Somewhere down beyond the wide windows of the ancient control room, a brighter light turns on, followed by an angry shout.
Tair grabs Selah and pulls them both to the floor, and her heart is caught somewhere between ribs and throat. She’s almost grateful for the low murmur of conversation now drifting up from the taskmasters in the mines below, an excuse not to give voice to the thousands of questions and angry thoughts buzzing through her head. Selah, too, looks like she’s on the brink of saying something, so Tair slaps her hand over the other girl’s mouth. Diana Ontiveros, eyes wide but at least meant to be here, sinks slowly into the chair at her desk.
A long moment passes, then another, and every measured breath Tair takes is a gamble.
The light goes off.
She crouches there very still for thirty, forty-five, then sixty seconds. They can’t stay here.
“Fuck,” she whispers, barely a breath, into the air. “Fuck.”
“Tair.”
Selah is still holding the Stone, frowning down at its gray glow. Where Alexander Kleios’s face had been, speaking impossible words, are now a myriad variety of symbols lit from within and arranged in neat rows, most of which Tair couldn’t begin to understand. One of which she knows all too well. Another Kleios sun, tiny and glowing gold. And under that, the tiniest label—not Ynglotta, but Sargassan Latin, written clear as day.
Urban Power Grid—Central Hub
A quick glance followed by a nod, then Selah taps a thumbpad lightly against the sun. The tablet screen shifts again, illuminated images of the irradium surface dancing to rearrange themselves, and Diana Ontiveros leans forward to watch with the eager, hungry eyes of an alchemical scientist witnessing a paradigm shift in her life’s work.
There are more images, now, each with its own accompanying label. A lamppost—Street Lights. A spray of water—Reservoir. A shield—Armory. And a long, metal carriage cart, the identical twin to the one just beyond the doors on the track outside. The one she’d be willing to bet once belonged to a larger fleet, traversing the path built by some long-ago architect in the mines below. Beneath that—Metro Rail.
Alarm bells ring in Tair’s mind, more pieces falling into place now she’s allowed herself to entertain the impossible. She has to, now. Alexander Kleios made sure of that.
Urban Power Grid—Central Hub. Some previous Historian must have translated from Ynglotta to make the emblems easier to read, but there’s more than just history and information left behind here.
Urban Power Grid—Central Hub. If another world existed in this place before Luxana, then it must have run on the sun’s power. And maybe, long ago, before it was a patrician familia’s heirloom, the Iveroa Stone was something else entirely. Something vital to the infrastructure of the city that became Luxana.
Her gaze lifts, runs up to the solaric sun carved into the wall, and across the instruments set into the control boards. Then her eyes are drawn even further upward, to long strips of black irradium running the length of the ceiling, quietly unlit overhead. Duplicates, too, of the smashed and ruined panels of the platform where they came through, and Tair doesn’t imagine for a moment that there aren’t more to be found in the mines. If the rest of it mirrors up—subterranean train tracks, tiled arched ceilings, metalworks too precise for human hands—then this, too, is the only logical result.
“Diana,” she whispers. “You said you’ve been trying to destroy this place. It runs on solarics.”
“It should,” the woman says. “But it doesn’t. I’ve looked high and low—there’s no mechanism for turning on the power. More thumbprint recognition tech, I’m sure.”
“Maybe. Or maybe the mechanism routes through somewhere else.” And she points to the glowing image of the long carriage on the Stone’s screen, a twin of the real one that sits gutted and abandoned just beyond the control room’s doors. Metro Rail. “Maybe it only works when the source is live.”
Selah frowns. “You think pressing that thing will let us turn on the lights?”
“No,” she says, eyeing the overwhelming foreign array of long-ignored buttons and pulleys and dials spanning across the control room, this place belonging to a murdered world. “If I’m right, then pressing that thing is gonna let us do a fuck ton more than just turn on the lights.”
From the look on Selah’s face, she’s caught up to Tair’s line of thinking. There’s a glint of something slightly manic in her eye, yet something reassuring all at once, and Terra help her but this is why she loves her, after all. Selah has a crazy streak all her own. Selah has never needed to go running for help.
