by Jenny Moyer
I look at the other people gathered here, the man and two young women who joined us from the Delvers’ pods. They gear up with equipment piled in crates. They watch me like I’ve come to steal their rations.
“How do we pass the test?” I ask.
“Whoever performs best earns Fortune. That person also gets to choose someone to go with them.”
I pull on a harness and stare down into the gorge. All I see is Dram’s face, when he ordered me to go. “What do Delvers do exactly?”
“They forge pathways beneath the flash curtain.”
Her answer startles me from my haze of shock.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because the curtain is a caged beast—only so long as we work to keep it contained.”
“You think we can help … contain the flash curtain?”
“It won’t take all of you,” she says. “Just one. One who’s very good. But that’s only for the Delvers with Fortune. For now, you have to prove you’re capable. This is what you’re looking for.”
She lifts a handful of dirt from a pouch. It glimmers in the dark. At first I think it’s the flashfall lending it the iridescent colors, but as she shifts her palm, I see bits of gems. “The flash curtain emits bursts of energy beneath the surface that we Delvers have named flashpulses. When this happens, it comes from a specific place along the curtain. It’s imperative we find these places, delve paths to them, and place these pulse transmitters.” She lifts a narrow, cylindrical tech that looks similar to the light bolts Dram used to mark routes.
“If you succeed here, you will gain entrance to a place you can’t imagine currently.” She says this without any apology, as if simply stating fact.
Fortune is beyond your comprehension. The sun is a star.
“We have technology that helps explain this further, but for now—” She holds up the soil. “Find this. Mark the coordinates in your depth gauge. Bring it up.”
“Why bring it back?” Kara asks. “If you just need to find where to place the transmitters—why do you need us to mine the soil?”
Val narrows her eyes, like she’s deciding which flavor of nutri-pac she’s going to choose. “It’s extremely valuable to the Congress. Eludial soil contains elements unlike anything else. It’s believed to have … transformative properties.”
She goes on about her special dirt and their efforts to delve paths to the eludial seam, the bedrock directly beneath the flash curtain. I fasten my gear, only half listening. A Brunt. Dram is going to have to march out into the cordon tomorrow as bait.
“Miner.”
It takes me a moment to realize Val’s addressing me. I pull my gaze from the direction of the pricking tent.
“Whatever you think you have to go back to,” she says, “it’s gone. He’s gone. Let it go, so you can move forward.”
“I left people behind in Outpost Five,” I say. “I keep going because of them—not in spite of them.” I lift a pickaxe from a crate and tuck it through my harness. “That Dodger you saw—he’s the reason I’ll do your test. The reason I’ll win it.”
“These aren’t like the tunnels of Westfall.”
“I’ll try to manage.”
Her lips twist in the semblance of a smile, as if they’re holding back a secret.
“You’ll be equipped with a bolt gun and—”
I lift one from the ground and sling a coiled rope over my shoulder.
“Orion, you’ll need a depth gauge to show proof of—”
“Fine.” I slap one over my wrist. “I can earn a place inside the compound, underground?”
“In Fortune, yes.”
“Fine,” I murmur. I should care about the cure, and finally getting a chance to gain access, but right now all I care about is making sure my best friend doesn’t die a Brunt. I crouch beside the edge of the gorge. “How much to earn Fortune?” I ask, clicking on a headlamp.
“The most,” Val says. “You should know … there are creatures down there—”
“Creatures, yeah. I’ve got it.” I thrust my legs over the side and let go.
* * *
The cavern is alive.
It breathes with a heartbeat I can feel pounding up through the granite beneath my fingers. My hands begin to sweat as I traverse the wall, even though the rest of me is so, so cold. I keep seeing Reuder’s head fling backward, and Dram lurching after him, catching his body.
I find a chalk pouch attached to the harness and dip my hands inside, one at a time.
You have a job to do, girlie.
Fire, don’t I know it.
