305.82 grams cirium
NEWS OF OUR escapade down the tunnel spreads through camp. I can tell by the number of people gathered near the mouth of nine as we stagger out. I think it has less to do with our near-death rescue, and more with the seam of ore we found. Someone in Central must have let it slip. Hardly surprising in a place where cirium is everything.
I lean into the man supporting the bulk of my weight. “I think we missed the monkey party, Owen.” He gives me a pitying look that tells me the drugs in my system must be talking again. I’ve never reacted well to shock inhibitors.
“Hang on just a bit longer, Scout.” He smiles, his teeth flashing white against his dark skin.
“We’ll have to dance another day, girlie,” says Graham Jorgensen, breathing hard under Dram’s weight. He always calls me girlie and Dram boyo. Since our mothers died and he taught us how to swing their axes.
The other two members of the retrieval team follow close behind, dragging our discarded Oxinators. By now, the fires around camp have burned to embers. Someone plays a waltz on a fiddle, and a few of the cavers stagger toward us in an alcohol-induced haze. They’re probably more coherent than I am.
Dram missed his dance with Marin, but she is waiting for him anyway, a draft of ale in hand. I have people waiting for me too, but they wear guns instead of smiles.
I feel Dram hesitate beside me, and his eyes skip past Marin to the group of guards circling me. “Flash pistols,” he whispers.
My gaze swings to the metallic cylinders projecting from the sides of their guns, reservoirs for flash dust. Only Alara’s elite are issued weapons that harness the energy of the flash curtain. Mined in the cordons, flash dust is an even more precious commodity than cirium.
“Orion Denman?” A man steps past the unfamiliar guards. Tall, younger than my father, but with a bearing that feels ageless. His uniform bears the seal of Alara on his arm like we all have, but his opposite sleeve carries five red bands for the five outposts, and five black bands for the cordons.
“Flash me,” I whisper.
“I’m Commissary Jameson.” He shows the chain at his neck—his badge of office, as if I needed further proof he’s from the Congress of Natural Humanity. His gaze flicks to Dram, then back. I feel us being assessed and weighed, like the ore in our pouches. “Are the reports true?”
His cultured tone sets me on edge, reminding me that he comes from a place behind a shield.
“I brought proof, as requested.” I barely stop myself from saying “ordered.” Subservience is always an effort for me. I pull away from Owen’s support, swaying slightly. I will meet this man on my own two feet, even if they’re wobbly.
“I’m here to inspect your ore,” he says.
Dram grips my arm. I think he’s afraid I’ll make some derogatory reply, and I bite my lip to keep it in. Subpar humor is usually lost on Naturals.
The commissary’s features swim before me, and some part of my addled mind orders me to stand up straighter and dig deep for some respect. This man is the Congress’s own representative, overseeing all the outposts and cordons. It’s hard to imagine one person in charge of the entire Exclusion Zone, but he carries himself like he owns whatever land he stands on.
“Come this way, Scout,” Mull Cranston says, striding forward as if he wants to take my arm. Or grab me by the hair.
I drag my goggles off my face and let my gaze skip over the director all us cavers refer to as Cranny. He wears an ill-fitting, rumpled gray uniform. “I didn’t realize you owned a uniform, sir.”
Definitely grab me by the hair. His eyes narrow over his beaklike nose. I can’t help it. I’m angry about the faulty tanks. Dram and I almost died.
Cranny stands off to the side, an inconsequential planet inhabiting the commissary’s solar system. He glares at me as if it’s my fault a man of such importance is striding about his domain reminding him he’s inferior.
“I want you to describe how you located the vein of cirium,” Jameson says.
I pull off my skullcap, and my hair tumbles out. I need to get out of my caver’s gear—the cavern particles are irritating my skin like tiny slivers. A stricken look crosses the commissary’s face, as if a weapon unexpectedly lodged in his chest. Maybe he’s realizing how bad the exposure is down nine.
“Come with us to Central,” he commands. I look past him, to the command center that dominates the outpost, the gated mansion that houses all the Natural techs and guards. As far as I know, no Subpars have ever gone inside.
“Huh.” Not what I intended to say, but my brain’s struggling to connect the dots.
“She needs the infirmary,” Dram says.
I start laughing. Dram’s words, spoken from someone who looks like death warmed over, strike me as terribly ironic.
