Page 18 of Cage of Starlight

CHAPTER NINE

H is chance comes the following afternoon.

“Ready!” Menden cries. The assembled Seeds brace for impact.

Another set joins the mix for today’s maneuvers: the Fielders, forcefield-makers deployed to the battlefield in groups of five to set up a huge, one-way barrier.

“Protect them like your life depends on it,” Menden yells, “because it will!” And then, pacing and muttering, “We have a lot of work to do if they expect me to have you placement-ready in three weeks.”

Placement-ready. Tory shivers, then braces himself. Doesn’t matter. He’ll be gone before then.

The volley begins, three of the Legion-spheres rolling over the scarred yard at three-quarters speed.

Tory and his unit protect the Fielders until they’ve raised the shield.

Once it’s up, the shield repels the Legion unit, and Tory’s team takes care of all other projectiles.

Ten minutes without a major injury or a single balloon breaking on the shields, and they’ll earn a break.

“Spread out! You want something to get through and kill one of your Fielders? You’re the only thing between them and early death, and they’ll be the only thing between you and whatever horrors come your way. Act like it!”

Tory drops three balloons before they reach him, directing their force at the wall.

He hopes it slaps some unsuspecting officer in the gut.

He huffs a laugh when his lapse in concentration almost earns him a high-speed balloon to the face.

As training wears on, the difficulty level increases, bringing them closer to the wall—close enough to see the lit-up stone slivers embedded in the cannons’ sides.

Close enough, finally, to make a run for the gate.

He just needs the right timing. A returning soldier. A new arrival. A supply truck. Something . It opened a couple times yesterday, a quick whip up and down. It hasn’t opened at all yet today.

Just once. He needs it to open once.

But this close, the balloons are deadly.

There’s no gentle arc to them. If they land, they won’t knock the breath from him and leave a bruise—these ones rupture internal organs and shatter bones.

There are more than a few stories of unfortunate trainees who took a hit to the skull or spine and were gone before a Healer could reach them.

Tory shouldn’t split his attention like this, but he can’t help it. As long as the gate opens—

“Arknett!”

He startles, reflexively releasing the balloon he’d started to grab. It sputters mid-air before plummeting to burst on the shield.

The group groans as a whole, which isn’t fair. They weren’t that close to earning a break. He gets a few sharp elbows and curses from his fellow trainees, and a cheerily chirped, “You’ve got this!” from Randall.

Menden paces and mutters from his position away from the barrage. “Pay attention!” he calls. “On a real battlefield you’d be dead by now!”

I know that , Tory wants to retort. That’s why I’m getting the fuck out of here.

Maneuvers wear on. The gate doesn’t open.

Tory’s focus splinters. He loses them at least two more breaks, to the group’s mounting fury, Menden’s exasperation, and Randall’s embarrassed glee.

Randall slides close enough, once, to whisper, “When I told you not to be too good, I didn’t mean you had to suck. ”

Eyes glued to the gate, willing it to open, Tory feels a little bad for not grinning and sharing in the joke. Randall protected him yesterday when he didn’t have to.

Tory should probably caution him against that. His last kindness.

“Randall?” he says, and Randall makes a thoughtful hmm? “You’re right. I’ve got this. You need to watch out for yourself instead, all right?”

He doesn’t catch Randall’s reply, because that’s when it happens. The whip-like snap of the front gate rising at last hits him with a rush of adrenaline.

Tory doesn’t hesitate. He breaks formation and skirts the forcefield, feet pounding muddy earth. There’s a wagon stacked with boxes approaching the gate. Tory won’t have long. The second it’s safely through, the gate will snap closed like the maw of a beast.

Menden makes a startled noise when he notices Tory running and reaches for the strange device on his chest with its blue-lit stellite. The same sort of communicator Vantaras wears.

Tory can’t let him use it.

He grabs the force from two balloons and directs it at Menden, trying to spread it out—he doesn’t want to kill the guy. Menden makes an ugly cry as he flies back, but the delicate device shatters, its clean light flickering out.

The wagon is a mere finger’s width through the gate when Tory arrives in its shadow.

When the thing snaps closed, it nearly bisects him, but he makes it through.

In a stroke of luck, it cuts him off from the small clump of uniformed soldiers who thought to pursue Tory.

He runs through almost backward, stealing the momentum from a few of his pursuers and using it against them before they can call for the gate to open again.

