by Teresa Rook
“Darga!”
Suddenly, Ennis’s arms are around me, and I’m being lifted from where I stumbled in. My feet leave the ground, and he spins me around in a semi-circle. But he sets me down too fast, ignorant of my injury, and my bad leg bends wrong under me and sends me crashing back to the smooth stone floor. Ennis tries to catch me but he’s not fast enough.
“Ow,” I say, a vast understatement.
“Shit,” he says, immediately crouching down beside me. “I’m sorry. Are you okay?”
I take his offered hand and haul myself back to my feet. “I’m fine. It’s nothing you did.”
“Darga’s back,” comes a deadpan voice I almost don’t recognize. I squint into the darkness and see Riksher sat against the far wall, arms draped over his knees, watching me with undisguised contempt. Riksher doesn’t usually sit. His withdrawn body language unnerves me, and without meaning to, I find myself trying to goad him out of it.
“Still salty, I see. Not as if I literally just got myself thrown into a prison to warn you.”
“Warn us of what?” Ennis asks. “And what are you doing here?”
“Tribe Ren plans to sell you—us now, probably—to the Cirinese.”
Both men stare at me with blank looks. I smile grimly. It’s a long way for them to fall.
“Sell,” Riksher says slowly, as though the word is sour. Carnigan doesn’t do slaves. I never thought this would be something I’d have to worry about. “Please explain why in hell you think we would trust you.”
“Riksher,” Ennis says, a distressed and ineffective admonishment. He cringes at me. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “These weeks have been…”
“You can tell me all about it once we’re out of here,” I say, briefly taking his hand and squeezing it. “And I’ll fill you in on my time, too. For now, though,” I say, raising my voice, “we get out of here.”
“Sounds fair,” he says with a wide, bright smile, and then a little laugh. “Lions. It’s so good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you, too.”
He doesn’t look good. Peaceful, relieved, maybe. Happy to see me. But the body underneath all that is worn and tired, thinner than it was last time I saw him. His elbows now stick out at the sides, and there are deep pockets beneath his eyes and hollows in his cheeks. His rich, dark skin looks chalky, like someone’s been trying to scrub him away. And the way he moves is different. His shoulders curl forward now.
“So…the plan?”
I bite my lip. “Not sure yet. I got in here. That was step one.”
Riksher snorts. “We’ve been over every inch of this place, or you wouldn’t have caught me sitting down. There’s nowhere to go.”
He’s right. We’re at the bottom of some sort of chamber, a long tube that stretches straight up to reveal a jagged circle of sky, blue with the light of the moon. I lay my palm flat against the wall. That same smooth, black stone with a heat that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the steam vents. I frown and step back.
“How long do we have?” Ennis asks.
I glance at our little circle of sky. Just me, or does it seem darker now? “I’m not sure. It happens tomorrow, but that’s all I know.”
“Crap.” Ennis holds his palms to his temples and bends his knees, trying to hold himself together. “We’re fucked.”
“Sold to the Cirinese,” Riksher says. “What an end.”
“Okay, Riksher, seriously,” I say, “aren’t you the late Wolf’s eldest son? Didn’t you help her win a war?”
He ignores me, determined to wallow in self-pity. Instead of fighting, I join Ennis in his manic brainstorm.
“We could pretend to be sick,” I say. Ennis tilts his head, but then I shake mine. “No. I don’t think they’d care. This isn’t about money. They’re not going to care if we die before they get paid. It’s about vengeance.” I sigh. “You guys really got on their bad side.”
Ennis closes his eyes. “We didn’t know anyone lived here.”
“I know that. But they don’t.” It’s okay, it’s tempting to add. You are good. I don’t blame you.
He blinks a few times, trying to focus. “Okay. How did you get in here? Maybe that’s how we get out.”
I shake my head. “I had a…friend, who helped. But she’s not going to betray her tribe directly. It was too much for her just to hide me, and then bring me here when I asked.”
Ennis is silent.
“What?” I ask.
