The beach isn’t hard to get to. After all, this is an island. And while the main base is well developed, the rest of Tuck is empty, covered only in dunes, hills swathed in tall grass, and a few pockets of ancient trees. There aren’t even paths through the grass, with no animals large enough to make them. We disappear nicely, winding through the swaying plants until we reach the beach. The dock stands a few hundred yards away, a wide knife jutting out into the waves. From this distance, the patrolling Lakelanders are only smudges of dark blue pacing back and forth. Most focus on the cargo ship approaching from the far side of the dock. My jaw drops at the sight of such a large vessel obviously controlled by Reds. Kilorn is more focused.
“Perfect cover,” he says, and starts to take off his shoes. I follow suit, kicking off my laceless boots and worn socks. But when he pulls his shirt over his head, exposing familiar, lean muscles shaped by hauling nets, I’m not so inclined to follow. I don’t fancy running around a secret bunker shirtless.
He folds his shirt over his shoes, fiddling a bit. “I take it this isn’t a rescue mission.” How could it be? There’s nowhere to go.
“I just need to see him. Tell him about Julian. Let him know what’s going on.”
Kilorn winces, but he nods all the same. “Get in, get out. Shouldn’t be too hard, especially since they won’t expect anything from the ocean side.”
He stretches back and forth, shaking out his feet and fingers to make ready for the swim. All the while, he goes over Farley’s whispered instructions. There’s a moon pool at the bottom of the bunker, opening up into a research lab. Once used to study marine life, now it serves as the Colonel’s own quarters, though he never visits them during the day. It’ll be locked from the inside, easy to open, and the corridors are simple to navigate. At this time of day, the bunks will be empty, the passage from the docks sealed, and very few guards will remain behind. Kilorn and I faced worse as children, when we stole a case of batteries for my dad from a Security outpost.
“Try not to splash,” Kilorn adds, before wading into the surf. Goose bumps rise on his skin, reacting to the cold autumn ocean, but he barely feels it. I certainly do, and by the time the water reaches my waist my teeth are chattering. With one last glance toward the dock, I dive below a wave, letting it chill me to the bone.
Kilorn cuts through the water effortlessly, swimming like a frog, making almost no noise at all. I try to mimic his movements, following close to his side as we swim farther out. Something about the water heightens my electrical sense, making it easier to feel the piping running out from the shore. I could trace it with a hand if I wanted, noting the path of electricity from the docks, through the water, and into Barracks 1. Eventually Kilorn turns toward it, angling us on a diagonal to the shore, and then parallel. His advance is masterful, with the stolen boats at anchor to hide our approach. Once or twice he touches my arm beneath the waves, communicating with a slight pressure. Stop, go, slow, fast, all of it while he stays fixed on the dock ahead. Luckily, the freighter ship is unloading, drawing the attention of any soldiers who might spot our heads bobbing through the water. More crates, all white, stamped with the green triangle. More clothes?
No, I realize as a crate topples, cracking open. Guns spill across the dock. Rifles, pistols, ammunition, probably a dozen in one crate alone. They gleam in the sunlight, newly made. Another gift for the Scarlet Guard, another twist of even deeper roots I never knew existed.
The knowledge makes me swim faster, pushing me past Kilorn even when my muscles ache. I duck under the dock, safe at last from any eyes above, and he follows, keeping pace just behind me.
“It’s right below us.” His whispers echo oddly, reverberating off the metal dock above and the water all around. “I can just feel it with my toes.”
I almost laugh at the sight of Kilorn stretching, his brow set in concentration as he tries to brush a foot against the hidden bunker of Barracks 1. “Something funny?” he grumbles.
“You’re so useful,” I reply with a mischievous smirk. It feels good to be with him like this, sharing a secret goal again. Although this time we’re breaking into a military bunker, not someone’s half-locked house.
“Here,” he finally says, before his head disappears below the water. He bobs back up again, arms wide to keep himself afloat. “The edge.”
Now comes the hard part. The plunge through suffocating, drowning darkness.
Kilorn reads the fear on my face plainly. “Just hold on to my leg, that’s all you have to do.”
