Such a Daring Endeavor (6 page)

Shackles.

While I sleep, he’s in shackles. What am I still doing here?

I hurry to slip into my jeans—which I sloughed off beneath the covers, hoping Ren wouldn’t notice. I check out the empty street outside, the streetlamps still pouring light in various corners.

The door is locked, but that’s not anything to hold me back, not while everyone is hopefully still sleeping. With a sure inhale and a stem of magic, I coerce the lock into a silent undoing and turn the knob as quietly as I can.

I enter into the expansive foyer, recognizing the bloodstains on the floor, the line-up of doors and the columns near the descending stairs. Even as I tiptoe, my steps echo on the marble.

“You shouldn’t have been able to get out of that room.”

Dircey stands behind me in baggy pajama pants and a tank top. Her black-and-white hair hangs loose this time, the top is white, the bottom layers slowly fading to black and blending with her dark tank.

“It wasn’t Ren,” I say, all nerves. “He’s on your side.”

To my surprise, Dircey nods. “Those soldiers didn’t go for us. The one Micro stopped was heading for you two. That Arc couldn’t have sensed Micro’s magic. The talisman he wears protects him from their detection.”

“So you believe me? Us?”

“Why else did they focus on you two? We’re Black Vault, little sister. Tyrus has been after me for years. Yet those soldiers headed straight for the Csilles.”

I don’t say anything.

Dircey steps closer, looking up at me.

“They’re newer soldiers; they’ve got to be. They didn’t recognize me or Micro. Tyrus didn’t send them specifically for us, and they wouldn’t have been after you and Ren if Ren had been the one to summon them here.”

“We didn’t summon them. We’ve stayed in that room. We’ve done everything you asked.”

Dircey looks down her nose at me. “You really got his magic back,” she says, though it’s not a question. More like an acceptance.

It’s my turn to nod. I thought she was younger, but this close up I catch the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, and the laugh lines in her cheeks.

“Better get some sleep, little sister,” she says before padding off down the hall.

I pause for the smallest moment, considering the doors, the crumbling walls and marble floor. I’m not about to go back to sleep. Not now that she’s allowing me out. So I follow her.

Dircey leads me down the stairs and into the kitchen area. A dismal amount of cupboard space joins a sink and small black fridge. It looks as if this could once have been a break room of some kind. Dircey sits at one of the two small, round tables in the room’s center while a food-warmer slowly rotates to heat something that smells of blueberries. Glowing near the light switch, the canteen’s levels dissipate the slightest bit as the machine beeps.

A girl with ice-white hair twisted into several braids across her head, with the remainder pooling down her back, rises from the other table, leaving a book, a pair of glasses, and a steaming mug behind. She cuts me off on her way to retrieve her blueberry pastry from the food-warmer.

“Morning, Ayso,” Dircey says to the girl.

Ayso gives Dircey a wave. “Morning.” Then with a small smile in my direction and a slight limp, she takes her pastry back to the table.

Dircey clears her throat, capturing my attention. She directs her hand to the empty seat beside her, at a completely different table.

A smell I can’t exactly place swirls from the steaming cup in her hand. Dircey mixes a few things into her drink and chugs it back, hacking at the taste.

“Tastes bad?” I ask, sitting across from her, trying to think of a way to broach the subject.

“This keeps me from just breathing,” Dircey says, tipping the cup toward me to display a grayish-green liquid.

“You mean…” I’m not quite sure how to ask the question. It keeps her from
just
breathing?

“Without this I’m like a shell, all motion but with nothing on the inside.”

“Oh.” Disappointment settles in. I hoped to find someone else like me among them. Someone who could feel regardless of having magic. But so far it looks like I’m the only one.

“And you sell that?”

One of her delicate brows rises. “I came up with it—I keep it,” she says.

Dircey gestures to Ayso whose attention is currently trapped by the book next to her half-eaten pastry. She’s restored the glasses to her nose. “Ayso has been growing the basole plant for some time now, so she takes it too.”

My brows furrow. “I thought that plant was deadly.”

“It is deadly,” Ayso says, speaking for the first time since I entered the break room. She pushes the thick-rimmed glasses onto her nose with her middle finger. “When ingested without being primed first, anyway. I strip it of its prime.”

“Its…prime?” I don’t remember reading about that.