Selah nods once, decided, and slams her thumb against the carriage on the screen.
Brilliant light pours in from all sides, solar panels of black irradium stone at their full charge. The light is blinding, but there’s no time to panic, no time to do anything but work fast.
Dials turn, knobs twist, switches flick. Little black squares set along the wall burst into life, the same ethereal glow as the Iveroa Stone. She doesn’t know precisely what to do with that—instead, she grabs three tiny levers in each hand and pulls them all the way up.
The worst thing that could have happened is nothing. No effect whatsoever, nothing happening down in the mines, just two fool-headed girls up in the control room messing around at random with technology they could never begin to understand—that is, up until someone below noticed the bright light coming from above and caught them in the act.
What happens, instead, is chaos.
And that’s the best thing they could have hoped for.
Down in the mines, solarics blare on overhead. Locked doors and grilled cells slam open. Alarmed enforcers stumble haphazard into the temple-sized cavern, only to be met by the roars and fury of prisoners climbing out of their dirty cells. The enforcers are armed, and the imprisoned miners are weak from work and torture and abuse. It doesn’t matter. They’re angry, and Tair knows from hard experience just how dangerous that can be.
A red-haired woman with one arm wrests the club from one of her captors and bashes a crumpled dent into his head. A barrel-chested teen with no teeth and a rotting eye slams a hatchet-faced man against the spike of an open cell door, running him clean through. The bare flesh of a naked child flashes through the crowd, and Tair wants to grab them to safety, wants to yell at someone to watch out, but she’s too far away and then the child is gone, disappeared back into the melee.
Selah twists another dial, and a sluice groans open on the far end of one deep-set track, liberating the rush of water it had held at bay. Tair can’t see how many people are swept away in the roar.
This is chaos.
This is reckless.
And this is working.
Then Selah shouts, “Tair, we have to move.”
“But they’re still—”
Selah jabs a finger down to where the fighters—captive and captor alike—have converged, a platform metal staircase snaking against the wall, up and up and around and leading straight to the control room where they stand, and Tair sees her point.
“Get Dr. Ontiveros to safety,” she yells to Selah over the noise. She had to leave her combat knife behind before the weapons check upstairs. She’ll figure something else out. But Selah, she doesn’t know how to defend herself. She has to get out of here now.
“But—”
“I’ll find you up there, I promise, but you have to go.”
Selah isn’t a fighter. Not this kind, anyway. As for the scientist, Tair’s willing to bet she’s never touched a weapon or thrown a punch in her life. And she doesn’t have time to be worrying about the pair of them in the middle of this. Selah, apparently thinking along the same lines, nods—she grabs Diana by the arm and yanks her toward the open door. The moment the two of them are gone, Tair wrenches open the side door, the one that opens out to the metal staircase leading up from the chaos below. A few dozen meters off, across the rickety platform, an enforcer is at the lead of the murderous mob, only steps ahead of his own doom.
She grabs the copper coil off the table where Selah left it. The end is sharp enough.
Come on, then.
But then a creak of metal squeals out from behind her and she turns to see Selah, hands clasped around the end of the metal prybar she’d used to pop off the door’s hinges, wielding it like a bat.
“Oh, come on,” Tair yells at her, half panic, half exasperation. “Do you even know how to use that thing?”
“No,” Selah answers. “But you do.” And she sends it flying like a pole vault across the control room.
The enforcer comes barreling through the side door just as Tair reaches up to snatch the prybar out of the air. She steps forward in two elegant moves, hands widening on the metal pole the way Jinni Jordan taught her, and bashes him upside the head. He crumples, a tiny spray of red blood and pink brain matter flying upward as he falls.
Selah stares at her, awe and admiration and something like okay, gross shining from her eyes. The barest twitch of a smile makes it to the corners of Tair’s mouth.
“I love you,” Selah says, and an eruption of something wild and free loosens from her chest.
“You—”
Then the melee bursts into the control room, and Selah is gone, and Tair throws herself into the fray.