Why was he taking me to see this? If we were caught, Percy wouldn’t be kind. Hell, Percy wasn’t going to be kind anyhow.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I have my reasons.”
“Which are?” I pushed. “Why are you willing to risk getting caught helping me?”
He didn’t answer right away. We both had to watch our feet. Rocks and old boards littered the ground, which was gridded with ore cart crossties and rails. Ragged stubs of rotting wood thrust out from the walls every so often. I kept expecting to see rats nosing along and bats hanging overhead. The tunnel shrank the farther we walked down it. I began to sweat. I balled my hands into fists and made myself count breaths—five in, five out. I had to duck when my head scraped stone, and I nearly screamed. My heart thundered in my chest.
I didn’t realize I’d stopped until Luke turned around and shined the light in my face. I squinted and looked away.
“What’s wrong?”
I didn’t speak. If I opened my mouth, the sounds that would have come out would only humiliate me. So I stood there, my entire body shaking. In the back of my head, I was praying I didn’t pee myself.
“Hey!” Luke snapped his fingers in front of me, and then he put his hands on my shoulders and gave me a little shake. “Snap out of it.”
Oh, good. I was afraid I’d never be cured, and he’d done it. A quick
snap out of it
and I was over my claustrophobia. If I could have, I would have rolled my eyes. I opened my mouth. Something like “ack” came out.
“Fucking hell. You’ve got claustrophobia.”
Thank you, Doctor Phil. I didn’t know. I’d have said it out loud if my lips weren’t made of frozen rubber.
“Jesus.” He shook me again and then made a frustrated sound before he slapped me.
I suppose it was a gentle slap. Admittedly, it didn’t hurt quite as bad as when Percy had hit me. It also woke up a little fire in my stomach. My hands rose mechanically, and I shoved against his chest. Or maybe my hands just fluttered like butterflies there. I liked to think there was shoving. In my head I was pounding him to a pulp.
“Riley—Get over it.”
I’m not sure whether the
get over it
is what got me going, or the fact that he actually knew my name. It shouldn’t have surprised me. After all, I’d been deliberately lured down into Percy’s trap. All the same, it was the first time he’d used it, and it shocked me. Between the two, it was enough to get my blood flowing to my head again.
“Don’t ever hit me again,” I mumbled. He still got the gist.
“Don’t stand around like a wooden puppet and maybe I won’t. Are you ready to get this over with? Or do you want to turn tail and run? Quit before you even get in the game?”
The light of the headlamp cast his face in demonic shadow, and there was no missing the derisive twist of his lips as he stared down at me.
“I’m not bailing,” I said. “Tell me why you’re showing me this. I get that you want to save Madison before she gets into trouble, but why add to your risk?”
He laughed, short and humorless. “Once I freed you from your cell, I lost all my choices,” he said. “You’re right. I hate Percy. Showing you his secrets is a Hail Mary to cut the bastard’s legs out from under him and put him the ground and keep him from hurting anybody else.”
And by anybody else, he meant Madison. “If you hate him so much, why do you work for him?”
He gave me a look like I’d said something so stupid it didn’t deserve an answer. Abruptly he spun around, calling back over his shoulder. “Do me a favor and try not to turn into a statue again.”
“Do
me
a favor and try not to turn into an asshole again. Oh wait, you never stopped,” I muttered. I didn’t know how he’d come to work for Percy, but he stayed for Madison. I was sure of it. He’d made himself her protector, and so long as she was here, he wasn’t going anywhere. That made him less obnoxious, so maybe he wasn’t a total asshole after all.
In response to my comment, he actually made a sound that might have been a laugh. It was hard to tell. He could have been choking, or maybe he swallowed a spider.
I kept that thought in mind as we went deeper into the tunnel, imagining spiders crawling out his nose and dangling out his ears. Luckily, the passage had shrunk as far as it was going to, and all I had to do was tolerate it. Easy peasy. Almost as easy as sitting through Percy burning me.
We turned off into a little side passage that went about ten feet and ended in a little nook about the size of a bathroom. There wasn’t anything in it except for a boulder that protruded a couple of feet out from one wall.
“
This
is what you wanted to show me?” I asked, turning to see what I’d missed.
“Keep your voice down. And no. We have to go through there. If you can.”
