The Girl and the Stars

“I’m sorry.” Arka took back her hand. She looked around at Yaz’s friends. “Petrick is not with you?”

“He . . . fell.” Yaz found it hard to speak about. “Into the chasm.”

Arka closed her eyes. Something like a mother’s pain twisted her lips. “So many gone.”

Another silence stretched between them. Yaz broke it.

“Why are you here?” She tried not to sound unwelcoming. Her plan interfered with the fundamentals of life in the caverns and might disrupt the long-held arrangement that kept the Broken alive. She didn’t want Arka trying to stop her.

Arka seemed on the point of answering with some rousing speech for the benefit of her followers but instead she released the deep breath she’d drawn and her shoulders fell. “Because Pome is winning.”

It wasn’t the news Yaz wanted to hear. She pursed her lips. “Won’t the city be harder to defend than anywhere else?”

“It will.” Arka nodded. “But the hunters here will attack them as much as us. Which will help even the odds. If we’re lucky a hunter will take Pome. They might even destroy his hunter.”

Yaz frowned, puzzled, then realised that much of what she’d learned during her time in the city was unknown to Arka. “The regulator made all of the hunters, not just Pome’s one. I don’t know how much he sees down here but you could find yourself facing Pome’s forces along with the very hunters you hoped might attack him.”

Arka shook her head. “That makes no sense. Why would the regulator have made the hunters? They’re responsible for the loss of so many of the best of us. Without them we could get more iron. Lots more! And that’s why we’re down here.” She shook her head again, more emphatically. “Someone has been lying to you.” She glanced at Erris, brows rising as she clearly remembered Yaz’s claims about his origins. “And this stranger . . . what does he want from us? Or did he follow you up from the city like Quell followed you down from the ice?”

“It was me he came here for, yes.” She hid a smile, surpressing a kind of pleased embarrassment. “But listen to me. The hunters serve the regulator. Erris saw him make them.”

Arka still frowned in disbelief but her shoulders slumped a second time. “If that’s true then we’re finished.”

Yaz glanced toward the fungus heap and felt immediately guilty for wondering if Arka and her followers would need feeding. “I guess you should ready your positions. Thurin is still on watch but you could send—”

Arka nodded. “I left two warriors with him.”

“Well . . . if we see Pome he’ll have all of us to deal with.” Yaz didn’t mention that in a day at most she expected to be gone. She wasn’t sure that Arka wouldn’t try to stop her rather than coming with her. Arka still dreamed of restoring the Broken to what they had been when Yaz arrived. She saw herself as Tarko’s heir and she wouldn’t want to antagonise the regulator. If she started to believe that the priests owned the hunters, that might just make her more willing to placate them. She might still let Yaz ride the cable to the surface, but alone, and bound as a tribute.

Yaz drew a deep breath. “We’ll stand with you. If we see him.”

Arka clapped a hand to Yaz’s shoulder. She offered no thanks. Her authority stood on the assumption that Yaz owed her obedience, but there was gratitude in that contact. She moved away as Erris came in close. “Positions!” Arka gestured to Jerra and the others with her. “As we discussed.” Together they moved away toward nearby openings leading down into the city.

Yaz watched them go, feeling unsettled. Pome was hunting Arka and her people. When he found them gone from the main caverns he would follow them to the city. She felt that she was abandoning Arka’s faction to their fate, and it made her feel dirty. Jerra wasn’t the only child among them, but it seemed that the caverns of the Broken weren’t large enough for childhoods. Quell had said she couldn’t save them all, and it was true. Lately life seemed full of ugly truths and attractive lies.

 

* * *

“HOW LONG DOES the cage normally stay down?” Yaz had gone to eat in one of the craters. This one had a rectangular shaft at the bottom of it, sheer sided and too narrow for any hunter she’d yet seen.

“Two days,” Thurin said. “It takes a while to load all the iron securely.” Quell had taken over his guard duty above the slope and Zeen had gone with him, though Yaz had wanted to protest it. “Sometimes three.”

“We won’t have two days. Not with Arka here and Pome hunting her.” Maya bit into a large mushroom without enthusiasm.

“But the regulator is sending this cage down for you, right?” Kao asked. “So he might just leave it there long enough for someone to get on, then haul it back up.”

“True.” Yaz nodded.

“This means the regulator is going to be right there waiting for you up top,” Thurin said. “With gods know how many priests. He’ll want the rest of us back down here to work for him.”

“But he won’t be expecting the rest of you.” Yaz offered a smile. “And you can pick a man up without touching him, Thurin. If the regulator tries to stop us going south then you can throw him down the hole to scavenge his own iron.”

Maya and Kao nodded. Thurin looked worried. They ate without speaking, and after a short while Maya and Kao left the pair of them alone, going to join Erris, who was still working on fashioning their collapsible shelter from the materials that Maya had recovered from the settlement.

“Eular wasn’t with Arka,” Thurin said.

“No.” Yaz had noticed the blind old man’s absence and had worried for him. “Pome must have caught him after the Icicle Cavern. If he’s wise he’ll do whatever Pome asks and hope Arka can rescue him.”

“Oh, he’s wise.”

Thurin said it with such conviction that it prompted Yaz to share what the old man had said to her when Pome first brought her before him. “He predicted all this, you know.”

“All this?” Thurin raised a brow. “That must have taken some telling.”

“Well, not all of it. He said I was an agent of change. That I had been dropped into the middle of something that was ready to become a new thing.” For an eyeless man it was impressive vision. Though his foresight had been blind to Theus lurking inside Thurin. “What did he tell you?”

Thurin’s pale skin reddened and he turned his head away to watch the distant star-littered ceiling. “He talked about . . . you, I think . . . well, I’m not sure what he was saying. But I remember what he said, if that makes sense? He said when you put some people together for the first time there’s a kind of gravitation, a slow spiral dance as they’re drawn into each other’s orbit, each opening to the other by degrees, discovering how closely their wants and hopes and passions align.” Thurin kept his eyes on the distant stars, speaking the words from memory as if he had spent many hours turning them over in his own mind. “He said there’s a darkness in each of us, afraid to show itself, wrestling with such blunt tools as words and deeds to make itself known to the darkness in another person similarly hidden behind walls of camouflage, disguise, interpretation. Honesty is a knife that we can use to pare away those layers, but one slip, go too deep, and who knows what injuries might be inflicted.” He frowned and quoted, “The wounds an honest tongue can open sometimes take a lifetime to heal.”