305.82 grams cirium
WE CAVERS HAVE many secrets, most of them preserved down the tunnels where Congress will never see.
Dram and I climb over twin lumps of stone—markers, for those who know what they’re looking for. Past the stones lies the first pool, but this is a puddle compared to our destination.
Cracks dent the cavern ceiling, like someone punched holes to the outside. Someone probably did—back when Conjurors worked the tunnels alongside Subpars.
When Mom first told me of the Conjies, they seemed even less believable than the stars she named me for, but proof such people existed is illuminated in the glow of my headlamp. Gnarled roots twist up through stone, forming a ladder. I climb the underground tree, trying to imagine the ability to manipulate matter, to touch rock and make plants sprout up through my fingers. We weren’t the only ones the flash curtain altered.
Like magic, Orion, Mom would say.
But then Conjies rebelled and the Congress punished them, taking away their abilities through a process called Tempering.
Not magic, after all.
“We’re getting close,” Dram says.
I scan the walls for chalk marks. “There—” I point to a V tipped on its side.
A whining sound echoes off the cavern walls, like the drone of an unnatural insect. Dram grabs my shoulder and hauls me into a crevice. A second later, a tracker whines past.
Guards don’t have to risk themselves down the tunnels in order to look after us. Years ago, Alara developed pulse trackers; fist-sized, hovering monitors that can detect and monitor human heat signatures. Techs use them to locate cavers when a transmitter’s damaged.
And they use them to expose Subpars who are breaking rules.
The fact that they’re down six tonight tells me that Cranny must suspect we’re up to something, but he won’t find us.
Trackers don’t register us when we’re in water.
Dram cracks a light stick, and we follow the cavers’ marks as the tunnel winds and widens into a cavern. Blue, luminescent light glows so brightly from a pool I have to squint until my eyes adjust.
A band of cirium shimmers at the bottom of the basin, but Subpars will never mine it. We will not carve this place up, not even to buy ourselves freedom.
Reeves and Lenore step from the shadows.
“Did you bring it?” Reeves asks. I hand him Foss’s axe.
They have churches in the protected city. Faith, for us, is something less tangible—raw as these cavern walls. Graham says that “sacred” is what you carry with you in your heart.
We move toward the pool, and blue light bathes our faces, mimicking the sky beyond the curtain.
“The guards have set pulse trackers,” I say.
Reeves nods. “Let’s hurry and get in the water.”
I hear the sounds of belts unbuckling, and axes and knives clinking on stone. Beside me, Dram drops his boots and zips off his caver’s suit. The air is kind, warm even—a pocket of grace on the fringes of hell.
We leave everything on the side and slip into the water in only our underclothes. The only thing we bring of Outpost Five is Foss’s massive pickaxe, held above the pool in Reeves’s clenched hands.
I spread my arms and lie back, floating, weightless. This place doesn’t have a name, but in my heart I call it the Sky.
We brought Foss’s axe here, where he will never be forgotten.
“You should be the one to do it,” Lenore says to Reeves.
“It should be all of us.” His low voice echoes in the cavern, filling the space, filling my bones. Reeves extends the axe, his arms flexing from the weight.
Dram clasps the end of the handle. I take hold just above, the edge of my hand pressing his. Lenore fits her hand beneath Reeves’s.
“Ready?” Reeves asks.
We hold our breath, and he lowers the axe beneath the water. I take the image of Foss with me as I’m drawn deep, the weight of the axe pulling me down, down. Our bodies brush as we glide to the bottom, each holding tight to the handle as the pick clinks against the cirium.
The last swing of a caver’s axe is one of beauty.
We kick to the surface, letting go until Reeves bears the weight of the axe once more, then we swim to the other side, toward an expanse of rock covered in white markings. Water flows over Dram’s bare back as he climbs out of the pool.
“Hurry now.” He reaches down and clasps my hand, lifting me from the water. It cools our body temperatures, making us less detectable to the trackers, but no one wants to get caught down here.
