The Girl and the Stars
To either side of the descent ice walls glittered, glowing with stardust, the occasional brighter star twinkling amid the constellations. The cavern that the slope led down into was vast, a hundred times larger than the largest Arka had yet shown them. The glow came most strongly on the west side where the walls stood shining with the spoils of the ice’s theft, the glittering remnants of a city full of stars. Clearly the ice had once ground its way across the city of the Missing, which had been standing here long before the original four tribes of man beached their ships on this world. All that remained now was scraped rock and strange scars.
“It’s beautiful,” Maya breathed beside Yaz.
“It is.” The ice glowed in a million shades. The air was frosty here, as cold as it had been in Eular’s small cave out on the margins on the far side of the Broken’s territory. The constant sound of dripping had faded then gone and Yaz hadn’t noticed it leave. For a moment even the ice itself was quiet—no distant groans, no creaking, just a frosty silence. Yaz found the stillness more beautiful in its rarity than even the swirling wonders her gaze tracked across the walls. A peace that held the breath in her lungs. Holy perhaps. After a life lived leaning into the wind she could imagine that silence housed its own gods.
In that moment, standing beneath the vast ethereal ceiling of the city cavern, Yaz decided that this would be her new life. She and Zeen would remain with the Broken. She would refuse the regulator’s claim on her.
“Why’ve we stopped?” Kao glanced over his shoulder then pushed to the front. He looked as though he might be about to whistle for the echo, but a dark look from Arka diverted him into another question. “Where’s the city?”
“What remains is under the ground in tunnels and chambers carved through the rock.” Arka pointed toward the middle of the chamber. “There are a great number of ways into it in that area.”
“What about the hunters?” Quina asked.
“They are generally deep in the complex, roaming the regions where there is still material to be scavenged, which is where they will find scavengers to hunt. If they try guarding some of the entrances we just use an alternative. But one hunter did come out today so we will go carefully.” As they descended the long slope Arka began to point to locations on the cavern floor. “At the first sign of a hunter we run and we hide. We do not all hide in the same place. To hide you want to get deep. You’ve already seen what kind of reach they have. The best spots are marked with purple splodges. These are the ones I’m pointing out to you. But any hiding place is better than none.”
“Hunters are made of metal,” Yaz said. “Why do they chase us? Can they eat flesh?”
Arka paused before answering. “Nobody knows. They carry their victims away and we don’t see them again. Not even their bones.” She drew in a deep breath. “It’s overconfidence that gets you captured. They take the best of us. Those who delve deepest and have been scavenging the longest. Those who start to think they’re too good at scavenging to ever get caught. Those who oppose them when they roam into our caverns.” She frowned as if assailed by a painful memory. “But hunters are certainly not the only danger down in the city. I’ve known scavengers lost to cave-ins, to strange machinery, gas, explosions . . . or just plain lost and unable to find their way back. It’s big down there. Much bigger than what you see up here. A world below ours just like we are a world below the ice clans.”
As they drew nearer to the two gateposts a pressure began to exert itself on Yaz. At first a mental pressure, a reluctance to advance, and then a physical one where the air itself pushed against her. None of the others appeared to feel it.
Yaz pressed on even as the two black posts swallowed her vision, driving everything around them into insignificance until only they and she remained. Both seemed a hundred feet tall, a thousand, taller than the Black Rock itself, and as they grew the space between them diminished, stealing away the possibility of progress.
“Are you alright?” Quina asked beside her. The girl reached to set a hand to Yaz’s arm, bird-quick, tentative, the contact broken as soon as it was made.
“Y-yes,” Yaz lied. She found herself at the back of the group, stumbling. Grinding her teeth together she set her gaze firmly on the floor before her feet and focused on taking the next step. She couldn’t let them leave her here for Pome to find. And what she needed to save Zeen lay down there, in the city under the city.
Even with her head down she could see the gateposts in her mind, huge with forbidding. “I can . . .” Each step came harder, the pressure building along with a vibration in the marrow of her bones that quickly turned into pain. Yaz didn’t even know why she was fighting it, and hiding the fight. She felt that she must be bleeding, from her eyes, her nose, blood sweating from her skin. You couldn’t battle so hard and not bleed.
Zeen! The city held the stars that would save him. In that instant she saw him falling, felt herself jumping, and knew why she was fighting. For her brother, but not just for him. It was more than that. She was fighting against . . . against everything, against the system that saw children thrown away, against the thinking behind it, against the ice itself. And suddenly the pain and pressure were gone and she was falling.
13
YAZ?”
Yaz opened her eyes to find Thurin trying to lift her into a sitting position. Behind him a line of backs presented themselves as the others stared at the gateposts to either side of the long slope. A purple fire filled both posts, as though they were glass rather than the black iron they had seemed to be. For a moment she felt very conscious of how close Thurin was to her, arms around her. The dark eyes locked to hers were full of concern. She felt the nearness of him, the warmth of him.
By the time Yaz got to her feet, refusing Thurin’s arm, the effect within the posts had died to flickers within the blackness.
“I tripped. I’m fine.” Yaz brushed at her knees and elbows.
Thurin looked back along the smooth ramp then returned his gaze to her, saying nothing.
“Perhaps it’s to do with the hunter escaping,” Arka was saying. “I’ve seen a hunter chase a scavenger right to the posts then stop as if they’ve hit an invisible wall. It’s very difficult for a hunter to leave the city and when they do they return to it quickly. But if the gateposts are broken and won’t hold anymore . . .” She shuddered. “Things will be very different.”
Arka carried on, sparing only a frown for Yaz and seeming to accept that she had simply fallen. Instructions on hiding places came thick and fast now, with special mention for the gerant-sized ones, though Kao could likely still squeeze into those used by people of more regular size.
At last they came to the more level ground. Here the bedrock had been scraped by the ice’s teeth for eons as it moved slowly toward the Frequent Sea many miles to the west. Despite this toothed erosion having carried on for untold millennia the rock still bore testimony to the vanished city. Everywhere it lay scarred with shafts of different rock revealed as depressions or prominences depending on the hardness of their composition, some like worn teeth jutting a yard or more into the air. In other places there were holes rimmed with rust, or metal columns reaching down into the rock, the exposed lengths torn and bent in the direction of the ice. All of it fringed with frost.