by Jenny Moyer
Dram shifts beside me, his hands flexing. I wonder if he feels the same shame I do. Reeves was his friend.
“Where are the others?” Cranny asks. He consults a ledger. “Three males and two females.”
Reeves’s gaze shutters. “Where do you think?”
“You’re telling me they’re dead?”
A cold light hardens his eyes. “They weren’t as resourceful as me.” His gaze slips over the crowd and swings back to Lenore. “I’m the only one down here.”
“We have a proposition for you,” Cranny says.
“So I guessed by the clanging bell.”
Looking at him now, I’d never guess he’d been living beneath a rock. The guy is remarkably clean. There’s water down four. Of course, he would have had to search for it in the dark. Well, not total darkness. One of the first things Lenore sneaked him was a headlamp that Dram swiped from the Rig. And a battery charger.
Reeves is resourceful. He almost made it away on that hover. No guards saw him stow away in the hold—one of the cavers gave him away. I search the crowd, trying to remember. Foss. The burly caver with a tender heart. A good man who probably thought he was saving Reeves’s life.
Foss stares at the ground. Whatever shame I feel, it’s multiplied tenfold in that man. He stands hunched, as if his massive frame can’t bear the weight of it.
“There are cordon shards all around the camp,” Cranny says. “We will provide you with a Radsuit and a cart. You will haul the shards to the catapult and launch them back over the cordon.”
“Then you’ll no longer be forfeit.” This from Jameson, who studies Reeves like he’d like to get him under a microscope.
“The radiation exposure could kill me,” Reeves says.
“It might.” Cranny shrugs. “It’s your choice.”
“What if I can’t lift some of them?” Reeves asks.
“Then you will return to four.”
Reeves tucks his hair behind his ears. He walks forward, and the Subpars part to give him room. Congress told him he wasn’t a person anymore, but he defied them—in darkness and isolation, through sickness and death and fire only knows what. As a boy, he risked everything to get free. That same spirit wasn’t broken by four; it was honed.
Reeves looks over the crowd, his gaze lingering on Lenore. “I’ll do it.”
I want to thump my axe into the ground. It’s how a caver tells another they’re worthy. I understand why I let myself forget Reeves Stram.
It hurt too much to remember.
* * *
They offer him a Radsuit and rebreather like those the Naturals are wearing. If I ever break into Central, it will be to steal one of those things before the next flash storm. I glance at Dram and see that he’s thinking the same thing. His eyes narrow, and his head tilts thoughtfully—but there’s a reason no Subpar has ever breached the Protocol-protected command center. The mansion’s external security sensors would alert guards in seconds, and even if we somehow made it inside, our biotech Radbands would set off the internal alarms. The idea of breaking into the mansion suddenly loses its appeal. I don’t want to have to leave clothes and serums inside the bars of four for Dram.
Reeves crouches and hefts the first few shards. The entire camp gathers, hanging back to stay clear of the radioactive particles, but close enough to send an unspoken message of support. Dram slips him rations he palmed off a guard. Lenore gives him a tie for his hair.
But it’s not enough. As strong as Reeves is, the day wanes into evening, and there are so many shards left—the largest and heaviest.
A pale haze, the color of bleached bone, hangs over the outpost. Beside the Alaran flag, new indicator flags slap the air with warnings, declaring the higher-than-normal Radlevels.
“I’ll help him.” Dram strides forward, wearing his caver’s suit dusted with yellow powder.
Lenore grasps his arm. “You don’t need to do this.”
“Yes, I do.” His eyes hold Reeves’s as he moves to his side. He crouches and sets his shoulder to the enormous rock. “You’ve grown since I saw you last.”
Reeves grins. “And you don’t have little-girl arms anymore.” Together, they heft the cordon shard and drop it in the cart.
“And yours are wide as doors,” Dram mutters. “What have you been doing down there, wrestling bears?”
“Flash bears.” Reeves laughs and tosses another huge rock onto the cart. “There are all kinds of things deep in those tunnels.” His gaze shifts to me. “Isn’t that right, mountain goat?”
