A scream tore from me. I was broken open, I was waves against stones in a cataclysm of grief as his blood painted a red swath across the floor. My feet were moving—I was running—but the image had seared across my mind. I sobbed, gagging on the tears. Every breath was agony as I wept.
I reached the servants’ door and threw it open. Tallia was waiting on the other side, and she didn’t speak, just joined me as I ran. An alarm sounded in the distance, but as we ran, it blended with the other sounds of unrest coming from the city.
The agony spread from my chest to my arms and legs. I couldn’t feel the ground beneath me. Every breath was ragged. My lungs ached. The world swirled around me.
Kit was dead.
Soldiers blocked our path. My heart jumped to my throat.
This was the end.
“Stop,” a voice called, and then Valus was striding toward us from the other end of the corridor, half his face streaked with blood, but alive and whole and on his feet. I stared at him, unable to summon words. They’d kept their promise.
He was a swirl of black cloak and piercing eyes as he stepped in front of me. “You won’t harm her. Stand down.”
The soldiers hesitated.
“Go,” he said to me, turning just long enough to graze my cheek with his finger.
Tallia and I fled.
“This way,” Tallia said, and then we were half climbing, half sliding down a ladder, and then another, descending deeper and deeper into the city, away from the luxury of Nautilus’s chambers and guest houses.
“Quick,” Tallia hissed, and then we were in a docking bay with the Riptide waiting at the end of a dripping metal bridge, waiting to dive. I gaped as Tallia tugged my arm. “There isn’t much time, my lady. You must go now!”
“Stop!”
Soldiers. They rushed toward us from the corridor, truskets raised. Tallia turned, producing a weapon from beneath her flowing black garment. I headed for the ship, slipping on the wet ground, slipping once. I hit the floor of the bridge, breaking the fall with my arm, my fingers scrambling to snatch up the journal again. I turned as I rose and saw Tallia convulse, hit by a trusket spear in the side. She fell to her knees and I stopped, but she cried out, “Keep running!”
The soldiers advanced.
I wasn’t going to make it in time.
Tallia pushed herself up on her elbows and faced the soldiers. The fabric that hid her face and head had fallen into a pile at her side, and her hair cascaded over her shoulders. She stared the soldiers full in the eyes as they advanced, and they slowed, truskets still aimed at her and me.
Tallia climbed to her knees with a groan as the shaft in her side moved. She wrapped her fingers around it, and I half-expected her to yank it out, but she didn’t. She continued to face the soldiers.
“Are you going to kill me?” she demanded.
Her voice echoed through the space. The soldiers were silent, impassive. This close, I could see their gloved hands tighten on their weapons. Then one of them held up a hand.
Slowly, the soldier removed his helmet. He was young, with a shock of black hair and piercing green eyes. Sweat drenched his face, and his hand shook as he dropped the helmet to the ground.
“Tallia,” he said. “Get out of the way.”
“It’s too late,” she said. “Volcanus is crumbling. You can’t stop it.”
He lifted the trusket. “Get. Out. Of. The. Way.”
“Are you going to shoot me?” she cried. Her voice carried loudly, and the others seemed slapped by it. “For what end? Who do you fight for? Another man’s lust for power? Or for your people? Itlantis or Nautilus?”
“Nautilus fights for Itlantis,” he replied, but he sounded uncertain.
Tallia didn’t move.
My blood drummed in my ears. I was fused to the spot where I stood.
“Where is Nautilus now?” she asked. “He has divided Itlantis. He has divided us all. We are dying. How many drowned in Celestrus’s destruction? How many were lost at Primus? How many of our children have died below?”
Slowly, the soldier lowered his weapon. After a pause, the others did the same.
Tallia looked over her shoulder at me. “Go.”
She continued to face the soldiers as I stumbled toward the ship, and escape. The journal thudded against my chest as I ran.
I boarded the ship, and the others were there waiting, all of them. They rushed to help me.
“Kit is dead,” I managed. I pushed them away and looked through the port hole to see the doors closing, the water rushing in, and Tallia surrounded by soldiers.
Then Nol folded me in a hug, and I let him hold me, my face pressed to the curve of his shoulder as he murmured my name into my hair.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE RIPTIDE SLIPPED away into darkness as magma from the volcano lit the water behind us. I sat with my head pressed to the wall of the ship, feeling every tremble that wracked my body. Nol and Garren spoke tersely about how to best contact the Dron. Myo sat beside me.
“My lady,” Tallyn asked quietly at my elbow. “Are you well?”
His words penetrated the fuzzy numbness that surrounded me. I looked down at my hands as I answered.
“I’m alive.” Half of my arm was scraped and bruised. I touched the place gingerly, focusing on the tears in my arm rather than the jagged ruin that was my heart.
Kit was gone.
How many times would I flee an Itlantean city with dead loved ones left behind?
Nol returned to sit beside me. He took my hand without a word and held it, rubbing his thumb over mine. I sank into the warmth of his side.
Tallyn disappeared without a word and reappeared a few moments later with a salve, which he applied gently.
“How did he die?” he asked, his tone even and kind.
