by Jenny Moyer
No. There is no axe. Just my hand, hitting the floor of the Luna. But the dirt against my palm is real. Soil from the provinces, its elements alive in my hand, slipping like threads along my fingers.
Roots tease my palm like soft hairs. Like little Wes, when I used to comb his hair and those baby-fine strands would wind through my fingers. The roots thicken, pushing against my palm, restrained by my gloves. The vine thrusts from my palm, stretching the fabric, tearing through with a rending I can’t hear, but feel all the way to my bones. Serum 5 winds a cocoon around me, snuffing out all sensation, all thought, until I can’t—
“Augh!” Thorns pierce my skin, clearing my mind enough to focus my ability. I conjure more thorns along my vine, long enough to pierce my suit and make pain penetrate the haze of serum. My vine lifts, green shoots tangling, thorns thrusting past leaves, and I center every remaining bit of energy I have on directing the vine, like a hand to my pocket. The thorns poke me, like teeth keeping me awake in nips and bites, as the vine wraps around my medkit and carries it to my outstretched hand.
My vision is fading. I direct the vine to pry into the kit, because I can barely move my arm. Adrenaline. I uncap the syringe with one hand. I don’t have the strength to drive the needle into my thigh. The world spins away; I am falling through a galaxy of stars, where I can rest with the sound of my heart loud in my ears …
“Water,” I whisper. My leaves shiver and morph. I can’t open my eyes to see them alter, but I feel it. Droplets of water splash onto me, drip down my neck. I gasp, jolted from my dozing half sleep. I send vines shooting around me like arms, turning me on my side while my shaking hand holds the syringe. Vines shoot upward, widening to limbs and branches; roots shudder against the fuselage, flipping my body. I slam down, the needle piercing my thigh. I sob into the floor of the ship, wet and shivering, thorny vines tangled around me.
It’s not enough. Whatever Dad composed this serum with, adrenaline’s not enough to—
I gasp, long and hard. My breath shudders through my lungs like it’s shaking out cobwebs. Blood races through my veins so fast—too fast. Now I’m breathing like I’ve run for hours. I tear free from the vines and stand.
Dram took my guns but not my knives. I find two of them, along with a pickaxe. I strap them on, secure my suit, and step from the Luna. As I scout my way to the seam, I consider my options. Part of me wants to take the ship and leave Dram here, but he’s out there in the seam—engaging a device that will wipe out all the transmitters. If I don’t stop him, every passage we’ve delved will collapse, and the seam and its eludial soil will be inaccessible once more. Besides, I’m not sure the Luna’s going to be able to take anyone up out of here. As I pass the craft, I can’t help noticing the damage.
Dram left a trail of bloody corpses. I wind my way through the cavern passages, my lights turned low, the pungent scent of termit blood thick in my nostrils despite the headpiece. I can’t believe how many there are. I’ve stepped over five already. That means only one thing—there’s a food source for them down here, large enough to draw multiple termits to the same territory.
The thought should scare me, but I’m numb inside and out. Dad and Dram betrayed me, and my body is mine to command only so long as the adrenaline lasts. Even now, I sense Serum 5 teasing the edges of my mind.
An orbie pool glows orange, illuminating the slick walls like flames of fire. I cross the water, my feet slipping on stones. I’m slow. Too slow. Orbies clamber atop each other to get to me—the hope of a meal stirring the pool into a frenzy. These orbies are fast, so numerous they rise from the water in growing towers. They won’t leave the water, but I still have ten meters to cross before I’m back on the ground. I should conjure a bridge, but I’ve barely enough energy to walk.
A rock path suddenly forms close by, arching across the pool. I race to follow the mole that’s conjuring it. The orbies shoot up toward us, reaching from the water like glowing hands. I’ve never seen them move this way, fast, linking to each other to form chains that reach—
I unfasten my glove, gritting my teeth against the sting of particles. They burn—but not as much as the orbies would. I grasp dirt and conjure fire, throwing it at the towers reaching our bridge. The orbies let out shrill screeches as they burn up. I’m almost across the pool. I keep throwing fire, hoping the mole doesn’t conjure this path to dust the second it reaches safety. My aim is terrible, and I stagger as I run; the serum feels like hands pulling me back. The rock path glows orange as orbies spill onto it. Then it dissolves.
