by Jenny Moyer
My bandaged hand loses hold, and I hang from my other fingers. Breath saws from my lungs, filling the air with tiny clouds. I shake feeling into my injured hand and reach up, my toes sliding into familiar footholds. I’ve been climbing here since before I started down the tunnels. I guess that, even as a child, I looked for something beyond Outpost Five.
No one here climbs like I do. They call me the mountain goat, which I think is funny, since none of us have seen such a creature. The flash curtain killed most nearby animals and vegetation. Except my ancestors. They eked out a means of survival beneath the ground and emerged when the worst of the radiation dissipated. Subpartisans. Not a grand name for a new kind of people, but I suppose they weren’t really concerned with how it would sound to their great-grandchildren.
I push myself over the final ledge and lie on the ground a moment, catching my breath. I imagine the air this high up is truer to what it once was. It’s not, but this is a place for pretending.
“Fire, you’ve gotten fast,” Dram says.
My head whips up. Dram reclines on a projection of stone that overlooks the cordon.
My stone.
I can count on one hand the times he’s come here with me, and none within the last year. We tend to give each other space when we’re not partners beneath the earth. Especially since Marin.
“You going to keep lying there?” he asks. “I thought the point was to look out at the…” Dram stretches his gaze toward the pseudo-horizon. “The nothingness.”
“It’s not nothingness.” I climb to my feet and join him on the rock.
He looks toward the flash curtain. The view is hampered by the orange and red sulfur clouds over Cordon Five.
“Okay,” Dram murmurs. “The view of hell.”
Hell is climbing a kilometer beneath the ground with orbies digging through your skin.
“I like it,” I say.
“That’s because you have a good imagination.” He turns to face me. I imagine the sight of Cordon Five reminds him of his father and his exile to Cordon Four.
“I thought you’d take the day to heal up,” I say. “How’s your skin?”
“Healing.” He lifts his shirt. Small red bruises cover his chest and abdomen. I look away before he can see the heat creeping into my cheeks. He does this to me lately—confronts me with reminders that he’s eighteen and not the boy I’ve been hunting ore with most of my life.
Fire, my hands are sweating. I wipe them on my pants and stare toward Cordon Five. The image is still emblazoned in my mind. The curve of his muscles, the smattering of hair—
Ergh! Why did he have to come here? Seeing his bare chest reminds me I touched him mere hours ago, that our lips pressed together. Yesterday, all I could think about was saving him. Today, far above the tunnels, with plenty of air—it makes me breathless.
“How’s Marin?” I tease, even though I’m sure he spent most of the night in the infirmary.
He grins. “Marin’s good.” The look he shoots me makes me think that maybe he wasn’t as incapacitated as I thought.
“I imagine she was worn out from pouring those pints all night long.”
He lifts a brow. “Jealous?”
“Of her proximity to the ale? Yes.”
He grins. “Of her?”
“Am I jealous of the lodgemistress’s daughter? Of tending the lodge and looking after the orphans and unmarrieds? No.”
Dram smiles.
“Why are you here?” My tone holds more bite than the air, and I pick at the bandage on my hand. My nails are broken, and the skin peels away from where the orbies chewed their paths. I’m sure Marin holds nothing more dangerous than a cleaning cloth. I doubt she even has a callus.
Dram studies me a moment. “How’s your hand?”
“Tiny glowing organisms exploded inside it less than a day ago. How do you think it feels?”
Dram grins. “You are jealous.”
“I’m irritated. There’s a difference.” I spear him with a look. “You’re intruding on my time.”
His smile fades. “I won’t stay long.” He looks toward Cordon Five, then quickly away. “I wanted to talk to you about our descent yesterday. I’m concerned about the faulty Oxinators. That shouldn’t have happened.”
I should tell him that my dad said practically the same thing. I look toward the cordon, to the place where orange clouds block the towering, radioactive curtain we’re trying to earn our way past.
“Then a representative from the Congress shows up,” Dram continues. “Something’s off.”
