40.2 km from flash curtain
THUNDER RUMBLES THROUGH camp, and I’m grateful for our conjured tree shelter. Most nights, Dram and I sleep under the stars, but the winter has brought snow. And snow, this close to the flash curtain, can be deadly.
Particle snow exposes us to radiation as surely as a breath of cordon air. It shouldn’t reach us here—we’re camped beyond the flashfall—but I feel a shift in the atmosphere, as if it’s pushing past boundaries along with the vultures and gulls.
Another rumble, and I give up on sleep. Usually I sense the approach of a flash storm, the deepest parts of me awakened to the curtain’s particles. A bead of sweat trickles down my back, and I realize it’s not a storm that woke me, but a premonition, a tingling sense of dread I can’t ignore.
I push up my sleeve, and my Radband casts a glow on the woven branches on either side of us. My eyes water from staring at the indicator. It turned yellow while I was imprisoned by King in Cordon Three. Even then, starving and half mad with fear, I marveled that it wasn’t red after the days I’d spent in the cordons, so close to the flash curtain I could feel its song pulse through my body. My father’s compound saved me, preserved my life long enough to get him the elements he needed to create a cure.
But no one’s heard from him in weeks.
Dram stirs, and I glance down to find him studying my face. He gently clasps my wrist, blocking the light of my Radband. He despises the biotech all Subpars wear from birth—indicators of approaching death by radiation.
But we’re safe from that now. So long as we don’t get close to the curtain again. And as long as we take shelter from any storms that carry its radioactive particles to us. I weave my fingers through his, and our callused palms press together, hands scarred from years of mining and fighting the creatures down tunnel nine.
Tension creeps into his eyes, and I turn up the lantern before he has to ask. I need the sky above me, and Dram needs light in dark spaces. We both carry demons from Outpost Five. He sits up and gently checks my wounds. I didn’t need stitches after all. He trails his finger beside a row of butterfly bandages.
“You in pain?” he asks.
“No. Looks worse than it feels.” I pull my shirt back over the angry red gash marking my ribs.
“Glenting vultures,” he mutters.
“Glenting out-of-practice axe skills,” I say.
He grins ruefully and draws me into his arms. “What’s got you flighty, ore scout?”
Lately, Dram speaks more and more like the Conjies who’ve taken us in. I feel the rings on his fingers as his hands move over my skin—another bit of Conjie adornment, like the matching cuffs we both wear. But the rest of him is all Subpar. His lips brush mine, and I lean into his kiss, weaving my fingers through his dark hair. My hands skim his shoulders, the hard muscles that mark him for the caver he was, the boy who climbed down tunnels every day after me.
“Orion?” He senses my tension, like there’s a line stretched between us that he can feel when it pulls too tight. But how do I tell him what I’m uncertain of myself? “Is it the curtain?”
Four words that state perfectly the nature of our existence. If we Subpars live, it is because the curtain stayed far enough away, that it yielded enough of its cirium to provide a shield, but not so many radioactive particles that it killed us. If the curtain reaches toward us through winds or storms, though … we become flash dust the Congress can use to fuel its weapons.
Is it the curtain?
When you live this close to the flashfall, it is always the curtain. But Dram knows there’s more to it for me.
“I feel it … pressing,” I whisper.
“We’re more than thirty kilometers from it,” Dram says. “Beyond the flashfall.” I can’t stand the tension drawing his brows together. I should tell him that I barely sleep at night, that in my dreams the curtain rolls and undulates in waves, an iridescent sea of pink, green, and violet—and it moves. Toward us. Toward me, as if I am tied to it so strongly I have the power to bring it with me wherever I go.
I shiver, and Dram slips his blanket around my shoulders. “Talk to me, Rye. What’s going on?”
Something. Something bad. But since I don’t have any answers, I clasp him around the neck and kiss him. He makes a soft sound of surprise, but then a moment later, his arms wind around me. We fled the cordons, found our way to the freedom of the mountain provinces, but this is our true escape—the places we find together where fear can’t follow.
