Flashtide by Jenny Moyer

Author:Jenny Moyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

NINETEEN

7.2 km from flash curtain

“MEREDITH,” VAL SAYS, “may I present Orion Denman, your newest Delver.”

An older woman turns, and color drains from her face. “You’ll have to forgive me,” she murmurs, shaking her head. “It’s just that … I feel I’ve stepped through time. Ferrin was your age when she came to us. You look just like her.”

The white-haired man at her side steps forward, scrutinizing my features. “You’re indeed Ferrin’s daughter,” he says. “You have her features.”

I like to think I have her heart or her courage.

They stand before a wall of ports, each marked by a tiled pathway etched with a number. Meredith stands atop a chipped 3 carved into the stone.

“This was your mother’s tunnel.” Her words pierce me, like a knife slipped past my armor.

“My mother mined the Barrier Range,” I say. “Seven was her tunnel.”

“Before that. Before she was sent to Outpost Five. She grew up here, in the Overburden.”

Mom is preserved in my mind in hazy, light-filled images, snippets of memories that are painted with feeling more than visual representations. Her smile, the way her hand felt on my cheek, and now—like it’s been summoned by Meredith’s words—a sort of lost look in her eyes, when she’d stare toward the curtain. But now I know—she wasn’t looking for the curtain at all. She was trying to see her home. The Overburden.

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

“Because it’s a dangerous thing to know. Her silence kept you safe, Orion.”

“I’m not sure that lies keep anyone safe.”

“No, but they keep people alive. And in a world like ours, that’s often the best one can hope for.” She ushers me into the port and a cage-like door slides behind us. It descends, and scents of earth and musty air rush up around us.

“Why did she leave?” I ask.

“Our system is a careful construction of roles and boundaries. One must adhere to them, or we are no longer effective. She could not comply.”

She could not comply.

I picture Mom dressed as I am now, the Congress’s Delver. Noncompliant. I feel like I’m retracing her steps and it’s bringing her back to life, a moment at a time.

“Your mother is a bit of a legend. She was the best Prime Delver we’ve ever had. I’m hoping you possess her same skill.”

“She died before she could teach me to mine.”

Meredith cocks her head and studies me. “Biology is an interesting thing,” she murmurs. “I’m hoping you’ve inherited your mother’s … instincts. Things she understood that no one ever taught her.”

“I won Fortune because I captured a gull and followed it out of the cavern. I tracked moles to the soil. I cheated.”

Meredith nods. “That’s precisely what I’m talking about.”

The port groans to a halt, the sound echoing in the cavernous depths. She lifts her chain of office before a sensor and the metal bars pull away to reveal the yawning maw of a tunnel. Bare bulbs flicker from the rock ceiling.

“The Congress is busy finding ways to survive in a world with flash curtains.

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