I leap across the remaining distance and crash onto the ground. I’m not sure I can get up again. Serum 5 is a door closing me into the Tomb. I feel like I could sleep and never wake. But my ungloved hand presses against the dirt, and without having to look, I know it’s eludial soil. I’ve made it to the seam.
I curl my fist around it and shove it into my pocket. My arms shake, but I manage to lever myself off the ground. The soil is so thick that I can see each one of Dram’s footprints. Step in my steps, I think bitterly as I follow his marks.
He doesn’t hear me as I approach from behind. He’s leaning over some sort of device: tech that glows with a Codev.
I could stop him right now—take him down with fire from my hands. I reach for dirt, and eludial soil glitters in my palm. Flame sparks.
I can’t do it. Not with his back to me.
He didn’t fight you fairly, a bitter voice reminds me.
“I followed your marks,” I say.
He whirls around, shock written across his face. “Orion.” He holds a flash rifle, aimed at me.
“You going to shoot me, Dram?”
“Don’t make me. Please.”
“What you’re doing is going to kill everyone.”
“It’s going to save everyone! The delving is making the curtain expand, the flashbursts—”
“You’re wrong!”
“When did you become so compliant, Orion?”
“I’m not—”
“You do everything you’re told, like a good little Forger—Meredith’s obedient Ghost. When did you stop questioning things?”
“Jameson said—”
“Jameson did this to me!” He lifts his arm, where the clear sleeve of his suit shows the Codev glowing beneath his skin.
“Why?” My voice is a choked cry.
“So I’d survive long enough to finish this. So I’d be capable of stopping you.”
Better that Dram had died than be turned on me like some brainwashed mercenary. I thrust my hands toward him, conjuring vines that slam into him, knocking him off his feet. He hits the ground, and I pin him down, weaving the vines into thick roots. I crouch beside him and remove every knife, every gun. “You’re not able to stop me. Even with your damned modifications.”
“Oh, fire, Orion, I really am.” He looks forlorn, like he’s being forced to stab me, but his hand is empty; I’ve kicked all his weapons aside. His gaze shutters, in the way Vigils have, like they’re reading internal data. A wave of energy bursts from his Codev, cracking apart the roots I conjured. He grasps my wrist.
Pain.
Ripping.
Tearing.
Can’t. Breathe.
Makeitstopmakeitstop.
My vision blurs, but I can still see tears in his blue eyes.
“Stop. Fighting me.” I read the words from his lips, because I can’t hear anymore. My eardrums are outside my body, somewhere beyond the
seizing
choking.
I try to speak, to scream all the thoughts knocking around my head, but only bubbles of drool form on my lips. What is he doing to me? The force of it makes his arms shake where he grasps me, as if a current pulses from him into me.
I have to make my words count, then. They’re the only weapon I have left.
“You put poison … inside me.” My voice is so soft, but I see the words flash across his screencom. “When you were … Weeks.” He stops—whatever he’s doing—and I gasp a breath.
I sound like an old caver, wheezing through particle-filled lungs.
“What are you talking about?”
“You didn’t know … it was me.” He sits back on his heels, like he wants to escape what I’m telling him. But he can’t; the truth writes itself across his headpiece in glowing text. “We fought … in the Tomb.”
“That’s not possible.”
“You attacked me … with your spear … and a venom spike.”
“That was a Brunt…”
“Me. I became a Brunt … for you. To get to you.” His breath is ragged. I can’t hear it, but I can see his shoulders rising and falling. He shakes his head.
“No.” The single word flashes on my screencom. “I was … gone … out of my head.”
“I know.”
He reels back, like I hit him. And I have, I know it. I’ve rocked him to his core with the one thing I know he can’t handle. Not even modified Dram can manage this horrifying truth.
“I hurt you,” he says, the words somewhere between a question and a statement.
