There’s only one way to go. At the dead end of the dark subterranean corridor, just past the crevice where Theo thinks they can smuggle Miro out, Tair’s foot catches against the dip in the floor. Behind her, Selah breathes in sharp, and Tair knows she’s seen it, too.
So this is where Cato Palmar’s been disappearing off to.
The small, circular trapdoor is little more than a pothole, set into the stone at their feet in a perfect circle. Tair sinks to her knees, skims her fingers along the grooves that run around the pothole’s unbroken edge, the five-point holes sunk into the door lid. It’s made of some filthy stone-metal something that’s not concra and not iron, and she regards it for a moment, frowning. Then, with a little laugh, “Oh. Of course.”
She sinks her fingers into the lock—what had seemed to be a lock, anyway, those five-point holes—and twists. A little circle laid in around the holes, barely perceptible before, gives way to shift counterclockwise, and then the entire trapdoor swings down with an enormous bang, left swaying great and heavy on a groaning hinge.
Below is nothing but darkness, and the little rungs of the not-concra ladder that disappears into pitch black.
“Come on,” Selah says, already lowering herself down. “With our luck, someone definitely will have heard that.”
It’s not a long way down. Not as long as she thought at first glance, anyway, closing the trapdoor above her head. The darkness isn’t a bottomless pit, just the natural result of emerging down to a double sub-level in the middle of a tight and lampless tunnel. By the time she steps off the last rung, Selah has already felt around enough to take stock of their surroundings, and she throws her arm across Tair’s chest just in time to stop her from stepping off the little lipped edge and falling onto the tracks below.
“Mines?” Selah asks, as Tair’s eyes readjust to the new and thicker dark. It’s still almost impossible to see, but she can just make out the murky outline of some filthy maybe-silver rail-path snaking the length of the tunnel. The tracks are wide, far too wide to belong to a cart.
There are no mines in Luxana, not as far as she knows. No valuable deposits of Terra’s wealth sitting below the city, and no chance the Imperium would ever compromise their precious catacombs like that.
Tair shrugs, unnerved, and she doesn’t think she’s imagining it, the way that far in the distance the looming dark seems to give way to a lighter, grayer gloom. She leads the way, the pair of them feeling along the high lip of the tunnel, grappling semi-blind at the sloped wall, tiled and filthy and unnaturally smooth. It would be so easy to get lost in the dark, Selah’s hand clasped tight in hers, accidentally scuffing against Tair’s feet every now and again, and she can practically hear the echo of her heart ringing out in the silence.
This can’t be right. There’s no sign of Diana Ontiveros. No sign of any life at all.
But this has to be right. They’ve come too far for this to be a dead end.
The tunnel does open out, in the end, making itself first known in the dark when Tair slams directly into a safety gate at the edge of the lip, followed by a small flight of stairs.
“Safety, my ass,” she grumbles, rubbing at the pointy part of her hip, and sees that they’ve stepped onto a platform of some kind.
It’s easier to adjust to the darkness here, more a deepening gray than true pitch black, and soon she can see the motes of dust and decay floating lazily through the air. The tracks still run here, sunk deep into the ground until they disappear in the far distance, off into another tunnel. But while the two of them had to press against the wall to tread the narrow lip of the tunnel behind, here it has opened out to something that could easily accommodate ten or fifteen people deep. Small benches scattered every thirty feet or so, the twin of the platform across the deep-inset tracks. Cords and tile and broken apparatuses hang in ruin from the low ceilings, dotted here and there with unlit and shattered solarics. Tiled walls and concra floors and graffiti covering every inch of it, a thick layer of dust disturbed in little breaths with each step they take. And sitting there on the tracks, some fifty yards away—
Selah breathes out low. “What in the savage Quiet . . . ?”
Tair’s inclined to agree.
Some sort of mammoth carriage-cart, all rusted metal and broken glass windows and the same faded graffiti that covers the platform’s walls and floors. Tair finds herself moving, drawn as though hypnotized, fear and wonder and curiosity mingled all together, and she reaches out to touch the first set of doors, smashed in and leaning sideways on their hinges. There’s something not right about it. The precision welding, the shine too smooth to have been made by artisan hands. She can practically hear Selah in the back of her mind, And I’m supposed to be the reckless one.