Some secrets are sacred.
Reeves nestles the axe in a crack in the cavern wall. I slip a watertight pouch from my undershirt and withdraw a piece of chalk. Lenore does the same. The chalk scrapes over the wall as I write Foss’s name, and beside it, the flash date.
Took the cordon shards so the rest of us didn’t have to, I write.
Gave a forfeit his life back, Lenore writes, dragging her chalk in a circle beneath the words. Before techs in Alara developed light bolts, Subpars marked caverns with an X for danger and a circle for safe.
All the inscriptions bear this caver’s mark.
“He is free,” Lenore whispers.
“He is free,” we echo.
Sometimes I forget the date, in a place where time is measured in grams added to the Cavers’ Log, but then I step back and glance over other inscriptions, some reaching back fifty years. My eyes catch on one of the newer ones.
Ferrin Denman, 142:03:07
I touch the date when seven claimed my mom. March 7 in the 142nd year since the flash curtain fell. The words are faint in places, written in a child’s scrawl. Lenore’s.
Loved John, Orion, and Wes
Held her axe over my head so I could live
Lenore swam my mother’s axe to the bottom of the Sky, but she didn’t leave it here. She brought it back to me.
Tears slip down my cheeks, the only things I have to lay at my mother’s memorial. I trace my chalk over the circle beneath her inscription. “You are safe,” I whisper.
We never stay long. Soon, others will filter in, staggering their comings and goings so the guards don’t notice. Cavers will come throughout the night, slipping in and out like shadows.
Burning Days are for all Subpars, but this ritual is for us.
Not even my father knows about this place.
Lenore and Reeves dress beyond the ring of light, preparing to leave.
“I stole something,” Dram announces softly. “From one of the guards. This is the only safe place to show you.” He crouches beside his suit and slips something from one of the pockets—a narrow, rectangular piece of tech the size of his palm. “When the guard first pulled this out, I thought it was a flash wand—”
“You stole a flash wand?” Reeves asks. Even he looks horrified. I’ve never actually seen one of Congress’s most powerful weapons, but I’ve seen what they can do. Tunnel nine was blasted open with flash wands.
“It’s not.” Dram grins ruefully. “I wouldn’t have risked stealing a flash weapon. This is something different.” He touches the device, and an image projects across the cavern.
“A map…” I’m relieved, but part of me is oddly disappointed.
“This is more than a map,” Lenore says. It moves as she moves, as if it senses her presence.
I walk forward, and the three-dimensional image shifts so that I’m crossing the five outposts bordering the Barrier Range. On the other side of the Range, the cordons stretch all the way to the flash curtain. Beyond it are more cordons, and the tapped-out tunnels of the first outposts, now an abandoned strip of the Exclusion Zone. Congress calls this area the Overburden, the name given to land above depleted mines. All around me are elements of the flashfall—shifting clouds and the fractured radiance of the curtain I’ve known all my life
I step beyond it.
My breath catches. I know it’s just tech—an illusion only—but as the towering peaks of the provinces rise up around me and the first forest I’ve ever seen enfolds me like a lush green secret, I want to take hold of it. I want to grasp at bark and pine needles and seize this life for myself. Living things. Life-giving, natural things. A life of my own choosing.
This isn’t real, this isn’t real, I keep telling myself.
But, fire, I want it to be.
Everyone stops moving, and I look to see what they’re all staring at. The cirium shield rises up before us, arcing around the city like an enormous silver wing.
The shield our ancestors died to put in place. And beyond it, the place we’re trying to earn our way into, a gram of cirium at a time.
“Ready?” Dram asks. We step forward, and the shield shifts past us. We stand inside the protected city.
The jewel.
The Prime Commissary called it that once, during a transmission she sent to cavers. I remember her smiling when she said it, her accent lending precise corners to her words. The protected city is the jewel in the crown that is our city-state.
