King's Cage

by Victoria Aveyard

  “We can’t land at all,” Cal snarls.

  “Maybe I can do something, stop the lightning—”

  “It won’t just be lightning down there!” Even over the roar of the climbing plane, his voice rumbles. More than a few heads turn in his direction. Davidson’s is one of them. “Windweavers and storms are going to blow us off course the second we drop through the clouds. They’ll make us crash.”

  Cal’s eyes flutter up and down jet, taking stock of us. The wheels turn in his head, working on overdrive. My fear gives way to faith. “What’s your plan?”

  The jet bucks again, bouncing us all in our seats. It doesn’t faze Cal.

  “I need gravitrons, and I need you,” he adds, pointing at Cameron.

  Her gaze turns steely. She nods. “I think I know where you’re going with this.”

  “Radio the other jets. We’re going to need a teleporter in here, and I need to know where the rest of the gravitrons are. They have to distribute.”

  Davidson ducks his chin in a sharp nod. “You heard him.”

  My stomach swoops at the implication as the jet bursts into activity. Soldiers double-check their weapons and zip into tactical gear, their faces full of determination. Cal most of all.

  He forces himself out of his seat, clutching the supports to keep steady. “Get us directly over Corvium. Where’s that teleporter?”

  Arezzo blinks into existence, dropping to a knee to stop her momentum. “I do not enjoy that,” she spits.

  “Unfortunately you and the other ’porters are going to be doing it a lot,” Cal replies. “Can you handle jumping between the jets?”

  “Of course,” she says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Good. Once we’re down, take Cameron to the next jet in line.”

  Down.

  “Cal,” I almost whimper. I can do a lot of things, but this?

  Arezzo cracks her knuckles, speaking over me. “Affirmative.”

  “Gravitrons, use your cables. Six to a body. Keep it tight.”

  The newbloods in question spring to their feet, pulling wound cords from special slots on their tactical vests. Each one has a mess of clips, allowing them to transport multiple people with their ability to manipulate gravity. Back at the Notch, I recruited a man named Gareth. He used his ability to fly or jump great distances.

  But not to jump out of jets.

  Suddenly I feel very sick, and sweat breaks out on my forehead.

  “Cal?” I say again, my voice climbing higher.

  He ignores me. “Cam, your job is to protect the jet. Put out as much silence as you can—picture a sphere; it’ll help keep us level in the storm.”

  “Cal?” I yelp. Am I the only one thinking this is suicide? Am I the only sane person here? Even Farley seems nonplussed, her lips pursed into a grim line as she cables herself to one of the six gravitrons. She feels my eyes and looks up. Her face flickers for an instant, reflecting one ounce of the terror I feel. Then she winks. For Shade, she mouths.

  Cal forces me up, either ignoring my fear or not noticing it. He personally straps me to the tallest gravitron, a lanky woman. He cables in next to me, one arm heavy across my shoulders while the rest of me is crushed against the newblood. All down the jet, the others do the same, flanking their gravitron lifelines.

  “Pilot, what’s our position?” Cal shouts over my head.

  “Five seconds to center,” comes a responding bark.

  “Plan all passed on?”

  “Affirmative, sir! Center, sir!”

  Cal grits his teeth. “Arezzo?”

  She salutes. “Ready, sir.”

  There’s a very good chance I will throw up all over the poor gravitron in the middle of this honeycomb of people. “Easy,” Cal breathes in my ear. “Just hold on; you’ll be fine. Close your eyes.”

  I definitely want to. I fidget now, tapping my legs, shuddering. All nerves, all movement.

  “This isn’t crazy,” Cal whispers. “People do this. Soldiers train to do stuff like this.”

  I tighten my grip on him, enough to make it hurt. “Have you?”

  He just gulps.

  “Cam, you can start. Pilot, begin drop.”

  The wave of silence hits me like a sledgehammer. It isn’t enough to hurt, but the memory of it makes my knees buckle. I grit my teeth to keep from screaming and squeeze my eyes shut so tightly I see stars. Cal’s natural warmth acts as an anchor, but a shaky one. I tighten my grip around his back, as if I can bury myself inside him. He murmurs to me but I can’t hear him. Not past the feel of slow, smothering darkness and an even worse death. My heartbeat triples, ramming in my chest until I think it might explode out of me. I can’t believe it, but I actually want to jump out of the plane now. Anything to get away from Cameron’s silence. Anything to stop remembering.

