Page 60 of Cage of Starlight

The wall around the garden lays in ruins, exposing the Compound’s innards. No longer is it lit in cold colors. Bursts of flame light the semi-darkness blue and gold. Smoke billows out, and the cracks race up and up and—

The dome over the garden has crumbled on the same side, netting hanging down and beams littering the ground. One, indeed, right where Sena was lying.

“What . . .?” he says again. Perhaps a better question: “Why?”

He can barely hear his own voice over the screaming. His awareness trickles back slowly. Not screaming—the wail of alarms and a ringing in his ears.

“I don’t—” Tory shakes his head. “Oh.” His eyes shift to Sena, his lips bloodless white, and they’re all Sena can focus on as he says, “I did this. This is my fault.”

*

Tory did this.

He turns to the gaping wound in the wall in front of him, surrounded with spidering lines.

“One in Intake.” Then to the cracks splitting the wall at the right rear end of the circular, enclosed garden.

“One in . . . in residence quarters.” Finally, he turns to the third place that shows damage, a hole disgorging chunks of stone and twisted metal into the garden: the room that was numbered, not named. #004.

The damage sits in a neat triangle, and Tory knows it well. He spent the better part of an hour running around the Compound to place those devices. “I did this.” Tory swallows. “I didn’t mean to. He said—”

Riese said they’d create a distraction . He never said what kind. Tory just assumed it would be benign.

“I was so stupid.”

“You didn’t know.” Sena moves Tory with a hand at his back. “Come on. Let’s go.”

A wrenching snap at the rear makes his point for him.

Cracks spread up the wall. Another corner of the dome crumbles, dropping metal beams into the erstwhile flowerbed overrun with vines.

More chunks of the wall collapse to fill the hole, and the area sags.

Sena drags at the door in its warped frame, pulling it until there’s a gap large enough to escape through.

Sena tips his chin toward the gutted remains of the room formerly labeled #004.

“Central power. If the blast destroyed the stellite core that powers the facility and centralizes its security, the existing arrays will only have what little energy they currently hold—or whatever’s in the much smaller backup core, if it survived.

” He pales. “We have to hurry. We need to get to the Monitor Room before the switch.”

“Why?” Tory pushes through the door and into the hallway. Sena follows, but he, like Tory, caught some shrapnel, and his face is wet with blood.

“Because if it switches to backup, the tabs will no longer work, and we’ll be locked out. Faster.” He says it as much to himself as to Tory. “My presence won’t go unnoticed for long. If the colonel—”

The lights dim to sickly gray as they half-run through the halls. A rumble punctures the tense silence, shuddering up through the soles of their feet. Sena staggers.

Part of the building must have collapsed.

It’s not a good time for it—not a good time for anything, but Tory can’t get those stark blue-black lines up Sena’s neck out of his head.

He saw those vein-like roots just yesterday on a platter in front of him, except his were a deep red.

Sena’s pallor, the way he crumpled when Tory touched his shoulder—it tells a story Tory doesn’t want to contemplate. “Your Core.”

Sena squeezes his eyes closed. “Tory, please . . .”

“How?”

The halls grow hazy with smoke, and Tory coughs and squints.

“Helner,” Sena finally whispers, supporting himself with a hand along the wall. “The ‘antibiotics’ she gave me.”

“I’ll kill her .” Helpless anger careens through him and leaves him shaking.

“It wasn’t her choice.”

Tory growls. “Riese, then. I’ll gag the bastard and gut him slow.”

Sena sighs. “Don’t worry about it.”

“What do you mean, don’t—” Tory closes his lips on the flood of words he wants to say, but some escape, anyway. “How did I get stuck doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Hoping there’s a way to fix this. You’re so fucking calm, and you’re dying , and I can’t keep—” His conversation with Jeffra comes back and he breathes out an awful laugh, because he has his second chance, his next time , but he has no idea how anyone is supposed to do this better.

He doesn’t know what to do because there’s nothing he can do but watch Sena leave again.

Sena reaches out, but his fingers close before reaching Tory. “You don’t have to,” he manages.

“Too fucking bad. I can’t help it.”

*

The Monitor Room waits for Sena like a sea of wide-open eyes.

The brittle, processed stellite that powers the facility leaks energy like a sieve.

The compasses in the Monitor Room, though, each with a hook and a plaque with the locker number of its corresponding Seed, are powered by the energy of the Core-bearing Seeds.

The crystals at the center of the tracking compasses for all the still-living Seeds glow brilliant white.

For any who are farther away, the glow is dimmer and more orange-tinted, the compass needle fixed in the direction the holder must travel to find them.

For the dead, the light is gone. Many lights are gone, after the explosions.

Sena seeks out his own slot at the far end of the room, below the plaque labeled #001. It’s empty.

Someone was here, looking for him.

The compass labeled #002 swings on its hook, like whoever took Sena’s compass was in a hurry and knocked its neighbor on the way past.

The compass swings like a pendulum, a cruel countdown.

The person who took it to hunt Sena must have left just before they arrived.

Perhaps it was taken for a mundane reason.

Sena hasn’t had the opportunity to observe what the slow death of a Core inside its bearer does to the light on the compass, but it can’t be a pleasant thing.

Perhaps they assumed him dead and took the compass to the labs for disassembly so the number could be assigned to the next Seed to come through STAR-7.

But when has he ever been so lucky?

