Page 6 of Cage of Starlight

A thud. A smooth landing. Footsteps pick up behind him. “I don’t want to use force!”

Funny. Those are the last words he hears before something buries itself in his neck. His legs knock and lurch, fingers reaching to grab at whatever it is. A needle? Tory drops, rain choking him and tunneling his vision.

He can stand. He has to. This can’t be how he loses the freedom his mother died to give him.

A desperate flight, a clumsy fall. No strength to fight—the only blood in his mouth his own.

Tory hits the ground, head cradled between the roots of a felted oak.

He blinks up at its wide branches. Its presence hums warmly against his mind, and he spares a moment to curse the thing, so smug and confident planted right where it is.

It’s so easy for trees, being rooted. They rarely have reason to run.

The comfort of the forest crumples to an echoing emptiness as footsteps scrunch the fallen leaves. Stars crackle across his vision, and he blinks to dispel them.

The soldier who took Tory down looms over him, his presence like electricity skittering over Tory’s skin.

Weapon-studded belt, crisp undercut, and that double-breasted navy uniform.

Powder blue trim and silver buttons, like the soldiers who watched the weak and wounded die in the labor camps.

Tory quivers, muscles tensing to attack.

He spits the blood in his mouth at one of those perfectly polished black boots.

The soldier sidesteps and kneels, offering Tory a close-up of the man he’ll kill one day.

The guy’s downright delicate —unmarred skin and fine features, a fan of dark lashes over amber-brown eyes bruised with exhaustion.

The black hair tumbling over his forehead, plastered to bone-pale skin with the rain, nearly obscures his left eye.

He’d have been eaten alive in any city Tory survived.

He could almost be Arlunian. Laughter tears from Tory’s throat. Arlune. Tory wanted to run for it, but instead it ran for him, wrapped in prison colors. The vines that climb the trees dangle purple blooms down at Tory, just out of reach. His numb fingers twitch against the thing buried in his neck.

The asshole says, “You shouldn’t touch that.”

He touches it anyway, closes fumbling fingers around the thing and pulls. Pain, hot and sudden. A flood of warmth. His vision narrows, rimmed with crushing dark.

“Fool. It’s barbed ,” is the last thing he hears before blackness swallows him.

*

Unfamiliar noise—rhythmic clattering and a clanking like chains—tugs him from the fuzziness of drugged rest. Vertigo and darkness do their best to lull him back, but it doesn’t take long for the memories to resurface.

Icy rain, blood in his mouth, bruised amber-brown eyes.

That uniform .

Fear sharpens Tory’s vision. He wiggles his fingers, his toes.

He’s unbound, on his back on some sort of bench, shoulder blades digging into wood.

Shifting, grayish light sifts in from three tiny squares near the top of the wooden walls.

An unlit lamp swings from a hook in the corner of the small, rectangular room, its walls so narrow they could close in and crush him.

Too much like a holding cell, like the camps.

It smells like them, too—unwashed bodies and something like hay.

Desperation drives Tory to his feet, where he staggers, vision shuttering and dizziness rocking him like the earth has liquefied. He finds his way to what he guesses is the door and throws his weight against it. No give.

He drops back on the bench, ears ringing. The sky-blue shackle of the tattoo around his upper left arm burns. He tugs up his sleeve to make sure they haven’t laid the red ring over the blue while he slept, but there’s only unblemished skin, no hot ache from a fresh needle.

“I won’t go back. Those bastards can throw me on the front lines instead. I—”

“You hardly have a choice,” a cold voice says, startlingly close.

A figure sits cloaked in the darkness beneath the swinging lamp.

Tory growls, “Don’t I?”

“You will not be going to the labor camp. The Grand General wouldn’t waste your skills at menial labor.

” There’s a bitter note in it—some joke at Tory’s expense, no doubt—and Tory’s eyes narrow, because he knows that clipped and cultured tone.

That chill, the condescension. It’s him .

The pretty-boy bastard who sniped at him about the needle after shooting him in the neck.

“Where am I?”

“We’re on our way to a place for people like you.”

On our way. With that, the odd, untranslatable sounds slot into place: the cottony hush of the rain; the clopping of horseshoes against gravel; the grunt of a driver. A cough. The vertigo makes sense. He is moving.

“People like me?”

“Unregistered Seeds.”

It could be a lot worse. He’s heard of these places. People like Tory are sent there to learn and then assigned somewhere Westrice can make use of them. Like the mines, the Houses, and the labor camps, Vantaras won’t pass up the opportunity to make use of any resource.

It could be worse, but it’s not ideal. Tory takes stock.

They’re on the move. He’s probably in a carriage of some sort.

Given the hay smell, maybe even some rudimentary livestock transport car.

Less sophisticated than he’d expect from Vantaras’ soldiers who like to show off in their brand-new fuel-belching vehicles, but good for Tory.

He might be able to find a way out. Movement in his peripheral vision draws his eye.

The lamp . If nothing else, he could use it as a bludgeon.

The soldier’s eyes follow his. An eyebrow arches. “It’s chained in. No glass.”

“I could still kill you with it.”

“Could you?” the soldier deadpans. “You’re hardly in a position to make threats. You might have noticed you cannot access your Seed at the moment.”

What’s he going to do with his Seed? Heal the lamp?