“My sh-shock inhi-hibitors are w-wearing off,” I announce. The smile on my face feels out of place; my body’s having a hard time matching my expressions to my emotions. I feel Serum 129 evaporating from my system, like a blanket sliding from my body. Pain penetrates the haze, and I cry out, clenching my teeth to hold in the sound.
“What’s wrong with her?” Jameson demands.
“I b-brought you your ore,” I murmur, lifting the samples. It’s like I’ve finally remembered I have hands, and they’re not in good shape.
“She’s infected.” Cranny eyes my burned, chewed-up gloves as if I’m aiming a weapon. I suppose in a way, I am.
“Get the physic!” Jameson calls.
Marin gasps. I suppose my glowing hand is something of a stunner. She drops the mug of ale and dashes off.
“Director, the boy is worse off,” Graham says, supporting Dram with an arm around his waist. “We did what we could for him down the tunnel, but he’s got the burn bad.” He slides aside the silver shock blanket draped over Dram’s torso.
This time, it’s Cranny who gasps. “How is he still standing?”
“You’d be surprised what p-people with the will to live can do,” I say, too loudly. If Dram had any strength at all, he would’ve clamped his hand over my mouth. Apparently Serum 129 breaks down the brain-to-mouth filter, and mine was questionable to begin with. I try to bite my lip, but my mouth is growing numb.
“Get them to the infirmary,” my father calls. He runs to Dram’s side and gives him a cursory scan, palpating his torso gently. “Good, we’ve still time.” He looks at Graham. “Get him on the table and start an IV.”
“Hi, Daddy,” I sing. A giggle bursts past my numb lips. “Owen gave me Serum 129.” My words still sound like a song.
He tears off my remaining glove. A couple orbies have chewed through the fabric and burrowed deeper. They move slowly beneath my skin, twin black dots. Full orbies don’t glow. Not once their bodies begin to swell like ticks.
“I need to remove these at once, before they chew through an artery,” Dad says. He looks at Jameson. “Whatever business you have with her will have to wait.”
The commissary looks equal parts horrified and fascinated. Then his features blur, and I can’t tell which way is up and which way is down. He reaches out to assist me, and it’s an unexpected sight. Naturals tend to keep their distance from Subpars—and none of them touch us when we are fresh from the tunnels, with particle dust coating our suits. He catches my arm, and his dosimeter flashes red at the contact, in case there was any doubt I’ve been crawling through radioactive elements.
Now it’s Cranny’s turn to look poleaxed. Naturals protect themselves from the flashfall, and that includes us.
“Commissary, you’re breaking Protocol,” he says, his tone carefully neutral, though I see shock in his eyes.
The ALARA Protocol, the rule our city-state was named for, an acronym for As Low As Reasonably Achievable. A philosophy of radiation use and exposure, borrowed from the time before the flash curtain. Everything in our society is based upon this principle: exploit the resources of the flashfall, but limit radiation exposure and preserve human life, particularly the most vulnerable of our society, the Naturals whose genes remain uncorrupted by exposure.
My thoughts suddenly break apart, whirling from my mind’s reach like ash on the wind. Someone stuck me with more Serum 129. The night sky tips up and spins. My father breaks my fall. I focus my last remaining energy trying to interpret the expression on Jameson’s face.
The commissary who crossed the flash curtain to inspect my ore.
Who broke Protocol to keep me from falling.
* * *
“Explain to me again how both your Oxinators ceased to function,” my father says.
“Coincidence,” I say softly, watching him tie off the bandage on my hand.
“Funny thing, coincidence,” he muses.
“Hilarious.” I hop down off the kitchen table and pace. There isn’t much space, just this room beside a bedroom and a small loft, but my steps carry me across the worn floorboards again and again as I work through what happened down nine.
Dad rinses his hands in our rationed water, his thoughts churning like mine. I watch him across the kitchen—both the room and the word itself a remnant from the days of the first outposters, when Congress still transported food into the camps, before techs developed nutri-pacs. I trail my fingers along the wall, a mix of wood and metal. With the exception of Central’s mansion, everything here is like this—a blend of tech bracing up the original buildings. “Archaic,” Dad calls it, but that’s only because he’s seen a picture of Alara.
