by Jenny Moyer
I scream.
“I’m here.” Dram’s voice in my ear.
Reeves scoops Winn into his arms, and Dram drags me over his shoulder. He has a bat clamped around his wrist. A knife protrudes from its skull.
“Did it break the bone?” I ask.
“I’m fine.” Dram carries me from the cave. “Male bat. No venom.”
He lowers me onto my stomach on a ledge of rock and presses an Oxinator over my nose and mouth. I choke down the air. A few breaths in, I recall the bats dropping onto my back, biting into my tank. There are still some on me. I suddenly realize why my mind is spinning out across the cavern like a handful of particle dust.
“Subpars!” Dram shouts. “Watch me. This is how you kill them.” He thrusts his knife into one bat’s brain and extends the second blade. I hear a crack, and the pressure on my back lessens.
He pushes a piece of rope into my hand, and I thrust it between my teeth.
“This is how you remove them,” he calls. I squeeze my eyes shut and bite the rope as he levers his blade against my skin, cracking the jaw and easing the teeth from my flesh. “Only the females are venomous. They have a black underbelly.” He sighs. “This one’s male.” He tosses it to the ground. “Females will kill you inside of ten minutes if you don’t get all the venom out.”
The cavers curse and shout commands. Dimly, I’m aware they’re still fighting the swarm Winn and I stirred from the cave. Another caver—Reeves maybe—works the dead bat from my arm.
“Brown belly,” he says.
“Let me see,” Dram says. Then: “Fire, you’re lucky, Rye.”
I was bitten by males. Only males.
“She could still bleed to death,” Ennis whispers.
Dram hisses a breath. “Quiet, old man. She’s still with us.” He knots a tourniquet so tightly around my arm, I cry out. Lenore grasps my hand.
“You’re wasting your time with me,” I murmur. “I can’t climb—”
Dram curses and presses cloth to my back. I want to tell him to leave me and help the others. There is so much they don’t know; nine holds so many dangers. But I can’t get the words out.
“She’s still got one on her,” Winn whispers.
Yes. The other flash bat. The one they didn’t see.
Dram rolls me over. A twitching bat gnaws the inside of my thigh.
“Flash me,” he breathes. He stakes it with his blade, and I cry out. The pain is piercing through my shock.
“I need help over here!” Dram calls. I’ve never heard that desperation in his voice before. “Reeves, put pressure on the wound, I’m going to pry it off of her!” He’s breathing so rapidly, I start to think he’ll pass out.
I hear the crack and pop of the jaw and then my head floats away. Something warm seeps down my thigh. It’s warm, and everything else is so cold.
I shiver so hard the rope falls from my lips. Was I still biting that? I taste blood in my mouth. I want to laugh. The rope didn’t work.
“Dram?” Graham’s voice. He has that same fearful tone. The one that tells me I’m in trouble.
Dram doesn’t answer. He sucks in a shaky breath. Fire, is he crying?
“Female,” he whispers.
Now I understand. Tears seep from my eyes, warm like blood. Like the venom coating my wound, pumping through my veins.
Dram tears my suit open and cavern particles prick my exposed skin. “This is how you save someone from the venom,” he says, and sets his mouth to the wound.
My mind goes as black as the tunnel.
* * *
I’m conscious again. Cracking one eye open gives me a view of the tunnel floor and Dram’s feet. He’s carrying me over his shoulder, placing each foot carefully as he tries not to jar my body. Foreign sounds leak past my lips. I try to make them stop, but Dram moves, and pain lances through me.
“Roland,” he says, “another dose of Serum 129.” He shifts my weight in his arms.
Roland spears me with a syringe. “She’s fading fast,” he murmurs.
“We need to get her up,” Graham says.
“Impossible,” Roland whispers.
“Boyo, stop for a moment and let me help you,” Graham says. “You’ve still got that carcass sunk in your arm.”
Dram huffs out a breath and extends his arm. There’s a shuffling of feet as a handful of cavers move in to pry the flash bat loose. I smell Dram’s blood before I see it drip into the dirt. He stifles a moan, and a moment later, a furry body flops to the ground. Blood patters, then flows in a steady stream.
