0 grams cirium
I SLIP INSIDE nine. Twenty headlamps turn and pierce me with their glare. I squint against the light.
“They’re bringing down the Range,” I call. We don’t have earpieces or transmitters—nothing that techs could use to track us. “If we don’t go now, it’ll be too late.”
“Here.” Owen hands me a metal spring clamp the size of my hand. “I swiped it from the supplies building. Is that what you needed?”
I open the metal jaws and clamp it to my belt. “Perfect. Guard the entrance.” I jog to the front of the group, searching faces, counting heads. “We’re missing tunnel five’s team.”
“Changed their minds,” a man says. I don’t know his name, but I recognize him as one of the replacement people Congress sent us. A Natural. “Said nine’s a death trap—they’ll take their chances in the outpost.”
Five’s team is about to redefine its understanding of death trap.
I peer past the headlamps, looking for wiry red hair. The lodge mistress is missing. “Where’s Anna?” I find Marin’s face. Her eyes tear.
“She wants to stay,” she says.
“And Barro?” I search the group again, hoping to see the glassblower’s knowing brown eyes.
“He said to give you this,” Roland says. He lifts a narrow rod of metal as long as my body, a piece of rubble I found in the Range. “He attached the copper wire at the top like you asked. And he got you the water, too.” Roland reveals the bottle strapped in his belt. “I’ll carry them for you.”
“He’s not coming?”
Roland shakes his head. “He said he’s needed here.”
“Fine.” I switch on my lights, pretending my heart doesn’t ache for the people we’re leaving behind.
“What if they tell Cranny?” he asks.
“No one’s telling Cranny anything,” I murmur.
“But they’ll know we’re down nine—”
“We’re not going down nine.” I take Roran by the shoulders and steer him in front of me. “You’re lead scout now. Time to show us what you’ve been working on.”
“This way.” He flashes his palm lights, illuminating a hidden tunnel of rock and sparkling crystal that looks like something from a fairy tale.
“What is this?” Marin asks.
“A path across the tunnels,” I answer. “There’s a way out through four.”
Owen beams like a proud father. “Show ’em what you did with the sulfates, kid.”
Roran sets a flame to the rock. Patches of sulfate ignite like the flaming shard of a cordon breach, the metal ions illuminating the tunnel.
“It’ll burn and light up—just long enough for us to pass by,” he says.
“He made this with … an axe?” Roland asks.
“I’ve got movement,” Owen calls from his post beside the entrance.
“Everyone in!” I call. The cavers file past me into Roran’s tunnel.
“They’re coming—two squads of Striders!” Owen runs toward us.
“Seal it off, Roran,” I say.
Roran grips the cavern walls, eyes wide. “They’ll know my secret—”
“Do it!”
The Striders lift their guns. Rock scrapes over stone with a sound like screaming. The bullets ricochet.
“Conjuror!” a Strider shouts.
Roran shuts his eyes, and the entrance to nine pushes together, weaving the earth like the strands of a rope.
Our team stares at him with wide eyes. Most of them have never seen a Conjie in action.
“He’s conjured a path across the tunnels,” I say. “A way to escape through four.” Further explanations will have to wait.
“Get inside!” The muffled shout reaches us from the other side.
It makes me smile. Good luck breaking through this rock without any cavers. I glance at the two ore carts full of provisions I’ve been stowing.
“Grab as many nutri-pacs and serums as you can. Put them in your pouches, your suit—every space you’ve got.”
They dive into the supplies while a huge blast rocks the entrance. Bits of rock and dirt pelt us.
“Helmets on. Let’s go!” I guide Roran to the front of our group. “We’re going to have to run it.”
Roran sets a flare to the wall. Color bursts across the stone, spreading like a contained fire. The tunnel glows in muted shades of red and blue and gold.
“Step in my steps,” he says. Then he turns and runs, the last lead scout of Outpost Five.
* * *
We’re crossing tunnel six when the first explosion hits. I trip and slam against the ground.
“Everyone okay?” I call. I’m at the back of our group, rounding up stragglers, pushing anyone not going fast enough.
“We’re not going to make it!” Rita Calder cries. She’s the one I’ve been pushing most.
I tug her to her feet. “Come on, we have to keep going.”
“It’s too late,” she says, sobbing. “They’re just going to blow us up.”