I pick up one of his slides and peer at it. “What did you find?” I ask.
“How do you know I found anything?” He drops into his chair and adjusts the focus on his microscope.
“’Cause you’ve barely looked up from those slides since I gave you the sample.”
“Who else has seen this?”
I shrug. “The retrieval team and Cranny. Oh, and the commissary who came all the way from Alara.”
His gaze narrows. “It’s likely they still don’t know.”
“What?”
“This isn’t typical cirium.”
“I don’t care what kind of cirium it is as long as it measures four hundred grams.”
He looks at me over his glasses.
“What now?” I ask.
“You need to take me down there. I need to see this for myself.”
“Too dangerous. Tunnel nine’s not like the others.”
I can practically see the wheels turning in his mind, assessing, shifting variables in equations I will never understand. He sighs and settles back in front of his microscope.
“Eat this.” He hands me a nutri-pac.
I glance at the blue foil packet. “I’m not taking your rations.” He eyes my empty red packet, the half-size “children’s portion” we’re given until we turn eighteen.
“You’re not getting enough,” he says, pressing it into my hands. “Take it.” I don’t tell him that Dram shares his larger portions with me each day, because he’s right—I’m starving.
I rip open the packet and squeeze some of the nutrient gel into my mouth. Dad told me it used to be flavored when he was a child. Berry, I think he called it. I don’t know what berry tastes like, but the slick texture is similar to the water posey down nine, if not as bitter.
“The orbies covered this vein of cirium?” he asks.
“More than I’ve ever seen before.”
“So they’ve been down there … absorbing the cirion gas, and taking … nutrients from the cirium for the past hundred and fifty years.” I know better than to answer. He’s not looking for my response. He scribbles a series of numbers and letters on his notes, staring hard, like he’s waiting for them to rearrange themselves. “This cirium is altered,” he murmurs, one eye peering through the microscope. “Fewer radioactive isotopes.” He shoves his notes aside and grabs a beaker. “Orion. Grind this ore. I need to see something.”
“Dad?” I grip the pestle and set myself to pulverizing the ore.
“Our ancestors drank the water down the tunnels,” he says. “Those who didn’t die adapted.” There’s urgency in his actions as he lights a burner. “They ate water posey and tunnel gulls—the only things available to them. They absorbed trace amounts of cirium and built a tolerance to the curtain’s electromagnetic particles—like drinking small doses of poison until you eventually develop immunity to it.” He looks at me—hair mussed, glasses askew, and fire in his hazel eyes. “Do you understand what I’m suggesting, Orion?” His voice is as soft as a whisper, and I feel his words move over me. I can only nod.
He takes my bowl of crushed ore and pours it over a burner. I know what he means to do, and part of me is wishing I’d never found this vein of cirium. He goes back to his notes and slides, and I stare at the beaker, where this new, altered cirium is beginning to liquefy. I wonder if he plans to inject it or ingest it.
“Please don’t do this.” I cannot lose him too.
He looks up, surprised. “If I’m right, a compound made of this cirium could boost our resistance to the flash curtain. We could survive in places without cirium shields. I’m talking about freedom, Orion.”
Freedom. The word shivers through me. “But if you’re wrong, then it’s just poison.”
There’s a knock on the door, and Dad yanks the slide from the microscope. I cut the burner flame and whisk the beaker into a cabinet. The door opens, and Cranny steps into the dim light of Dad’s desk lamp.
“I saw a light on,” Cranny says. “You know how important our energy rations are.”
“Yes, of course.” Dad switches off the light. “I was bandaging Orion’s hand.”
“We have an infirmary for that, John,” Cranny says. He walks toward me, his focus so sharp I feel it cutting through the haze of pain and exhaustion. “You need to be more careful next time, Scout.”
A tart reply forms on my lips, but then I catch sight of something through the open door. Indicator flags, red with three yellow stripes. Something in my expression must reveal my horror. He follows my gaze.
“We’ve just raised the alert. Techs have traced patterns of instability in the atmosphere. They’ve warned us to expect anomalies and fluctuations in the flash curtain. A flash storm’s coming.” He tosses the words out as if they don’t weigh anything at all. As if they don’t invoke memories of deaths so violent, I still have nightmares of it.
“When?” Dad asks, his voice rough.
“A week at most. You’ll need to begin prepping the infirmary.”