“Did you see the teeth on that thing?”
“It might’ve broke bone—look at his arm.”
“Bandage it, fast!” Graham says.
“Prep her ORU,” Dram murmurs as Reeves helps him ease me to the ground.
I can’t stop my tears. The movement feels like knives pressing into me.
“Winn?” I ask.
“Safe,” Lenore says. “You saved her in that cave.”
I let Serum 129 pull me a little closer to oblivion. Cool air brushes my bare shoulder where my suit’s cut away. The sulfuric smell of Serum 38 coats my skin. The bite was deep, but they’ve saved me from mineral burn.
I don’t even want to think about my leg. I can’t feel anything below my waist on my right side.
Something Graham said sticks in my mind. Serum clouds my thoughts, but there’s an idea I’m trying to puzzle out. He said Dram still had the flash bat in his arm. They just removed it to tend his injury.
Dram would have been the one to show them the proper way to disengage a flash bat’s jaw from my shoulder. I try to imagine him stabbing the bat in the head, cutting away my suit, prying the teeth out, and treating my injury, all with a bat stuck in his own injured arm.
My eyes slide over him. He watches me intently.
“Hang on tight,” he says. His lips are cracked and bleeding, the skin around them peeling. Through his goggles, his reddish eyes reveal that he’s fighting flash bat venom. “I’m sending you up.” He tightens the belt holding me to the ORU and engages the unit’s transmitter. I flinch. It reminds me of Winn’s transmitter the moment before the bats descended.
“I can’t believe I’m putting her in an ore cart,” Dram murmurs.
“It’s the best chance she has, boyo,” Graham replies.
Reeves clamps his hand on Dram’s shoulder. “Send her up.”
Dram’s bloodshot eyes bore into mine. “If there was any other way, I’d do it.”
He tips his forehead down against mine and whispers something. They replaced my earpiece, but I can’t hear what he says.
“What?” I murmur.
He looks at me, and suddenly I know exactly what he said.
He engages the unit, and it jolts forward. I am towed behind it, my feet dragging the tunnel floor as it gains momentum. Then it rockets upward, and I’m grateful for Dram’s tight belt, holding me secure. For the first time, I understand what Roland’s father must have felt when he rode his ORU away from Outpost Five—in the moments before guards seized him. Possibility. Exhilaration. Hope.
The ORU scrapes along the tunnel neck, hitting the sides in a shower of sparks. The unit hovers above the wire, rocking me side to side, and I think of Wes, when he was a baby and I rocked him as he cried for our mother. Our mother who couldn’t hear him because she was down seven. And later, when she couldn’t hear him because she was dead.
The tunnel dips, and the cart veers right, my limbs swinging out behind it like a pendulum, cracking against the cavern wall.
Ding-dong. Like the gears in a clock. Counting down minutes. And seconds. And lifetimes. I can’t hold on any longer. My arms flop loose, bouncing and dragging like dead weight.
But I can’t die now. I made Dram a promise. Something about him before me, or me before him, or neither of us, ever. Not like this. Not on this side of the flash curtain.
The rocking cart lulls me to a place outside myself, and my thoughts scatter like cavern particles. All
but one.
I’m returning without a single gram of cirium. And I’m going to be sent to Cordon Four.
TEN
315.82 grams cirium
I WAKE TO the glow of infirmary lights.
Cranny sits at my bedside.
“You’re a special girl, Orion.” He smiles like a bully pulling his fist back for a punch.
“So you’ve said.” My head feels like it’s stuffed with rags. I’m in the back room, isolated from the rest. My father must be in the main room, the infirmary aides with him. I’m hooked to an IV, and there’s a catheter tube running from between my legs to a bag of urine hooked to the side of the bed.
“How long?” I murmur. My voice sounds rusty.
“Since you came up nine strapped to an ore cart? Three days.” He sets a used syringe on the bedside table. “I used Serum 61 to wake you. I’m impatient to talk to you.”
