0.23 km from flash curtain
THE CURTAIN IS so loud that from this far beneath the earth, it sounds like groaning. Or maybe that’s the Luna, the strain on its aluminum and rivets as it carries me closer. I pull sound cancellation devices over my earpieces and watch the meters tick off on the instrument panel. Almost there.
“Approaching curtain threshold,” a voice says in my earpiece. “Shields in place in five … four … three…” Cirium panels descend over the viewing window, obscuring the caverns blurring past outside my craft. Cabin lights illuminate, flickering with those in the cockpit.
A warning suddenly flashes from one of the gauges, one that monitors the energy spikes in the curtain. Not now. Please, not now.
“Detecting particle interference,” a voice crackles in my earpiece. The stall warning goes off, a droning sound that spikes fear into my blood. The ship wobbles, and I stare at the controls, waiting for the remote pilot to do something.
“Central Command!” I move my mouthpiece closer. “I could use some help here!”
“Auxiliary power commencing in five … four…” The cockpit plunges into darkness. I hold my breath as the craft whines, as if it’s struggling to catch its breath. It slows, banging into cavern walls like a bird with one wing. It nicks a wall of rock, jolting me off my feet. I grasp the console, holding tight as the craft spins awkwardly off its axis.
“Central!” I shout.
No response. Just the grinding of steel on stone as the Luna careens to a stop.
The craft is suddenly too quiet, and in the silence, I’m made aware of exactly where I am. I feel bared to the elements, the meters of rock my only shield from the radioactive particles crashing down overhead. The curtain presses on me, its energy pulsing inside my chest like a second heart. I don’t need my gauges to tell me how close I am. With shaking fingers, I tug free my sound cancellation earpieces. I try to hear the curtain’s song, but it sounds like screaming.
Maybe it knows it’s about to die.
I have to hurry. The release point lies half a kilometer from here. The caving suit they created for me will protect me long enough to get the SAMM into place. I’ll have to do this like a Delver.
I slide along the wall, following the hum of cirium in the fabric of my suit. My hand glides over dents in the aluminum where rock nearly penetrated the fuselage. A sinking sensation settles in the pit of my stomach. This really is going to be a one-way trip. I stumble against the tube of glass housing my gear. My fingers slip over the locking mechanism, and the door opens with a hiss. Cirium hums its melody as I drag the suit free. It has its own power cell, and I engage the perimeter lights.
It reminds me of the spacesuits I saw pictures of in Alara. Only this is more compact, with built-in armor, and it’s black, silver, and gray—the shades of cavern shadows that I insisted upon. I lift myself into the suit and seal it at my wrists and neck. It’s warm inside the suit, and I engage the auto-adjusting body coolant and the air intake, but what I need most right now is contact with Congress.
They designed my headpiece with a screen that shows text in case I can’t hear anything more than the curtain. It’s compact, with a 360-degree viewing shield, so I won’t have any blind spots. I settle it over my head and lock it into place. The silence is a welcome relief. I activate the screencom.
“Congress? Can you hear me?”
“Luna—” The garbled voice cuts out.
“You’re not transmitting,” I say. “Too much interference. Auxiliary systems failed. I’m ditching the Luna and delivering the SAMM manually.” I can’t understand the response. The words that scroll across my screen don’t make sense either.
Something stirs in the darkness, and I look past the jumbled words on my visor. I lift my palm light, and a shape moves just beyond the glow.
“Who’s there?”
A friend
The words display on my screen.
“I came alone!”
You’re not alone
My heart thunders in my chest as I peer through the dark cabin. This isn’t possible. I would have known if someone had slipped onto this craft with me. “I told the Congress I don’t need a Delver.”
Not a Delver
I stare at the words. Whoever this is, he’s using a private comlink. Congress isn’t hearing any of this.
“If not a Delver, then what?” I whisper the words, but I know they’re coming up on his screencom. I search the darkness for the glow that will give him away.
