She followed Shy into the stairwell and up the steps, heart hammering. At the top was a balcony level overlooking the room through the arch. There were no torches — not even sconces. The four-person wide walkway traced a half-circle around the view, and the only thing standing between Tayel and a story drop was a navel-high wall.
Shy chopped the air with her hand — the signal to move — and Tayel crawled across the path. She shuffled into cover next to a polymer crate filled with silver spheres, and peeked around its edge. The guards escorting Jace stood at the end of the walkway to the right, their eyes fixated on the scene below.
Tayel followed their gaze to the recruits gathered in the center of the room. Most of their heads turned to the ornate podium — away from the balcony overlook — but those who looked around wore frightened faces, staring every direction as if expecting to be jumped. Fifteen, maybe twenty figures stood in the shadows along the sides of the chamber, silver spheres strapped into their belts and glowing softly in the darkness. Tayel frowned.
The same objects filled the crate beside her. She sat up a bit with the tips of her toes to get a better look, but a single box placed atop the half open lid caught her eye. One lone silver sphere rested inside. She plucked it out of its casing, and knelt back into the shadow of the crate. The ring of aether around the sphere’s circumference glowed a richer hue of blue than the ones belonging to the figures below. She rubbed her thumb over its smooth, icy surface.
Shy turned her attention to it and eased it out of Tayel’s hands. “Careful.”
“It’s a cryonade, right?”
“A class four cryonade.” Shy indicated the four black bars painted like a little war medal in the middle, and placed the sphere safely in a pouch on her tool belt. She peeked over the wall. “But theirs don’t look as high caliber.”
Tayel peered around the crate again. Jace wiggled between his two guards, eyes wild with fear. She could hardly stand to wait any longer; whatever was about to happen to those refugees would just have to work as a distraction.
“Good evening, valued recruits.”
Tayel followed the voice to the Argel woman stepping up to the podium. Her yellow feathers, curved orange beak, and sharp eyes felt familiar, like seeing an old acquaintance after years apart.
“Welcome to your initiation,” the woman continued.
Tayel gaped, remembering the voice from election ads and speeches. “That’s the Delta council representative.”
Shy narrowed her eyes — a warning to stop talking.
The councilwoman raised her talon, and her claws siphoned ethereal darkness out of thin air. Tayel’s shoulders tensed. It looked like aether, but dark aether. Not lightning or fire or ice — just darkness.
The recruits shuffled, some murmuring, some looking back to the exit.
Tayel focused on the trails of black and purple winding through the woman’s talons. It looked like the same substance that made up the portals on Delta. Like the one she encountered at Sif field. Like the ones dumping the people who killed her mom into the streets.
The Argel waved her talon, and the archway filled with inky blackness. The refugees snapped into a fervor of yells and pounding feet, their attempts at breaking free proving the darkness filling the archway to be a wall. The shadowed figures at the edges of the room flung their cryonades at the hoard. Tayel lurched into a shivering fit as the room exploded into a winter storm. A thin layer of ice covered the floor and walls, and the recruits stood frozen, each body coated in a frosty white veil.
Tayel found Jace at the end of the path, his eyes wide and beak ajar. “Shy,” she hissed.
“Wait,” Shy said.
“Please.”
“I need to know what they’re doing first.”
The figures moved out of their shadows and into the center of the room, withdrawing what looked like needleguns from their equipment. They glided between refugees, whose cries were muffled by the ice over their mouths. A figure grabbed a too-young girl with short black hair and drove the needle into the base of her neck before pulling the injection trigger. Tayel ducked behind the wall and clapped her hand over her mouth.
She fought down nausea. It wasn’t the cryonades, or even the needleguns and whatever substance they delivered. It was that this was all bigger than she could possibly comprehend. It was that she’d watched countless groups of refugees leave the camp as recruits, envying them. They all had family or friends cheering them on, expecting them to come back war heroes, but they were being subjected to this by the very people who they signed up to fight against. It was horrible. Too much.
“Alhyt, save us.” Shy hadn’t stopped watching.
“No,” Jace squawked. “Please let me go! Please!”
He pulled back against the guards, but the force he exerted was so weak they didn’t even need to budge to hold him in place. A desperate cry escaped him, and fire ignited at the tips of his talons. He thrashed back and forth, the aether building in his grasp before it dwindled. He sagged forward. Tayel grimaced. She put him here. This was her fault.
The room darkened. It hadn’t held much light before — only some from the torches below — but now it was close to pitch black. The figures retreated from the center of the room, leaving only the frozen refugees, blood dribbling from some of their necks. It was a horror scene Tayel couldn’t look away from.
The councilwoman set a glass canister atop the podium and disengaged the lock on the lid. It hissed open, and a glob of black and purple ethereal liquid writhed inside. She held her talon open and lifted the liquid from the canister as if by invisible threads. It floated for a moment under her claws, and then through the air until centered above the refugees. Tayel wanted to do something — to stop whatever was happening — but she could barely manage to keep breathing.
The woman hung her head, eyes closed. The ethereal ball exploded into a dozens of black tendrils that shot out and pierced the neck of every recruit on the floor below, spiraling into whatever the shadowed figures had put there. The refugees screamed, and even muffled by ice, the sound grew, a haunting cry that rose acid to the back of Tayel’s throat.
She ducked behind the wall and pasted her back to the crate. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, her lungs refusing to hold much more than a half-second’s worth of breath. Her hands felt suddenly numb, even though she could see them shaking. Her breath hitched. She couldn’t be captured. Whatever was happening to those recruits, it could never happen to her. The screams brought her back to Delta. To her mom falling through a hole in the sky.
Shy knelt down. “We need to — Tayel?”
Tayel squeezed her eyes shut, but she still saw debris raining from Median Sector roadways, and raiders hurling her neighbors over the barriers. She saw portals opening all around her as she ran through Deltic City’s streets, silhouetted figures reaching out to grab her from within them.
A pair of hands clasped her wrists, and her eyes shot open. Shy stared back, eyes cold and hard even though she was breathing just as fast as Tayel.
“You with me?” Her warm fingers slipped away, and she unstrapped the FTL drive from her back. She stashed it between the cryonade cases. “If you’re going to save your friend, now’s the time. We have to take his guards together, understand?”
Tayel nodded once.
“Good.” Shy slid the enormous wrench off her tool belt — the one she’d used before — and handed it over. “Let’s hurry.”