Benedict Jacka - Fated

Cinder started and nearly got his arm burnt off for his trouble. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

‘Shut up, Cinder,’ Rachel said wearily. ‘Alex? How do I get there?’

‘There’s a route through,’ I said. ‘Move your head forward and shift about six inches to the side and you’ll see the first part.’ I paused. ‘It’ll have to be you. Cinder’s too big.’

Rachel only nodded. She moved her head and shifted. ‘I see it,’ she said and began to move.

‘Del-’ Cinder said.

‘Catch me if I fall,’ Rachel said, and started sliding through the beams.

If it had been Luna I’d have been terrified, barely able to look. As it was, I watched Rachel with something like indifference. Despite everything, I had to admire her body control. She didn’t tremble at all as she crawled and stretched and balanced over and under and through the beams, heading for their source. I looked into the future and saw her slip and die in agony, and each time I spoke, telling her which way to move, when to stop and when to go. Rachel obeyed without question. Despite everything that had happened between us, in a weird way we still understood each other. I wondered what Luna and Sonder must be thinking, watching from the sealed corridor.

At last Rachel made it. She rested in a crouch, body angled to avoid the beams streaming from the opening just above her. ‘What do I do?’ she said without looking.

‘Put the middle three fingers of your right hand against the mirror just below the beams,’ I said. ‘Up. A little to the right. Now press.’

There was a click and a small section swung open. ‘There should be two crystal spheres,’ I said. ‘Can you see them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Put your finger between.’

There was a pause, then a tiny spark. All of a sudden, as if someone had thrown a switch, the beams vanished. Cinder and Rachel were standing in an empty room.

Cinder turned, looking from side to side. Rachel rose and walked towards the door. ‘It won’t open,’ I said as she disappeared from my sight. ‘You’ll have to-’

At my side, the door seemed to flash green, then crumble to powder, becoming a fine dust that hung in the air. Rachel strode through, followed an instant later by Cinder. ‘-disintegrate it,’ I finished. The room on this side of the trap was a small one, with corridors leading off right and left. Cinder and Rachel entered and stopped, facing me from only a few feet away.

Cinder looked at the smashed controls, then back at me. There was an expression on his face I’d never seen before. ‘Why?’ he said at last.

I shrugged. ‘We had a deal.’

Cinder looked at Rachel. She was studying me, her eyes opaque behind her mask. ‘Outside,’ she said at last, addressing Cinder. ‘We keep him alive, he gets rid of these bracelets.’

I nodded. Rachel stepped forward and held out her right wrist, pushing back the sleeve to reveal the bracelet. ‘Well?’

I pulled out a tool and set to work. Rachel waited patiently while I probed at the bracelet’s inner workings, looking into the future to see the outcome of every action. From time to time my hand brushed against Rachel’s skin. She didn’t react, and neither did I. I might have been her dressmaker.

I finished after five minutes and moved on to Cinder, who stuck his arm out with poor grace. He was in worse shape than Rachel; I could see patches where his clothes had been burnt away, and he smelt of ash and scorched flesh. As the minutes ticked past he made a growling sound. ‘Why don’t you just burn ’em off?’

‘Same reason you can’t. I’m guessing you’ve tried.’

Cinder was silent. ‘I can’t break the locks,’ I said. ‘But I can shut down the receptor so it can’t receive Onyx’s signal. He won’t be able to tell they’re sabotaged until he tries to zap you.’

‘That’ll work?’ Cinder said suspiciously.

Without looking away, I held up my right wrist, which still held Onyx’s bracelet. ‘It worked for me.’

Cinder shut up then, and the three of us stood there quietly. After all our history, it was a strange feeling to have them just wait there. At last, it was finished. I stepped back. ‘Done.’

Cinder and Rachel looked at their bracelets. ‘Doesn’t look different,’ Cinder said.

‘It’s different,’ I said.

‘I believe you,’ Rachel said. She looked at me. ‘So.’

‘So,’ I said.

The moment stretched out, silent, tense. I stood watching the pair of them, looking at the two possible futures, wondering which one they were going to choose.

‘Don’t get in our way,’ Rachel said at last. She turned and walked towards the nearest exit. Cinder gave me a final scowl and followed her.

As their footsteps faded away into the distance, I let out a long breath and let my shoulders slump. I stood still for a moment, alone with my thoughts, then shook myself and looked across at the secret door. ‘Guys? You can come out.’

Cautiously, Sonder and then Luna emerged. Sonder looked around. ‘Where did they go?’

‘Further in,’ I said. Suddenly I felt very tired.

‘Oh,’ Sonder said, and scratched his head. ‘Well … I guess that’s better.’ He walked forward, rummaging in his bag. ‘You know, I think I’ve seen this layout before …’

Luna waited for Sonder to get out of earshot, then looked at me. ‘We’re going to run into them again,’ she said at last.

I didn’t answer. I led Luna and Sonder into the corridor Rachel and Cinder hadn’t taken, and together we headed deeper.

The hands on my watch pointed to 2.13 a.m. As I stared, they blurred and seemed to swim until I was no longer sure what I was looking at. I forced my eyes to focus, knowing I couldn’t afford to sleep.

We’d been inside the tomb for four hours. The closer we spiralled in towards the centre of the facility, the more lethal and hard to bypass the traps and security systems were. Our progress had slowed to a crawl — worse, the number of paths was steadily diminishing, forcing us closer to the others hunting the fateweaver.

Cinder and Rachel were the easiest to spot, and I stayed away from them, not wanting to find out how long our truce would last. More of a concern was Khazad. He had split from the others and was searching the corridors on his own, and in the last hour we’d been forced to hide from him three times. Each time we let him pass, he reappeared again a short while later. I was starting to worry that it wasn’t a coincidence and that he was actively hunting us. I could vaguely feel his presence through the futures of our meetings, somewhere behind us and to the left. Having to stay constantly on the alert was wearing me down.

I shook off my fatigue and looked up at Sonder. ‘Which way?’

Sonder had held up better under the strain than I’d expected, but was looking tired as well. He’d managed to piece together a sketch map in his notebook, extrapolating from the parts of the facility we’d seen and from the designs of other Precursor structures he’d read about. It wasn’t perfect, but it was getting better. ‘Left, I think. It shouldn’t be trapped.’

I glanced ahead through the futures. We were standing at a T-junction. ‘They’re both trapped.’

‘There’s supposed to be a corridor. It might not be easy to open the other end, but … The right way is open, but I think the traps are denser.’

I sighed and slid down against the wall. ‘I need to rest. Try and figure out which path will get us through.’ I closed my eyes and made myself relax.

I’d been sitting only a few moments when a voice penetrated my thoughts. ‘Alex?’

I opened my eyes to see Luna looking at me. She was crouching in the room’s far corner, the crystal cube held absent-mindedly in her fingers, as though she’d forgotten about it. Luna had been quiet for the past two hours, her thoughts and manner more distant since the encounter with Cinder and Rachel, and I knew she’d been thinking about it.