Sing Down the Stars (The Celestine Series Book 1)

by L. J. Hatton

  How could someone who sounded so genuinely friendly have a job like this?

  “What’s that?” C. B. asked; he pulled something from the dog’s teeth.

  A piece of trim and torn leather from my coat, and it definitely didn’t look like anything that belonged on a rabbit.

  Baxter whined again and stretched his paw out as best he could. C. B. moved forward, still on his knees, and I leaned back, pressed into the wall.

  Fall, I chanted to the stars. Catch his attention. Fall.

  All I needed was something bright enough to make him turn around and lose interest in rabbits hiding in the garden hedge.

  Fall—please.

  I was too tired for this. The coat had packed extra hours into the space of what should have been a single day, and after the vestibule burnout, even adrenaline had its limits.

  C. B. reached into the trench, groping blindly. My right hand tightened on the rock. Smashing a man in the head wouldn’t be as easy as beaning a dog, but if I had to, I had to.

  He grabbed my left hand, and I felt surprise shake through his arm. C. B. shifted position so that we were looking each other straight in the face. It took a minute, but he recognized me. I thought he was going to call me out, but someone called him, first.

  “Problem?”

  This voice was older, more authoritative.

  C. B.’s fingers flexed with a startled jolt, and he pulled away, mouthing keep quiet as he climbed quickly to his feet. Baxter took his place.

  “No problem, sir,” C. B. said. He dropped the piece of torn trim into the dirt and covered it with his heel, pretending to stumble back when he gave Baxter some extra leash.

  “Your dog seems to disagree.”

  No, his dog seemed to want to tear my arm off for proof that I was under the hedge. And thanks to my coffee buddy, I was now leaning on the arm I needed to throw my rock.

  “Shoo,” I ordered in the loudest volume I dared.

  “Rabbit, sir, but it’s gone now. I checked.”

  C. B. tugged on the leash, but Baxter wasn’t ready to give up.

  I tried blowing in the dog’s face, but that was about as effective as it sounds.

  “Move, you stupid mutt. Move!”

  Awkwardly, I swung my forearm down toward Baxter’s face. C. B. pulled hard at the same time, so that I missed the dog and hit the ground.

  Loose dirt and gravel sprayed right into Baxter’s nose. He ran and hid behind his master’s legs. “Sir” moved toward the hedge, tapping the dirt at the mouth of Baxter’s trench with his toe.

  “Fill this in before Admin sees it, or you’ll be filling in landscaping reports instead,” he said, and walked away.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll do it right now, sir,” C. B. stammered. “Come on, you.” He tugged Baxter away with him. “Now I’ve got to leave my post, and repair the damage you did to the flower bed. Didn’t think about that when you were chasing rabbits, did you? Didn’t think of me, or how the yard will be empty all the way to the fence. If someone escapes, it’s your fault, too. You’re just lucky I . . .”

  His rant kept going until he was too far away for me to hear, but he’d made his message clear enough. If I could get to the fence, I could escape. He was the only one on ground patrol.

  I crawled out of Baxter’s trench and took a look around. The stars were twinkling to my pulse again.

  The building was much as I remembered it, made mostly of rock and occupying a wide yard. In the distance was the glowing haze of a city skyline, but here there were metal fences on wooden posts—the kind that belonged around prisons. It looked like a farm, but my long-ago fears told me there was more to this place than I could see.

  No!

  I needed to calm my mind enough that I could control my next landing, or else some stray thought was going to carry me off to places that should only exist in ghost stories.

  Everything has boundaries, Penn, my father had taught me. When things get too big for you, make them shrink.

  There was always something to anchor myself to, and I could find it, so long as I didn’t allow my fears to outgrow the rest of me.

  Steady the gale, and the wind can’t blow your thoughts into chaos. Still the maelstrom, and nothing can scatter your resolve. Confine the fire, or your fear will consume you. A boulder blocking your path is a pebble grown beyond its station; crush it under your heel.

  I seized on the scent of dirt that was still in my nose, and held tight, reaching into myself for the echo of a familiar voice and the steadying presence that came with it.

  Anise.

  Condensing my worry for everyone to a single thought of a single person was a step in the right direction. My legs grew strong on solid earth, unmovable as a mountain’s shadow. My self-control grew roots, leaving me unshakable. Even when we were separated, Anise was my grounding wire.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, and set off to find my escape.

  CHAPTER 18

  A chime sounded, announcing the hour as two in the morning, only there was no indication of which morning. Were Jermay and the others already at the Hollow?

  At present, the coat seemed to be taking a rest, so I’d have to wait to find out. Wait and not panic, in the middle of the sort of Commission facility my father swore existed only as a fable, where the stones of the building cried out from the pain they had witnessed. The lights flickered bright and dim in their own language, meant to impart what had happened unseen by the outside world.

  The dread of that fear spawned embers in the grass around my feet. I stamped them out, and a jutting rock popped out of the ground in response. It caught my boot and snarled my next step. I was beginning to think I’d be better off if I just stayed on the ground so I couldn’t fall.

