7.2 km from flash curtain
I WATCH FROM the shadows of the pricking tent, the only place where the different stations mix. I slipped away from the rest of the Delvers—at the front, lingering near the crowd of Miners. It’s been two weeks since I began my work at Fortune, delving paths alongside Fern and Cora. Two weeks of arguing with Val, but she refuses to take my pleas to Meredith, insisting that Brunts have no place in Fortune. I can’t offer Dram solace, but I’m desperate to see him, to know that he’s still alive.
“Can I borrow your neck cloth?” I ask a woman still clutching her pail and sifter. I show her the small orange clasped in my palm: a trade. We get real food in Fortune.
“If you’re trying to blend in, it will take more than that, Scout,” she says, eyeing my white Delver’s suit. She unwraps her torn coat and drapes it around me, her eyes darting to the Striders lining the tent.
“Thank you,” I murmur. “I’ll give it back.”
I stall as long as I can, keeping my head down, my body hidden amongst the group of Miners. If they notice I don’t belong with them, no one says anything. Finally, I’m the last in line. The tech raises his brow when he sees me.
I’m too clean to be a Miner. That was my first mistake. I’m missing a pail and sifter, too. And there’s no hiding my white Delver’s suit and boots poking out beneath the dirty coat.
The tech grins. “Good fortune to you, Delver.” He has an accent, a strong one. His hands are cirium.
“And you.” I’m unused to the Conjie greeting. It feels stiff on my lips.
A needle jabs my arm, and I welcome the burn that tells me I’m safe for another day. Brunts enter, and I strain to see each face. Then, behind a wall of ragged bodies, dark, newly shorn hair and a set to the shoulders I would know anywhere.
Dram shuffles forward, his eyes scanning the tent like he’s bracing for attack. My heart twists. Gone is the tenderness, the easy smile. Ice-cold clarity stares out of a face stark with an emotion that’s several degrees beyond desperation.
“I’ve seen him out there,” the tech says, following my gaze. “He’s the maniac they call Weeks.”
“Weeks?” I ask.
“Brunts usually just live a few days if they’re charmed, but not that one. He slays anything that gets close—the only Brunt that’s lived this long. Not days, but weeks.”
I stare at Dram. Weeks.
I barely recognize him, his hair cropped close, skin reddened and bruised, a hollow despair filling up his features. Just a little longer, I tell him in my heart. I have a plan. Hold on. Keep fighting.
His eyes lift suddenly, and his gaze bounces off me as if I’m just another Miner, then flies back.
“Rye…” His voice is rusty-sounding, like a wheel trying to turn with a broken axle.
I push my way to his side, but he steps back as I reach for him.
“Careful,” he says, lifting his arms.
He wears armor made from the skin and feathers of flash vultures, and long cuffs on his wrists formed by the overlapping feathers of tunnel gulls. Tiny silver blades, like deadly scales. He’s done more than protect himself; he’s turned himself into a weapon. Even his spear is wrapped in cordon brush, so that both ends are barbed. There’s a cordon rat impaled on the thorns.
“You know there’s a dead rat stuck on your spear?”
He doesn’t grin like he would’ve before. He just stares a moment, then nods. “They don’t always feed us,” he says, his voice hoarse. “Forget to give us nutri-pacs sometimes.”
My mind catches up to his words. “Oh, fire,” I whisper. I see the furry brown body with new eyes: as a meal held in reserve. This is Dram surviving. This is why he is Weeks.
“Your dad was right. The cactus with gray spines and red fruit is really bad.” He says it with that scratchy, stripped-raw voice I don’t recognize, but a hint of his outpost humor lies beneath his words. It all comes back to me, the conversation Dad had with us before Dram and I were first sent to the cordons. It seems like a lifetime ago.
“The paralysis was temporary,” he murmurs, a trace of the old Dram lighting his eyes. “At least it kept me from feeling the pain in my stomach.”
“Miner’s compass,” I answer, fighting the tears swimming in my eyes. “The cactus with yellow fruit. He told us that was good. The pulp, I think he said.”
Dram nods. “Found some. Followed the dogs to it.”
“Miner!” a Strider calls. “Back to your squad.”
“I have to go,” I say, pulling off the coat I borrowed. “Look for the Miner wearing this. She’ll share her orange with you. She knows who we are.” Dram’s gaze slips over my Delver’s suit and chain.
“Who are we now, Rye?”
The truth of his question slams into me.
“More than what the Congress says we are.”
“I feel like a Brunt.”
“I see a Subpar. A Fourth Ray caver.” I lift his hand, avoiding the barbs of his cactus armor, and draw my finger across his palm in two slanted lines. The caver’s mark that means we’ve found the way out. He curls his fingers over mine.
“Maybe not this time, ore scout.”
“Soon,” I whisper, but I’m not sure he hears me over the sound of a Strider’s armor as I’m pulled away.
Days, I assure myself. A few more days, and Bade and Aisla will show up with an army. Just a few more days for Dram to keep proving that even a Brunt can survive the Overburden.
* * *
My mom was reckless. Impulsive. Possibly more than I am.
