Page 10 of Cage of Starlight
“We can do this peacefully,” a low voice calls—nearer than the rest, gaining on him.
Not if Tory has any say in it.
The dainty spatters shift from a hum to a roar, water falling in gray sheets. The cloak isn’t wrapped right and he can’t stop to fix it. Ice cold rain drips down his neck and into his shirt.
He reaches for the tree and swings up, palms slipping on bark that sloughs off into his hands as he hooks his feet over a low branch.Cries sound behind him. He grabs the sturdiest branch and throws himself over the wall.
He has time only for half a gasp and the adrenaline rush of horror when he loses his grip too soon. Both palms and one knee crash into wet leaves and grind into the rocks beneath. His jaw snaps shut on his tongue, but he has no time for pain. He stands and runs, mouth full of copper and heart clambering in his chest. The yelling behind the wall grows distant.
Tory pushes his aching body faster, trees blurring past, and maybe, maybe—
A thud. A smooth landing. Footsteps pick up behind him. “I don’t want to use force!”
Funny. Those are the last words he hears before something buries itself in his neck. His legs knock and lurch, fingers reaching to grab at whatever it is. A needle? Tory drops, rain choking him and tunneling his vision.
He can stand. He has to. This can’t be how he loses the freedom his mother died to give him. A desperate flight, a clumsy fall. No strength to fight—the only blood in his mouth his own. Tory hits the ground, head cradled between the roots of a felted oak. He blinks up at its wide branches. Its presence hums warmly against his mind, and he spares a moment to curse the thing, so smug and confident planted right where it is.
It’s so easy for trees, being rooted. They rarely have reason to run.
The comfort of the forest crumples to an echoing emptiness as footsteps scrunch the fallen leaves. Stars crackle across his vision, and he blinks to dispel them.
The soldier who took Tory down looms over him, his presence like electricity skittering over Tory’s skin. Weapon-studded belt, crispundercut, and that double-breasted navy uniform. Powder blue trim and silver buttons, like the soldiers who watched the weak and wounded die in the labor camps. Tory quivers, muscles tensing to attack.
He spits the blood in his mouth at one of those perfectly polished black boots.
The soldier sidesteps and kneels, offering Tory a close-up of the man he’ll kill one day. The guy’s downrightdelicate—unmarred skin and fine features, a fan of dark lashes over amber-brown eyes bruised with exhaustion. The black hair tumbling over his forehead, plastered to bone-pale skin with the rain, nearly obscures his left eye. He’d have been eaten alive in any city Tory survived.
He could almost be Arlunian. Laughter tears from Tory’s throat. Arlune. Tory wanted to run for it, but instead it ran for him, wrapped in prison colors. The vines that climb the trees dangle purple blooms down at Tory, just out of reach. His numb fingers twitch against the thing buried in his neck.
The asshole says, “You shouldn’t touch that.”
He touches it anyway, closes fumbling fingers around the thing and pulls. Pain, hot and sudden. A flood of warmth. His vision narrows, rimmed with crushing dark.
“Fool. It’sbarbed,” is the last thing he hears before blackness swallows him.
*
Unfamiliar noise—rhythmic clattering and a clanking like chains—tugs him from the fuzziness of drugged rest. Vertigo and darkness do their best to lull him back, but it doesn’t take long for the memories to resurface.
Icy rain, blood in his mouth, bruised amber-brown eyes.
Thatuniform.
Fear sharpens Tory’s vision. He wiggles his fingers, his toes. He’s unbound, on his back on some sort of bench, shoulder blades digging into wood. Shifting, grayish light sifts in from three tiny squares near the top of the wooden walls. An unlit lamp swings from a hook in the corner of the small, rectangular room, its walls so narrow they could close in and crush him. Too much like a holding cell, like the camps. It smells like them, too—unwashed bodies and something like hay.
Desperation drives Tory to his feet, where he staggers, vision shuttering and dizziness rocking him like the earth has liquefied. He finds his way to what he guesses is the door and throws his weight against it. No give.
He drops back on the bench, ears ringing. The sky-blue shackle of the tattoo around his upper left arm burns. He tugs up his sleeve to make sure they haven’t laid the red ring over the blue while he slept, but there’s only unblemished skin, no hot ache from a fresh needle.
“I won’t go back. Those bastards can throw me on the front lines instead. I—”
“You hardly have a choice,” a cold voice says, startlingly close.
A figure sits cloaked in the darkness beneath the swinging lamp.
Tory growls, “Don’t I?”
“You will not be going to the labor camp. The Grand General wouldn’t waste your skills at menial labor.” There’s a bitter note in it—some joke at Tory’s expense, no doubt—and Tory’s eyes narrow, because heknowsthat clipped and cultured tone. That chill, the condescension. It’shim. The pretty-boy bastard who sniped at him about the needle after shooting him in the neck.
