0.23 km from flash curtain
METAL GROANS.
My body hums with vibration that has nothing to do with serums—I’m on a ship. Part of a crushed metal hull pushes into my side. The Luna.
I try to sit up, but I’m strapped down. I’m in a medcot, an IV trailing from my arm to a drip suspended above my head. The bag of fluid sways with the ship. I twist my neck and see that beneath the blanket I’m dressed in a fresh undersuit, my particle-exposed hand bandaged. The door of the decontamination chamber bangs against the fuselage; whoever used it last didn’t even bother to close it. I look at my skin. Particle-free.
The Luna groans again, a shudder that ripples up from the engines and shakes the cabin. Dram stands at the controls, still dressed in his suit, coated in particle dust. He wears a com unit and is speaking to someone, his tone strained, the words soft but urgent. Somehow he’s blocked the sounds of the curtain from the cockpit. But he couldn’t block the sounds of the Luna, and she sounds like she’s dying.
“The straps are for your protection,” he calls, and I realize he’s talking to me. “Hang on!”
We dive, and my stomach leaps. We should be headed up, not down. The thrusters must be damaged.
“What have you done to us, Dram?” I pull free of the restraints and slide the IV from my arm. The hull shakes, and I grasp hold of the medcot.
“You shouldn’t be up,” he calls. The lights flicker as the ship lurches, and I hold my hands out, feet braced as I make my way to the cockpit.
“What did you do to my ship?”
“Not me. The curtain.” The lights go out, and for just a moment, the only illumination is Dram’s Codev. I follow the glow. The instrument panel flickers to life above the console, illuminating his anxious expression.
“Another flashpulse?” I ask.
“Not a flashpulse,” he mutters. “Ordinance is bringing the device online. They warned me the curtain could destabilize momentarily.”
“Momentary destabilization … of the flash curtain? We’re traveling the eludial seam!”
“Yes, Orion,” Dram mutters. “I’m aware of that.”
He presses a button and speaks in an undertone. I can hear only his side of the conversation. He says my name more than once. A knife sits on the console beside him like a dare.
“Don’t, Rye,” he says without looking. “I won’t fight you again.”
“Well, then this should be easy for me.”
He hands me a screencom. “Jameson intercepted these. Projections on the device the Congress ordered you to deliver.”
“I made a deal,” I say behind my teeth.
“You made a mistake.”
“The cure, Dram. Freedom for our people—”
“They were going to be dead, Orion! Of course the Prime Commissary made that promise—it cost her nothing!” He slides his finger over the screencom, and a projected image illuminates above it. It takes me a moment to understand what I’m seeing—image after image of the curtain expanding. Maps of predicted outcomes.
“Look at it!” Dram says. “You think I’m lying? You think Jameson would help me—your father would help me—if it wasn’t the truth? Open your eyes, Orion! The Prime Commissary did not make some deal with a seventeen-year-old caver from the outposts! She tricked you. Used you.”
I sink to the floor and draw my legs to my chest. The holoprojection plays on repeating loop.
“Who knew about this?”
“The Prime.” He looks at me. “And Meredith. I think she has some fantasy about restoring Old Alara. Ordinance is changing our society. They saw this as a way to take it back.”
“They would start a war with Ordinance.”
“Not if it seemed like an accident. They planned to pin this on you. Rebel intervention.”
The ship heaves and stops, slamming against the side of the tunnel. We catch ourselves against the floor of the craft. “What happened to the Luna, Dram?”
“They didn’t trust a remote detonation—too many variables affecting the tech. I had a window of time to get back and get out of the seam before it went off. I didn’t plan to—” He breaks off, a look of stark hopelessness in his eyes. “I took too long getting back to the ship.”
He didn’t plan to have to carry me. That’s what he’s not saying. I run through the passage in my mind—the termits, the massive orbie pool. My memories of it are hazy, but enough to paint a startling picture.
“How?”
“How what?”
