The deserter will be dead before dawn.
His tracks zigzag like a struck deer’s in the dust of Serra’s
catacombs. The tunnels have done him in. The hot air is too heavy down
here, the smells of death and rot too close.
The tracks are more than an hour old by the time I see them. The guards
have his scent now, poor bastard. If he’s lucky, he’ll die in the chase. If
not . . .
Don’t think about it. Hide the backpack. Get out of here.
Skulls crunch as I shove a pack loaded with food and water into a wall
crypt. Helene would give me hell if she could see how I’m treating the
dead. But then, if Helene finds out why I’m down here in the first place,
desecration will be the least of her complaints.
She won’t find out. Not until it’s too late. Guilt pricks at me, but I shove
it away. Helene’s the stro ngest person I know. She’ll be fine without me.
For what feels like the hundredth time, I look over my shoulder. The
tunnel is quiet. The deserter led the soldiers in the opposite direction. But
safety’s an illusion I know never to trust. I work quickly, piling bones back
in front of the crypt to cover my trail, my senses primed for anything out of
the ordinary.
One more day of this. One more day of paranoia and hiding and lying.
One day until graduation. Then I’ll be free.
As I rearrange the crypt’s skulls , the hot air shifts like a bear waking
from hibernation. The smells of grass and snow cut through the fetid breath
of the tunnel. Two seconds is all I have to st ep away from the crypt and
kneel, examining the ground as if there might be tracks here. Then she is at
my back.
“Elias? What are you doing down here?”
“Didn’t you hear? There’s a deserter loose.” I ke ep my attention fixed on
the dusty floor. Beneath the silver mask that covers me from forehead to
jaw, my face should be unreadable. But Helene Aquil la and I have been
together nearly every day of the fourteen years we’ve been training at
Blackcliff Military Academy; she can probably hear me thinking.
She comes around me silently, and I look up into her eyes, as blue and
pale as the warm waters of the southern islands. My mask sits atop my face,
s eparate and foreign, hiding my features as well as my emotions. But Hel’s
mask clings to her like a silvery second skin, and I can see the slight furrow
in her brow as she looks down at me. Relax, Elias, I tell myself. You’re just
looking for a deserter.
“He didn’t come this way,” Hel says. She runs a hand over her hair,
braided, as always, into a tight, silver - blonde crown. “Dex took an auxiliary
company off the north watchtower and into the East Branch tunnel. You
think they’ll catch him?”
Aux soldiers, though not as highly trained as legionnaires and nothing
compared to Masks, are still merciless hunters. “Of course they’ll catch
him.” I fail to ke ep the bitterness out of my voice, and Helene gives me a
hard l ook. “The cowardly scum,” I add. “Anyway, why are you awake? You
weren’t on watch this morning.” I made sure of it.
“Those bleeding drums.” Helene looks around the tunnel. “Woke
everyone up.”
The drums. Of course. Deserter, they’d thundered in the middle of the
graveyard watch. All active units to the walls. Helene must have decided to
join the hunt. Dex, my lieutenant, would have told her which direction I’d
gone. He’d have thought nothing of it.
“I thought the deserter might have come this way.” I turn from my
hidden pack to look down another tunnel. “Guess I was wrong. I should
catch up to Dex.”
“Much as I hate to admit it, you’re not usually wrong.” Helene cocks her
head and smiles at me. I feel that guilt again, wrenching as a fist to the gut.
She’ll be furio us when she learns what I’ve done. She’ll never forgive me.
Doesn’t matter. You’ve decided. Can’t turn back now.
Hel traces the dust on the ground with a fair, practiced hand. “I’ve never
even seen this tunnel before.”
A drop of sweat crawls down my neck. I ignore it.
“It’s hot, and it reeks,” I say. “Like everything else down here.” Come
on, I want to add. But doing so would be like tattooing “I am up to no
good” on my forehead. I ke ep quiet and lean against the catacomb wall,
arms crossed.
The field of ba ttle is my temple. I mentally chant a saying my
grandfather taught me the day he met me, when I was six. He insists it
sharpens the mind the way a whetstone sharpens a blade. The swordpoint is
my priest. The dance of death is my prayer. The killing blow is my release.
Helene peers at my blurred tracks, following them, somehow, to the
crypt where I stowed my pack, to the skulls piled there. She’s suspicious,
and the air between us is suddenly tense.
Damn it.
I need to distract her. As she looks between me an d the crypt, I run my
gaze lazily down her body. She stands two inches shy of six feet — a halffoot shorter than
me. She’s the only female student at Blackcliff; in the
black, close - fitting fatigues all students wear, her strong, slender form has
always drawn admiring glances. Just not mine. We’ve been friends too long
for that.
Come on, notice. Notice me leering and get mad about it.
When I meet her eyes, brazen as a sailor fresh into port, she opens her
mouth, as if to rip into me. Then she looks back at th e crypt.
If she sees the pack and guesses what I’m up to, I’m done for. She might
hate doing it, but Empire law would demand she r eport me, and Helene’s
never broken a law in her life.
“Elias — ”
I pr epare my lie. Just wanted to get away for a couple of days, Hel.
Needed some time to think. Didn’t want to worry you.
BOOM - BOOM - boom - BOOM.
The drums.
Without thought, I translate the disparate beats into the message they are
meant to convey. Deserter caught. All students r eport to central courtyard
immediately.
My stomach sinks. Some naïve part of me hoped the deserter would at
least make it out of the city. “That didn’t take long,” I say. “We should go.”
I make for the main tunnel. Helene follows, as I knew she would. She
would stab herself in the eye before she disobeyed a direct order. Helene is
a true Martial, more loyal to the Empire than to her own mother. Like any
good Mask - in - training, she takes Blackcliff’s motto to heart: Duty first,
unto death.
I wonder what she would say if she knew what I’d really been doing in
the tunnels.
I wonder how she’d feel about my hatred for the Empire.
I wonder what she would do if she found out her best friend is planning
to desert.