One of the advantages of shock, I’ve learned, is an immunity to fear. I could stumble across a tunnel gull’s nest right now and probably not care. The disadvantage is that my mind is blank, a canvas painting obliterated with white paint. My emotions are contained in a locked box, too volatile to let loose.
I’m a creature of action.
The other Delvers descend, so loudly I can hear their conversation. Whatever caving experience they have, it wasn’t down tunnel nine. I hoist myself atop a ledge and tuck into the shadows. I hear the word scout, and it splashes a bit of color on my blank-canvas mind. They talk about me. Not in ways that would make my father proud.
“Do you think she knows?” one of them asks. “About what happens down here?”
“I doubt it. She didn’t take a locating transmitter.”
“She’ll never make it out!”
“She’s probably already lost.”
“If we’re charmed.”
I follow, setting up a rappel in the lee of a crevice, and descend a few meters behind them.
They are a team, and they’ve agreed to give Fortune to the other. Now I understand the test Val arranged. It was never about anyone else. She wanted to know how far I’d go to get what the Congress wants. I have no limits. Not anymore. They blew apart the moment Dram pressed that button.
The Orion from yesterday would’ve approached this differently, but I’m pretty sure I just watched Dram shatter. The kind of breaking that doesn’t mend. My breath catches, and I shut my mind to the images that invade, chase them back inside the box. And lock. Them. In.
Keep reaching.
Keep climbing.
Perhaps it’s these caverns, or the sway of an axe at my side once more, but I feel the memory of Graham with me, his gruff voice inside my head, my heart.
What is the most important thing we bring with us into the caves? he asked me, crouching down so we’d be eye-to-eye.
Our axes, I said, my young voice full of bravado. But he shook his head.
“Light,” I say aloud, now.
And what happens if our light fails?
“We find another source,” I murmur, pushing off the rocks. And he taught me, finding our way across a cavern with only our Radbands glowing dimly, to an orbie pool. We carefully filled my water pouch and gave ourselves two hours of luminescent orange light until the orbies began to chew their way out.
Light is the most important thing a caver has, Orion. You could find all the cirium in the world, but it wouldn’t matter if you couldn’t find your way home.
“I miss you,” I whisper. I can’t think of Graham without a weight pressing my chest.
Keep reaching.
Something slinks from the shadows. A scuffling sound, like claws scratching against stone, and I twist to see if it’s headed toward me or away. It freezes in the glare of my headlamp, and I reel back. A mole of some kind—large, the size of my axe head. I’ve heard other cavers describe them, though we didn’t come across any in Outpost Five. I think it’s blind, but the odd tentacles on its nose tell me it senses exactly where I am. The teeth and front claws are massive, like curved shovels.
There’s a small knife sheathed alongside my ore pouch, but I don’t reach for it. These creatures hunt earthworms. I remain still, watching it test the air with its tentacles. One of the cavers—Owen, I think—told us about creatures in the tunnels beneath the Overburden that could sense seism
ic shifts in the ground. I hold my breath to make myself very, very still. Soma has taught me to respect the animals that survive the flashfall. Their instincts have saved me more than once.
Suddenly, it darts across the rock and plunges its claws into the ground, pulling up worms in a blur of motion. I’m so startled I lurch back, and the creature freezes. Before I can move, the rock directly beneath its long claws shifts with a crumbling and cracking of granite. It shoots upward, into a wall of stone that separates me from the mole. Rock crumbles beneath it as it scurries away on a bridge of stone that forms as it runs.
I hang from my rope, gawking as the thing disappears into the shadows. What just happened? Val’s last warning rings through my mind. You should know … there are creatures down there—that can what? Conjure?
I tip my head back and study the sides of the cavern rising above me. A chill prickles along my spine. It’s different. Even without mapping it, I can tell the cavern’s various ledges and tunnels have shifted.
Holy. Fire.
