown resentful of the Republic, and especially of the Sovereign for not being able to protect the formerly enslaved people.

After a terrorist organization known as the Red Hand attacks Lyria’s camp and kills most of her family, except for her young nephew Liam, the young girl loses any hope of building a life on Mars. Desperate and lost, she finds a job in Kavax au Telemanus’s household on Luna. While she is grateful for the opportunity to escape her past, Lyria soon realizes how lonely and isolated she is from everything she has ever known. She naïvely develops a friendship with Ephraim, who dupes her into helping him kidnap Pax.

However, Lyria’s strong moral compass leads her to surrender to the authorities to honor her family. Thanks to her help, the Sovereign’s forces are able to identify Ephraim and locate Pax. At the end of the novel, Lyria lets go of her anger toward Virginia and finds peace in forgiveness: “I can’t hold on to the anger or the pettiness or the pain. I want only to help her, to protect families like mine. Letting go of that anger doesn’t spit on the memories of Ava or Tiran or the children. It honors them. And for the first time I can remember, I feel hope” (558). She is set up to become a force for good in the following book, as she has now found her voice and embraced her purpose. Over the course of the novel, Lyria journeys from bitterness and resentment to empathy, coming to see the humanity of even those who have caused her pain.

Ephraim ti Horn is another of the four protagonists and narrators of Iron Gold. He is a 46-year-old Gray who describes himself as having “the telltale swollen face of a man who’s gone one too many rounds with the bottle, and a slight body even a decade in legion gravity gymnasiums couldn’t broaden” (46). Ephraim has a distinctive limp due to a knee injury, and often dons disguises to mask his appearance, as he is a renowned thief. He works with a crew comprising Volga, a faithful Obsidian woman, Dano, a Red acrobat, and Cyra, a Green hacker.

Ephraim is very cynical and quick-witted, and the humor of his chapters offers relief from the tensions in the novel. He joined the Rising after his fiancé Trigg was killed fighting for the rebellion, mainly to get revenge on Trigg’s murderers. However, after watching his squadron be tortured, Ephraim lost faith in the cause and defected. Still traumatized by Trigg’s death, Ephraim struggles to get close to people emotionally and pushes Volga away every time she offers a gesture of friendship. He has also developed an addiction to zoladone, a numbing drug that enables him to function despite his nightmares and flashbacks.

At the beginning of the story, Ephraim’s success in robbing a high-security museum lends him a job offer from the Syndicate, a dangerous criminal organization. Unable to refuse due to the threat on his friends’ lives, Ephraim reluctantly agrees to kidnap Pax and Electra, Darrow and Sevro’s children, respectively. Over the course of the novel, he and his crew plan the heist and Ephraim approaches Lyria undercover as Philippe.

Although he only believes in selfishness and opportunism, Ephraim struggles with the moral implications of abducting children. After the deed, his sister-in-law Holiday ti Nakamura, who works for the Sovereign, identifies him as the perpetrator and recruits him to help get Pax and Electra back. Ephraim agrees to help assuage his feelings of guilt but demands a pardon for his friend Volga in return. At the end of the novel, he successfully frees the children from the Syndicate, but they are in a dire situation as Ephraim is seriously injured and they are stranded far away from the Sovereign’s forces. Ephraim’s journey is one of moral redemption, in which he both accepts responsibility for his past actions and works to offset them by changing his ways.