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  He twists his head around and meets my eyes. I can barely see him through the blur of my tears.

  “Subpartisan,” the machine drones. A faint voice answers, maybe a tech on the other end of the com.

  “Reanalyze,” the voice commands.

  Dram gasps as a narrow tube pierces his vein. His blood spatters the snow, and my gut clenches.

  “Subpartisan,” the machine announces.

  The drugs in Dram’s system make his head sway, but his eyes hold mine as he mouths a word. I squint, trying to see, and he says it one last time.

  Run.

  He’s yanked off the ground, and his head flops forward, his long Conjie hair covering his face. With a start, I realize I’ve taken the stance we developed down the tunnels. I’ve got an overhand grip on a knife, and I’m tensed, waiting for his cue to attack. If my caving partner changes his mind, I’ll dive after the Mod with everything I have.

  The machine sweeps him into the collection pod, and a metallic door grinds shut. Through the windshield, I see clamps fasten over his arms and legs. His head tips back, and I feel his panic like it’s my own. He hid his fear from me before, but it erupts from him now.

  He fights the restraints, his mouth open on a yell. The lights die a flickering death as the hover wobbles in the air, battling interference from the curtain.

  Dram’s in the dark, restrained and sealed in an unsteady, droning craft. No chance of light—only the blistering heat of the flash curtain as it carries him back toward the burnt sands and the starving creatures birthed in its shadow.

  I drop to the ground as the hover lifts, pressing my face to the snow. The icy crystals burn, even as they numb my cheeks and forehead. I embrace the physical pain, because I cannot bear the agony tearing open my heart.

  The Congress has Dram.

  With no one left to hear, I give in to the scream. I shout into the snow, into the particles I sense more than anyone else. The curtain sings to me, and I used its melodies to find my way out. I will use it to find a way back.

  But first, I have to find Bade. And my father. Or we all die.

  I stand, shielding myself in the folds of the camo-cloth. The Mods shoot upward, ascending in a growling chorus of engines. Sunlight glints off the machines as they disappear overhead. All at once I’m alone in a glade spattered with blood.

  I tuck my cloak around me and run.

  SIX

  39.1 km from flash curtain

  I’VE GONE LESS than a kilometer when I find the craft, half buried in snow. I know the hover’s one of ours by the parallel lines—a caver’s mark—painted on the side. It’s small, just a four-person Skimmer, but smoke pours from it, and as I approach, I hear the crackle of fire. The flight and nav systems should have been safe this far from the curtain’s interference, but just like the particle snow, the flashfall is extending beyond its normal parameters.

  This must be the Skimmer Jameson told us to expect. This isn’t the coded location he mentioned, but it’s close—within a few kilometers. A bloody hand suddenly pounds against the viewing window. I run forward, shocked anyone managed to survive the crash.

  “Hold on! I’m here!” I boost myself atop the metal fuselage and pound on the glass. Flames lick the sides of the craft, and I know they’ll draw any nearby Mods like a beacon. “Move away from the glass!” I shout. I balance on my knees and raise my axe. I swing it down, and the windshield cracks. Heat bleeds off the wreckage, bringing tears to my eyes and making my skin burn. Two more swings and I’ve made a hole. I holster my axe, wrap my hands in my jacket, and reach through.

  “Watch the glass,” the man calls around hacking coughs.

  A jagged edge catches the inside of my wrist and I gasp, more surprised than pained. “Flash me,” I mutter, ripping the sleeve of my cloak free and hastily wrapping it over the cut.

  “Grab my hands,” I say, reaching through the glass. The man grasps my hands, and I give him the leverage he needs to pull free of the smashed cockpit. He wears a medkit strapped across his chest. Through the smoke and snow, I can’t see him clearly, just enough to see that he’s pulled on extra layers of clothes—maybe the pilot’s—to protect himself from the burning heat.

  “What about the others?” I ask.

  “Just the pilot,” he answers, his voice muffled behind a thick scarf. “I did what I could for him—”

  “Then we need to get away from here. Trackers will be here any second.” We stumble through the drifts, and I barely notice the sting of the particle snow.