“The deadly parts,” Ayso explains. “Plants have a primary element that makes them what they are. Basole is poisonous; I just help Dircey de-poison it.”

Dircey gulps down the last of the drink before tossing the cup into the garbage behind me. “Treasures aren’t meant to be shared,” she says with a wink. “And Ayso is a treasure, with the way she can work the magic out of plants. Don’t know what I’d do without her.”

Ayso ignores her praise and resumes eating her breakfast and poring over the dense book beside her bowl. I hoped to talk to these people, to see what makes them similar to me, why we can all feel. I should have known their emotions were manufactured.

Ren stops in the doorway, his hands on either side of the jamb. His mouth drops as if he wants to speak but isn’t sure what to say. It’s no wonder he’s surprised, waking up to find me gone and his prison door for the past three days suddenly open.

“Morning,” says Dircey with a grin.

“What’s going on?” he asks, stepping in. “I thought you didn’t trust me.”

“They believe us,” I say before Dircey gets a chance.

Ren rubs a hand over his chin, which prickles with several days’ growth. “Okay…” he says as if waiting for more. “Good, ‘cause I’m starving.” He struts toward the fridge and checks out its insides. Dircey gives me a shrug.

“We don’t have much,” she says to me, “but you’re welcome to it.”

“Thank you,” I say. I join my brother, taking an apple from the basket near the fridge.

At that, a child enters the room. I take a bite of my apple, its juices bursting over my tongue. No, not a child—a
nymph
. The tiny creature’s limbs aren’t short in the way that children’s are, that shows they still have room to grow. She’s full-grown, a woman in miniature. Thin wings pulse between her shoulder blades, and she walks like the sirens do, as though it’s for show and not really a necessity.

“Cadie,” says Ren in acknowledgment.

“Let you out, have they?” says the small creature. I take in her neon purple hair, remembering her telling me to wait my turn, that her ink was in short supply.

“You give the magitats,” I say stupidly. I’m not sure why, but the nymph intimidates me. Perhaps it’s her tiny size that makes her that much more of a mystery.

Ren clears his throat as if embarrassed. Dircey looks amused.

“From what I hear,” says the nymph, “you don’t need one.”

“Cadie, this is—” Ren gestures.

“Your sister. Yeah, I know, and anyone who can sneak magic back out after those vrecking claws can keep her distance from me.”

I look to Dircey for direction.

“See this finger?” says Cadie. “It can do the same things those Xians can. I don’t need any humans thinking they can subvert me.”

“Don’t mind her,” Ren says. “Cadie’s known for being touchy.”

“Only because you wouldn’t stop pestering me, Ren Csille.”

“No, I don’t want a magitat,” I tell the nymph. It’s the first time I’ve ever really talked to one beyond a simple greeting. Our neighbors, the Hollys, weren’t exactly friendly. “But I do need a way into the Triad Palace.”

The soft chatter halts almost at once. Dircey rests a palm on the table. Ayso actually glances up from her book. Though their gazes make me feel smaller, I keep going.

“There’s no way I can get in on my own. I need help. A map, anything.”

Dircey clears her throat again and juts her chin toward the door. Ayso taps her glasses higher on her nose with a middle finger before closing her book, and together she and Cadie leave us. Dircey readjusts herself so that instead of sitting, she crouches on her toes
on
the chair and interlocks her fingers.

“That’s right into the lion’s den, little sister,” she says. “I’d avoid the Triad like a disease.”

“I’m going, so if you know of some way I’d really appreciate it,” I say. “Maybe you have something like the basole plant that can make me stronger. Or that can make me turn invisible, like you did with that golden outline,” I suggest to Ren. The night Gwynn and I met him outside the ice cream shop, he shielded us from being seen by the guards on the street.

It’s about time for some lesson in magic usage, now that I have it. I missed out on so much in school while I was in teaching the newly Torrented. Tyrus used the golden outline against me the last time I saw him. Talon did it too, come to think of it, under the bleachers at my school.

“I’m not sure I can maintain it long enough to get us in there and keep us hidden,” says Ren.

I return my attention to Dircey. “Please, my friend is there. They’re going to kill him any day. It’s my fault he got caught. I promise I won’t betray any of you. But I’ve got to go. Do you have a layout of the Triad, maybe?”