“He...” My tongue scraped my teeth as I spoke. Tears gathered in the corners of my eyes. “He found Nautilus.”
“He defended you as he promised,” Tallyn said. “I’m proud of him.”
The book I’d retrieved from Nautilus’s library sat on the bench beside me, and when Tallyn had finished cleaning my arm, I reached for it.
“Myo,” I said. “Do you think we’ll find the rest of what we need here? The rest of the song that triggers my memories?”
Kit gave his life for me and for this journal. It had to have the answers.
Myo reached for it and ran a hand over the cover. He opened it and scanned the pages, looking for anything he could find. He hummed beneath his breath, the bits he knew, and a strange shiver worked over my skin. I saw my father crouching down, heard him saying, “The key is in the play city.”
I wrinkled my forehead.
“That glass city by your window... did you know it came apart?”
Lyssia had given me the pieces she’d found from it. I’d put them in my pocket...
I rose without speaking and went to my chamber. I dug through my things, desperate to find that tunic. I pulled it from a pile of clothing at the bottom of my chest of drawers and held it upside down, my heart hammering.
Something thumped against the floor. I snatched it up. A long, knobbed bit of colored glass.
I returned to the common room and held it out. “This came from the toy city I had as a child.” I explained how Lyssia had found it. “It looks like a key. Do you know what it’s for? Is this all we need, then?”
“Not quite,” my mother said before he could speak.
We looked at her. She sat slumped on the bench, tendrils of hair falling in her face, her whole body bowed as if she’d been squeezed by an invisible fist. The woman without the mask.
“The final piece you need is on Primus,” she said.
“Primus?” I said.
Even Myo appeared alarmed at this revelation.
“Yes,” my mother said wearily. “Aemi’s father hid the final pieces in his paintings. I knew they were important, but I didn’t know why.”
My father’s paintings. An undefinable emotio
n swept through me, leaving me full and hollow at the same time.
“What are we looking for, exactly?” Nol asked.
“Music,” Myo said. “We need the last bit of the song.”
“How is a song hidden in a painting?” Garren demanded.
Myo looked at my mother. She sighed.
“It is an old Tempest method of passing along information, one most have forgotten by now. Criston always found it curious, and he used to play with the idea. He painted ‘love’ in our bedroom with the colors of his painting, ‘family’ along the columns in the dining hall...”
Love? Family? These concepts were sneakily embedded in the Graywater decor? I almost couldn’t believe such a thing.
“The point,” Myo said, “is that the notes to the song could be colored in such a way.
“Wait.” I stood. “Wait. This is a Tempest method.”
“Yes,” my mother said. She looked tired, old.
“My father was...”
“A member of the organization you know as Tempest,” she confirmed.
I felt as if I was dangling off a ledge, about to lose my grip.
He was executed for treason.
I kept talking, the words gushing out of me. The revelation was a wound, and she knew it. “And you know he was part of Tempest.” I stopped. I tasted the words. “That must mean you were with Tempest, too.”
Annah had been right not to trust her. It was no surprise, but yet I felt gutted. Battered by the truth. After our conversation on Volcanus, I’d thought... I didn’t know what I’d thought, but I’d hoped, perhaps, that I had been wrong about her, that she was someone I could finally trust.
“They tried to kill me,” I said.
Treason.
Nol stepped toward me as if to defend me if my mother made a move. Tallyn shifted his weight. The rest watched us both with a mixture of wariness and disbelief at what was unfolding.
My mother rubbed a hand across her eyes. I’d never seen her look so stripped raw, so vulnerable, her armor of silence and stoicism ripped from her. She was without her shields as she spoke. “Let me explain.”
“Perhaps you’d better,” I said, my words coming out tight and monotone.
The others were silent, watching us. I was numb to them. I saw only my mother, heard only her words as she continued.
“Criston became involved in the organization before I did. At first, he believed it was for the good of Itlantis. He grew up on Arctus, where hate for the Dron is especially pronounced due to attacks that were made years ago—” She cut a glance at Garren. “—and where much talk is made about the need to keep the cities strong for the good of Itlantis. Tempest promised him a way to help the republic thrive, a way to be a good citizen, a way to protect his family and his little girl. After he became a member, he brought me in. I was young, and I loved him. I didn’t understand how ruthless and deadly the organization would prove to be.”
She drew in a breath and paused as if sorting her thoughts. “Criston came to realize over time that Tempest was wrong about many things, and destructive. He wanted to leave, but he knew too many things. He thought perhaps he could work against them by joining with other groups, groups whose purpose he strongly believed in. Groups like the Mist. As a trusted and longstanding member of Tempest, he was in a unique position to serve such organizations.”
“As a spy,” I said.
My gaze flicked to Myo. He said he’d served my father once. Was that how they had worked together? As comrades in the Mist?
I met his eyes, and he gave me a slight nod.
My mother was silent a moment. “And then you were born.”
When she raised her head, her eyes were surprisingly warm. “You were everything we wanted, and I— I asked him to extract himself from that life. We had a child now. We had to think about our family. He began to distance himself from his work as a spy within Tempest, but there was always something else, some cause, some secret, some conspiracy.”