“I tried talking to them,” he says. “They wouldn’t listen. I couldn’t get through.”
“They saw you setting fires, though, didn’t they?” I ask. “I had a defense. I argued I wasn’t really on your side.”
“Nothing like the truth,” Riksher quips.
“So, your friend won’t help,” Ennis says, deliberately talking over his brother. “And nobody comes in here. That door hadn’t opened once until they threw you in here. Guess we missed that chance.”
There’s nobody else for them to arrest. Our whole group is here, unless they turn significantly on Yarlin. “They don’t bring you meals?”
“Savages,” Riksher spits.
I feel my blood pressure rising. My hands clamp into fists. “You are a Chiral,” I shout. “Everything these people are, you made them. They were doing just fine until you destroyed the keystone of their civilizations.”
“What,” he sneers, “like the witches did to us? You forget your history, Darga. The tribes came first. This was our land first. You want to talk about destroying civilizations? How about the fact that none of these people needed any of this shit before the witches came and took away their real lives? Their real structures and societies? Chirals aren’t the bad guys. Chirals are the underdogs who fought back. We didn’t steal from the witches. We reclaimed what they took from us.”
“Why not ask the Yurals and the Irals what they think of that,” I growl, but Riksher doesn’t respond. He sits back against the wall and closes his eyes. “No,” I say, grabbing him by the collar. He doesn’t get to check out of this.
His eyes open into slits and he grabs my wrist, quick as a snake, and squeezes. I clench my jaw and don’t make a sound.
“Hey! Stop that. Cut it out.” Ennis steps between us and Riksher lets my wrist drop. It will bruise later. “We’re here together, right now. This is the problem that matters. Both of you,” he says with a pointed look at me. But he overestimates how calming he is. I try to stare him down, and he holds his ground. I forgot he’s not completely at my mercy anymore. He knows enough of me to know when to push back. “We figure out this problem, and then we go back to figuring out why we’re all pissed at each other.”
But there doesn’t seem to be any way to figure out this problem. We have nothing to work with except steep, sheer walls, a heavy wooden door with an impossible deadbolt, and the clothes on our backs. Ennis and I go back to bantering around ideas, but nothing sticks. Nothing will work. Soon we’re blind in the darkness. We can’t climb. We can’t dig. We can’t fake sick. We can’t get through the door.
We can’t do anything.
But then a massive light brightens the sky, almost like it’s day. Ennis and I blink at each other, and then the sound follows. Thunder like we’ve never heard, nothing like in Akisir. A sound that shakes the rock under our feet and nearly throws me to the ground again. This time, Ennis catches me.
The shaking comes again, and then it opens up a giant, hissing rift in the stone at our feet, one that travels the length of the floor and goes right through the wall of our prison, splitting it in two and crushing the once-impenetrable wooden door into splinters with the shifting of stone. The city appears before us, only for a second, before steam begins to rise out of the gash, obscuring the exit.
And then the rock at our feet starts spitting red.
twenty-eight
We emerge from the stomach of the mountain into chaos, the bubbling heat behind us forcing us outside. I duck immediately from a charging Ren, her eyes wild
and her hair flying loose behind her. She doesn’t even glance at me.
Rens continue to run past us, unconcerned with our escape. I look up.
The mountain itself has changed, a huge chunk missing from its easternmost tip. A bright, hissing red seeps from the wound in the mountain, sliding down towards the Dead City.
Families run past us, everyone frantic to get away from the mountain. Children and the elderly stumble alone or at the center of their family units, and one isolated child simply stands in the road, the Rens parting around him like the sea around a boulder. He wails with his face pointed to the sky and his mouth wide open. “Somebody’s got to get that kid,” I say just as a woman swoops in on him from the side, scooping him into her arms. The now-silent child watches fearfully over his mother’s shoulder as the liquid fire continues its crawl down the face of the mountain. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Riksher and Ennis are as dumbstruck as I am. We stare. “What is that?” I ask, my question completely drowned in the panicked cacophony.
