7.2 km from flash curtain
EVEN DELVERS GET one day off a week, which means I spend an entire day locked in my prison. I knew this was coming, but there’s nothing that prepares a person for utter isolation in a three-meter-square cube of metal.
The solitary light died a flickering death. Now I sit, my body aching from too many hours on the hard cot, holding the last of Dram’s flares. The candle he stole for me burned down to a puddle of wax hours ago. And I was only lighting it when I felt I would go mad from the darkness—when it felt so heavy, pressing on me like a living thing, slowly suffocating me. I stare at the red flame, gold at the center, with a sort of manic affection. In a matter of days, I have come to love fire, when once I hated everything that reminded me of Burning Days. Now each flame is a gift beating back impenetrable darkness. Sparks hit my skin, and I cherish the sting that tells me I’m alive. Smoke fills the Box, but I pretend the ache in my lungs is from standing too close to a fire pit on a Friday night at Outpost Five. The flare burns out, and panic rushes in, the darkness presses …
I close my eyes to better imagine a mug of ale, held in one hand, my other warming above the fire. Voices spill from the Rig as cavers ditch their gear and join the raucous laughter of Subpars gathered on Friday night. Graham is there, telling stories in his graveled voice, calling me girlie and pouring me too much ale. My heart aches with a sudden stab of loss, but I push it away, back to memories of a time before he gave his life in the burnt sands.
The thrum of the flash curtain stirs inside me, raising goose bumps along my arms. I shut it out, imagining Roland tuning his fiddle, and the nervous feeling I’d get wondering if Dram would ask me to dance.
I open my eyes, and I can’t see—I’m blind! No, it’s like I’m dead. Buried. It’s my day off. Dram’s not coming. I’ve got thirty-six hours to go.
Thirty-six hours of nothing but the flash curtain whispering across my senses. My scout’s instincts magnify the cirium on every side, so that I feel like the curtain has me contained in hands made of its elements. Hands surrounding me, squeezing me—
“Ugh!” I surge to my feet, hands pressed over my ears. I yell again, until I’m louder than the stirrings of the flashfall. I sway, my hands lift, and I turn to the patterns the cavers taught me. My feet tap to a rhythm Owen pounded on a barrel, a bawdy song about women and brew, with words Dram explained with a red face when we first became caving partners. I was twelve, and he fourteen, and the memory of it makes me smile and sing louder. I twirl and stomp and dance, with nothing to hinder me in this empty Box. I sing until my voice grows hoarse, until I’ve filled the Box with memories so vivid, I no longer feel alone.
* * *
My collar chimes, waking me from a restless sleep. The door slides open, but something’s off—it’s not time for Dram to be here. The tunnel lights are still at night-dim. I rise from my cot, tense.
“Ore scout? You awake?”
I leap for the figure pushing his way into the Box. Dram catches me against his chest with a soft laugh.
“What are you doing here?”
“I decided I was through being a compliant Prime.”
Laughter bubbles up inside me, but it’s tempered with worry. No one goes against Meredith. “How are you here?” My collar lets out a warning chime. “If you’re caught—”
“It will be worth it.” Dram slips a pack off his shoulders.
“We can’t close the door from the inside.” Red light blinks from the tech circling my throat.
“I worked that out,” Dram says. He turns and speaks to someone outside the door. In the faint light, I can just make out her features. Cora.
“Be well, Orion.” She nods to Dram. “We’ll only get away with this once. Make it count.” She shuts the door, and Dram grabs hold of me. He’s kissing me when my collar chimes.
“Fire, I hate that sound,” he murmurs. I catch his face between my hands and guide his mouth back to mine. He smiles against my lips, and his hands leave me long enough to pull something from his pocket. I recognize the cracking sound from a light stick just before the glow illuminates my prison. He tosses it onto my cot and draws me back into his arms.
I unfasten the buckles at his neck and waist, and our hands bump as we work his coat off. His Prime’s chain hits the floor with a clank. He kisses my neck, and I pull his shirt free, throwing it aside along with everything else that marks him as a Delver. His mouth skims along my collarbones, and my head tips back. His lips bump my collar, and I want to scream at the reminder that I am not free, I am not my own.
“Shhh,” Dram whispers. “There is nothing separating us, Rye. Nothing.” He presses kisses over my throat, like that cursed piece of tech isn’t there. His weapons belt drops to the floor, and I reach for the one holding his pants up. His breathing quickens.