I can barely nod. “Right.” The moon pool is on the bottom of the bunker, only twenty-five feet down. “It’s nothing at all,” Farley had said. Well, it certainly looks like something, I think, peering at the black water below me. “Kilorn, Maven will be so disappointed if the ocean kills me before he can.”
To anyone else, the joke would be in poor taste. But Kilorn chuckles lowly, his grin bright against the water. “Well, as much as I’d like to annoy the king,” he sighs, “let’s try and avoid drowning, shall we?”
With a wink, he dives, end over end, and I grab hold.
The salt stings my eyes, but it’s not so dark as I thought it would be. Sunlight angles through the water, breaking up the shadow cast by the dock above. And Kilorn moves us quickly, pulling us down along the side of the barracks. The water-bent sunlight dapples his bare back, spotting him like a sea creature. I focus mainly on kicking when I can and not getting caught on anything. This is not twenty-five feet, my mind grumbles when the twinge of oxygen deprivation sets in.
I exhale slowly, letting the bubbles rise past my face, up to the surface. Kilorn’s own breath streams past, the only testament to his strain. When he finds the bottom edge, I feel his muscles tense, and his legs kick along, powering us both beneath the hidden bunker. Dimly, I wonder if the moon pool has a door, and if it’ll be closed. What a joke that would be.
Before I know what’s happening, Kilorn bursts up and through something, hauling me with him. Stuffy but blissful air hits my face and I gulp it down in deep, greedy gasps.
Already sitting on the edge of the pool, his legs dangling in the water, Kilorn grins at me. “You wouldn’t last a morning unknotting nets,” he says with a shake of the head. “That was barely a bath compared to what Old Cully used to make me do.”
“You really know how to cut me deep,” I reply dryly, hoisting myself up and into the Colonel’s chambers.
The compartment is cold, lit by low lights, and offensively well organized. Old equipment is pushed neatly against the right wall, gathering dust, while a desk runs the length of the left. Stacks of files and papers crowd the surface in neat rows, dominating the space. At first I don’t even see a bed, but it’s there, a narrow bunk that rolls out from beneath the desk. Clearly the Colonel doesn’t sleep much.
Kilorn was always a slave to his curiosity, and now is no different. He drips his way over to the desk, ready to explore.
“Don’t touch anything,” I hiss at him while I wring out my sleeves and pant legs. “Get one drop on those papers and he’ll know someone was in here.”
He nods, pulling his hand back. “You should see this,” he says, his tone sharp.
I step to his side in an instant, fearing the worst. “What?”
Careful, he points a finger at the only thing decorating the walls of the compartment. A photograph, warped by age and damp, but the faces are still visible. Four figures, all blond, posing with stern but open expressions. The Colonel is there, barely recognizable without his bloody eye, one arm around a tall, well-boned woman, and his hand on a young girl’s shoulder. Both the woman and the girl wear dirt-stained clothes, farmers by the look of it, but the gold chains at their necks say differently. Silently, I remove the gold chain from my pocket, comparing the metal so fine it could be thread to the necklaces in the picture. But for the mismatched key dangling from the end, they are identical. Gently, Kilorn takes the key from my hand, puzzling over what it could mean.
The third figu
re explains it all. A teenager with a long, golden braid, she stands shoulder to shoulder with the Colonel and wears a smirk of satisfaction. She looks so young, so different without her short hair and scars. Farley.
“She’s his daughter,” Kilorn says aloud, too shocked for much else.
I resist the urge to touch the photograph, to make sure it’s real. The way he treated her back in the infirmary, it can’t possibly be true. But he called her Diana. He knew her real name. And they had the necklaces, one from a sister, one from a wife.
“C’mon,” I murmur, pulling him away from the picture. “It’s nothing to bother with now.”
“Why didn’t she say anything?” In his voice, I hear a little bit of the betrayal I’ve felt for days.
“I don’t know.”
I keep hold of him, moving us both toward the compartment door. Left down the stairs, right at the landing, left again.
