“We’re here.”
Samson stopped, and the sound of 180 boots stopped with him.
They stood on a ridge that looked down into a snow-carpeted valley. An eerie stillness swallowed all sound. There was neither the whispered scuttle of animals nor the sweet lilt of birdsong.
“I’m detecting no movements.” A Cyleoni soldier peered into the valley with his radar. “No heat signatures either. This is it. The tunnel entrance is just below this ridge.”
Samson turned to Jaya as she began to set up her board. It had taken three soldiers to haul up her panel, another ten to guide the hovercrates of metal lotuses. As soon as they lined up her crates, she flew forward, a flurry of hums and chirps as she deactivated the hover sensors and began to magnetize the sand.
“How long do you need?”
“Seven hours.” She did not look up as she warmed up her panel. “You should get moving. No, put thatthere, you idiot. And you, get your grimy little hands off the lotuses. They’re fragile. Mother’s Gold.What did I just say—”
Akaros drew up beside him as the soldiers scuttled under Jaya’s instructions. “Time to get moving, Haku.”
Samson froze. He had not heard that name in a long time, and hearing it now brought back memories of the Arohassin, the few joyous ones with Yassen as they discarded their old identities for something stronger, meaner—but mostly, he remembered the pain. Akaros smiled, and Samson hated how his old master could still conjure fear within him, all these suns after.
He brushed past Akaros to gather his soldiers. He saw his own exhaustion reflected in their faces. They had marched for two days now, camping during the day and moving in the night, guided only by a partial moon and their headgear lights, eating stale rotis and hard strips of salted meat.
Once more into the storm, he thought. It was a part of a Sesharian poem, one whose name he could not remember. He gripped the hilt of his urumi and called to his men.
Fight, fight, for the lives of the sea depend on you now.
The entrance led them to old, abandoned tunnels of a pit that had run dry. Patrols rarely ventured down here, but even so, Samson rested his fingeron the trigger. Tremors vibrated through the tunnels, shaking loose dirt. With each one, his shoulders tightened, his heart ratcheting up a degree. Even now, in the cold dead of winter, the Jantari were mining. The hours inched by, torturous, as they neared the main chamber that adjoined the old tunnels to the new pit. The air grew thick, musty. Despite his mouth filter, Samson could taste its rank staleness in the back of his throat. He crept forward, pulse gun raised, silencer on, as Chandi brought up his right. Their squads followed.
“Approaching Mine One,” Jaya said, her voice tinny and warped in his comms unit. “Arrival in thirty minutes.”
“We’ll be in position by then,” Samson said as they finally reached the fork.
He nodded at Chandi. She paused for a beat, and he felt the unsaid desperation in her stare, the awkward tension between them both, before she rapped her chest in salute. Stiffly, she broke off toward the right with her squad. The rustle of their footsteps soon disappeared.
Akino crept forward, taking the lead with his two men. They ventured down the left tunnel, and after a few moments, Samson and the remaining men followed.
The tunnel began to squeeze in toward the end, the walls crushing down with the weight of the mountains above. Samson swallowed. His arm brushed against the wall, and he jerked away. The wall gave a wet pop, as if the earth wanted to suck him in.
“You all right?” Akino called.
Samson nodded fiercely, blinking sweat from his eyes.Like clockwork, he thought.In and out. In and out.
After what felt like hours, but was only twenty minutes, they reached a turn. The tunnel forked into three separate chambers. Akino consulted the holomap, its pale blue light washing out his features.
“This is it,” he said.
Quickly, quietly, they pressed the explosives against the walls, tucking them in the depressions of shadows. Samson took a step back, assessing. Heat teased down his chest to his fingertips as his Agni stirred with his intent.
Burn, it crooned.
“Go,” he commanded. His men hurried down the second tunnel as hestood in the entrance. On his right, he could see the slot where the fire wall lay hidden. The explosives blinked to life.
“Thirty seconds,” Akino warbled through the comms.
Samson took a steadying breath, exhaling his vicious tangle of fear and dread. He thought not of the closed, cramped walls of the tunnel, or of the tons of earth bearing down above his head, but of his Agni. It lay waiting, simmering, a blue warmth that bloomed through his nadis and up into his chest and throat. He opened his eyes just a fraction before the explosives were set off.
Flames roared forward, a growling, thunderous force. Samson whipped his urumi and captured that percussive power into a fiery ball. The explosion rippled, trapped, and he trembled as its strength surged through his bones. It wanted to burn. Great Serpent, it wanted tofeed. Samson felt himself bending to that intense hunger, and a whip of flame flared out, hitting the wall. He grunted and flattened it back into place.
The ball quivered, straining against his hold. Sweat beaded down his forehead as Samson carefully guided the ball and placed it right between the three tunnels. With a snarl, he snapped his urumi, and the ball cleaved in two, rushing down the adjacent tunnels in giddy laughter.
“Now!”
