Page 68 of Cage of Starlight
Part Three:
Fall
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The fall isa short one, the landing merciless. Sena plummets into icy water nearly cold enough to stop his heart.
It’s sheer luck that he doesn’t inhale. He tightens his arms around Tory, kicking his feet, but Tory’s dead weight drives them deep into the churning water.
Sena surfaces to the taste of brine and the smell of smoke. Above him, fog rolls over the sharp black cliffs, illuminated by intermittent rushes of fire or the bright blare of an explosion. The noise of it grates on his ears, but it’s not the worst sound: it means there are people still alive to fight.
Tory is an anvil in his arms and they’re a long way from anything resembling shoreline. A wave lashes against Sena and nearly buries him in water again, but just before it hits, he catches sight of a sad stretch of sand shaded by the cliffs. He’s too dizzied by the fall to know whether it’s on the Arlunian or Westrian side of the border, but it hardly matters. They will be far more dead, far more quickly, if Sena doesn’t swim.
His muscles still ache from yesterday’s—from yesterday, but they serve him well enough to bring them both to shore. By the time he gets to the shallows, the prospect of dragging Tory across wet sand is unappealing enough that he seriously considers letting the oceantake him. He’s not even sure he has the will to draghimselfacross wet sand right now. Briefly, he entertains the thought of lying face-down and drowning in a knuckle’s depth of frothy water.
But while Sena is many, many things, he’s not a quitter, so he drags Tory out of the surf and into the shade of the cliffs, taking only a tiny, truly conservative amount of joy from dragging Tory’s dead weight over two large, bumpy rocks.
When he finally drops him and checks his breathing (three sharp pumps to his chest make him groan and expel the water he swallowed) Sena flops down next to him. Beast have mercy on anyone who calls upon him to stand.
But his reprieve doesn’t last long. Now that he’s not imminently at risk of death, his body begins to process its own aches, and a pain in his chest—a sharp, stabbing thing that glows white-hot with every breath—makes itself known.
Sena shouldn’t be surprised. The landing wasn’t kind, and Tory has very sharp elbows. Sena muses, with a careful press to his ribs that makes him grit his teeth, that he may have broken something.
It won’t be a problem. Sena will not allow it to be.
Sheer stubbornness brings him to a sitting position, where he takes stock of himself. He’s soaked, naturally. The rations in his pockets are still secure, but the communicator clipped to his pocket must have gotten lost in the fall—not that its delicate components would have liked the water even if it remained on him. Aside from the communicator, his belongings are intact.
By the time Sena finishes cataloging everything, Tory is groaning awake. He rolls onto his side, coughing more water onto the sand.
His voice is gravelly when he speaks. “What happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
Tory rasps a laugh. “I remember . . . being about to throw that explosion, then you pulled us over the cliff.”
Sena lets the silence stretch long enough to grow a personality. He grits out, “The fall must have addled your brain.”
“By all means, tell me what really went down.”
“Youbotched throwing the explosion and were about to be tossed over the cliff. I foolishly tried to warn you and, failing that, tried to keep you from falling. And here we are.”
“You have a terrible memory,” Tory mutters. “We’d be ground meat if I hadn’t thrown it as far as I did.” Which is accurate enough. Tory sits up with what appears to be monumental effort. “Did you send out a distress call?”
Sena waves a hand over his empty pocket. “Lost it in the fall. Not that it matters. Anyone in range is likely dead.”
“Mm, love that optimism.” Tory shivers for a while before he startles, looking up at the cliffs. “It’s over?”
It is. No more smoke or flashes.
No more fighting, because there are no more fighters.
He makes himself stand. “On your feet. We need to move inland. We’re likely still in Westrice, but that just means any infiltrators who find us will be on high alert—more likely to kill than capture us.”
Tory lifts himself and brushes wet sand from his clothes. “Tired,” he says.
“Tired is better than dead. We need to put whatever daylight we have left to good use. Navigating around the rocks will waste time, but there’s no way we could scale them in our condition. Once we make it around, as long as we head northeast and don’t get killed, we’ll find the road to the Compound before long.”
They start off, traversing the rock-strewn sand.
