Flashtide Read online

  “Owen?” Bade asks. “He’s a Subpar?”

  “Yes, a Third Ray caver, and a scout. He would’ve been the one to lead them.”

  “You’re assuming they could dig their way down through rock and rubble to this cavern?”

  “They could,” Dram says.

  “They had full caving gear,” I add. “Oxinators, rations, medkits … If they survived the flashburst—and if the cavern held—there’s a good chance they’re alive.”

  “It’s been two months,” Aisla murmurs. “If they ran out of rations…”

  “Tunnel gulls,” Dram and I say at the same time.

  “It’s how the forfeit survived,” he says. “Subpars who were sentenced down tunnel four for noncompliance weren’t supplied with rations.”

  “There’s more,” I say softly. “This cavern, it’s…”

  Sacred doesn’t seem like the right word. I’m not sure I can put the Sky into words.

  “It’s like a talisman,” Dram says. “If a place could be a talisman.”

  Bade studies us for a long moment. Finally he nods. “Then you have to go after them. Somehow.”

  I lift my gaze to the young boy standing so still. Too still, like the wrong word might make him shatter. “I don’t want to give you false hope, Roran. I could be wrong about all of this.”

  “My mom would’ve stayed,” he says, his voice thick with emotion.

  “I know.” Maybe this is why I didn’t share my thoughts earlier—because he’s right. It’s possible Mere would’ve died searching the cordon before she gave up trying to find her son. Her mother’s instinct is stronger than her survival instinct. My eyes fill with tears. I drop my gaze, but too late. Roran runs off.

  “Let him grieve her,” Bade says. “We don’t have any real reason to believe she’s alive. That any of them are.”

  “Just a fragile hope,” I murmur.

  “No such thing,” Aisla says. I meet her green eyes, which are filled with some emotion I can’t interpret. “Dram said the Sky is a talisman. I’d say that’s pretty powerful.”

  * * *

  The screams sound inhuman.

  I jolt upright, still caught in the foggy remnants of a restless sleep. It’s dark; the fire has died. I listen for the sound that woke me. Was it a vulture? It sounded like a man. A man in pain. The ground shifts beneath me, and I shove my sleeve up and use the glow of my Radband to see it. At first, I don’t understand how the pine needles and dirt seem to be melting. Then, suddenly, I do. King.

  “Orion!” Dram’s voice, but garbled, like he’s drown—

  I sink. Mud surrounds me, sucks me deeper. I scream, and it fills my mouth. I struggle to lift my arms above my head. It’s like lifting my caving gear. Mud oozes into my ears, my eyes. I thrash but barely move.

  How like King, to kill us horribly rather than trading us for freedom.

  All at once, the mud evaporates. I flop forward onto a carpet of grass, coughing, spitting mud. My arms weigh a thousand pounds, but I drag them across my eyes so I can see. Roran crouches at my side, his hands still pressed to the ground. He grits his teeth, and the mud pushes back.

  “Stay down!” he shouts.

  He saved us. I can’t speak. Dram drags himself across the ground to my side. He holds his pistol out to Roran, who grasps it and conjures away the mud without looking. We scan the darkness for our attackers.

  King laughs, the sound lifting from the trees a few meters away. Dram levels his gun at the shadows.

  “Ah, how I’ve missed you, Orion,” King says. I stand, shaking, mute, caked in mud. My lungs ache. Part of me is still drowning. “The Congress promoted me,” he says.

  “You’re still wearing their collar,” I mutter.

  They leap from the trees like wolves, all three of them at once. A wall of clashing matter collides as free Conjies rush to meet them. Energy pulses around us, exchanges of matter so rapid it makes my head spin. A scent on the air, verdant, like grass pulled up from the roots. Then fire, smoke, and electricity in the air like lightning.

  Gunshots rip across the night, the sounds reverberating over the mountains. Birds scatter from the trees, children cry. Men shout, and I can’t tell if they are ours or theirs.