“There’s not a lot that gauze can do for radiation poisoning,” I say.
Dad throws me a warning look, but I can’t seem to help myself. My three-year-old brother died in the last storm.
“Fortunately,” Cranny says, “the cirium shields over Central are larger now. We shouldn’t have as many casualties.”
I snort. “Fortunate, indeed—that the guards and techs will be safe while the rest of the entire camp scurries under the rocks.”
Cranny’s gaze narrows, and he gets that look on his face—like he’d feel better if he were squeezing my neck between his hands. “The lodge has a steel roof—”
“Which worked so well before.” Images of Wes, the last time I saw him, tear through my mind.
“She’s right,” my father says softly. “The cavers down the tunnels were safer that day.”
“Then I guess it’s lucky your daughter was taking her mother’s place down there.” Cranny taps the cord I wear around my neck—the pendant I never take off. His fingers brush the blue glass that contains Mom’s ashes.
This time, I’m the one to restrain my father. His arm tenses under my bandaged hand.
“You understand I must maintain order,” Cranny says. His gaze slips to our empty ration packets. He picks one up and idly passes it through his fingers. I want to ask him what size his rations are. I doubt anyone at Central is going hungry. “If Central falls, the outpost falls.” Cranny gifts me with the paternal look he uses on Burning Days. “Subpars are helpless without this vital connection to Congress.
“If you don’t care for me, or the guards, or the technicians”—Cranny leans in, like he’s sharing a secret—“at least have some concern for the city this outpost protects.”
My teeth clamp my lip. But the words won’t stay put. “Concern?” I throw the word back in his face. “I risk my life every day for the city this outpost protects.”
Cranny’s expression hardens. “You went past the boundary marker.”
I can’t immediately speak past my shock. “I found a vein of ore!”
“Whatever you found has brought the commissary breathing down my neck!”
“I’m supposed to protect Alara—”
“Not without compliance,” Cranny growls. “There are boundaries for reasons, Scout.”
My heart pounds like Dram just shot me with adrenaline. I know this tone. There is punishment coming.
“Two weeks, half rations.” He turns toward the door. “And, John—prepare for the storm.”
The door bangs shut, and I tremble in the darkness. My unsteady breath fractures the stillness as Dad folds me in his arms. His memorial pendant presses against mine.
“I’m going to get us free,” I whisper. The flash curtain will not take one more person I love.
Dad doesn’t answer. I know he’s thinking of broken air tanks and coincidence that likely wasn’t coincidence.
“Me too,” he says after a moment, and even in the dark, I can tell he’s looking at the cupboard. At the place we’ve hidden the altered cirium.
I shiver again, and he holds me tighter.
* * *
I’m out the door before most cavers have stirred from their alcohol-induced sleep. Daylight—or what passes for that around here—lightens the sky like it’s as reluctant to emerge as the rest of the outpost.
Frost coats the ground, but I wear only my undershirt with my shirt tied around my waist. When you spend most of your life beneath stone, in darkness, the wind on your skin feels like a gift. I tear open my red foil packet and eat my rations—just half—and tuck the rest in my pocket. Thoughts of Cranny and his angry warnings fill my mind, but I push them away.
Today belongs to me.
I pass the tunnels, ignoring their yawning entrances, pretending that my feet haven’t carved a path into the ground between my house and this place. I’m a Subpar by birth, but for the next few hours, I don’t have to be a caver. I’m no one’s ore scout. I’m not a potential meal for orbies, flash bats, or tunnel gulls.
I have no idea what girls my age do on the other side of the cirium shield, but I have never shied away from imagining it. I know only that sixteen-year-old girls in the protected city are safe from the flash curtain. They don’t fear storms, and they never, ever pick up axes.
I set my foot on a ledge of rock and push up, my fingers skimming the stone and finding handholds. Outpost Five is bordered along its east side by giant heaps of rubble that fused with the mountains when the flash curtain fell. We call it the Barrier Range because it provides a natural shield, separating us from the burnt sands of the cordons, which stretch all the way to the curtain. As bad as things get at the outposts, things could be worse. We are the fortunate ones.