He doesn’t need it, anyway. He has hands. That’s all anyone’s ever needed to take a life or piece one back together. Tory could wring this bastard’s elegant neck.

But healing isn’t why he’s here. That carriage—the way it stopped so smoothly it was like it never moved, that wasn’t healing.

It wasn’t anything Tory’s heard of. Now is a bad time to regret slipping away from conversations about people like him for fear that his pointed interest might out him.

If there’s a name for what Tory did, he never learned it.

The soldier sinks into silence, arms crossed.

Without anger to warm him, Tory shivers.

Icy autumn wind moans through the openings at the top of the carriage.

Tory buries himself in a corner as far from the soldier as he can get, clenching his teeth to stop the chattering.

He reaches up to close Thatcher’s cloak around himself, but they’ve taken it away.

He’s unmoored without the weight of the treated leather, bare and frozen through.

It shouldn’t matter. He’s been cold like this before.

He’s gotten soft, being loved.

He can’t make that mistake again. Lingering in Hulven—holding onto the people there—is what got him into this situation.

He squeezes his eyes shut and lets himself drift, startling awake only when the carriage creaks to a stop. The doors at the back swing wide, and Tory hisses as the cloud-smeared sky sears itself on his vision.

Up ahead, a black road snakes through yellowing grass toward a wall as high as any Tory has ever seen.

As soulless, too—seamless, ash-gray stone.

Shadowed suggestions of weapons crouch atop it like carrion birds.

The forest sits well apart from it, like nature knows to lean away. It’s very Vantaras.

Two soldiers wait outside. “Sir?” the first one says.

“I’ll escort him,” the delicate soldier responds.

Except—the outside light glints off a smart set of bars on his uniform.

Tory sneers. Not a soldier, then. An officer .

They’re the worst types, bloodying hundreds of hands with their orders while their own stay clean and soft.

He’s even wearing white gloves , impeccably clean but frayed at the knuckles and fingertips.

“This way.” The officer walks up behind Tory so he has no choice but to get out of the carriage, then steps around him.

Tory plants himself where he is. First order of business: testing boundaries.

The officer walks up the road, measured strides slowing and stopping about halfway up. “You can choose not to follow.”

Two soldiers idle on either side of him, hands on their belts. Tory doesn’t miss the implied threat. “Then what?”

“You learn what happens to the ones who make trouble.”

“What, you gonna kill me?”

The officer’s expression, by form alone, should be a smile. “That might be kinder.”

Tory’s pounding pulse tells him to run. It’s all he’s ever done, all he knows how to do. “What do you mean?”

“Try it and find out.”

Tory was born in a prison crueler than this one. He escaped at eight; he will escape again. Snapping at this bastard would be salve on a burn, but the relief would be temporary. Sharp words won’t free him. Sharp eyes might.

He needs to bite his tongue, observe and absorb. Tory swallows bile and follows.

As soon as he’s within a few strides, the dark-haired officer continues to walk.

The words STAR Compound #7 loom ahead, engraved on the plate above the wide mouth of a massive gate, and underneath it: Seed Training, Assessment, and Registration.

The officer says, “You will be registered and typed, though the process is merely a formality at this point. After that, you’ll be informed of the expectations in the facility and allowed to acclimate. Your training will begin tomorrow.”

“Training for what?”

No answer.

The officer stops in front of a window set into the watchtower. A guard on the other side springs to his feet when he sees them, snapping into a sharp salute. “Lieutenant Vantaras.”

The name hits Tory like a slap. Vantaras , king of this land of prisons. Tory knows Michal Vantaras has two sons, but they have a decade and change on Tory and are built like their father—musclebound, walking fortresses. The exact opposite of this guy.

It has to be coincidence.

Vantaras says, “I’ve returned with the alleged Channeler.”

Tory examines the soldier in the booth. Dull smile—distractible. The stone wall is imposing but not impassable.

Vantaras follows Tory’s gaze, eyebrows rising. He opens his mouth as if to speak but just shakes his head, mouth curling into a cool expression of disdain.

The watchtower guard pulls a clipboard from the wall and draws a thick red line across the page. “You’re authorized to enter, Lieutenant; your re-entry has been logged and your permit to leave has been withdrawn. Welcome back, sir.”

Vantaras nods, exposing his neck. A long white scar snakes from the fine, short hairs at the base of his skull, down along his spine until it disappears into the high collar of his uniform.

The gate whips up into the wall with a sound like a gunshot, tooth-like serration at its base, and Tory clenches his fists and makes himself move.

This is strategy, not surrender.

Inside, a wide path leads toward a squat, round building like a sleeping serpent, the same seamless gray stone as the wall. High, dark windows stretch across the front, but the rest of the building has only slit-like windows or none at all.

It’s nothing like homegrown Hulven. Nothing like the labor camps, either, cast in dusty browns—rickety shacks with bedrolls set edge to edge and towering fences—but it’s not altogether different.

It’s another kind of cage, the precision of its construction a testament to wealth.

Vantaras falls in behind Tory as he enters.

Too late, he catches the silhouette of the weapons atop the wall and sees why he couldn’t make sense of them before. They’re cannons—and they’re not pointing outside to punish intruders or escapees.

They point inward, barrels low and at rest. Glasslike circles on the sides glow with wan, eerie light as Tory passes, like empty eyes watching him.

The door falls like a guillotine as soon as they’re inside.