  Bade rushes by, arms swinging, fire launching from his hands. He catches one of the men in the chest, knocking him off his feet. The man yells, and I recognize the sound that woke me. He conjures the flames to water, then lurches up, aiming a weapon unlike any I’ve seen. Something illuminates Bade’s hands, like the ionic marks trackers use, then twin bolts launch toward him. Webs of metal wrap around Bade’s hands. Cirium binders.

  “The Congress gave us toys to play with,” the man calls.

  I run to Bade’s side, reaching for a weapon. My knife. I left it back beside the fire. It’s somewhere deep beneath the earth, in mud that isn’t mud anymore.

  “Rye!” Dram shouts. He throws his pickaxe, and I catch it.

  I grasp Bade’s bound hands and shove them against a rock. “Don’t move.” Every metal has its breaking point. Even cirium.

  “You can do this?” Bade asks, his eyes wide.

  “I’m really good at this.” I focus on the loose links and swing my axe. The metal shatters apart. Bade frees his hands, muttering Conjie words I don’t know. Then he conjures a spear of rock that sails across the clearing into the man’s chest.

  “Conjure that to water,” Bade mutters. The man collapses to the ground.

  Suddenly, King grabs me from behind, his hands around my throat.

  “Stop!” he shouts. “One move—from any of you—and I conjure a branch right through her neck.”

  Everyone stills.

  “Weapons down.” King slides a glance to Dram.

  Dram reluctantly drops his gun, his gaze fastened to King’s hand on my throat.

  “The Congress wants the Scout and Berrends. Alive. We’re going to take them, and you’re going to let us.”

  “No.”

  We all look to see who dares refuse the mad Conjie. Aisla. Bade’s bonded mate. She walks toward King as if he’s not about to spear me with conjured bark. She extends her left arm to Bade, and he grasps her forearm. I stare in shock as he conjures away her skin. A blue Codev glows in its place.

  “You can conjure a Codev?” King asks. Even he sounds impressed.

  “Ordinance gave me this,” Aisla answers. “Bade just helps me hide it.”

  “You see that symbol on her arm?” King’s man calls. “She’s a Vigil! We need to get away—”

  “CEASE!” King roars. “I have the power here! I’m not afraid of some Gem.”

  “You should be,” Aisla says. She shifts her arm, and the collared man jolts, then drops like a stone.

  King’s hand loosens, and I lurch from his grasp. He conjures a rock wall and dives into the trees. Bade and Aisla sprint after him. Dram retrieves his gun and jogs to my side. He pulls me into his arms.

  “They’ll have announced our location to the Congress,” Newel calls. “We move. Now!”

  Dram and I turn to gather our gear, and Newel stops me with a hand on my arm.

  “I haven’t seen Aisla’s Codev since she was a child,” he says. “You must be very special to her.”

  “She’s special to a lot of people,” Dram says.

  “Yes, but Aisla risked more than her life by revealing herself like that.”

  “They’ll come after her?” I ask.

  “Not the Congress,” Newel says. “Ordinance.”

  “She’s not a Conjuror, then?”

  “No. She was sent to hunt us, years ago. We adopted her instead.” He looks at the Conjies hurriedly loading supplies. “I suppose that’s the nature of secrets. Apply enough pressure, and they unravel. Nothing stays hidden indefinitely.”

  * * *

  Bade and Aisla meet up with us hours later, slinking in from the woods, once more looking like they’re part of it.

  “The Congress picked him up before we could get to him,” Bade announces
grimly. He conjures away their camouflage, and I see that Aisla’s Codev is again just a smooth patch of skin.

  “Thank you,” I tell her. I glance at the other Conjurors, hard at work constructing a new camp, even more concealed than the last. “Did they know about you?”

  “Yes. Conjies are good at keeping secrets.”

  “What you did to that man … Can all Gems do that?”

  “No. Vigils are genetically modified for a specific purpose.”

  “King probably told them what you did,” I say. “They know your secret now.”

  “Not all of them,” she says softly. “This world is changing.” She looks up toward the flashfall, visible in the distance. “Not even the provinces are safe anymore. The flash curtain, the Congress—it’s all so unpredictable.” She crouches and draws an inverted V in the snow. “Only Vigils bear this mark,” she says. “If you ever see this symbol on a Codev—run.”

