Page 39 of Cage of Starlight

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I ri’s words ring in Sena’s head all night. He said the Voidseed was meant for growth, protection .

Surely, he was lying, but as soon as the first rays of light pierce the flaps of the rudimentary tent Sena was given to sleep in, he finds his feet, ignoring the growing ache in his chest—it’s inconvenient, not debilitating.

The place is abandoned, all the more eerie for the many indications that it should have people.

Frowning, Sena wanders. It might be challenging to implement their plan of convincing Riese to return to the battlefield if there is no Riese around to convince.

Sena should be much more worried about that than he is, but it’s the fear of Iri’s absence that bothers him more.

He promised. Tomorrow, he said. Sena forces calm on himself.

He needs to investigate, find out what precipitated everyone’s absence.

In the rest of the camp, there are more indications of a quick departure. A line strung between one tent and the next contains drying clothes. A half-drunk cup of tea steams on a log, and the fire still contains stubborn embers and a kettle bubbling merrily away on a metal grate.

When a hand lashes out to grab the kettle, Sena startles, but the shock is soon replaced with a flutter of anticipation. A figure, hunched over and bleary-eyed, emerges from a huddle of brown blankets beside the fire.

The chaotic poof of long, dark hair and the resting murder face allow him to place the person quickly.

Iri. It’s Iri . “You’re here.”

The figure blinks, refills his cup, and takes a long gulp of tea so hot Sena is surprised it doesn’t sear his throat closed. “Mm.”

He should ask about Riese. “Where is everyone else?”

Iri irritatedly waves away. “Not here, mostly.”

“I gathered. When will they return?”

“Who knows? They’re on a mission .” Iri cups both hands around the battered metal cup, sullen. “Riese has another Flameseed. Didn’t need me.”

Tory emerges from his own tent with sleep-swollen eyes and staggers toward the fire. He mumbles something Sena can’t discern and doesn’t bother trying to. Instead, he turns to Iri. “Yesterday—” he starts.

With a sigh, Iri pushes himself up off the stump he’s sitting on, stumbling and nearly spilling his tea. He catches himself with a guttural growl that can only be a curse.

“Yes, right. Promised you a demonstration.” He still looks half-asleep, clutching his drink like a lifeline, but his eyes narrow at Sena, his sleep-slack expression sharpening. “Ready to learn the things your bastard father could never have taught you?”

Sena couldn’t be more ready.

After Iri dips into his tent to grab a lovely woven rug, a bowl, and other assorted items Sena can’t identify—on account of them being wrapped up in the rug—Iri leads them to a leaf-strewn clearing a short way outside the camp and lays down his bounty.

Yawning, he heads off to gather more supplies, then takes his time setting everything up.

He calls Tory over first, to Sena’s disappointment.

While he waits, Sena cups the stellite crystal his mother sent him the year he would have celebrated his Dedication, holding it under a bubble of light that slips through the trees and casts dim galaxies onto his gloves.

The pendant has never touched his skin. If he were careless, his bare fingers could crack and blacken it.

But this—the reflected light of stars he cannot reach for—is something he dares, at times, to enjoy.

These stars, his mother always told him, shine because of the crystal’s flaws.

When things were too much, she’d whisper his favorite stories to him word for word and stroke his hair.

Oh, miokh, she’d sigh. My heart. She still calls him that in her letters.

Visit home, won’t you? she always asks, and he has to come up with increasingly creative reasons why he can’t.

In the northern capital of Maran, stellite is a luxury item. At STAR-7, it’s a marvel, allowing his father to create weapons that target Seeds and Cores that imprison them. Sena is not so unlike stellite—all his stars made from flaws, a trinket at best and a tool to hunt his own kind at worst.

In Arlune, it’s a precious mineral, borne by warriors who fear neither pain nor death.

They use it to store and amplify Seed energy—the secrets of how, they have so far managed to keep from Westrice.

Each crystal is a fragment of Arlune’s history, a fractured scale from the hide of the Beast who birthed the cosmos, a creature star-strewn and crystalline, snake and lion in one.

There’s nothing holy about Sena. He’s no warrior. He is not brave. Like the Compound, he is destructive, reductive.

But Iri said his abilities are meant to nurture life .

Hope is a sharp and terrible thing, and despite his best efforts, Sena has cut himself on it more times than he’d like to admit.

Minutes pass, then an hour, and Sena watches Tory work.

