Page 58 of Cage of Starlight

Jeffra bustles over to the other side of the room, where she begins to make an already made bed, smoothing out invisible wrinkles.

Back facing him, she says, “I know you were out there. I heard about the battle.” He knows the question is coming before he watches the tension coil through her spine.

At last, she says, “Niela, did you see her?”

Tory winces. “Jeffra . . .”

“I asked because I wanted an answer.”

“. . . All right, then. I saw her.”

Jeffra waits.

“Randall was—he was.” Tory can’t look at her. “Niela tried to heal him.”

“Fool girl,” Jeffra whispers.

“It was chaos. I didn’t see her after that, but . . .”

Jeffra nods, hands riding over the blanket on the cot in a long, gentle sweep before she pulls herself up.

“All right. I asked because I wanted an answer.” She sets her shoulders, sets her mouth into a grim line.

“I’ve done enough blubbering, so I’m going to ask you to give my hands some work to do. What else hurts?”

“Jeffra. You don’t have to.”

“I always have to! It’s our job. It was her job. Doesn’t matter how we feel. We go out and fix things.”

“Not today,” Tory says. “I won’t tell anyone.”

Kierney continues his cheery tune.

“Just tell me what else hurts. Don’t make an old woman go looking.”

“Nothing much.”

Her hands settle on either side of him, brown eyes unsettlingly close and steady. “Don’t nothing much me. Pain is your body’s free warning system. I’ll thank you not to ignore it.”

That damn bird won’t stop singing. Tory throws his arm over his eyes, muffles his next words into his elbow. “I just need to focus . I don’t have time to be weak, to think—” He has a mission. He gulps a breath in, exhales the disgusting heat of it against his face. “I don’t need this.”

Jeffra tuts, and the warmth starts up again, seeking out little pains. After a while, she says, “I don’t think you have any idea what you need.”

“It’s over , it’s not important anymore—”

“Did you hear a word I said? If something hurts, it’s because it’s important. My girl was important. Sena? He was important. The important things are ugly. They leave scars. What you’re feeling, that’s how you know it mattered.”

It mattered. The truth is a horrible thing in retrospect. Mattered, past tense, because he turned away to save himself. He doesn’t feel saved. He feels eviscerated. “I left him there. I left him behind.”

She lets his words sit between them. “Then hold on tighter next time.”

He’s not sure why he says what he says next. Jeffra’s matter-of-factness, maybe. The birdsong. The underwater dimness in here, hazy as a dream or a secret. The words slip out before he can stop them: “I hate how the world looks without him. I’d take his place, if I could.”

The words strip him bare. He wishes he could stuff them back inside.

Jeffra just nods. The healing energy fades out, slow.

“Tired,” Tory murmurs. His vision blurs anew, and that cursed bird keeps singing. He squeezes his burning eyelids closed.

He waits for Jeffra to tell him she’s plenty busy without a lazy-ass dodging duty in her infirmary, but a heavy hand smooths his hair down.

“Sleep, then.”

He could, easily. He wants to, but he makes himself stand. He can’t save Sena, but he can save a lot of other Seeds today. More important than survival , Sena said.

Tory can do this for him, if nothing else. An apology in action. He’ll do this, and then he’ll go back. He’ll search those woods and find Sena, even if the only thing left to do is bury him. Grieve for him, without hiding.

“There’s something I have to do.”

Jeffra waves him out, smile slow and sad. “Stay out of trouble, all right?”

“Can’t promise anything.”

The devices Riese gave him to create interference wait at the bottom of his pack. Intake, residence quarters, and the room marked #004.

First those, then the Monitor Room.

A swell of Sena’s energy stops him in his tracks as he paces down the hall. Tory’s stride falters, a surge of foolish hope nearly tripping him over his own feet.

He pauses in front of a closed door and pulls Sena’s stolen tab from his pocket, dangling it in front of the stellite slice in the door until it unlocks.

There’s more than one source of Sena’s energy inside, but the most intense one is a small cube of dull gray metal on a crowded, paper-strewn desk, the seam between the box and its lid barely visible.

The type-determination tests, the targets, the vest, Null, and now this cube. Tory snatches the box off the desk and tucks it under his arm. It’s his, now.

The density of the energy coming off the thing is ten times stronger than that off the targets.