  FOUR

  41.6 km from flash curtain

  I SLING MY pack over my shoulder, and it drags across the flare wound. I groan aloud, shoving the pack off and dropping it on the ground. I sink to a rock, peeling back my cloak and shirt as the burn pulses in time with my heart.

  I don’t want to look at it. I’ve seen enough burns that I know what it looks like, and how the skin will eventually heal into a puckered scar. But this wasn’t a normal wound; this was the flash curtain, reaching across boundaries to brand me.

  Dram’s checked it each day, to make sure the strange luminescent streaks didn’t come back. I turned my head away each time, too afraid I’d see the flash curtain’s imprint on my body again. I can feel it oozing now, the skin torn open from our fight with King.

  “You have a bad owie.”

  I glance up. Briar stands over me, her conjured cloak dwarfing her small frame.

  “Yes,” I whisper, trying to muster a smile. I slap a handful of snow over my wound, hoping to numb the pain.

  “Mom says aloe for burns.” She kneels beside me and digs in the snow until she uncovers a green shoot. I wonder if she sensed it was there, like Subpars sense cirium in stone. She peels off her mittens and cradles the blade of grass. The grass quivers, like it’s waking up. It grows, stretches, as if spring just announced its arrival.

  My pulse quickens. I never tire of watching Conjurors in that moment when they shift matter to something else. I realize I’m stretching my hand toward that shivering plant, like I’m somehow part of its alteration, as if I can feel the energy making it something new. It widens, splits; spines ripple along its length, and pointy fronds burst from the center.

  “Aloe,” she says, breaking off a spiny leaf. She squeezes the juice along my wound. I hiss from the touch, but moments later the cool liquid chases away the burn. She snaps another pad from the plant and dabs it over my skin, humming softly.

  She is a child of nature. Everything we Subpars have sacrificed was to protect the remnant of natural humanity inside the city, but I wonder if our society has been looking at it wrong this whole time.

  “It will heal now,” she says.

  “Thank you,” I murmur.

  Healers. These people are healers, and the Congress is exterminating them.

  I think of all the wounds torn open by our city-state—the families ripped apart in the outposts, and the miners burning in the cordons. A Protocol that preserves some people and not others.

  I wonder if Alara could ever heal.

  Maybe. If we use our abilities to transform what is into something new.

  * * *

  My wound still aches as I jog from our camp, but instead of slowing me down, it propels me, a warning of a single truth that can no longer be ignored. The flash curtain is expanding its reach, and if we don’t act soon, it will take hold of us all.

  “Orion, wait!” Roran calls. His gaze travels over my pack to the climbing harness I’m wearing. “I know you’re planning something. I want to help.”

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  “As if things around here are ever safe.” He lifts his wrist to show the flash vulture feather he wears as a cuff. “This is my fight as much as it’s yours.”

  “No.”

  “How long have you been hiding from the Congress?” he asks. “A few months? I’ve been running from them my entire life.”

  “I’m going after a Mod.”

  Words die on his lips, and he simply stares. “What do you mean ‘going after’?”

  “I’m going to climb a charging station and bolt onto one of them. Ride it straight into Alara.”

  A smile spreads across his face. “The camo-cloth…” I can see him mentally piecing together my plan. “But the platform is fifty meters high. How do you plan to—”

  He breaks off when I shift my coat to reveal the climbing harness strapped tightly around my waist and thighs. From my belt sways Dram’s old climbing bolt gun and a dozen bolts.

  He shakes his head. “Not good enough. Those platforms are alive with current. Even if you made the climb without attracting attention, I’m sure your charred corpse would hinder the rest of your plan.”

  I glare at him.

  He shrugs. “You need to think like a Conjie.”

  “Fine. What would a Conjie do?”

  “It’s better if I show you.” He shoves two handfuls of dirt into his pockets and strides ahead of me, in the direction of the one remaining charging station.