  “How did you escape?” a voice whispered.

  I raised myself up on hands and knees until I was eye level with a low, barred window with the glass broken out.

  “Who’s there?” I leaned closer.

  A pair of hands latched on to the bars. They were caked with blood; a boy’s face appeared between them, strained from holding himself up to see out the window. He couldn’t have been thirteen.

  “Take me with you,” he begged.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Wren. I’ve been here for days, but I don’t know why. I didn’t do anything wrong, I swear.”

  Wren. Another lost birdie. If that wasn’t Providence, nothing was.

  “They keep taking people from our room, but no one comes back. I want to go home.”

  I wondered if he was once a hungry runaway who accepted an offer of a meal from someone like C. B. or Rye. What did the Commission want with mundanes off the street? Boys, at that.

  “Please, help me.”

  My better sense said I had no loyalty to a stranger in a hole in the ground; springing Wren would lower my chances of a successful run at the fence, but half my Show-family wouldn’t exist if my father hadn’t taken a few extra risks for them.

  I told my better sense to go hang itself.

  “Step away from the bars,” I warned him.

  This wasn’t likely to be pretty—or precise. Calling down fire by accident in the middle of an onslaught was one thing, but I’d never aimed before. This was cracking walnuts with boulders.

  I used Anise’s voice to remind me that our gifts weren’t all that different. She dredged rocks out of the dirt; I pulled them from the sky. A rock was a rock, and what could be more common than that?

  Common is good. Common is effortless. Common is possible.

  “Common,” I whispered. “Not special. Not difficult. Common as dirt. Common as rocks.”

  “What are you doing?” Wren asked. He was shouting, but his voice barely breached the rumble in my ears.

  “Stay away from the wall!”

  Power passed through my body,
feet to hands and back around, until the only thing I felt was trembling.

  “Help me up,” Wren called out of the dungeon. “I can’t reach.”

  Alarms were going off. People were screaming. Lights swept the yard from all directions. Every indication said the sky was falling . . . Only, it wasn’t. I hadn’t sung down the stars, but thoughts of Anise had brought me an earthquake.

  At the building’s base, a fissure split the ground beside my boots, dislodging the bars so they fell inside, leaving the window open. People were fleeing side buildings as the foundations rumbled; they stumbled over fresh cracks and piles of rock that burst from under their feet. One of the guard towers shook to pieces.

  I leaned into the hole. Wren jumped, and together we struggled back out.

  We’d just cleared the window when someone else appeared at the sill, hoisting himself into the night.

  “Out of the way,” he ordered gruffly, as he turned and pulled someone up behind him. The next person brought someone else. On and on until there were at least thirty—all male.

  Another alarm sounded, and this time, when the remaining tower lights moved, they all converged on our window and the people clambering out of it.

  “It’s him,” Wren said, terrified and staring at something behind me. “The warden.”

  I turned and saw a man descending the stairs of the main building. His features were impossible to see with the light behind him, but I could tell he wasn’t the same warden I’d seen before. This one stood shorter, and broader. His clothes cut sharp angles at his shoulders and waist. He was a gargoyle, but not my monster.

  “Don’t let him catch you,” Wren insisted. He sounded suddenly younger.

  “Did he hurt you?” I asked.

  “Just run!”

  Wren took off for the fence with everyone else, but the warden didn’t go ten steps beyond his building. He raised a radio to his mouth.

  “Secure the source and relocate it to diagnostics,” he said. There was no emotion in his voice, not even a change in volume or pitch, but the words were as clear as if they’d been written in the sky. He thought one of the prisoners caused the quake. He still didn’t realize their breakout had begun with a break-in.

  A melee started at the fence. The first few escapees had reached the wires, but found them running with enough electricity to kill. Some were thrown back, smoking and twitching. Others turned on the guards who had been dispatched to bring them back into the prison. It was either fight or surrender, and that was no real choice at all.

  Fall, fall, fall . . .

  I was pleading with the stars to strike. If I’d known what to call out, I would have begged for another quake on top of it—anything to crack the fence so that we could run through.

  Anise could have done it. She’d have plowed the fence posts under with a stray thought and a snap of her fingers. I took a deep breath, and prayed she’d lend me her tenacity.

  “Turn out the hounds,” the warden ordered, and still he didn’t move.

  Another alarm came, backed by the buzzing of an electric lock. Five people emerged, all female and all wearing tight, one-piece uniforms that made them look like something out of a comic book. Stray light glinted off bands of glass and metal at their wrists, ankles, and throats.

  “Clean this up,” the warden shouted at them.

  A couple of the women frowned or tried to dig their heels in, but disobedience didn’t last long once the bands activated. One twitched in the aftermath of shocks worse than what the fence doled out, lurching forward against her will. Tiny fires formed and died on her fingertips as she fought for control of herself and her ability, but she was forced into the fight.

  “Fall!” I shouted to the sky. The warden expected this to be easy, but I’d bring the sky down on his head, moon and all. “Fall!”

  I stomped my foot. If it took a tantrum to make this work, I’d put a toddler to shame.