My bandaged hand loses hold, and I hang from my other fingers. Breath saws from my lungs, filling the air with tiny clouds. I shake feeling into my injured hand and reach up, my toes sliding into familiar footholds. I’ve been climbing here since before I started down the tunnels. I guess that, even as a child, I looked for something beyond Outpost Five.
No one here climbs like I do. They call me the mountain goat, which I think is funny, since none of us have seen such a creature. The flash curtain killed most nearby animals and vegetation. Except my ancestors. They eked out a means of survival beneath the ground and emerged when the worst of the radiation dissipated. Subpartisans. Not a grand name for a new kind of people, but I suppose they weren’t really concerned with how it would sound to their great-grandchildren.
I push myself over the final ledge and lie on the ground a moment, catching my breath. I imagine the air this high up is truer to what it once was. It’s not, but this is a place for pretending.
“Fire, you’ve gotten fast,” Dram says.
My head whips up. Dram reclines on a projection of stone that overlooks the cordon.
My stone.
I can count on one hand the times he’s come here with me, and none within the last year. We tend to give each other space when we’re not partners beneath the earth. Especially since Marin.
“You going to keep lying there?” he asks. “I thought the point was to look out at the…” Dram stretches his gaze toward the pseudo-horizon. “The nothingness.”
“It’s not nothingness.” I climb to my feet and join him on the rock.
He looks toward the flash curtain. The view is hampered by the orange and red sulfur clouds over Cordon Five.
“Okay,” Dram murmurs. “The view of hell.”
Hell is climbing a kilometer beneath the ground with orbies digging through your skin.
“I like it,” I say.
“That’s because you have a good imagination.” He turns to face me. I imagine the sight of Cordon Five reminds him of his father and his exile to Cordon Four.
“I thought you’d take the day to heal up,” I say. “How’s your skin?”
“Healing.” He lifts his shirt. Small red bruises cover his chest and abdomen. I look away before he can see the heat creeping into my cheeks. He does this to me lately—confronts me with reminders that he’s eighteen and not the boy I’ve been hunting ore with most of my life.
Fire, my hands are sweating. I wipe them on my pants and stare toward Cordon Five. The image is still emblazoned in my mind. The curve of his muscles, the smattering of hair—
Ergh! Why did he have to come here? Seeing his bare chest reminds me I touched him mere hours ago, that our lips pressed together. Yesterday, all I could think about was saving him. Today, far above the tunnels, with plenty of air—it makes me breathless.
“How’s Marin?” I tease, even though I’m sure he spent most of the night in the infirmary.
He grins. “Marin’s good.” The look he shoots me makes me think that maybe he wasn’t as incapacitated as I thought.
“I imagine she was worn out from pouring those pints all night long.”
He lifts a brow. “Jealous?”
“Of her proximity to the ale? Yes.”
He grins. “Of her?”
“Am I jealous of the lodgemistress’s daughter? Of tending the lodge and looking after the orphans and unmarrieds? No.”
Dram smiles.
“Why are you here?” My tone holds more bite than the air, and I pick at the bandage on my hand. My nails are broken, and the skin peels away from where the orbies chewed their paths. I’m sure Marin holds nothing more dangerous than a cleaning cloth. I doubt she even has a callus.
Dram studies me a moment. “How’s your hand?”
“Tiny glowing organisms exploded inside it less than a day ago. How do you think it feels?”
Dram grins. “You are jealous.”
“I’m irritated. There’s a difference.” I spear him with a look. “You’re intruding on my time.”
His smile fades. “I won’t stay long.” He looks toward Cordon Five, then quickly away. “I wanted to talk to you about our descent yesterday. I’m concerned about the faulty Oxinators. That shouldn’t have happened.”
I should tell him that my dad said practically the same thing. I look toward the cordon, to the place where orange clouds block the towering, radioactive curtain we’re trying to earn our way past.
“Then a representative from the Congress shows up,” Dram continues. “Something’s off.”
“It makes sense they sent the commissary,” I say. “It’s a massive vein of cirium, probably more than anyone’s found before.”
“You’re too good, Orion.” Dram looks at me, his gaze shuttered, but I hear the warning in his voice. “What happens when you have to explain how you found it?”
“I’m lead ore scout—”
“No, Rye. It’s more than skill. You … sense the cirium somehow. I’m your marker—I watch you more closely than anyone. You’re listening when you’re down there.”
