by Jenny Moyer
My fingers brush Dram.
He’s right beside you, Orion.
Home. I’m going home.
I give myself over to the music.
* * *
Cool air brushes my cheek. I’m still riding the butterfly. My eyes open. Not a butterfly—a helicopter. My thoughts reorder themselves as I stare across at the boy watching me.
His eyes smile, even if his cracked lips can’t quite manage it.
“You threw yourself … out of … helicopter for me,” he says. “That’s … a new one.” His lips lift on one side.
“Well,” I say, my voice as graveled as his, “you weren’t keeping … your end of the deal.”
The rest of the things we need to say, we do without words.
Dad hovers beside me, checking my vitals. “You don’t have to keep proving to me how brave you are,” he says.
“Maybe I’m just foolish.”
“No.” He grins down at me. “I’ve heard about all the things you’ve done. Only some of them were foolish.”
“Dram.” Bade crouches beside us. “Did you make it out with the cirium compound?”
“In my chest pouch,” Dram says. He still can’t move. He’s covered in a shock blanket and tubes stream from both his arms.
Bade slides the blanket aside and opens the pouch. He lifts out shards of shattered glass. No one speaks.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. I remember the moment my body crashed into Dram’s. Like hitting a wall.
“I should’ve protected it better,” Dram says. “There wasn’t time—”
“And the serum?” Bade asks.
In my veins.
Dad hands him the empty vial. “I took a sample of her blood. I can try to replicate it—”
“They’re both gone.” Bade speaks the words like he can’t quite believe them. Like he’s wrapping his mind around the fact that all our efforts were in vain.
“Not all of them,” I say softly. I lift my mother’s memorial pendant from around my neck. With trembling, blood-streaked fingers, I caress the blob of wax at the top.
“Funny thing about tunnel gulls,” I murmur. “Their talons are great for drilling tiny holes.” I lift the blue glass. “Just the right size to shake out the ash and pour something else in.” I drop it in my father’s hand. “Like 1.5 milliliters of distilled Cirium 2 from tunnel nine.”
His eyes slide shut. Bade murmurs something I can’t hear. Dram just stares.
I slip Wes’s memorial pendant from around my neck. I think of how I felt him with me, like sunlight, sustaining me when I ran toward the curtain in Cordon Four. And how I felt him again, close to me when I emptied his ashes on the Range the day before I fled Outpost Five.
I press the yellow glass into my father’s hand. “Two milliliters of Serum 854,” I say softly. “The treatment for flash fever.”
His eyes fill with tears as he takes it.
“Go test your theory, Dad.”
THIRTY-THREE
0 grams cirium
0 grams flash dust
0 milliliters Cirium 2
0 milliliters Serum 854
THEY MOVE US from place to place—small camps of rebels on the east side of the curtain. I’m asleep more times than awake, but I’m aware of two things: air that smells of pine whispering over my skin, and my father, speaking to me as he tends my injuries, calling me back to myself. He says my name, and it sounds different than it did before. Maybe because I am different.
I squeeze his hand now. There’s a question behind his words that he’s not asking. It’s been there all along, but I haven’t had the strength to answer. Until now.
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Orion?”
“Go to Alara.” Not even my voice sounds the same. “Finish the cure.” The tech and equipment he needs are there. We don’t even have electricity, and we have to move constantly to evade the Congress.
He doesn’t say anything, at least nothing I hear before I sleep again. Later, he kisses my head. I can’t understand his soft words, but I know they mean good-bye.
He doesn’t ask me to come. I don’t tell him I’ll see him in Alara.
I’m not sure I’m meant to live behind a shield.
* * *
Jameson stands beside a small hover outside the tent. He’s dressed in his uniform, the civilized commissary I first met in Outpost Five. I’ve seen him conjure a tree from dirt, but what’s even more astounding is his ability to conjure a different persona—one that the leaders of Congress haven’t seen through.
I recognize the guards at his side—two that he trusts. But these men were not with him in the cordon. I wonder how many of his secrets they actually know.
I wonder how many of them I know.
“I can find a place for you both in Alara,” he says. “Orion, you’d be close to your father.”
“He’s safe?” I ask.
“Safe as he can be developing the vaccine in secret. I have my best people working with him. As soon as it’s ready, we’ll take it to the cordons.”
“He’s happy,” I murmur.
