Page 66 of Cage of Starlight
Where are the Fielders with their forcefield dome to protect everyone? Where are the cocky Kinetics to lob projectiles at the enemy?
Someone stumbles into view, fog-dimmed and ghostly. Randall.
A shaky smile splits his freckled face. “Hey there!”
The moment of distraction nearly kills them both. Tory barely deflects a crushing wave of Seed energy before it barrels into them. “Pay attention!”
Randall laughs, half-hysterical.
Explosions swirl the fog, swallowing great gulps of it in rushes of flame. Screams pierce the air. There’s no energy to the fog, nothing Tory can wrap his mind around andmove. Every man trapped in it dies alone. Tory didn’t train for this.
A few brave Healers duck low over the ground to reach the wounded just like in training—except none of this is like it was in training. A breath of peace, then—
Randall’s voice, from his left, high with terror. “Niela? Niela, run!”
An explosion rocks the ground, spraying Tory again with dirt and stone.
It’s wet. Tory swipes three fingers over his face and pulls them away. In the eerie, flat fog-light, the blood that turns earth to mud is impossibly red.
He steps on Randall before he notices him. He’s strewn across the ground, chest a mess of broken flesh. His eyelids flicker, red-slick mouth gaping wide.
The fog rushes away as the Fieldersfinallyestablish a barrier (weakened; one of the attacks must have thinned their numbers), but it’s too late. They worked like a machine in maneuvers, CFRs dropping projectiles while the Fielders established their barrier in record time, every time. They were soconfidenton a field where a balloon to the chest meant a bruise and Randall smiled on his way to the infirmary every day.
“Randall?” Niela’s cry from beyond the wall of fog is wrenching.
Tory’s breath clogs in his throat. He falls to hands and knees as the sword corps rush to the front to take their positions and the CFR Seeds retreat to do their work at the periphery. Now that the shields are up, the rest of the Healers scramble in to whisk away the injured, heal them, and return them to the fight.
Niela finds them then.
Randall’s name tears from her throat as she stumbles to her knees. She doesn’t spare Tory a glance, pressing her hands to the meaty mess of her boyfriend’s chest, and Tory staggers back. Niela curses through her teeth. Randall’s unblinking eyes stay fixed on the sky.
“No.Damnit, Randall,no,”Niela is saying, and she leans down to give him breath, but the air just bubbles from his lacerated lungs.
Tory coughs on an exhale but manages to keep from gagging. When he looks up, the fog is thin enough to reveal a group of Fielders and fighters lobbing attacks at nothing, their practiced formation in tatters.
In his peripheral vision, there’s Niela, hazy in the fog and soaked yet again with someone else’s blood, giving herself away for a corpse.She grabs Randall’s face, squeezing at his chin like he might move his lax, wide-open mouth for her.
Tory screams for her to run, or maybe he just thinks it. She’s an idiot. He’s gone already. Tory will be, too, if he doesn’t focus. He’s standing here stock-still and covered in mud and Randall’s blood, making a target of himself.
He tears his eyes from them and turns. Arlunian soldiers in loose shirts saunter from the tree line in pairs. Tory understands, now, why they wear no armor. They don’t need it.
A small splinter group. No more than ten, the report asserted.
There are ten at the front of the line and more behind them than he can count. Seeds, all of them. Tory has learned, with practice, to pick out the faint, electric presence of Seed energy. There’s nothing faint about these, each one a lightning storm. Their attacks rock the forcefield, splintering it with glowing cracks the trembling Fielders hurry to seal. They won’t survive this for long.
He’ll die here. They’ll all die.
Either he’s shaking or the earth is. Tory reaches for the next wave of attacks—massive, overwhelming—and peels off the Seed energy and kinetic energy before they can hit the shields.
He gives the entire unit a moment’s reprieve. They regroup, but the CFR unit is still hindered by the fog, and Tory won’t be able to deflect all the attacks forever without the support of his unit. He diverts everything he can, but he’s only one pair of hands, and carrying the buzzing energy of hundreds—thousands—of projectiles is like lifting a boulder twice his size. Sweat stings his eyes. His vision swims.
The weakened forcefield bursts when he fails to fully deflect the next volley of attacks. The unit scatters. Tory ducks and runs zig-zag, weaving in and out of smoke.
This isn’t how he wants to go. Not like this. Not today. He barely knows himself, is only now learning to speak the words he used to swallow. Their own weapons fly back at them, amplified. Seed-enhanced explosives carve craters in the earth.
Tory swallows hard as the trembling under his feet increases.
The earth really is shaking.
