Eclipsed (Heartstone Book 3)

by Frances Pauli

  “What was that like?”

  “I imagine it was like anyone’s childhood.” She sniffed and hugged the tunnel wall.

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  He set the welder down and leaned back so that the wall could support his squatting. It shifted him just enough to face her directly. He stared, and for the first time since they’d met, caught Corah on the defensive. The filter mask made her expression a touch blurry, but he could still see it, how the idea of her past made her tense, twitchy. Her hands fluttered like moths above her crossed knees.

  “Well, I’m not interested in your beliefs,” she said far too late.

  “It must have been tough.”

  That much he could imagine. He’d seen enough of this planet to want off it as soon as possible. Even taking into consideration all the work Vashia and Dolfan had done to clean up Wraith, the city was clunky and unlovely. And next to Spectre it looked like a park.

  Corah sniffed and looked back down the tunnel. “Are they just going to leave us alone down here?”

  “I think so.” He laid the welder across his lap and watched her squirm. “Match said to finish the mend and then report back, but I think he mostly wanted me out of the way.”

  “They don’t seem to put much stock in Gervis’s direct orders here, do they?”

  “It would seem not. Probably, they are too far from Spectre to share your devotion.”

  She jolted at that. No way to hide it, here in the dark, away from her boss and unguarded by his muscle. The sniff echoed this time, maybe so loud even Gervis Dern could hear it.

  “Devotion.” She spoke the word as if she could taste it, as if she rolled it off her tongue and pondered the after effects.

  “Isn’t that to be expected?” He pushed it, pressed onward as she unraveled. “You’d think someone he refers to as his right arm must be the most loyal of his people.”

  She glared at him. Mofitan could see that, even through the mask.

  “And why wouldn’t you be loyal? Anyone who has seen Spectre would understand. The alternative would be unpleasant, I’m sure.”

  “The alternative. Right. You don’t understand, Mr. Mofitan. In Spectre, there is no alternative.”

  “It’s Mof.”

  He wished for a second that he had Shayd’s skills. Her skills, too. If he could peer into her thoughts, maybe he’d be able to understand why the kind of person who would notice the Chromian’s plight, who could feel for them as she obviously had, could stand beside a man like Gervis Dern. What kind of desperation could drive someone good, someone kind, to tolerate so much evil? Somewhere in the darkness of the mine, he had already decided that she was good.

  “I was very young.” Her voice rang hollow now, sounded like an echo even before it hit the stone walls. “Very small, when Gervis sold my parents.”

  Corah’s mask hid her face, but not the emotion in her words. Those rang across the arm’s span between them and squeezed his chest into a tight knot. Her parents. She’d confessed something in that revelation, something he couldn’t begin to imagine. The air in the tunnel changed flavor, shifting like sand and throwing him mentally off-balance. She worked for Dern. His right arm, but the man had wronged her deeply, and the bite of that, the fury behind it, also came through clearly.

  She was no friend of Gervis Dern.

  It changed everything.

  He imagined a small child Corah, alone in Spectre without protection. Had Dern done something to her? Did he have something over her or possibly, just maybe, their plans were not in as much opposition as he’d assumed. She’d told him for a reason. It could be a trap, a lie meant to lure him out of his own shell. He stepped carefully and imagined sand beneath his feet.

  “If Dern did that,” he said. Careful. Tread lightly. “If he sold your parents, why would you work for him now?”

  She stayed quiet for a long breath, didn’t move. He saw the little girl, then, alone and afraid of the dark, of the things in the dark. How had she survived, and how did she end up where she had? She’d tell him now, he could see the spark of it behind her mask. He saw it in the way she shifted forward, leaned out and opened her mouth and her secrets to him.

  “I—”

  The tunnel walls vibrated. Stone groaned, and the air filled with particles, with a sheen of gray dust.

  “What is it?” Corah’s voice might have been that little girl’s now. She’d flown across the passage and hunkered close to him, her words shaking like the walls.

