41.6 km from flash curtain
I SLING MY pack over my shoulder, and it drags across the flare wound. I groan aloud, shoving the pack off and dropping it on the ground. I sink to a rock, peeling back my cloak and shirt as the burn pulses in time with my heart.
I don’t want to look at it. I’ve seen enough burns that I know what it looks like, and how the skin will eventually heal into a puckered scar. But this wasn’t a normal wound; this was the flash curtain, reaching across boundaries to brand me.
Dram’s checked it each day, to make sure the strange luminescent streaks didn’t come back. I turned my head away each time, too afraid I’d see the flash curtain’s imprint on my body again. I can feel it oozing now, the skin torn open from our fight with King.
“You have a bad owie.”
I glance up. Briar stands over me, her conjured cloak dwarfing her small frame.
“Yes,” I whisper, trying to muster a smile. I slap a handful of snow over my wound, hoping to numb the pain.
“Mom says aloe for burns.” She kneels beside me and digs in the snow until she uncovers a green shoot. I wonder if she sensed it was there, like Subpars sense cirium in stone. She peels off her mittens and cradles the blade of grass. The grass quivers, like it’s waking up. It grows, stretches, as if spring just announced its arrival.
My pulse quickens. I never tire of watching Conjurors in that moment when they shift matter to something else. I realize I’m stretching my hand toward that shivering plant, like I’m somehow part of its alteration, as if I can feel the energy making it something new. It widens, splits; spines ripple along its length, and pointy fronds burst from the center.
“Aloe,” she says, breaking off a spiny leaf. She squeezes the juice along my wound. I hiss from the touch, but moments later the cool liquid chases away the burn. She snaps another pad from the plant and dabs it over my skin, humming softly.
She is a child of nature. Everything we Subpars have sacrificed was to protect the remnant of natural humanity inside the city, but I wonder if our society has been looking at it wrong this whole time.
“It will heal now,” she says.
“Thank you,” I murmur.
Healers. These people are healers, and the Congress is exterminating them.
I think of all the wounds torn open by our city-state—the families ripped apart in the outposts, and the miners burning in the cordons. A Protocol that preserves some people and not others.
I wonder if Alara could ever heal.
Maybe. If we use our abilities to transform what is into something new.
* * *
My wound still aches as I jog from our camp, but instead of slowing me down, it propels me, a warning of a single truth that can no longer be ignored. The flash curtain is expanding its reach, and if we don’t act soon, it will take hold of us all.
“Orion, wait!” Roran calls. His gaze travels over my pack to the climbing harness I’m wearing. “I know you’re planning something. I want to help.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“As if things around here are ever safe.” He lifts his wrist to show the flash vulture feather he wears as a cuff. “This is my fight as much as it’s yours.”
“No.”
“How long have you been hiding from the Congress?” he asks. “A few months? I’ve been running from them my entire life.”
“I’m going after a Mod.”
Words die on his lips, and he simply stares. “What do you mean ‘going after’?”
“I’m going to climb a charging station and bolt onto one of them. Ride it straight into Alara.”
A smile spreads across his face. “The camo-cloth…” I can see him mentally piecing together my plan. “But the platform is fifty meters high. How do you plan to—”
He breaks off when I shift my coat to reveal the climbing harness strapped tightly around my waist and thighs. From my belt sways Dram’s old climbing bolt gun and a dozen bolts.
He shakes his head. “Not good enough. Those platforms are alive with current. Even if you made the climb without attracting attention, I’m sure your charred corpse would hinder the rest of your plan.”
I glare at him.
He shrugs. “You need to think like a Conjie.”
“Fine. What would a Conjie do?”
“It’s better if I show you.” He shoves two handfuls of dirt into his pockets and strides ahead of me, in the direction of the one remaining charging station.
* * *
We’re silent the first few kilometers, stealthily trekking through the woods. Then we pass through the trees at the top of a ridge and see it rising from the ground like a finger balancing a plate. I was never really aware of the charging towers before. Not with the visceral awareness thrumming through me now. Seeing them and knowing you’re about to climb to the top of one are very different things. I step forward, before fear paralyzes me.
“Wait.” Roran catches my arm. “Not much cover once we head down the ridge.”
“Except what you conjure.”
“True.” He plucks a pinecone off the ground and closes both hands around it. Seconds later his fingers spread apart, revealing the shiny skin of an apple. He hands it to me and conjures water. “There won’t be time for rations once you anchor onto that Mod.”
I crunch the apple down to the core, not even tasting it. I don’t tell him that my stomach is a twisting ball of nerves. Instead, I hand him my loaded gun. “In case of flash vultures.”
“You’ve seen more of them?”
I consider lying, just to spare him, but I can’t think of a time that has ever helped any of us. I nod.
His features harden, like water turning to ice. “Let them come,” he murmurs, lifting dirt from his pocket. The soil bounces in his palm, twisting on an invisible wind current, then suddenly explodes in thick spikes of wood, a five-pointed star with tips sharp as blades. “Keep your gun,” he says.
“Promise me—if something goes wrong, you’ll get out of there.”
He conjures the wood back to dirt. “They won’t catch me.”
We race down the ridge at the same time.
“I should warn you,” I call, “this plan has a lot of holes.” Foolish, reckless, headstrong. The words pass through my mind on a loop, sometimes in Dram’s voice; other times it’s Graham, shaking his head at me with a caver’s whistle clamped between his teeth. Stop, Orion. Think.
Fire sparks inside me, the way it did in Outpost Five when I climbed the sign that hung before the tunnels. WE ARE THE FORTUNATE ONES, it said. I had beaten the words with my axe like a battle cry.
And the Congress punished every Subpar for my noncompliance.
But this is different. I’m not just reacting in anger. I’m going to do something that will help everyone.
Beneath my resolve unease tingles, like I’m stretching my hand toward an electrified fence. We run toward the station, and all the while anxiety dances in my belly to the tune of foolish, reckless, headstrong.
I press my fingers against my flare burn, and pain answers, overriding my thoughts, my senses.
“What are you doing?” Roran asks.
“Reminding myself.”
“Of what?
“That doing nothing isn’t an option.”