If you’re going to find your way back, you need a marker
The words stop me cold. There’s no sound but the flash curtain, but I swear I heard Dram’s voice in that com. I scan the cabin, turning in a slow circle, breathless. Hope is a flower, blooming in my chest, poison if I’m wrong.
“There are no markers anymore,” I whisper.
Right behind you, ore scout
The lights flicker, the auxiliary power struggling to find life. In the flashes of light, I catch glimpses of his face. The visor of his helmet is clear, so nothing blocks the blue eyes I thought I’d never see again this side of life. The Luna shifts, and we both stagger. Dram catches my arm, but I feel like I’m falling still.
“I watched you die.” My words flicker across his screencom.
He shakes his head. “You saw Striders shoot me.” He removes his helmet, and I stare numbly as he unfastens mine.
The curtain screams inside my head.
I cry out, but I can’t hear myself. The sounds of the flash curtain are like fingers raking across my mind. Dram grips my arm and shoves a bit of biotech behind my ear. A pinch of pain, but I am numb, and the curtain is all I feel, its voice filling every part of me until I explode—
Silence.
My eyes fly to Dram’s worried gaze. He did something. The device he inserted shut out the curtain somehow. I taste blood on the back of my tongue. He grips my face in his hands and wipes my tears with his thumbs. Not tears. Blood. I can see it on his fingers, even though his suit is black like mine.
He touches the device behind my ear. “This will block the sounds of the curtain. It transmits only the frequency of my voice.”
I try to make sense of what he’s telling me, but his fingers brush the side of my face, and I can’t think at all. I’m suddenly a creature of sensation. Touch. Sight—though I’m still doubting what I see. And now I hear …
Dram’s voice, calling to me. Not on a screen, not in my memories, but right …
Here.
“Rye? You all right—”
I crush him to me. His arms steal around me, and a sound escapes him—like he was stuck too long underwater and just came up for air. His lips move beside my ear as he murmurs my name in a choked voice.
“Orion.”
The way he says it is like no one else. He knows what it means to me—a girl named for some of the brightest stars, who lived in a place of only ash and embers. Even when I earned the title scout and the cavers stopped laughing about my name, he called me Rye—to remind me of who I really was. To remind me there was more beyond the flashfall. I never thought I’d hear my name like that again.
“I don’t understand,” I murmur. “There were Striders surrounding you. I heard the shots.”
“Only one of them actually shot me. A … friend intervened while they were transporting my body.”
“A friend.” The word sticks on my tongue like a sour taste. He doesn’t offer further explanation, and I sense an edge to his emotions, like he’s holding them in check as much as his body.
“We need to move.” He glances to the right of his visor, and I know he’s reading something—time, or depth gauges, maybe. Or communication from a friend. “It’s not particle interference,” he says. “I jammed the coms myself. They can’t know I’m here.”
Apprehension tingles along my nerves. “Why are you here?”
“For the mission—the real one.” He hoists a pack over his shoulders and fastens it across his chest. “I’m going to destroy access to the eludial seam.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask. “What happened in Alara?”
“Ordinance … recruited me.”
Ordinance. My mind spins through the implications.
Something nags at me, like a hand tapping my shoulder. I look closer at Dram. He’s different, and it’s not just his allegiance that’s changed.
“Your Radband’s gone.”
He lifts his sleeve, past the place where the tech’s been removed, and I gasp. It’s not a stretch of scarred skin like mine, but smooth, with the brand of a Codev glowing beneath it. Numbers and symbols, the luminous blue of safe cavern water. But he is not safe.
I recognize the symbol pulsing from his arm. Vigil. They’ve made Dram deadly.
“Glenting hell!” I lurch back, an instinctive reflex at the sight of that symbol. “How?” I ask, staring, as if my eyes will give me some explanation.
“I don’t even understand it myself,” he says. “Ordinance tech is…”
Gems are engineered from conception with biologically predetermined features and characteristics, and genetically synthesized resistance. Dram is not a true Gem. But Ordinance has modified him like one. A million questions jump to mind, but only one matters now.
