Page 8 of Cage of Starlight

“Damn it, Channeler.” Another strap across his lower back. “You know what? Keep writhing. I can do this for hours.”

“What . . .” He drags ragged breaths in through his nose. “What . . . are you doing ?”

“I already told you: I’m a Reacher. I’m inside you. Surgery without incisions. I could tear out your spleen if I wanted—or if you distract me. So be quiet.”

Tory squeezes his eyes shut against the ringing in his ears. His stomach rolls.

“Gonna be sick.”

“Please recall what I said about your spleen.”

Tory swallows thickly. Happy things.

His thoughts turn to Thatcher, but that makes him sick in a different way. He hopes the soldiers went easy on him. And Hasra—surely, she got away safely.

When he comes back to himself, his body thrums with waves of heat and ice. Blackness dances at the rim of his vision.

Pressure at his back, short and firm. “I said sit up . It’s finished.”

The straps are gone. His shoulder and neck blaze as he lifts himself. Dizziness washes over him, and Helner grabs his arm before he tips off the table.

“Burns,” he says.

“Not surprised. Don’t know much about Channelers, but the other Source has a history of not playing well with other Seed energies.”

He waits until his feet are likelier than not to hold his weight, then starts a coltish walk toward the door.

Helner snickers. “See you later.”

Not if Tory can avoid it. He stumbles over his feet, stomach lurching.

Vantaras reaches to right him, face creased with what might be concern, then tears his hand away. There’s fear in his eyes—then something like disgust, then nothing. Whatever shreds of pity Vantaras has earned burn away. He’s wearing gloves and still can’t stand to touch him?

“Follow me.” Vantaras steps through the door, hands stiff at his sides.

The hallway goes on forever. His mouth is dry, shoulder throbbing, but there’s no wound when he reaches back to touch the place Helner put the Core in.

“When,” he rasps, and Vantaras’ strides slow to even the distance between them. “When can I get rid of this thing?”

“Never.” A pause. “We will arrive shortly in the changing room.”

The changing room is as clinical as everywhere else: slate-gray lockers, slate-gray walls, floors tiled in white and the by-now-familiar powder blue. No windows. Vantaras leads him to a locker numbered #2417.

“You may change into the clothes inside. The things you’re wearing will be incinerated. Any items on your person deemed dangerous will be disposed of.”

Tory tugs out a pair of slate-blue drawstring pants and a loose, short-sleeved shirt of a slightly lighter shade. He crosses his arms, tugs at his long sleeves to dip his closed fists inside. “They’re too short.”

“Excuse me?”

“The sleeves.”

“All detainees in the Compound wear this.”

Don’t make waves. Hide the tattoos. His mother never told him what to do if following one rule broke another. Tory dangles the shirt by a fistful of the coarse cloth. He forces air into the reed-thin tube of his throat. It’s a big shirt. The sleeves will be long enough, surely. “Privacy?”

“Transition upon arrival must be monitored.”

Tory turns so his marked arm faces away, pulls his clothes off, and tugs the ugly shirt and pants on. The shirt dwarfs him, yet the sleeves are barely long enough to cover the tattoo. Tory ties the strings on the pants into a tight knot to keep them up.

“Those markings.” Tory flinches at Vantaras’ cold voice. “You’re the child of an interned laborer.”

Tory bites his lip almost hard enough to taste blood and keeps his silence.

Vantaras looks away as Tory tugs at the shirtsleeves. “You won’t have time to shower, but there’s a bag of supplies in your locker, replenished monthly.”

Next, Vantaras takes him to another room with a sad slit of a window at the back and a dull metal table and chairs, bolted down.

Tory sits; Vantaras retreats to stand against the wall as red-headed Dr. Helner strides in, heels clicking.

A younger man, mousy and unarmed, half-asleep, stumbles after her with a notepad.

Tory shifts in his chair as they settle. “What is this?”

“Standard protocol.” Helner offers a sharp smile.

“Told you I’d see you soon.” She waves a slender hand, and a silver bracelet swings with the motion.

Its centerpiece is a flat plate with a series of letters and numbers stamped into it.

“We don’t get so many inductees that I install Cores full-time.

I also supervise dietary and lifestyle requirements for unique Seeds and advise the Grand General on arranging training regimens to best suit them.

Not that the rancid meathead listens .” She smiles at the young man with the notepad.