Thunder shakes the ground, blocking out the sounds of our breaths, our soft words. Not thunder.
Engines.
“Dram!”
He shoots up, letting go of me to reach for his guns. Outside our shelter, Conjies shout, a child cries.
“Weapons and warmth,” Dram commands, shoving his feet into boots. “The cold can take us as fast as their flash weapons.”
We snatch up every weapon that’s not already strapped to us, and he tosses me my coat.
A Conjie ducks inside our shelter. “Inquiry Module at the edge of camp—”
We follow him, gliding down a conjured slide to the ground. I gasp. Particle snow. I sense it even before I touch the fresh white powder.
In the feeble dawn sunlight, Conjies flee from the earthen shelters they’ve conjured; others leap down from the woven branches of tree forts. None of it offers sufficient protection from the Congress’s trackers. The orbs swarm in the distance, their sensors glinting with light. If we can’t evade them, they’ll bring the Inquiry Modules racing to collect us.
Our band of Conjies is small—twenty-six men, women, and children. Fewer than half have fighting experience—but they know how to hide. Trees twist up around us, sending snow and pine needles cascading. Conjured rock juts from the ground, and Dram grasps my arm before I collide with the sudden barrier.
“Camo-cloth,” Dram says, digging his cloak from his pack.
I yank mine over my head and thrust my arms through the sleeves. We thread through the trees, blending with the snow whipping up around us.
A Conjuror sends a wall of snow flurries arcing over our camp, shielding us from view of the Inquiry Module approaching from the east. We don’t have the kind of weapons necessary to take down one of the unmanned hovers. Bade’s the only Conjie I know who can make fire in his hands and throw it, but he’s not here now.
It rumbles, nearing, and the Conjies still. They are suddenly tree or rock, nothing but elements the Mod’s roving sensor won’t see. It drones above us, so low it knocks snow from the treetops.
Buzzing metallic cylinders drop from its hold.
“Pulse trackers,” Dram murmurs. These don’t need to see us to find us. “Everyone—get wet—they track body heat!”
“The spring’s a half kilometer—”
“Get in the snow!” I shout.
They look at me, eyes wide, deciding which danger is worse. If the Congress captures us, we’ll be processed and sent into the cordons. The particle snow might not kill us—not right away, anyway.
With Bade away, everyone looks to Dram. And right now, he’s looking to me.
His brow creases beneath his cloak’s hood. He doesn’t want to ask me to take the risk—but he’s never had to. I tug my glove off with my teeth and crouch. My heart hammers in my chest, urging me to stop. I thrust my hand into the fresh powder, closing my eyes to better sense the—
Burn. Like paper taken by flame, the way the fire curls the edges before it turns black … I breathe past the pain, wedging my hand farther, into the deeper layer of snow. My hand freezes, numb with cold, but that is all.
“Is it safe?” Dram asks.
My eyes meet his, and he curses. “Flash me. How bad, Rye?”
“We need to get deep,” I call. “Don’t let the fresh snow touch your skin.” We’re resistant to the curtain’s radioactive particles, but not immune. And it’s the recent snow the curtain has gifted with its particles, brushing our camp like a radioactive caress.
The pulse trackers whine toward us, drawn to our body heat.
“Get under the snow!” Dram calls.
We burrow, digging ourselves under blankets of fresh powder. The cold soaks through, and I shiver, burrowing deeper. I lie back, gasping when wet droplets snake down my collar. The trackers hum above us, whistling through the air. Roran lifts his hands, cupping dirt, and snow flurries lift from his palm, giving us cover.
We are cold enough that the machines don’t register our body heat, but parts of us are on fire. Beside me, in a hastily dug trench, a little girl whimpers.
“Where does it hurt, Briar?” I whisper.
“My hands,” she says, shivering. “They burn.”
