Page 7 of Cage of Starlight

CHAPTER FOUR

Alarm bells kick up before he’s three steps inside—a relentless clattering against his eardrums.

Vantaras claps both hands over his ears and jerks his head in the opposite direction. “ This way.”

Tory steps back, but the alarm doesn’t stop.

A device clipped to Vantaras’ chest crackles—no doubt some newfangled invention from the big brains in the capital. A voice emits from it. “ Lieutenant, report. ”

Vantaras peels a hand from one ear with a glare at Tory and presses the surface of the device. “False alarm, sir. I’m taking the new Seed through Intake now.”

A long pause precedes the knife-like response: “ I’ll expect an explanation. ”

“Yes, sir.” Vantaras jumps to attention, like the guy on the other end can see him. Maybe he can. The alarms taper out, and Vantaras’ hands return to his sides. “Registration,” he snips.

Tory’s tired— still tired from helping Kelly—and all he wants is to kick this officer’s face until it caves in. “What kind of registration?”

Vantaras strides down the opposite hallway in lieu of answering, shoes ticking against the cold floor. Brushed metal covers the bottom half of the walls. A thin, guiding line of powder blue sits below another line, painted a white so bright Tory’s head hurts to look at it.

No, not painted.

It’s a light, somehow. Blindingly illuminated, the thin line goes on forever. The mere sight of it raises the hair on his arms and makes his stomach twist, and that’s how he knows what it is.

Stellite. Vantaras has kitted this whole disgusting place out with stellite lighting, that rich bastard.

The first time Tory heard that Vantaras had captured lightning inside a stellite sample, he didn’t believe it—not until he saw it with his own eyes.

Even Hulven’s pleasure house, the only building outfitted with stellite anything , only has a single, small lantern set into the chandelier in the main hall, and it’s only illuminated for special events.

But this—the wastefulness sickens Tory. Is this what the miners break their bodies for?

It feels wrong, too. It’s nothing like the raw stellite in the mines that makes Tory’s head spin and his mouth go dry. This stuff feels dead. It looks it, too, milky like corpse eyes.

“In here.” Vantaras indicates an open door.

Tory paces into a wide room to the stares of at least six people.

“Alleged Channeler,” Vantaras says. “Here for typing and registration.”

A woman in a powder-blue uniform pushes him into a bleached leather chair and straps his wrists to its arms. Before Tory thinks to free himself, another nurse arrives with a needle.

“Just need a blood sample.” He kneads Tory’s arm and swipes at it with a cold cloth.

“I need to be tied to a chair for just a blood sample ?”

“A precaution.”

“Against what?”

The nurse frowns, and Tory clenches his fists, testing the bonds. No give.

They won’t look at him. No one, save the Vantaras guy, has looked him in the eye since he arrived. Tory’s always relied on remaining anonymous and invisible, but there’s something wrong with this.

He sucks in a breath. It’s fine. Observe and absorb.

Tinted windows line the far wall—the ones he saw from outside. If they open, they could be a good escape route.

“Relax. It’s only a prick.”

It’s two. One in the tip of his finger to draw a generous globe of crimson, and one in the crook of his elbow to fill two vials. They press his finger to a square of parchment with a bullseye in the middle; the thick paper sucks up the blood.

A nurse pulls out a black mat. Another dons goggles and lifts a dropper with a tiny measure of yellow fluid at the bottom. Everyone’s attention turns toward the paper.

Tory can’t say why. As far as he can tell, they’re about to squeeze an eyedropper of piss onto a piece of paper saturated with his blood.

More and more nurses don goggles, and several hold clipboards at the ready. The nurse with the fluid squeezes out one careful drop. It falls, lands— explodes.

A blue-white flame puffs up, devouring the bullseye and both rings outside it. The fire then fades to a dimmer navy and fizzles out in a hiss of cerulean sparks. The parchment curls up, ashy at the edges.

Hushed voices burst out around him.

“Did you observe the reaction?”

“Reaction recorded. Patterns confirm preliminary type report: synergistic Source. Channeler.”

“Confirmed.” It elicits a chorus: Confirmed. Confirmed. “No additional tests required. Archive the sample and prep a compass.”

Tory wrenches his bound wrists, but the straps won’t budge.

“So you are a Worldseed.”

Tory twists toward Vantaras at the dry remark. “And you’re an asshole.”

The burn of satisfaction fades as fast as it comes. Vantaras’ eyes sharpen on him, and Tory clamps his teeth on the soft flesh of his cheek until the sting clears his head. That was foolish. It’s better if they think him docile.