I thought I had forgiven him, that I had placed the blame for his actions on Congress. But now resentment claws its way from the deepest parts of me, from the part of my soul that died that night on the dirt floor of the Tomb.
“You attacked me.”
He stares, like I’ve impaled him straight through the gut with a spear. He slowly shakes his head, but I’ve got my hands clenched on the other end of that spear, and I’m coming in with the death twist.
“I traded my clothes. Payment. To get to you.”
He yells so loud I have to press my hands to my ears. He yells like I’m stabbing him with my truth spear again and again, but I’ve stopped. I’m all out of revelations.
Some part of him—the deepest part that contained Weeks—remembers. Maybe not my face, but the girl, broken and brave, staring him down inside the Tomb. The yelling stops, but these sounds are worse. He’s crouched, arms over his head, but he can’t escape himself.
He doesn’t ask for forgiveness. He doesn’t explain away what he said and did that night.
I don’t tell him I understand, that Congress took his humanity one gram of flash dust at a time.
We don’t say anything. I’ve mortally wounded him with the truth, and now we can only kneel here, bleeding out all our broken pieces. Serum 5 takes me farther under. I can’t muster the strength to fight it any longer.
“Orion,” Dram says, his voice raw. Tear tracks streak the grime on his face. His eyes are red-rimmed, making the blue extra bright. “I need you to trust me.”
“Trust you?” If I had any strength at all, I’d laugh.
“There is no chance that you will outmaneuver me. Not with that serum in your veins.” He says it as an apology, with a look of such remorse that it’s like he’s sorry about the Tomb also, and everything that’s happened to put us on two different sides.
“Please, Dram.” I can barely move. “Finish my mission.” He looks at me, hard, as if he’s looking for his answer in my face.
“No.” And now the spear is in his hands, the tip twisting in my gut. He lifts my hand and examines the holes a vine tore through my glove. “It was in your gloves.” He pulls off my glove, and I gasp as particles tingle along my exposed skin. He shakes out the earth and seeds.
Tears burn the back of my throat, and anger rises past the drugs in my system. As he empties my pockets once more, I lift my exposed hand to my mouth, grip the rope bracelet he gave me with my teeth, and pull it off. Dram watches me grasp the bracelet with shaking fingers, the bonding cuff he wove for me, the figure-eight knot that symbolizes the strength of our union.
I drop it over the ledge.
I feel him tug my glove back over my hand, wondering why he cares about protecting my skin when he’s utterly destroyed me. I want to curse at him. I want to be back on my feet, fighting him with everything I have. But he stands and walks away.
Text glows across my screencom, too blurry to read—the words sway to the slowing of my pulse. Darkness crowds the edges of my vision. I’m paralyzed, as if I’ve been hit with the barbed tails of cordon rats, and I ache, like they’ve chewed right through to my heart. I stare at the ribbon of words until it stills enough for me to read it.
I love you, Orion.
The pain is too much. Darkness pulls me down.
THIRTY-THREE
0.23 km from flash curtain
METAL GROANS.
My body hums with vibration that has nothing to do with serums—I’m on a ship. Part of a crushed metal hull pushes into my side. The Luna.
I try to sit up, but I’m strapped down. I’m in a medcot, an IV trailing from my arm to a drip suspended above my head. The bag of fluid sways with the ship. I twist my neck and see that beneath the blanket I’m dressed in a fresh undersuit, my particle-exposed hand bandaged. The door of the decontamination chamber bangs against the fuselage; whoever used it last didn’t even bother to close it. I look at my skin. Particle-free.
The Luna groans again, a shudder that ripples up from the engines and shakes the cabin. Dram stands at the controls, still dressed in his suit, coated in particle dust. He wears a com unit and is speaking to someone, his tone strained, the words soft but urgent. Somehow he’s blocked the sounds of the curtain from the cockpit. But he couldn’t block the sounds of the Luna, and she sounds like she’s dying.
“The straps are for your protection,” he calls, and I realize he’s talking to me. “Hang on!”
