Tabitha Chirrick - Overshadowed

Shy placed her hand on the wall beside Tayel’s head. Her arm was taut with tension, muscles perfectly still under her smooth skin. Tayel held her breath to stop her chest from rising and falling against Shy’s, but strapped for air and tense as hell, it didn’t last long. Heat rose to her face at Shy’s slight movement against her.

Clanking footsteps rose out of the staircase and into the hall.

“Stop resisting,” a guardswoman growled.

“Please, I don’t know anything. Just let me go.”

Jace! Despite the situation, Tayel beamed. He was alive. He was mostly okay. She could save him.

She ducked under Shy’s arm. Jace trudged between the two guards in the hall, both talons restrained behind his back. The guardswoman shoved him along.

“I told you! What I saw was a — an accident. I don’t even know what it means,” Jace pleaded.

The second guard smacked him. Fire burned inside Tayel as he collapsed. Shy caught her head in the crook of her elbow and pulled her swiftly back into the nook. Her hardened eyes and tightened jaw said enough — don’t leave cover . Tayel breathed a little faster, anger making her jittery. Jace was okay. He was still okay. Hurt, but alive.

“What was that for?” the guardswoman asked. “You knocked him unconscious!”

“Why should Adonna have all the fun?”

“You’re depraved. He’s just a kid.”

Tayel peered into the hall once again.

The man hoisted Jace over his shoulder and continued walking. “Keep your morals to yourself. If it weren’t for these damned Igadorians…”

The guards ascended another set of stairs at the far end of the corridor, their conversation lost in the echo of their boots.

Tayel wiggled out of the nook. “Hurry. We have to follow them.”

“I can’t believe that kid’s still alive,” Shy muttered.

“Well he is. So let’s go. ”

“Hey, keep your voice down. I know you’re amped up right now, but if we rush and get reckless, we’re going to get caught, and neither of us are going to get what we want.”

“I—.” Tayel squeezed her head with both hands, willing herself to calm down. “I know. I know.”

“Okay, so keep quiet, and come on.”

Tayel followed Shy up the same steps the guards had taken Jace, contented to have some guidance — someone to hold her back from doing something stupid. Or reckless, as Shy put it. The princess was a real banshee sometimes, but she knew how to keep her cool.

They tailed the guards through hallways, hiding and losing some progress when processions of other guards ran past — looking for them . Every movement was a close call. No switch from cover to cover went without the risk of being seen.

As they climbed higher in the castle, the décor changed. Parchment-colored wallpaper covered the walls, and Tayel’s footsteps sunk into the ground a little more, the royal blue carpet more plush than the red ones many floors below. Every staircase they took upward ate at her nerves. Maybe the guards would never stop toting Jace around, leaving Tayel and Shy more and more vulnerable to capture as they grew tired and anxious.

The guards dragged Jace up another staircase. By the view out the window, they couldn’t go much further. They had to be near the top of the castle. Tayel and Shy snuck into the stairwell behind them, and as they climbed, chatter echoed from the top. Shy slowed her pace, and they inched their faces into the hall at the top of the steps.

It was the final floor. The ceiling came to its apex in a tall, spire-like point. There was only one hall — straight ahead — and dozens of people filled it. Tayel recognized the recruits from the Aishan camp. There were no nooks or crannies to hide in, and if anyone else came up the steps, Tayel and Shy were completely exposed.

The guards escorting Jace came to a stop behind the procession of refugees as it continued to file in under an archway at the far end of the hall. They passed into the next room while Jace’s escorts guided him, now awake and wide-eyed, up another set of steps to the right of the room’s entrance.

Tayel chewed her tongue. “Do you think we can slip up those stairs unseen?”

Shy nodded. “If we go now.”

Tayel shadowed her, sidling along the wall toward the stairs. The murmur of refugees grew as they inched closer, and Tayel caught a glimpse of shuffling feet in the dimly lit room beyond the archway. She pained for them, for how little they knew about the war they volunteered to fight.

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.