The last was a flat-out taunt, and my hackles rose. I’m sure he meant to piss me off enough to keep me from freezing up. It worked. I followed his pointing finger around the jut of stone and into a darkened corner where a small opening hunched low. It was all of about two feet tall and maybe eighteen inches wide. I was going to have to crawl through.
I didn’t let myself think about it. I gripped my irritation at Luke in both hands and dropped down on my hands and knees.
It’s just a doorway
, I told myself.
You’ll be through in no time to something bigger.
I took a couple of deep breaths and crawled forward before I let myself consider how insane I was. I couldn’t see anything ahead of me. I should have asked for the damned light, but at this point I wasn’t going to give Luke the satisfaction of seeing me scared again.
Chills curled around me, and I shuddered. It took everything I had to go forward. I stuck one hand out in front of me to keep from banging my head. Or worse, sticking it into a bunch of cobwebs. Once I was all the way in, I eased to my feet and stepped out of Luke’s way.
When he came through, the light revealed a similar sized room as the outer chamber. Luke pointed at a rope ladder hanging down one wall. Looking up, I could see that it led to a narrow niche about ten feet up. It looked to be about a foot and a half wide. Oh yay. I was about to be the meat inside a rock sandwich.
“Can you get up there?”
“Yep.” I didn’t move.
“Are you going to?”
“Yep.” I still didn’t move.
“Today?”
“You’re a fucking bully, do you know that?”
“I thought I was saving your ass. That won’t be true if you don’t get it in gear.” He sounded more worried than angry.
Remembering that Percy would be looking for me and possibly finding me was enough to get me started. I clambered up, trying not to think of the mountain sinking down to crush me. The rope ladder required concentration—they aren’t easy to use—and that got me to the top. I lizard-crawled onto the stone platform. The opening was more like two feet wide, maybe a little more. Light gleamed about ten feet ahead. I inched forward while Luke crawled up beside me. He’d turned off the headlamp.
The light came through a small chiseled window, maybe three feet long and not quite a foot tall. I should have been catatonic from fear, but I was too distracted.
“What the hell is this?” I whispered.
“The horror show,” Luke whispered back.
I could feel his agitation through his trace ribbon wrapping my wrist. No, agitation was too tame. Rage and horror and fear and frustration all tumbled together in a torrent.
Forty or more feet below us was a cavern. Cages made of the same mesh as my own prison door lined the walls and made aisles across. They were each large enough for one bed with maybe two feet to walk around. There had to be a couple thousand, if not more. Most were empty. A half-dozen people wearing various colored scrubs pushed metal carts around, collecting trays. Four others in lab coats carried clipboards and wandered from cage to cage, pushing more carts and doling out something to each of the prisoners. There were all clustered at the far end. I guestimated there were maybe fifty to a hundred people in the cages.
“What is this?” I breathed, my mouth going dry.
“Wait,” Luke said.
Bursts of magic erupted down the line of cages where the lab coats had just passed. It was like dominoes falling. As each flared, nulls answered, shutting each down as fast as they occurred. That’s when I realized that the cages were the nulls. Then the other pieces fell into place.
“They’re giving everybody in those cages Sparkle Dust,” I said, much louder than I intended.
Luke slapped his hand over my mouth. “Sh!”
I pushed his hand away and glared at him. “I’m right, aren’t I?” This time I whispered.
“Seems so.”
“Why?” But I was remembering what Doctor Inawa and Percy had talked about.
We’ve only a little stock left to finish ripening before harvest.
These prisoners were the stock they were ripening. But what the hell did that mean?
“Come on,” Luke said and wriggled backward.
I was more than ready to get out of there. I scraped my knuckles getting back down the ladder. Luke had turned his light back on to let me see. Before I could ask any questions, he crawled back out. Again I followed. He barely waited for me to stand before he started off again.
This time I was the one to grab his wrist. He didn’t stop.
“What’s going on in there?”
“You’re not stupid, figure it out,” he snarled.
I could feel the emotions boiling up in him. One of the biggest was sheer terror. He wasn’t the kind to be afraid. But he was afraid of Percy and his farm project. He pulled away from me and stalked away. I followed automatically as I considered what I’d seen. There’s no doubt they were deliberately feeding prisoners SD. The null cages were designed to protect against the sudden random magical talent side effect that came with taking the drug. Even non-talents would have a temporary talent. It didn’t last long, though I had no actual facts to back that up. Most of what I knew was rumor and word of mouth. So the cages kept the magical talents bound. But why give an expensive drug like that to so many? Why keep them caged?