“Tell the General I said that, and I’ll pull your kidney into your throat and leave it there. ”

The young man makes a pathetic noise.

Helner laughs. “The skittish little turd over there is filling out your file and will generate your ID number. Let’s get started. State your full name and birthplace for the record.”

“Tory Arknett.”

The man in the corner scratches out notes on his pad.

“And?”

Tory resists the urge to pull at his too-short sleeves.

“Your birthplace .”

“Why does it matter?”

“Fine. We heard you were performing healing in the southwestern mining town of Hulven. Is that true?”

They think he’ll just admit to a crime? Tory raises an eyebrow.

“Doesn’t matter. It was stupid, considering your abilities, but we can move on. I’m sure you’ve suspected by now that you’re one of the Sources.”

“The what?”

“No need to play coy. We have first-hand testimony of that kinetic energy redirection incident. Witnesses say you stopped a rampaging carriage. And what a performance! The concussive force you stole off it wiped out a copse of trees in the forest nearby. You been practicing for long?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Helner laughs, short and sharp. “Hulven’s not too far from the border, is it? Perhaps you small-towners still use the old terms. Does Worldseed ring a bell? First Children? We would call you a Channeler, synergistic Source.”

“ What ?”

Helner stares. “You really don’t . . .?”

Tory stares back.

“Oh, come on. Surely , you’ve heard the stories. Shit, it went something like—I don’t know. Once upon a time, there was a weird dog god who died, and the first-ever Seeds grew up out of its ashes or something?”

“You could not be more wrong.” Vantaras sounds disgusted.

Helner snorts. “Didn’t ask you. Anyway, you’re one of those.

The first ones. We call them Sources. There are two great big umbrella types of Seeds, see?

Intrinsic and synergistic. The way the stories go, it all started with two Seeds—one of each type.

The originals of those two types are long-dead, but once every generation or three, a Source gets recycled into the mix again, and people make a fuss. You’re the synergistic Source.”

“What does that mean ?”

Helner’s hands fly up. “Fuck if I know, but I’d like to figure out. The comparative rarity of the Sources means we don’t fully understand their particular skills. You following?”

Not in the least. Tory’s eyes burn, lids weighted, shoulder throbbing where she reached inside him.

Observe and absorb . If he can get her to tell him what she means—what he is, what he did with the carriage, he can keep it from happening again when he’s free.

He waits for her to speak, presses his lips together, longs for dark and sleep.

The dead stellite lighting in the wall casts thick shadows on the table in front of him.

“Right, you’ve been living under a rock!

Let me explain it like this: regular old synergistic Seeds work with energies outside of their own bodies, and they work with only one type of energy.

Pyros with fire, Healers with life—you get the gist. They amplify those energies and use them to affect the world around them.

True Healers amplify life energy to close wounds or heal ailments, but they can’t fix a corpse because a dead body has no energy they can use.

Kineticists work with objects or bodies in motion.

Typical bruisers. They can strengthen their own attacks, increase their speed, or accelerate projectiles at a target, but the thing they amplify must first be moving.

Pyrokineticists start with a spark and make it an inferno, but they’re useless without that spark.

Useless to us, too, really. They have a reputation for hotheadedness and a habit of being unable to control the breadth of destruction they cause, so we don’t keep any here.

But it’s like that. Electricity, heat, movement, the energy that fuels the growth of plants—any flavor of energy you can imagine likely has a synergistic Seed that can handle or enhance it. ”

She doesn’t wait for him to nod, just lashes a hand across the table, points its fingers like a spear, and shoves it not only straight through Tory’s hand but through the whole table.

Tory only half-swallows the yelp that tries to escape him, and Helner grins like a sated beast as she pulls back and wiggles her fingers.

“Intrinsic Seeds, meanwhile, are exactly what they sound like. The energies we use are intrinsic to our bodies and usually enhance a sense or ability we already possess. Many people can reach, but few can reach through solid objects. Illusionists can manipulate people’s senses to make them see or hear or believe whatever they’d like.

Other intrinsic Seeds can do party tricks like taste the truth or hear the past, but the Grand General has little use for games, so we don’t stock the party-trick types here, either. ”

“Okay . . .”

Helner’s still smiling. “So, synergists enhance external energies. Intrinsics use their own.”

“Not sure how this relates to me.”

The smile widens, and Tory bites his tongue. “Oh? Why?”