“Don’t say that.” I pull harder, but the woman won’t budge. She digs her hands into my suit. I look past the others and meet Owen’s eyes. “Go on,” I mouth.
His brows lower, and he strides through the group to where I strain against Rita’s bulk.
“Look here, woman,” he says. “You can stay right here and whine all you want. You want to quit? Fine.” He pulls her hands off me. “But you’re not taking Scout with you.”
He guides me to the front. “Your place is up here,” he says gruffly. “The rest of you—keep up or let the tunnel have you.”
I press forward with Roran, but keep looking over my shoulder. The stragglers are getting farther and farther behind.
“You can’t do their running for them,” Owen says, huffing at my side. This pace is strenuous, even for a veteran caver like him.
There’s a shift in the cirium. I feel it, like a tap on the shoulder. The Range is crumbling.
“Axes up!” I shout. The cavers lift their axes above the heads of the people in front of them. They watch me, wide-eyed, waiting.
Rita’s not at the back. Neither is the Natural whose name I don’t know.
“Stay with Owen.” I lower my axe and tuck Roran in front of the other caver.
“Scout,” Owen says, his tone conveying more than his words.
“I’m going after—” Five steps forward, the explosion rocks me back. Axes arch above my head, the cavers protecting me. Stone rains down, but the tunnel holds. Roran and Owen have done their work well.
A woman screams.
“Rita!” I push past the line of cavers. The Natural shouts, his voice too distant to hear clearly. “I’m coming!”
“Scout!” Owen shouts. “We have to keep moving!”
“You go!” I call. I can just make out the Natural. He shouts again. What is he saying?
“Scout!” Roran’s voice. He must sense the change in the earth, too.
A deep rumble lifts from beneath us. I close my eyes, waiting for the tunnel to collapse around me, to enfold me in a tomb of rock.
You’ve got a job to do, girlie.
It’s like Graham’s with me, reminding me that I promised these people a way out.
I turn my back on Rita and the Natural. I slam my bolt gun in my belt and run toward the others. Dust and debris roar toward us, shooting through the tunnel like water bursting down a pipe.
“Oxinators!” I shout. “Get your masks on!”
Roran stands in the path.
A woman shouts from behind me, her voice distant, followed by another.
“Seal it off!” I tell Roran. “Now. Before it hits us.”
I brace myself behind him, strapping his Oxinator over his nose and mouth as he faces down the rage of the tunnels with his hands pressed to the earth.
“But those people—”
“No time. Do it!”
Crystals shoot from the walls of the tunnel, splintering the rock in massive bursts. Gnarled roots buffet our bodies as they erupt from the earth in tangles of limbs and leaves.
Roran’s efforts are extraordinary. But this is not shield enough.
“Roran!” Mineral dust explodes over us like the winds preceding a storm. I cough, choking on dust as I drag on my Oxinator.
A cascade of rock pours down the tunnel, illuminated in the still-burning glow of metal ions. Our deaths will be beautiful and swift.
“AUGH!” Roran yells. Rock slams together an arm’s reach away. The tunnel shudders, and I shelter him with my axe and my body. His wall holds. White blossoms float down like snow.
“We’re going to make it.” I will myself to believe it, so he will too. “We’re almost there.”
“That woman—” A sob tears from his chest. “She’s dead. And those others—”
“We have to keep going.” The stone beneath us trembles.
“I killed them!”
“No.” I force him to meet my eyes. “The Congress killed them. You are giving the rest of us a chance to live.”
I catch one of the blossoms clouding the air and tuck it into his fist. “Your mother is waiting for us, Roran. Winn is waiting for us.” I turn him toward his path. “Run!”
* * *
Cordon Five. The east end of the flash curtain. An unpredictable, shifting tail of radiation that emits flash bursts, which turn the sands to glass. No one mines here, not even the Gems. It is a closed cordon, and the Congress has no use for such a place.
It is a perfect place to hide.
Glass crunches beneath my boot.
“Careful, Orion,” Mere says.
The curtain shimmers in the distance, beyond clouds of flashfall. I feel it pulsing—its energy erratic, like a moth trapped behind glass. I drag off my Oxinator and inhale. No particles scrape my lungs. It’s as if the curtain is holding its breath—saving it for something worse.