The door swings open on oiled hinges, revealing an empty passage quite like the ones on the mersive. Sparse and clean, with metal walls and piping above us. Electricity bleeds overhead, pumping through a wired network of veins. It’s coming from the shore, feeding the lights and other machinery.
Like Farley said, there’s no one down here. No one to stop us. I suppose, as the Colonel’s daughter, she would know firsthand. Quiet as cats, we follow her instructions, mindful of every single step. I’m reminded of the cells beneath the Hall of the Sun, where Julian and I incapacitated a squadron of black-masked Sentinels to free Kilorn, Farley, and the doomed Walsh. It seems so far away, yet that was only days ago. A week. Just one week.
I shudder to think where I’ll be in seven more days.
At last we come to a shorter passage, a dead end with three doors on the left, three doors on the right, and just as many observation windows set in between. The glass of each is dark, but for the window on the end. It flickers slightly, casting harsh white light through the pane. A fist collides with the glass and I flinch, expecting it to crack beneath Cal’s knuckles. But the window holds firm, echoing dully with every boom boom of his fists, showing nothing more than smears of silver blood.
No doubt he hears me coming, and thinks I’m one of them.
When I step in front of the window, he freezes mid-motion, one clenched and bleeding fist poised to strike. His flame-maker bracelet slides down his thick wrist, still spinning from his momentum. That’s a comfort, at least. They didn’t know enough to take away his greatest weapon. But then why is he still imprisoned at all? Couldn’t he just melt the window and be done with it?
For a single, blazing moment, our eyes meet through the glass, and I think our combined stare might shatter it. Thick, silver blood drips from where he struck his hand, mixing with already-dried stains. He’s been at this for a while, beating himself bloody in an attempt to get out—or burn off a little bit of his rage.
“It’s locked,” he says, his voice muffled behind the glass.
“Couldn’t tell,” I reply, smirking.
Next to me, Kilorn holds up the key.
Cal starts, as if noticing Kilorn for the first time. He smiles, grateful, but Kilorn doesn’t return the gesture. He won’t even meet his eyes.
From somewhere down the hall, I hear shouting. Footsteps. They echo strangely in the bunker but grow closer with every heartbeat. Coming for us.
“They know we’re here,” Kilorn hisses, looking back. Quickly, he jams the key in the lock and turns it. It doesn’t budge and I throw my shoulder against the door, slamming into cold, unforgiving iron.
Kilorn forces the key again, twisting. This time I’m close enough to hear the mechanism click. The door swings inward as the first soldier rounds the corner, but my thoughts are only of Cal.
It seems princes make me blind.
The invisible curtain drops the moment Kilorn shoves me into the cell. It’s a familiar sensation but I can’t place it. I’ve felt it before, I know I have, but where? I don’t have time to wonder. Cal surges past me, a strangled yell erupting from his lips, his long arms outstretched. Not to me, or the window. To the door as it yanks shut.
The click of the lock echoes inside my skull, again and again and again.
“What?” I ask the heavy, stale air. But the only answer I need is Kilorn’s face, staring at me from the other side of the glass. The key hangs from one clenched fist, and his face curls into something between a scowl and a sob.
I’m sorry, he mouths, and the first Lakelander soldier appears through the window. More follow, flanking the Colonel. His satisfied smirk matches the one his daughter wore in the photograph, and I begin to understand what just happened. The Colonel even has the audacity to laugh.
Cal hurls himself at the door in vain, driving his shoulder against solid iron. He swears through the pain, cursing Kilorn, me, this place, himself. I barely hear him over Julian’s voice in my head.
Anyone can betray anyone.
Without thought, I call for the lightning. My sparks will free me and turn the Colonel’s laughter into screams.
But they don’t come. There’s nothing. Bleak nothing.
Like in the cells, like the arena.
“Silent Stone,” Cal says, leaning heavily against the door. He points with one bloody fist to back corners of the floor and ceiling. “They have Silent Stone.”
To make you weak. To make you like them.
Now it’s my turn to pound my fists against the window, punching at Kilorn’s head. But I hit glass, not flesh, and hear only the cracking of my own knuckles instead of his stupid skull. Despite the wall between us, he flinches.
