Page 24 of Cage of Starlight

The laboratory blinds him—polished metal and white walls made cutting and cruel with brilliant light.

Surrounded by murmuring technicians in the center of a gleaming silver table, a ball of tightly wrapped, peeling vines waits, at odds with its clinical surroundings.

A few serrated, heart-shaped leaves sprout from it.

They’re identical to the leaves on the vines in the garden and the ones in Hulven with their organ-red blooms.

Pulses of energy—violent and vibrant, like something living—barrel into him. Da-dum, da-dum, like an electric heartbeat. Tory shakes with it, knees knocking, breath frozen in his chest. He traces the energy to its source.

To the nondescript ball of vines.

The scientists mill around like it’s nothing . Helner stands less than a foot away, tapping long, sharp fingernails on the table. She’s close enough to touch it.

Even from the doorway, Tory can barely stand. His vision tunnels.

It’s like that eerie feeling he got from the mine in Hulven except so much worse. Better?

He’d die to touch this thing.

“Breathe,” Vantaras reminds him, dry.

Tory manages a blurry glare. “Can’t they feel that? Can’t you?”

“They’re not Seeds.”

Tory notes the fine tremors in his clenched fists. “Helner is.”

“Dr. Helner isn’t human,” Vantaras snips.

Tory doesn’t mean to laugh.

At the sound, Helner turns. “Ah! Knew I could count on you, Vantaras. Such a good boy.” She invites them over with two scalpel-sharp gestures.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to go, but there’s no way his legs will carry him there.

He manages a few toddling steps, and the energy intensifies, filling every empty place inside him. He looks back, vision swirling. “You’re not coming?”

At least if Vantaras was going, he could hide his jelly-limbed staggering behind him.

“I’ve been the subject of this experiment more than once.” A quick, mirthless smile. “They didn’t like the results.”

“Tory! We don’t have all day!”

He clamps his mouth shut on the questions he wants to ask. Halfway to the strange sphere, he goes down on one knee. There’s a shuffle behind him, and when he manages to turn, Vantaras is halfway across the floor toward him.

Helner growls, “Lieutenant, move one step closer and I will trash you to the colonel.”

All color fades from his face and he’s flat against the back wall again, an inch or so from blending into it.

“Arknett, up.”

Helner grabs his elbow when he gets close.

His blurred vision clarifies when he stops mere feet from the table, the world etched with sharp lines and painted in colors Tory has no names for. Dr. Helner and Sena are revelations, galaxies, the Seeds within them unspeakably bright.

“He’s high,” Helner says. “How sweet.”

Pain blooms on his cheek like a flower, sharper and duller than any sensation he’s felt.

It could be hours later when he manages, “Ow?”

Helner lowers the hand that must have slapped him and curls it into an elegant fist. “Hilarious though your reaction may be, you have work to do.”

He’s outside himself. His lips don’t belong to him. “Work . . .?”

“What do you feel?”

“A lot.”

“Your specialty is in recognizing and handling energies—which accounts for your extreme reaction to proximity. It also increases the likelihood of your ability to help us. You’ve done this before—there were reports of the stellite in Hulven glowing, a clear resonance response.”

“I didn’t . . .” But he remembers the strange, impossible energy that leapt into his hands when he was healing Kelly. It was nothing near so intense as this, though.

“Don’t bother denying it. The color of the glow matched what the analysts saw during your typing. In any case, meet Legion unit #2. Shari here calls it Joe , but we don’t listen to Shari.”

The scientist beside Helner crosses her arms. “Joe is one of only three in our possession. We used to have six.” She glares at Sena.

Legion . Isn’t that what those huge things in training are supposed to emulate? This is melon-sized and kind of cute. It has leaves. It’s a toy compared to what Tory has faced in training. But those bone-crushing spheres are supposed to be the toys? Someone is confused.

“Legion units are the thorns in Westrice’s side.

They’re Arlune’s strongest weapons. Their stellite cores are locked to the unique energy signatures of their users, and no standard Seeds have had any luck awakening them.

Zero response to proximity or touch. They’re so simple , but we haven’t been able to reverse-engineer them, either.

General Renstein put a stop to our attempts after our third potential pilot bit it.

Anyway, there’s clearly something they’re doing to the vines or the stellite we can’t replicate.

” She sniffs. “We’ve had a hard enough time getting stellite to hold any energy for a significant amount of time.

” She gestures to the lights along the wall with their milky, cracked crystals.

“As you can see, Westrice’s attempts have met with less-than-perfect results. What do those lights feel like to you?”

Tory scowls. “Dead things. They’re wrong.”

“Ha! Wait until I tell the generals they’ve killed the stuff trying to process it.

Anyway. So we discovered—” her eyes flick to Vantaras again, “that the Sources may be able to . . . interact with the ones in our possession in certain ways, but we still haven’t managed to get anyone to form a proper connection with one and make it move.

Your abilities should be well suited to controlling one.

If I’m right, those assholes will finally listen to me. ”

“It’s . . . cute.”