“It’s safe to breathe,” I announce. I help Winn with her Oxinator, and she latches onto my hand as soon as I’m done. She’s been beside me like a shadow since we met them in four. She tugs her doll free.
“She’s safe,” I tell her. You’re safe. I don’t say the words, but I know she reads it in my eyes.
Marin runs her hand over a patch of crystallized sand. “This entire cordon is like a memorial pendant—ash and glass.”
“Can they see us from Outpost Five?” Mere asks.
“No,” I say. “It’s nearly impossible to see past the sulfur clouds.”
“They aren’t looking,” Marin says. “Nothing can survive out here.”
“You might be surprised,” I murmur.
“Do you think they’ll come after us?”
“No. They think we died when they blew the Range.”
“So we’re free,” Owen says.
“Free in a cordon made of glass,” Marin says.
“Free in a closed cordon with an Untempered Conjuror,” Mere says, her eyes glowing. “Roran will help us survive.”
“Down here,” he calls, waving us over. Exhausted as he is, he’s managed to conjure steps into the side of a deep trench. I smile grimly. His instincts are as strong as mine. The only true refuge here is belowground.
A small hand squeezes mine. I crouch down in front of Winn. “It’s just a place to stay safe when the curtain sends out flash bursts.” I look at the Subpars. “When the Radlevels are high. You’ll sense it before it happens.” The day of the cordon breach seems like a lifetime ago, but I remember how I felt up on the Range with Dram just before it happened—like an instrument being tuned.
Marin looks away, but not before I see her swipe at tears. At least you’ll be alive, I want to tell her. But this is no real life.
I’ve led my friends to a cordon that looks like a blend of all our memorial pendants. But I will leave them with more than ashes.
“Winn?” I ask. She looks at me, her dark eyes wide. I brush my hand over her straight black hair, fighting to keep my voice steady. “Have you seen the stars?”
“Yes,” she says. Her fingers twist in her doll’s rope hair. “I know how to find the North Star and the Big Dipper.”
“That’s good.” I smile, even as my throat tightens. “Tell the Subpars what they look like,” I say. “So they’ll know them when they see them.”
Owen watches me intently. “You making some kind of promise, Scout?”
“I hope so.”
He nods, like he’s not surprised the Scout is off to hunt another passage. One that might lead everyone to a true sky.
“I have to go,” I announce.
“Aren’t you staying with us?” Marin asks.
“No.” I check my pendants, tucked safe inside my shirt. The only piece of Outpost Five I’m bringing with me.
“Why not? You’re finally free.”
I suddenly remember Reeves, before he made himself dust.
I don’t think I’m the only one of us who loves like that.
“I need to find Dram.”
“But we need you,” Roland says.
“No,” I look at our little band of rebels with a small smile. “You really don’t. But Dram does. And I need him.” Roran tows himself up out of the trench, and I stare at the hole in the ground. My fear shifts to conviction. “This isn’t really freedom,” I say. “I’m going after something more—for everyone.”
“Where are you going?” This from Roran, who holds himself rigid, his rock clamped in his fist.
“Cordon Three.” I touch his shoulder. “My dad’s out there, too, and there’s something I need to give him.”
He nods, then looks away. Mere steps forward and puts an arm around his shoulder. There is so much I want to say, but my throat is tight and I’m out of time.
“You have the map I gave you?” She nods. “I’m not sure what my mother was scouting. Maybe an old passage to Alara. She ran into barriers that were impassable, but with Roran’s abilities…” I shrug. “It’s unstable, but it might be your best chance if you have to leave the cordon.” I spent hours beneath the bed, copying the map Mom had died making.
Mere pulls me close, and I swallow hard.
“You have a warrior’s name,” she whispers fiercely.
“I have a hunter’s name.”
“You’re both.” Her arms tighten around me, and the vials I’m carrying press against my chest, where they’re hidden above my heart. I’m hunting for more than Dram and my father.
I’m scouting a way out of the flashfall—for all of us.
I carry the elements close—possible makings for a cure too dangerous to tell anyone about. My father could do something with these. Maybe something that sets everyone free.
An antidote for radiation sickness would limit Congress’s power. Their so-called protection would be meaningless. How could they force compliance from Subpars and Conjies if we could survive without them? And without us, they have no way to acquire flash dust.
Dram and I didn’t just mine cirium from that cavern.
We discovered the elements for a cure.