by Liz Delton
The few who volunteered for this mission had all gotten thorough lessons from Apex in the past few weeks. Huge hulking Apex had made an unlikely teacher, casually showing the rebels how to adjust their harnesses and expertly tying knots for them.
With her feet parallel to the cliff, she made contact with the stone as she bumped herself downward. To her right and below, on another immeasurably long rope, her brother Flint was doing the same.
Tonight’s rescue force was much smaller than Ember would have liked, but Apex could only acquire so much stolen climbing equipment, and they barely had enough volunteers for the harnesses they did have.
Ember and Flint had been itching to do something since they had arrived back in Riftcity and encountered their aunt, who had only just escaped Riftcity herself and was planning to sabotage the Scouts as much as she could. With the small force of fighters Ember and the others brought back from Meadowcity, they all set up camp outside of Riftcity and finally started fighting back.
There was no shortage of vengeance running through Ember’s family’s blood.
Ven’s absence on this mission was painfully obvious to her. The Meadowcity native had been hard to convince to partake in any planning, and instead only agreed with what others suggested with tepid interest. Instead, he volunteered to watch their camp, or hunt, refusing to make any decisions that would affect the rebel movement.
Ember wasn’t entirely surprised by his behavior, since she knew Ven blamed himself for the entire destruction of Lightcity—a heavy burden which certainly didn’t belong on his shoulders alone. Though she wasn’t involved in the fall of Lightcity, even she felt partially responsible: the terrible burden belonged to all of Arcera.
Yet she worried his haze of melancholy would never lift. He seemed an entirely different person these days, compared to the confident Hunter she had trained with over the winter.
She understood his sorrow, but she didn’t know how to help. There were people suffering this very moment that they still had a chance to save. That was what kept Ember fighting, anyway.
“You stuck?” Flint asked in a whisper from below.
Ember suddenly realized that the other four climbers had descended quite far while she had slowed in reverie. She led more rope through her left hand, and descended once more in answer.
It wasn’t long after she caught up to the others that Jack, one of the Riftcitizens who had escaped with Ember’s aunt Rekha, called a halt.
They had reached the southeastern airway to the mine.
As she continued to lower, she watched Jack kick out strongly from the cliff a few times, swinging from his rope anchored to the top of the cliff. Ember’s stomach squirmed the farther and farther he got away from the cliff.
Finally, instead of landing back on the face of the cliff, he disappeared—into the entrance to the mine.
Apex followed in the same manner: pushing off from the cliff and then finally disappearing. Flint and Striker, another Riftcity refugee, shuffled over to what appeared to be the entrance. Two sets of hands reached out to grab each of them, pulling them inside.
At last, Ember hung at the mouth of the airway, and Flint and Apex reached out to grab her by the legs. She let a little more rope through her left hand, and they pulled her into the airway.
Finally, they set her down on the stone, and immense relief flooded up through her nerves at the contact of solid ground. She paused a moment, reveling in the solidity of the stone under her feet.
Jack was busy rummaging in his satchel for something while the others waited. Ember had never met Jack before the war, but she had since learned that he was one of Riftcity’s famed farmers. The sun-tanned and thick-haired man was one of the few people who knew how to coax crops from their rocky soil.
Ember and the others went to the edge of the airway where their five ropes still hung, swaying slightly in a breeze that was rolling through the rift. High above, the ropes had been anchored to the top of the cliff by heavy bolts driven into the stone. If Ember hadn’t seen how deep the bolts had gone in, she never would have stepped off the top.
They each coiled up as much rope as they could—whatever hung past their airway—and waited. Jack finally joined them at the edge, a carefully wrapped bundle of straw in one hand, and a shiny firestarter in the other. Ember handed her coiled rope to Apex, then took the straw bundle from Jack, who immediately began to work the firestarter with well-practiced movements.
Big red sparks flew from the rods of the firestarter, and Ember was glad for the thick gloves she wore as several sparks glued themselves to the straw and burst the round bundle into flame. The others holding ropes quickly parted to the side, and she flung the flaming ball of straw out of the opening.
All five watched as the burning ball flew into the open rift and quickly extinguished.
The right eyes were watching for the signal, and Apex, Striker and Flint braced themselves when the ropes were cut from above. The three men backed further into the airway with their burdens and began to coil the rest of the rope that had fallen. Without a word, Ember took her rope back from Apex just as he finished coiling his own. The former Scout nodded at her seriously before going to get his tools from Jack’s satchel.
Ember was almost used to the amicable presence of the once-hated Scout, though if he came up behind her in the dark unexpectedly, he could still scare her out of her skin. Apex had been an invaluable member of their force: he had inside knowledge about the Scouts, their weapons, and their orders for Riftcity—up until he had defected, anyway.
Their aunt Rekha had developed a friendly rapport with the Scout during the early days of the occupation. At the time, Ember had been appalled by her aunt’s behavior, but it was clear that Rekha had seen something in Apex, and that something had saved more than a few lives.
When it had come down to choosing between fighting for Greyling, or helping Rekha’s family escape and save Meadowcity, Apex had changed allegiance.