Jameson grins. “You should have seen his face when he saw the lab. When I left, he barely looked up from his microscope—just long enough to ask after you.”
“When you see him next, tell him I’m happy too.”
He hands Dram a narrow silver screencom. “Your father evaded capture and disappeared in the outlier regions. These are his last known communications.”
Dram closes his fingers around the device. A possible link to his father.
“Thank you,” he says softly.
Jameson’s gaze shifts back to me. “So,” he says. “Are you ready to go?”
He’s offering us the protected city. Or what actually exists in place of the myth I’ve held in my mind all these years. Part of me still wonders what girls my age do in a place with clean air and a shield that keeps the storms at bay, but a bigger part of me doesn’t care anymore.
I’m not that seventeen-year-old girl, and I never will be. A girl who had never endured a flash storm wouldn’t have survived the cordons. A girl who didn’t have to carry an axe and hunt for cirium would not have found the elements for a cure.
I look at Jameson. He watches me, waiting—even though he probably knows what I’m about to say.
“A Conjie once told me that the mountains are the only place you can still see the sunrise.”
Jameson smiles. “True, but there’s no electricity up there, no running water, no tech that can be tracked by the Congress.” His smile dims. “The free Conjies are hunted, Orion. It’s dangerous to associate with them.”
Dangerous. I consider the word. It rides my nerves like tension in a climbing rope, but it doesn’t fill me with fear. “I’m okay with dangerous.”
Beside me, Dram laughs.
“What about you?” I ask him.
He looks toward the ridge of mountains. “No tunnels up there, but I’m pretty sure you still need me as your marker.”
My smile matches his. “Mountains it is.”
* * *
The free Conjies welcome us like their own. We celebrate with music and dancing and enough ale that it almost feels like Friday night at Outpost Five. Only we don’t have to return to the tunnels anymore, and each choice we make is ours.
The idea is unfamiliar, but liberating—like the loose blouse and skirt I wear. A beaded scarf sways at my hips, a present from Dram on our special day. It’s the purest shade of blue.
Like the sky, he said.
Like his eyes, I told him.
Dram takes my hand, and his new metal cuff brushes mine. We are not just scout and marker anymore. We were never just that, but now it’s official. Well, as official as Conjies get, anyway.
“Bonding suits you,” Bade says with a grin.
I watch him turn Aisla under his arm, thinking the same thing about him. She laughs at something he says, and the sound lifts on the wind like it’s part of the music.
“I ha
ve something for you,” Dram says.
“What did you steal?”
He smiles. “Not stolen. I promise.”
“If you’re showing me the inside of our tent, you’re a little early.”
His smile widens. “Not our tent, either.” He loops a satchel across his chest and takes my arm. “Come with me. It’s the perfect time.”
He leads me away from the campfires, the raucous laughter and the music. It fades until I hear only crickets and owls and the sounds of Dram’s breath as we climb the path.
“Just a bit farther,” he says.
We emerge through the trees, and I follow him up past the tree line, our steps silent over the pine needles that slowly give way to earth and stone. “Bade told me about this place.”
We’ve made it to the top. I catch my breath, and Dram spreads out a blanket.
“It’s better if you lie down,” he says.
“Ah. Now I understand.”
He grins. “That is not what I have in mind.”
I lie back and set my head on the curve of his arm.
“Look,” he says.
I lift my eyes. It’s as if he threw my father’s compound against a cloud of cirion gas. The stars shine that brightly. Brighter than I imagined as a child, listening to my mother’s stories.
It robs me of breath. This far above the tree line, nothing hinders the view. The stars encompass the entire sky, illuminated like the shards of a cordon breach, only these are safely stowed far, far overhead.
“The North Star,” Dram says, pointing. “Polaris. It’s part of Ursa Minor. And if you follow it down”—he points to a grouping of stars—“you end up at the Big Dipper inside Ursa Major.”
“Now—” He rises up, holding me close as he turns. “See those three stars in a row? They form—”
“A belt,” I whisper, hearing my mother’s voice from my memories. I know what he’s going to say next. My heart races.
“That’s Orion.”
Tears burn the back of my throat. They blur the glimmering pinpricks of light stretched above me. I don’t have any words so I just squeeze Dram’s hand.
“Aisla said it’s a constellation you can see from anywhere in the world,” he says. “It contains two of the brightest stars in the sky.” He catches me studying his face. “What?”