“How did you possibly carry me all the way back?” He doesn’t say, and I know it has something to do with the Codev glowing on his arm.
“It doesn’t matter. The ship’s dead. We’re not getting out of here.” Whatever Gem modifications he’s had, they didn’t fix his claustrophobia. I can almost see the whites of his eyes.
“I’m glad they didn’t make your eyes purple,” I murmur.
“What?”
“How much do you trust me?”
“Completely. Not at all. It depends.”
“You’re not thinking like a Conjie.” I search the dark hold for my clothes and start dragging them on.
“What are you talking about?” Dram asks. He watches me secure my suit and stuff my feet into boots. “We can’t just conjure a path. We can’t survive this close to the curtain without cirium shields, and the ship’s dead.”
“We’ll have cirium shields,” I assure him. “But we’re not riding the ship out of here. We’re taking the SAMM.”
* * *
As far as tight spaces go, this ventures into Dram’s nightmare territory. The SAMM was designed to hold eludial soil, not Subpars. We managed to secure ourselves inside the vessel and launch it from the crippled Luna. The autonomous controls kicked in immediately, and the craft self-pilots itself along the eludial seam, faster than the Luna in her best moments.
“If this doesn’t work,” Dram mutters, “at least we’ll die quick.”
I barely hear him. Even with the tech he placed behind my ear, I’m struggling to block the sounds of the curtain slamming down around us. We brace ourselves against the rounded metal walls as the SAMM rockets through the passage. It’s stifling. There’s no ventilation. Our suits are the only things keeping us from suffocation.
The metal collection doors strain to open. The seams groan where I’ve conjured them shut. Eludial gems ping against the metal, and it sounds like rocks hitting a tin roof. They sound like they will hammer right through the cirium shields.
The SAMM was designed to collect ore, and it seems to resent being forced to transport people. It begins to rattle so hard it shakes the breath from my chest. I brace myself, but my teeth clack together. The door motors grind, smoking as the gears spin uselessly, the sounds adding to the cacophony pounding through my skull.
Please end soon, please end soon, please end—
We hit the seam bed, and my head slams against the inside of the pod. Dram wedges me against him, gripping me tightly with one arm, the other braced against the metal wall, his legs splayed to keep us secure.
“I’m going to tell you about my talisman,” he says loudly in my earpiece.
“What?”
“The promise I made you. The secret one.” The craft rattles so hard that it makes his words vibrate in his chest. I feel them better than I hear them.
“I’m listening.” Anything to get my mind off the rattling, jolting—
“Home,” he says. “I vowed to give you a home. One you didn’t have to keep running from.”
Home. The word resonates in me, stronger than the curtain. I try to paint an image in my mind, but come up blank. So I hold on to the word, as if it’s a thing with doors and windows and shields enough to shut out the flashfall. And I cling to Dram as we rattle through the passage.
All at once, the collection doors cease their clatter. We’ve left the seam behind. The SAMM glides through the delved passages. I don’t give myself time to catch my breath. We have only moments before we reach the tunnel entrance, and whoever’s awaiting the SAMM beside the Box. I tear my gloves off and drag my hands across the inside of the module.
“What are you doing?” Dram asks.
“I didn’t seal it completely. I left it open—just a crack.”
“Why?”
“A theory. An important one.” Rock forms beneath my touch, and I concentrate, focusing on the elements. I have to get this right.
“Are you conjuring rocks?” Dram asks.
“Tunnel shale.”
“Is there a reason you’re filling this very small space with worthless stone?”
“I’m thinking like a Conjie.”
“Great. You’re talking like one, too.” The SAMM slows to a crawl. “Whatever you’re doing,” Dram says, “you’d better hurry.”
I conjure away the places where I sealed the opening, then carefully slide my gloves back on. The module stops with a hiss. “Let me do the talking,” I murmur.
“Part of your theory?”
“Step in my steps.”