“Why are you here?”
“To save you.” Something in the way he says it—like there’s a message in his words I’m not getting. It’s how Gems speak, like their thoughts are beyond ours. I shiver. I didn’t feel truly alone until this moment. I step back, feeling my way through the fractured darkness with caver’s instincts.
“You jammed my coms. You did something to the auxiliary power.” He doesn’t respond. I back away, bumping into things. I have never been afraid of Dram Berrends, but this isn’t the same boy I grew up with at Outpost Five. “Fire, Dram, why are you really here?”
“To stop you.” There’s no hidden meaning in his words this time. He walks toward me, this Dram who is not Dram. He was always graceful in the way he moved, but his stride now is efficient. Predatory.
“What did they do to you?”
“Set me free.”
“You’re different.”
“And you’re blind, Orion. You don’t see what’s really going on. Mining eludial soil is what’s causing the flashfall to worsen. We have to stop the delving. Permanently.”
“You can’t stop me.”
A pained look crosses his face. “I already did.” I touch the place where the biotech earpiece pricked me. I felt the stab of it inserting, but in the pain of the flash curtain tearing through my senses, I didn’t register the additional prick of a needle. Even through my glove I feel the swollen skin at the side of my neck. The place where Dram stuck me with … my thoughts turn inside my head, like flurries of snowflakes in a gust of wind. Where he must’ve … I stagger against the console, suddenly exhausted. What was I doing?
“Serum 5,” Dram says, his voice echoing strangely. “Conjie inhibitor. Your dad’s creation.”
Dad. Dram. Betraying me. My legs forget what they’re for, and Dram catches me, easing me to the floor of the ship. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“You won’t…” My words stick inside my mouth, and I work to push them past my lips. “Make it … without me…”
“This is the only way.” He pulls a space blanket from a pocket of his suit and covers me, then goes through every one of my pockets, removing the dirt and seeds I’d stored there. “I’m sorry, Orion.”
My name again, only this time, the sound of it is all wrong. My eyelids refuse to stay open, and part of me is wondering why I even care. I should just sleep. Another part of me is screaming that I have to stay awake. There is something … something I need to remember …
Dram says something else, but it sounds like I’m hearing him from underwater. He touches my face, but I can barely see him through the slits of my eyelids that are heavy as rocks. Lights flicker as I watch him climb out the hatch, and I sink deeper, down, down.
Water cradles me. I’m floating, weightless in the Sky. I stare up toward the cavern walls, where chalk circles glimmer like stars above me. Mom. Her name, her chalk circle. She is safe.
You’re not safe!
My brow crinkles. That other voice intrudes … but I’m happy here, floating—
Orion!
My name is the stars, and I am floating with them, far beyond this—
Ship. Crashed. The Luna!
The water pulls me down, but I can breathe underwater. I am a creature of the cavern, resting along the cirium basin. But something’s missing. Dram should be here.
Dram. Betrayer! He left me here to float away—took everything that would let me conjure.
I force my eyelids open, but I still see the Sky. There is something—
Conjure!
No, I’m a creature that sleeps at the bottom of safe cavern water—
Conjure!
I can’t conjure anything. Dad drugged me, and Dram took the earth of the provinces—
No.
My hands fist, and my eyes open wide, seeing the damaged cabin. Dram didn’t take everything.
He didn’t know about the dirt in my gloves.
* * *
He left the medkit. It rests against my thigh in the large pouch on my left leg. I can only seem to hold one thought at a time, so after I grasp this realization, I set it aside for another.
I can’t lift my arms.
Whatever serum Dad made, it relies on knocking me out hard. I have no idea what adrenaline will do to me now, but I have to try. And fast. Some part of my mind is awake, but it’s losing the battle to the rest of my head that feels like it’s being stuffed with gauze.