I see so much water and so many green, growing things—not rugged, like the provinces, but tamed. I reach toward buildings glowing with light, thinking, jewel. In the distance, waterways bisect parks and roads. Transport devices whir by, and I’m saddened by how small-minded I was all the times I imagined this.
Dad is right. We live a rustic life here in the outposts. Now I understand the way he half laughs, half cringes the word when he says it. Rustic. I want to spit it out like a sour taste. No wonder Cranny and the other Naturals spare no smiles for us. Who would want to leave this to go serve in the outposts? I can hardly imagine more different worlds.
I’m standing in sunlight that does not wish to consume me, with the arc of the shield casting part of the city in shadow. There is no hint of the flashfall. Above me the sky—
Ah, the sky—
Clear. Not a cloud in sight. And blue, like Mom always told me it was.
Blue, like her glass memorial pendant around my neck.
The thought brings me back to this cavern, my bare feet on smooth stone, the grit of memorial chalk on my fingers.
I glance at Dram, but his eyes aren’t fastened on the jewel.
They’re on me.
“You climb the Range like you keep hoping to see beyond Cordon Five,” he says softly. “So when I saw the guard use this…” His lips lift in a half smile.
My eyes fill, blurring Dram and his gift.
“They’ll tear the outpost apart when they find out this is missing,” Reeves says.
“I’ll return it tonight.”
“You’re mad, Dram. If you’re caught, they’ll send you down four.”
“Some things are worth the risk,” Lenore says, and she crushes Dram in a hug. I’m not the only one who longs for a life beyond this outpost. She breaks away, darting a look toward the shadows. “I think I hear a tracker.”
“We need to leave,” Reeves says.
Lenore fastens her skullcap, her eyes locked on Dram. “Stay by the water. We’ll go first.” She reaches for the rest of her gear.
“Hurry, Len,” Dram whispers, his concern as evident as hers. The air fairly hums between them, like there is a special tension reserved for siblings who have only each other left in the world. Reeves stoops to help Lenore, and it occurs to me that he has no one—not a single person in the world with shared blood. But as he and Lenore duck from the cavern, he clasps her hand, and I think maybe shared blood doesn’t mean as much as love.
I’ve never been more aware of the chalk circles in this cavern.
Dram slides his finger over the device, and the image cuts out. Now it’s just us two beside the luminous blue pool. He sets the device with his gear, and our gazes collide and bounce away. With Reeves and Lenore gone, this space feels smaller, and I’m suddenly aware that we are wearing almost nothing. Wet almost nothing.
But now, when I close my eyes, I can call up an image of a forest, and the sky, and they are more than my imaginings of them ever were before. No one has ever given me such a gift.
“Thank you,” I whisper. The words aren’t enough, but I don’t know how to say what I’m feeling.
He starts to respond, but then whirls toward the cave entrance. We hear the whistling at the same time, louder than usual, and throw ourselves into the water just as they hum into view. Not one, but four trackers.
“Dive!” Dram says.
I kick to the bottom of the pool, my chest squeezing for lack of air. I’ve never seen trackers working in tandem, and some instinct tells me it magnifies their sensors. I press my hands to the cirium, willing my body to stay down.
Dram’s beside me, staring up toward the surface. We breathe out air, working to keep our bodies submerged. The bubbles lift, where we can see the trackers hovering still.
I need air. Panic flutters beside the pain in my lungs. These aren’t black spots clouding my vision, but a red wave of pain. One set of trackers leaves.
My body is having a war with my mind. I’m telling it to stay under, but it’s showing me it intends to live, and I realize I’m kicking to the surface.
Dram grabs my leg, and I cry out, losing my last bit of air.
One second … two … three. The trackers leave. And now Dram’s not pulling me down, but pushing me toward the surface.
We gasp, treading water, and I lie back, letting the Sky hold me in its embrace again.
Dram dives deep, and I watch him stretch his hand along the cirium basin. The water moves in eddies as he breaks the surface, droplets shimmering over his chest and arms. He looks different with his hair slicked back from his forehead, more a man, less a boy.