Just as she finished coiling her rope the way Apex had shown them in their training, the metallic clinking of a hammer rang sharply through the airway. All eyes turned toward Apex, who paused.
He shrugged, eyes wide, as if to say, It can’t be helped, and continued hammering.
Now that their silence had been broken, it was as if Ember was coming up from a dream. She felt warmth in her cheeks, and her hands were sweaty inside her gloves. I can’t believe I’m beginning to think rappelling the cliff was the easy part, she thought.
She took a deep breath to focus her thoughts. All of their careful planning had taken them this far, and now they had to follow through. There were plenty of innocent people in there that needed their help.
Apex finally finished hammering the bolts into the stone, and Ember was glad when the deafening ringing stopped. Apex secured the ropes with intricate knots, then threw each coil over the edge one at a time, back into the rift. After looking over the edge to check on the ropes, he brushed the dust off his hands and rose to meet the others.
It was time to break into the mine. Time to free as many Riftcitizens as they could.
The airway tunnel was silent but for a constant and quiet howling, originating from deep within the mine as air flowed to and from the outside. They walked in complete darkness, which would have been unsettling in itself even if they didn’t have to contend with the creepy noises the wind made.
They shuffled along for several minutes behind Apex until he breathed, “Wait.”
Flint bumped into her from behind, so she elbowed him lightly in the gut.
“Incline now,” Apex reported. “Pretty steep.”
It wasn’t so steep that they couldn’t walk up it, but even after a few steps up, Ember began to sweat, the effort of climbing already beginning to tax her muscles. She was painfully reminded of the time she, Sylvia, Ven and Flint had raced up the Grand Staircase pursued by the murderous Scouts.
This isn’t so bad, she reminded herself. The Scouts don’t know we’re here yet, and no
one’s throwing explosives at us this time.
The thought did little to cheer her.
They all knew there was a high probability that the Scouts would discover them at some point during their rescue mission, but Ember was hopeful that their careful planning would help them avoid it—for a few hours anyway, or perhaps, if they were lucky, until it was all over.
She thought back to the plans of the tunnels they had drawn up from the Riftcitizen’s memory as well as Apex’s, who had helped carry out the original assault on the city. A brief stab of anger fled through her; she could never quite rid herself of the final seed of doubt that Apex was truly on their side.
After ages of silently climbing the steep airway, they finally reached the mine itself. The small square of light they had spotted ten minutes ago had grown to become a proper entrance into one of the mine passages. Ember and Apex each peered around the corners, then met eyes—it was clear.
All five silently hopped out of the airway, which was about half-way up the wall of the passage. Now that they were in the mine proper, dimly glowing orb lamps were mounted to the stone walls set at equal intervals. Ember was immensely grateful for the light, which was bright enough to see down the passage, but not strong enough that they would be immediately recognized if they encountered anyone.
A slow panic began to build in Ember the deeper they penetrated into the mine. Quite well she remembered the stench of fear mixed with stone dust that had permeated the caverns the Scouts had made them mine just after the invasion. And it would be a long time before she forgot the beatings she received when she didn’t agree with the Scouts who watched over her mine shift.
She realized her panic was born of the fear of being trapped in this place again. Only the thought of freeing more refugees kept her trudging silently forward behind Apex. She trained her eyes on his wide back, and watched his knife hilt bob up and down on his belt with the roll of his gait until the panic passed.
The mine was nearly deserted. The other week they had learned that the Scouts had finally stopped forcing Riftcitizens to work around the clock, after the Scouts had grown tired of dragging out workers overcome by exhaustion.
Then, there was the business of the Scouts no longer carrying the explosive orbs—a fact that was hard to miss, even when spying on the city from the top of the rift.
The rebels knew that these two new developments had made the living conditions in the Citizen’s Hall much, much worse. More people at a time were being packed together in the once beautiful city building, with food and resources already stretched far too thin.
The Scouts no longer held the threat of immediate death with the orbs, so they compensated with violence and menace, neither of which was in short supply in the men or their beasts. Ember felt lucky to have escaped when she did, thanks to Sylvia and Ven.
Twice they encountered Scouts patrolling the deserted corridors. Apex paused at every intersection to check each next passage or stairwell, and had luckily spotted the Scouts with enough time for the rebels to retreat back to the previous corner and wait with held breath until the patrol passed.
It was only due to the fact that the beasts the Scouts controlled hated the cramped indoor spaces of the mine that they were able to pass through undetected. It was one of the reasons they had chosen to use the mine for this particular mission.
They crept down narrow passages wide enough for only one person, then tried not to let their footsteps echo when they passed through the cavernous chambers. They avoided the lifts, which would make too much noise, and instead used the cramped stairs that connected floors at random.
Ember checked her map every so often, and anticipation began to outweigh the soaking mantle of fear that had settled over her. This would be their largest raid since she had returned from Meadowcity, and an enormous strike against Greyling. A grin curled up her lips.
Finally, she spotted the meeting place, one of the cavernous mining rooms down the third corridor six flights up from where they had entered. She looked back and caught Apex’s eye, motioning toward the large gateway to their right. It was marked with a carving of three hammers down the right of the gateway. Ember slowed and peered around the doorway.