  “Nothing good. Come on.”

  He took her by the hand, led her through the dust while the tunnel grumbled. A cave-in or their saboteur, he couldn’t say which. Mofitan only knew that he had to get out, get her out safely. She was about to open up to him, to let him in, and running in the dark now, he could admit it. He wanted that, wanted it more than he wanted to fulfill his mission. He wanted Corah, and close behind that, he wanted Gervis Dern’s head on a stick.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Corah ran through the darkness with only a warm hand to guide her. The air had filled with rock crumbles, and the sound of all that stone shifting had her heart hammering in her ears. Panic nibbled at her edges, but she focused on his hand. The big purple warrior that would lead her out of the nightmare.

  She knew it now. This man was her lifeline somehow.

  He was on her side.

  The dust swirled. Particles made a whirlwind in their wake and ahead the passage lightened, the smokiness thickened, but the darkness faded and Corah could see shadows moving across the opening where their tunnel met the main branch. Miners or rebels, and it didn’t matter to her which. At least something still lived down here.

  Mofitan led her to the opening and then paused and held quiet. Visibility was still a pipe dream in the swirling particles, but Corah could hear his low breathing and she felt the steady pressure of his fingers around her hand. He was a dark patch in the dust, a wall of safety between her and the pressing weight of a planet surface hovering above them.

  Someone shouted and another shadow passed. Mofitan pulled her closer and they held position against the branching tunnel’s wall. Were the people moving through the rubble Gervis’s miners or Niels’s men? If the rebel leader had gotten her message, maybe he’d taken it as a sign to act. Whatever damage had been done, the place where they’d been working hadn’t fallen prey to it.

  “Match!” Mofitan stood up, recognized one of the shadows, and simultaneously killed her hopes that the rebels had chosen to attack openly.

  “You two still alive?” If the miner felt any relief or disappointment in that, it didn’t come through his gruff mumble.

  “We’re working on it.” Mofitan’s voice echoed. “What happened?”

  “Explosion down the secondary shaft.”

  “Need help?”

  “No. Anyone still alive is moving up fast.”

  “No one trapped?” The note of suspicion bounced off the miner. His silhouette already inched its way toward the ladders.

  “Nope. You never know what comes after though, cave-ins, cracks. You’ll get out, get her out, if yer smart.” He vanished as quickly as he’d appeared, left a swirl in the dust to mark his cowardice.

  “Should we go check?” Corah tried to keep the terror out of her words.

  “I’m getting you out.” His grip tightened, and he tugged her into the main passage.

  Corah spared a look back toward the damage and experienced a flutter of guilt. Had Match told the truth? Or could someone still be trapped back there? She could see more shadows moving, more people working their way toward the ladder, toward them. But Mofitan pulled her onward, and she moved, hating how each step brought a tremble of relief, a shudder of fear that screamed to her flight instinct, get out. Get out. Get up, out from under the rock and the darkness.

  She blinked and breathed and prayed for light and sweet, fresh, even damp-infused oxygen.

  The tunnel air rushed against her arms, swirled the world into a tube of fai
nt light speckled with black forms just as terrified as she. Mofitan’s grip guided her forward, held tight and urged her at the same time. If she stumbled, it steadied her. When the others caught up with them, pushing past with rough, unapologetic mumbling, Corah focused only on keeping that hand in hers, on keeping her steps moving.

  “Here.” His voice still boomed, still spoke as clearly despite the crap choking the air. Inside the mask, she couldn’t imagine how. “Grab the ladder.”

  But she couldn’t even see it. And she knew the huge gap, the main open shaft bored into the planet right beside the thing. Mofitan guided her hands to the metal. She fished with her boot toe, found a rung, and tested it.

  “This segment won’t take two. Get to the first platform and then wait,” Mofitan said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  She couldn’t answer, didn’t bother to nod or smile inside her filter. Corah clung to the metal frame and climbed as fast as she could and with her thoughts forcibly avoiding the drop-off she knew waited one stumble away. The ladder shifted and wiggled in her grip. She ground her teeth together and pulled her body up, one step after another, until the ledge, the tiny plane of steel grate that meant one small leg of the journey was behind her.