Particle snow. At this elevation, we experience it more than we did down in the outpost. Like the rains and wind that herald a flash storm, they carry with them the deadly particles of the curtain. We should be far enough from the flash curtain to avoid any of its fallout. More proof of what I fear.
“This isn’t right,” Roran says, shifting in the snow. “It shouldn’t burn like this. We made camp ten kilometers from the boundary marker. We’re beyond the flashfall.”
“Maybe you read the marker wrong—”
“I didn’t read the glenting marker wrong, Meg!”
“Then why is there glenting particle snow burning my arms?”
“Quit scrammin’ or we’re all slayed!” Dram hisses.
“It’s shifting,” I announce softly. In the hush that follows, I hear wind whining through bare branches. They know I have a connection to the curtain, even if they don’t understand it. These are Conjies—people so tied to nature they can transform it at will. They don’t question my scout’s senses. But it doesn’t make them any less afraid.
“What do you mean, it’s shifting?” Newel asks.
I try to think how to describe what I’ve been sensing for days. I close my eyes, letting the snow around me numb all outside distractions—shut out the rational side of me that wars with my instinct.
“Pulses,” I whisper, and my blood—my Subpar, adapted blood—seems to echo the sentiment. I sit up, and the Conjies watch me like I’m a creature they haven’t yet named. “Pulses of energy, like it’s testing for holes, pockets of energy that have dissipated. That’s why it’s worse at night—when the Earth’s turned away from the sun. Like it … frees the curtain, to stretch, to reach…” I’m babbling, I realize, throwing out half-formed theories in an effort to help them understand how much danger we’re in. Their wide eyes fasten on me like I’m something that came from the flashfall, something feral.
I did come from the flashfall. And I am more a creature of the caverns than they will ever understand.
“Trackers are gone,” Dram announces. We dig ourselves from the snow, wet and shivering. “No fires,” he says. “Dry clothes and pack up. We need to leave within the hour.”
The Conjies set about their tasks without further instruction. This is how they’ve evaded the Congress for generations. One hour. They will be ready in half that time.
I don’t go to collect my gear with Dram. Instead, I jog to the base of the nearest ridge and start climbing.
* * *
Rock scrapes my palm as I reach past the ledge. My injuries throb, and a sheen of sweat makes my hands slip. I don’t have to climb anymore—I’m no longer the ore scout the Congress forced me to be. But I need to see the flash curtain, need to know why its song started humming through my veins again.
I shove my fingers into a shallow crack, scraping the back of my hand. I repeat the action with my other hand and lever my body higher. If I were a Conjie, I’d just weave a vine from rock and pull myself up. But that is not how the curtain affected my people.
How it affects me.
My breath hitches, and the scent of pine winds through my senses, reminding me that I’m beyond the ash of Outpost Five. I let the memories linger as I climb, until the ghosts of the cavers I loved propel me past my limits.
I reach the top, grasping tree roots to hoist myself up.
I have to do this before Dram leads us farther east. He doesn’t look back—only forward. He doesn’t ever look west beyond this perimeter of mountains, toward the flash curtain. From this vantage, I can make out shifting violet and green hues, stretching like a wall of light from the ground upward as far as I can see. Rivulets of aquamarine shimmer down, as if an artist dripped paint over a canvas. The colors bleed together as I watch.
The sight of it, after two months of living beyond the flashfall, steals my breath away. Back at Outpost Five, I’d climb the Range and stare out over Cordon Five, catching glimpses of the curtain beyond the sulfur clouds. It strikes me suddenly that I’ve missed the view.
I have never hated myself more.
This thing destroys everyone I love. It is killing Subpars and Conjurors forced to mine the burnt sands, even as I perch here, safely beyond its reach. And yet … it hums a tune inside my soul that I recognize.
I close my eyes and let the wind buffet me, let the sounds of the air whining through the pines block out the sounds of my self-recrimination. Tears streak down my cheeks—from the cold, the wind, I tell myself.