  “Let me look at your wrist,” he calls. I glance back and realize I’ve left a trail of blood.

  “Damn.” I sway on my feet, staring at the spots of red, stark against the snow. This will lead Striders to us as surely as marks on a map. I tear more of my cloak free, my fingers shaking—more from shock than cold, I realize dimly. I must’ve cut myself deeper than I thought.

  The man wades toward me, his steps hampered by the snow and extra clothing. He’s unwrapping the scarf covering half his face. “Stay there, I’m going to apply pressure.” As he nears, I see that his sleeve’s soaked with blood.

  “You need a physic,” I murmur, trying to connect the suddenly disjointed thoughts rambling through my mind. “You’re bleeding—”

  “This isn’t my blood, Orion. It’s yours.” Without the scarf shielding his face, I recognize the man I pulled from the hover, but it’s his voice I knew first.

  “Dad,” I whisper. The world tips beneath me and the snow is everywhere.

  I am numb and all is white.

  * * *

  “Orion.”

  I fight my way through the chemical haze clouding my mind. “Dad?” There’s something in his tone that makes me feel like a little girl, frightened by the panic I hear in his voice.

  “You need to see this.”

  “Mmph.” I bite my lip to keep from being sick. My wrist is opened up, skin pulled back, tendons exposed. He woke me too soon.

  “I’m sorry, Orion, but you need to see this for yourself. You might not have believed me if I told you later.”

  The glow of a lantern illuminates sutures and clamps and bloody gauze. I’m on a ledge of rock. “What are you doing?” My Radband is dangling off my arm, the biotech partially removed. I can’t believe he would attempt this surgery.

  “I had to remove part of it to suture your wrist. You nicked your radial artery.” He lifts my wrist, and I flinch. “Look at your biotech. Four lights, not two.” He lifts my Radband. “The indicators don’t function properly.”

  “It broke?”

  “It never worked.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Your radiation levels are higher than the tech indicates. You’re sick, Orion. We all are. They just don’t want us to know it.” He works the biotech back over my wrist and inserts the sensors into place. I don’t feel anything. I am numb, inside and out.

  “Four lights,” I murmur. “I’m at gold.” Too soon to feel the effects of radiation. My gaze shifts to Dad. “What about you?” My fog-filled mind runs the math, the years more radiation he’s been exposed to.

  He doesn’t answer and my eyes rove over him. “It’s nearly impossible to remove the biotech,” he says. “Not without irreparable damage. But Jameson found someone in Alara. He was the one who told me about the indicators.” He lifts his bare left wrist, and I see just how much he was willing to risk for the truth.

  “How many lights, Dad?” I don’t recognize the strangled voice choking past my lips.

  He hesitates. “Five.”

  Orange. My dad’s at level orange. There’s only one light after that.

  “I’m putting you back under, Orion,” he says softly. I barely notice the sting of the needle; my mind is grasping at scattered fragments of thought. There is something … something important. Heaviness settles over me, and I struggle to keep my eyes open. Red. An orange indicator means a Subpar is actually at red.

  A whimpering cry pushes past my lips.

>   “Sleep now,” Dad murmurs. “I’ll be done soon. You’re going to be fine.”

  “Dram.” I slur the name, but I hear it echo a thousand places inside myself. “Dram’s … orange.”

  Dad doesn’t answer—or if he does, I don’t hear it. I can only hear that name, echoing in the halls of my heart, along with one other word.

  Red.

  SEVEN

  31.2 km from flash curtain

  WE SURVIVE THE day in a cave. My emotions swing wildly, between relief that Dad is alive and the terror I’m reminded of every time I move my wrist. Dram’s Radband is giving him a false sense of security, an indication of time he doesn’t actually have. Plans shape and reshape as I lie on the ground, anchored to consciousness by my tether of pain.

  Dad wakes, and I ask him only the essential things. We keep our words to a minimum, but he shares enough to give me an idea of what’s going on.