The familiar buzz of it warms him as he stalks down the hall.

He tips his pack off one shoulder and swings it around front.

It’ll be a tight fit, but he can probably fit the cube inside.

He stops before dropping it in, curiosity getting the better of him.

He gets why they’d use Sena’s energy for the type tests, for Null.

But why a box? What is it they’re neutralizing?

Tory pries one corner of the lid up and nearly drops the whole thing as a billow of crushing, disconcerting heat rolls through him. “Shit!” He punches the lid back on as something inside the box stirs, like it’s moving from sleep to slow wakefulness. Vines.

Of course. Of course they’d store a Legion unit in a box like this.

Tory shoves the thing deep into his pack and hurries down the hall.

*

Sena shakes awake to haze in his head, heavy-limbed slowness, and the shadowless solid gray of an overcast sky.

At Niela’s bidding, Iri pumped Sena full of whatever was in the med kit before he fell asleep. Painkillers, antibiotics. Ointment and a simple dressing for the scalpel wound and another for the blistered injection site in the crook of his elbow.

Niela must notice him stirring. “Feeling any better?”

“Yes, thank you.” He’s feeling a different sort of worse, so it’s not a lie. “How far out?”

Her lips turn up in a determined grimace. “A few minutes if the fuel lasts that long.”

The meter shivers on empty.

Niela taps her foot on the accelerator, but she’s already flooring it.

A few minutes.

They crest a hill, and the world spreads out beneath them.

The great, cold mass of the Compound and the sea of trees with their fading, yellow-brown leaves block the sight of the Golden River Anton Chimre fell in love with and the rocks beyond it, mined bare of stellite.

In the sterile Compound’s high walls, pinprick-sized Seeds scurry to training, to dinner, to the infirmary.

“The sun is almost down. Riese and the others are likely already there.” Iri squints down the road. “No smoke, screaming, or other signs of chaos, so whatever he’s making Tory do, it hasn’t happened yet. That’s good. I am going to kill him.” The words come out soft and strangely thoughtful.

Sena’s NOVA winds around his spine tight enough to crush it. The man who can use it to kill him waits beyond those walls, but Tory’s in there, too. What a rotten choice to be left with.

“How will we get in?”

They’re hardly an impressive fighting force.

Niela frowns. “You’ll have to convince them to let us in the front, then you can find Tory and convince him to stop whatever idiocy this Riese guy’s put him up to.”

Sena has never been convincing. “I don’t know if that’s the best idea.”

“We don’t have time for better ones.” Niela’s knuckles show like blades from her bloodless grip on the steering wheel. “You’ve got this, right? Tell me you’ve got this.”

Trees swallow the Compound and its suffocating walls as they descend the hill.

Sena breathes while he still can. “I’ve got this.”

“You’re a terrible liar.” Niela pulls off the road at the rim of the forest, and they get out.

Even with the drugs softening the edges of his pain, it thuds up through Sena’s bones. The earth pulls him down, pulls his eyelids low, begs him to sink into a long sleep.

“I’ve got this,” Sena says again.

Iri and Niela exchange a conversation in glances, and Sena closes his eyes. He can keep going. Ahead of him, beyond the trees, yellowing grass and a serpentine black road slither up toward the sharp-toothed gate.

Iri speaks first, voice soft but gaze steely. His eyes turn, unerring, to the right, and he rubs the flint rings on his thumbs to create a spark he builds into a sphere, wild flames licking from the circle. “You both go ahead. I’ll make sure no one stops you.”

“Be careful,” he says.

Iri raises an eyebrow. “Surely you know me better than that by now. I will see you when this is finished.”

It’s probably not appropriate to admit that he doesn’t expect to leave these walls once he enters them.

Niela settles in beside him as Iri disappears into the woods, red-lit by his flames.

“Let’s go,” Sena says.

Anxiety churns in his gut as they walk the wide-open road toward the guard tower. Sena barely dares to breathe. But Iri was as good as his word. No one intercepts them on their way up.

The gate guard behind the window’s smoky glass jumps to attention as always, but his posture slackens with shock as he takes both of them in. “Sir! You’re . . .”

“I’ve come with urgent information to report.”

“Everyone’s saying you were . . .”

Sena forces calm over himself. “I need to enter.”

