Page 129 of Cage of Starlight
The sound comes first—a rumble, then a deep and hollowcrack. Another follows it, then another. The world shakes, then there’s nothing and everything, and Sena is on the ground, vision fizzing.
His head is screaming. Something’s screaming, anyway.
Someone? A high whine. Rock dust and smoke clog his nose, and he doesn’t want to cough but he can’t stop. Smoke burns his eyes and something wet tracks down his face. Colors swirl above him, white and gray and green, green, green. Muted thuds all around.
Roots beneath him, digging into his back, and—
“Sena, move!”
Hands pull him beneath the branches of the tree. More thuds shake the ground.
The sky falls in great chunks.
He catches his breath, manages, “What . . .?”
Tory’s face is wet, too. Red. In his hair and down over his ear. Sena reaches up, gets it on his bare hand. Tory hisses, and Sena snaps back to himself. This, he understands. “You’re hurt.”
“That doesn’t matter!” Tory’s eyes dart beyond the tree, and Sena’s head is still screaming and all the colors are yelling, flaring bright and sharp enough to stab a man, but he squints and sees what Tory sees.
The wall around the garden lays in ruins, exposing the Compound’s innards. No longer is it lit in cold colors. Bursts of flame light the semi-darkness blue and gold. Smoke billows out, and the cracks race up and up and—
The dome over the garden has crumbled on the same side, netting hanging down and beams littering the ground. One, indeed, right where Sena was lying.
“What . . .?” he says again. Perhaps a better question: “Why?”
He can barely hear his own voice over the screaming. His awareness trickles back slowly.Notscreaming—the wail of alarms and a ringing in his ears.
“I don’t—” Tory shakes his head. “Oh.” His eyes shift to Sena, his lips bloodless white, and they’re all Sena can focus on as he says, “I did this. This is my fault.”
*
Tory did this.
He turns to the gaping wound in the wall in front of him, surrounded with spidering lines. “One in Intake.” Then to the cracks splitting the wall at the right rear end of the circular, enclosed garden. “One in . . . in residence quarters.” Finally, he turns to the third place that shows damage, a hole disgorging chunks of stone and twisted metal into the garden: the room that was numbered, not named. #004.
The damage sits in a neat triangle, and Tory knows it well. He spent the better part of an hour running around the Compound toplace those devices. “I did this.” Tory swallows. “I didn’t mean to. He said—”
Riese said they’d create adistraction. He never said what kind. Tory just assumed it would be benign.
“I was so stupid.”
“You didn’t know.” Sena moves Tory with a hand at his back. “Come on. Let’s go.”
A wrenching snap at the rear makes his point for him. Cracks spread up the wall. Another corner of the dome crumbles, dropping metal beams into the erstwhile flowerbed overrun with vines. More chunks of the wall collapse to fill the hole, and the area sags. Sena drags at the door in its warped frame, pulling it until there’s a gap large enough to escape through.
Sena tips his chin toward the gutted remains of the room formerly labeled #004. “Central power. If the blast destroyed the stellite core that powers the facility and centralizes its security, the existing arrays will only have what little energy they currently hold—or whatever’s in the much smaller backup core, if it survived.” He pales. “We have to hurry. We need to get to the Monitor Room before the switch.”
“Why?” Tory pushes through the door and into the hallway. Sena follows, but he, like Tory, caught some shrapnel, and his face is wet with blood.
“Because if it switches to backup, the tabs will no longer work, and we’ll be locked out. Faster.” He says it as much to himself as to Tory. “My presence won’t go unnoticed for long. If the colonel—”
The lights dim to sickly gray as they half-run through the halls. A rumble punctures the tense silence, shuddering up through the soles of their feet. Sena staggers.
Part of the building must have collapsed.
It’s not a good time for it—not a good time for anything, but Tory can’t get those stark blue-black lines up Sena’s neck out of his head. He saw those vein-like roots just yesterday on a platter in front of him, except his were a deep red. Sena’s pallor, the way he crumpled when Tory touched his shoulder—it tells a story Tory doesn’t want to contemplate. “Your Core.”
Sena squeezes his eyes closed. “Tory, please . . .”