  Mofitan came up faster. He didn’t pause either, when he found her catching her breath against the next ladder. She could hear his breathing, shallow and slow, like a heartbeat. His arms grabbed the metal on either side of her, and his voice growled, she suspected, to cover a cough. “Up.”

  “You could have a turn with the filter.”

  “UP.”

  They climbed the second stretch together, his arms on either side of her legs and both moving as fast as she could. If she hadn’t been in the way, Corah had no doubt the big man would stand on solid ground already. She pulled until her arms burned and kept going at the next landing without pause.

  On the third platform, they found Match panting against the rock wall. The air still swirled with particles, but Corah could see they’d cleared a little, and she could taste the lack of heat and chemicals that meant they were that much nearer to the surface.

  “Do you need assistance?” Mofitan asked him, though he still herded her to the rails, still clung to them with a huge purple arm on either side of her body.

  “Just catching my breath. They took out the damn lifts in the last attack.”

  “You’re sure no one is stuck or hurt down there?” Mofitan’s insistence drove Corah’s panic deeper. She wanted the surface, could taste it now, but he was thinking of what or whom they’d left behind.

  “There never is,” Match said. “They take out the equipment, but the bastards are careful, precise. It’s damn uncanny how they can do it.”

  “Hmm.”

  If she believed him or thought he only meant to save his own skin, Corah couldn’t tell, and she was in no shape mentally to try prying. The miner’s report was enough to shift Mofitan’s focus back to their own escape. He grunted at the man and then growled and ordered her, “Up.”

  They began another ascent, and this time she could see the light above. It gave her strength, when her arms wobbled, to keep pulling, to keep climbing, as did the man’s presence behind her like an engine, growling and encouraging her to continue.

  She placed each foot, looking at the end to avoid slips and catching, each time, a glimpse of a tense, lilac face, the swinging of a black braid.

  “Out you go.” He stood at her back when she finally crawled free, and he ushered her by the elbow, away from the crowd of panting miners at the shaft opening.

  Corah caught a glimpse of Boon in the crowd, and she no doubt should have gone to him straightaway and found a way to report in, to contact Gervis and play the doting employee. Instead, she trusted in her boss’s enemy, almost certain now that he was Gervis’s enemy. She could read it, in fact, as they wove through the pipes and gases. Mofitan’s surface thoughts blamed Gervis for this, and there was nothing complimentary in his emotions where her boss was concerned.

  She’d have called it murder, in her own mind.

  By the time Mofitan had escorted her to their cabins, Corah was certain he’d come to join her in killing Gervis. He’d been on that slave ship by no accident, no. Fate had brought him to her so that she could finish what she’d started by breaching that back fence years before. Niels had been wrong to stop her, and now, Mofitan would help her end the man they both despised.

  “Stay here.” He nudged her toward her doorway and turned back so fast that Corah listed to one side.

  “What?” She’d been planning their attack, but he had other ideas.

  “I don’t believe him,” he said. “Someone might be trapped down there.”

  Did he mean to play the hero? Part of her wanted to shriek at the thought. The rest of her admired him for it, understood even more fully the sort of man he was. She might not be able to talk him into outright murder after all.

  “Take my filter.” Her hands grappled for the straps of her mask, but Mofitan already trundled back the way they’d come. “It’s too dusty down there.”

  “I’ve had practice.” He stopped for a second, turned only his head, and called back over one shoulder. “That’s nothing compared to our Shroud when she’s angry.”

  Corah frowned and watched him vanish. She watched the frenzy building around the shaft. Miners from the larger, still functioning, craters scurried to the old ladder. He was right, then. Match had lied about everyone getting out.