“It’s. Um. See, it’s complicated, a bit, because your permissions to enter have been revoked with, uh, your presumed death. I’d have to . . . I’d at least need to contact the colonel and—”

“No!” The word tears itself from Sena’s throat. “I’ll report when I’m inside. Private Jemmes, please. Time is of the essence.”

A sigh, a restless tapping on the table. “This is highly unusual. I’ll need to see your tab, at least.”

Sena’s hand dives into the pocket where he keeps it, and he finds nothing.

“That’s part of the problem,” he blurts.

“A . . . security breach.” Oh, he’s awful at this.

“Rebels intercepted me near the border” —true— “and took it.” Lie?

“We need to immediately change security protocols or we’ll be vulnerable to attack. ” Irrelevant, given the situation.

“Oh!” The boy’s eyes widen. “If that’s the case, surely I should—”

Niela stomps around to the window, and she really is a vision, bathed in Iri’s still wet blood and the dried blood from the sheet-covered boy she couldn’t save.

“Don’t you get it? How do you think they found him?

” she hisses, and Private Jemmes jolts back, eyes wide.

“The higher-ups are part of it. Don’t you get it?

At least one of them is in on it. Are you a gambler, Private? ”

“This . . . I can’t,” Jemmes mumbles. “I mean, I shouldn’t . . .”

“You should,” Niela says, “If you want anyone within these walls to survive the night.”

Jemmes blinks rapidly, and the gate whips up into the wall. He stares after them, eyes huge and round, as they approach it.

“Hurry,” Niela whispers. “He starts thinking about any of that and he’ll find holes big enough to swim through.”

Sena resists the urge to apologize until the toothy maw of the gate clamps shut behind them, locking them inside. If the Compound survives, Jemmes will lose his job for this.

At the end of the path, the blacked-out glass of the Compound’s entrance casts its interior in subdued charcoal and blue. It opens as they draw near. Sena’s feet slowing until he stands, frozen, on the threshold.

“You know, I swore I’d die before I’d come back here.” Sharp tines of fear rake down his spine.

Once he enters the Compound, his NOVA will almost certainly be within range. If Kirlov sees Sena, if he visits the Monitor Room to examine his compass—

“Why change your mind? There’s no accounting for taste, but Tory seems a bit of a . . . work in progress.”

Sena smiles. “Yeah.”

Niela’s hand settles on his sleeve when he tilts, vision fading. “Be careful. Those injections might help the pain, but they’re a stopgap at best. I couldn’t heal Randall,” she whispers, “and I can’t heal you. I’m sorry.”

Sena tries on a smile. “Go ahead, find your mom.”

“And you go find your idiot.”

They enter STAR-7. Niela goes right. Sena goes left.

Not too far in, he runs into a huddled, murmuring group of Seeds. They pin him with a stare as he passes, like they’ve seen a ghost. Sena’s probably looking at them the same way.

“Lieutenant Vantaras, we thought you’d—”

It’s easy to fall into the role he’s played for so long. “Rumors poison the mind,” he snaps. “Why aren’t you at training?”

“I—we—”

“Where is Arknett?”

The spokesman of the group opens his mouth, then closes it. He ducks into the group and whispers furiously. Another guy, gangly and tired, speaks up.

“Saw him running down the halls earlier like his ass was on fire.”

“Which direction?”

The guy points, and Sena follows.

They sink into whispers as soon as he’s put them behind him, but he has no time for them.

The hallway blurs past, dizzying and too bright.

In the Compound, everything is clear-cut and flooded with cold light.

Squinting, Sena scans every room he passes.

He doesn’t linger, doesn’t dare contemplate what the light reveals about him.

He doesn’t see Tory. Doesn’t see anyone who can tell him where Tory is.

A soldier stops dead as Sena passes, and Sena can’t help meeting his shocked eyes. The man hurries away at a near run. Wherever he’s going, it can’t be good, but Sena has neither the time nor strength to pursue him.

He loses his breath when Tory, pack hanging from one shoulder, stalks across an intersecting hallway ahead of him.

Sena quickens his pace, takes a right down a familiar short corridor: Tory must be heading for the tree.

Sure enough, the click of the door to the central garden spears the silence as it opens.

He grabs it before it can close and freezes there, trying to breathe.

He’s here, and Tory’s here, and he’s not the least bit ready to see him.

He opens the door anyway.