My hands. I just need one to move. I concentrate, pushing every last fragment of energy into the fingers of my right hand. The pouch of dirt and seeds rests against my palm, ready to be broken open. A thin barrier of cloth rests between me and freedom.
Oblivion beckons. Meds pulse through my body, weighing down my veins, my bones. I’m so, so tired. I’ll just rest a moment …
Orion.
Mom’s voice. Or the way I remember her voice. It’s been so long.
I’m here.
She hands me her axe. The handle’s cracked, but she’s smiling. Why does her broken axe make her happy?
Use it to get free.
She said that to me. I was just eight. She’s saying it now. Her voice fills the cabin, and I feel the wood handle crack beneath my fingers. Bloody fingers. Conjie blood. Subpar blood. I’m back in Outpost Five, shattering my Radband with Mom’s broken axe. I slam it into the ground, and dirt explodes beneath my fingers.
No. There is no axe. Just my hand, hitting the floor of the Luna. But the dirt against my palm is real. Soil from the provinces, its elements alive in my hand, slipping like threads along my fingers.
Roots tease my palm like soft hairs. Like little Wes, when I used to comb his hair and those baby-fine strands would wind through my fingers. The roots thicken, pushing against my palm, restrained by my gloves. The vine thrusts from my palm, stretching the fabric, tearing through with a rending I can’t hear, but feel all the way to my bones. Serum 5 winds a cocoon around me, snuffing out all sensation, all thought, until I can’t—
“Augh!” Thorns pierce my skin, clearing my mind enough to focus my ability. I conjure more thorns along my vine, long enough to pierce my suit and make pain penetrate the haze of serum. My vine lifts, green shoots tangling, thorns thrusting past leaves, and I center every remaining bit of energy I have on directing the vine, like a hand to my pocket. The thorns poke me, like teeth keeping me awake in nips and bites, as the vine wraps around my medkit and carries it to my outstretched hand.
My vision is fading. I direct the vine to pry into the kit, because I can barely move my arm. Adrenaline. I uncap the syringe with one hand. I don’t have the strength to drive the needle into my thigh. The world spins away; I am falling through a galaxy of stars, where I can rest with the sound of my heart loud in my ears …
“Water,” I whisper. My leaves shiver and morph. I can’t open my eyes to see them alter, but I feel it. Droplets of water splash onto me, drip down my neck. I gasp, jolted from my dozing half sleep. I send vines shooting around me like arms, turning me on my side while my shaking hand holds the syringe. Vines shoot upward, widening to limbs and branches; roots shudder against the fuselage, flipping my body. I slam down, the needle piercing my thigh. I sob into the floor of the ship, wet and shivering, thorny vines tangled around me.
It’s not enough. Whatever Dad composed this serum with, adrenaline’s not enough to—
I gasp, long and hard. My breath shudders through my lungs like it’s shaking out cobwebs. Blood races through my veins so fast—too fast. Now I’m breathing like I’ve run for hours. I tear free from the vines and stand.
Dram took my guns but not my knives. I find two of them, along with a pickaxe. I strap them on, secure my suit, and step from the Luna. As I scout my way to the seam, I consider my options. Part of me wants to take the ship and leave Dram here, but he’s out there in the seam—engaging a device that will wipe out all the transmitters. If I don’t stop him, every passage we’ve delved will collapse, and the seam and its eludial soil will be inaccessible once more. Besides, I’m not sure the Luna’s going to be able to take anyone up out of here. As I pass the craft, I can’t help noticing the damage.
Dram left a trail of bloody corpses. I wind my way through the cavern passages, my lights turned low, the pungent scent of termit blood thick in my nostrils despite the headpiece. I can’t believe how many there are. I’ve stepped over five already. That means only one thing—there’s a food source for them down here, large enough to draw multiple termits to the same territory.
The thought should scare me, but I’m numb inside and out. Dad and Dram betrayed me, and my body is mine to command only so long as the adrenaline lasts. Even now, I sense Serum 5 teasing the edges of my mind.