But I know it’s shame. I promised them freedom. Even if the cavers I left behind didn’t hear me say the words, I know they’ve heard stories of the Hunter, the Scout who will find a way out for everyone. Months have passed, and we haven’t gotten any closer to finding the leader of the resistance—Dram’s father, Arrun—and now we’ve lost contact with Commissary Jameson, the only connection we had to my father somewhere inside Alara. It’s taken all we have just to survive, to outrun the Inquiry Modules.
Now this. The curtain is changing. I can sense it, even if I don’t understand what’s happening. For 150 years, it’s been a constant horror that wipes out all life within its perimeter. As bad as it is, at least we’ve adapted to it, found ways to survive even within the flashfall. But now, all that could change. I feel it deep inside myself, like a cup filled to overflowing.
“I thought I’d find you here.” I whirl, surprised to find Dram pulling himself over the ledge. “I’ve watched you slip away for days now, Orion. Like you have a secret.” I don’t say anything, and he walks to my side, takes in the view. “Alara’s the other way, you know.”
I smile, but I can feel tears in my throat. During our first weeks of freedom, I climbed for views of the protected city. I’d watch the sunset reflect off its cirium shield.
“Why aren’t you saying anything?” he asks softly.
“Because it’s useless to lie to you.” And the truth is too terrifying.
“You know something about the flashfall. Why it’s changing.”
“I couldn’t tell you why it’s happening.”
“But it is,” he says, asking the question more with his eyes than his words.
“Yes.” I turn back toward the horizon, the bands of color shifting in the distance. Green, pink, faintest red. Red is rare. Or it used to be.
“What does that mean for us?”
I don’t answer. I just watch the red bands bleed across the sky. He hasn’t asked the most important question.
“Fire,” he curses. “What does this mean for Subpars left in the outposts?”
My stomach twists. It didn’t take him long.
“Fire,” I answer, repeating his word that is both curse and truth. It means fire.
Not a literal fire with flames licking the air, but an internal one, that burns from the inside out. The kind of burning our Radbands monitor in shifting shades of green to red. Fire that swept away my beloved mentor, Graham, in a gale of cordon wind, and fire that burned our friend Reeves in pieces, a day at a time.
Exposure to the radioactive particles of the flash curtain takes many forms, but it all ends the same. And it leaves only ashes behind.
* * *
Conjies have stories.
When we dare to risk firelight, we huddle close, weapons at the ready, satchels packed—ready to flee at the first rumble of an Inquiry Module, the faintest hum of a tracker. Singing and dancing are saved for special occasions, but storytelling, to Conjurors, is like food. Essential. Life-sustaining.
Tonight, I lean against Dram’s legs, watching flames flicker. The cadence of Newel’s voice lulls me deeper into the tale he weaves as artfully as a song.
“The sun was reaching solar maximum,” he says. “But this was not the eleven-year cycle scientists had come to expect, nor the hundred-year cycle they had predicted. These solar storms didn’t fit any known pattern. They were the largest on record—sixes and sevens on a five-point scale, and the velocities they traveled were unprecedented.”
Conjurors are rarely still. Maybe it’s something to do with the energy within them, or their connection with the elements, but as we sit listening, I watch them. I think of Roran and the rock he always clutched in his fist, how he was constantly—secretly—altering it. Practice, his father had told him. I wonder if it’s more than that, though. Like maybe, on some level, they need to conjure, need to maintain an exchange of energy with the natural world.
He sits apart from the rest of us, on the fringes of the camp. Firelight dances over him, leaving the rest in shadow. He stares into the woods, and I wonder if he’s watching for flash vultures or maybe for his mother to suddenly emerge. I used to do that with Mom. An entire year after seven collapsed, I still looked for her in the caves. He conjures something in his hand. Dirt morphs into white flowers, which turn to ash before the petals have unfurled, and back to dirt. Dirt-flowers-ash, over and over, while he stares toward the darkness.
