| |
Eldren looked at the scrap of cloth with the lapel pin on it and rubbed his tired eyes. He groaned as he scrubbed his face, wanting to erase the pin from his memory. It was the orange rose everyone employed by Temple wore, with the addition of a red rose. Which meant it was from someone on the High Council. He didn’t know who to tell first. Assuming Torin would tell Phae was the simple part. Who else should he let know?
Eldren ran through the list of people he could give a heads up to that would believe him and not cover it up. It was a remarkably short list. Aside from Phae, there was Orso and Abraham. He knew he could trust both of them. Maybe he could start there. It wasn’t that Merethyl didn’t need to know. She just had little control over Temple politics, and they needed someone from council on their side. He said a quick apology for the emergency and pocketed the scrap of cloth and headed out of the engineering lab to find Orso. It was midafternoon, so he should have been in his office. When he got there, though, he found it empty.
He headed off for Abraham’s office, but it was empty, too. There was always Phae, but he didn’t want to be the one to break the news to her just then. Eldren headed to the library to look up all who had these pins. Maybe he could narrow it down himself.
Eldren found the library and located the documents where he’d find the information. He suspected Lavorna was the one up to no good, but he wouldn’t have been the one to pull the trigger. It had to have been one of his people. He read down the list of people who worked under Lavorna’s employ, but no names stuck out. Putting the book back on its shelf, he started looking at others. Voices coming closer made him duck into an alcove. He pulled a random book off the shelf as he listened.
“Well, the new cartridges work,” said a woman’s voice. “They did a fantastic job in fact.”
“So I heard,” muttered Lavorna. “Someone repaired the prophecy machine, too. I bet it’s that elf Orso took in, the one who used to do all the maintenance on it back at Sanctuary.”
Eldren’s throat tightened at the words as he continued to stay quiet.
“Eldren, right? Not many elves in Temple, so he should be easy to find.”
“We have to get rid of everyone, but we can start with him.” Lavorna’s voice was thick with scorn, making Eldren bristle. “For all Demeter is Phaedra’s sister, they couldn’t be more different from one another. Demeter at least knows how to obey. Phaedra always did her own thing.”
“Phaedra is also popular,” the woman pointed out. “Getting rid of her is going to be hard. Even with the men she brought back with her. I thought that would be a mark against her, but it’s rallied hope instead.”
“Hope isn’t a bad thing,” Lavorna said. “They’ll regret it in due time, but right now it’s helping keep down an uprising. People were angry and growing restless until she came back. I’m confident we can use that to our advantage.” The voices grew distant. Eldren strained to hear more, but he couldn’t make out anything else. He slipped the book back onto the shelf in preparation so he could sneak away. Looking down the row of books, he spied a doorway. It wasn’t too far away, far enough that if he was quiet, he could slip through it and avoid being noticed. Eldren started to stealth away, hoping he wouldn’t run into anyone else. He was almost to the door when one of the Temple Librarians saw him. Eldren felt his face pale and tiptoed in a different direction, looking for another exit. He needed to get out and tell someone.
He slipped out the next doorway. It led to a stairwell that he wasn’t familiar with. Eldren looked both up and down and headed down. He needed to tell Phae, but more than that, he also needed to tell Orso and Abraham. His word against Lavorna’s wouldn’t matter as much as the pin in his pocket, ripped from the person who had killed Luca.
Reaching the bottom of the stairwell, Eldren burst through the door and skidded to a halt in front of Lavorna. “You,” Lavorna said as a blond woman on his right drew a spell cannon.
Eldren turned and ran the other way down the hall, ducking behind a corner as he heard Lavorna order the woman to put her gun away. Goosebumps prickled his arms as Lavorna called out a greeting.
“Come out, Eldren. We can talk about this.”
Eldren kept running, hearing the blond woman running after him. It took a few turns to figure out where he was; in all his years at Temple, this was a part he wasn’t used to, and Eldren realized he was in a section off limits to everyone but council members. The woman knew Temple at least as well as he did, if not better, since she had access to restricted areas. But that didn’t mean Eldren couldn’t ditch her.
He took the next right and ducked into the nearest room. There was an entrance to the underground tunnels here, he was sure, and there were enough areas he could lose her. Flinging the door open, he heard her curse as he ran through it. It only took a second to shut the door and lock it, and another moment to barricade it. Though, depending on how determined they were, it wouldn’t stop them.
Eldren stopped long enough to grab a lantern and took off, looking for a place to ditch the blond woman. He didn’t know these tunnels near as well, so looking for a secret passageway was a bad idea. But what could he do?
He ducked into a passageway and extinguished the lantern, creeping farther into it to hide deeper inside. Just behind a curve in the passage, he waited, listening. A light bobbed down the tunnel and he held his breath as it swung around before it left.
A sigh of relief escaped him, and he sank down onto the floor, contemplating what to do next. He had to tell someone, but he also needed to wait out the woman looking for him.
Eldren crept out of the tunnel and took a different path that he hoped would take him back to a different entrance. Back at Sanctuary, he had memorized most of the tunnels, but here he only knew a handful. Luckily, there were directions scratched into the various corridor intersections if you knew how to read them.
Navigating to a different entrance, Eldren popped the door open, his arms tingling with the adrenaline that hadn’t left his system. There was no one on the other side. Exhaling a sigh of relief, he went to go find Orso. Eldren walked past the radio room and froze when he heard a familiar voice. It was Demeter, talking to someone. He paused to listen.
“Everything’s ready. No, she doesn’t suspect a thing.”
“Good,” boomed a deep baritone. “I shouldn’t have underestimated her, but what’s done is done,” the voice said. Eldren frowned. It wasn’t Cristiano she was talking to.
“What about the ’stones?” Demeter asked.
“They haven’t fully awakened yet, so we have time. As long as we retrieve them before they’re dead, there won’t be a problem.”
Eldren clapped a hand over his mouth as he fought to not scream.
“Okay. I’ll collect them before they’re gone.”
“You were the one I really wanted,” Aurelius said. “Your sister threw a wrench into my plans, but nothing I can’t recover from.”
Eldren backed up to go hide because he didn’t want to be discovered. Waiting in the shadows, he saw Demeter leave the radio room and walk off in front of him. Thinking fast, Eldren followed her.
“I really wish you wouldn’t do that,” Demeter said as he entered one of the gardens where she had disappeared.
“You threw it all away,” Eldren said. “You greedy, selfish-” Demeter cut him off by drawing a blade, and slammed it into his abdomen.
“I’m sorry Eldren. But this is for the best,” she said as she twisted the knife and shoved him. Eldren gasped as he fell. Someone has to tell Phae.