But this isn’t reckless. Her heart is thumping so hard she half expects it to burst clear out of her chest. Her mind is whirring at six hundred miles a minute. But this is not reckless.
And then the faintest thump from somewhere behind her, like a distant frustrated boot against concra.
“Tair.”
She turns, fingers an inch still from the carriage doors. Selah isn’t where she left her, some ways down the platform instead, where the dust motes rise and dance in puffs of breath, illuminated by the faintest cracks of light.
It’s a doorway. Small and rounded slightly at the corners, the door itself is tightly shut. Only the tiny crack around the edges allows a silhouette of light to escape.
Tair’s heart catches in her throat. Right. Signs of life. Okay, then. This is either a good sign, or very, very bad.
She stands back on instinct as Selah takes the lever that seems to function as a knob and twists. The metal lever, solid and unyielding and still definitely not made of concra either, gives her nothing. Tair glances around in the murky dark, making sure no one’s around to hear.
“Savage . . . Quiet,” Selah groans, leaning into it, trying to find some kind of twist, although it’s clearly locked or rusted shut. “Godsdamn it.”
Eyes alight, Tair snatches up a piece of debris lying on the ground some ten yards away. Some kind of pipe or bar segment, maybe iron or that same not-concra as the door, rounded and thick but thinned to a fine edge at one end. Tair slots it into the door’s rusty middle hinge, and it pops off with a satisfying plink. The top comes next, then the bottom hinge, and at last the door groans wide open.
“You’re brilliant, you know that?” Selah asks, mouth agape.
“I’ve been told.”
Lit by candles and paraffin gaslight, the strange little room swims into focus as the two of them step inside. Broad boards of not-concra metal inset with too many tiny knobs and levers and little pulleys to count. Mountains of papers and coiled parts sprawled across a collection of tables, a blackboard covered in chalk scribblings of proofs and equations. A single cot bed pushed into the corner, blankets neatly tucked in. Looming over it all, wide windows overlook a pitch-black abyss. Some kind of observatory-turned-makeshift lab. A mirror world—twisted, somehow, and wrong. And in the center of it all, a middle-aged woman stares back, arms firmly folded across her chest.
“Well,” she says, observing the pair of them with an alchemical scientist’s critical gaze, “that explains why you didn’t just knock.”
“Professor Ontiveros?” Tair asks cautiously. The woman in front of them certainly looks like Xochitl and Miro, with her black braids and skin as dark as jetstone.
The woman snorts. “I guest-lecture sometimes when they need a little color in the curriculum, that hardly makes me a professor. It’s Doctor, if you’d rather stand on ceremony, but Diana will do fine. Who are you?”
“I’m Tair. This is Selah.” Diana raises a brow. “Your son told us where to find you—we’ve come to get you out. Both of you.”
“That’s sweet,” says Diana, uncrossing her arms to jab a thumb over her shoulder, toward the wide windows. “How about them?”
Frowning, Tair follows Selah over to the window, and she nearly forgets to swallow her gasp when she sees the room below.
No, not a room.
Mines, for real this time.
And she had thought the fighting pits were huge.
Below, far far below the observation window where she and Selah and Diana stand, paraffin ghostlight casts a weak beam across one end of the underground cavern, enough to illuminate two more platforms, just as unnaturally made as the one above, another row of deep-set tracks—and beyond that, the cavern has been blown out wide, opened up to the point that it could comfortably house the Sisters’ headquarters on Naqvi Row five times over. Slivers of shining black stone glimmer in the earthen bedrock.
Mouth after mouth after mouth, tunnels blasted deep into the earth, disappearing in every direction, deep into the dark. A crude set of latrines dug along one side. And row after row of cells sunk into the long tracks, latticed bars secured and locked from above like some grotesque patch job, their inhabitants crouched and shoved together underneath.
There are hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. Men, women, thremed. Grandparents so old their limbs have faded to nothing but wrinkle and bone. Children so young their hair barely brushes past their ears. And even this far away through the open dark, Tair feels nausea bubbling up in her gut at the sight—because emaciation and poking-out ribs are far from the worst of it. Festering stumps at shoulder caps and purple, shining burns covering necks and torsos and limbs. Faces half melted off. A little girl without a foot. Less than half still have any hair to speak of. A dozen or so enforcers, indistinguishable from the handlers above, patrol past the locked cells, banging batons against the bars every now and again whenever they hear a murmur. Or maybe just because they can.
