Page 27 of Cage of Starlight

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T ory finds an envelope torn open and thrown on his bare mattress when he swings by his room after dinner. Gavin regards him with a predator’s smile, his card-playing buddies stone-faced beside him, as Tory skims the single page. Deployment orders, as promised.

CFR unit, of course. Corpse corps.

He has two days.

One of them snickers. “Not so special now, huh, Special Diet?”

Tory throws the papers down with numb fingers.

“Ready to bleed, Seedbait?” Gavin sing-songs.

Laughter follows him from the room and into the claustrophobic and ever-narrowing halls. Every short, sterile corridor looks like the next. It figures that when he needs to find the garden, he gets lost around corners.

He could run, but he wouldn’t get far. They’d deactivate his Core. Vantaras’ words mock him: a lit fuse, he called it.

There’s got to be a way to take it out. Maybe Vantaras is misinformed. He’s the type to follow orders without question. He’ll bet another Reacher could do it. They may not be as rare as they’re said to be. Maybe not all of them work for the military.

Tory has survived so many things. He’ll survive this, too.

At last, he pulls the windowless gray door to the garden open.

His heart slows; his eyes stop roving. Life thrums through him.

He trades the acrid bite of chemicals in the hallway for a honey-sweet breeze that carries the smell of herbs and earth. Echoing stone shifts to irregular cobbles and springy, sun-warmed grass. His feet lead him to the tree with the gnarled trunk.

Sunset—fiery yellow and fading—sifts through the netted dome and sets the tree’s leaves aglow. Specks of greenish-gold swim over the grass with every whisper of wind.

In the Compound’s neglected garden, flowerbeds lie devastated, long since gone to seed and crowded out by weeds and wild things.

Woody vines cling to every crack in the concrete, stubbornly blooming and straining toward the sky.

Tory sits back against the massive trunk, yawns, and closes his eyes.

The rustle of leaves and the distant calls of birds blend into a white-noise melody.

His fingers, outstretched, trace roots that wind out of and back into the ground.

Tension slinks from his body like an unwelcome visitor, and he sighs as he drifts.

“Do you know the story of this tree?” The voice comes from his left, tearing him from his peaceful haze.

Vantaras .

Speaking of unwelcome visitors. Maybe he’ll go away if Tory doesn’t answer.

“You might like it.”

Or maybe not. “What, you’re stalking me now?”

“If you’re referring to the garden, I’ve been visiting since long before this place was graced by your presence, Worldseed.”

“You know you’re a hypocrite, right? You’re one of us.”

“You treat the word like it’s an insult.”

Tory cracks open an eye. “They made it one when they locked us in here.”

Silence.

“Yeah, I thought so.”

The light shines red through his eyelids, but Vantaras pipes up again before Tory can sink too deeply into rest. “Have you seen the plaque on this tree’s trunk?”

Tory rolls his head until he has Vantaras in sight: he sits on the half-circle of stone benches around the other side of the tree.

“There is no plaque.”

It’s only because he’s looking that he catches Sena’s dry smile, there then gone. “Exactly. They drove it into the tree so long ago the trunk grew around it and swallowed it up. Remind you of anything?”

Tory thinks of the Core spreading poison roots inside him, a mark of their ownership and power.

“They say Westrice’s founders, Anton Chimre and Ramus Vantaras, followed the capital’s Golden River to the southeast corner of the country while they were seeking to expand their territories.

The land at the time was heavily wooded, so thick with blooming kuhlu vine that they could see nothing.

This tree stood taller than all the rest, so Ramus made use of it, climbing its trunk and standing on its branches to look out over the land.

He saw trees blood-bright with kuhlu blooms bowing over the Golden River and light glinting in every color off a vein of stellite by the water, and he fell in love, made it his goal to bring prosperity to this place.

” He gestures to the strings of flowers in all shades of blue and violet, only a few of them gray-maroon.

“Kuhlu vines bloom only in proximity to stellite—the richer the vein, the closer to red. This place was once the richest mine in the country. It’s dry, now, like all the other border mines.

Within a few years, these vines will bloom bright blue.

A few years after, they’ll stop blooming entirely. ”

The vines in Hulven bloom purplish for miles outside the town and maroon close to the mine. Maybe it, too, is on its way to emptiness. “That’s depressing.”

“Yes. So when my father chose to mine his territory for Seeds , he had STAR-7 established here. They have a joke about the tree: it’s us, penned in by the Compound, marked with their name.

