The Gauntlet (The Cage 3)

Lucky. Lucky’s voice. He’d been born in Colombia. He spoke Spanish fluently. Cora scrambled to sit back on the bench, her shaking fingers poised over the keys. She could match the notes and handle the rhythm.

She just needed the words.

From deep down, the paragon burst stirred. She could feel it in her blood, her bones, almost moving her hands and her vocal cords for her. Lucky’s spirit was inside her, putting words in her mouth.

“Pero tu espíritu,” she sang, not understanding the words coming out of her mouth, “es siempre conmigo.”

She struck the final note.

Tears streamed down her face. The stock algorithm couldn’t know this—it was just a code and a machine—but it had given her a gift with this puzzle. It had stirred her blood and reminded her of what mattered. Of Lucky. Of hope. She didn’t remember her family back home, but as she played, she felt them. Felt their love, even from afar. She felt the melody of the world, a planet that was a song in itself, and a people who wouldn’t stop singing.

She pushed up from the piano.

The notes lingered in the cavernous concert hall. She looked out over the empty theater and smiled. Somewhere, deep down, Lucky would always be with her. As soon as the next door appeared, she’d be finished with this round. And she was ready: to see her friends, to face the final round—and most of all, to bring humanity the song it deserved.

34

Mali

A BOMB.

Mali threw herself under the worktable that was littered with Willa’s frequency-emitter equipment, shielding her head with her hands. A bomb had gone off—a package that Leon had smuggled from the station. The explosion had ripped through the chambers of the Gauntlet. Torn apart the central vestibule, shattering half the control compartments.

Dust still rained down through the recess rooms. The bomb’s boom echoed off the walls, making her ears ring and her head spin.

She blinked out of her shock.

Had she seen right? Was Bonebreak really . . . gone? Dead? That Mosca trader was the last person she’d expect to sacrifice himself.

Dust clouded as the wreckage settled. Dazed, she squinted through it, trying to find the others. Something was dripping, splashing her. Blood? Was it hers or someone else’s? She held up her wet hands, relieved to find it was only water seeping through the walls.

She crawled shakily out from under the table. Willa was frantically trying to salvage the damaged emitter equipment, and from across the room Serassi was yelling something at her, but Mali couldn’t make out the words past the ringing in her ears. She caught sight of a beam pierced through Serassi’s leg, pinning her in place near the coded monitor. Her dark Kindred blood was soaking into the fabric of her left pant leg and mingling with the puddles of water on the floor.

Mali traced the lines of water up to the ceiling, still feeling dazed. Where was the water coming from? The Gauntlet modules weren’t powered by any liquid fuel source. The water had to be external. . . .

The storm.

The realization hit her with a dark sense of foreboding. When they had entered Drogane’s atmosphere, Cassian had warned of the planet’s unpredictable weather. He’d said they were fortunate to land during the eye of the storm and that his instruments indicated the worst of the weather would most likely hold off until the Gauntlet was over.

But storms were anything but predictable.

“Mali!”

Someone was calling her name, but it sounded small and tinny, as though coming from miles away. She tilted her head, tapping her ear to try to stop the ringing, as she searched the room, coughing through the dust. Cassian had gone to Serassi’s side and was trying to wrench the beam out of her leg with his bare hands. Willa was still fumbling with the equipment like it was more precious than any of their lives. Ironmage was sprawled on his back near the bench, unconscious, a bruise on his temple where shrapnel must have hit him. She started to crawl toward him to make sure he was alive when someone streaked across her line of vision.

Anya’s clothes—the impostor.

“Stop!” she yelled. The impostor was the only one who could tell them where the real Anya was. She tried to scramble to her feet, but her balance was thrown off from the blast. She careened first to the left, then to the right, until she managed to grab hold of a bench.

Leon was near the doorway, clutching the side of his face, blood streaked over his tattoos. The impostor was running straight toward him.

“Leon, don’t let him get away!”

Dazed, Leon shook his head, stumbling as though he too were barely able to stand. Mali choked in desperation. She tried to take a step forward but tripped and fell.

“Please, Leon, I . . . I need you!”