Surely it will only delay them for an instant, but it’s an instant more of free air for Tory.

He’s outside those ugly, impenetrable walls and the cannons mounted atop them, and for the first time in days he breathes and it fills him to the brim.

A hysterical laugh breaks from him as his legs pump, bringing him farther and farther from the cold cage of STAR-7 and Sena Vantaras with his flame-bright eyes.

If Tory ever meets him again, they’ll stand on equal ground, and Tory will make sure Vantaras doesn’t walk away from the encounter alive.

He’s out . He did it. He made a mistake lingering in Hulven, but he knows better now.

He’s down the gravel path, running free.

Then he’s in the cool embrace of the forest, running and running like his legs never learned how to stop.

*

He’s probably been racing for hours through the sparse trees, long enough to forget he has bones.

His legs pump, numb and mechanical. Pain is an odd, distant thing—and thought farther still.

His brain says run , a blazing imperative, so he runs long after no footsteps beat the ground behind him.

Long enough that when he catches sight of a tower of rock through the trees, he trips over his own feet and rolls twice when he tries to stop.

He ends up on the ground, pulse pounding in his aching legs.

There it is, visible between the trunks: a natural outcropping of rock looms over the treetops, its odd peak reminiscent of a snake head.

Serpentshead Rock.

Tory’s only thought when he came to a fork in the road and went left rather than right, which would’ve led him past Hulven, was that he wasn’t sure he’d be strong enough to see that place and resist checking in on Thatcher. It didn’t occur to him that the other road went through Serpentshead.

Hasra . She promised she’d find him here.

Old instinct urges him to keep moving. Stopping anywhere, even here, could get him caught.

But when he finds his feet, he heads deeper into the woods instead of farther away, filling his heaving lungs with the sweet, damp rot of decaying leaves.

The murmuring trees drop puddles of light onto his shoulders as he weaves between them, until he steps into Serpentshead’s cool shadow. His body still remembers this path.

He arrives at the mouth of the wide cave he slept in for months after fleeing the labor camp. The murmuring of the nearby brook joins the rustle of leaves, and he breathes in rhythm with the world around him, deep and slow.

He looks up at the head of the maned serpent.

The hollows that would have been its eyes once glinted with stellite crystals, the stories go, but now, they sit empty.

What might be age-old paint in shades of blue, red, and purple lies in the deepest pits in the rock, worn away everywhere else.

Everyone pretends Serpentshead is a mystery.

Fools, all of them. They’re barely a few hours from the border at a sedate walk, and this land didn’t always belong to Westrice.

Tory stills at motion to his left, but it’s only light—prismatic shards of it flickering over the ground with every sigh of wind.

From a tree branch, faceted clear, amethyst, and pale-green beads dangle on a fine cord. Tory’s first instinct is a rush of fondness, but he crushes it before it can take root.

That’s a wind charm.

A wind charm all the way out here, too far from the fuel fog they wish away in Hulven to be a coincidence. Tory approaches it. It’s not just similar to the ones at Hulven’s House. It’s identical, down to the chip in the largest bead.

Hasra.

At the base of the wind charm, a rectangle of paper swings in the breeze. Hasra’s bold, blocky writing tells him, wait for me.

She was here. His pulse rushes in his ears.

That’s probably why he doesn’t hear the men approaching until it’s too late. They freeze as they pass the mouth of the cave, canteens slung around their shoulders and a huge bucket in each hand. They must have come from the brook.

The man nearest Tory drops both of his buckets with a splash and reaches for a revolver at his side, eyes widening. “He’s from the Compound!” the man yells. “Mr. Belmin! Scouts in the area!”

Belmin? The Belmin?

Tory barely has time to process the name before someone bursts from the woods and tackles him.

He lands on his back with a painful whoosh of breath.

On top of him, face set with intent to kill but hands free of weapons, sits a girl.

Short and slender with offensively vibrant red-blonde ringlets angled to follow the line of her chin, she sports a splash of freckles over her pale nose that reminds Tory of nothing so much as blood spatter.

She wears a delicately embroidered vest in the same hazel-green as her eyes over a flowing white blouse, and men’s trousers.

The fragments of light from the wind charm swing over her face.

“You didn’t see us,” she hisses.

What is she talking about? He absolutely did—did . . .