I smile, pleased to see that four didn’t steal his humor. “I beat your record.”
“That so?” His eyes search the board posted on the lodge. “Well, well, looks like the littlest caver grew up. Lead ore scout, huh?”
“Three hundred five grams.”
“A Third Ray caver,” Reeves muses. He and Dram heave another boulder into the cart, which sags under the weight. “No more help, Berrends—it’s not safe.” He nods toward Dram’s Radband. “We’re resistant, not immune.” He puts his shoulder to the cart and pushes.
No one says anything about the two shards pointing up out of the lodge like a couple of incisors. They are enormous. Deadly. From where I’m standing, I can feel the radiation pouring off them.
Even if Reeves could move them, he wouldn’t survive long after.
I begin to see the other Subpars arrive at the same conclusion—in the way Marin’s mother sneaks Reeves a pint of ale and how Graham talks to him, slipping in words of wisdom he’ll need to survive a lifetime down tunnel four. Dram’s palmed so many things off the guards, I’m surprised they haven’t caught him. Dad slips Lenore a wrapped bundle, and she disappears toward the prison gate. Everyone’s preparing for the inevitable moment when Cranny forces Reeves back down four.
Reeves loads another shard into the catapult. Then he nods to Owen, who releases the catch. The arm swings, hurling the shard back out over Cordon Five.
“Everyone back!” a hoarse voice commands. We all turn as Foss approaches, his shoulder to a cart. Every muscle in his body bulges, straining against the weight. “Clear out!” Cavers dart away, every one of us aware of the danger he’s towing.
Reeves stands frozen, with his mouth open.
“Move aside, boy,” Foss grunts. His eyes are yellow, and he swipes blood from his nose. The exposure has permeated his system. I don’t know how he’s still standing.
“How did he lift that on his own?” Dram murmurs.
“Physics,” Dad says beside us.
Foss lifts a long metal girder from the cart. I recognize it from the rubble of the lodge. He climbs into the cart, wedges the girder beneath the shard and levers it onto the catapult.
A guard strides forward. “No one gets close. Director’s orders.”
Apparently, there’s a limit to how many of us Cranny’s willing to lose in this endeavor.
“Release the lever, son,” Foss calls. His breath heaves from his lungs in unsteady gasps. Sweat streams down his body. Sweat and blood.
Reeves pulls the release. Wood groans as the catapult strains against the weight of the shard. The arm tips forward, sending the boulder sailing over the Range. It’s so massive, we see it catch fire over the cordon, a blaze of blue and green, before it plummets.
“Foss,” my father says. There’s a warning in the way he says the caver’s name.
“I know what I’m doing, John.” Foss grips the empty cart and tows it back toward the lodge. “Keep everyone clear.”
The guards push us back until we can barely see him ply his lever of twisted metal. But we can hear him. He cries out, straining against impossible weight, while his body begins to shut down.
I steal a glance at Graham. Tears slip down the old man’s face, and that grips me like nothing else. Graham is a rock—as steady to me as my heart hammering against my ribs.
“Graham…” All at once, I’m nine and following him into darkness so deep I can’t breathe.
He doesn’t look
at me. Instead, he raises his axe high above his head. Beside him, Ennis does the same, and suddenly every caver is holding an axe in the air. I don’t have mine, so I just raise my arm.
It’s what we do to protect the head of the caver standing next to us when there’s a cave-in. It is too late to save Foss, but we are here, showing our support in silent salute.
Foss tips the shard into the cart with a grunt and staggers to his knees. Something, maybe the sound of crying, makes him look up. His eyes widen when he sees us. Slowly, he smiles. There is blood on his teeth, and conviction in his eyes like I’ve never seen before. The indicator on his Radband glows red.
He pushes himself to his feet and drags the iron girder from the ground. With agony in his eyes and that smile on his face, he thrusts his arm toward the sky.
The cavers shout. It’s not a cheer, but a roar. The guards pull their weapons, holding us back, but they can’t keep Foss from hearing us.