“And?” I was breathless.
“And then you were taken.”
The memories I’d recalled through dreams and flashes spun in my head like petals in a windstorm—my father’s hand holding mine, the Azure facility, playing games and hiding behind a curtain with Valus as a child. The woman who’d raised me putting a finger to her lips. I blinked, my eyes burning.
“After you disappeared,” my mother continued, now with a dogged determination, as if she did not want to tell the rest but had no choice, “your father went half-mad. He saw it as his fault; I saw it as mine.” She paused. “Clearly, judging by your...gift... there are things he did not tell me, things concerning you and your disappearance that I...” She stopped for a moment, choosing her words again. “He made mistakes in his grief, and Tempest realized some of the things he had done to undermine them. They arranged for his death.”
“Then he didn’t...?” Myo’s words from several months ago came to my mind.
“He was executed for treason. That does not mean he was a traitor. They are not one and the same.”
My mother shifted. “I don’t know exactly how they framed him, but it happened quickly and it was all managed through back channels. Treason, the official reason was. To bring shame upon our family and censure against us. To keep me from saying anything, and to keep the rest of Itlantis from listening.” She laughed, a low bark of bitterness. “They thought they could control me with fear. Instead, they drove me to plot their destruction every night as I fell asleep.”
Tob snorted, the sound startling me. “They thought they could scare a Graywater that easily?”
A look from my mother quelled him. He shrank toward Tallyn.
“What else?” I asked.
“I raised your sister. I lived my life. And then you came back to us, and brought the same firestorm of political controversy and attention that your father always seemed to find.”
I had so many questions, but it wasn’t the right place for them. I looked at the others, remembering where we were and what still needed to be done.
“Time’s running out,” Garren said. “The Dron cannot wait indefinitely.”
“Well,” Myo said. “We shall simply have to go to Primus.”
“It’s occupied by Nautilus’s forces,” I said.
“We’ve entered enemy territory before.” Tallyn raised his eyebrows. “We can do it again.”
“I...” We were still putting ourselves back together from our escape not an hour earlier, and we were going to leap straight into the fire again?
But he was right. Itlantis needed us. If we didn’t find Perilous soon, the tentative peace that had been established might splinter, and divided, we had little chance of surviving the rest of the war.
“To Primus, then,” I said.
~ ~ ~
Primus was a half ruin.
Ships littered the floor of the ocean around the city, the twisted wrecks like tangles of driftwood. Portions of the city were blackened and broken, flooded with seawater where Nautilus’s torpedoes had torn holes.
Patrols swept the waters around the city, lights cutting through the deep blue. Above, the light was turning rosy, signaling dawn.
“I’d almost forgotten what sun looked like,” Garren muttered at my shoulder as we stood crowded in the control room, gazing at what awaited us.
“Here’s the plan,” Tallyn said. “The waters are crowded with abandoned and partially destroyed ships. We’ll let ours drift toward the city until we’re close enough to make a dive.”
“That could take days,” Keli protested.
We didn’t have that kind of time.
A slow creep of movement stirred at the edge of my awareness, at the place where the gloom of shadows melted into the blue of the deep water.
A whale?
Or a ship?
“Look,” I said.
“More warships,” Keli said with a sigh. “Does this mean Nautilus decided to come running back to his conquered city?”
“No,�
�� I said. “Look closer. Those are the ships we captured.”
“The Remnant,” Tallyn murmured.
My stomach twisted into a knot of excitement and fear.
The invasion.
“Should we wait?” Nol asked. “If there’s warring in the city—”
“You heard the plans,” Myo said with a shake of his head. “The retaking of Primus could last for weeks. They’ll be taking the city corridor by corridor. No, we need to find these paintings now, and we need to do it discreetly. This mission is not known among the general Remnant soldiers either. We get in and get out without calling attention to ourselves.”
Everyone was silent as the Remnant-claimed hammerships slid past, their long black bodies like sea monsters as they moved toward the city, carrying the promise of freedom.
I looked at Garren as an idea struck me.
“The dolphins.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I HUNG ONTO the slippery body of the dolphin like a starfish clinging to a rock, my body pressed as close to its muscular gray back as I could manage, my arms around the dorsal fin. The dolphin cut through the water relentlessly, and I kept my eyes focused on the city ahead instead of the graveyard of ships below.
Above, a patrol ship passed over. The dolphins kept swimming, with Garren, Tallyn, Nol, and I borne by four in the center, and dolphins without human riders surrounding us and hiding us from view.
We reached the city on the heels of the patrol ship. When it entered a docking bay, we followed, letting go of the dolphins and swimming upward before the doors closed beneath us and the water drained away.
The seawater streamed from our bodysuits as we stole through a hatch and into the city proper. The air inside was damp and smelled wet and musty. Signs plastered to columns and walls reminded citizens of the curfew times. Over one of the signs, someone had painted the words FREE PRIMUS.
Few people walked the streets of the capital. Smoke stained some of the corridors, and several of the statues had fallen, giving evidence of battle. Several times, we ducked into alleys to avoid a column of soldiers marching past.
In Dawn and Darkness Page 17