  Pale streaks came into view between the stars as tremors returned to the ground. A mound of sand and stone formed at my feet. The mound became a wave rushing toward the yard’s boundary, growing larger in the shape of a sailfish breaking the surface of the earth. By the time it reached the fence, it was taller than the posts and rolled right over the top of them, leaving us a hill of dirt for a ladder.

  “There!” the warden called. “Contain the aberration!”

  The idiot thought I was one of his boys.

  “You’re a hound!” Wren stammered when I met him on the run.

  That word and everything it represented crawled under my skin and burrowed in. It pressed all the buttons on my temper at once, and in so doing, it unlocked something.

  “No I’m not.”

  “But you’re . . . you’re . . .”

  “I’m getting us out of here.”

  The feeling of that connecting string returned, accompanied by what I could only think of as music. Notes, clear and pure, trilled along the line, growing louder and more intense. They piled on top of one another in a furious rhythm.

  Penn stepped aside, and the Celestine Penelope came roaring into existence.

  An aerokinetic hound left the ground, headed for me. This time, I didn’t pull back or beg the stars to keep their place. I wanted them to come. A flaming stone slammed her straight back to earth. The final piece of my control clicked, and I painted the sky black with rage, streaking fire down in bursts to rip the night wide.

  Life and death sat perched in my palm, a bird awaiting its cue to fly. All I had to do was give the word. One breath. It was too easy to give myself over to the power surge. This would not end like the fight for the train. I would not lose another soul. I wouldn’t lose at all.

  A hydrokinetic hound split the ground with a geyser. A twitch of my wrist, and I filled it in again, altering the angle of the water so it hit the hound, whose skin glowed blue. Impossible or not, my sisters’ gifts were mine to use, and the Celestine refused to squander them.

  My father assumed that I wouldn’t be able to control my true nature if I set it free, but I was stronger like this. Trails of burning rock cut the sky to ribbons. Vehicles exploded as every falling star hit its mark with deadly precision. The building we had just cleared collapsed, ensuring it would never be used again.

  “Impossible,” Wren said, but that was a word losing meaning by the second.

  On the warden’s face I saw a hatred that matched the one I felt. Shattering falls of rock and fire drove a line straight toward him. He stepped sideways to miss a direct hit; once he was in motion, he broke into a full sprint.

  “Time to go,” I told Wren.

  I’d distracted the hounds long enough for most of the escapees to overrun the fence; it was our turn. The dirt wasn’t packed like a natural hill, so we dug in with our hands and feet. Unfortunately, those ahead of us were having the same problem, resulting in rivers of gravel and earth cascading down.

  “Don’t wait for me,” I told Wren when he looked back to see if I needed help. “Go on!” We were nearly to the top; the air should have been clearing, but I still couldn’t breathe. The heat of anger, which had fueled my attack, was replaced with the uncomfortable burn of another impending skip with my coat.

  There were no words for the strangeness that overtook me, other than to say energy replaced flesh. I had presence, but no substance. I blew apart, so that bits of myself detached and floated off, but the sensation didn’t last long enough to truly feel it. For that brilliant and terrible moment, I understood. Everything. I held out my tongue to taste the ashes like they were winter’s first snow.

  Time slowed down. I was buzzing. Electricity danced like the blazes from our Faraday cage, leaping with a snap of blue fire. It spiraled down my arms and wove itself around my wrists. It lashed out at the warden and his men, bursting dirt and gravel into the air and robbing them of their handholds, lilting with the laughter of a
mischievous child.

  Each snapping, fiery tendril bridged a connection between me and the yard’s fence. If I pushed against them, they pulled, leaving me to float in a state of equilibrium.

  Words like conduit and capacitor swirled through my head, coaxing out memories of sitting on my father’s workstation as a child.

  “Careful. Don’t touch,” he had warned when I tried to stick my finger into live current. But was he protecting me from the shock, or the reality that it wouldn’t have hurt me?

  I thrust my stinging palms into the dirt and released the current I had absorbed, to do as it pleased. The ground boiled, belching gravel into the night as it disintegrated from under the warden and his guards. And then I was falling, too.

  I closed my eyes, tilted backward when I felt the coat activate, and welcomed oblivion when it came.

  CHAPTER 19

  I was no longer falling, but the darkness never left me. I didn’t have the strength to open my eyes.

  The coat had shrunk to the point that I could have worn it for skin, burning so hot I thought it was trying to remove the flesh that was actually mine. I’d pushed too hard, channeled too much energy through a body not meant to handle it. Every bone felt brittle and every muscle sprained; my blood had dried in my veins, leaving me a husk.

  I could believe this was death. I could even believe it was better than being taken alive, but my ears told me I’d not made it through whatever mystic slip the coat could open and close at will.

  “Stop her!” several someones chanted, ominously.

  They were the same voices I’d heard behind me on the hill, but louder.

  Band by agonizing band, the coat released, breaking loose like an overtight spring. Explosions of pain painted the back of my eyelids with stars that didn’t exist.

  “Bring her down!”