He can barely look at me. He shivers when the Colonel puts one hand on his shoulder, whispering into his ear. Kilorn can only watch as I scream, an indecipherable roar of frustration, and my blood joins Cal’s on the glass.
Red running through silver, joining into something darker.
EIGHT
The legs of the metal chair scrape against the floor, the only sound in the square cell. I leave the other chair where it lies, upended and battered after being thrown against the wall. Cal did quite a number on the cell before I got here, hurling both chairs and a now dented table. There’s a single chink in the wall, just below the window, where the corner of the table hit home. But throwing furniture is no use to me. Instead of wasting my energy, I conserve it, and take a seat in the center of the room. Cal paces back and forth before the window, more animal than man. Every inch of him yearns for fire.
Kilorn is long gone, having left with his new friend the Colonel.
And I am revealed for exactly what I am—a particularly stupid fish, constantly moving from hook to hook, never learning my lesson. But next to the Hall of the Sun, Archeon, and the Bowl of Bones, this might as well be a vacation, and the Colonel is nothing compared to the queen or a line of executioners.
“You should sit,” I tell Cal, finally growing tired of his vengeful intensity. “Unless you plan on wearing your way through the floor?”
He scowls, annoyed, but stops moving all the same. Instead of pulling up a chair, he leans against the wall in a childish act of defiance. “I’m starting to think you like prisons,” he says, idly knocking his knuckles against the wall. “And that you have the worst taste in men.”
That stings more than I’d like it to. Yes, I cared for Maven, cared for him far more than I want to admit, and Kilorn is my closest friend. They are betrayers both.
“You’re not too good at choosing friends either,” I fire back, but it glances off him harmlessly. “And I don’t have”—the words jumble, coming out wrong and stilted—“any taste in men. This has nothing to do with that.”
“Nothing.” He chuckles, almost amused. “Who were the last two people to lock us in a cell?” When I don’t reply, shamed, he presses on. “Admit it, you’ve got a hard time keeping your heart and your head separated.”
I stand so fast the chair falls backward, clanging against the floor. “Don’t act like you didn’t love Maven. Like you didn’t let your hear
t make decisions where he was concerned.”
“He is my brother! Of course I was blind to him! Of course I didn’t think he would kill our—our father.” His voice breaks at the memory, letting me glimpse the ragged and broken child beneath the facade of a warrior. “I made mistakes because of him. And,” he adds quietly, “I made mistakes because of you.”
So did I. The worst was when I put my hand in his, letting him pull me from my bedroom, into a dance and a downward spiral. I let the Guard kill innocents for Cal, to keep him from going to war. To keep him close to me.
My selfishness had a horrible cost.
“We can’t do that anymore. Make mistakes for each other,” I whisper, skirting around what I really mean. What I’ve been trying to tell myself for days now. Cal is not a path I should choose or want. Cal is simply a weapon, something for me to use—or something for others to use against me. I must prepare for both.
After a long moment, he nods. I get the feeling he sees me in the same way.
The damp of the barracks sets in, joining the cold still deep in my bones. Normally I would shiver, but I’m getting used to this feeling. I suppose I should get used to being alone too.
Not in the world, but in here. In my heart.
Part of me wants to laugh at our predicament. Again, I am side by side with Cal in a cell, waiting for whatever fate has in store for us. But this time, my fear is tempered by anger. It won’t be Maven coming to gloat, but the Colonel, and for that I’m terribly thankful. Maven’s taunts are not ones I ever want to suffer again. Even the thought of him hurts.
The Bowl of Bones was dark, empty, a deeper prison than this. Maven stood out sharply, his skin pale, eyes bright, his hands reaching for mine. In the poisoned memory, they flicker between soft fingers and ragged claws. Both want to make me bleed.
I told you to hide your heart once. You should have listened.
They were his last words to me, before he sentenced us to execution. I wish it hadn’t been such good advice.
Slowly, I exhale, hoping to expel the memories with my breath. It doesn’t work.