“If you’re going to look at me like that, it’s only fair that I get to stare back.”
I blink. “Oh. Um.” I duck beneath the water. Flash me, what am I doing? I stay under longer than my lungs tell me they’re comfortable with.
When I emerge, Dram’s waiting. A smile lingers in his eyes.
“We should go,” I say. But I don’t swim to the edge. The levity fades from Dram’s eyes as he watches me. “What is it?”
“I just had this image of you—taking my axe to the bottom.”
“Our axes will never hang here.” I swim to him, grasp his shoulders. “We’re getting free.”
He studies me as if he’s judging how sure I really am. “What does it sound like?” He speaks so softly, but I know what he’s asking.
All Subpars sense the elements in the earth—to some extent. We are born with an innate connection to the curtain that is honed down these tunnels, where our families have mined for generations.
But it is different for me.
“I don’t hear it with my ears.” I take his hand and press it above my sternum. “I feel it here. Like a sort of vibration…” I hum and watch his face. “Feel it?”
He looks down at his hand, pressed above my heart. “No.”
I lift his hand so it cradles my jaw. His fingers brush my skin, and there’s a question in his eyes. “Sometimes it’s stronger, like this…” I hum, and his breath stutters.
“Felt that,” he says.
Then there is just the sound of Dram’s breathing and mine, and the water lifting us, so that everything feels impossibly light. I feel things that scare me, that threaten to take what Dram and I have together and trade it for something altogether different.
“I have an idea,” Dram says suddenly. He pulls away and swims for the pool’s edge.
“What are you doing?” I heave myself over the side and follow him.
“We’re both about to reach four hundred grams, so this may be our last time here.” He fishes some chalk from his suit pocket and writes Orion on the blank stone wall. And beside it, Dram. But he doesn’t draw the caver’s circle. We’re not safe yet. Instead, he scrapes two parallel lines, tilted at an angle. It means—
“The way out,” Dram says. He and I will be the first cavers of Outpost Five to earn our way beyond the curtain without dying. “Maybe one day this wall will be filled with more names—other Subpars who mined enough.”
I touch the expanse of dark stone, and something stirs in me, too big to name. A promise that beats above my heart, in the place where the cirium sings.
* * *
We rarely see hovers at Outpost Five. The few times a year Congress sends us supplies and collects our cirium, the machines drop down behind the walls of Central, usually in the dead of night. But a cordon breach must break all kinds of rules. Cranny released a forfeit, and the day after, a craft lands beside the lodge.
I nearly drop the hammer I’m clasping in my blistered hand. Nails hang forgotten from my mouth as I watch the craft settle with a hiss into yellow sludge and ash. We were given the day free from caving, to honor the dead, but we’ve spent the remaining hours of this Burning Day salvaging what we can of the lodge. Because I’m the “mountain goat,” Cranny has me perched in the eaves, banging shingles into place.
I spit out the nails and scurry down the roof. My mind is racing so many places at once, I nearly fall. All I can think is that a hover like this will be coming soon for Dram and me, Lenore, and Dad.
I make my way to Dram’s side, where he watches the craft, grim-faced. He saw this sight the day his father was forced aboard. I can barely picture the hover that day, but I remember Dram clearly. His shirt had a tear, and I kept thinking that Lenore was going to have to learn how to sew. And I wondered about the new memorial pendant he wore for his mother—if it felt as heavy to him as mine did to me.
Technicians unload the craft, revealing crates of nutrient packs and wooden beams to rebuild the lodge. There are also new cavers. Congress sent us replacement parts and, apparently, replacement people.
Ashes from the funeral pyres lift on the wind, mingling with the smoldering remnants of the cordon breach. Even now, there’s a burn in the air. It irritates my exposed skin and makes my lungs work a little harder for air.
People are pouring from the hover. Four women, six men, and two I can’t quite believe. A little girl, maybe eight years old, and a boy who looks about eleven. I watch the children through the smoke of nine bodies.