People scream for each other. They must have seen this before. They must know what it does.
A woman in a building close to the base of the mountain tries to leap from her window, but the red has already invaded the street and her jump doesn’t clear it. She lands in the river with a scream, and she immediately bursts into flames.
My vision pulses black at the edges, and I vomit onto the ground at my feet. Ennis tries to comfort me, but I shake my head, spittle flying from the corners of my mouth.
“Go!” I gurgle, and the three of us turn and flee with the rest of the tribe. The river of fire follows us down through the city, occasionally catching a Ren that’s fallen in its path. It’s slower than water but fast enough that not everyone can get out of the way in time. People die as we run.
And then the crowd of Rens is pushing back uphill, a whole new level of panic. “We can’t get out!” one woman says, clutching my arms. The ground gives another shake and tears stream from her eyes. “The gate is blocked. We can’t get out!”
She breaks away from me without ever really focusing on my face, her eyes glassy. The tribe erupts into utter chaos, people shoving and screaming as the red river advances. People begin to break off to the sides, hoping the fire hasn’t spread wide yet, thinking to outrun it at its edges. I run us back up the mountain, parallel to the river, thinking that if it flows downhill, we’re safest on high ground.
“What’s going on here?” Ennis pants, transfixed by the fire flowing beside us. It expands slowly, eating more and more ground as it rolls downhill. At least nobody is insane enough to follow us up here, back towards the source of the deadly river. As if anybody has the presence of mind to care about us at all.
“Not a fucking clue,” I say.
#####
We catch our breath at the base of the mountain, far west of the river, and I lead us to the station.
“Where are we?” Ennis asks.
I shrug into the mouth of a giant archway, a wide, sweeping gesture that invites him to investigate. When his hands meet with the smooth surface of one of the trains, he gapes. He shuffles his feet in search of tracks. Finding them, he lets out a low whistle.
“How did we not find this place?” he asks.
“We’re right at the base of the mountain,” I say. “Tribe Ren caught you before you got this far.”
There is a brief, curious silence, and then Ennis asks. “So…did you figure it out?”
Deep breath, squared shoulders. “No.”
Riksher doesn’t have to say a word. Shame bubbles up in me in waves. I grit my teeth against it. “There’s no way,” I add, an apology and a defense. And then a whisper: “We are all going to starve.”
#####
The gamble I took in coming here pays off when Yarlin arrives not long after, her cheeks red and puffy from running. She immediately grabs me by the arm. “You can’t stay here.”
I frown and yank out of her grasp. “What’s happening out there?”
“You can’t stay here,” she says again. “The lava’s started coming down this side of the mountain. It will be here in minutes. You have to leave or you’ll be buried alive.”
“What about the trains?” I ask. My hands come up in front of me, my fingers curling in the air. “What will happen to them?”
Yarlin gazes at me for a moment, her lips parted in a cringe, and shakes her head. I stumble back against one of the steel shells. So long I’ve spent searching for these. So many bad decisions I’ve made in their name.
“Hello,” Ennis says, so calm and deliberately tone deaf that I choke out a deranged laugh.
“Oh, lions,” I say, dipping my head and covering my smile with my wrist. I suddenly want these two to be friends.
“Hello,” Yarlin says back, straightening in surprise. She watches him with wide eyes.
“I’m Ennis. Thank you for helping Darga.”
She slides her gaze sideways to me. “You’re welcome.”
He nods, satisfied with the introductions. “Where can we go?”
She shifts her weight and clasps her hands behind her back. “You have two options. The Wolf is here, searching for you. You can go with him.”
“The Wolf?” Ennis asks. “Already?”
Ennis was expecting him? “Never,” I spit. The corner of Yarlin’s mouth twitches upwards.
“Your other option is for me to take you to Cirrin.”
Riksher roars in outrage, but Ennis stays quiet.
