surrounded herself with the fragments of the hunter’s star, a dozen or so, none of them larger than her thumbnail. Each followed its own slow orbit about her, collectively weaving a glowing cocoon, their light sending myriad faint shadows sliding across rock and ice. As she led them further from the Tainted’s ground and the caverns grew lighter she directed the stars into her pocket, not wanting to signal her approach to any of Pome’s faction.
Zeen followed close on her heels. After his purging he had hugged her like a much younger child and had not wanted to let go. Yaz had held him just as tight as though he were an anchor to her old life and somehow together they might follow the chain back to better days. At last she had had to pull away from him and explain that they needed to hurry and to keep silent.
Yaz took them through the outer fringes of the Broken’s caverns where the air grew colder, the ceilings lower, and the stars fewer in number. She wasn’t sure how much Zeen remembered or if he fully understood where they were. She hoped that his experiences remained a bad dream and that his youth would help him shrug them off. But Mother Mazai had always said that the hurts done to us as children cast shadows as long as our lives.
The outer chambers proved echoingly empty—no distant sounds of combat, no bodies, blood, or discarded weapons. Moving through them Yaz could imagine that she was the first to have ever come here, and that when she had moved on it would be as if she had never been. An unearthly beauty haunted these places, these dark, star-speckled voids miles deep beneath the ice. On their own slow timescale they were as fleeting as bubbles in water. Something about the majesty of them encouraged silence.
“Where are we going?” Thurin asked.
“To the city.” Yaz smiled. It was the first bit of curiosity he’d shown since they set off. She’d wondered if he were too afraid to ask about their friends in case she told him they were dead. No doubt the vision of Petrick falling from the bridge still haunted him. “We’re going to escape with the iron collection. Quell and Maya are gathering what we’ll need for our journey on the ice.”
Thurin stayed silent at that. He’d never been out in the wind before, up there, beneath the open sky, never seen the sun or the true stars. Yaz supposed that in its way the prospect was as daunting to him as being thrown into the Pit of the Missing had been to her. Part of her wanted him to ask about Quina but he didn’t.
“Maya?” Kao rumbled. They had crossed a wide chamber in the time it had taken the name to sink through whatever introspection was tying up his thoughts. “Maya, trying to scavenge while there’s a war going on down here? She’s too little. She’s just a—”
“She’s deadly,” Yaz said. “An Axit spy here to steal the priests’ secrets. She was the one that rescued me and the others from the black ice. Worry about yourself. That one will outlast all of us down here.”
She led them on through the frozen chambers and they asked no more questions.
* * *
“STOP.” ERRIS CAUGHT her shoulder. They weren’t far from the city now, crossing a freezing, low-roofed chamber reachable only through worm tunnels twisted and squeezed by the flow of the ice. A handful of small stars and a band of glowing dust provided faint illumination. Close at hand a small clutch of red-ball fungi clung to the rock, where they looked to be losing the struggle to prove that life will find a way.
“What is it?” Yaz asked.
“Listen.”
She heard it then, in between the creaking of the ice. A faint noise, hard to make out, attenuated as if it were reaching them from some distance.
Zeen showed his first interest in proceedings, pointing at one of the tunnel mouths. “It’s coming from there.”
“Sounds like sobbing,” Kao said.
Yaz pursed her lips. She wanted to get to the city. She didn’t know how long they had before the collection was due but knew that it couldn’t