Tory stands in the center of the round rug Iri has rolled across the ground, Sena’s kerchief (offered up when Iri realized he didn’t have anything on hand for the purpose) wrapped around his eyes, knotted at the base of his skull.

“Do you sense an energy?” Iri asks for the fifth or sixth time.

Each time, he hides something under a silky stretch of cloth on top of a wooden barrel, and each time he spins Tory in a wide circle and asks him to locate the energy in question. For the purposes of the exercise, Sena and Iri stand in various locations on the circular rug.

As he has done for the past two times, Tory turns first toward Sena, which makes something inside him leap. It’s a strange feeling, to be found.

“This one’s you, right, Sena?” Even with his eyes covered, Tory points directly at Sena’s chest. “Right . . . here.”

Iri sighs. “Very good, but not the object of the exercise. Try again. The energy I’m asking you to seek out will be faint.”

“Seed energy this time?”

“No. It will be many times fainter than our previous exercises, but it will be the same type I’ve been asking you to find so far.

You’ve done well in our previous tries. This time, it will be .

. . nearly absent. The energy I’m asking you to seek is likely to be so faint it’s a mere thread away from nonexistence. ”

“What the fuck, that’s—” Tory reaches up to his blindfold. Iri stops him.

“Removing the blindfold will ruin the object of the exercise. Leave it on.”

“But I can’t—”

“You can. We have already done it many times.” Iri sighs and takes Tory’s shoulder.

“Those were easier!”

“Did you expect them to stay that way?”

Tory huffs.

Iri mutters something in Arlunian, too quiet to catch. By the tone, it’s not complimentary. “Excuse me,” he says, before he spins Tory a few times.

When Tory stops, he staggers, feet tangling like a drunkard’s.

“All right. The cups on the end of this training rug hold stones that silence outside energies, so you are already doing this in the easiest possible situation. Other than Sena and I, there should be no interference. The energy lies not behind you but in front of you. If you had to guess whether it lay to the left, right, or center of your current position, which direction feels most likely?”

“None of them.”

“Choose one. This is not a trick question.”

Tory frowns, turning to his left, then center, then right.

“If it would be easier, Sena and I can leave the training rug so you can focus more effectively.”

Whatever it is Iri wants him to find, it lies atop the barrel, hidden beneath an elegantly embroidered towel to Tory’s right. “No, it’s actually . . . I think it’s easier with Sena here.”

Tory turns again, lingering a while in each direction. One hand scrubs at the short hairs at the back of his neck, and he exhales slowly. “There,” he says at last, finger pointing more or less at the barrel. “Over there feels . . . more. There’s something there, I think.”

Iri’s eyes shine with some complicated, overpowering joy. “Yes.”

Tory waves at the blindfold. “Can I . . .?”

“Not yet. Heal it.”

“Heal? This is . . . that’s not . . . it’s not a person. I can tell.”

Iri’s eyebrows rise. “Can you tell me what it is, then?”

Tory shakes his head.

“You’re correct. It’s not a person. But you can renew it. When you heal, are you not able to sense the body’s desire to return to wholeness?”

Tory stands straighter, stiller. “Yes.”

“All living things have this intent—the instinct for restoration. When you handle the energy of the human body, you know where to send it without sight, because you speak the language of restoration. This is not human, but the language will be the same. If you let it, the energy will tell you where it wants to go. Reach out for it. Allow me to instruct you when you’re holding it. ”

Tory’s hands twitch at his sides, like they did on the training field that day.

“Do not restrain yourself if you wish to reach with your hands.”

His right hand lifts. “I have it.”

“You’re certain?”

Tory nods.

“Excellent. Hold it. Give me one moment. I’m going to do something that should make it easier to sense and manipulate.”

Iri paces over the rug with its dark metallic strands woven in, and lifts the embroidered towel.

Beneath it is a branch no longer than Sena’s forearm, raised into the air at an angle by what looks to be a hurriedly hand-twisted piece of wire wedged into the barrel.

The wire forms a y-hook that cups the branch at the top.

It’s dead, or nearly dead, brittle-looking and gray with age.

A small cup, translucent blue with an iridescent glaze, lies next to it.

Iri lifts the branch and tucks the bottom into the cup.

“Oh,” Tory says. “That’s . . . that helped.”

Iri smiles. “Yes, I imagined it would. I would not ask you to do this work without assistance—it would be unnecessarily harmful to your body and in opposition to our goals. Do you understand what I meant when I spoke of restoration?”