“Looks like they’re planning the future repopulation of Outpost Five,” Dram murmurs.
“No Radbands,” I say. “They’re not Subpars.” These new people aren’t transplants from another outpost. They’re Naturals.
“Cave fodder,” Ennis huffs at my side.
I look at Dram. His jaw clenches so tight I see a muscle twitch in his cheek. “Why wouldn’t they just send more Subpars?” I ask.
“Maybe there aren’t any,” he says.
Outpost Five has never lost so many. Not even in the last flash storm. It’s safe to assume the other four outposts would have been impacted, too.
The little girl tips her head back, like she’s looking for a familiar landmark. She’s discovered the night is darker this close to the curtain, where we have only ashes for stars. Her dark hair hangs down over her yellow dress. She is the only splash of color in this gray world.
My eyes sting. From grief, from ash, the remnants of the curtain—it hardly matters. Congress is going to send this child down the tunnels.
“Fire,” I whisper. I have this horrible image of flash bats seizing her through that yellow dress.
“We’ll keep her safe,” Dram says.
I curse again and turn on my heel. I can’t listen to any more empty promises today, so I run past the infirmary, the Rig, and the weigh station, unsure where my feet are taking me. We tell ourselves we’re serving the city in some noble way, but the truth is so ugly, and it’s getting harder and harder to believe what they tell us.
“Evening, Scout,” Barro says as I turn into the forge. He glances up from his bellows just long enough to nod his head.
“Can I just … sit here awhile?” I ask.
His eyes shift back to mine, and in their depths I see a deep sorrow. This man gave me the memory of my mother that hangs around my neck. Barro is the only artisan at Outpost Five, but I’ve always thought of him as a magician because he takes all the death and gives back some precious bit of beauty. Something that reminds us that the tunnels don’t take everything—not the memory of the person we love.
I sit beside the furnace, absorbing its warmth, hoping it will thaw the ice within me. I close my eyes and imagine that I’m on the other side of the flash curtain—but it’s difficult with smoke burning my nostrils and the ache of Foss’s death pressing my chest like a stone.
* * *
“Found you,” Dram says quietly. The firelight plays across his face, bathing his stubbled cheeks in flickering shadow. He sits beside me and watches the glassblower pour ash into his tube. “They are free.”
It’s what we say on Burning Days to comfort the grieving. Today it just makes me angry. “Do you think Naturals have Burning Days?” I ask.
“Naturals aren’t as strong as us,” Dram says. “I’m sure they mourn even more dead than we do.”
“They call them ‘funerals.’” A young man steps into view. He has almond-shaped eyes and fair skin, and I remember seeing him emerge from the hover. His black hair hangs to his shoulders. “I’m Gabe,” he says. “Gabrielein, actually.”
He has an inflection to his voice I’ve never heard before. It makes me think that the language we speak is not the only one he knows. I stare at his hands—or rather, the metal palms and fingers that have taken the place of his hands.
“Not seen these before?” he asks.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to stare.”
“It’s fine. I still catch myself looking at them.” He flexes his hands. The hinged phalanges and metacarpals make a pinging sound.
“Were you in an accident?”
His eyes narrow, like he’s weighing his words. “No. I had two perfectly great hands. The Congress gave me these.”
“Why?” I can’t keep the shock from my voice.
“Have you never heard of Tempered Conjurors before?”
Conjuror.
I glance at Dram. His eyes are as wide as mine. “There hasn’t been a Conjie here for fifty years,” he says.
“That you know of,” Gabe says with a wink. “We’re a sneaky lot.” He lifts his hands. “Have to be, these days.”
“So you could … alter natural elements?” Dram asks.
Gabe watches the flames dance in Barro’s forge. “Our talents vary, but I could build shelters from rock, make shrubs produce berries—that kind of thing. Before my alterations, anyway.” He waggles his fingers.
I imagine weaving a vine from rock and letting its twisting arms carry me up and out of Outpost Five. But that’s ridiculous—there’s nothing out there but wasteland, outposts, and the cordoned zones on the other side of the range.