“It’s not like I have blueprints lying around,” says Dircey.

“I don’t have blueprints, but I spent time as Tyrus’s guard there,” Ren says in offering. Dircey stands at this admission and leaves the two of us to ourselves.

I fight the urge to hug my brother. “Do you know where he’d be keeping a prisoner? Are there, I don’t know, dungeons?”

Ren traipses to a leather-bound notebook on top of the fridge. He tears a clear sheet of paper free and removes a pen from a drawer. Clearly he’s been here before.

“Here’s where we’ll want to enter,” he says, sketching out a rough layout.

“Wait,
we?
”

“I’m going with you.”

“No—you’re not.”

“I can guide you.”

“No way. Ren. You just got away from Tyrus.”

“Thanks to you and Haraway.” Exasperated, Ren presses a palm to the table. “You’re my sister; I can’t let you go back there without me, especially not when you’ve never even been to the Triad and I’ve lived there.”

A guide would definitely come in handy and save me from wandering around like a futz. “Fine. Walk me through the layout, at least. I need to know my way in case we get separated.”

“Agreed,” says Ren. “So, here…” He draws a crude outline of a courtyard—a small square, really, bordered by columns. “This is where Tyrus has all the new recruits brought in for extraction and training.”

“Extraction?”

“Yeah.” Ren tugs at his ear. “Once the last group of deserters got away, Tyrus quit taking chances with Prones.”

“How kind of him,” I say, biting back all the nasty things I’d like to say.

“My thoughts exactly. They go through a room here.” He draws. “And once their magic is taken, they go here to await training. Everyone else who wasn’t soldier material got carted off to the Station.”

“How do they manage with so much stolen magic? How can the Arcs control that many people, especially now?” When I saw it with Talon that first time it made me sick. The masses were shot with poison darts all at once, losing their magic in a huddle in that Station. I doubt the axrats even know the people they took magic from, and yet they have control over them.

“That much magic only makes them stronger. But Arcs have to keep their victim close by if they want to use their magic.”

“I remember that girl, Shasa, freaking out and hurrying back to Craven that night,” I say.

“It’s similar to the way we inject magic to control a device,” Ren says. “Have you operated things or filled a canteen or anything since you got your magic?”

“Not really,” I tell him. “Talon and I mostly roughed it in the woods while he taught me how to fight.”

“Well, you taught kids some of this stuff in any case,” says Ren, picking up his aud. The screen alights, and several colored squares tally along the side like bullet points. To my surprise, one of them reads Gwynn’s name.

Gwynn mentioned she and Ren were in contact before—they can’t possibly be now. Why does he still have these messages?

“It’s the same thing for Arcs,” Ren goes on, apparently not noticing that
I’ve
noticed he still has her messages on here. “In a sense, we become their devices. They use our own magic to control our actions. It won’t work as well from a distance, but that doesn’t really matter, as they can order us to follow them around.”

“That’s so twisted,” I say. “How can they tell whose is whose?”

“They can tell,” he says. “Tyrus had several of us lackeys trailing him, but for some reason he always ordered me to stay directly with him. Others can be nearby, within several hundred feet, even. It’s not like Tyrus can take all his captives with him when he travels, so he just orders them around and they have to obey whether he’s there or not.”

“Why did they let those people leave Valadir, then?” I ask.

Ren stares at the table. “It’s difficult for Arcaians to cart around so many subjugates. They may not have known how to handle the excess they’d gotten.”

I scoff, leaning back to fold my arms. “Excess. Magic can be the
only
emotion a person has access to, and Arcaians take it only to cast it off like it’s nothing.”

We sit in silence for a few moments.

“It was Gwynn,” I say. “She was the one who made Tyrus keep you around. Don’t you see? She was trying to protect you!”

“I doubt that.”

Ren claimed earlier that she changed, that she wasn’t the friend I knew. But wanting him near, that sounded like something she might do.

“So where would Talon be in relation to that entrance?” I ask, not wanting to argue with him about her. “The dungeons?”

Ren draws me a map from memory, showing me a secret passage into the dungeons and the main places we need to avoid in order to get there. I clear my throat with the smallest sound, though there’s really no need. Just something to do, some type of noise to break up the tension building through me like I’m slowly hardening into glass, waiting to be shattered.