  * * *

  We’re silent the first few kilometers, stealthily trekking through the woods. Then we pass through the trees at the top of a ridge and see it rising from the ground like a finger balancing a plate. I was never really aware of the charging towers before. Not with the visceral awareness thrumming through me now. Seeing them and knowing you’re about to climb to the top of one are very different things. I step forward, before fear paralyzes me.

  “Wait.” Roran catches my arm. “Not much cover once we head down the ridge.”

  “Except what you conjure.”

  “True.” He plucks a pinecone off the ground and closes both hands around it. Seconds later his fingers spread apart, revealing the shiny skin of an apple. He hands it to me and conjures water. “There won’t be time for rations once you anchor onto that Mod.”

  I crunch the apple down to the core, not even tasting it. I don’t tell him that my stomach is a twisting ball of nerves. Instead, I hand him my loaded gun. “In case of flash vultures.”

  “You’ve seen more of them?”

  I consider lying, just to spare him, but I can’t think of a time that has ever helped any of us. I nod.

  His features harden, like water turning to ice. “Let them come,” he murmurs, lifting dirt from his pocket. The soil bounces in his palm, twisting on an invisible wind current, then suddenly explodes in thick spikes of wood, a five-pointed star with tips sharp as blades. “Keep your gun,” he says.

  “Promise me—if something goes wrong, you’ll get out of there.”

  He conjures the wood back to dirt. “They won’t catch me.”

  We race down the ridge at the same time.

  “I should warn you,” I call, “this plan has a lot of holes.” Foolish, reckless, headstrong. The words pass through my mind on a loop, sometimes in Dram’s voice; other times it’s Graham, shaking his head at me with a caver’s whistle clamped between his teeth. Stop, Orion. Think.

  Fire sparks inside me, the way it did in Outpost Five when I climbed the sign that hung before the tunnels. WE ARE THE FORTUNATE ONES, it said. I had beaten the words with my axe like a battle cry.

  And the Congress punished every Subpar for my noncompliance.

  But this is different. I’m not just reacting in anger. I’m going to do something that will help everyone.

  Beneath my resolve unease tingles, like I’m stretching my hand toward an electrified fence. We run toward the station, and all the while anxiety dances in my belly to the tune of foolish, reckless, headstrong.

  I press my fingers against my flare burn, and pain a
nswers, overriding my thoughts, my senses.

  “What are you doing?” Roran asks.

  “Reminding myself.”

  “Of what?

  “That doing nothing isn’t an option.”

  FIVE

  35.3 km from flash curtain

  THE CHARGING STATION towers above the treetops, a solitary metal pole. Even from the ground we can hear its disk-shaped top buzzing with current.

  I tip my head back, but I can’t see much from the forest floor. My mind fills in the parts of my plan I can’t see—from the times I watched Inquiry Modules drone through and land atop these stations. This is one of the few that Conjies haven’t destroyed or disabled. Mostly because it’s too close to Alara, and not worth the risk. Ideal for my purposes.

  “You’re really going to do this?” Roran asks.

  In answer, I adjust my camo-cloth cloak, lifting the hood so it conceals me.

  “What if getting close to it shocks you?” he asks.

  “I won’t touch the charging pad—just the Mod.”

  “So you secure yourself to the outside of the pod and ride it back into Alara. You do realize the drones are kept in the military compound?”

  “Which I’ve been to once before, so it’s familiar to me.” I don’t mention that Bade and Aisla are the only reason that Dram and I escaped with our lives. I strap a water bottle to my side and fill my pockets with nuts and dried fruit, conjured food I’ve been saving for the past few days.

  “And then—if you’re still miraculously alive and uncaught—you’re going to sneak into the central part of the city? And track down your father?”

  “The last time I had contact with him, they were testing the cure. He had done it, Roran—finally created a way for all Subpars and Conjies to live free within the flashfall—and then no communication from him for two months. Something’s off. I don’t trust…” For some reason, I don’t say his name. Jameson. The commissary playing both sides of the fence. He has a habit of helping me and betraying me at the same time.