I break eye contact, but it’s too late. There’s nothing I can hope to keep from Dram. Not about the tunnels. Not about cirium.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” he asks. There’s anger in his tone now, mixed with a hint of fear. “What the hell is it saying to you?”
I cannot tell him what I’ve never understood myself—that when I first swung my mother’s axe, I felt something in the stone respond. A pulse, like blood in veins, a hum that’s more than vibration. And it’s not just the cirium I hear, but its source … the flash curtain. And it doesn’t speak to me.
It sings.
He curses long and low. I wonder how much he can read on my face. I’m suddenly wishing for the barriers of Oxinator and goggles, the darkness of tunnel nine. But this is Dram—even with all that, he still reads me.
“If they find out,” he says softly, “they’ll never let you go.”
“I’m almost to four hundred grams—”
“No.” He shakes his head. “They need cirium more than they need to give you a place in the city.”
I lurch to my feet, as if I can physically combat what he’s suggesting. “Congress won’t go back on its word. That’s the deal they make with us—Subpars do their part to protect Alara, and if we do really well, we’re granted passage through the curtain.”
“Maybe,” he says, looking out over the cordon. He wears the pensive gaze of his father, like he’s seeing something more than the ash-filled sky.
“We’re not prisoners here, but protected.” I nearly choke on the words. I have seen too many people die to ever call this outpost safe. “Maybe the commissary is here to reward us. Congress knows we’re close to earning four Rays…” But even as I speak, my chest tightens, the ghost pain of lungs screaming for air that won’t come.
Dram turns toward me with a shake of his head and a smile that puts a dent in his cheek. “I’m overthinking things. Guess I expected the man in charge of the outposts to greet us with gratitude and a handshake, instead of a contingent of guards with flash weapons.” His dark hair blows into his eyes, his lips lift, and I realize suddenly how much of him is muted down the tunnels. Maybe this is why I avoid him aboveground. Something in him sings to me in ways more powerful than the flash curtain.
Maybe if I wasn’t a girl who needed ninety-five more grams of cirium to be free, I might sit beside him, set my hand next to his, and see if he touched his fingers to mine. I’d reach and see if Dram reached back.
“Orion…?” he says, drawing my name into a question.
I feel like Roland’s fiddle, my strings plucked hard, humming. But it’s more than this moment. I sense the flash curtain stirring me. My head whips toward the horizon. I can just make out faint waves of iridescence rising above the clouds of the flashfall—same as it always looks. But I feel its approach.
Something stirs above the cordon. Dozens of shimmering projections sail toward us. They’re beautiful, like the shooting stars Mom told me stories about.
“Dram, look.” He turns, and his face pales.
The wail of an air siren pierces the stillness.
“What is that?” I ask.
“Cordon breach,” Dram says.
“A what?”
“Energy shifts in the curtain,” Dram says, “strong enough to kick up rocks and debris.” He drags me down behind the ledge of stone. “I was only six, but I still remember the last one.”
The balls of light make a sound as they approach, a whistling so loud I can hear it over the siren. Two of them arc over us. The flames of the cordon ignited the metal ions in the rocks and they burn with different colors—purple, gold, and aquamarine.
It’s like the flash curtain is attacking us, hurling flaming missiles past the cordon, mocking our shelter. It is spellbindingly beautiful. In a place that is so many shades of gray, the colors mesmerize me. The shards arc over us, pulsating with a vibrant, searing intensity. They are alive.
They are death.
Screams rise from the camp. Too many shards have found their mark in homes, in paths. Dram squeezes my leg, and I realize he’s pulling me back, that I’ve worked half my body over the side.
“Stay here!” He drags me closer, hauls me to his side.
“We have to get below!”
“Too late.” He wedges me into a wide crack in the stone just large enough for my small frame. He’s torn open a cut above his eye. It drips blood, and he swipes his arm across it. His arms bracket the walls of rock on either side of me as he pushes his body tight against my burrow. It blocks my view of the soaring projectiles; it’s dark as a cave.
He’s dampened the sound of the screams, but I hear his breath punctuate the quiet. Everything in me yearns to get deeper. We are too exposed up here. Sounds of shattering rock break into my refuge, and Dram’s body tenses.
This is not the air cave. I can’t pull him in with me where it’s safe. “Dram?”
“I’m okay,” he says.
