The Girl and the Stars

“I didn’t come in this way, but it looks as safe as any.” Quell took the lead, spear levelled before him. “There are signs on the floor to show—”

“I know.”

He glanced back at her, flashing that smile she’d known all her life, white teeth pinked with blood from her punches. “Of course you do. Sorry.”

Within a hundred yards they reached a turning into the cavern that Yaz had seen from the corridor windows. Quell breathed a sigh of relief and stepped out, waving her to join him. The water from Quell and the starlight reaching down through the square holes above combined to squeeze a last turn of speed from her and she shuffled forward almost at a jog. She could smell the ice, scent her freedom from the long dry nightmare of the Missing’s city.

“Come on.” Quell bent low and hurried across the chamber toward the ramp of broken stone that would take them to the edge of the more distant hole.

Yaz followed, her mind crowding with the questions to be asked. How could Quell have possibly found her in such a maze of rooms? How did he even get below the ice?

The silence seemed larger in the vaulted space, their footsteps an intrusion. They passed beneath the larger, inaccessible hole, both of them bathed in starlight, and skirted the pit before approaching the slope. One last scramble and they would be free of this place.

When the hunter rose from the slope ahead of them, shouldering aside small boulders, debris streaming from its black carapace, Yaz stumbled to a halt, choking down a sob at the unfairness of it all. This one looked a lot smaller than the hunter that had left the city, but its armoured body was still as large as three men. It moved cautiously over the uneven gradient on half a dozen many-jointed legs. Something about it reminded Yaz of the crabs that Clan Zennik take from the Infrequent Sea, the serrated pincers on its two reaching arms perhaps. The thing glowed from within, red light escaping the chinks in its armour and illuminating the base of each leg where it joined the body. The crash of tumbling rocks and the clatter of metal on metal sounded shockingly loud after so long in the city’s endless peace.

Quell looked tiny standing between Yaz and the hunter, his bone spear clutched in both hands, but he stood there unflinching even so. Yaz moved to join him, empty-handed, she couldn’t run, not again, and not without Quell. She hoped the end would be quick.

Yaz had covered half the ground between her and Quell before something caught her foot and she went sprawling. She twisted to free herself and saw with horror another, far larger, hunter rising from the pit, a nightmare of waving arms reaching out over a behemoth’s body of black iron plates and other makeshift armour. A fierce red light lanced through every gap. A metal tentacle had snared her leg from her foot most of the way to her knee. The appendage was disturbingly reminiscent of the right arm that Erris had built himself, but dark and pitted with corruption.

“Get off me!” Yaz caught up a loose stone and hammered at the coils about her leg.

The hunter jerked her across the rock toward the pit it was still rising from. A scream tore its way from Yaz’s lungs as she slid toward the edge of the hole, where huge claws now gouged the stone, seeking purchase. She braced her feet against the nearest claws, determined not to go over without a fight. These hunters weren’t like the soldier that the city had sent chasing her through walls, firing its spikes. She had only glimpsed that one before it destroyed Erris but it was not like this creature. Erris had said these were the work of the thief who had stolen significant stars from the depths of the city and so enraged it. An image of the regulator flashed across her mind even as the hunter hauled on her. Erris had said the thief who took the stars generations before was script-burned. The regulator bore scars that looked like letters—Yaz saw the burn marks with her mind’s eye: script had been seared across the man’s scalp and face. The regulator was old too, old beyond the memory of any elder, and unchanging with the years. Regulator Kazik had stolen the stars that the city mourned and made these monsters around them . . .

Yaz reached out for the star hidden inside the huge hunter, seeking it with her mind. She knew it would be big but she had commanded Pome’s star to dull its light. She had even made it float above her hand. Maybe she could— The fierceness of the hunter’s star took her by surprise. It was like a fire. Not the flame of a lamp but the savage roar of fire let loose as she had once seen it when old Vallak and his wife had set their tent alight in the long night.

“No!” The shock of that raging from the star loosened her grip for a moment and now she found herself among those iron claws, clinging to them, her legs over the drop as the tentacle tried to tug her free.

Yaz strained to keep her place and reached out with her mind, struggling to influence the star burning deep within the hunter’s makeshift bulk. She could see it there, hear its heartbeat slow and powerful like that of a resting man, but she could no more touch it than she could pick up ingots red with heat in the forge, no more oppose it than she could turn the ice winds with her own breath. Hope escaped her and her grip on the claws to either side of her began to fail.

Quell came into view, shouting and flailing with his spear. It was not the rescue Yaz had hoped for. He came backwards, dragged like her by a tentacle of many overlapping iron rings that bound both his legs. The hunter lifted him from the ground and he dangled head-down before it, caught in a beam of red light that lanced out from where something like an eye opened in the main body. Yaz now heard not only the heartbeat of the star inside but its song also, wordless, violent, broken.

“Yaz!” Quell spotted her. Twisting, he lifted his body and somehow drove his spear into the hunter’s eye. A metal shutter slammed across the opening, shattering the spear. Broken pieces dropped away, trailing their bindings.

In one smooth motion the hunter swung Quell against the rocks as an Ictha might brain a fish, the impact brutal and crunching. Yaz craned her head back to see where he lay. The world turned around her, that slow rotation, as old as the night. Zeen had fallen into the pit and guilt had pulled Yaz after him. That had been a moment like no other. Quell lay with his arms and face to the rock, blood leaking beneath him. This was her second moment. All her anger, all her frustration, all her outrage twisted together in a white heat pinning her to the instant. She reached toward the intolerable fire dwelling within the hunter’s armour and took hold though it burned her. She found no give in the hunter’s star, no possibility of overcoming the stone that bound and animated it, and yet she refused to let go.

Quell! It had killed Quell!

The world retreated. Yaz no longer knew or cared if she were still clinging at the edge or being hauled away into the depths.

It had killed Quell!

Quell who knew the secrets of her life and whose calm stitched together the pieces of her, those she liked and those she did not, into something worthy of his devotion.

It had killed Quell!

Something broke within her. Something that was not meant to break. And with it came new strength and new weakness. Suddenly the balance of the struggle shifted, and with a vast effort that brought blood running from her mouth and from her eyes, she struck the hunter’s heart a blow.