The murmuring Seeds in the hallway and the soldier who hurried away double-time flicker through his mind. But none of them would have access to this room. Sena wouldn’t even have been able to get inside if Tory didn’t return his tab to him, sheepish, when they arrived at the door.

Sena’s knees knock when Tory’s hand lands on his shoulder, and he suppresses the childish urge to turn toward Tory and lean against him.

“That’s not good.”

Only officers have access to this room.

Kirlov, then. Sena’s muscles lock in anticipation of pain, and he forces them to slacken. He chose this, and he won’t let even Kirlov stop him from seeing it through.

Tory withdraws a crystal core from his pack. It’s several times larger than the delicate point hanging from Sena’s pendant, but it’s only half as pure.

Tory feeds energy into it until the crystal glows as blue as it did back when Tory touched the Legion.

It’s lovely, Sena thinks. It’s a good color for Tory.

The one time Sena fed his energy into stellite, before he startled and killed it, turning it a milky gray, the light it emitted was frightening red.

The compasses along the wall brighten, flicker—glowing for just a moment with Tory’s colors.

Sweat breaks out on Tory’s forehead, and Sena gives himself permission to lean into him. Just for now. If Tory asks, Sena will say it’s because he thought Tory might fall over.

The crystal continues to glow, searingly bright. Sena hears little pings. Cracks.

Tory is overloading the stellite, but all the compasses have already shifted pure blue, overwritten. They can never be used to track another Seed again. Everyone here is now free, even if they don’t know it.

The crystal continues to ping and pop, even when Tory lets go.

Sena has seen this, too. The first time they tried to make the Compound’s Seeds use the stolen Legion units, they tried a method like this one.

The results were devastating, though Helner contended they were also educational .

They did, after all, allow her to coin the term stellite backlash injury.

“It’s going to explode,” he tells Tory. “That’s what happens when you feed too much energy into stellite in a short period of time. If you’re not far enough away, your energy suitably shielded, it will kill you.”

“Riese mentioned that.” Tory grabs Sena’s elbow and pulls him out the door, into the dim and graying hallway, its sick lighting sinking ever closer to perfect dark.

Sena scowls. And how, exactly, did Riese expect Tory to defend himself against it, with no Sena around to neutralize Tory’s energies and prevent the backlash from reaching him? He would have had to put significant distance between himself and the crystal to avoid the backlash on his own. Reckless.

Sena has not often considered himself capable of harming another person with malicious intent, but the urge swells in him.

“I would like to hurt him,” he tells Tory.

Tory laughs when Sena is the one to push him to go faster, and he yelps and scurries ahead when the blast in the Monitor Room flings the heavy metal door against the opposite wall and spits smoke and rubble into the corridor. Dust whooshes past Tory and Sena, blurring the air.

The dim, dying energy from the inset lighting fades out, and scarlet light picks up in panels along the floor. It makes a womb of the smoky hallways, the light pulsing like a heartbeat.

“Emergency power,” Sena says, and points them toward the nearest exit.

Soon, they come upon a group of Seeds, dragging an injured friend with them. Tory turns to Sena. Sena nods.

“Hey!” Tory gestures at the group. “We’re getting out of here! This guy knows the way.”

Their eyes shift to him, and Sena shrinks back.

“You know the way, too,” he mutters at Tory.

But everyone’s looking at him , so he draws himself up.

“We’ll aim for the typing and registration labs.

If the outer walls have been breached anywhere, it’s probably there, and the lab is far enough from the main entrance that we’re marginally less likely to encounter resistance. ”

The group huddles together. As they walk, the fizzy drone of sirens grows closer.

“As soon as we get out, run,” Sena says. “As far as you can.”

They come upon a group of three, then a staggering crowd of maybe twenty. They fold in together, Tory at the head. Sena takes up the rear, guiding the injured ones along.

The larger the group gets, the more unwieldy it is, clogging the narrow halls. They dodge rubble where the ceiling has crumbled, baring open sky.

The smoke in the enclosed hallways grows thicker as they hurry toward Intake.

A door they pass hangs on its track, inner walls blackened. In another room, obscured by rubble from a fallen wall, is a shock of white hair too much like Lieutenant-Colonel Menden’s.

“Don’t look,” Sena whispers to the Seeds beside him.

It gets worse as they walk on. Flames lick from doorways. Soot blackens the walls.

The young man bringing up the rear, shirt pressed over his mouth and cheeks wet with tears, mutters, “What’s going on what’s going on —” in a hollow litany; it cuts off in a choked scream.

The boy staggers. Sena can hardly bear his own weight, but he grabs the boy by the arm and looks for injury.

He finds the source of the boy’s pain quickly enough. A dart. He rips it out, and the last of the pressurized fluid inside the syringe empties onto the ground. But what went into the boy was more than enough. On the side, printed in neat black letters, the dart reads N001.

Null. And Sena is the only one here who can’t be affected by it.

“Tory!” He pushes the screaming boy into the safety of the crowd and spreads his arms to take up as much space at the back of the group as he can. The whole seething, nervous crowd separates Sena from Tory.

By the time Tory calls back, “What?” it’s too late.

Kirlov rounds the corner, lit vital red by the lights, the shadows of his face carved deep.

He’s as put together as he’s ever been. With one stone-steady hand, he aims a tranquilizer gun at the crowd.

From the other, Sena’s compass dangles, its core lit foggy, flickering gray.

Kirlov’s eyes find Sena, brutal and unerring.

“Lieutenant,” he says. “I thought I’d find you here.”