That explains the sting in my hand. How like Cranny to use a needle when his voice would have been enough.
“These must have been a surprise…” He picks up a vial from the bedside table. Inside, a wriggling ore mite claws against the glass.
I shrink back. “Why is that in here?”
He tips the jar, flipping the mite onto its back. Rows of pronged legs kick the air. “A reminder that, no matter how bad things seem, they can always get worse.”
“That sounds ominous,” I mutter, forcing myself to sit up. Every muscle in my body is tensed, though I doubt I could run if I wanted to. I’m not even sure I can walk.
“Graham is crippled,” Cranny says.
“What?” My thoughts collide. What does Graham have to do with me?
Cranny shrugs. “He refused the treatment that would dispel the mites on his leg. The parasites worked their way into his tendons and knee joints.”
“Why would he refuse treatment?” Cranny doesn’t answer. He stares at the ore mite wriggling on its back. “What do you want?”
“A confession,” he says.
My stomach knots. There are many things I could confess. “About what?”
“Whose idea was it? For you all to bring out the same amount of ore?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My heart slams against my chest, like it wants to escape as much as the rest of me. “I came up with nothing.”
“Actually, Scout, you had a hundred fourteen grams’ worth of cirium in your ORU. Same as the rest.”
“I don’t know how that happened.” That, at least, is no lie. Ennis must have weighed and loaded it just before Dram sent me up. I wasn’t empty-handed after all.
He tilts the jar, and the mite wrestles itself right side up. “I think you’re a schemer and a troublemaker. Tell me what I want to know.”
“I have nothing to tell you.”
Cranny’s lips twist. On an animal, I’d read it as a sign it’s about to attack. “Stand up.”
“I can’t stand,” I murmur breathlessly. “There’s a … a catheter—”
Cranny lifts the bag, and I hiss with pain. He pulls it toward him, and I stagger to my feet, holding on to the bed for support. A sob breaks from my lips.
“Please,” I whisper. “It hurts. Everything hurts.”
“Like I said,” Cranny murmurs, “things can always get worse.” The light is back in his dark gaze. It reminds me of the hunger of flash bats—creatures who will die just to keep their teeth in their prey as long as possible. “Give me a name.”
I can’t believe this is happening. If I call my father, he will attack Cranny and be sent to the burnt sands. If I tell Dram, he will kill the director. He will become ash that I wear around my neck. My eyes dart to the closed door. No one can find us like this. I can’t risk having the people I love retaliate against the director.
Anger replaces my fear. A rage so powerful that, for a moment, I think I might just murder Cranny myself. All the lies they’ve told us. All the brainwashing about what we’re really doing here.
“Last chance, Scout,” he says.
“I have nothing to tell you.”
He hooks my catheter bag back, and I nearly cry out from the pain. Tears prick my eyes as I crawl back onto the bed.
“You disappoint me, Orion.” He unscrews the vial.
Fear gnaws a pit in my stomach. “I’m the best ore scout you have.”
“Maybe you’re too good,” he says softly.
“I’ve done everything the Congress wants!”
Cranny’s eyes trace the scrapes and bruises on my face. “Poor, naive girl, you have no idea what the Congress wants.” Glass clinks as he drops something inside the vial.
He sets it beside the bed. At the bottom of the glass, beneath the mite’s clicking claws, lie four curving metal Rays—the symbol of how much ore I’ve collected.
“The Congress revoked your Rays.” He drops the words like a bomb, and I feel the shock and then the utter annihilation of my hopes. Without my Rays, those precious 400 grams, I will never, ever leave this place.
Cranny walks from the room and pulls the door shut behind him.
I press my battered face into my pillow and scream.
* * *
“Wake up, Orion.”
My eyes fly open. An anxious infirmary aide hovers over me. “You’ve been summoned to the Rig,” she says. “All the cavers have.” She doesn’t meet my eyes.
“Where’s my dad?”
“Your father’s been detained.”
