0 grams cirium
0 grams flash dust
0 milliliters Cirium 2
0 milliliters Serum 854
THEY MOVE US from place to place—small camps of rebels on the east side of the curtain. I’m asleep more times than awake, but I’m aware of two things: air that smells of pine whispering over my skin, and my father, speaking to me as he tends my injuries, calling me back to myself. He says my name, and it sounds different than it did before. Maybe because I am different.
I squeeze his hand now. There’s a question behind his words that he’s not asking. It’s been there all along, but I haven’t had the strength to answer. Until now.
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Orion?”
“Go to Alara.” Not even my voice sounds the same. “Finish the cure.” The tech and equipment he needs are there. We don’t even have electricity, and we have to move constantly to evade the Congress.
He doesn’t say anything, at least nothing I hear before I sleep again. Later, he kisses my head. I can’t understand his soft words, but I know they mean good-bye.
He doesn’t ask me to come. I don’t tell him I’ll see him in Alara.
I’m not sure I’m meant to live behind a shield.
* * *
Jameson stands beside a small hover outside the tent. He’s dressed in his uniform, the civilized commissary I first met in Outpost Five. I’ve seen him conjure a tree from dirt, but what’s even more astounding is his ability to conjure a different persona—one that the leaders of Congress haven’t seen through.
I recognize the guards at his side—two that he trusts. But these men were not with him in the cordon. I wonder how many of his secrets they actually know.
I wonder how many of them I know.
“I can find a place for you both in Alara,” he says. “Orion, you’d be close to your father.”
“He’s safe?” I ask.
“Safe as he can be developing the vaccine in secret. I have my best people working with him. As soon as it’s ready, we’ll take it to the cordons.”
“He’s happy,” I murmur.
Jameson grins. “You should have seen his face when he saw the lab. When I left, he barely looked up from his microscope—just long enough to ask after you.”
“When you see him next, tell him I’m happy too.”
He hands Dram a narrow silver screencom. “Your father evaded capture and disappeared in the outlier regions. These are his last known communications.”
Dram closes his fingers around the device. A possible link to his father.
“Thank you,” he says softly.
Jameson’s gaze shifts back to me. “So,” he says. “Are you ready to go?”
He’s offering us the protected city. Or what actually exists in place of the myth I’ve held in my mind all these years. Part of me still wonders what girls my age do in a place with clean air and a shield that keeps the storms at bay, but a bigger part of me doesn’t care anymore.
I’m not that seventeen-year-old girl, and I never will be. A girl who had never endured a flash storm wouldn’t have survived the cordons. A girl who didn’t have to carry an axe and hunt for cirium would not have found the elements for a cure.
I look at Jameson. He watches me, waiting—even though he probably knows what I’m about to say.
“A Conjie once told me that the mountains are the only place you can still see the sunrise.”
Jameson smiles. “True, but there’s no electricity up there, no running water, no tech that can be tracked by the Congress.” His smile dims. “The free Conjies are hunted, Orion. It’s dangerous to associate with them.”
Dangerous. I consider the word. It rides my nerves like tension in a climbing rope, but it doesn’t fill me with fear. “I’m okay with dangerous.”
Beside me, Dram laughs.
“What about you?” I ask him.
He looks toward the ridge of mountains. “No tunnels up there, but I’m pretty sure you still need me as your marker.”
My smile matches his. “Mountains it is.”
* * *
The free Conjies welcome us like their own. We celebrate with music and dancing and enough ale that it almost feels like Friday night at Outpost Five. Only we don’t have to return to the tunnels anymore, and each choice we make is ours.
The idea is unfamiliar, but liberating—like the loose blouse and skirt I wear. A beaded scarf sways at my hips, a present from Dram on our special day. It’s the purest shade of blue.
Like the sky, he said.
Like his eyes, I told him.
Dram takes my hand, and his new metal cuff brushes mine. We are not just scout and marker anymore. We were never just that, but now it’s official. Well, as official as Conjies get, anyway.
“Bonding suits you,” Bade says with a grin.
I watch him turn Aisla under his arm, thinking the same thing about him. She laughs at something he says, and the sound lifts on the wind like it’s part of the music.
“I have something for you,” Dram says.
“What did you steal?”
He smiles. “Not stolen. I promise.”
“If you’re showing me the inside of our tent, you’re a little early.”
His smile widens. “Not our tent, either.” He loops a satchel across his chest and takes my arm. “Come with me. It’s the perfect time.”
He leads me away from the campfires, the raucous laughter and the music. It fades until I hear only crickets and owls and the sounds of Dram’s breath as we climb the path.
“Just a bit farther,” he says.
We emerge through the trees, and I follow him up past the tree line, our steps silent over the pine needles that slowly give way to earth and stone. “Bade told me about this place.”
We’ve made it to the top. I catch my breath, and Dram spreads out a blanket.
“It’s better if you lie down,” he says.
“Ah. Now I understand.”
He grins. “That is not what I have in mind.”
I lie back and set my head on the curve of his arm.
“Look,” he says.
I lift my eyes. It’s as if he threw my father’s compound against a cloud of cirion gas. The stars shine that brightly. Brighter than I imagined as a child, listening to my mother’s stories.
It robs me of breath. This far above the tree line, nothing hinders the view. The stars encompass the entire sky, illuminated like the shards of a cordon breach, only these are safely stowed far, far overhead.
“The North Star,” Dram says, pointing. “Polaris. It’s part of Ursa Minor. And if you follow it down”—he points to a grouping of stars—“you end up at the Big Dipper inside Ursa Major.”
“Now—” He rises up, holding me close as he turns. “See those three stars in a row? They form—”
“A belt,” I whisper, hearing my mother’s voice from my memories. I know what he’s going to say next. My heart races.
“That’s Orion.”
Tears burn the back of my throat. They blur the glimmering pinpricks of light stretched above me. I don’t have any words so I just squeeze Dram’s hand.
“Aisla said it’s a constellation you can see from anywhere in the world,” he says. “It contains two of the brightest stars in the sky.” He catches me studying his face. “What?”
“Thank you,” I whisper, leaning up and weaving my arms around his neck. He kisses me back, and I feel like I am falling across the sky, a blaze of light—one of the shooting stars my mother used to tell me about. We used to make wishes on stars we couldn’t see.
Now I am the star, and our wishes spread before me, infinite and vast and unfolding inside me.