The collection unit opens. Techs in Radsuits hover at the opening. They stare at us, their instruments hanging slack from their gloved hands.
“Commissary?” one of them calls. “You’d better come see this.”
Meredith strides forward just as Dram and I sit up, dusted in glinting particles of eludial soil.
“Striders,” she orders, and four soldiers raise flash rifles at us.
“The Luna failed,” I announce, unfastening my headpiece and stepping free of the pod. “I had to ride the SAMM out of the seam.”
“And him?” Her wide eyes shift to Dram like he’s a flash bomb about to detonate.
“Ordinance sent him to assist me.” Always best to lie with the truth.
“He died in Alara.”
“Not completely,” Dram says, taking off his headpiece. He turns his arm so she can see his Codev.
“Restrain him!” Meredith commands. She turns to a tech. “Get the council on the screencom. Now!”
“We can’t transmit from down here—”
“We’ll go up. Bind her,” Meredith orders. I don’t fight as a Strider forces cirium binders over my gloved hands.
Meredith pushes past the techs and peers into the pod. “This isn’t right,” she mutters, lifting the small boulders of tunnel shale. She tosses them on the ground. I watch where each piece lands.
“Where’s the eludial soil?” she demands.
I meet her hard stare. “Beyond your reach.”
Her gaze flicks to Dram, then to the Striders holding him. “Take him up. We’ll question him before the council.” They drag Dram into the port.
“Where do you want the Forger?”
“Put her in her cell,” Meredith says. “We’ll find out what happened, then deal with her.” They guide me into the Box, and she hovers at the entrance.
“Your mother played her tricks with me,” Meredith says. “And it gained her nothing. She died beneath a heap of rock at the bottom of a cave. It seems you’re following in her footsteps, after all. The physic will be coming for you to fit your collar. If you survive the procedure, you will probably wish you hadn’t.” She steps away and nods to the tech.
“There’s no light,” he says, glancing past me at the dark bulb.
“Seal her in,” Meredith orders. “Ghosts don’t need light.”
The door slides shut. Darkness holds me in its grasp.
“I’m not a Ghost,” I say.
I wait for the vibration that tells me Meredith and the techs have ascended the shaft. Then I turn my focus to the eludial soil pressed against my palms, hidden beneath my gloves.
Flame sparks and flares in my hand. They have consigned me to darkness, but I have my own light. I study the flame leaping through the cirium binder. I shouldn’t be able to conjure through cirium. It’s not possible. Not unless I’m right about eludial soil …
I stop conjuring fire and turn my focus to the dirt pressed against my hand. My Subpar senses pick apart the elements until I can identify every trace of rock and eludial gems. I’m already attuned to the cirium—there’s so much of it—surrounding me on all sides and binding my hands. An image fills my mind: the flashtide swirling in spirals through the flashfall, like it’s being drawn down from the atmosphere. I feel the eludial soil pulsing with similar energy, a sort of compulsion to draw the cirium back into itself.
I told Dram I had a theory—and I know, as the binders fall away, that I was right. I conjure fire with both hands. The gloves are burned away, but the eludial soil remains. I crouch and study the metal binders. Iron. I turned them into iron.
I start laughing. The Congress thinks they have me contained. They have no idea what I’m capable of, but I’m figuring it out, inside their carefully designed prison.
Meredith and the Prime Commissary may understand the power of eludial soil, but not the people who have the ability to wield it.
“I’M NOT A GHOST!” I shout. They can’t hear me. No one can hear me.
The flame wavers in my hand, dancing in a draft of air. I lift it, examining the size and shape of the air shaft. No other Forger would have seen it—not without light. Even if they had, the vent is high up, with no possible way to reach it.
Not for a regular Forger.
I don’t speak aloud my next thought, but I hear it echoing from my past, from the tunnels of Outpost Five, and the dust of the cordons …
I’m Orion, the Hunter, the Scout who can find anything.
And I just found the way out.