Page 131 of Cage of Starlight
Sweat breaks out on Tory’s forehead, and Sena gives himself permission to lean into him. Just for now. If Tory asks, Sena will say it’s because he thought Tory might fall over.
The crystal continues to glow, searingly bright. Sena hears little pings. Cracks.
Tory is overloading the stellite, but all the compasses have already shifted pure blue, overwritten. They can never be used to track another Seed again. Everyone here is now free, even if they don’t know it.
The crystal continues to ping and pop, even when Tory lets go.
Sena has seen this, too. The first time they tried to make the Compound’s Seeds use the stolen Legion units, they tried a method like this one. The results were devastating, though Helner contended they were alsoeducational. They did, after all, allow her to coin the termstellite backlash injury.
“It’s going to explode,” he tells Tory. “That’s what happens when you feed too much energy into stellite in a short period of time. If you’re not far enough away, your energy suitably shielded, it will kill you.”
“Riese mentioned that.” Tory grabs Sena’s elbow and pulls him out the door, into the dim and graying hallway, its sick lighting sinking ever closer to perfect dark.
Sena scowls. And how, exactly, did Riese expect Tory to defend himself against it, with no Sena around to neutralize Tory’s energies and prevent the backlash from reaching him? He would have had to putsignificantdistance between himself and the crystal to avoid the backlash on his own.Reckless.
Sena has not often considered himself capable of harming another person with malicious intent, but the urge swells in him.
“I would like to hurt him,” he tells Tory.
Tory laughs when Sena is the one to pushhimto go faster, and he yelps and scurries ahead when the blast in the Monitor Room flings the heavy metal door against the opposite wall and spits smoke and rubble into the corridor. Dust whooshes past Tory and Sena, blurring the air.
The dim, dying energy from the inset lighting fades out, and scarlet light picks up in panels along the floor. It makes a womb of the smoky hallways, the light pulsing like a heartbeat.
“Emergency power,” Sena says, and points them toward the nearest exit.
Soon, they come upon a group of Seeds, dragging an injured friend with them. Tory turns to Sena. Sena nods.
“Hey!” Tory gestures at the group. “We’re getting out of here! This guy knows the way.”
Their eyes shift to him, and Sena shrinks back.
“You know the way, too,” he mutters at Tory. But everyone’slooking at him, so he draws himself up. “We’ll aim for the typing and registration labs. If the outer walls have been breached anywhere, it’s probably there, and the lab is far enough from the main entrance that we’re marginally less likely to encounter resistance.”
The group huddles together. As they walk, the fizzy drone of sirens grows closer.
“As soon as we get out, run,” Sena says. “As far as you can.”
They come upon a group of three, then a staggering crowd of maybe twenty. They fold in together, Tory at the head. Sena takes up the rear, guiding the injured ones along.
The larger the group gets, the more unwieldy it is, clogging the narrow halls. They dodge rubble where the ceiling has crumbled, baring open sky.
The smoke in the enclosed hallways grows thicker as they hurry toward Intake.
A door they pass hangs on its track, inner walls blackened. In another room, obscured by rubble from a fallen wall, is a shock of white hair too much like Lieutenant-Colonel Menden’s.
“Don’t look,” Sena whispers to the Seeds beside him.
It gets worse as they walk on. Flames lick from doorways. Soot blackens the walls.
The young man bringing up the rear, shirt pressed over his mouth and cheeks wet with tears, mutters, “What’s going on what’s goingon—” in a hollow litany; it cuts off in a choked scream.
The boy staggers. Sena can hardly bear his own weight, but he grabs the boy by the arm and looks for injury.
He finds the source of the boy’s pain quickly enough. A dart. He rips it out, and the last of the pressurized fluid inside the syringe empties onto the ground. But what went into the boy was more than enough. On the side, printed in neat black letters, the dart reads N001.
Null. And Sena is the only one here who can’t be affected by it.
“Tory!” He pushes the screaming boy into the safety of the crowd and spreads his arms to take up as much space at the back of the group as he can. The whole seething, nervous crowd separates Sena from Tory.