“It makes sense they sent the commissary,” I say. “It’s a massive vein of cirium, probably more than anyone’s found before.”
“You’re too good, Orion.” Dram looks at me, his gaze shuttered, but I hear the warning in his voice. “What happens when you have to explain how you found it?”
“I’m lead ore scout—”
“No, Rye. It’s more than skill. You … sense the cirium somehow. I’m your marker—I watch you more closely than anyone. You’re listening when you’re down there.”
I break eye contact, but it’s too late. There’s nothing I can hope to keep from Dram. Not about the tunnels. Not about cirium.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” he asks. There’s anger in his tone now, mixed with a hint of fear. “What the hell is it saying to you?”
I cannot tell him what I’ve never understood myself—that when I first swung my mother’s axe, I felt something in the stone respond. A pulse, like blood in veins, a hum that’s more than vibration. And it’s not just the cirium I hear, but its source … the flash curtain. And it doesn’t speak to me.
It sings.
He curses long and low. I wonder how much he can read on my face. I’m suddenly wishing for the barriers of Oxinator and goggles, the darkness of tunnel nine. But this is Dram—even with all that, he still reads me.
“If they find out,” he says softly, “they’ll never let you go.”
“I’m almost to four hundred grams—”
“No.” He shakes his head. “They need cirium more than they need to give you a place in the city.”
I lurch to my feet, as if I can physically combat what he’s suggesting. “Congress won’t go back on its word. That’s the deal they make with us—Subpars do their part to protect Alara, and if we do really well, we’re granted passage through the curtain.”
“Maybe,” he says, looking out over the cordon. He wears the pensive gaze of his father, like he’s seeing something more than the ash-filled sky.
“We’re not prisoners here, but protected.” I nearly choke on the words. I have seen too many people die to ever call this outpost safe. “Maybe the commissary is here to reward us. Congress knows we’re close to earning four Rays…” But even as I speak, my chest tightens, the ghost pain of lungs screaming for air that won’t come.
Dram turns toward me with a shake of his head and a smile that puts a dent in his cheek. “I’m overthinking things. Guess I expected the man in charge of the outposts to greet us with gratitude and a handshake, instead of a contingent of guards with flash weapons.” His dark hair blows into his eyes, his lips lift, and I realize suddenly how much of him is muted down the tunnels. Maybe this is why I avoid him aboveground. Something in him sings to me in ways more powerful than the flash curtain.
Maybe if I wasn’t a girl who needed ninety-five more grams of cirium to be free, I might sit beside him, set my hand next to his, and see if he touched his fingers to mine. I’d reach and see if Dram reached back.
“Orion…?” he says, drawing my name into a question.
I feel like Roland’s fiddle, my strings plucked hard, humming. But it’s more than this moment. I sense the flash curtain stirring me. My head whips toward the horizon. I can just make out faint waves of iridescence rising above the clouds of the flashfall—same as it always looks. But I feel its approach.
Something stirs above the cordon. Dozens of shimmering projections sail toward us. They’re be
autiful, like the shooting stars Mom told me stories about.
“Dram, look.” He turns, and his face pales.
The wail of an air siren pierces the stillness.
“What is that?” I ask.
“Cordon breach,” Dram says.
“A what?”
“Energy shifts in the curtain,” Dram says, “strong enough to kick up rocks and debris.” He drags me down behind the ledge of stone. “I was only six, but I still remember the last one.”
The balls of light make a sound as they approach, a whistling so loud I can hear it over the siren. Two of them arc over us. The flames of the cordon ignited the metal ions in the rocks and they burn with different colors—purple, gold, and aquamarine.
It’s like the flash curtain is attacking us, hurling flaming missiles past the cordon, mocking our shelter. It is spellbindingly beautiful. In a place that is so many shades of gray, the colors mesmerize me. The shards arc over us, pulsating with a vibrant, searing intensity. They are alive.
They are death.
Screams rise from the camp. Too many shards have found their mark in homes, in paths. Dram squeezes my leg, and I realize he’s pulling me back, that I’ve worked half my body over the side.