Definitely more, I decide, as we forge our way through craggy tunnels reeking of termit scat.
“This is mad,” I grumble, sliding past a trail of bones.
“Right, and you’ve never done anything like this before,” Cora murmurs.
I glare at her through my goggles. “How do you know my mother went this way?”
“She and her Ghost marked it.”
The light of my headlamp catches letters the length of my forearm. “What does it say?” I ask.
“Conjies have five words for freedom,” Fern answers, her gaze trained on the wall. It’s the most I’ve heard her speak. The first four words inscribe the rock in bold, looping script etched with flourishes. The last is all raw, jagged lines, cutting across the stone. I can’t read them, but it’s like I can feel them.
“How far does this passage go?” I ask.
“Right up to the edge of a termit den,” Cora says. “No one has forged past it.”
“They didn’t try?”
“They didn’t survive.” She shines her light against the base of the wall, illuminating a dust-covered, cracked piece of tech. She lifts what looks like an old, shattered pulse transmitter and curses. “We need to replace the transmitters that were damaged here. This passage is probably overrun with gorge moles.”
Fern freezes suddenly. She draws a handful of dirt from her pocket and shifts into the shadows.
“What is she—”
Cora clamps her hand over my mouth. The heat-sensing indicators to the right side of my goggles paint an object in orange light. A hulking body, shoulders packed with muscles that bunch and shift as the creature nears. The termit lifts its stunted snout and scents the air, rising onto its hind legs. It stands taller than a man. A sound—like a blade sliding from a sheath—and its claws extend.
Fern presses her palms to the earth. A tremble of vibration and a wall of rock erupts before us.
“Hurry, Fern!” Cora shouts. “It’s climbing!” She reaches for her rifle.
Rock scrapes and clatters, meters above our heads, but the sounds of the termit are louder. A gorge mole suddenly darts from the shadows, and the termit lunges for it.
“RUN!” Cora shouts.
A tree bursts up from the stone, roots thrusting beneath our feet. Stone rains down on us, and I cover my head. A screech, a startled cry. I can’t see them, but their pain echoes back to me.
The ground gives way. We cling to a ledge, our feet dangling near the gulf that’s opened beneath us. Cora’s sobbing, the sounds tearing from her lips.
“How bad is it?” I call. I can’t see her clearly, but I know the sounds of a serious injury.
“Glenting mole,” she bites out. “Conjured s-straight through us.”
“Fire,” I breathe. I shove my goggles off my head and stare. A branch juts through Cora’s palm, splaying her fingers wide. But it’s nothing compared to the limbs impaling Fern. The girl teeters at the edge, half her body conjured roots and bark.
“I’ve got you!” Cora holds tightly to Fern. “Conjure! Fix yourself!”
“Can’t. Not … this.”
“Orion!” Cora’s voice shakes more than her arms. “She needs the earth of the provinces. Find some!”
I pull myself up and stagger over the crumbling ground. “Cora—”
“You’re the glenting Scout—find some!”
I crouch and grasp her arm instead, using my weight to anchor her.
“Give me … knife,” Fern gasps. “Life … linked.”
“Can you get the tech out?” I ask softly.
“Yes,” Fern says.
Cora sobs, her arms straining to hold on to Fern. I set the handle of my knife into Fern’s trembling hand. She digs the blade into her wrist and levers it beneath her skin, grimacing. She pries a narrow chip loose and says a word I don’t understand.
“From the … wall,” she says. A chill spreads over me. Her accent strengthens around the syllables of another Conjie word, then another. Words for freedom my Ghost father conjured along this tunnel. “The last one”—she gasps—“wasn’t conjured. It was carved.”
Carved. Ghosts don’t have knives. But Delvers do.
I meet Fern’s eyes, and she answers with a sad smile.
“Sarcoom,” Fern says. And I repeat it, like my voice can keep her in this life.
Blood streaks down her arm, and the linktech drops from her fingers. She is gone when Cora lets go.
* * *
I leave the branch in Cora’s hand. She tugs at it, her face drained of color.
“Keep going,” I mutter as we crawl through bones and scat. She mumbles beneath her breath, a litany of senseless murmurings.
Before we left, I secured the passage with every pulse transmitter we had. And I drew a chalk circle with Fern’s name beside the words for freedom. Cora moans her name over and over, but she didn’t see the girl’s eyes at the end. The relief there.
I haul Cora to her feet and stagger toward the tunnel entrance. I sense the solid cirium of the Box and direct my steps toward it like a beacon. Fern’s prison.
Not anymore. She’s free now. Sarcoom.
We collapse into the port, and I direct it to the infirmary. The physic settles Cora onto a gurney, and I numbly recount the events of the past hour. Meredith grows still as I reach the part of the story where we got between a gorge mole and a termit. She shakes her head in disbelief when I tell her that Fern is not locked in her cell. That she never will be again.
“You secured the passage?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Then we continue to move forward.” She thrusts Cora’s bloodied chain into my hands. “You’re Prime now.” As if to further her point, she drapes the Prime’s cape over my shoulders. “I’ll send Val to acquire a new Delver.”
“No,” I say, securing the clasp. “I’ll go.”