I kneel beside Drev and speak to him in Ostium. He flinches at my proximity, then steadies himself and listens. When I finish, he nods slowly.
"He will take us inside," I say. "He says the main shaft is just beyond the entrance."
Drev rises on unsteady legs. One of the medics reaches for him, but he waves the help away with the fragile dignity of a male who has had enough of being handled. He leads us toward the facility's reinforced entrance, the one carved directly into the rock face.
The interior is dim and oppressively hot. The corridor is wide enough for equipment to pass through – carts on rails, hauling machinery – and the walls are rough-hewn stone, functional and ugly. The air smells of dust and something mineral andsharp. Emergency lighting still flickers along the ceiling, casting everything in a sickly amber glow.
Drev speaks as he walks, his voice echoing off the stone. I translate for the others.
"There were nearly forty of them at the beginning," I say. "They worked in shifts. Around the clock. The overseers did not care about safety. They experienced cave-ins, toxic dust, and equipment failures. Many were worked until they collapsed, and injuries were not treated. There were a lot of deaths."
The tunnel opens into a wider chamber. Mining equipment lines the walls, abandoned mid-operation. Carts sit on their rails, still half-loaded with rubble. Everything is coated in a fine brown dust.
Drev crosses to the far wall, where the rock has been cut away in deep, ragged gouges. He places his hand on the exposed stone and says a single word.
"Velith."
I step closer. The flickering light plays across the seam he is touching, and I see a vein of mineral running through the dark volcanic rock like a river of trapped light. Golden brown. The light catches inside the vein of rock, rippling through the stone in slow, striated bands. It holds the faintest glow, the way only one substance I have ever known can do.
My hand goes to my throat.
"That is not velith," I say, and my voice sounds as if it is coming from very far away. "That is sunstone."
L'Zaen makes a sound behind me.
"Sunstone," I repeat, and I cannot stop staring at it. The vein runs deep into the rock, branching and threading through the stone in delicate fractures, and it is beautiful. Of course it is beautiful. My people have always thought so. We carved it into jewelry and sacred objects. My grandmother wore sunstone beads threaded into her braids. The community center atBrishar has sunstone inlaid in its door. We used it as fuel in ancient times, before we developed solar energy. We'd advanced beyond the need for it. Left it in the ground and forgot it was valuable for anything other than beauty.
"A'Vanti." L'Zaen's voice is careful. "We need to tell you something."
I turn to face him. His expression tells me everything, but I let him speak anyway.
"Queen Ameela has been in contact with our leadership since the early days of her regime. After Diamalla fell, Ameela's people began uncovering the full scope of her mother's operations. It has been far more extensive than anyone realized." He pauses. "Ameela's investigators found a massive stockpile of ships and weapons. An armada on a scale we had never imagined. All of it hidden in fortified installations across their planet."
"And it is powered by sunstone," I say. It is not a question.
"The Ostium call it velith," L'Zaen says. "And yes. It is the key component in a new generation of weapons and propulsion systems. Refined using Ostium technology, it becomes extraordinarily powerful." He holds my gaze. "Ceraste sits on one of the largest known deposits in the galaxy. Diamalla did not poison our world simply to eliminate our species. She did it for access. She killed almost all of our people so she could mine our planet without resistance once she realized that her Regina pheromone had no effect on our people."
The chamber tilts around me. I press my hand flat on the rock wall to steady myself, and my palm lands directly on the vein of sunstone. It is cool beneath my fingers.
I have always understood that Diamalla was a monster. I have lived with the consequences of her cruelty branded into my body and my memory. But this – this is a new depth of horror.
She destroyed us for the pretty golden mineral my grandmother threaded into her braids.
She exterminated an entire civilization so she could dig holes in our ground.
"That's…" Cody's voice cracks beside me, and I hear the rage beneath it, molten and barely contained. "That's what this was about? A mining operation? She killed millions of people for?—"
"For power," D'Rett says. His voice is rough. "With enough of it, Diamalla was building a fleet capable of dominating not only the Ostium home system, but far beyond it."
I stare at the sunstone in the wall. At the gouges where it has been torn from the rock. At the half-loaded carts and the abandoned tools and the dust that coats everything in this place where my people's heritage was ripped from the earth by pheromone-bound slaves.
"We never knew," I whisper. "We were sitting on top of the most valuable resource in the galaxy, and we used it to make necklaces."
No one speaks. There is nothing to say.
I pull my hand from the wall and look at my palm. Golden dust clings to my fingers, glittering faintly in the dim light. I stare at it for a long moment, then close my fist.
"I have seen enough," I say. "Let us go back outside."