I wonder if Dram senses the energy crackling between the Conjurors. The air feels alive tonight. With memories, with magic.
Newel continues his story, speaking of our past, but I’m struck suddenly with a sense of our future. It stirs in me, like a creature waking. Possibility.
“What if we use the Mods against them?” I say.
Heads turn, and on many faces are the looks I’ve grown accustomed to. Expressions that ask unspoken questions.
“How do you mean?” Newel asks.
“They come from behind the shield, they return there. What if we could … harness one? Without them knowing?”
“We’re hunted as it is,” Newel answers. “We can’t risk provoking the Congress further.”
“We’ve lost connection to my father. Maybe from inside Alara it would be possible to—”
“We survive because we hide,” Newel says.
“What about those with no place to hide? Subpars and Conjies trapped in the flashfall?”
“We help when we can. Bade and Aisla are tracking Arrun. We wait.”
Wood pops, and sparks lift into the air. Arguments collide in my mind, reasons why we cannot simply wait. Mainly, the names and faces of my friends left behind.
“When was the first Conjie Tempered?” I ask.
Newel studies me, as if searching for the hidden meaning in my question. “A hundred years ago. After the first rebellion.”
“A hundred years,” I say. “And you want to wait more?”
“We’re not the revolutionaries we once were.”
“Maybe we should be,” a voice calls. Bade strides into camp, covered in mud and leaves. Branches weave around his arms—he looks more tree than man. I realize it’s intentional, conjured concealment. Another figure pulls away from the forest, mud covering her blond hair. Aisla. Beneath the bark and branches, they wear guns.
I look past them, hoping to see another person wander in from the trees.
“Did you find Arrun?” Newel asks.
“No.” Bade holds his palm against his arm, and the branches morph and dissolve to dust he brushes away. “The outlier regions are overrun with Striders. The Congress set guard towers along the pass. We barely made it out.”
“So we have no word from him.”
“I didn’t say that.” Bade hands Newel what looks like a packet of leaves. “One of his men managed to get us this message.”
Newel conjures the leaves away, then holds up an object that doesn’t belong in a camp of free Conjies. “What does it mean?”
Bade shakes his head. “I have no idea.”
* * *
MORIOR INVICTUS.
Death before defeat.
I stare at the words emblazoned on the patch. Dram grasps it tightly, the only message from his father. No note. No instructions. Just this patch torn from a Strider’s uniform. In the months we’ve been in the mountain provinces, this is the first we’ve heard from him.
Morior invictus. The Latin words arc above the symbol of a coiled snake with fangs bared. I try to imagine how Arrun got hold of it. Striders wear electrified armor.
“This was all he sent?” I ask.
Bade sighs. “If there was more to this message, it’s been lost.”
Dram presses his lips together in a tight line, probably holding back the words we’re all thinking. Whatever Arrun’s been doing in the outlier regions, it’s likely to cost him his life. There are scorch marks on the jagged bit of cloth. And blood. He breathes a curse and shoves it into his pocket.
“It’s a sign he’s still alive,” Bade says.
“That’s one way of seeing it,” Dram mutters.
“Our coms system is compromised,” Bade says. “We can’t even get through to Jameson right now. Not with Alara on lockdown as it is.”
“What about Orion’s father?” Dram asks. “Any word from him?”
Bade’s features tighten further. “Nothing. I’m sorry.”
Two months with no word.
Dram and I thought we could save our people. So far, we’ve only put them in more danger.
* * *
We crouch beside Alara’s shield, camo-cloth draping us head to foot. Dram shifts beside me, and the cloth ripples in shades of moonlight-touched silver. I wouldn’t have known he’d moved if I weren’t pressed against his side, if I hadn’t felt his armored body brush mine. It’s a move I recognize—something we did crawling through tunnels back in Outpost Five. A shift of weight, a stretch of muscles to keep legs from going numb.