“Stay here!” He drags me closer, hauls me to his side.
“We have to get below!”
“Too late.” He wedges me into a wide crack in the stone just large enough for my small frame. He’s torn open a cut above his eye. It drips blood, and he swipes his arm across it. His arms bracket the walls of rock on either side of me as he pushes his body tight against my burrow. It blocks my view of the soaring projectiles; it’s dark as a cave.
He’s dampened the sound of the screams, but I hear his breath punctuate the quiet. Everything in me yearns to get deeper. We are too exposed up here. Sounds of shattering rock break into my refuge, and Dram’s body tenses.
This is not the air cave. I can’t pull him in with me where it’s safe. “Dram?”
“I’m okay,” he says.
Another minute passes with my pulse pounding out the seconds. The rock beneath us stops trembling.
“I think it’s over,” Dram says.
“Let’s go.” I push past him and reach the mountain’s edge in three strides, sliding to my knees and pitching myself over.
Dram joins me. Neither of us speaks as we climb down, both hampered by our injuries. The air siren cuts off, and I hear cries for help from camp. I swing away from the wall and jump. My feet hit the ground, and I pitch to the side, stumbling to my knees. Dram hauls me up, and we both run.
“I’ve got to check on Lenore,” he says. Then: “Flash me.” He staggers to a stop. Half the lodge is missing. Its splintered walls poke up through the wreckage like broken matchsticks.
He doesn’t say her name, but his face screams his fear. Marin.
“Go to the lodge,” I order softly. “I’ll check on Lenore. Most of the homes seem intact.”
He nods and takes off running.
I rake my eyes from the rock and rubble of the lodge and pray that Marin-of-the-soft-hands is not beneath it. Dram has already lost too much.
As I sprint past the tunnels, I see the cavers emerging. Face by familiar face appears, and I breathe in gratitude. Their eyes widen, reflecting their shock, when they see the lodge. Then I hear a shout.
“Tunnel three’s been hit!” A bleeding caver comes running from the south end of the tunnels. “Get your axes—they’re buried in there!”
Half the cavers run for the Rig, for caver’s suits and equipment to help save whoever sought refuge down three. The others head toward the lodge, where there might actually be a chance at saving someone.
Yellow containment dust spews from pipes that run the length of the outpost. Even Central’s stalwart fortress is being showered with the radiation barrier. So far, it seems to be effective. As I trudge through the mixture, I don’t see anyone showing signs of radiation poisoning. Maybe this isn’t as bad as a flash storm.
I give my two-room house a quick glance as I pass. Dad won’t be there. He’s either at the lodge or infirmary, saving as many people as he can.
Nine houses later, I reach the Berrends’.
“Lenore?” I push into the tiny cottage Dram shares with his older sister. The kitchen and loft are spotlessly clean. And empty. A sense of foreboding works its way into my thoughts. It tangles in my stomach until I feel I may lose my meager rations.
“Lenore!” The silence jabs me in the gut. “Fire, oh fire.” I dart through the door.
My eyes comb the dirt pathways between the houses, looking for straight brown hair the same shade as Dram’s. Every person gets a second look—my hopeful, desperate appraisal. At nineteen, Lenore’s just a year older than Dram, but she’s cared for him since the day after their mother died and their father was sent to the burnt sands. She is all he has.
Well, he has me. But if I were him and I had to choose, I’d want Lenore. She is kindness, where I am tough. She is thoughtfulness, where I am action. She’s compassion. I am survival. We both love Dram, but her love is tender and mine is like an axe forged in fire.
“Lenore!” I scream, not caring who sees my fear. Most people are screaming, anyway. They hardly notice me.
I can’t get near the lodge. Our outpost is only sixty strong, but they’re all here, gathered beyond the bones of the building. I search the faces, my heart pounding out a rhythm.
Please, please, please.
My chest heaves, and I skirt the crowd. There’s Dram—he’s with Marin. My heart gives a leap of gratitude, then:
Please, please, please.
