Chapter Nineteen

 

The meeting with Duro was set for the wild lands north of the Pajot and east of the Lazona. On the way out of the settlement, she passed the skeletal processing building, which was being rebuilt larger and sturdier. Unlike the ramshackle version that had served for many years, it would be composed of steel and reinforced concrete.

Elani and her crew were working diligently day and night to get the center back up and running. The loss of profits was hurting the Drops, who were already under strain due to the attacks on their legitimate businesses in the city. Pandora saw the older woman, who was going over blueprints on a table near the construction site. The idea that she'd been the bomber seemed ludicrous in retrospect given how hard Elani worked at keeping the settlement running in the harsh environment of the Undercity. Pandora decided that the presence of the satchel had been purely coincidental.

Before she reached the cavern where she was to meet Duro, she wondered if it was a trap. That her false pretense for joining the Drops had been found out and the Shadowmaster was going to kill her. But that had always been a lingering concern. Pandora entered the prescribed meeting place and found Duro waiting.

He stood on a rock with his arms by his side and his eyes closed. He looked like he could have been sleeping, but she knew the truth even without an amber. Rumors were that Duro slept but a few hours each night. Many a younger clan member had seen the warleader in the earliest hours of the day scrambling up cliffs or carrying small boulders through the caverns on his shoulder, maintaining his relentless training schedule.

She crept in as silently as possible, using her sapphire to keep her feet light.

"Did you bring the pistol?" he asked without opening his eyes.

Pandora halted, pulled the weapon from her waistband, and held it out on the palm of her hand. When he opened his eyes, she gave the pistol a Push, sending it in an arc until he snatched it out of the air.

"You're getting better."

"Not good enough."

He inclined his head. "Good. Never be satisfied. It's the only way you'll survive." Duro quickly inspected the weapon and then shoved it in the back of his pants. "It's the reason why Irina will never be the warleader. She thinks she's reached her peak. The problem with excellence is it blinds you to the possibilities that you have yet to uncover. I've had to invent challenges to keep myself progressing."

Duro reached into a pocket and casually tossed an ornate box to her. She caught it easily, giving him a questioning eyebrow.

"Open it."

Inside, an opaque stone sat in a velvet catch next to a small vial of electric blue liquid.

"An opal?"

"You've only one stone, not enough for a waku of your ability."

She hung her head. "I failed to attune to the amber and topaz. Maybe I'm destined only to be a single stone waku."

"That's what the vial is for," he said with a smirk.

"This is Eclipse?"

Duro nodded. "A quarter of the normal draught, but I think it's all that will be required to attune."

Pandora wasn't sure she agreed. She looked around at the cavern they were standing in. It was wide, with multiple levels, a section with stacked stone pillars, and a grotto that looked like teeth. There was plenty of illuminating fungi to see by, which made her wonder why he'd asked her all the way out here to give her the gift of a new stone and the Eclipse.

"Drink it."

She popped the top and threw back the liquid, which burned like peppermint schnapps on the way down. She was tasting the cool coating across her tongue when she looked up to see Duro aiming the pistol at her. A heavy punch in her shoulder knocked her on her rear. The bullet had ripped right through her muscles. Pandora couldn't catch her breath as he approached without the weapon in his hand.

"Now heal yourself."

"What?" she asked, holding a hand over the wound as she gasped for breath. "I'm not attuned."

"Better hurry before you bleed out."

The agony in her right shoulder made it hard to pull the opal out of its velvet catch. She fumbled with the sticky bandage as she placed it against her wrist while Duro observed passively.

"Why did you shoot me?" she asked as a wave of disorientation hit as if she'd just been spun around a dozen times and had fallen on her rear.

"Focus on the task. Answers will reveal themselves."

The warleader was unassuming. A man with dark hair and a medium build. Had it been anyone else, she might have wondered if this was a sick game, but his reputation gave her the impetus to trust, even if her mind was screaming alarms.

A gurgle in her stomach had her closing her eyes, rocking against the pain and nausea. The smell of damp stone filled her nose.

"Why aren't you healing yourself?"

Pandora could barely sit up straight. The world spun around her, but she put her hand to the wound. How do I make the opal work? Deciding that any questions would be met unanswered, she imagined her flesh knitting together at the same time she focused on the stone against her wrist.

Nothing happened.

She checked her shirt to find it soaked through down to her pants. She'd lost a lot of blood and was growing dizzier by the moment. Duro could heal her wound, but he was making no move to help.

Rather than interact with the wound, Pandora pressed her thumb against the opal, pushing it into her skin. A flash of a vision startled her. It was as if she'd seen her entire body revealed by an X-ray in her mind. She saw the veins pumping blood, the spark between neurons in her mind, the way her muscles stretched and bunched providing locomotion.

In the afterimage of the vision, Pandora was beset by another wave of vertigo. She fought to maintain her seated position while trying to claw back to the picture of her body, sensing it was an opportunity. A window to the opal.

Pressing her hand against the wound a third time, Pandora could feel the way her heart pushed the blood out of the severed veins, the torn muscles trying to shift as she breathed but because they were missing mass they sent alarm signals down her nervous system letting her know that something was terribly wrong. Had she not had the hole in her shoulder, leaking life fluid, she might have stayed seated exploring the wonders of her body with the opal for hours, but she renewed her focus on the wound.

Convincing the flesh to knit back together felt like molding with clay, except that her fingers knew the ways of shaping. Maybe it was because it was her body and she carried great subconscious knowledge about it, but once she'd attended to the hole, she was able to convince it to grow back together.

"Done," she said.

The effort left her weak. Duro handed her a water bottle filled with thick green liquid that looked like juiced vegetables.

