77. Propago

propāgō ~āre ~āuī ~ātum, tr.

1. to extend, increase

draviticus aster de ressinimus smiles at the naked noble before him struck silent by all he has revealed. Rax Istra-Velrayd’s grip goes weak, and he releases Dravik and staggers back against the cell wall.

“So you’re saying…it’s either Hellrunner or Heavenbreaker?”

Dravik straightens his breast coat. “When the majority of the hive mind has been injured, the living one takes over as the de facto leader, guiding the rest. They obey the living one’s word—a fail-safe to prevent the death of the species. Hellrunner was the only one. But now one is alive in Heavenbreaker, too. It has learned. It has grown. And it is ready.”

Rax is the rook—straightforward and strong—and so the prince is not surprised when he recovers quickly and asks, “So…so what happens now?”

“I do not claim to know the future, but I know my father. He will detain Synali the moment she begins to exhibit symptoms, and he will quickly spread a false explanation to assuage the rider nobles who can see the thing.”

The girl makes it three exhausted steps out of her cockpit and into the hangar before the doors slide open and two dozen men in the violet-gold armor of the king burst through in precise order—precise motion as they draw their hard-light pistols and arrest her.

Dravik spins his cane around patiently, sapphires catching in the spilled water and the spilled worry in Rax’s eyes.

“They will shuffle her away to the most secret laboratory they have and no doubt run a cadre of tests on her.”

She thinks, for a split second, about calling Heavenbreaker to her through the glass of the hangar, but they are men—fragile—and this was inevitable. What happens next will not hurt—not now that she knows what together means. She raises her hands, slow, and they grip her wrists behind her back and put the bag over her head with lightning speed.

The prince looks at the ceiling of the metal cell thoughtfully, calculating between the seams of the sky.

“I will need all three of you to help me infiltrate the place and rescue her.”

Rax frowns. “All three of us?”

The girl can’t see, but she can feel—Heavenbreaker getting farther away from her. She can feel the steed as if it’s her own body, her own pulse, her own heat drifting farther and farther into the distance. They’re taking her somewhere, roughly—all shoving and pushing and lifting into the back of something hard and metal (a hum—a hovercarriage)—and they tie her hands during the flight, and she thinks to herself that those are now the weakest of her parts.

Dravik stops his cane mid-spin and looks up.

“You see, Sir Istra-Velrayd—Synali and I have been playing something of a game. And I’m afraid it required her to wade to the very depths of our opponent’s back row.”

The boy snarls and stands abruptly. “You—”

“You will aid me in retrieving her. You, and your Spider neighbor next door”—he tilts his wheat-colored head to the wall still vibrating with rhythmic thumps—“and Mirelle Ashadi-Hauteclare.”

Rax’s scoff is a bark. “Mir hates her. Synali killed her father, her whole goddamn family. And you helped her. You did the killing. She’d never—”

“I assure you, she will.” Dravik looks up at him, all gray titanium.

The girl hears it over the jets of the hovercart and the vis chitchat of the king’s guard—something is coming. No—they’re getting closer to something; something she’s heard every match, something ear-piercing and soul-piercing, a cry growing louder and louder in the back of her mind. It moves from a hum to a song to a screech, and finally—when the hovercart comes to a stop and they usher her out to walk on her own—it is a scream vibrating up from somewhere directly below her feet, drowning out even the hissing of what sounds like water.

“This will all take preparation. We cannot stay on the noble spire—we will move our operations to the Under-ring. We have time; the king knows better than to cancel the Supernova Cup, but he will delay it. He’ll fill the gaps with minor tourneys to tide the nobles and his people over until he deems Synali sufficiently neutralized—either by death or by science. Only then will he allow the Supernova Cup quarterfinals to begin.”

The guards lead her with iron grips over dirt, over marble, over stainless steel. She knows the sound, still so far below, and she can’t help the way her heart leaps when they enter an elevator and begin to descend, the desperate cry becoming an untenable bellow seething beneath a skin of sleep. Closer. Just a little longer, and we will be together. The guards’ steps stop, and then she stops, the bitter smell of medical antiseptic and the sweet burned-metal scent of open space clashing in her nose.

The prince stands up off the bucket, shedding his coat and holding it out to Rax. “If I am correct, we have precisely four weeks to rescue her.”

Rax clenches his teeth. “And if you’re wrong?”

Dravik smiles. “Then she dies. And all of this will have been for naught.”

The guards pull her to a stop, yanking the hood off her head. She blinks into dimness, into LED lights barely piercing through the gloom of a darkened room. The center of it is brightest—a tube large enough to hold up the world, full to the brim with pale blue-purple fluid and silver spirals. The monster under the sea. It starts singing sharper than the eternal bellow—high-pitched, as if overjoyed to see her.

hello, she says wordlessly.

A dozen people stand before the tube in white lab coats, but a woman stands before them all. She is youngish but so rigid in her spine and shoulders she seems far older. She wears a strict bun, a holomonocle, and an expression of mild apology and utter determination both.

“Hello, Synali. My name is Ysolde. I’m the head scientist for the core. We think you’ve done some very interesting things, so we’d like to run a few tests. Will that be all right?”

The girl looks up—one iris blue as ice, the other silver.

TO BE CONTINUED IN HELLRUNNER