  I barely feel the plane drop or rock against the storm. Cameron exhales in steady puffs, trying to keep her breathing even. If the rest of the plane feels the pain of her ability, they don’t show it. We descend in quiet. Or maybe my body is simply refusing to hear anymore.

  When we shuffle backward, crowding onto the drop platform, I realize this is it. The jet rumbles, buffeted by winds Cameron cannot deflect. She shouts something I can’t decipher over the pound of blood in my ears.

  Then the world opens beneath me. And we fall.

  At least when House Samos ripped my last jet out of the sky, they had the decency to leave us in a cage of metal. We have nothing but the wind and freezing rain and swirling darkness pulling us every which way. Our momentum must be enough to keep us on target, as well as the fact that no sane person would expect us to be leaping out of planes a few thousand feet in the air in the middle of a storm. The wind whistles like a woman’s scream, clawing at every inch of me. At least the pressure of Cameron’s silence is gone. The veins of lightning in the clouds call to me, as if saying good-bye before I’m turned into a crater.

  Everyone yells on the way down. Even Cal.

  I’m still yelling when we start slowing about fifty feet above the jagged tips of Corvium, spiraling out in a hexagon of buildings and inner walls. And I’m hoarse when we bump gently against the smoothly paved ground, slick with at least two inches of rainwater.

  Our newblood hastily unclips us all, and I fall backward, not caring about the bitterly cold puddle I’m lying in. Cal jumps to his feet.

  I lie there for a second, thinking of nothing. Just staring up at the sky I plummeted through—and somehow survived. Then Cal grabs my arm and hoists me up, literally pulling me back to reality.

  “The rest are going to be landing here, so we have to move.” He shoves me ahead of him, and I stumble a bit through the sloshing water. “Gravitrons, Arezzo will come down with the next batch to teleport you back up. Stay sharp.”

  “Yes, sir,” they echo, bracing themselves for another round. I’m almost sick at the thought.

  Farley actually is sick. She heaves up her guts in an alleyway, dumping whatever her quick breakfast was. I forgot she hates flying, not to mention teleporting. The drop was the worst of both.

  I make for her, looping my arm to help her stand up straight. “You okay?”

  “Fine,” she replies. “Just giving the wall a fresh coat of paint.”

  I glance at the sky, still lashing us with cold rain. Oddly cold for this time of year, even in the north. “Let’s get moving. They aren’t on the walls yet, but they will be.”

  Cal steams slightly and zips up the neck of his vest to keep the water out. “Shivers,” he calls. “I have a feeling we’re about to be snowed in.”

  “Should we go to the gates?”

  “No. They’re warded with Silent Stone. Silvers can’t pummel their way in. They have to go over.” He gestures for us and the rest of our dropjet to follow him. “We have to be on the ramparts, ready to push back whatever they throw. The storm is just the vanguard. Block us in, reduce our vision. Keep us blind until they’re on top of us.”

  His pace
is hard to match, especially through the rain, but I forge to his side anyway. Water soaks through my boots, and it isn’t long before I lose sensation in my toes. Cal stares ahead, as if his eyes alone can set the entire world on fire. I think he wants to. That would make this easier.

  Once again he must fight—and probably kill—the people he was raised to protect. I take his hand, because there are no words I can say right now. He squeezes my fingers, but lets them go just as quickly.

  “Your grandmother’s troops can’t get in the same way.” As I speak, more gravitrons and soldiers plummet out of the sky. All screaming, all safe when they touch down. We turn a corner, moving from one ring of walls to the next, leaving them behind. “How do we join our forces?”

  “They’re coming from the Rift. That’s southwest. Ideally, we’ll keep Maven’s force occupied long enough for them to take the rear. Pin them between us.”