She winced at her own words. Never in her life had she begged someone for help. And yet Leon didn’t look at her with a gloat of superiority. He only blinked through his daze, eyes darting to the impostor, and nodded.

“I’ll get him, Mali. I promise!” He took off after the impostor.

Mali sucked in a sob—leave it to Leon, a criminal, a smuggler, a lovable pain in her side—to be the one person in the world she could rely on.

She pushed to her feet, making her way across the room after them. She clung to the wall for support as she stumbled into the central vestibule.

She froze, gaping. The vestibule was even more damaged than the Mosca recess room. The floor behind the judges’ dais was now a hole where the bomb must have exploded. There was no sign of Bonebreak’s body, only a few pieces of torn rust-red jumpsuit. Her stomach twisted as she felt an unexpected hitch of sadness. Sadness, for a Mosca? But not just any Mosca. A Mosca from whom she’d never expected anything but betrayal but who had just saved all their lives.

The four Chief Assessors’ chairs had been ripped up and twisted, the dais itself splintered in two. Monitors crackled and hissed, showing only static. For a second she remembered that Cora was trapped inside the Gauntlet puzzle chambers, and she ran to the portal door. Had Cora felt the blast? Had the bomb broken the puzzle modules? But the portal door was still sealed, a burn mark across the front the only sign of damage. Mali tried to pry the door open with her fingers, but it wouldn’t budge. She let go with a frustrated sigh.

Cora was still on her own.

Half the overhead lights had shattered and the few remaining ones flickered uselessly. Bodies of Gatherer and Axion and Kindred delegates littered the floor, and she fought the urge to turn away at the sight of a severed arm wearing a Mosca sleeve, and a chunk of hair, and a single boot with the Axion crest.

She coughed, trying to clear the dust from her eyes. Where had Anya’s impostor run to? Had Leon caught him? Some of the survivors were starting to rise out of the dust. It felt like eternity since the bomb had detonated, but Mali knew it must have been only seconds. The dust hadn’t even fully settled. She heard moans. A scream of pain. And yet that high-pitched ringing was still in her ears.

She tapped her ears again as she stumbled around the remains of the vestibule. She let go of the wall and suddenly slid across the floor, catching herself on the broken dais. This wasn’t just off-kilter balance from the blast. The room was actually leaning. Water was running down the floor, pooling against the back wall. And then the room shook and shifted again, and Mali and the others were thrown backward. She clung to the dais.

It was the storm, she realized as more water poured in through the ceiling. The bomb’s blast must have compromised the infrastructure of the Gauntlet modules. The structure was no longer stable. It might have easily withstood the storm before, but now they were at the mercy of Drogane’s raging tempests.

“Mali!” Leon appeared in the doo

rway, one hand clutched over his bleeding face.

“Where’d he go?” she yelled back. “Where’s the impostor?”

“Forget him—behind you!”

She spun just as an Axion lunged for her. She ducked out of the way, twisting around the dais, using the off-balance room to her advantage. The Axion tumbled toward the back wall, hitting his head hard. Mali took a deep breath, steeling herself.

She flexed her muscles, ready to fight. The Axion was pushing himself to his feet again, but he was dazed from the blast too. She frowned, noticing his uniform. Beneath the thick coating of dust, he wore long, gauzy white robes that swept the floor. Gatherer robes.

She saw movement from the corner of her eye. Another Axion rose from the dust, coughing. He ripped a thick Mosca mask from his face. Confused, she caught sight of a Kindred uniform she recognized—Fian’s uniform. Only now an Axion woman wore it, her gaunt frame too small for it, the sleeves dangling too long for her arms.

“It’s the blast.” Leon stumbled beside her, still clutching his face. Blood had stained the collar of his shirt a crimson red. “It somehow set off Willa’s equipment and triggered the frequency that makes them drop their disguises. Now all those sneaky bastards can’t hide anymore. They’re exposed and they know it. There’s no telling what they’ll do—we should be ready for anything.”

Mali drew in a sharp breath. That was the high-pitched ringing she still heard. The frequency that Willa had broadcast to turn Axion impostors back into their real selves. It had spread beyond the Mosca recess room into the full Gauntlet chambers, and now the impostor Fian was exposed, and all the rest. . . .