Tether (2 page)

But Sasha was safe, back on Earth, where she belonged. He’d made her a promise, and he’d kept it. He knew it would be hard to send her home, but he couldn’t have imagined how sad and frightening it would be to watch her disappear, just vanish, like a figment of his imagination, there one minute and gone the next.

Even after all that, he couldn’t quite let her go. He kept expecting to blink and find her beside him. When this nightmare first began, he still believed he could make it back to her; he’d attempted escape twice, determined not to give up without a fight. The first time, he got as far as the prison’s
outer wall; the second, slowed by hunger and weakened by fever, he didn’t even make it out of the building.

The guards learned their lesson, and they took it out on him. He knew what would happen next. Bound and exhausted, he would die in Adastra Palace Prison; his body would be incinerated and his ashes buried in the yard with those of countless other criminals and spies, traitors and enemies. His only possible future was a mass grave.

His interrogator released him and sat back in his chair. “Tell us where the girl is, and we’ll let you live.” It was the only thing they seemed to care about. Thomas wanted to ask which girl he meant, but it didn’t matter—to the man, Sasha and Juliana were the same. Not to Thomas, though. Not to him.

The guards had been bewildered when they found him alone in the cell with a gunshot wound in his shoulder, delirious from blood loss. They’d brought in the prison doctor to patch him up, to prevent his death long enough for the queen of Farnham to order it herself. The extraction he’d hoped for had never come.

Lucas and Juliana had taken off long before the sun came up. Lucas might have hesitated, questioning the decision to leave him behind. Thomas had already begun to slip into unconsciousness, so he couldn’t be sure. But whether Lucas had been reluctant to desert him or not, the outcome was the same: his brother and his friend had left him on that cold stone floor to bleed to death.

“There’s a war on, do you know that?” the man said, softening his tone. Torture hadn’t worked, and neither had threats. Now he was trying to coax Thomas into cooperating, but that would fail, too. “You can help us end it. Tell us where to find the princess and you’ll have your freedom. Don’t you want it?”

“I don’t believe you.” Thomas’s ragged, pinched voice was foreign to him. His throat ached. The man held out his hand. There was a brief flurry of movement, and then he pressed a canteen to Thomas’s lips. The metal was cold, and Thomas could smell the cool, crisp water. His pride begged him not to drink, but his body needed it, so he did.

When he was finished, the canteen disappeared and the man leaned forward, his face only inches from Thomas’s. “Believe this: no one is coming to claim you. They’ve left you here to die. Doesn’t that make you angry, boy? Don’t you hate them for abandoning you?”

“I’m not a boy,” Thomas said in a low, dark voice. They thought he was weak, but there was power in him yet, a dangerous, animal might that was lawless and ancient. He could make them feel all the pain they’d dealt him if they only gave him half a chance. “You can’t break me. You’re wasting your time.”

The man shook his head. “I have all the time in the world. You’re the one who’s running out. Make no mistake: if you don’t tell us what we want to know, we will kill you.”

“Then do it already! I have nothing to say.” The man was right about one thing—Thomas was angry. He’d lost more than they would ever know. But they couldn’t make him a traitor. He’d sworn an oath, and he wouldn’t betray it, not even to save his own life.

“Come on,” the man said to the guards, rising. “Let’s leave him to contemplate his mortality.”

And then Thomas was alone with nothing but his thoughts, and his pain, and the clock that ticked away the last moments of his life.

Eleven hours and twenty-four minutes left.

When the time came, they were quick about it. Thomas’s muscles shook with the effort it took to stand. They shuffled him out of the cell and down a series of concrete hallways until they reached a large, empty yard of packed dirt where no weed or blade of grass dared grow. He’d spent so long in near darkness the light from the sun hurt his eyes, but he forced himself to keep them open, to adjust enough to look at the sky. It was bright blue and streaked with clouds, so normal in spite of everything.

He licked his lips and tasted blood. There was a lump the size of a rock in his throat; he swallowed against it and struggled to breathe his last breaths with whatever dignity he still possessed. The world began to waver before his eyes. He was so, so tired. The men and women on the firing squad were wearing masks, so he couldn’t see their faces. He didn’t wonder if they were good shots. They wouldn’t be there if they weren’t. A guard blindfolded him and asked if he had any last words.

“Aim high,” Thomas said. He’d never needed to hide behind bravado before, but now he was really afraid. It was a fear that lived in a deep, unknowable corner of his heart, cowering like a scorpion beneath a rock and waiting for the darkest moment to strike. Its venom spread through him like a shock of cold water. His fingers curled up instinctively, as if someone had taken his hand. He closed his eyes, imagining Sasha’s head on his shoulder, her hair soft against his neck, and his own voice came back to him on a tide of memory:
Whatever happens, this has been the best night of my entire life.
He’d meant it when he said it, but he hadn’t known how true it was until now.

Thomas braced himself as the gunmen raised their weapons. He heard the shots, but he felt no pain. Was this really what it was like to die? But he wasn’t dead, he realized after
a few jagged heartbeats. They had fired, but not at
him.
His legs buckled, and he fell to his knees. Someone removed his blindfold, and he squinted up at the figure standing over him as hands freed him from his shackles. A familiar voice spoke his name.