“This isn’t what I came for,” he says, pulling away. “I mean—I love this, I want this—but it’s not the reason I came.” He grabs my questing hands and kisses my knuckles.
“What are you talking about?” My breath’s as ragged as his.
He grins and brushes his thumb over my kiss-swollen lips. “I brought you gifts.”
“I can’t have anything in here.”
“Just for tonight,” he says, reaching into the pack he brought. He tosses me a canteen.
“Rations,” I murmur, failing to hide my disappointment.
He laughs. “Not rations. Try it.”
I twist the lid and sip. “Oh, fire.” I take a longer drink. “Where did you get this?”
“Meredith keeps a hidden keg. Well, not so hidden, it turns out.” He toasts me with his own canteen of ale. “Ready to hear something more than the flash curtain singing in your head?” He draws a screencom from his pack, and music fills the Box.
“It’s like we’re in the outpost,” I say.
“Or the provinces.” He grasps my hands and twirls me into a dance. “Do you still hear the curtain?” I shake my head. For the first time in months, it’s drowned out by something louder, a melody born of laughter and hope and sacrifice and passion. The flash curtain calls to me so powerfully, I hear it inside myself. But now I know … love is louder.
The music changes. Something soft, quiet, not like we had in the outpost. “It’s Alaran,” he says. “I thought, even if you can’t go there, you could at least hear—”
“It’s lovely,” I say, and we sway to the sounds of instruments I can’t name. I can’t think about never seeing Alara, about this Box being a permanent part of my life, so I tighten my arms around his neck and lose myself to the sounds of a city I still dream about.
“Will you step in my steps, Orion Berrends?” he asks softly. Tears prick my eyes. I haven’t heard my name linked to his since we lived in the provinces.
“Always,” I whisper. He slips something over my wrist, where my bonding cuff used to be. Braided rope threads, wound in climbers’ knots.
“I figured this suited us.”
I touch the woven cords. “A figure-eight knot.”
“The strongest, most secure.”
I can’t speak right away, so I swallow hard and clasp his face in my hands. “Will you step in my steps, Dram Berrends?”
“For as long as this life allows.” He lifts his hand, and I see the rope band circling his wrist, an exact match to mine.
I launch myself at him, and he catches me against his chest, laughing even as our lips meet. This time, he doesn’t stop my hands, and they skim over his shoulders, his arms, pausing along the scars left by flash bats. I sweep my lips over his chest, all the places he was exposed to particle burn down nine.
“Remember the air cave?”
“No clear thoughts right now,” Dram breathes. But his eyes meet mine, and I can see the memories lingering there.
“I thought you’d die—”
“Fire, Rye, if we discuss all the times we thought we’d die, that’ll be a lot of talking.” He kisses me, hands skimming over my body, touching every scar, every injury he knows by heart. “Sit down and close your eyes,” he says. I raise a brow, and he smiles. “One last gift.”
I sit on the floor and press both hands over my eyes. My skin smells like Dram, and it intoxicates me more than the ale. I sneak a glance. Dram stands on my cot, a broken light stick in one hand, his other stretched above his head. He studies the cirium ceiling, then presses the metal with his fingertip.
“Stop peeking,” he calls without looking. I cover my eyes, trying to imagine what he’s doing. I hear the sounds of him dragging my cot across the floor, and clicking that sounds like another light stick. “All right,” he says. “You can look.”
I peer up at the dots of light. We sit in darkness, illuminated only by pinpricks of chemical he painted across the ceiling. I look at the patterns, trying to …
Stars.
He painted the night sky just as it looked from the provinces.
“I drew it in the sand when I was first captured,” he says. “And each day after that. So I wouldn’t forget.”
“Fire, I love you.” The music is turned low, so I know he hears me, and again, when I say it just beside his ear, where my lips brush the side of his face. Soon, there’s nothing of Congress between us—not my collar, our Radbands … not even this cirium prison. There’s just Dram and me, our skin glowing beneath the stars he’s given me.
He raises himself onto his arms, and his memorial pendants slide over me. We have this between us: life and death and all the ways we’ve fought to hold on to what matters.
He drops his forehead to mine, and our hands tangle.
Our bracelets press together, and I think how they’re like us—pieces of frayed rope, woven into something stronger than they were before.