  I gulp. So much of the plan relies on the work of Silvers. I know better than to trust such things. House Samos could simply not arrive and let us all be captured or killed. Then they would be free to challenge Maven outright. Cal isn’t stupid. He knows all this. And he knows Corvium and its garrison are too valuable to lose. This is our flag, our rebellion, our promise. We stand against the might of Maven Calore, and his twisted throne.

  Newbloods man the ramparts, joined by Red soldiers with arms and ammunition. They don’t fire, only stare out into the distance. One of them, a tall string bean of a man with a uniform like Farley’s and a C on his shoulder, steps forward. He clasps arms with her first, nodding his head.

  “General Farley,” he says.

  She dips her chin. “General Townsend.” Then she nods to another ranking officer in green, probably the commander of the Montfort newbloods. The short, squat woman with bronze skin and a long, white braid coiled around her head returns the action. “General Akkadi.”

  “What are we looking at?” Farley asks them both.

  Another soldier approaches in red instead of green. Her hair is different, dyed scarlet, but I recognize her.

  “Good to see you, Lory,” Farley says, all business. I would greet the newblood too if we had the time. I’m quietly happy to see another one of the Notch recruits not just alive but thriving. Like Farley, her red hair is closely cut. Lory belongs to the cause.

  She nods at us all before throwing an arm out over the metal-edged ramparts. Her ability is extremely heightened senses, allowing her to see much farther than we can. “Their force is to the west, with their backs to the Choke. They have storms and shivers just inside the first ring of cloud cover, out of your sight.”

  Cal leans forward, squinting at the thick black clouds and pelting rain. They make it impossible for him to see farther than a quarter mile from the walls. “Do you have snipers?”

  “We tried,” General Townsend sighs.

  Akkadi concurs. “Waste of ammunition. The wind just eats the bullet.”

  “Windweavers too, then.” Cal sets his jaw. “They have the aim for that.”

  The meaning is clear. The windweavers of Norta, House Laris, rebelled against Maven. So this force is Lakelander. Another person might miss the twitch of a smile or the release of tension in Cal’s shoulders, but I don’t. And I know why. He was raised to fight Lakelanders. This is an enemy that won’t break his heart.

  “We need Ella. She’s best at storm lightning.” I point up at the looming towers overlooking this section of wall. “If we get her up high, she can turn the storm against them. Not control it, but use it to fuel herself.”

  “Good, get it done,” Cal says with a clipped tone. I’ve seen him in a fight, in battle, but never something like this. He becomes another person entirely. Laser-focused, inhumanly so, without even a flicker of the gentle, torn prince. Whatever warmth he has left is an inferno, meant to destroy. Meant to win. “When the gravitrons finish the drops, put them here, evenly spaced. The Lakelanders are going to charge the walls. Let’s make it hard for them to move. General Akkadi, who else do you have on hand?”

  “Good mix of defensive and offensive,” she responds. “Enough bombers to turn the Choke road into a minefield.” With a proud smirk, she indicates the nearby newbloods who have what look like sunbursts on their shoulders. Bombers. Better than oblivions, able to explode something or someone on sight instead of just touch.

  “Sounds like a plan,” Cal says. “You keep your newbloods ready. Strike at your discretion.”

  If Townsend minds being dictated to, and by a Silver at that, he doesn’t show it. Like the rest of us, he feels the thrum of death in the air. There’s no room for politics now. “And my soldiers? I’ve got a thousand Reds on the walls.”

  “Keep them there. Bullets are just as good as abilities, sometimes more so. But conserve ammunition. Target only those who slip through the first wave of defenses. They want us to overexert, and we’re not going to do that.” He glances at me. “Are we?”

  I grin, blinking away the rain. “No, sir.”

  At first, I wonder if the Lakelanders are very slow to move, or very stupid. It takes the better part of the hour, but between Cameron, the gravitrons, and the teleporters, we manage to get everyone into Corvium from the thirty or so dropjets. About a thousand soldiers, all trained and deadly. Our advantage, Cal says, lies in uncertainty. Silvers still don’t know how to fight people like me. They don’t know what we’re truly capable of. I think that’s why Cal mostly leaves Akkadi to her own devices. He doesn’t know her troops well enough to command them properly. But Reds he knows. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, one I try to swallow away. In the stretch of time, I try not to wonder how many Reds the person I love sacrificed for an empty war.

