Page 100 of The Sunlit Man

He put his hands to his skull, digging his fingers into the skin. Howcould he run so hard and never get anywhere? The journey was supposed to be the important part, wasn’t it?

Why, then, was he so miserable?

Part of him wanted to burst out of this place and go looking for the Beaconites, but what good was that? He couldn’t make a home for them, a safe place. And if he got caught by the Night Brigade, it could mean the deaths of millions.

He had no answers. He didn’t know his destination. Maybe that was why he was so lost. Hard to be anything else if you didn’t know where you were going.

It wasn’t a revelation in light. More, one in tears.

The room had fallen silent. He forcibly ripped himself away from his self-loathing, looking up long enough to see why. The Scadrians had mostly turned to watch the screen with the Beaconites, where the Charred wereretreatingtoward Union—the massive city hovering in the near distance. At first, hope sparked—but like an ember from a fire released into the cold, hungry night, that hope died immediately.

The Charred had taken the sunhearts from Beacon’s ships. They were leaving the people alone in the growing grass. Lit by too much light. The sun, never resting, was close to rising again. The Cinder King was going to leave theentire town’sworth of people as offerings. Nearly one hundred and thirty-five souls.

The brutality of it was minimal on the grand scale; Nomad had just been thinking of the deaths of millions, the fall of planets. Yet there was a terriblepersonalcruelty to this event. Even the Scadrians picked up on it, every single one of them staring at the screen in silence. The postures of the Beaconites, falling to their kneesin sorrow and terror. The abject abandonment of Union cruising away, leaving them behind, deaf to their pleas.

The Cinder King certainly had learned his lessons in tyranny well. Granted, that wasn’t the sort of thing humans needed mentoring in. Too many of them could intuit how to be terrible all on their own. He’d been there himself.

Soon the screen had drawn the attention of everyone in the room except the most focused workers. An opportunity. The glowing Investiture Cell was right within Nomad’s reach. He stood up, and nobody glanced his way.

He could take it and be gone in a moment.

He didn’t.

He…he couldn’t.

Are…we going to do anything? the knight asks his faithful squire.

“Yes,” Nomad said. “We’re going to watch and witness.”

The words drew the attention of a nearby scientist—a woman with a ponytail who had been too interested in her work on a pair of sunhearts to be distracted by the screen. But she found him interesting enough, apparently.

“Who were you talking to?” the woman asked him, narrowing her eyes. “I thought you said you were unoathed. Do you have a spren?”

Damnation. He’d grown careless. These people could see the signs he hadn’t needed to hide from the Beaconites.

“Just an old habit,” he said. “It’s nothing. What are you doing there? Are you transferring Investiture between two different sunhearts?”

“Yes!” she said, sitting back, displaying the age-old joy of a scientist who was pleased to find someone who actually caredabout her work. “We recharged this one earlier. We’re studying how much we can stuff into a single sunheart.”

Recharged.

“Yourechargeda sunheart?” he asked, numb.

“Well, of course. Using that sunlight.”

“The people have tried that,” he said. “They told me. Leaving out a used sunheart doesn’t do anything…” He stood up straighter. “Wait. It has to do with the strange current of this world, doesn’t it? The way the core of the planet draws Investiture and heat from the sun? Sucking it down, like it’s creating an electric circuit?”

“Yes!” the woman said, looking at him more closely. “How did you know? That took usmonthsto figure out.”

“The sunhearts don’t recharge normally…” he said. “But the ground melts. People go aflame. Anything trappedbetweenthe sun and the core is like…like interference between two opposite electric poles.” He looked upward at the lights in the ceiling. Modern ones, but reminiscent of those from long ago.

“An incandescent bulb,” he whispered. “I thought of it earlier. It glows when current passes through the filament—but not because the filament is good at conducting. Rather the opposite. That filamentresistsand loses energy as heat and light. Radiating it. That’s what makes a light bulb work.

“Normal sunhearts…the Investiture just passes through them, doesn’t it? That’s why nothing happens if you leave a used one buried. But when they’re formed in the first place, it’s because a soul is resisting—causing the Investiture there to flare. Like the light of a light bulb. That’s what captures all that power and leaves behind a sunheart.”

The woman folded her arms on the table. “Yes,” she said. “Haveyou been intercepting our communications? Is that why you know this?”

“How do you do it?” he asked, ignoring her question. “How do you recharge them? Wait. You put something else into them, something to be burned away by the sunlight? That temporarily blocks the circuit—or offers resistance to it.”

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