by Jenny Moyer
The other two members of the retrieval team follow close behind, dragging our discarded Oxinators. By now, the fires around camp have burned to embers. Someone plays a waltz on a fiddle, and a few of the cavers stagger toward us in an alcohol-induced haze. They’re probably more coherent than I am.
Dram missed his dance with Marin, but she is waiting for him anyway, a draft of ale in hand. I have people waiting for me too, but they wear guns instead of smiles.
I feel Dram hesitate beside me, and his eyes skip past Marin to the group of guards circling me. “Flash pistols,” he whispers.
My gaze swings to the metallic cylinders projecting from the sides of their guns, reservoirs for flash dust. Only Alara’s elite are issued weapons that harness the energy of the flash curtain. Mined in the cordons, flash dust is an even more precious commodity than cirium.
“Orion Denman?” A man steps past the unfamiliar guards. Tall, younger than my father, but with a bearing that feels ageless. His uniform bears the seal of Alara on his arm like we all have, but his opposite sleeve carries five red bands for the five outposts, and five black bands for the cordons.
“Flash me,” I whisper.
“I’m Commissary Jameson.” He shows the chain at his neck—his badge of office, as if I needed further proof he’s from the Congress of Natural Humanity. His gaze flicks to Dram, then back. I feel us being assessed and weighed, like the ore in our pouches. “Are the reports true?”
His cultured tone sets me on edge, reminding me that he comes from a place behind a shield.
“I brought proof, as requested.” I barely stop myself from saying “ordered.” Subservience is always an effort for me. I pull away from Owen’s support, swaying slightly. I will meet this man on my own two feet, even if they’re wobbly.
“I’m here to inspect your ore,” he says.
Dram grips my arm. I think he’s afraid I’ll make some derogatory reply, and I bite my lip to keep it in. Subpar humor is usually lost on Naturals.
The commissary’s features swim before me, and some part of my addled mind orders me to stand up straighter and dig deep for some respect. This man is the Congress’s own representative, overseeing all the outposts and cordons. It’s hard to imagine one person in charge of the entire Exclusion Zone, but he carries himself like he owns whatever land he stands on.
“Come this way, Scout,” Mull Cranston says, striding forward as if he wants to take my arm. Or grab me by the hair.
I drag my goggles off my face and let my gaze skip over the director all us cavers refer to as Cranny. He wears an ill-fitting, rumpled gray uniform. “I didn’t realize you owned a uniform, sir.”
Definitely grab me by the hair. His eyes narrow over his beaklike nose. I can’t help it. I’m angry about the faulty tanks. Dram and I almost died.
Cranny stands off to the side, an inconsequential planet inhabiting the commissary’s solar system. He glares at me as if it’s my fault a man of such importance is striding about his domain reminding him he’s inferior.
“I want you to describe how you located the vein of cirium,” Jameson says.
I pull off my skullcap, and my hair tumbles out. I need to get out of my caver’s gear—the cavern particles are irritating my skin like tiny slivers. A stricken look crosses the commissary’s face, as if a weapon unexpectedly lodged in his chest. Maybe he’s realizing how bad the exposure is down nine.
“Come with us to Central,” he commands. I look past him, to the command center that dominates the outpost, the gated mansion that houses all the Natural techs and guards. As far as I know, no Subpars have ever gone inside.
“Huh.” Not what I intended to say, but my brain’s struggling to connect the dots.
“She needs the infirmary,” Dram says.
I start laughing. Dram’s words, spoken from someone who looks like death warmed over, strike me as terribly ironic.
“My sh-shock inhi-hibitors are w-wearing off,” I announce. The smile on my face feels out of place; my body’s having a hard time matching my expressions to my emotions. I feel Serum 129 evaporating from my system, like a blanket sliding from my body. Pain penetrates the haze, and I cry out, clenching my teeth to hold in the sound.
“What’s wrong with her?” Jameson demands.
“I b-brought you your ore,” I murmur, lifting the samples. It’s like I’ve finally remembered I have hands, and they’re not in good shape.