An orbie pool glows orange, illuminating the slick walls like flames of fire. I cross the water, my feet slipping on stones. I’m slow. Too slow. Orbies clamber atop each other to get to me—the hope of a meal stirring the pool into a frenzy. These orbies are fast, so numerous they rise from the water in growing towers. They won’t leave the water, but I still have ten meters to cross before I’m back on the ground. I should conjure a bridge, but I’ve barely enough energy to walk.
A rock path suddenly forms close by, arching across the pool. I race to follow the mole that’s conjuring it. The orbies shoot up toward us, reaching from the water like glowing hands. I’ve never seen them move this way, fast, linking to each other to form chains that reach—
I unfasten my glove, gritting my teeth against the sting of particles. They burn—but not as much as the orbies would. I grasp dirt and conjure fire, throwing it at the towers reaching our bridge. The orbies let out shrill screeches as they burn up. I’m almost across the pool. I keep throwing fire, hoping the mole doesn’t conjure this path to dust the second it reaches safety. My aim is terrible, and I stagger as I run; the serum feels like hands pulling me back. The rock path glows orange as orbies spill onto it. Then it dissolves.
I leap across the remaining distance and crash onto the ground. I’m not sure I can get up again. Serum 5 is a door closing me into the Tomb. I feel like I could sleep and never wake. But my ungloved hand presses against the dirt, and without having to look, I know it’s eludial soil. I’ve made it to the seam.
I curl my fist around it and shove it into my pocket. My arms shake, but I manage to lever myself off the ground. The soil is so thick that I can see each one of Dram’s footprints. Step in my steps, I think bitterly as I follow his marks.
He doesn’t hear me as I approach from behind. He’s leaning over some sort of device: tech that glows with a Codev.
I could stop him right now—take him down with fire from my hands. I reach for dirt, and eludial soil glitters in my palm. Flame sparks.
I can’t do it. Not with his back to me.
He didn’t fight you fairly, a bitter voice reminds me.
“I followed your marks,” I say.
He whirls around, shock written across his face. “Orion.” He holds a flash rifle, aimed at me.
“You going to shoot me, Dram?”
“Don’t make me. Please.”
“What you’re doing is going to kill everyone.”
“It’s going to save everyone! The delving is making the curtain expand, the flashbursts—”
“You’re wrong!”
“When did you become so compliant, Orion?”
“I’m not—”
“You do everything you’re told, like a good little Forger—Meredith’s obedient Ghost. When did you stop questioning things?”
“Jameson said—”
“Jameson did this to me!” He lifts his arm, where the clear sleeve of his suit shows the Codev glowing beneath his skin.
“Why?” My voice is a choked cry.
“So I’d survive long enough to finish this. So I’d be capable of stopping you.”
Better that Dram had died than be turned on me like some brainwashed mercenary. I thrust my hands toward him, conjuring vines that slam into him, knocking him off his feet. He hits the ground, and I pin him down, weaving the vines into thick roots. I crouch beside him and remove every knife, every gun. “You’re not able to stop me. Even with your damned modifications.”
“Oh, fire, Orion, I really am.” He looks forlorn, like he’s being forced to stab me, but his hand is empty; I’ve kicked all his weapons aside. His gaze shutters, in the way Vigils have, like they’re reading internal data. A wave of energy bursts from his Codev, cracking apart the roots I conjured. He grasps my wrist.
Pain.
Ripping.
Tearing.
Can’t. Breathe.
Makeitstopmakeitstop.
My vision blurs, but I can still see tears in his blue eyes.
“Stop. Fighting me.” I read the words from his lips, because I can’t hear anymore. My eardrums are outside my body, somewhere beyond the
seizing
choking.
I try to speak, to scream all the thoughts knocking around my head, but only bubbles of drool form on my lips. What is he doing to me? The force of it makes his arms shake where he grasps me, as if a current pulses from him into me.
I have to make my words count, then. They’re the only weapon I have left.