Tair drops out of sight into a crouch, heart pounding in her ears, a violent lurch threatening somewhere in her stomach. Beside her, Selah’s pushed herself away from the windows, away from the view of unfriendly eyes.
“What is this place?” she hisses, rounding back on Diana Ontiveros, grabbing a coil of copper off the workstation—though how, exactly, she thinks she’s going to be able to threaten the scientist with it is both a mystery and deeply endearing. “Who are all those people? They need a medic. Why are they chained up?”
Tair climbs to her feet, in case she needs to hold Selah back. Diana, far from being rattled, sets herself down in the chair at her makeshift worktable. “Can’t have them making noise during the entertainment upstairs, I imagine. It wouldn’t be good for business.”
“Explain.”
“And here I thought you two were the ones with all the answers. Here to rescue me.”
“Explain.”
“It’s an irradium mine.”
Both Selah and Diana snap their heads toward Tair, who’s staring at the alchemical scientist’s chalk blackboard scribblings. Some equations, yes, but closer up she can see now more notations than numerals, more hypothetical questions posed than proofs to solve. The sketch in the corner gives it away, even without the glittering black stones on Diana’s worktable, safely locked up inside glass observation cases, serving as confirmation.
Tair eyes one of them, roughly the same size of her palm, and she’s willing to bet it’s the same as the glints of black embedded in the gray stone below. She doesn’t dare touch it. Untreated irradium is notoriously volatile. A potential explosive.
“Clever,” Diana says then. “And I’m sure you know irradium’s predominant usage.”
“Even if I didn’t, it wouldn’t be hard to guess. You’re the expert on solaric tech here.”
She hasn’t spent much time studying solarics. There was never any point, not when it was assumed to be a dead technology. The domain of quacks and dreamers. Even Diana’s own texts suggest more hypothesis than verifiable fact. But she saw those black bulbs of Alexander Kleios’s prized lamps, the one time Gil showed them to her. And she knows the look now, that endless dark shine of the stone on the worktable just the same as the Iveroa Stone in her messenger bag.
“So Palmar’s mining irradium,” she says, and meets Selah’s widening eyes. “This place, these tunnels, whatever they are. He figured out it’s an irradium deposit. And all these arrests . . . he needs the manpower.”
“Good question,” mutters Tair, and glances down at Diana. “Follow-up to that—what does he have you doing with it?”
One corner of the woman’s mouth quirks into a smile, and it isn’t at all pleasant.
“No,” she says, flat, although somehow it doesn’t feel like an answer to Tair’s question. “No, I don’t think we’re going to do this again today. You say you know my son. How am I supposed to trust that this isn’t another of the Consul’s tricks?”
“Do I look like I’m friends with the Consul?” Tair snaps. She and Selah both are covered in dust and debris from the tunnel they came through, as if her oversized wrap pants and tattoos don’t scream low-caste as it is.
“No,” Diana answers, “but neither did the last idiot he sent to pry information out of me.”
And all at once, it locks into place—the woman’s wariness, her haughty demeanor, her unwillingness to share anything that the two of them haven’t already confirmed first. She’d put it down to Diana being Seven Dials, eager to align herself with the same patricians who’d never have her over Tair’s low-class patois. She realizes now it isn’t that at all. Cato Palmar’s been playing games with her.
Tair crouches down, eye level with Diana, and hopes she can see that she’s sincere.
“I’m a Watcher with the Sisters of the First,” she tells her, doing her best to keep her patience in check. “You’re a donor, right? Ask me anything you want about them, I can tell you. The chairman’s Artemide Ekagara. We’re based out of Naqvi Row in the Kirnaval. And I’m working with your daughter, Xochitl. She . . . she was arrested, because she knew something was wrong. They spread a story about you and Miro, faked your deaths. She knew it wasn’t right. So that’s why I’m here. For Xochitl.”
Diana regards her silently, but slowly Tair begins to see the cracks in her carefully constructed mask. The rapid blinking, although no tears follow.
“Is my daughter all right?” she asks finally, voice thick with the unsaid. “Is she safe?”