“She’s infected.” Cranny eyes my burned, chewed-up gloves as if I’m aiming a weapon. I suppose in a way, I am.
“Get the physic!” Jameson calls.
Marin gasps. I suppose my glowing hand is something of a stunner. She drops the mug of ale and dashes off.
“Director, the boy is worse off,” Graham says, supporting Dram with an arm around his waist. “We did what we could for him down the tunnel, but he’s got the burn bad.” He slides aside the silver shock blanket draped over Dram’s torso.
This time, it’s Cranny who gasps. “How is he still standing?”
“You’d be surprised what p-people with the will to live can do,” I say, too loudly. If Dram had any strength at all, he would’ve clamped his hand over my mouth. Apparently Serum 129 breaks down the brain-to-mouth filter, and mine was questionable to begin with. I try to bite my lip, but my mouth is growing numb.
“Get them to the infirmary,” my father calls. He runs to Dram’s side and gives him a cursory scan, palpating his torso gently. “Good, we’ve still time.” He looks at Graham. “Get him on the table and start an IV.”
“Hi, Daddy,” I sing. A giggle bursts past my numb lips. “Owen gave me Serum 129.” My words still sound like a song.
He tears off my remaining glove. A couple orbies have chewed through the fabric and burrowed deeper. They move slowly beneath my skin, twin black dots. Full orbies don’t glow. Not once their bodies begin to swell like ticks.
“I need to remove these at once, before they chew through an artery,” Dad says. He looks at Jameson. “Whatever business you have with her will have to wait.”
The commissary looks equal parts horrified and fascinated. Then his features blur, and I can’t tell which way is up and which way is down. He reaches out to assist me, and it’s an unexpected sight. Naturals tend to keep their distance from Subpars—and none of them touch us when we are fresh from the tunnels, with particle dust coating our suits. He catches my arm, and his dosimeter flashes red at the contact, in case there was any doubt I’ve been crawling through radioactive elements.
Now it’s Cranny’s turn to look poleaxed. Naturals protect themselves from the flashfall, and that includes us.
“Commissary, you’re breaking Protocol,” he says, his tone carefully neutral, though I see shock in his eyes.
The ALARA Protocol, the rule our city-state was named for, an acronym for As Low As Reasonably Achievable. A philosophy of radiation use and exposure, borrowed from the time before the flash curtain. Everything in our society is based upon this principle: exploit the resources of the flashfall, but limit radiation exposure and preserve human life, particularly the most vulnerable of our society, the Naturals whose genes remain uncorrupted by exposure.
My thoughts suddenly break apart, whirling from my mind’s reach like ash on the wind. Someone stuck me with more Serum 129. The night sky tips up and spins. My father breaks my fall. I focus my last remaining energy trying to interpret the expression on Jameson’s face.
The commissary who crossed the flash curtain to inspect my ore.
Who broke Protocol to keep me from falling.
* * *
“Explain to me again how both your Oxinators ceased to function,” my father says.
“Coincidence,” I say softly, watching him tie off the bandage on my hand.
“Funny thing, coincidence,” he muses.
“Hilarious.” I hop down off the kitchen table and pace. There isn’t much space, just this room beside a bedroom and a small loft, but my steps carry me across the worn floorboards agai
n and again as I work through what happened down nine.
Dad rinses his hands in our rationed water, his thoughts churning like mine. I watch him across the kitchen—both the room and the word itself a remnant from the days of the first outposters, when Congress still transported food into the camps, before techs developed nutri-pacs. I trail my fingers along the wall, a mix of wood and metal. With the exception of Central’s mansion, everything here is like this—a blend of tech bracing up the original buildings. “Archaic,” Dad calls it, but that’s only because he’s seen a picture of Alara.
I pick up one of his slides and peer at it. “What did you find?” I ask.
“How do you know I found anything?” He drops into his chair and adjusts the focus on his microscope.
“’Cause you’ve barely looked up from those slides since I gave you the sample.”
“Who else has seen this?”
I shrug. “The retrieval team and Cranny. Oh, and the commissary who came all the way from Alara.”