A nurse clicks her tongue at him as she works at the straps. Another pulls the needle from his arm and secures a folded piece of gauze with white tape. The straps fall off one hand, then the other, and he’s ushered to his feet.

“Finished, Lieutenant.” The nurse doesn’t look at Vantaras, either, but at least he gets the honor of direct address.

Vantaras turns on a heel and strides out the door and down the hall.

“Next, you’ll receive a Core.” His pace increases with every step, until Tory has to jog to keep up.

His body protests the exertion, but if Vantaras notices, he doesn’t care.

If not for him, Tory would be free. Something ugly stirs inside him, clawed and sinuous, forged in flame. It’ll crawl up his throat if he opens his mouth.

Vantaras leads him to a door and knocks. When a voice calls for them to enter, he doesn’t go inside with Tory, just waits in the doorway with his arms crossed. The room is cast in silver and white, filled with strange tools.

A redhead in a white coat with sharp cheekbones hunches over a stack of notes, tapping a high heel on the floor.

She could kill a man with whatever instruments she’s stabbed into her messy bun.

Spinning on a cushioned stool, she glances at Tory over a pair of thin spectacles.

Her gaze shifts to Vantaras, plum-painted lips curling to reveal an unsettling predatory smile.

“This our Channeler?” She pushes toward them with two quick steps.

Vantaras retreats, speaking to the wall behind her. “Here for a Core, Dr. Helner.”

Oh, how delightful. She intimidates him. Tory can work with that.

“Good, good. This way. Time to put the shackles on.”

Tory isn’t sure he likes her tone, pleased and a little off-kilter. He follows anyway, shooting a glance back at Vantaras.

“On the table, Channeler. On your belly. I’ll secure your wrists here.” The woman gestures. “The procedure will be painless.”

“People keep saying that and strapping me to chairs.”

Dr. Helner bustles into a corner to open the lid of a small wooden box. Fog billows out, and she extracts a corked vial half-filled with muddy fluid. If it weren’t for the faint light pulsing out to illuminate the liquid, Tory would have said the vial contained the bulb and roots of a tiny plant.

“Ah, see, when I said painless , I meant it should not be excessively pain ful . The straps are for your and my safety. Reaching is harmless as long as I mean it to be, but some Seeds may react adversely to our energies, injuring themselves or the Reacher.”

“Reacher?”

Her voice is terribly cheery. “You’ll see.”

The table angles upward, cushioned to raise his shoulders. There’s a hole for his face and strong, thick straps for his hands. More straps coil from the bottom for his ankles, his torso. He can’t tear his eyes from the vial.

The heat of anger in his belly vanishes, leaving a static-rush of cold. “What is that?”

“A Core. It’ll be your best friend for the rest of your life.”

Vantaras flinches in the doorway, lips thinning. “A Core is a . . . tracker, a personal identifier, and a precaution against escape.”

“Tracking?”

“A drop of the blood they took in Intake is being linked to a stellite compass. That compass will be engraved with your identifier code and matched to your Core. If you escape, they can be used to hunt you.”

Helner isn’t armed aside from the implements she’s stabbed into her bun, but Vantaras is. No windows here to escape through, but the door to the hallway remains open.

He’s not bound—yet. Tory calculates his odds.

He doesn’t get the condescension he expects when Vantaras understands what he’s considering. Instead, he shifts to the left so he’s not filling the doorway. When Tory catches his eyes, he looks away.

Like invitation. Like absolution.

Or mockery . Helner’s hand winds around his arm before he can run.

“You don’t want to know what happens to the ones who try to escape. A NOVA is far worse than this. On the table.”

Her bruising grip, tight over the cloth of his shirt that covers the tattoo, guides him down. “On your stomach,” she says. When he doesn’t go immediately, she pushes him down.

Her other hand locks around the base of his neck.

She takes her hand from his arm—blood floods back in with a rush of pins and needles—and buckles the straps around his forearms, then strains the neck of his shirt to expose his right shoulder.

The hole in the cushioned table offers a view of a small stretch of floor and nothing else.

“This may feel strange.”

A crack, a hiss, and the drip of cool liquid on his shoulder. Helner’s fingertips trail around to his neck. He waits for the sharp edge of a scalpel, but she only palpates the area with her fingers. “Ready?”

The air around him ignites before he finds words, the pressure no longer on the surface of his skin but inside him—ghosts of her fingertips on his vertebrae.

He can’t see it, but he feels it—somehow, impossibly, this woman has shoved her hand into his body as though flesh is as easily displaced as water. Tory bucks against the restraints.