Tair hesitates, if only for a split second. She can’t do this, not right now. Can’t be the one to deliver this kind of news. But she’s never been much good at lying, either.
Selah rescues her from herself.
“Yes,” she says, bewilderment and anger vanished into the air, replaced by a kind of world-weary compassion. Selah is a fearsome actor, Tair is beginning to understand, and she doesn’t know if she finds that more admirable or worrying. “She is. And your son’s alive, but he definitely isn’t safe. So let’s get the three of you reunited as soon as possible, yeah?”
Diana, now shaken from her position of defense, seems to slump. She clasps her hands together, leans forward to brace her forearms against the worktable. And then she shakes her head. “I can’t leave this place,” she says, deathly quiet.
“Yes, you really, really can.”
“No. I can’t. The Consul was under the impression I was close to . . . reviving solaric technology,” she says, voice small. “He was wrong, of course. I’ve spent my life studying the chemical and alchemical properties of irradium, but I’m no closer to discovering the conduit for solaric power than I was my first day as a junior scholar at the Universitas.”
“Then what . . . ?”
“I made some suggestions.” She grimaces. “When I first came here. I thought . . . I thought I could find a way to make it safer for them, the laborers down there. If Palmar wouldn’t provide them with adequate protection, then I thought maybe a change in methodology . . .” Diana’s face goes dark. “I was wrong. Only there was an increase in production, so the changes stayed. The poor souls who meet their end in mineshaft explosions are the lucky ones.”
“What do you mean?” Tair finds herself asking, morbid curiosity getting the better of her.
A dark shadow crosses over Diana’s face. “You saw them, down there,” she says. “The effects of interacting with untreated irradium are . . . horrific. And my strategy only made it all the worse. Two days ago I watched third-degree burns spread across a young man’s body in under a minute. Skin, organs, all of it.” A shudder ripples through Tair’s skin, raising goosebumps in its wake. Diana’s mouth hardens into a line. “Through it all, that boy never made a sound. The Consul has his people dose them with flumene to ensure compliance. He robbed that boy of everything, even his own death screams. I could see them, though, there in his eyes. At the very end.” She shakes her head once more, determined. “I can’t abandon these people, not when I’m responsible for so much of their suffering.”
Selah takes her hand. “You’re not to blame for—”
“I am, though.” She chuckles darkly. “I am. I told you Consul Palmar thought that I was close to discovering the conduit, and I told you that he was wrong. But I wouldn’t be so far away, not if I had the right tools to work with. The right materials to treat the irradium. The theory’s sound enough. All I’d have to do is ask. I’m sure he’d be happy to provide.”
Tair stares at her.
“You’ve been stalling.”
She shrugs, and doesn’t bother to deny it. “Solaric technology is a wonder. I’ve devoted my life to bringing it back to the world. It doesn’t belong in the hands of someone like him.”
“But you had to know that would only work for so long,” Tair points out. “Eventually he’s going to want results.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Diana snaps. “You think I’ve just been sitting here twiddling my thumbs? That man has less patience than a toddler waiting for dessert. And I only just survived raising two of those. It’s been barely a month and he’s already threatening to bring Miro down here.” She breathes in, heavy through her nose. “I’ll find a way to tear this place apart before it comes to that. He’s safer up in the pits.”
A groan of frustration rips from Tair’s throat, and she pushes herself from the workbench before she can say something she’ll regret. This isn’t Diana’s fault, intellectually she knows that, even if she’s a holier-than-thou updistrict pleb. This is Cato Palmar’s fault, and putting the blame on anyone else is playing exactly into his hands.
Then she sees it.
Just in the corner of her eye.
Something small, a minute detail, yet something she can’t stop seeing lately, like it’s been hiding in plain sight.
The eight-point Kleios sun, set into the metal board between the two large observation windows, is old and fading, but it’s unmistakably there. The same one she’s seen delicately etched into the lamps in Alexander Kleios’s office. The same one she’s seen somewhere else, and much more recently than that. The memory of Gil Delena’s voice seems to fill the air, one of his oft-repeated mantras during their forays into the Archival stacks on some research project.
Once is an incident. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern.
Because what other possible reason could there be for it to be down here of all places?