His gaze narrows. “It’s likely they still don’t know.”
“What?”
“This isn’t typical cirium.”
“I don’t care what kind of cirium it is as long as it measures four hundred grams.”
He looks at me over his glasses.
“What now?” I ask.
“You need to take me down there. I need to see this for myself.”
“Too dangerous. Tunnel nine’s not like the others.”
I can practically see the wheels turning in his mind, assessing, shifting variables in equations I will never understand. He sighs and settles back in front of his microscope.
“Eat this.” He hands me a nutri-pac.
I glance at the blue foil packet. “I’m not taking your rations.” He eyes my empty red packet, the half-size “children’s portion” we’re given until we turn eighteen.
“You’re not getting enough,” he says, pressing it into my hands. “Take it.” I don’t tell him that Dram shares his larger portions with me each day, because he’s right—I’m starving.
I rip open the packet and squeeze some of the nutrient gel into my mouth. Dad told me it used to be flavored when he was a child. Berry, I think he called it. I don’t know what berry tastes like, but the slick texture is similar to the water posey down nine, if not as bitter.
“The orbies covered this vein of cirium?” he asks.
“More than I’ve ever seen before.”
“So they’ve been down there … absorbing the cirion gas, and taking … nutrients from the cirium for the past hundred and fifty years.” I know better than to answer. He’s not looking for my response. He scribbles a series of numbers and letters on his notes, staring hard, like he’s waiting for them to rearrange themselves. “This cirium is altered,” he murmurs, one eye peering through the microscope. “Fewer radioactive isotopes.” He shoves his notes aside and grabs a beaker. “Orion. Grind this ore. I need to see something.”
“Dad?” I grip the pestle and set myself to pulverizing the ore.
“Our ancestors drank the water down the tunnels,” he says. “Those who didn’t die adapted.” There’s urgency in his actions as he lights a burner. “They ate water posey and tunnel gulls—the only things available to them. They absorbed trace amounts of cirium and built a tolerance to the curtain’s electromagnetic particles—like drinking small doses of poison until you eventually develop immunity to it.” He looks at me—hair mussed, glasses askew, and fire in his hazel eyes. “Do you understand what I’m suggesting, Orion?” His voice is as soft as a whisper, and I feel his words move over me. I can only nod.
He takes my bowl of crushed ore and pours it over a burner. I know what he means to do, and part of me is wishing I’d never found this vein of cirium. He goes back to his notes and slides, and I stare at the beaker, where this new, altered cirium is beginning to liquefy. I wonder if he plans to inject it or ingest it.
“Please don’t do this.” I cannot lose him too.
He looks up, surprised. “If I’m right, a compound made of this cirium could boost our resistance to the flash curtain. We could survive in places without cirium shields. I’m talking about freedom, Orion.”
Freedom. The word shivers through me. “But if you’re wrong, then it’s just poison.”
There’s a knock on the door, and Dad yanks the slide from the microscope. I cut the burner flame and whisk the beaker into a cabinet. The door opens, and Cranny steps into the dim light of Dad’s desk lamp.
“I saw a light on,” Cranny says. “You know how important our energy rations are.”
“Yes, of course.” Dad switches off the light. “I was bandaging Orion’s hand.”
“We have an infirmary for that, John,” Cranny says. He walks toward me, his focus so sharp I feel it cutting through the haze of pain and exhaustion. “You need to be more careful next time, Scout.”
A tart reply forms on my lips, but then I catch sight of something through the open door. Indicator flags, red with three yellow stripes. Something in my expression must reveal my horror. He follows my gaze.
“We’ve just raised the alert. Techs have traced patterns of instability in the atmosphere. They’ve warned us to expect anomalies and fluctuations in the flash curtain. A flash storm’s coming.” He tosses the words out as if they don’t weigh anything at all. As if they don’t invoke memories of deaths so violent, I still have nightmares of it.
“When?” Dad asks, his voice rough.
“A week at most. You’ll need to begin prepping the infirmary.”
“There’s not a lot that gauze can do for radiation poisoning,” I say.