Holly Westward, the woman who had volunteered to remain as their spy inside Riftcity, lay flat on the floor, one of her legs crooked at an unnatural angle.
Ember’s stomach dropped to her feet, and she rushed into the room, not caring if there was still danger. Holly had been working for weeks inside the city to organize this raid. Something was startlingly wrong.
She flew to Holly, and vaguely heard Apex curse and the others dart into the cavernous room after her. She threw herself to the floor by Holly’s head, while the others checked the rest of the room, eventually calling an all clear that Ember didn’t hear.
Ember put a finger to Holly’s throat and felt a steady throbbing of pulse there. The woman’s eyes fluttered open at her touch, and she immediately grimaced in pain. She tried to get up, but Ember put a hand on her shoulder to keep her supine.
Even without checking, she could tell that Holly’s leg was broken. Dark wetness at Holly’s calf told of a bone through the skin. Fear of how they could get Holly out safely shot through Ember’s heart like a knife.
Then she realized Holly was trying to speak, the woman’s voice weak but insistent.
“Taking them out... To punish...” Her eyes fluttered shut, and Ember thought she might have passed out.
Ember opened her mouth to speak, but then:
“Punishing them...my fault—” Holly’s eyes suddenly snapped back open, and she grabbed Ember’s arm with surprising strength. “They took them!” she pleaded hoarsely, then collapsed back to the floor.
Ember looked back to Apex and the others, terror mirrored in each of their eyes.
Six
Ember swallowed the lump in her throat and ordered, “Jack, put something together to brace Holly’s leg.” He immediately dropped his pack and began rummaging inside.
“Striker, guard the door,” she added in a low command.
She stood and pulled the well-worn map from her pocket with shaking fingers. Apex and Flint came over to look at her map in stunned silence.
“The Scouts must be taking them out of the mine—to the Citizen’s Hall maybe?” she muttered, trying to make sense out of the jumble their mission had suddenly become. All this time she had envisioned the refugees waiting here for them, and getting them out being the hard part. Clearly, Holly’s cover had been broken.
“What’s the quickest way out of the mine from here?” she asked no one in particular. Her brain was moving as fast as molasses.
Apex’s heavy finger landed on the paper, drawing a line from where they stood, through several more passages, up the lift, then toward the cliff face. Ember nodded and stuffed the map back into her pocket, then pulled a knife out of each boot.
“Flint, take Holly back to where we came in. She won’t be able to make it out the way we had planned in this state.”
For a moment, Ember thought he was going to argue, but he must have swallowed whatever retort was on the tip of his tongue. Instead, he reached down to grab hold of Holly, who was conscious, but had her eyes closed, moaning in pain. He hoisted his shoulder under her arm, and with the hasty splint and Flint’s help, she was able to limp forward. The pair hobbled through the exit, and back to the airway.
Ember knew Flint’s lungs were permanently damaged from the smoke during the invasion of Riftcity, and he couldn’t possibly outrun the Scouts if it came to it. She would use any excuse to keep him safe.
“Let’s go,” Ember growled, and Apex, Striker, and Jack burst into motion.
They didn’t bother to keep quiet, and ran at a steady pace from the cavern. With one last fleeting look at her brother’s retreating back, Ember prayed they could catch up with the refugees before they were taken from the mine. But what they would do when they did catch up, she hadn’t quite figured out yet.
I hope A
pex is busy thinking up a plan, she thought. Vague ideas of the four rebels trying to block the mine entrance bubbled up in her thoughts as they ran up yet another cramped stairwell that they were hoping to overtake the Scouts with.
Far quicker than she expected, Ember caught the sound of shouting ahead in the next passage to their left. Her heart thudded to a stop. It was the wailing of a child, and behind it, the thundering of the lift. She quickly wiped her damp palms on her thighs and took a steely grip on her knives.
Without pausing, they shot out of their passageway onto a stairwell corridor overlooking the largest lift. The grinding of gears and chains covered the sound of their pounding feet, but they would soon be exposed. The Scouts must have gotten onto the lift several levels below; with such a large group, they couldn’t maneuver through the corridors very fast.
Over thirty men, women and children huddled at the center of the lift, surrounded on all sides by gruesome Scouts. The large wooden platform was sedately climbing up through the open space as the gears turned and the bearings slid up the rails. It was a platform intended to lift the heaviest of stone from the depths of the mine—it didn’t move very fast. Without thinking, Ember raced up the nearest staircase to get a better view.
“Can we stop it?” Striker hissed as he came up behind her. She barely heard him over the racket, but he was pointing to the lift gate on their level, which had its own control panel. They pressed themselves against the back wall, and Ember shook her head.
“It wouldn’t do any good. There’s a master control on the lift. No way we can jam those either,” she jerked her thumb at the wood and metal beams the lift tracks and gears ran up. The lift was now just one level below where they crouched.
“We need to get onto the platform,” Apex interjected.
“There’s only four of them,” Ember said. A menacing Scout stood positioned at each corner of the platform. “Someone will need to get to the control lever, too. That Scout with the scary beard has got his hand on it.”