“It can take many forms. Just hope you don’t have to see them.” Helner extracts a small wooden device with a clock-like hand that swings back and forth. “We’ve exhausted all avenues of research with the lieutenant. Thus, your turn.”

“How do you know I won’t do something worse?”

“I assure you, that’s impossible. Step closer. You’ll need to touch it. It might be overwhelming at first, but once you’ve settled, I’ll provide further instruction.”

He reaches out, and the roots pull back like a curtain, like they’ve been waiting for him.

“That’s new,” Helner breathes.

A huge stellite crystal sits at the center, flaws sparkling like a field of stars in the Compound’s merciless fluorescence. Alive.

Tory’s hand trembles, body throbbing with a beat out of time with his own pulse. If it’s this bad being near it . . .

“By the Beast, just touch it.” Helner seizes his wrist and presses his hand to the crystal—

—and Tory breathes for the first time in his life. His blood sings with it. A map of light and texture and sensation unfolds itself across his awareness.

The tang of citrus and the bite of woodsmoke and the brush of silk against his skin fade out, a farewell kiss to every sense. The crystal beneath Tory’s hand glimmers with the same galaxy of blues his blood shed when they typed him, casting light like ocean waves onto its cradle of roots.

The roots shift , too, like they’re eager to listen.

“Good!” Helner could be outside the room, outside the Compound, for all her voice matters. “Yes, this is—” She gulps. “Try a shape, an easy one. How about . . . a sphere that goes all the way around you.”

“Dr. Helner, I don’t know if that’s—”

“Cork it, Vantaras.”

Tory imagines it—a sphere to embrace him. The roots lift, tentative.

“You have to visualize it ,” Helner says.

He closes his eyes and sinks into the image: the closeness and darkness of it, claustrophobic. A cage of roots to lock him in, each one a bar in a living prison. Adrenaline scorches him, and the crystal sears his palm. He twists away, but it won’t let go.

Heat mounts. Sound fades. The light grows until it burns his eyes.

Roots explode in every direction. One spears the ticking instrument and impales it against the far wall where it spills wood splinters and cogs onto the floor. A strip of the inset stellite lighting bursts when a root punches through it, throwing glass-like shards through the air.

The white-coated assistants duck and cower. With awful, hollow thunks , more roots crash into stone walls, the floor, the ceiling, burrowing like they want to break through. More stellite slivers fly. The roots writhe, curling deeper. The ceiling falls in chunks.

Tory stands in the midst of it, safe and far away, senses swathed in wool. Two or three roots over his head deflect debris.

Red light kicks up in the strips along the floor—burst and fade, burst and fade. Tory staggers when something pulls at him from behind. He tips his chin to peer at whatever it is.

Helner.

She’s screaming in his ear, but she could be whispering from another room.

Let go, she’s saying. Tory, let go of it!

He can’t. It’s part of him now. Tory tries to pry his fingers away with his other hand.

Pipework tumbles from the ceiling, and water sprays down in a fine mist.

Sound returns in a roar. Twist of metal, crash of glass.

Screams. The discordant clatter of an alarm bell.

The instruments the vines didn’t topple or destroy hum and sing and tick around the crystal.

The assistant who bemoaned how few of these were left sobs at Tory’s feet, hands bloodied from stellite shards.

Tory meets every eye, but not one has an answer, until—

Vantaras strides toward him, backlit in red, a study in purpose and fear. The roots shy away, like they know something Tory doesn’t. Like the cannon did on the training field.

“Move,” he whispers, but Tory hears it loud and clear.

“ Damn it, Vantaras,” Helner growls, but she doesn’t stop him.

He pulls the glove from his left hand with his teeth and lets it drop.

The air electrifies. There’s no other word for it. Static raises the hair on Tory’s arms and neck. It’s nothing he can feel or touch, nothing much of anything—it’s the silence before a lightning strike, and it’s coming from Vantaras.

Vantaras apologizes just before he lays a shaking hand on the roots.

The energy shifts at his touch. It’s something, nothing, everything—the bright burn of a star before it dies.

The root beneath his hand goes still and gray.

The color spreads, and vines crumble to ash, unable to bear their own weight.

The crystal cracks, gray-black at its core, stars winking out.

Tory staggers, freed from its hold and hollow with its absence.

Reality rushes in. A light flits on and off, a dying smoke-gray in color. The bell shrieks louder, earth-shattering and consuming.

Sena drops to one knee to grab his glove, shoving his hand into it before pressing both palms to his ears. The communicator on his chest flickers blue. “ I said alarms were triggered at your location, Lieutenant. Respond. ”

Kirlov’s voice.

Sena doesn’t answer, probably doesn’t hear it.

Ash-like flecks floating on the air are all that’s left of most of the roots, or little fragments in the shape of roots that crumble at the touch of Tory’s foot.

Red light throbs in and out with the cacophony of the alarm, and on the floor, in the center of it all, Sena says, s orry, sorry, I’m sorry and rocks into the cradle of his knees.