“Thank you,” I whisper, leaning up and weaving my arms around his neck. He kisses me back, and I feel like I am falling across the sky, a blaze of light—one of the shooting stars my mother used to tell me about. We used to make wishes on stars we couldn’t see.
Now I am the star, and our wishes spread before me, infinite and vast and unfolding inside me.
/ /
OTHERS HAVE STARTED leaving their marks in the rubble this side of the protected city. Sometimes notched in trees or doors, on roadways, even the bottoms of hovers: two vertical lines, angled. A simple cavers’ mark that’s now a symbol for something greater. The stories are spreading too fast for the Congress to contain. People have stopped believing the lies. They are who they believe themselves to be—and nothing less.
This wall says SUB—like the person was stopped before they could finish. I spray paint from a can, finishing the rebel’s tag. SUBPAR. I stare at the word, thinking of our friends still trapped in Cordon Four.
“Nos sumus fortunati,” I whisper, touching the paint. We are the fortunate ones. Dram and I. But they are there—with those words on their sleeves.
“At least now they have hope, Orion,” Dram says. “They know it’s possible to break free.”
Maybe we can give them more. “Let’s go find your father.”
He hasn’t shown me the transmissions, but I know he’s watched them countless times. He studies my face, looking for holes in my resolve.
“The outlier regions are lawless,” he says. “Not even the Congress has maps for where he is.”
“Then we’ll make our own.” I hand the paint to Dram. “Marker.”
He grins and paints the lines. “Mark,” he says, like he’s just shot a light bolt into the stone.
We walk away, leaving behind a beacon.
Proof that there’s a way out.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to the amazing people who brought Flashfall to life with their talents and support:
To the best, most tenacious, forensically editing agent, Sarah Davies (who was once a caver herself!). You helped me get rid of “all the dodgy bits” so Orion’s story could really shine. I’m so grateful to be part of the Greenhouse!
My wonderful editor, Kate Farrell, who believed in this book from the start and pushed and stretched me as a writer until the world was more dimensional and the characters so richly drawn they felt real. There’s not a gift basket large enough to express my appreciation for your wisdom and guidance.
Everyone at Macmillan Children’s Publishing, especially the talented team at Henry Holt, who worked tirelessly to bring Flashfall to new heights. I could not have asked for a more fantastic group of people to launch my debut, and I’m thrilled to continue the journey with you all on the next one!
To Mary Pearson and Aprilynne Pike, who have been very special champions of this book. I cannot begin to tell you what your support means to me. I’m truly honored!
ALL THE LOVE to my family, friends, and fellow writers who supported, encouraged, and pushed me past the hurdles. I am grateful for each and every one of you.
Special thanks to my parents, Mary and Jim Brinda, who never set a limit on my dreams. When I wanted to fly, you pointed me toward the sky. And to my brother, Dave, who never stopped telling me to go for it.
To Jacob, who reminds me every day that teenage love is not only possible but quite spectacular, and to Caden, Landon, and Kai. You’ve taken this crazy journey right alongside me, and you make it all worth it.
And finally, to all the readers: none of this would be possible without you.
Nos Sumus Fortunati
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenny Moyer grew up in Arizona, where she learned to fly before she could drive. She studied writing at Seattle Pacific University and co-owns Luminary Creative with her filmmaker husband, Jacob. She lives in Des Moines, Iowa, with her three boys and three-pound dog, Emmy. Flashfall is her debut.
Visit her online at jennymoyer.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Jenny Moyer
Map copyright © 2016 by Jon Chadjurian
Henry Holt and Company
Publisher
s since 1866
Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
fiercereads.com
All rights reserved.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Moyer, Jenny, author. Title: Flashfall / Jenny Moyer.
Description: First edition. | New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2016. Summary: In a world shattered by radiation fallout, teenaged Orion and her climbing partner Dram, in exchange for freedom, mine terrifying tunnels for a precious element that keeps humans safe from radiation poisoning, but disturbing revelations force Orion to question everything she knows.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016008939 (print) | LCCN 2016035846 (ebook) | ISBN 9781627794817 (hardback) | ISBN 9781627794824 (ebook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Radiation—Fiction. | Mines and mineral resources—Fiction. | Government—Resistance to—Fiction. | Love—Fiction. | Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.M72 Fl 2016 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.M72 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008939
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eISBN 9781627794824
First hardcover edition 2016
eBook edition November 2016