  A map forms in my mind. Not a tunnel map of caverns and depth readings, but a map of this Eastfall world with more spaces filled in. Places like the Overburden, a land of tapped-out mines. Dad doesn’t know much more than the Conjies do—that the original outposts and cirium there are gone, but the cordons of the Overburden are mined for flash dust.

  “We developed a cure,” he says. But there are tears in his eyes when he says it. Because he couldn’t hold on to it. Dad perfected the cure to the radiation poisoning, and the Congress took it. Not to save people, but to keep them enslaved. “Workers in the Overburden are given a rationed, daily dose,” he explains. “In exchange for service. And compliance. Jameson tried to—”

  “Stop,” I say. “Don’t tell me any more.” Because all the hollow places inside me are filling too fast with horror, devouring me from the inside, like I’m being pumped full of orbie water.

  Dad studies my face, then doses me with Serum 129. It’s only a temporary relief from physical pain, but maybe it’ll grant me just enough oblivion to keep the orbie water from drowning me. Slowly, the tether holding me eases and I float up

  up

  up.

  “Rest, Orion,” Dad says. I think I hear him tell me that he loves me and that we’ll find a way.

  Dram said that, too. Just before the Mod took him.

  I doze in snatches of time, my ears pricked for the drone of trackers. My mind stirs, restless, shaping my fractured thoughts into a single realization. The flash curtain isn’t finished with me yet.

  I crawl to the edge of the cave and watch the stars arc across the sky. I wonder if Dram and the others can see them or if they’re already under a flashfall sky, where the air has teeth.

  I shoulder our gear, being careful of my injured wrist, and hoist Dad to his feet. We trudge through the forest as the sky lightens to palest pink. Like the inside of a shell, Mom would say. Then she’d go on to explain shells and oceans, and I’d want to leave Outpost Five even more than I did before.

  “Orion?”

  I realize I’ve stopped. I let go of my wrist, the reassembled Radband glowing up at me. Dad managed to reattach it, though it’s not adhered as it once was.

  “Why did the Congress do this to us?” I ask.

  “Protocol,” Dad answers. “The principle Alara is built upon—in order to preserve natural humanity, radiation exposure must be kept ‘as low as reasonably achievable.’ Better that some die, instead of all.”

  “I hate them.”

  “Most Alarans don’t know what’s happening to Subpars and Conjurors on the other side of the curtain.”

  “They know they mine. They know people die to keep them shielded in their glenting city!” I taste salt and realize I’m crying. It stirs my rage. We cry—and it doesn’t matter. We bleed—and nothing changes. It has been this way for 150 years. Subpars mine and die. Alarans live. Protocol is preserved.

  “Orion. You’re stronger than this.”

  I glare at him like he’s standing inside the protected city. “Maybe I’m sick of having to be strong!”

  “We’re tired. Let’s—”

  “Tired?” I practically shout the word. “We’re dying, Dad! The Subpars—if there are any left—are mining cordons. Owen and Marin, and Mere and Winn—my friends are waiting for me to s-save them! And Dram—” I break off, swiping my eyes. “Dram’s at RED!”

  His arms steal around me, holding me as I shake. I’m drowning in my own weakness, my inability to save the people I love. He rocks me, like he did when I was nine and Dram’s sister crawled out of seven, the only survivor from Mom’s team. He’s speaking softly—fragments of sentences.

  “My brave girl … see your strength … You’re just like her…”

  His voice slowly replaces the sounds of my hitched breaths. Words that don’t mean anything.

  That mean everything.

  He clasps the sides of my head. “There’s a reason she named you for the stars. And not just any constellation. One of the brightest.”

  Tears slip down my cheeks. “I don’t know what to do. Back at Outpost Five, each day was the same. I knew how to survive the tunnels. Here, everything’s different. It’s constantly changing.”

  “Then change with it.” He smiles, a sad tilt of his lips.

  “It’s not changing me, it’s breaking me.”

  “Maybe we are meant to break. Maybe that’s what makes us stronger.”

