Page 32 of Cage of Starlight

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T he fall is a short one, the landing merciless. Sena plummets into icy water nearly cold enough to stop his heart.

It’s sheer luck that he doesn’t inhale. He tightens his arms around Tory, kicking his feet, but Tory’s dead weight drives them deep into the churning water.

Sena surfaces to the taste of brine and the smell of smoke.

Above him, fog rolls over the sharp black cliffs, illuminated by intermittent rushes of fire or the bright blare of an explosion.

The noise of it grates on his ears, but it’s not the worst sound: it means there are people still alive to fight.

Tory is an anvil in his arms and they’re a long way from anything resembling shoreline.

A wave lashes against Sena and nearly buries him in water again, but just before it hits, he catches sight of a sad stretch of sand shaded by the cliffs.

He’s too dizzied by the fall to know whether it’s on the Arlunian or Westrian side of the border, but it hardly matters.

They will be far more dead, far more quickly, if Sena doesn’t swim.

His muscles still ache from yesterday’s—from yesterday, but they serve him well enough to bring them both to shore.

By the time he gets to the shallows, the prospect of dragging Tory across wet sand is unappealing enough that he seriously considers letting the ocean take him.

He’s not even sure he has the will to drag himself across wet sand right now.

Briefly, he entertains the thought of lying face-down and drowning in a knuckle’s depth of frothy water.

But while Sena is many, many things, he’s not a quitter, so he drags Tory out of the surf and into the shade of the cliffs, taking only a tiny, truly conservative amount of joy from dragging Tory’s dead weight over two large, bumpy rocks.

When he finally drops him and checks his breathing (three sharp pumps to his chest make him groan and expel the water he swallowed) Sena flops down next to him. Beast have mercy on anyone who calls upon him to stand.

But his reprieve doesn’t last long. Now that he’s not imminently at risk of death, his body begins to process its own aches, and a pain in his chest—a sharp, stabbing thing that glows white-hot with every breath—makes itself known.

Sena shouldn’t be surprised. The landing wasn’t kind, and Tory has very sharp elbows. Sena muses, with a careful press to his ribs that makes him grit his teeth, that he may have broken something.

It won’t be a problem. Sena will not allow it to be.

Sheer stubbornness brings him to a sitting position, where he takes stock of himself.

He’s soaked, naturally. The rations in his pockets are still secure, but the communicator clipped to his pocket must have gotten lost in the fall—not that its delicate components would have liked the water even if it remained on him.

Aside from the communicator, his belongings are intact.

By the time Sena finishes cataloging everything, Tory is groaning awake. He rolls onto his side, coughing more water onto the sand.

His voice is gravelly when he speaks. “What happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

Tory rasps a laugh. “I remember . . . being about to throw that explosion, then you pulled us over the cliff.”

Sena lets the silence stretch long enough to grow a personality. He grits out, “The fall must have addled your brain.”

“By all means, tell me what really went down.”

“ You botched throwing the explosion and were about to be tossed over the cliff. I foolishly tried to warn you and, failing that, tried to keep you from falling. And here we are.”

“You have a terrible memory,” Tory mutters. “We’d be ground meat if I hadn’t thrown it as far as I did.” Which is accurate enough. Tory sits up with what appears to be monumental effort. “Did you send out a distress call?”

Sena waves a hand over his empty pocket. “Lost it in the fall. Not that it matters. Anyone in range is likely dead.”

“Mm, love that optimism.” Tory shivers for a while before he startles, looking up at the cliffs. “It’s over?”

It is. No more smoke or flashes.

No more fighting, because there are no more fighters.

He makes himself stand. “On your feet. We need to move inland. We’re likely still in Westrice, but that just means any infiltrators who find us will be on high alert—more likely to kill than capture us.”

Tory lifts himself and brushes wet sand from his clothes. “Tired,” he says.

“Tired is better than dead. We need to put whatever daylight we have left to good use. Navigating around the rocks will waste time, but there’s no way we could scale them in our condition.

Once we make it around, as long as we head northeast and don’t get killed, we’ll find the road to the Compound before long. ”

They start off, traversing the rock-strewn sand.

“How can you still be wearing those gloves?” Tory asks. “All . . . soggy and . . .”

“I don’t notice it. I rarely take them off.”