We need to be able to move—to run—at a moment’s notice.
We haven’t spoken in over an hour, since we took our places here. I can’t even read his eyes. We wear the camo-cloth draped over our faces, so that when I look in the direction of his head, I see only the cirium shield reflected back at me. I touch my own with a camo-cloth glove, just to make sure I haven’t disappeared. We’ve gotten so used to hiding that at times I lose myself.
It’s the only tech we allow ourselves. The Congress has tracked every screencom, every device. With the commissaries secured somewhere within Alara’s Central Tower, we’ve been cut off from Jameson. From my father.
From our plans to get a cure to our people.
The moon rises in a cloudless sky. I look up at it, feeling a mixture of wonder and trepidation. Wonder, because I never saw it from Outpost Five—the cloudlike layer of flashfall blocked the sky from view. Trepidation, because we risk capture with this plan.
First night of a full moon. According to Bade, it’s when Jameson positions one of his Striders at the third shield entrance. I am not absolutely positive that it’s not the second night of a full moon. What if it is? I glance at Dram, but see only a thin outline of a shape slightly incongruent with the shield. I want to ask him, How do we know this is the right time? For that matter, are we certain this is the third shield entrance?
I don’t ask. Dram is desperate for word of his father, as am I. He has become more like me—moved to action and less to thought.
We track time in constellations, slowly trekking across the sky. Two hours. Four. Finally, a narrow passage opens beside us a meter from Dram’s hand. I hear the click of his gun. He lifts it, hidden under the cloth—just in case.
A Strider emerges, electrified armor humming. Dram tenses.
The Strider mutes his armor, then slowly scuffs his boot across the ground, forming a mark: two slanted parallel lines. Still, we don’t move. Even Alarans know this symbol now—a caver’s mark that’s become a rallying cry for Subpars and Conjies, anyone oppressed by the Congress. An easy enough trap to draw us out.
“I can see your heat signatures,” the Strider says, looking in our direction.
“Can you see my gun aimed at your head?” Dram asks.
The Strider lifts his face shield. “If Bade trained you, then I’d expect nothing less.”
We push back the hoods shielding our faces, but Dram doesn’t lower his gun.
The Strider stares at me until I begin to fidget under his close scrutiny. “I can’t believe you risked coming here,” he says.
“Tell me it was worth it,” Dram murmurs. “Do you have a message from Jameson?”
“They’re coming after you with something new. Something worse than trackers and Inquiry Mods.”
“When?”
“He’s already out there, tracking you.”
“He?”
“A Conjie that escaped from the prison cordon. They say he caught Orion once before.”
Dram swears beneath his breath. I can’t speak. I can’t breathe.
It’s not possible. The Congress dropped flash bombs on that compound. I barely saved Dram in time—
“His name,” Dram demands softly.
“King,” the Strider answers. “He calls himself King.”
My mind floods with images, memories buried in the deepest parts of myself. The man sizing me up alongside his gang of dusters, cannibals thrilling to the scent of blood. I hear an odd wheezing sound and realize it’s coming from me.
“He’s just one man, Rye,” Dram says.
“Three,” the Strider says. “He leads a squad of three Untempered Conjies. They wear cirium tracking collars—that’s how you’ll know them.”
“Why would he help the Congress?” I ask.
“They captured and interrogated him, then sent him off to hunt you. His life, in exchange for the Scout.” The Strider glances at a screencom on his wrist. “I’m out of time. One last thing—” He activates his armor, then lifts his voice over the hum of the current. “Within the next few days, a Skimmer will deviate from its flight path and drop supplies in grid echo six. I don’t know what the cargo is, but Jameson says you’re going to want to be there.” He lowers his helmet visor and turns toward the shield.
“Wait,” Dram says. “Did he say anything about our fathers?”
“If Jameson knows where they are, he’s not entrusting that information to anyone. After you two, they’re the most wanted Subpars in the city-state.”