“Funny thing, you telling me not to be careless with human life. I remember you doing everything you could to kill back in the prison.”
A prison where I was kept. Starved, neglected, forced to watch the people around me wither and die because they were born . . . wrong. And even before I entered Corros, I was a prisoner of another jail. I am a daughter of New Town, conscripted to a different army since the day I was born, doomed to live my life in shadow and ash, at the mercy of the shift whistle and the factory schedule. Of course I tried to kill the ones who held me captive. I would do it again if given the choice.
“Proud of it,” I tell him, setting my jaw.
He despairs of me. That much is clear. Good. There’s no amount of speechmaking that will ever sway me to his thinking. I doubt anyone else will listen much either. Cal is a prince of Norta. Exiled, yes, but different from us in every way. His ability is to be used as much as mine, but he is a barely tolerated weapon. His words can only travel so far. And even then they fall on deaf ears. Mine especially.
Without warning, he sets off down a smaller passage, one of the many burrowing through the warren of Irabelle. It branches off from the wider hall, angling upward to the surface in a gentle slope. I let him go, puzzled. There’s nothing in that direction. Just empty passages, abandoned, unused.
Yet something tugs. I’ve heard things, he said. Suspicion flares in my chest as he walks away, his broad form getting smaller by the second.
For a moment, I hesitate. Cal is not my friend. We’re barely on the same side.
But he is nothing if not annoyingly noble. He won’t hurt me.
So I follow.
The corridor is obviously unused, cluttered with scraps and dark in places where the lightbulbs are burned out. Even from a distance, Cal’s presence warms the close air with every passing second. It’s actually a comfortable temperature, and I make a mental note to speak with a few other escaped techies. Maybe we can figure out a way to warm up the lower passages using pressurized air.
My eyes trail the cabled wires along the ceiling, counting them. More there than there should be, to feed a few lightbulbs.
I hang back, watching as Cal shoulders some wood pallets and scrap metal from a wall. He reveals a door beneath, with the cables running overhead and into whatever room it hides. When he disappears, pulling the door shut behind him, I dare to get a little closer.
The tangle of cables comes into sharper focus. Radio array. Now I see it, clear as the nose on my bleeding face. The telltale braid of black wires that means the room inside has the ability to communicate beyond the walls of Irabelle.
But who could he possibly be communicating with?
My first instinct is to tell Farley or Kilorn.
But then . . . if Cal thinks that whatever he’s doing will keep me and a thousand others from a suicide attack on Corvium, I should let him continue.
And hope I don’t regret it.
FIVE
Mare
I drift on a dark sea, and shadows drift with me.
They could be memories. They could be dreams. Familiar but strange, and something wrong with each. Cal’s eyes are shot with silver, bleeding hot, smoking blood. My brother’s face looks more skeleton than flesh. Dad gets out of his wheelchair, but his new legs are spindle thin, knobbled, ready to splinter with every shaking step. Gisa has metal pins in both hands, and her mouth is sewn shut. Kilorn drowns in the river, tangled in his perfect nets. Red rags spill from Farley’s slit throat. Cameron claws at her own neck, struggling to speak, trapped in a silence of her own making. Metal scales shudder over Evangeline’s skin, swallowing her whole. And Maven slumps on his odd throne, letting it tighten and consume him until he is stone himself, a seated statue with sapphire eyes and diamond tears.
Purple eats at the edge of my vision. I try to turn in to its embrace, knowing what it holds. My lightning is so close. If only I could find the memory of it and taste one last drop of power before plunging back into darkness. But it fades like the rest, ebbing away. I expect to feel cold as the darkness presses in. Instead, heat rises.
Maven is suddenly too close to bear. Blue eyes, black hair, pale as a dead man. His hand hovers inches from my cheek. It trembles, wanting to touch, wanting to pull away. I don’t know which I would prefer.
I think I sleep. Darkness and light trade places, stretching back and forth. I try to move, but my limbs are too heavy. The work of manacles or guards or both. They weigh me down worse than before, and the terrible visions are the only escape. I chase what matters most—Shade, Gisa, the rest of my family, Cal, Kilorn, lightning. But they always dance out of my grip or flicker to nothing when I reach them. Another torture, I suppose—Samson’s way of running me ragged even as I sleep. Maven is there too, but I never go to him, and he never moves. Always sitting, always staring, one hand on his temple, massaging an ache. I never see him blink.