“We go meet Dyren,” Riksher says, trying to put on a rational face, the face of a leader. But he’s done nothing but sulk since we were reunited, and I don’t buy his authority, not anymore. “It’s the only option. We’ve wasted all this time.” He stops to level a clear glare at me. “We go to Dyren and tell him what’s happened, and we work together to figure out a plan. Some new way to destroy the tech.”
Yarlin’s eyebrows shoot up. “Destroy the tech? Why would you do that?”
“What did you think we were doing here?” Riksher snaps.
Yarlin replies coolly. “We assumed it had something to do with us, considering your reaction at the western spire.”
“Western spire?” Ennis asks. “What’s she talking about?”
“I don’t know,” he says through gritted teeth. “Nothing.”
“I’m talking about how you stumbled into a group of Rens and fled when they tried to talk,” she says. She turns to me. “I didn’t know this before. One of the foragers just told me.”
It takes me a moment to understand. Ennis gets there first.
“You knew there were people here?” he asks, his voice high and incredulous. “For how long?”
Riksher doesn’t answer, so Yarlin does. “This was early morning. Before the fires.”
“Shut up,” Riksher growls. I place myself between the two of them.
“You knew we’d be killing people. You knew,” Ennis repeats. Riksher starts to say something, but Ennis cuts him off. “They would have burned. You were going to sacrifice this entire tribe for a method we already know doesn’t work.”
That they know? What happened to them while I was on the plateau?
“We have to do something,” Riksher says. “Would you rather see this entire world turned to dust? We’d already wasted so much time burning metal on her word.”
“Don’t you try to blame Darga for this. All she wanted was to save her people, and she went out of her way to help us in the process. You? You’re willing to eradicate entire tribes for the supposed good of only those close to you. What a Chiral! I shouldn’t be surprised,” he says, shaking his head violently. He punches the air. “Of course this is what you are. This is what you did already, twenty years ago. None of this was ever necessary. You just want to be the hero to your own tiny community, the rest of the world be damned.”
“It’s not tiny,” he says. “And it returned freedom to all the tribes of Carnigai. It’s your community, too.”
“A community I was s
tolen into,” he says. “And I tried so hard to be one of you! Lions. Thought of myself as a Chiral. Am I a Chiral? Am I?” He turns to me. “Am I a Chiral?”
My anger at Riksher has bled into heartbreak for Ennis. Yarlin interrupts.
“We have to go. Now,” she says.
Riksher stands and holds out his hand to Ennis. “You are my brother. I don’t care what else you are. Come home with me, and we’ll figure this out together.”
“Not a chance,” Ennis says, backing away to align himself with Yarlin and I. “I’m done helping you. We’re going to Cirrin.” He looks at me. “Aren’t we?”
I nod. What choice do we have? Whatever Dyren wants with us, it can’t be good.
Riksher’s attitude changes once again, from pleading to vitriolic. “This is about her, isn’t it?” He jabs a finger in my direction. “You know Dyren will kill her. Let the girl go to Cirrin,” he says. “No skin off our backs. She doesn’t care for you, Ennis, can’t you see that?”
“This isn’t about Darga.”
“Like hell it isn’t! You’ve been a fucking puppy dog from day one. I get it, Ennis. You’re young, she’s pretty.”
“This is not you at all,” Ennis says, shaking his head. “Stop.”
“What? You think I’m wrong? Darga,” he says, swaggering forward until he’s right up in my face, “how do you feel about my little brother?”
Riksher’s invaded my space and clearly wants me to step back, but I won’t give ground. “He’s my friend,” I say, unable to keep the waver out of my voice. I look up at him with what I hope is steely-eyed certainty. This is the choice I’ve made and nothing you say about me will change that.
Ennis rams his shoulder into Riksher, knocking him away from me. He stands between us and crouches slightly, battle-ready.
“Don’t fight,” I plead, but neither hears me. Riksher rushes Ennis and tries to grab him. If Riksher had meant Ennis harm, there would have been no avoiding it. Ennis sidesteps and directs Riksher off to the left, just as I’ve shown him. I feel a jolt of pride.