Dad throws me a warning look, but I can’t seem to help myself. My three-year-old brother died in the last storm.
“Fortunately,” Cranny says, “the cirium shields over Central are larger now. We shouldn’t have as many casualties.”
I snort. “Fortunate, indeed—that the guards and techs will be safe while the rest of the entire camp scurries under the rocks.”
Cranny’s gaze narrows, and he gets that look on his face—like he’d feel better if he were squeezing my neck between his hands. “The lodge has a steel roof—”
“Which worked so well before.” Images of Wes, the last time I saw him, tear through my mind.
“She’s right,” my father says softly. “The cavers down the tunnels were safer that day.”
“Then I guess it’s lucky your daughter was taking her mother’s place down there.” Cranny taps the cord I wear around my neck—the pendant I never take off. His fingers brush the blue glass that contains Mom’s ashes.
This time, I’m the one to restrain my father. His arm tenses under my bandaged hand.
“You understand I must maintain order,” Cranny says. His gaze slips to our empty ration packets. He picks one up and idly passes it through his fingers. I want to ask him what size his rations are. I doubt anyone at Central is going hungry. “If Central falls, the outpost falls.” Cranny gifts me with the paternal look he uses on Burning Days. “Subpars are helpless without this vital connection to Congress.
“If you don’t care for me, or the guards, or the technicians”—Cranny leans in, like he’s sharing a secret—“at least have some concern for the city this outpost protects.”
My teeth clamp my lip. But the words won’t stay put. “Concern?” I throw the word back in his face. “I risk my life every day for the city this outpost protects.”
Cranny’s expression hardens. “You went past the boundary marker.”
I can’t immediately speak past my shock. “I found a vein of ore!”
“Whatever you found has brought the commissary breathing down my neck!”
“I’m supposed to protect Alara—”
“Not without compliance,” Cranny growls. “There are boundaries for reasons, Scout.”
My heart pounds like Dram just shot me with adrenaline. I know this tone. There is punishment coming.
“Two weeks, half rati
ons.” He turns toward the door. “And, John—prepare for the storm.”
The door bangs shut, and I tremble in the darkness. My unsteady breath fractures the stillness as Dad folds me in his arms. His memorial pendant presses against mine.
“I’m going to get us free,” I whisper. The flash curtain will not take one more person I love.
Dad doesn’t answer. I know he’s thinking of broken air tanks and coincidence that likely wasn’t coincidence.
“Me too,” he says after a moment, and even in the dark, I can tell he’s looking at the cupboard. At the place we’ve hidden the altered cirium.
I shiver again, and he holds me tighter.
* * *
I’m out the door before most cavers have stirred from their alcohol-induced sleep. Daylight—or what passes for that around here—lightens the sky like it’s as reluctant to emerge as the rest of the outpost.
Frost coats the ground, but I wear only my undershirt with my shirt tied around my waist. When you spend most of your life beneath stone, in darkness, the wind on your skin feels like a gift. I tear open my red foil packet and eat my rations—just half—and tuck the rest in my pocket. Thoughts of Cranny and his angry warnings fill my mind, but I push them away.
Today belongs to me.
I pass the tunnels, ignoring their yawning entrances, pretending that my feet haven’t carved a path into the ground between my house and this place. I’m a Subpar by birth, but for the next few hours, I don’t have to be a caver. I’m no one’s ore scout. I’m not a potential meal for orbies, flash bats, or tunnel gulls.
I have no idea what girls my age do on the other side of the cirium shield, but I have never shied away from imagining it. I know only that sixteen-year-old girls in the protected city are safe from the flash curtain. They don’t fear storms, and they never, ever pick up axes.
I set my foot on a ledge of rock and push up, my fingers skimming the stone and finding handholds. Outpost Five is bordered along its east side by giant heaps of rubble that fused with the mountains when the flash curtain fell. We call it the Barrier Range because it provides a natural shield, separating us from the burnt sands of the cordons, which stretch all the way to the curtain. As bad as things get at the outposts, things could be worse. We are the fortunate ones.