The Girl and the Stars
“Splash.” Yaz remembered the shock of it.
“Exactly. And it seemed like I was falling, or sliding, forever. I don’t think that rope would have reached anywhere near the bottom even if it hadn’t come apart.”
“And nobody found you?” Yaz imagined that so long after the regulator stopped his cull the pools would not be well guarded.
“I decided to watch and wait. I’ve seen others in the caves, but they didn’t see me. Everyone seems very busy down here, like something important is going on.”
Yaz stepped back to take Quell in. So familiar and yet so out of place. It seemed extraordinary. All of it. Not least that he would be so reckless, and for her.
“Why would—” But she didn’t want to ask that question. Not now. She wasn’t sure that she was ready for the answer. She had asked her mother about love once, and her mother, a practical woman not given to sentiment, had pushed back her long hair, streaked with grey, in both hands and said that love was like a storm in the night. “You wake up in the morning to find that the world has changed. There’s a new landscape beyond the doors of your tent, everything familiar yet different.” Yaz had wondered about that. With Quell there had been no storm. They had grown together, comfortable in each other’s company.
“We can’t stay here.” Quell took a last look at the wealth of metal scattered on the rocky slope below the hole.
“It might be better to stay,” Yaz said. “I’m not sure I remember the way back to the settlement. But the Broken come here every day, I think.”
“Yes, but we don’t want them to find us.” Quell flexed his hands as if missing his spear.
“We don’t?”
“No.”
“The Broken are our future now.” Immediately Yaz felt guilty. Quell had come for her, thrown away the life he loved. And for what? She was broken, there was no life on the ice for her. Maybe it was the star setting the point of its wedge to her mind but two voices spoke to her, equally loud. One told her she was a burden on the Ictha, her sacrifice necessary for the survival of the whole. Her weakness hadn’t only dragged her down but had now brought Quell low too. She didn’t deserve happiness. She could not be saved. It was her own voice and she believed it. The other voice was also hers and it told her that a whole that survived at the expense of its children did not deserve to continue. This voice told her that maybe, just maybe, she could be saved but that she could not be saved alone. If she deserved more than this then so did every child cast into the pit. She drew a deep breath. “The Broken are our future. There aren’t any other choices down here.”
“Well, we can escape. That’s a choice.”
“You think you can climb back out of the pit.” It wasn’t a question. Nobody could climb that. Not even Thurin with his ice-working. Not even Tarko, though their leader would be the least inclined to try.
Quell’s old smile returned. He nodded at the hole beside them. “I think it’s pretty clear now that the priests don’t mine their iron from the roots of the Black Rock. And we both know that if you consider all the clans the priests trade a lot of metal over the year.”
Yaz nodded.
“So they must have a way of hauling it from these caverns to the surface, and it won’t be up that twisting slanting shaft from the pit. The loads would snag and get caught. And it’s too exposed—half a dozen local clans come to pray there at different times across the year. The secret would never have kept so long. All we have to do is find out where and when the next load goes up, and we go up with it!”
Yaz’s eyes widened. She had only been away from the surface for a few days but already it felt like a lifetime. The idea that she might return was a dream. Part of her didn’t even want to step back out into the wind. That part of her had kept quiet until this moment, but it spoke now, surprising her. “I can’t go back.”
“Of course you can. The regulator passed you. You weren’t pushed into the pit, you . . . fell.”
“I can’t go back without Zeen.” It wasn’t just about Zeen, not now, maybe not even when she jumped. Something was wrong with the world, with everything, when being less than perfect, less than the tribes’ idea of perfect, just meant giving up on people, throwing children into a hole in the ice. Yaz knew that in her core, felt it blood to bone. Bringing Zeen back with her would mean something larger than just saving one child. Like a crack spreading across a cliff face it would be the start of something. The start of something larger beginning to fall. “He’s my brother.”
Quell rolled his eyes upwards as if about to appeal to the Gods in the Sky, but finding only ice above him he sighed. “Kazik rejected him. There’s no life for him with the Ictha, Yaz. The wind—”
“The wind might kill him, yes. But do you think the priests don’t lie? They certainly keep some pretty big secrets!” She swung an arm to encompass the chamber and the scars of the Missing city all around them. “Zeen needs to be given the choice. He might choose to stay or to come with us and see whether the wind really will kill him.”
Quell shook his head. “Fine . . . But I’m going to advise him to stay here. And it ends with Zeen. I’ve seen you with your friends. We can’t bring them all back. They’ll probably try to stop the whole thing anyway.”
“Oh.” Yaz hadn’t realised that Quell had already watched her. Something in the way he said friends hinted at a jealousy she wouldn’t have suspected he had in him. She appreciated his reluctance to approach them though. The gerants especially looked very intimidating. Yaz’s first encounter with Hetta wasn’t something that would ever fade from her memory.
“So, where is he?” Quell asked.
“With the Tainted.”
“The who?” A raised eyebrow.
“The Tainted. They live in the black ice. It drives them mad.” Said out loud it sounded as impossible as reaching the surface.
“And they’ve taken Zeen?”
“He’s one of them, probably.” Yaz walked back to the hunter’s star. “If we get him back then this will drive the taint out of him. But we’re going to need help.”
Quell blinked. He drew a deep breath, and then gave a nod that made Yaz wonder if there had to be a storm or if sometimes love just stole up on you. “Alright. Let’s do it.”
* * *
YAZ HID THE hunter’s star in an ice-filled hollow close to the cavern wall. They watched as its warmth began to melt a path down. The water would refreeze above it, and with the glow dimmed by Yaz’s will, there would be nothing to betray it save the aura. According to Quell, at its edges that aura felt more like a suggestion to keep away. The sort of feeling that might unconsciously slip into a man’s mind and turn him along a different path.