We dive, and my stomach leaps. We should be headed up, not down. The thrusters must be damaged.
“What have you done to us, Dram?” I pull free of the restraints and slide the IV from my arm. The hull shakes, and I grasp hold of the medcot.
“You shouldn’t be up,” he calls. The lights flicker as the ship lurches, and I hold my hands out, feet braced as I make my way to the cockpit.
“What did you do to my ship?”
“Not me. The curtain.” The lights go out, and for just a moment, the only illumination is Dram’s Codev. I follow the glow. The instrument panel flickers to life above the console, illuminating his anxious expression.
“Another flashpulse?” I ask.
“Not a flashpulse,” he mutters. “Ordinance is bringing the device online. They warned me the curtain could destabilize momentarily.”
“Momentary destabilization … of the flash curtain? We’re traveling the eludial seam!”
“Yes, Orion,” Dram mutters. “I’m aware of that.”
He presses a button and speaks in an undertone. I can hear only his side of the conversation. He says my name more than once. A knife sits on the console beside him like a dare.
“Don’t, Rye,” he says without looking. “I won’t fight you again.”
“Well, then this should be easy for me.”
He hands me a screencom. “Jameson intercepted these. Projections on the device the Congress ordered you to deliver.”
“I made a deal,” I say behind my teeth.
“You made a mistake.”
“The cure, Dram. Freedom for our people—”
“They were going to be dead, Orion! Of course the Prime Commissary made that promise—it cost her nothing!” He slides his finger over the screencom, and a projected image illuminates above it. It takes me a moment to understand what I’m seeing—image after image of the curtain expanding. Maps of predicted outcomes.
“Look at it!” Dram says. “You think I’m lying? You think Jameson would help me—your father would help me—if it wasn’t the truth? Open your eyes, Orion! The Prime Commissary did not make some deal with a seventeen-year-old caver from the outposts! She tricked you. Used you.”
I sink to the floor and draw my legs to my chest. The holoprojection plays on repeating loop.
“Who knew about this?”
“The Prime.” He looks at me. “And Meredith. I think she has some fantasy about restoring Old Alara. Ordinance is changing our society. They saw this as a way to take it back
.”
“They would start a war with Ordinance.”
“Not if it seemed like an accident. They planned to pin this on you. Rebel intervention.”
The ship heaves and stops, slamming against the side of the tunnel. We catch ourselves against the floor of the craft. “What happened to the Luna, Dram?”
“They didn’t trust a remote detonation—too many variables affecting the tech. I had a window of time to get back and get out of the seam before it went off. I didn’t plan to—” He breaks off, a look of stark hopelessness in his eyes. “I took too long getting back to the ship.”
He didn’t plan to have to carry me. That’s what he’s not saying. I run through the passage in my mind—the termits, the massive orbie pool. My memories of it are hazy, but enough to paint a startling picture.
“How?”
“How what?”
“How did you possibly carry me all the way back?” He doesn’t say, and I know it has something to do with the Codev glowing on his arm.
“It doesn’t matter. The ship’s dead. We’re not getting out of here.” Whatever Gem modifications he’s had, they didn’t fix his claustrophobia. I can almost see the whites of his eyes.
“I’m glad they didn’t make your eyes purple,” I murmur.
“What?”
“How much do you trust me?”
“Completely. Not at all. It depends.”
“You’re not thinking like a Conjie.” I search the dark hold for my clothes and start dragging them on.
“What are you talking about?” Dram asks. He watches me secure my suit and stuff my feet into boots. “We can’t just conjure a path. We can’t survive this close to the curtain without cirium shields, and the ship’s dead.”
“We’ll have cirium shields,” I assure him. “But we’re not riding the ship out of here. We’re taking the SAMM.”
* * *
As far as tight spaces go, this ventures into Dram’s nightmare territory. The SAMM was designed to hold eludial soil, not Subpars. We managed to secure ourselves inside the vessel and launch it from the crippled Luna. The autonomous controls kicked in immediately, and the craft self-pilots itself along the eludial seam, faster than the Luna in her best moments.