  * * *

  I stare at Bade across the campfire. Tension fills the space between us, thick as the wood smoke. We found him and the others sheltered near echo six and staggered into their hidden Conjie camp an hour ago. I can’t seem to ask him to forgive me for going against him and accidentally drawing the Mods. I’m not sure it would matter. Some things “sorry” can’t fix.

  “Seven Conjies were captured,” he announces, his voice gruff with emotion. I realize he’s counting Dram among the Conjurors.

  Six Conjurors will lose their hands and their freedom because of me.

  It was a well-intentioned idea. Roran and I nearly succeeded.

  Roran. My stomach lurches. One of the six.

  I take a shaky breath and level my gaze at Bade. Sometimes the forgiveness you need is too big to ask for. Sometimes you skip it and go straight to penance.

  “Let me get inside the Congress.”

  Bade lifts a brow. “Oh, are you asking me this time?”

  I wade past his bitter tone. “The curtain is expanding, creatures are escaping the flashfall … our Radbands are a lie. If we don’t act, then everyone who’s not behind the shield will be dead soon. You know it’s true.”

  “We’re not ready to bring a full-fledged fight to them,” he says. “We don’t have the numbers. That’s why Arrun’s been in the outlier regions—trying to assemble a secret army.”

  Arrun. Arrun and his cryptic, useless message. I retrieve the patch from my pocket. A memory stirs, painful, like a thorn tearing across my skin. Dram pushing this into my hand. Keep this. In case it means more than I think it does.

  My thumb brushes the stitching, the metallic thread stained with blood. I’ve considered it from every angle, even unraveled a bit of the outer stitching to see if it concealed another message. Nothing. Just this Strider patch, the motto twining above a snake. Morior invictus. Death before defeat.

  Is this really Arrun’s message to us? Die trying? Bade says it traveled by at least three different carriers. I consider the effort. There must be more we’re not seeing.

  I study the letters. M, O, R, I, O, R—the second R is dark with dried blood. I, N, V, I, C, T—the last three letters are stained. It reminds me of our caver’s suits in Outpost Five and all the nights Dram and I sat in the Rig, a bottle of vinegar between us, scrubbing bloodstains off our uniforms. I recall the times, exhausted from mining, I just wanted to toss the clothes into the fire pit. Especially when it was someone else’s blood. I glance down at the patch again. Something’s off. I stare so hard my eyes begin to water. The motto swims up at me.

  The motto.

  “Hand me a stick,” I say. I d
rop to my knees and smooth my palm across the ground. I clear an even patch of dirt and take the stick Dad hands me.

  “Orion?”

  “We kept it clear,” I mutter. “The Subpar motto, on the front of our caver’s suit. Even down the tunnels—if it got dirty, we wiped the words clear. It was tradition—or superstition—like touching the sign supports before entering the tunnels. Something only cavers knew about.”

  “I don’t follow,” Dad says.

  “Arrun didn’t know who to trust, so he sent a message only a caver would catch.”

  I draw the bloodstained letters into the earth. R, T, U, S.

  “What is it?” Bade asks, crouching beside me. I thrust the patch at him. “Look at the blood on the letters.” He lifts a brow. I huff my breath in frustration. “It’s wrong. Blood sprays, or drips, or smears. It doesn’t … skip letters like this. This marking is intentional.”

  “You think those letters hold a message?”

  “I think all of it’s a message. One that only a Subpar would see.” I rearrange the letters. R-U-S-T. No. T-R-U-S.

  “Holy fire,” I murmur. “If we use the T twice—” I draw the word into the dirt.

  Trust.

  I glance up, but Bade’s staring into the middle distance, like his thoughts are as far away as Arrun. He shifts and looks at Aisla.

  “It makes sense,” he says. She nods.

  “What does?” Dad asks.

  “Arrun went to the outlier regions to raise an army. He didn’t tell us his plan in case—”

  “Striders?” I ask, my voice choked. “His plan is Striders?” Memories surge: fear, shock, the heart-tripping effects of electrified armor.

  “Think of it,” Bade says. “If he can infiltrate the Congress’s soldiers, turn some of them to our cause, it would leave them defenseless. We could breach the city—and anything we wanted inside of it.”