Page 130 of Cage of Starlight
“How?”
The halls grow hazy with smoke, and Tory coughs and squints.
“Helner,” Sena finally whispers, supporting himself with a hand along the wall. “The ‘antibiotics’ she gave me.”
“I’llkill her.” Helpless anger careens through him and leaves him shaking.
“It wasn’t her choice.”
Tory growls. “Riese, then. I’ll gag the bastard and gut him slow.”
Sena sighs. “Don’t worry about it.”
“What do you mean, don’t—” Tory closes his lips on the flood of words he wants to say, but some escape, anyway. “How did I get stuck doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Hoping there’s a way to fix this. You’re so fucking calm, and you’redying, and I can’t keep—” His conversation with Jeffra comes back and he breathes out an awful laugh, because he has his second chance, hisnext time, but he has no idea how anyone is supposed to do this better. He doesn’t know what to do because there’s nothing hecando but watch Sena leave again.
Sena reaches out, but his fingers close before reaching Tory. “You don’t have to,” he manages.
“Too fucking bad. I can’t help it.”
*
The Monitor Room waits for Sena like a sea of wide-open eyes.
The brittle, processed stellite that powers the facility leaks energy like a sieve. The compasses in the Monitor Room, though, each with a hook and a plaque with the locker number of its corresponding Seed, are powered by the energy of the Core-bearing Seeds. The crystals at the center of the tracking compasses for all the still-living Seeds glow brilliant white. For any who are farther away, the glow is dimmer and more orange-tinted, the compass needle fixed in the direction the holder must travel to find them. For the dead, the light is gone. Many lights are gone, after the explosions.
Sena seeks out his own slot at the far end of the room, below the plaque labeled #001. It’s empty.
Someone was here, looking for him.
The compass labeled #002 swings on its hook, like whoever took Sena’s compass was in a hurry and knocked its neighbor on the way past.
The compass swings like a pendulum, a cruel countdown.
The person who took it to hunt Sena must have left just before they arrived.
Perhaps it was taken for a mundane reason. Sena hasn’t had the opportunity to observe what the slow death of a Core inside its bearer does to the light on the compass, but it can’t be a pleasant thing. Perhaps they assumed him dead and took the compass to the labs for disassembly so the number could be assigned to the next Seed to come through STAR-7.
But when has he ever been so lucky?
The murmuring Seeds in the hallway and the soldier who hurried away double-time flicker through his mind. But none of them would have access to this room. Sena wouldn’t even have been able to get inside if Tory didn’t return his tab to him, sheepish, when they arrived at the door.
Sena’s knees knock when Tory’s hand lands on his shoulder, and he suppresses the childish urge to turn toward Tory and lean against him.
“That’s not good.”
Only officers have access to this room.
Kirlov, then. Sena’s muscles lock in anticipation of pain, and he forces them to slacken. He chose this, and he won’t let even Kirlov stop him from seeing it through.
Tory withdraws a crystal core from his pack. It’s several times larger than the delicate point hanging from Sena’s pendant, but it’s only half as pure.
Tory feeds energy into it until the crystal glows as blue as it did back when Tory touched the Legion. It’s lovely, Sena thinks. It’s a good color for Tory. The one time Sena fed his energy into stellite, before he startled and killed it, turning it a milky gray, the light it emitted was frightening red.
The compasses along the wall brighten, flicker—glowing for just a moment with Tory’s colors.