We’ve only a little stock left to finish ripening before harvest.
Stock. Dr. Inawa had said something about using the fume source SD on the stock to shorten harvest times. What were they harvesting from the prisoners?
The answer came to me. But it was wrong. It
had
to be. It wasn’t possible or even likely. Besides, no one would do anything like that. No one could be that evil.
Percy’s face rose in my mind.
I stopped, hardly aware that I had. Luke turned around, his face harsh in the light.
“What are they doing?” I demanded. I needed him to tell me I was wrong, that I was crazy.
He gave me a long look. What he saw must have satisfied him somehow, because for once he gave me a straight answer.
“Sparkle Dust is people.”
Chapter 9
“What?” Even though I’d already figured it out, I wasn’t about to accept it without a fight. The idea that Percy could be farming people to make a drug was too awful to let it be true.
“Sparkle Dust is people,” he said again. “Just like Soylent Green, except for real.” Luke turned around and started walking again.
I hurried after him. “But that’s insane and impossible. How?”
Luke sighed. “I don’t know how they figured it out. One story says that someone found a stash of miners who’d been trapped near an underground spring. Over time, as the spring overflowed and retreated, the minerals in the water leached into them and turned their bodies into pure Sparkle Dust. More was found near the spring—it can be distilled from the water. That takes time, like getting salt from the sea, only there’s a lot less SD in the water. So eventually Dr. Inawa and Percy worked out a plan to experiment on manufacturing the drug by using people. Those with talents give a stronger Dust, but anybody can be turned. Percy would use you until you couldn’t trace for him, then stick you in a cage until you were ready for harvesting.”
“Why the hell do you work for such a sick bastard?” I demanded. I wanted to be yelling at Percy. I wanted to be pounding his face in with a brick. Luke was the only enemy in front of me.
“I’ve got my reasons,” he said, and I could feel the cold reserve drop around him as he recoiled from me. I felt his hurt and rage and doubt tumbling through his trace in a torrent. I forced myself to be calm. Madison was his Achilles’ heel. She was the reason. I didn’t have to hear him say it to know it for a fact. So I focused on her.
“Why does Madison work for him?”
“She doesn’t.” He snapped the words off like an alligator snapping legs on a wildebeest.
“That’s weird, because serving food certainly looked like her working for him.”
Luke sped up without replying. I broke into a jog, just to keep up. I stepped on a piece of loose rock, and my ankle twisted. I yelped and hopped, but he didn’t even slow down. I caught up, grabbing hold of his arm and leaning hard on him. He started to shake me off, but I gripped harder.
“If you want to go fast, then you’ll have to put up with being a crutch,” I gasped.
“You’ll breathe better if you shut up, then,” he said.
“I’ll breathe better when Percy’s hanging up by his balls and can’t hurt anybody anymore.”
Luke snorted. “Who’s going to stop him? You?” Despite his doubt, I could feel his hope.
“Maybe. Clearly it won’t be you.”
“Just be grateful I’m helping you escape,” he said. Under my fingers his muscles went rock hard. I didn’t need his trace to know he was furious. His trace told me that anger was mixed with healthy doses of fear and fatalism. Like he knew something bad was coming and couldn’t do anything about it.
“I am. I owe you,” I said.
“You’re damned right you do. I plan to collect. With interest. Now, this is where you’re on your own.”
We came around a corner, and in front of us was a barn-sized cavern. Just inside the door was a rotating crossing circle with rails on it. It could be turned to let ore carts from the various passages emptying into the cavern pass onto one of the four tracks leading up and out of the cavern. Chains and pulleys dangled from above, and old carts lined the wall, some tipped on their sides, others upside down or missing a wheel. They weren’t what caught my attention.
In the middle of the floor sprawled five bodies. I dropped into trace sight, and gasped with relief. All were alive. Leo lay to the left, Dalton to the right, with the rest of the team flopped over onto each other between. They tangled in the same magic that had wrapped my paralyzing captors. Sheets of it hung haphazardly across the passage, guaranteeing that anyone wandering through would blunder into one, if not more.
“What are those things? What kind of magic is that?” I demanded, pointing at the sheets. “What’s it doing to them?”
The sound of the magic grated on my nerves. This time it wasn’t just a high sound, it was a full-on symphony that scraped my bones and made my skin crawl. I shivered like a horse trying to twitch off a swarm of flies. It didn’t work.