  Her stomach fluttered. Mofitan had known, of course. He’d only made the choice to get her free first. Had anyone died for her weakness? She stumbled backwards, watched the action from the shadow of her own safe door. For the first time since Corah had met Niels, she imagined what might happen after she killed Gervis. When the monster had paid for his sins, for her parents’ death and suffering, what would she do then?

  And if she meant to keep living, how would that even work? She’d spent her life focused on a man’s death. What had it done to her as a person? She’d been willing to believe Match to save her own skin. She’d been happy to, in fact. There was no hero in her.

  If she succeeded in murdering Gervis Dern, would it set her free or set her back? Corah sighed. Living as the devil’s right arm had changed her, hadn’t it? If she survived his death, she’d have to figure out how to purge his influence. There had to be some way to redeem herself.

  In the end, that was what she needed. She’d been influenced by Gervis, just by living in his shadow. Corah slunk back against the thin metal door and stared at the fray. She could go out now, could do something to help. They probably wouldn’t send her back into the mine.

  Something clattered to her left. Corah shifted against her door and leaned out, just enough to aim her peripheral vision at the sound. She pretended to watch the action still, but tilted her head to get a better angle on the space between her and Mofitan’s shacks. The sound changed. A soft scuffing filled the space between the miners’ shouts. No one would notice it, in the cacophony. No one who wasn’t paying attention, who wasn’t standing right there, waiting.

  The metal wall vibrated and the clatter came again—a knock against the side of the building? Intentionally? Someone wanted her attention, when everyone else’s was fixed on the disaster. Niels. She dove on the possibility like a cat on fish. The shuffling continued in the knock’s wake, and Corah eased herself along the front of the shack, drifting nearer the corner and the narrow alley.

  Her steps lifted soft puffs of dust, silent, and yet the lurker must have heard her coming. He didn’t knock again, and when Corah reached the edge of the shed, the shuffling stopped as well. She took a breath and steadied herself. It might not be Niels. He rarely exposed himself in the field. Likely, this was one of his contacts, but in case it was someone else, someone not as friendly, she stepped away from the shed and rounded the corner a little farther out, in the open.

  A Chromian squatted in the shadow between buildings. He’d hunkered lower when she moved, a
nd only his color gave him away now. Pale and lumpy, he might have been a bump in the earth if the Spectre crater had been made of lighter stuff.

  Corah froze in place, held her breath and, when he didn’t bolt, took the final step that would carry her fully out of sight. She smiled, showed him open palms, and then lowered her body smoothly into a squat that brought them eye to eye. Once down there, she could see the knife lying between his nubby toes.

  “It’s you,” she whispered to him. She wasn’t sure he understood her, or that it truly was the same Chromian. Either way, the exact same knife rested between his feet. “You shouldn’t be out in the open.”

  The little man rocked on his heels and blinked at her. Behind Corah’s back, a miner zipped past, hollering and focused on the disaster. It didn’t mean he couldn’t glance into the alley, didn’t mean the Chromian would be safe here.

  “If someone sees you—”

  A white foot moved. Pudgy toes nudged the knife away, pushed it toward Corah.

  “It was a gift,” she tried.

  The Chromian’s face stared at her, empty, blinking and somehow communicating. She tried its thoughts, gently, skipping like a stone over the surface. Fear for her. A gift in return for a gift.

  “Thank you.” There was no other answer to what she found. Nothing except thanks and awe. The Chromian’s mind swam in psychism. He knew things. So many things that she was tempted to pry and at the same time knew any effort would be futile. This was a creature that lived in its mind, in the minds of others of its kind. “Thank you.” Corah breathed in, and the Chromian’s doughy head nodded.

  She’d never think of them the same way again, but when it pushed the knife out farther, she crept forward and took it. The pudgy creature she would consider a friend now, turned and slunk back into the alley and whatever hole he’d dug there. He vanished. How extensive was this warren? This Chromian city that Gervis Dern mined without a thought for its inhabitants?

  How far had the Chromians burrowed beneath Eclipsis?