Tair can appreciate, now—the realization clicking into place like it was always there, just waiting for her to open her mind to the possibility long enough for the pieces to fall into the right order—that the all-too-distinctive eight-point sun may well be the Kleios familia sigil, but it also means something else entirely.
She doesn’t stop to second-guess herself, just dives into her messenger bag for the leather-bound Iveroa Stone, ignoring both Selah and Diana’s curious eyes. She flips it open so that its shining surface of flat irradium gleams in the low lamplight, and there it is—the one imperfection on the Stone’s brilliantly cut surface.
“This,” she says to Diana, jabbing her finger at the eight-point sun etched deep in the otherwise unmarked black expanse, then up to the one on the wall. “We thought it meant that this belonged to the Kleios familia. It doesn’t, does it?”
“No,” Diana says slowly. “The symbol is found repeatedly in writings pertaining to solarics. This isn’t a well-studied area, you have to realize that. It isn’t respected and the Imperium isn’t inclined to grant us funding and access. But so far as we understand, this particular emblem does indicate a presence of solaric power.”
“So far as you understand?” asks Selah.
“Well, yes. Most surviving literature is written in Ynglotta. That, for example.” And she points at the tiny glyphs etched along the Iveroa Stone’s thin edge. Tair’s stomach does a loop on itself as Selah’s eyes go wide.
“That’s Ynglotta?”
“It is.”
“I didn’t realize Ynglotta had a written language.”
“Most people don’t, but there are some remaining examples from before the Great Quiet. A very considerable part of my research isn’t even in alchemical science, but linguistics. Trying to decipher the meaning of a dead language.”
“But it’s not dead,” Selah points out. “Ynglots still exist. Why didn’t you just ask one?”
“Oh, certainly, of course I should have just tracked down a band of bloodthirsty raiders and—”
“There are plenty of Ynglot servae right here in—”
“But you can understand it,” interrupts Tair. They’re wasting valuable time, and who knows what Arran and Theo are facing above their heads, to saying nothing of Miro’s upcoming death match.
Diana nods. “Well enough.”
“And?”
“And that says Property of Antal Iveroa. How in the savage Quiet did you two get your hands on it?”
Tair doesn’t answer. She can’t. She’s too preoccupied with her own sinking heart, and with the distinct feeling that she’s swallowed her own esophagus. Across from her, Selah’s face goes ashen gray.
“No,” Selah says, barely a whisper. “No, it has to say something else.”
“Well, it doesn’t,” Diana replies.
“But we already knew that.” It explodes out of her, out of patience and out of hope, and Tair shoves herself away from the long worktable that separates her from Diana Ontiveros, because this can’t be a dead end. She’s let herself believe too much for that. “This thing doesn’t do anything and we don’t know what the fuck it is, and everyone and their mima’s out for blood over it. And you’re really going to sit there and tell me that our only lead—”
“Well, of course it didn’t work for you.”
Tair stops. “What.”
Diana raises a brow, evidently unimpressed with her outburst. A knot works itself in the older woman’s jaw. “If this did in fact belong to Antal Iveroa,” she says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “it will be protected by thumbprint recognition technology. Someone of that status? No question. Unless you’re the Historian or someone deep in her trust who was granted explicit access, there’s no way in the Quiet it’s activating for you.”
Thumbprint recognition technology.
A very real part of her wants to laugh at the concept.
Sure. Why not?
But the roar of her thumping heart is deafening as Selah’s wide eyes meet her own, and the memory rests clear in its irony between them—last night in an empty clinic, and Selah’s pointer finger jammed against the Stone. Not her thumb. Her pointer.
They were wrong. The Iveroa Stone doesn’t need to be recharged. It doesn’t need to be explained. All it needs is the right part of the right person, and Alexander Kleios left Gil with explicit instructions to see that this ended up in Selah’s hands.
Tair has no idea what it’s going to do. But there isn’t a doubt in her mind that it will do it. Because that’s the thing about solarics. The real reason the Imperium keeps them so highly regulated, forget volatile untreated compounds. Solarics are powered by the sun, and the sun is an infinite source of power. The sun, too, is ancient. The sun is never too old to work. And neither is solar-powered tech.
Wordless, Selah snatches the irradium slate off the table and smashes her thumb against the small sun that means power.
And the Iveroa Stone turns on.