“I once knew a free Conjie so skilled he could form fire in his hand,” Gabe says.
“A free Conjie?”
Gabe gives me a smile, like I’m a child asking if the boogeyman is real. “How much do you know about the world beyond Outpost Five?”
“You mean the protected city?” Dram asks. “Are you from there?”
“I get to keep my hands—or what passes for my hands these days—if I limit what I say to you Subpars. That’s the deal your director made with me. So, in the interests of keeping my fingers—”
“Why are they sending Conjurors to the outposts?” Something isn’t adding up, and my own talent is telling me something that’s impossible.
Gabe smiles, but his eyes darken. “Stay safe in your ignorance, young ore scout. I intend to keep my hands this time.” He stands and walks out of the forge.
“Wait!” I jump to my feet and follow. “What’s it like—beyond the curtain?”
“Like nothing you can imagine. My people live in the mountain provinces—in places where you can still see the sun rise.” He’s right. It’s hard for me to imagine such a sight. His gaze sweeps the shadows. “I’m really not supposed to talk to you.”
“Your hands…” I reach toward him, needing to confirm what my scout’s senses are telling me. “Holy fire,” I breathe, clasping his metal wrists. “Cirium.”
His eyes widen. “You’re mistaken. It’s not even the same color—”
I scrape my fingernail across a joint seam. “Paint,” I whisper. “Why would they—”
He yanks his hands away. “Not a word to anyone, Subpar.”
“Why cirium?”
“It’s the only substance we can’t conjure.” He moves his fingers. “Or conjure through.”
The element hums along my senses. Purest cirium. It would take every gram I’ve ever mined to create just one of these hands. “Is this rare? What they did to you?”
“I can’t—”
“How many?” My voice is a bare whisper. “How many Conjies get cirium?”
Pain fills his brown eyes. “All of them.”
His answer stuns me into silence. “I thought … I thought cirium was used only to protect the city.”
“If I tell you what you want to know, they won’t just take my hands.”
Dram coughs, over by the forge. A guard is walking toward us. When I look back, Gabe is gone. Gabrielein. The Conjie with secrets too deadly to tell.
I came here hoping the heat of the forge would thaw the ice inside me, but now I’m on fire. A lifetime of mining nine to produce shackles for another human being?
“Five minutes to curfew,” the guard says.
“Thank you,” Dram says, cutting off my reply that wasn’t as polite. He touches my elbow. “I’ll walk you home.”
Silence stretches between us as we pass the mill and thread the dirt paths between the houses. My mind is a storm, as if I’m seeing through new eyes.
“Talk to me,” Dram says as we reach my door.
I want to tell him. My teeth ache because I’ve clenched my jaw so tightly, holding back the words. Congress disguised the cirium used for Gabe’s hands. They want the truth hidden, and they have no idea I don’t need to see cirium to know it’s there.
What Gabe told me is enough to incite rebellion. Subpars have served at the outposts for over a hundred years, dying in our efforts to mine the one element that can preserve Alara.
I mustn’t tell anyone, not even Dram.
“Rye?” he studies my face, trying to read me as usual, but I’m getting better at hiding secrets.
“What if my dad’s right, and we really are all prisoners here?” I muse, looking toward the boundaries of our camp.
“It’s been a long day, Orion.”
“They took your father away, Dram!” I hurl these words because I can’t say the ones I want—and I need him to feel the same sense of betrayal I feel.
He looks like I sucker punched him. “We each have a role,” he says after a moment. “My father refused his.” There’s hurt in his eyes still, but confusion too. “What did Gabe say to you?”
For a moment I can’t answer him.
“He said there are places you can see the sun rise,” I say. The diversion works, and Dram smiles.
“We’re going to see it,” he says. “The new vein you found will get us to four hundred grams.”
My gut twists. We are so close.
I want to be free, like the Conjies.
Instead, I mine the element that Tempers them.