“You can see them?” Luke asked, startled.
Yay. I surprised him. Points for me. I decided to act like I couldn’t always see magic other people couldn’t. “Can’t you?”
He shook his head. “Paralyzes them mostly,” he said, answering my last question. “Puts them to sleep. Might cause some pain. Depends.”
“On what?”
“How’re they made. You’re lucky. Usually Percy collects up the victims and puts them in the cages as soon as they trip the trap. He’s bugging out of here at the end of the week, so he didn’t bother with them. He’ll send someone to collect up the magic and kill them.”
“How do we get them out of there?”
He snorted, giving me a sidelong look. “
We
don’t. You do. You’re supposed to be the Wizard of Oz when it comes to trace magic. Null them out.”
He crossed his arms and looked at me. I resisted the urge to shake him, mostly because I didn’t need him dumping me on my ass when I tried. At least I wasn’t half-dead anymore. That would help. I bent down and searched along the ground with my fingers. I found a bolt about as big around as my middle finger and just as long. That should do it.
Before starting, I released Luke’s trace. I didn’t need distractions.
Creating a null mostly requires a tracer to pour magic into an object, all the while molding it into what you want it to do. Making a null that absorbed wasn’t that tricky, for me, anyhow. At least not for something small-scale like a defined space. The hard part was making it strong enough. Normally I’d take time to build the power—add to it daily until it reached the strength I wanted. If I was really desperate, I could suck the magic out of one null and feed it into another and build it up that way.
I dropped to the floor, crossing my legs and holding one end of the bolt in each hand. I focused, drawing magic up out of myself and feeding it into the metal. I wove it with my intent, winding power around the barrel of the bolt like thread around a spool.
I reached out beyond me, looking for bits of natural power that I might be able to use. The reason Diamond City was so magical had something to do with ley lines and the depth of the prehistoric volcano that had caused the caldera in the first place. Magic was in the dirt and the water and the air. Unfortunately, this area seemed to be a desert of magic. That meant I was depending only on myself, and I didn’t know if I had the strength to null out those swathes of magic, whatever the hell they were.
Unless—
What if I used one of them? I could dismantle magic. I’d done it before. And when I had, I’d been able to use the power to fuel nulls. It was dangerous without knowing what exactly the magic in the tapestries of magic could do, but even so, I’d demolished serious magic before and survived.
I stopped winding power around the bolt and stood.
“Done?” Luke asked, clearly surprised.
I gave a little shake of my head and walked toward the closest sheet of magic. His arm thrust out in front of me.
“If you go out there, you’ll end up like your friends.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
He dropped his arm. “Your funeral.”
“Let’s hope not.”
A strand of the sound got louder when I got near the shining sheet of magic. It swirled and twisted uneasily, almost like it was alive. I squinted at it. It almost seemed like there was a pattern in it. Or maybe like it was a bunch of pieces sewn together. But pieces of
what
?
I lifted my hand and hesitated. If I was wrong, I’d be trapped, just like Luke said. My hand tightened on the bolt. I could try it out and see how well it worked. I could feel the magic in the sheet, and I knew the null wasn’t strong enough. It needed a lot more power, which only the sheet could provide. I had to risk this.
I reached out and touched my fingers to the magic. Instantly, the sheet dropped over me, shrouding me from head to foot. My skin prickled, and energy crackled over it. It was like standing in a jar of Pop Rocks. The sounds I’d been hearing whined louder. It began to sound like a chorus of voices straight out of an insane asylum. I had a sense of being stung by bees from the bottoms of my feet to the top of my head. That, and invisible fingers started pinching at me.
I turned into Gumby. I teetered on the balls of my feet and started to fall. My fingers were still lifted. I channeled energy into them, sending out tentacles to suck the power out of the shroud.
At first, the magic resisted, then the fabric knotted into sticky clumps. It felt like clumps of tapioca. I fed the power into the bolt null clutched in my other hand.
Thirty seconds passed, and then the whining turned to screams. What was left of the sheet coruscated and rippled outward, tearing apart into patchwork tatters. Threads of binding power tangled with the seeking tentacles of my power. It was as if the binding power had been sewing the other bits together. The rags of leftover magic drifted in the air like dandelion fluff caught on a summer wind.