“You put poison … inside me.” My voice is so soft, but I see the words flash across his screencom. “When you were … Weeks.” He stops—whatever he’s doing—and I gasp a breath. I sound like an old caver, wheezing through particle-filled lungs.
“What are you talking about?”
“You didn’t know … it was me.” He sits back on his heels, like he wants to escape what I’m telling him. But he can’t; the truth writes itself across his headpiece in glowing text. “We fought … in the Tomb.”
“That’s not possible.”
“You attacked me … with your spear … and a venom spike.”
“That was a Brunt…”
“Me. I became a Brunt … for you. To get to you.” His breath is ragged. I can’t hear it, but I can see his shoulders rising and falling. He shakes his head.
“No.” The single word flashes on my screencom. “I was … gone … out of my head.”
“I know.”
He reels back, like I hit him. And I have, I know it. I’ve rocked him to his core with the one thing I know he can’t handle. Not even modified Dram can manage this horrifying truth.
“I hurt you,” he says, the words somewhere between a question and a statement.
I thought I had forgiven him, that I had placed the blame for his actions on Congress. But now resentment claws its way from the deepest parts of me, from the part of my soul that died that night on the dirt floor of the Tomb.
“You attacked me.”
He stares, like I’ve impaled him straight through the gut with a spear. He slowly shakes his head, but I’ve got my hands clenched on the other end of that spear, and I’m coming in with the death twist.
“I traded my clothes. Payment. To get to you.”
He yells so loud I have to press my hands to my ears. He yells like I’m stabbing him with my truth spear again and again, but I’ve stopped. I’m all out of revelations.
Some part of him—the deepest part that contained Weeks—remembers. Maybe not my face, but the girl, broken and brave, staring him down inside the Tomb. The yelling stops, but these sounds are worse. He’s crouched, arms over his head, but he can’t escape himself.
He doesn’t ask for forgiveness. He doesn’t explain away what he said and did that night.
I don’t tell him I understand, that Congress took his humanity one gram of flash dust at a time.
We don’t say anything. I’ve mortally wounded him with the truth, and now we can only kneel here, bleeding out all our broken pieces. Serum 5 takes me farther under. I can’t muster the strength to fight it any longer.
“Orion,” Dram says, his voice raw. Tear tracks streak the grime on his face. His eyes are red-rimmed, making the blue extra bright. “I need you to trust me.”
“Trust you?” If I had any strength at all, I’d laugh.
“There is no chance that you will outmaneuver me. Not with that serum in your veins.” He says it as an apology, with a look of such remorse that it’s like he’s sorry about the Tomb also, and everything that’s happened to put us on two different sides.
“Please, Dram.” I can barely move. “Finish my mission.” He looks at me, hard, as if he’s looking for his answer in my face.
“No.” And now the spear is in his hands, the tip twisting in my gut. He lifts my hand and examines the holes a vine tore through my glove. “It was in your gloves.” He pulls off my glove, and I gasp as particles tingle along my exposed skin. He shakes out the earth and seeds.
Tears burn the back of my throat, and anger rises past the drugs in my system. As he empties my pockets once more, I lift my exposed hand to my mouth, grip the rope bracelet he gave me with my teeth, and pull it off. Dram watches me grasp the bracelet with shaking fingers, the bonding cuff he wove for me, the figure-eight knot that symbolizes the strength of our union.
I drop it over the ledge.
I feel him tug my glove back over my hand, wondering why he cares about protecting my skin when he’s utterly destroyed me. I want to curse at him. I want to be back on my feet, fighting him with everything I have. But he stands and walks away.
Text glows across my screencom, too blurry to read—the words sway to the slowing of my pulse. Darkness crowds the edges of my vision. I’m paralyzed, as if I’ve been hit with the barbed tails of cordon rats, and I ache, like they’ve chewed right through to my heart. I stare at the ribbon of words until it stills enough for me to read it.
I love you, Orion.
The pain is too much. Darkness pulls me down.