He staggers to the front of the cart, settles the yoke over his massive shoulders, and leans forward, muscles straining. The cart wheels turn, splashing up yellow mud as he guides the shard toward the catapult, never taking his eyes off Reeves.
The boy whose freedom he’s buying.
He stumbles twice trying to climb into the cart. His bloody hands slip on the girder, but eventually, the final shard tips into the catapult. The arm swings and the shard flips, end over end, toward its home. Foss collapses. Reeves leaps forward and lifts him in his arms, and Dram runs to help.
“To the infirmary!” Dad shouts. “Lenore and Orion, you come too.”
As we run after him, I glance at Lenore, trying to think what possible help we’ll be to a man dying from radiation.
“You’re not here for Foss,” Dad says. His gaze shifts to Reeves, standing white-faced with the caver in his arms.
We settle Foss into the Radbed, a glass-enclosed case that sends oxygen and vaporized Serum 60 over an exposed patient. Dad injects him with Serum 129, twice the dose he’d give normally. He doesn’t even start an IV. He’s doing what he can to make Foss comfortable and limit our exposure to him.
“You shouldn’t have cleared the lodge,” Reeves says.
“Four years ago … made mistake,” Foss murmurs. His eyes drip blood. “Would’ve … traded places … with you.” Patches of his hair have fallen out. His red, inflamed skin rises up in open sores.
I bite my lip and will the serums to work faster.
“Will you … wear my ashes?” Foss gasps.
“I’m forfeit,” Reeves says. “I’m nobody.”
“You’re … Subpar,” Foss says.
Reeves sets his palm against the glass and his eyes fill. “What color?”
“Black.” Foss chokes the word out. “Like cave you … survived. You’re … survivor.”
I think of the memorial pendant I never take off, a shell-like swirl of blue glass surrounding Mom’s ashes. Dram and Lenore wear green for their mother.
“When you … get past … curtain,” Foss whispers, “bury it. Put my ashes in ground … of free men.”
Tears slip down my face.
“Ore scout—” Foss’s eyes shift and find mine. “You’ll help him get there, I know it.”
“Yes.” I say it aloud. A dangerous word if the wrong person were to hear. My heart wants to shout it.
He struggles for breath, and I press both hands to the glass, trying to suppress tears. I lost my brother this way. It is agony to stand here.
I like to think I am brave, but I could never do this.
Even if I have to mine his 400 grams myself, I will make sure that Reeves sees the other side of the curtain. And I will see Foss buried in free soil.
That much I can do.
Foss’s eyes widen now, and he gasps. I tell myself he caught a glimpse of something beyond the curtain—maybe the sky, with sunlight that is kind, and a breeze against his skin that feels like a gift.
His eyes glaze, and then he’s gone.
FIVE
305.82 grams cirium
WE CAVERS HAVE many secrets, most of them preserved down the tunnels where Congress will never see.
Dram and I climb over twin lumps of stone—markers, for those who know what they’re looking for. Past the stones lies the first pool, but this is a puddle compared to our destination.
Cracks dent the cavern ceiling, like someone punched holes to the outside. Someone probably did—back when Conjurors worked the tunnels alongside Subpars.
When Mom first told me of the Conjies, they seemed even less believable than the stars she named me for, but proof such people existed is illuminated in the glow of my headlamp. Gnarled roots twist up through stone, forming a ladder. I climb the underground tree, trying to imagine the ability to manipulate matter, to touch rock and make plants sprout up through my fingers. We weren’t the only ones the flash curtain altered.
Like magic, Orion, Mom would say.
But then Conjies rebelled and the Congress punished them, taking away their abilities through a process called Tempering.
Not magic, after all.
“We’re getting close,” Dram says.
I scan the walls for chalk marks. “There—” I point to a V tipped on its side.
A whining sound echoes off the cavern walls, like the drone of an unnatural insect. Dram grabs my shoulder and hauls me into a crevice. A second later, a tracker whines past.
Guards don’t have to risk themselves down the tunnels in order to look after us. Years ago, Alara developed pulse trackers; fist-sized, hovering monitors that can detect and monitor human heat signatures. Techs use them to locate cavers when a transmitter’s damaged.