“That sounds unsanitary.” Silence spreads between them, broken only by the obscene squish-schluck of Tory’s shoes. With Tory behind him, Sena feels his gaze like a brand between his shoulders. After a while, Tory says, “So, how long have you been doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“ This .” The word is not nearly as illuminating as Tory seems to think it is. Sena lets his judgmental silence clue Tory in, and he does eventually clarify. “Being a soldier, I mean.”

“An officer .” Sena speeds up as they enter the woods. “I was sent to officer preparatory school as soon as my Seed was discovered.”

“Yeah? How’d that happen?”

“As I said before, I was the target of harassment. A group of boys found joy in roughing me up whenever the teachers’ eyes weren’t on us. I reached out from the ground to stop one of them from kicking me in the face. Without meaning to, I . . .”

Tory perks up. “Killed him?”

“He survived. His leg had to be amputated below the knee.”

“Ah. Yeah, you mentioned that. You finally going to tell me what your Seed is?”

Sena pauses. “How much do you know of the First Children? Dr. Helner would have called them the Sources.”

“I know I’m supposed to be one of them. ’Til a few months ago, I’d’ve sworn up and down I was a Healer.”

Sena laughs. “That really was unwise.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Sena slows his gait. “In Arlune, there are legends of the Great Celestial Beast.”

“The what?”

“The Celestial Beast was an ethereal creature who swam among stars, the creator of our planet and many others.” Sena cuts himself off. He has the words right, but it sounds wrong. There’s something missing when Sena tries to recite them. He grumbles, “I can’t tell the stories like my mother did.”

“Give me the abridged version.”

“Just as well.” Sena adjusts his jacket and pulls in a halting breath.

He’ll have to get used to shallow breaths.

“The first Seeds ever to appear on this planet after the Beast’s body was planted in the earth were two children, the Beast’s gift to the planet it loved unto death.

They’re the so-called Sources, because the military likes slapping its own names on everything.

The First Children were the Worldseed and the Voidseed—Channeler and Neutralizer, if you use Westrice’s names.

Just as the world has roads and roots and the universe is flooded with rivers of stars, the First Children each carried life. From them, all other Seeds blossomed.”

“Worldseed.”

“That’s you. The Worldseed has the ability to handle all energies.”

“And the other one?”

“Voidseed.” Bitterness churns in Sena’s stomach. He stuffs his hands into his pockets. “That’s me. Intrinsic. The Voidseed destroys all energies. It’s notoriously unstable. Also the rarest, with your type coming in a rather distant second. I can break down anything I touch.”

“So you’d kill me if you touched me?”

Sena laughs, brutal and short. “My self-control is better than that, I hope. But . . . I could, if I weren’t careful. I also nullify foreign energies as a matter of course. It’s why no Seed abilities can affect me, and why my Core and . . . and NOVA had to be surgically rather than Seed-implanted.”

Tory winces.

“You remember when you came to the facility, the test they did to determine your type? It destroys the Seed in your blood when it touches it. The color and pattern of the sparks indicate your type, and the extent of the destruction indicates your range of effect. They’ve been taking my blood since I was eleven to develop it. ”

He swallows a surge of shame. Tory saw, the day his father visited. He saw Sena’s arm, marked with over a decade of needle scars.

“Not only the type tests,” Tory whispers.

“No.” Sena has not allowed himself to feel anger for years, but heat surges in his chest when he remembers the vest his father wore, the prototypes he promised—all the weapons they’re making out of Sena, like he’s not destructive enough on his own.

“When my ability comes into flesh-to-flesh contact, it neutralizes the energies that sustain the human body. The boy whose leg I grabbed when I was nine lost the limb to necrosis.”

Silence falls for a long while. Tory is probably horrified. But when he finally speaks, it’s not to express disgust. “So, if you can’t be affected by any Seed . . . you can’t be healed?”

Sena’s breath freezes in his chest before he regains control of it.

Typical Tory. Since the day they met, Sena’s had a beast of a time trying to predict him. He shrugs, brushing off the flutter of surprise. “My Seed has, thus far, kept me from experiencing any major illness.”

Another long pause. Uncomfortably long, this time. “And physical injuries?”

Sena flinches. Heat climbs his neck. Tory must be thinking of that shameful incident in Kirlov’s tent. “I’ve developed a high pain tolerance.” He speeds up. “We need to hurry. We’ve got an hour or so until nightfall, and this terrain will be too dangerous in the dark.”

A low wind rustles the leaves, and Tory audibly shivers. “Gonna get pneumonia.”