"Drink. All of it."

The liquid tasted like spinach and chalk. It took effort to swallow the mixture given how dense it was, but she managed to get the entire bottle down, releasing a belch for good measure.

"Satisfied?"

She hadn't meant the question to be disrespectful, but she knew how it had sounded the moment it came out.

Duro took a seated position across from her, resting his wrists on the bend of his knees.

"Quite. The green drink should help you recuperate from the energy it took to attune and heal. It's a mix of natural foods with some elixirs that I've found help with recovery. As for shooting you, I needed to put your body in a state of shock and emergency. I feared even telling you might lessen the impact. Do you understand why?"

"It's how I attuned to the sapphire. It was in the middle of a fight," said Pandora, nodding slowly.

"I gave you a quarter draught of Eclipse to ensure that it happened, but yes, your rapid attunement was facilitated by the body's shock response. Otherwise, as you know, it can take much longer."

"How long have you known this?"

He chuckled. "This is only the second test. Next time I need to confirm with other subjects in case this technique only works on you." Duro leapt to his feet from the cross-legged position, a movement that appeared almost instantaneous. "Now, training can begin."

Joining him on her feet with her uniform soaked in blood, Pandora offered a steep bow.

"Most waku think of the opal stone purely for its healing components. The faez crystal allows for great feats of bodily repair, but there is a hidden skill which few besides myself have unlocked. The ability to modify the body extends to manipulating the muscle tissues, adrenal glands, and other important functions that aid a warrior in a scrap."

Duro leapt away, landing thirty feet behind where he'd been previously standing, then ran across the cavern, bounding over stones until he ran sideways along the wall for a dozen feet before returning to the ground.

"Use your opal to enhance your muscles. It's almost like warming them before a fire. Once you get the feel of it, you won't be able to forget it."

Using the opal was unfamiliar, so it took her a moment to refocus her mind towards the newly acquired stone. She did as he suggested and then leapt away, attempting to follow the same path as Duro. She barely jumped further than she could without the stone, and then in bounding over the obstacles, overcompensated and slipped off a pillar, crashing to the ground.

The urge to stay prone was strong, but she regained her feet and continued on the path. She managed to prod her body to be faster, but it made her unsteady as her feet didn't land where she expected to be.

"The adjustments will come in time, but you're understanding the technique. I want you to follow that route until you can achieve wall running."

The next three hours Pandora spent attempting to repeat what Duro had so easily shown her. She managed to enhance her speed on every run, but fell frequently, smashing into boulders and rocks, scraping her skin and nearly knocking herself unconscious at least twice.

Duro never said a word during the entire process. He watched with the passivity of an old man bobber fishing in his boat on a warm summer day. Each time she fell, she healed herself and returned to the start.

"Now I know how a foal feels after birth," she muttered to herself at one point, catching the twitch of a smirk from the warleader.

He gave her a brief break. Enough to squat in the corner of the cave, down another bottle of the thick green liquid, and patch up the little wounds she'd missed earlier. Then she was back at the course, finding her limbs even less steady than during the first three hours.

After a time that started blending together—during which she'd suffered countless more injuries—Pandora grew frustrated by her lack of progress. She could reach the wall with speed but as soon as she put her foot on the vertical surface she could barely take two steps before gravity took hold.

"You fight like you're mad at the world," said Duro.

Pandora couldn't recall the last time words other than her cursing had been uttered in the space.

Duro tilted his head. "Don't force the stones. You have much power, but you wield it like a sledgehammer. It makes you tired. It's why you lost against the Razor boy. Had you not worn yourself out, you could have Pushed the rocks and him off of you, but you were tired."

The denial died in her throat. She saw the truth as soon as he said it. It was the same thing Instructor Irina had been admonishing her for during the last few months.

"Whatever it is that you're holding onto inside, you need to let that go before you can attain your true power. Come. Today's training is complete."

"But I didn't run the wall."

"You're not capable of it. Not yet. Not until you address these internal issues. I want you to spend time meditating on these ideas. Think deeply about who you are and what you want to become. Nothing else matters on this path."

Pandora glanced back to the rock wall, which brought a shifting of his mouth.

"I want you to come here every morning before class and practice with your opal until you've mastered the wall. Keep it hidden otherwise. I want no one to know that you've a second stone. Not even your friends Choo-Choo and Navos."

"Understood."

"Dismissed. You may return to the Pajot and clean up. You can charge your new uniform to me since I ruined this one."

Pandora chewed on the inside of her cheek. "Why isn't the Academy teaching how to use an opal this way? I've never seen Instructor Irina move like this, and she has an opal."

"You have not earned the right to ask this question. Nor do I think it necessary that you hear me speak the words." He pulled the pistol from his waistband and handed it over. "See me tomorrow after your training. I have an errand for you to run."

"The Terreno?"

The corners of his eyes creased. "The Lazona."

She tried not to show her disappointment, but with his amber, she knew it was unlikely that he hadn't sensed it. Duro left the chamber, moving at a speed she couldn't follow and in a direction not heading back to the Pajot.

Pandora made her way back slowly. The training had left her muscles spent, even with the elixirs. She was disappointed that the errand wouldn't take her back to the Terreno as she wanted to confront the Mod about the attack and figure out who she'd convinced to do the deed after Garret.

Before she reached the outer guard stations, Pandora removed the sticky patch on her wrist and reapplied it to her inner thigh until she could get a proper setting for the opal. Two stones. She smiled to herself. There were a lot of questions about why Duro was keeping this gift hidden from the Academy and Instructor Irina, but for now she didn’t care because it'd given her more ways to protect herself should events slip to war.