And they use them to expose Subpars who are breaking rules.
The fact that they’re down six tonight tells me that Cranny must suspect we’re up to something, but he won’t find us.
Trackers don’t register us when we’re in water.
Dram cracks a light stick, and we follow the cavers’ marks as the tunnel winds and widens into a cavern. Blue, luminescent light glows so brightly from a pool I have to squint until my eyes adjust.
A band of cirium shimmers at the bottom of the basin, but Subpars will never mine it. We will not carve this place up, not even to buy ourselves freedom.
Reeves and Lenore step from the shadows.
“Did you bring it?” Reeves asks. I hand him Foss’s axe.
They have churches in the protected city. Faith, for us, is something less tangible—raw as these cavern walls. Graham says that “sacred” is what you carry with you in your heart.
We move toward the pool, and blue light bathes our faces, mimicking the sky beyond the curtain.
“The guards have set pulse trackers,” I say.
Reeves nods. “Let’s hurry and get in the water.”
I hear the sounds of belts unbuckling, and axes and knives clinking on stone. Beside me, Dram drops his boots and zips off his caver’s suit. The air is kind, warm even—a pocket of grace on the fringes of hell.
We leave everything on the side and slip into the water in only our underclothes. The only thing we bring of Outpost Five is Foss’s massive pickaxe, held above the pool in Reeves’s clenched hands.
I spread my arms and lie back, floating, weightless. This place doesn’t have a name, but in my heart I call it the Sky.
We brought Foss’s axe here, where he will never be forgotten.
“You should be the one to do it,” Lenore says to Reeves.
“It should be all of us.” His low voice echoes in the cavern, filling the space, filling my bones. Reeves extends the axe, his arms flexing from the weight.
Dram clasps the end of the handle. I take hold just above, the edge of my hand pressing his. Lenore fits her hand beneath Reeves’s.
“Ready?” Reeves asks.
We hold our breath, and he lowers the axe beneath the water. I take the image of Foss with me as I’m drawn deep, the weight of the axe pulling me down, down. Our bodies brush as we glide to
the bottom, each holding tight to the handle as the pick clinks against the cirium.
The last swing of a caver’s axe is one of beauty.
We kick to the surface, letting go until Reeves bears the weight of the axe once more, then we swim to the other side, toward an expanse of rock covered in white markings. Water flows over Dram’s bare back as he climbs out of the pool.
“Hurry now.” He reaches down and clasps my hand, lifting me from the water. It cools our body temperatures, making us less detectable to the trackers, but no one wants to get caught down here.
Some secrets are sacred.
Reeves nestles the axe in a crack in the cavern wall. I slip a watertight pouch from my undershirt and withdraw a piece of chalk. Lenore does the same. The chalk scrapes over the wall as I write Foss’s name, and beside it, the flash date.
Took the cordon shards so the rest of us didn’t have to, I write.
Gave a forfeit his life back, Lenore writes, dragging her chalk in a circle beneath the words. Before techs in Alara developed light bolts, Subpars marked caverns with an X for danger and a circle for safe.
All the inscriptions bear this caver’s mark.
“He is free,” Lenore whispers.
“He is free,” we echo.
Sometimes I forget the date, in a place where time is measured in grams added to the Cavers’ Log, but then I step back and glance over other inscriptions, some reaching back fifty years. My eyes catch on one of the newer ones.
Ferrin Denman, 142:03:07
I touch the date when seven claimed my mom. March 7 in the 142nd year since the flash curtain fell. The words are faint in places, written in a child’s scrawl. Lenore’s.
Loved John, Orion, and Wes
Held her axe over my head so I could live
Lenore swam my mother’s axe to the bottom of the Sky, but she didn’t leave it here. She brought it back to me.
Tears slip down my cheeks, the only things I have to lay at my mother’s memorial. I trace my chalk over the circle beneath her inscription. “You are safe,” I whisper.
We never stay long. Soon, others will filter in, staggering their comings and goings so the guards don’t notice. Cavers will come throughout the night, slipping in and out like shadows.