As the shroud tore apart, I regained strength, catching myself mid-stagger. The stinging and pinching subsided. I hardly noticed. I reached out and captured one of the tatters in my hand. It fluttered and twisted as if trying to get away. Then it flattened, pressing soft against my skin. It sent a chill through me—not ordinary cold, but the kind I associated with the trace dimension. The kind that frosted the untouchable places deep inside me. I shook my hand to get it off, but it didn’t slide away. “What the fuck?”
“What’s wrong?” Luke rasped.
I glanced at him. Grooves cut deep lines around his mouth. He had his arms crossed over his chest, every muscle bunched tight. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought he was nervous.
I didn’t know how to explain what had happened, even if I wanted to, which I didn’t. “Nothing.” I rubbed the back of my hand against my pants, but the cling-wrap magic stayed stuck.
“Can you hurry up? I want to get back before someone misses me.”
“You should come with me.”
His mouth twisted. “Why don’t you worry about yourself? Can you get your people out of the trap?”
Right. He wouldn’t leave Madison behind. My fingers tightened on the null I’d made. Was it enough? I wasn’t sure. The shroud hadn’t acted like any magic I’d experienced before. On the other hand, something about it felt familiar. I just couldn’t place it. I rubbed the back of my hand against my thigh again. Where the patch of magic clung to me, my skin had gone numb and a chill ached deep inside me.
“Well?” Luke demanded.
I glared at him, then went to kneel beside Leo. My brother and two members of Dalton’s team were wrapped in the same blanket. It shimmered and pulsed with rainbow color. I activated the bolt null and thrust my hand inside.
Cold closed around my wrist, and once again, I felt the sensation of pinching and stinging where the shroud touched me. I’d created the null to suck in power like a battery, rather than just stamp it out. I hadn’t realized I’d done it that way. It was harder to do than just make a normal null, but far more efficient in the end. Once again, the shroud tore apart into tattered bits that drifted through the air and along the floor. I frowned at them. Why did they seem so familiar?
I didn’t get a chance to think about it. Leo groaned and blinked.
“Hey,” I said, relief making tears well in my eyes. I blinked them away, swallowing the sudden ache in my throat. “Are you okay?”
He stiffened and sat up with a jerk. “Riley? Where did you come from?”
He pulled me into a hug and then caught sight of Luke behind me. “Who’s that?” Leo jumped to his feet, staggering and then steadying himself. He tried to step in front of me to shield me, but I held him back.
“This is Luke. He’s helping me escape,” I said. “Luke, meet my brother, Leo.”
“I don’t give a fuck who he is. Get on with it,” Luke said.
Right. He was on borrowed time, and so were we.
“Can you see if there are any batteries in the packs?” I asked Leo. His toe lamps were dead, as were everybody else’s. Luke had the only light, and he was taking it with him. I didn’t wait for him to answer. I turned to Luke.
“You can go if you want.” I winced. That sounded obnoxious. I didn’t mean it to be. “What I mean is, thank you. I owe you big-time. You should go back before someone misses you.”
Luke glowered at me beneath his headlamp. For all his eagerness to leave, he seemed firmly rooted to the rock. “What about the others?” He jerked his chin at Dalton and the rest of my unconscious bodyguard squad.
“It won’t be a problem.”
“Then do it.”
“Where did you meet your new friend? Nazis-are-us?” Leo asked, handing me a headlamp he’d fished out of his pack.
“He was my prison guard.”
“Was he?” Leo eyed Luke with narrowed eyes.
My brother didn’t have the bulk that Luke had, but I’d give him odds in a fight. He might be a jeweler, but he was all muscle and tough as hell. I figured their talents were pretty even, though I knew better than most the tricks my brother could do with metal. He’d tortured me with them as a kid. I’d learned to null out his power in sheer self-defense.
“Relax. He’s a good guy.” I smiled when Luke’s mouth fell open. I bet he didn’t get compliments that often, and getting one from me was probably grounds for a heart attack. “He helped me escape and brought me here to help you. I owe him.”
Leo nodded, still watching Luke, his face flinty. “Yes, we do. Thanks.” He looked at me. “Why don’t you get to work on the others?”
I repeated the nulling process on the rest of our team. Dalton had been tangled by himself in two different blankets, while the others had been wrapped together in one. By the time I was done, the bolt null was pulsing with power, and a confetti of magic tatters floated through the cavern. As they brushed against me, several fastened on my skin, sticking to me like patches of silken ice.