We’re the thing they stand on to get to the top, the strength that supports their ambitions.

They discarded all the old stories about how Seeds came about.

Seeds, they decided, exist only to bring glory to Westrice. ”

Tory’s mouth twists into a grimace. “Why did you think I’d want to hear that?”

Sena laughs. Actually laughs, for the first time since Tory has met him. “Where do you think the founders are now?”

Maybe he’s supposed to have some profound answer, like they’re within every citizen of Westrice . “Probably rotting in the ground.”

A quiet chuckle. “And this tree?”

Tory can’t help laughing when he realizes what Sena’s driving at. The tree just keeps growing, alive and spreading, roots running up against the high walls of the prison they built for it and pushing through cracks in solid stone. It may well outlive the Compound.

“Yeah,” he says at last. “I guess that’s not so bad.”

A smile flickers over Sena’s face, lazy and satisfied, and Tory finds himself sharing it.

“You could work on your storytelling skills, though.” He leans against the trunk again and closes his eyes.

*

The first hit takes him by surprise.

It shouldn’t, after Gavin’s stunt during maneuvers and his eerie warning when Tory received his deployment orders.

After maneuvers the following day, Tory takes his usual shortcut between a couple of storage sheds while everyone’s waiting to be seen by the Healers.

The moment he steps into the narrow walkway, hands grab him from behind and fling him into the wall of the shed.

Gavin, his cardplayers, and a couple others Tory doesn’t recognize glare at him as he rights himself.

The first hit lands on his jaw, snapping his mouth shut on his tongue. They waste no time with words.

If he wasn’t swallowing blood, he might respect that.

He spits onto the ground. “What’s this about?” He pushes forward, and the group tightens around him.

“It’s about you going around like you’re better than everyone,” Gavin says.

Someone hooks a foot around his ankle and yanks, and Tory crashes against the wall of the shed.

Another punch—despite his attempt to block—batters his solar plexus.

Breath rushes from him, and Tory tips, a laughable attempt to right himself foiled by a push from his left. His right ankle wrenches as he falls.

Tory realizes, as hot pain stabs up his leg, that he can kill them.

He wouldn’t even need to do much. Bodies are so easily broken. The force from a punch dropped into their skull or spine would do it. He could rupture a spleen with just a little effort if he could remember where spleens are.

He’s thinking about that when someone grabs him and pulls him back up. Assholes. They worked so hard to get him on the ground. It’s not like he wants to be on his feet.

“You know what?” He sways and swallows more blood. “I’m done with this.”

They must think so, too, because he doesn’t see the last blow coming.

*

Tory blinks awake to pressure on the side of his face and a pair of appraising amber-brown eyes. A blurred figure crouches beside him. His world rocks as a hand tips his chin this way and that.

“Unequal dilation,” a familiar, dry voice observes, “and sustained loss of consciousness. You really did it this time, didn’t you, Arknett?”

Tory groans, head throbbing.

Sena Vantaras is the last thing he needs. Clever stories about Seeds and trees or no, it’s hard enough to deal with the guy when Tory’s operating at peak condition.

“Go ’way,” he says.

He thinks he says it, at least. His tongue pulses with pain, sausage-sized in his mouth. But it doesn’t matter if he spoke clearly. He at least made an unhappy noise.

He gets no response except that stare .

“. . . to Jeffra, just in case,” Vantaras is saying. “Can you stand?”

Tory grunts, hoping Vantaras will take the hint. When he gets closer instead of farther away, Tory licks dried blood from his lips and puts effort into enunciation. “Back . . . off .”

Raising a curious eyebrow, Vantaras does, standing and retreating until his back presses against the other shed’s wall.

Tory takes stock of his injuries. His head is a spongy mass of agony, and he thinks he might have done something to his ankle. All other pains are secondary, but his ribs, stomach, and back have a few things to say when he tries to sit.

He sucks a breath through clenched teeth as he pulls his knees up, testing his ability to put weight on his right ankle.

The ankle is having none of it.

Vantaras crosses his arms as Tory slides up the shed, pushing with his left leg and right arm until at last he’s upright. Burnt orange and purple clouds beyond the Compound’s wall indicate that it’s probably past dinner time, damn it. He’ll be lucky to catch a shower tonight.

Without warning, the sun sinks. The earth goes muddy and liquid, and he’s freefalling.

A startled curse bursts out beside him, and something catches him under his arms.

“I suppose that answers my question.”