  The storm never changes. Always churning, dumping rain. If they’re trying to flood us, it’s going to take a long time. Most of the water drains, but some of the lower streets and alleys are six inches deep in murky water. It makes Cal uneasy. He keeps wiping off his face or pushing back his hair, skin slightly steaming in the cold.

  Farley has no shame. She propped her jacket up over her head a long time ago, and looks like some kind of maroon ghost. I don’t think she moves for twenty minutes, her head resting on folded arms as she stares out at the landscape. Like the rest of us, she waits for a strike that may come at any second. It sets my teeth on edge, and the constant rage of adrenaline drains me almost as badly as Silent Stone.

  I jump when Farley speaks.

  “Lory, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  At another perch, Lory also has a jacket over her head. She doesn’t turn, unable to wrench her senses away. “I really hope not.”

  “What?” I ask, looking between them. The movement sends fresh rainwater down my shirt collar, and I shiver. Cal sees it happen and moves closer to my back, extending some of his warmth to me.

  Slowly, Farley turns, trying not to get drenched. “The storm is moving. Closing in. A few feet every minute, and getting faster.”

  “Shit,” Cal breathes behind me. Then he springs into action, taking his warmth with him. “Gravitrons, be ready! When I say, you tighten your grip on that field.” Tighten. I’ve never seen a gravitron use their ability to strengthen gravity, only loosen it. “Drop whatever’s coming.”

  As I watch, the storm picks up speed, enough to note at a glance. It continues swirling, but spirals closer and closer with every rotation, clouds bleeding over open ground. Lightning cracks deep within, a pale, empty color. I narrow my eyes, and for a moment, it flashes purple, veining with strength and rage. But I have nothing to aim at yet. Lightning, no matter how powerful, is useless without a target.

  “The force is marching behind the storm, closing the distance,” Lory calls, confirming our worst fears. “They’re coming.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Mare

  The wind howls. It buffets the walls and ramparts, blowing more than a few back from their position. Rain freezes on the stonework, making our footing precarious. The first casualty is a fall. A Red so
ldier, one of Townsend’s. The wind catches his jacket, blowing him backward along the slick walkway. He shouts as he goes over the edge, plunging thirty feet—before sailing skyward, born of a gravitron’s concentration. He lands hard on the wall, colliding with a sickening crack. The gravitron didn’t have enough control. But the soldier is alive. Injured, but alive.

  “Brace yourself!” echoes down the lines of soldiers, passing between green uniforms and red. When the wind roars again, we buckle down. I tuck myself against the icy metal of a rampart, safe from the worst of it. A windweavers’ strike is unpredictable, unlike normal weather. It splits and curves, clawing like fingers. All while the storm tightens around us.

  Cameron shoves in next to me. I glance at her, surprised. She’s supposed to be back with the healers, to form a last wall against any siege. If anyone can defend them from Silvers, give them the time and space to treat our soldiers, it’s her. The rain makes her shiver, her teeth chattering. She seems smaller, younger, in the cold and closing darkness. I wonder if she’s even turned sixteen yet.

  “All right, lightning girl?” she says with some difficulty. Water drips over her face.

  “All right,” I murmur back. “What are you doing up here?”

  “Wanted to see,” she says, lying. The young girl is here because she believes she has to be. Am I abandoning you? she asked before. I see the question in her eyes now. And my answer is the same. If she doesn’t want to be a killer, she shouldn’t have to be.

  I shake my head. “You protect the healers, Cameron. Get back to them. They’re defenseless, and if they go down—”

  She bites her lip. “We all do.”

  We stare at each other, trying to be strong, trying to find strength in each other. Like me, she’s soaked through. Her dark lashes clump together, and every time she blinks it looks like she’s crying. The raindrops land hard, making us both squint as they pelt down our faces. Until they don’t. Until the raindrops start rolling in the opposite direction, flowing up. Her eyes widen as mine do, watching with horror.

  “Nymph strike!” I scream in warning.