The creatures down here have more than a sense of the flash curtain’s shifts and pulses. They can manipulate organic matter—at least stone—like human Conjurors. As much as I’m stunned by the mole’s survival instincts, the analytical part of me I got from Dad is nodding in acceptance. The flash curtain’s particles cause living things to adapt in different ways. Why should the human species be the only one?
At once the dangers of this crash into me. How do you find your way out of caverns that are constantly changing—and tunnels that can be closed with a wall of rock if a mole is startled?
I climb with renewed fervor, anxiety propelling me past my exhaustion. The light from my headlamp falls on vines and trees, unnatural in this environment. Plants that can’t grow without light and proper soil, and yet they don’t need those things because they weren’t grown. They were conjured.
How many creatures can do it? All of them? A few? With every meter, my questions multiply. Does Jameson know? Val does—and the Delvers here. Why didn’t this happen on the west side of the flash curtain, in the tunnels beneath the Barrier Range?
And then an even bigger thought collides with the others, spinning my mind into a whirlwind: how are they doing it in cirium? Very few Conjurors can conjure this close to the flash curtain and its elements.
What is different about the tunnels beneath the Overburden?
To distract myself from thoughts of Dram and the thought that something coming after a mole snack might find an Orion snack instead, I paint my blank-canvas mind with the sights and sounds of the mountain provinces. Like the multidimensional map that Dram and I once walked through, I overlay everything around me with another place.
“Owl,” I say aloud, crimping my fingers around a rock. One of them lived in our conjured tree fort. Rock falls, scattering, but I hear the whir of feathers in my imagination.
Then I realize the wings I hear flapping are real.
My hand shoots up to mute my headlamp. I count to ten, frozen in place. If the gull is feeding, it’s focused on something else, and wouldn’t have heard me. If it’s tending a nest or a youngling, a female will have her talons in me before I reach twenty.
It attacks from behind.
I turn violently and knock it against the wall. It flops to the ledge, stunned. The gull is small, a young female. She blinks at me, her pulse beating rapidly against her chest. A plan forms in my mind, and I hurriedly unclasp the small pack I’ve got strapped to my back. I empty it in a blur of motion, stuffing rations and med supplies into my pockets.
Foolish. Reckless.
But possibly the means to find my way back.
I drop the pack over the gull, and she tries to flap her wings in protest. My hands shake as I scoop her inside and clasp it closed. She shrieks, a piercing cry that leaves my ears ringing. The roosting male gulls answer.
“Flash me,” I whisper, slipping the bag over my shoulders. Male gulls don’t normally leave their nests if they’re roosting, but I’ve never before stolen one of their females. She flaps and jerks against my improvised cage, and her beak pokes against the material. Her every movement tugs me backward. She’s a young gull, smaller than most females, but still larger than my skullcap. When her weight shifts, so does mine.
Ha-ha-ha! she screeches. A gull’s warning call, an attack cry.
“I’m bringing her back,” I assure the male gulls under my breath.
I grasp the rope wound through my rappel device and drop. I imagine myself explaining this later to Dram. Well, I was in a hurry to save you, so I didn’t listen to Val’s instructions. I didn’t take a locator device, so I just took a tunnel gull with me instead. Oh, by the way, the creatures down there can conjure and alter the tunnels—but I didn’t think that could stop a gull from finding its nest. I know—a reckless theory.
I’m counting on it.
Cavern air rushes up, enclosing me in darkness so heavy, it’s like another creature fastened to my side. The gull screeches, again and again. It tears at me. Vicious as these gulls are, she’s still a mother calling for her babies.
“You’ll get back to them,” I say, detaching from the rope. “We’ll get back to them.”
Her cries stir the moles from their burrows, and I follow.
I have a theory about them, too.
* * *
I dump out my ore pouch to make room for the worms. I’ve mined so much eludial soil that it fills my water bottle.
“Almost home,” I murmur to my gull. After the hours we’ve spent together, I think of her as mine. My responsibility. My only chance of escaping these shifting caverns.