“What?” I push myself up, wincing with pain. The wound in my thigh throbs like it has its own heartbeat.
“The commissary has questions about the cirium you mined.” She lifts the bandage, and I see a row of stitches pulling together swollen skin streaked purple from remnants of venom. She sprays a numbing serum over the area. “The stitches will dissolve in a few days.” She finally looks me in the eye. “You were lucky to survive this.”
“My dad—”
“The guards are on their way to escort you. I need to remove your catheter.”
I gasp and squeeze my eyes shut as she pulls the tube free. “I’m not sure I can walk that far on my own.”
“Someone else already thought of that.” She turns toward the door. “Dram, you can come in now.”
Dram steps through the doorway and freezes when he sees me.
“Tunnel nine and I had a bit of a disagreement,” I say. I try to smile, but my face is too bruised to pull it off.
He doesn’t say anything as his gaze travels over my face. His lips press together, and his jaw tightens.
The aide slips past him. “I’ll stall them as long as I can, but you need to hurry.” She shuts the door softly behind her.
Dram walks toward me, and I drink in the sight of him, though he’s battered and bruised, his left arm bound. He hands me a folded bundle of clothes and turns his back. “Do you need help?”
I slip my feet over the bed and start to stand. “No, I can—” I gasp and clutch the back of his shoulders. No one’s told me the extent of my injuries. I’m discovering them one move at a time.
“Rye…”
“Just give me a second.” I manage to drag my gown off. The effort leaves me shaking. I feel every stitch in my back.
“I’ve seen your body,” Dram murmurs. “In the cavern, when we treated you—and times before that. Let me help you.”
“All right,” I whisper.
He turns. “Just like suiting up in the Rig…”
I stand still, like the doll I made out of old socks for Winn. He guides my arm into a sleeve, his hands tentative—more gentle than I ever am with myself. He maneuvers the cloth around my bandaged arm and draws the shirt closed in front.
“I brought you my clothes. I figured they’d fit over the bandages better.”
I nod, unable to breathe, much less speak.
He struggles to get the buttons through the holes with one good hand. His fingers brush my skin, soft as the fabric of his worn shirt. His scent envelops me.
Dram kneels and slips the
pants up my legs. He touches the bandage covering the bite on my thigh, and it takes me back to that moment—when he rolled me over and saw the bat. His eyes lift to mine.
“I was so scared,” he says. “I didn’t know if I’d be able to bring you back.”
My throat tightens. “You did.”
“Ashes, Rye,” he whispers, drawing the pants up. “A few moments longer with that venom in your veins—you’d be ashes around my neck.”
It hurts to lift my arm, but I do it anyway, reaching to wrap my arms around his neck. He curls his injured arm tight about my waist and pulls me to him.
A knock at the door breaks us apart. A guard steps in.
“All cavers to the Rig,” he says.
“We’re coming,” Dram says, glaring at the man. He helps me into my boots, and we follow the guard. Six more flank us as we exit the infirmary.
I try to make sense of their unease. “I don’t know where you think I’m in danger of running off to.”
“Director’s orders,” says the guard beside me.
The guards herd us through camp. Every few steps I wince from the pain. My senses reel, and I fight to stay on my feet.
“Slow down,” Dram calls. “She can barely walk.” He slips his arm around my waist, and I lean into him. I realize he’s got his bolt gun loaded and tucked into the back of his pants.
“Planning to mark a route to the Rig?” I ask.
“Just a precaution. Everything’s changed.”
“What’s changed?”
His gaze slips to the board outside the lodge. The caving roster has been burned, but that’s not all that’s different about it. Between lines of charred wood, I can just make out my name at the top. When I last descended nine, it read 315.82 grams cirium. Now it says 429.21 grams.
I stumble, and Dram hoists me to my feet. Beneath my name is Graham’s: 426.17 grams. And Ennis with 410.26 grams. The last name on the board is Dram: 402.86 grams.
The last trip down nine pushed us past 400 grams.
But that doesn’t mean anything now for me. “Dram, the Congress revoked my Rays.”