“You’re all right.” It was Adele. She was a friend of his from a long time ago, back when he was at the Academy. She put a gentle hand on his shoulder, and he winced; the bullet wound wasn’t quite healed. She helped him to his feet, and he glanced around the yard. Bodies littered the ground; all his guards were dead. He felt nothing but relief, and he wondered if something in him
had
died after all.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“You’re being extracted,” Adele said, indicating the rest of the rescue team. He recognized some of their faces: Sergei and Cora, Navin and Tim. Adele gave him a tentative smile and added, “Obviously.”

He choked out a laugh. He had no idea what had possessed his father to dispatch a rescue squad, but he was grateful the General had thought to send his friends. Grateful—and a little bit suspicious. Adele murmured something into her comm and then turned back to Thomas. “Can you walk?”

He nodded. “What are you doing here, Adele?” The last time he’d seen them was when he graduated from the Academy; they’d still been recruits then. He hadn’t spoken to any of them in over a year, not even Adele. He considered once again the possibility that he had died or was hallucinating. None of this felt real.

“It’s Agent Nguyen now.” She clutched a black mask in her hand. “I’m here because I asked to be. Let’s get out of here. I figure we have about three minutes before someone realizes what happened, and it’s a long way back to the Labyrinth.”

The Labyrinth was a military compound that housed the training academy of the King’s Elite Service. Thomas couldn’t think of a single reason why Adele would be taking him there. “The Labyrinth?”

“That’s right,” she said. “The General wants to see you.”

the door. Selene’s heartbeat quickened, but she didn’t know whether that was due to the person whose appearance she anticipated or to the news she suspected he bore. In any case, she was pleased. Leonid was the only person at Home she was interested in these days. He strode into the room full of purpose, caught the widening of her eyes, and smiled. Her pulse thumped in her throat. He had it: the final piece of Terminus, the machine that would save them all.

She’d never doubted he could do it. Some of the older Learners had objected when she’d chosen Leonid, but she’d ignored them. She’d known from the moment she met him that he was the only Learner who would be able to help her decipher the prophecies of Kairos. It had nothing to do with experience or intelligence; it was his intuition that set him apart, and his open mind, unusual for a Learner. Leonid understood the nuances of Kairos almost as well as Selene did. She was lucky to have him, for that reason and so many others. Leonid was her confidant, her companion, her partner. There was so much she had to do alone, but what she could share, she shared with him.

“What does it say?” she asked.

“I don’t know, exactly,” he said, thrusting a piece of paper into her hand. “I believe that’s your job.”

She tried to hide a smile. She wasn’t supposed to have favorites, but he had to know she liked him best. Perhaps
more
than liked him.
But she knew the dangers of being distracted from her goal, and her personal affections could not get in the way of her world’s future. She unfolded the paper and turned away.

“Do you know what it means?” he asked impatiently. She liked Leonid’s eagerness to get to the truth. He wouldn’t eat or sleep or speak to anyone when he was working on a prophecy, not until he’d cracked it. It was a difficult job. Kairos was an encrypted text that required intense analysis and mathematics to read, only to yield inscrutable prophecies. Decrypting Kairos was the duty of a Learner; interpreting the prophecies was the duty of the oracle, the Korydallos
—
Selene’s duty. One that meant the difference between the continuation of life in their world and its end.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I think I do.”

Her long white skirt swished around her ankles as she entered the chamber. It annoyed her that Leonid wasn’t by her side; no one below Second Tier was allowed in the Tetractys assembly room, and as a young Learner, Leonid was stalled at Third Tier. She wanted him there, if only to lend strength to her case. The Tetractys would balk at her request. They didn’t send anyone into the other world haphazardly.

The Tetractys sat at a large triangular table. Erastos, its highest-ranking member, eyed her with growing curiosity. He was a small man, old-fashioned and infuriatingly out of touch. Selene didn’t like him. He never smiled, and he was suspicious of all Listeners, so he didn’t much like her, either. But as the two most important people in Apeiron, they were forced to tolerate each other. Sometimes it was all Selene could do to remain civil.

She stared them down. To show fear or apprehension—or worse, doubt—before the Tetractys was to undermine the power of her position. On her deathbed, Corinna, the previous Korydallos, had warned Selene that the Tetractys would make her fight for every prophecy, force her to argue her case before acting upon anything she divined.

“It is their way,” Corinna had said. Selene, only thirteen years old at the time, had been so afraid of her new responsibilities that she was visibly shaking. It had taken longer than she was willing to admit for that fear to go away. “They must question you, because an oracle is a powerful thing. The people revere the Korydallos; they fear the Tetractys. The Korydallos is spirit; the Tetractys is law. There must be balance. It is the only way to prevent chaos.”

“Korydallos,” Erastos said now. “It has been many months since you graced this room with your presence. I can only assume you come bearing a prophecy.”

“I do,” Selene said. “I’ve come to tell you three things. First, that my Learner and I have decrypted Kairos’s last prophecy. There will be no others.”

Erastos raised his eyebrows in surprise. Kairos was a mystery even to the Tetractys. Selene and Leonid alone knew how much of the text had been solved over the centuries. Selene had always known she would be the last Korydallos and that they would finish decrypting Kairos in her lifetime, but she hadn’t expected the end to come so soon. Nevertheless, she was relieved. The new world was almost upon them. When it came, perhaps things would be different. Perhaps she would be allowed her own happiness. She wished again that Leonid were with her but pushed the thought aside.