Lenore has to be here. Alive.
“Is she safe?” Dram shouts to me over the sounds of the crowd. He’s helping to drag away broken timber.
He reads the uncertainty in my eyes. The wood pylon hangs from his grasp, forgotten. Then he drops it and pushes through the people.
“Len!” he shouts. “Len!”
“She’s fine, son,” calls Foss, a quiet caver with muscles the size of boulders. He sets a broken beam aside and strides toward Dram. “She’s helping at the infirmary.”
Dram visibly relaxes, and tears stream from my eyes. I sit down right where I am, in the middle of the chaos. My legs shake so hard that it filters up through the rest of my body. Containment dust coats my hands, so I can’t wipe my eyes.
“Do you need the infirmary?” A guard crouches beside me, his voice distorted by a rebreather. They are beginning to stream from Central, pouring onto the yellow-coated path in hooded Radsuits.
I shake my head.
“Then clear the area. We need to make room for the forfeit.”
A weight lodges in my chest. The forfeit.
We’re worse off than I thought.
FOUR
305.82 grams cirium
GUARDS IN HEAVY Radsuits draw their guns, and the locked gate barring the entrance to tunnel four grinds open. We rarely see the forfeit—the prisoners who have been permanently denied the rights of Subpars. Once they pass beyond those bars, it’s easy to forget they exist at all, men and women scrabbling out a life in utter darkness. Cranny stands with Jameson at the entrance, bracketed by guards. He clangs an enormous iron bell.
“Wonder if they know they’re being called?” Ennis says beside me.
“Why are they doing this?” I ask. As the oldest caver, he’s most familiar with outpost customs.
“They’re going to get the forfeit to move the cordon stones.” He nods toward a boulder coated in particle dust.
“Won’t the radiation kill them?”
“Maybe, maybe not. It’s a chance for them to earn their freedom.”
The bell clangs and clangs, and people begin murmuring. I think we’re all starting to suspect the forfeit are not going to make an appearance. Maybe they don’t realize their opportunity to earn back their rights.
Maybe they’re hoping we all just rot from radiation exposure.
My Radband still glows a ste
ady green. I steal a glance at Dram’s. Whatever we’ve been exposed to hasn’t changed our levels. Yet.
The bell clangs, and I look back at Cranny. His lips are pinched together.
“When was the last sentencing?” Jameson asks, loud enough to be heard through the clear hood of his suit.
“Four years ago,” Cranny answers. “A young man tried to stow away on a hover.”
“Reeves,” Dram says beside me.
Reeves Stram, the impetuous orphan with the wild blond mane, a few years older than Dram.
Shame grips me. I haven’t thought about Reeves in months, not since the last time I distracted a guard so Lenore could stash a bundle of clothes and medicine inside the bars. I find her in the crowd. She stares at the gate like it’s the entrance to the protected city. Her Radband glows yellow.
“I’ll go after them.” The words leave my mouth without waiting for my brain to give permission.
Dram scowls at me, and my dad shakes his head. Fire, I’m going down the prison tunnel to search for violent and desperate people who aren’t even Subpars anymore.
But I forgot about Reeves, and he has a chance to come up out of that cave.
“Let me suit up,” I say. Cranny eyes me like I’m a species he’s not encountered before. Jameson looks stricken.
“It’s not safe, girlie,” Graham says.
“I’ll have my axe.” My mouth is a runaway ore cart with more bravado than I actually feel.
“Fine,” Cranny says, handing the bell to a guard. “Hurry and suit up.”
“I’ll go with her,” Dram says.
“So will I,” says Lenore.
“That won’t be necessary,” a low voice says from the other side of the bars. The man’s hidden in shadow, but his voice carries as he emerges slowly. Four years older, less a boy and more a man, but I’d recognize that wavy blond hair anytime.
“Reeves,” I whisper. He’s alive.
“Name?” Jameson demands.
“None,” Reeves says. His gaze narrows on Cranny, and a dark smile lifts his lips. “My existence was wiped from Outpost Five.”