“That’s the thing, Sonara,” Karr said. “It didn’t feel likeyourmemory at all.” He swallowed. “It felt like…” He closed his eyes, pressing his hand to the gash on his head, like he was trying to think past the pain of it. “I keep trying to hold onto it, to understand the truth, but whenever it comes close I feel like it falls through my fingertips. And there’s another thing. The Child of Starlight kept talking about the darkness, about the ship. She said that the darkness has returned. And this time, it will be the verylast timeto stop it.”
“But we did,” Sonara said. “We shut down the system. The prisoners should have been freed from it.”
“They weren’t,” Jaxon said.
Sonara turned to find him standing there, his hands clasped in front of him as he lifted his stubbled chin and glanced at the Bloodhorns. The valley in their center, where he’d lost his freedom.
“What do you mean?” Sonara asked.
Jaxon sighed and ran a shaky hand across the back of his neck, wincing as he did so. “After you freed me, I landed Razor on the mountainside and waited, hoping you’d come back out of that ship again… hell, I even prayed. The light-wall fell, your pod crashed, and I came to you as quick as I could, once I discovered they weren’t going to come find you in the wreckage. And… well, the prisoners aren’t caged anymore, Sonara. But they’renotrunning free.”
“Why?” Sonara asked, but she could already sense the tension in Jaxon’s aura.
The shift in him, as his hand grazed those awful marks on his neck.
“The mites are still controlling them,” he said. “And now they’re so far inside the mountain, I’m afraid if they keep going… it might already be too late.”
Karr cursed, and spat in the sand. He pressed at his forehead, squeezing the spot between his eyes like he was trying to see through a heavy haze. “Somehow, Cade must have anticipated it. Planned for it to happen. Or maybe Geisinger did.”
“A second plan,” Markam said, coming up from behind them, his hat in his hands, duster waving behind him as he helped Azariah keep her balance. She smiled at Sonara, who nodded her chin in greeting. “Every good Trickster prepares for it.”
“Room for error,” Sonara said, thinking of all the times their missions had gone south, and they’d had backup routes ready in order to still complete them. “Perhaps he has a second power source somewhere?”
Karr shook his head. “No, he wouldn’t have. There’s no other place for it on the ship… power that deep would fry the engines,screw with the cooling systems… it had to have been the atlas orb.”
“So what, then?” Sonara asked. “Where is it?” Karr closed his eyes. “I don’t know.”
Sonara felt it, then.
A little tremble from her curse, like a warning message of a weapon readying itself to inflict a wound.
She spun around, searching for the source, but saw nothing at all. “Sonara?” Jaxon asked.
And then her curse took flight, sprouting those little shadow wings and soaring away like a bird. Sonara yelped as it carried her vision with it, like a message was calling. Like her curse was going to be the thing that answered it.
Across the desert her curse soared, sucking in the scent of the bones and beasts buried beneath the sand, theirclever, cleverminds andpinchers sharp as double-edged knives.It spiraled through the beamed entrance to Miner’s Hope, delving into the darkness of the Bloodhorns tunnels.
Hunger,Sonara sensed, coming from a beast chomping on the entrails of an unlucky victim.Exhaustion,from another as it hissed and curled up in a cold, empty skull for a long sleep.
Her curse moved, flipping and twisting, bounding off the walls where it chomped on history after history, all the people who’d bled and died and cut into the rock as they fought for the gold and glory the Bloodhorns held within. It soared until it reached their outlaw cave, where Sonara sensed the red door. Shesawit, like she was seeing through her curse’s eyes, the tether stretching further than it had ever stretched before.
Sonara’s curse inched closer, slowing to peer at the symbols etched on the stone.
It sidled up against them.
Felt the pulse. Sensed the surge of power.
A beating drum, an ever-present rhythm from the other side of the red door. The salty aura offear, flighty and breathless,came with each pulse. As if something alive were hiding within.
Save me,Sonara heard.
That same whisper, the one that had followed her all of her Shadowblood days, was speaking, and whether it was inside of her mind, or coming form the other side of the door…
Sonara did not know.
“We have to go to it,” she whispered.
“Go to what?” Markam asked, as Sonara’s curse snapped back towards her in an instant, until she was staring back at her crew, wide-eyed.