Another minute passes with my pulse pounding out the seconds. The rock beneath us stops trembling.
“I think it’s over,” Dram says.
“Let’s go.” I push past him and reach the mountain’s edge in three strides, sliding to my knees and pitching myself over.
Dram joins me. Neither of us speaks as we climb down, both hampered by our injuries. The air siren cuts off, and I hear cries for help from camp. I swing away from the wall and jump. My feet hit the ground, and I pitch to the side, stumbling to my knees. Dram hauls me up, and we both run.
“I’ve got to check on Lenore,” he says. Then: “Flash me.” He staggers to a stop. Half the lodge is missing. Its splintered walls poke up through the wreckage like broken matchsticks.
He doesn’t say her name, but his face screams his fear. Marin.
“Go to the lodge,” I order softly. “I’ll check on Lenore. Most of the homes seem intact.”
He nods and takes off running.
I rake my eyes from the rock and rubble of the lodge and pray that Marin-of-the-soft-hands is not beneath it. Dram has already lost too much.
As I sprint past the tunnels, I see the cavers emerging. Face by familiar face appears, and I breathe in gratitude. Their eyes widen, reflecting their shock, when they see the lodge. Then I hear a shout.
“Tunnel three’s been hit!” A bleeding caver comes running from the south end of the tunnels. “Get your axes—they’re buried in there!”
Half the cavers run for the Rig, for caver’s suits and equipment to help save whoever sought refuge down three. The others head toward the lodge, where there might actually be a chance at saving someone.
Yellow containment dust spews from pipes that run the length of the outpost. Even Central’s stalwart fortress is being showered with the radiation barrier. So far, it seems to be effective. As I trudge through the mixture, I don’t see anyone showing signs of radiation poisoning. Maybe this isn’t as bad as a flash storm.
I give my two-room house a quick glance as I pass. Dad won’t be there. He’s either at the lodge or infirmary, saving as many people as he can.
Nine houses later, I reach the Berrends’.
“Lenore?” I push into the tiny cottage Dram shares with his older sister. The kitchen and loft are spotlessly clean. And empty. A sense of foreboding works its way into my thoughts. It tangles in my stomach until I feel I may lose my meager rations.
“Lenore!” The silence jabs me in the gut. “Fire, oh fire.” I dart through the door.
My eyes comb the dirt pathways between the houses, looking for straight brown hair the same shade as Dram’s. Every person gets a second look—my hopeful, desperate appraisal. At nineteen, Lenore’s just a year older than Dram, but she’s cared for him since the day after their mother died and their father was sent to the burnt sands. She is all he has.
Well, he has me. But if I were him and I had to choose, I’d want Lenore. She is kindness, where I am tough. She is thoughtfulness, where I am action. She’s compassion. I am survival. We both love Dram, but her love is tender and mine is like an axe forged in fire.
“Lenore!” I scream, not caring who sees my fear. Most people are screaming, anyway. They hardly notice me.
I can’t get near the lodge. Our outpost is only sixty strong, but they’re all here, gathered beyond the bones of the building. I search the faces, my heart pounding out a rhythm.
Please, please, please.
My chest heaves, and I skirt the crowd. There’s Dram—he’s with Marin. My heart gives a leap of gratitude, then:
Please, please, please.
Lenore has to be here. Alive.
“Is she safe?” Dram shouts to me over the sounds of the crowd. He’s helping to drag away broken timber.
He reads the uncertainty in my eyes. The wood pylon hangs from his grasp, forgotten. Then he drops it and pushes through the people.
“Len!” he shouts. “Len!”
“She’s fine, son,” calls Foss, a quiet caver with muscles the size of boulders. He sets a broken beam aside and strides toward Dram. “She’s helping at the infirmary.”
Dram visibly relaxes, and tears stream from my eyes. I sit down right where I am, in the middle of the chaos. My legs shake so hard that it filters up through the rest of my body. Containment dust coats my hands, so I can’t wipe my eyes.
“Do you need the infirmary?” A guard crouches beside me, his voice distorted by a rebreather. They are beginning to stream from Central, pouring onto the yellow-coated path in hooded Radsuits.
I shake my head.
“Then clear the area. We need to make room for the forfeit.”
A weight lodges in my chest. The forfeit.
We’re worse off than I thought.