She makes the rumbling cry I’ve grown familiar with. I drop an earthworm past an opening in the pack. Then there’s the clacking sound of her hooked beak, a sound that still terrifies me. I work quickly, breaking open a glow stick and dripping the glowing chemical over her wings while she’s distracted. She ruffles her feathers, staring at me with a gimlet eye. Then, with my heart in my throat, I unzip the pack. She flies at me. I hold my arms over my head as she screeches, the edges of her feathers cutting through my suit. Then she turns and propels herself up.
I climb after her, my eyes trained on her glowing feathers, my beacon. I lost count of the number of times moles conjured around me in the past hours. At first, I kept a mental map in my mind, modifying it as they altered the caverns, but as the hours passed, I realized there was no way to keep an accurate map down caves that are constantly shifting—not without tech.
My gull soars up through the gorge, and I can’t climb as fast as she can fly, but she’s hindered by ledges of rock blocking her path. She’ll roost, waiting for me to catch up and hammer through with my axe. As long as I keep her supplied with earthworms, she doesn’t seem to want to taste me.
I climb, shaking, my forearms shot. She watches me from her perch, then suddenly lifts her head. She launches herself from the ledge and flies beneath the ceiling of rock, her beak open with each cry. Mew, mew, keow!
Her silver wingtips glow in the stygian darkness, the chemical paint of my light bar illuminating the rock face. Her cries shift, like she’s responding to something calling her from the other side of the barrier. She scrapes at the stone with her talons, her beak drilling into the rock with a shallow clacking.
“No!” I shout. She attacks the stone like I’ve seen gulls attack cavers. She will kill herself hammering that stone.
Blood rushes through me, but I hoist myself closer. She could turn on me in a second—my knife is in my left hand—but her only concern is answering those cries.
I can’t believe I’m getting this close to a gull without a cage between us. So close I see blood on her feathers, beside the fading light gel.
“Please don’t attack me,” I murmur. I’m scared, but—more than that—I want to see her return to the nest I stole her from. She led me out. I can get us through this final step.
My pickaxe cracks against the stone. Granite spits against my face, and I hammer at it
again, harder. Rock rains down, and over the scrape and slam of my axe, I hear the gulls on the other side.
They could all attack me. I could be fighting my way to my own death. I check that the knot holding my rope is locked. I can free it in two seconds and descend if I need to. My palm sweats against the handle of my knife.
The mother gull watches me, her pulse fluttering the feathers at her neck. Her eyes are blue-black, slightly clouded.
“It would be really helpful if you could conjure,” I say, slamming my axe upward. Rock falls away; I’ve broken though. The gulls screech back and forth. She swoops and dives beneath me. Through the crack, I can hear the younglings. It’s a sound I know and recognize. Hunger.
I loosen the pouch of earthworms and lift it through the split stone with my pickaxe. The mother gulls darts after it, her sharp feathers scraping the rock as she pushes through. I harness my axe and grip the knot on my rope, heart in my throat. But her only thought is caring for her brood. I mute my headlamp and lever myself through the crack.
My heart trips, and I realize I’m counting down to an attack. If they’re going to come after me, it’ll be now, while I’m crouched over the side of this gulf, trying to gather my rope.
A sound lifts above my labored breathing. Cooing. I secure my rope, all the while searching the shadows. A faint green glow illuminates a shallow ledge of rock. I can just make out the nest, the bobbing heads of youngling gulls.
I look past the nest, as rock begins to shift in myriad directions. Stone cascades down, even as the ledge beneath me crumbles.
I climb, faster than I’ve ever climbed, toward the flashfall sky.
EIGHTEEN
7.1 km from flash curtain
I TROMP TOWARD the decontamination pods gleaming in the fading light. The metal pods reflect the glow of the flashfall, mirroring the curtain’s violet and green auroral bands. I lift my hand and watch the colors move over my skin. Every once in a while, the curtain reaches out this way, painting us with its hues like it wants to show it can touch us without causing harm.
We know better.