Page 17 of Ashes of Gold
“Geolocation. It’s a spell woven into the forging of our armor….When our people had a forge and magic to imbue armor back in Yiyo. Now we only have what we inherited.”
A sore spot somewhere inside me churns with pain or shame or a mix of both, I don’t know. I did this to them. It’s my fault.
“About the thing I—uhm, did… I’m very sorry. I never meant—” Wails of pain ripple through the air. “Do you hear something?”
She finishes cleaning up the wound and turns to a barred doorway on the far side of the dome.
“Rue, Kai… in here!” Jhamal’s voice, laced with urgency, shouts from the doorway. We hurry his way. Groans of pain echo off the walls in the closet-like chamber where we find Jhamal. He’s bent over a table with straps, and scrawny pale legs are dangling off its edge.
“She’s still breathing. Help me get her up.” He grunts, helping the familiar pale-faced blond sit up. Her cheeks are sunken, dark circles around her eyes, and her hair is a matted mess.
“Bri?” I rush to his side and help hoist up my best friend. Her eyes bat open and my heart skips a beat. “You’re going to be okay.”
I’d feared the worst. When Jhamal said they had her, but I didn’t see her in the cells. I… My chin hits my chest. White powder lines her mouth and her hands are covered in pricks.What did they do to her? I want to ask, but the words are a lump in my throat.
Jhamal and I throw one arm over each shoulder, and Bri stumbles as we help her stand.
“Rue.” Her voice is raspy and her lips tug sideways in a smile. “I knew…” She’s breathless. “Y-you’d come. I knew. Ri-ride or death… right?”
“Right. Right. I got you, always.” I blink away the stinging in myeyes. She reaches, gesturing at a bag or something across the room, and it’s then I notice Kai, leaning in the doorway, arms folded.
“Can you grab that?” I ask her.
She scoops up the bag with a grunt and shoulders it without a word. But her grimace says it all. Glass clinks against metal as Bri sifts through the bag with clumsy hands. I hold on to her as firmly as I can to keep her up.
“It’s in here somewhere…. There’s…” She pants. “Glass… blue liquid.” She rears back in pain and Jhamal chews his lip. I fumble through the bag, and my hands close around cold glass with a shimmery blue liquid in it. Bri opens her mouth and I pour it in. She lies on my chest panting as her breathing levels out.
“I-I’m going to be okay. They just gave me a lot of Extractor.” She takes the rest of the potion herself and her sickly pallor perks up a bit. She sits up on her own. “Thanks.”
“What did they do to you?” Jhamal’s expression is riddled with lines.
Probably the same thing they did to me.“Do you remember?” I ask her.
“I remember everything.” Her lips are thin, eyes sullen.
Not the same, then.She’s not weak like I was. I could hardly walk for months.
“They poisoned me, basically,” Bri goes on. “Well, first they wanted me to help them crack Rue. Apparently, they’d tried coaxing information about the cuffs out of you?”
The memory of a grinding sound of metal instruments pinching my skin claws at me. I bite my lip to bring me back to the present. “Th-they did? I don’t remember much of it, to be honest.”
Bri wrinkles her brows and Kai’s eyes flick to me. My cheeks burn. She already sees me as a screwup. Will they all see me that way? Is that what I am, then?
Burning.
Smoke.
Screams.
I suck in a breath to stuff down the panic.
“I told them to show me to their labs,” Bri goes on. “And I’d brew up a potion that would essentially knock you unconscious. So they could do whatever they wanted to you.” She pulls another vial from her bag as she talks, her countenance growing more lucid. This one has a minty paste inside, and she rubs it on the scratches on her arms. “They’re idiots, of course, and had no idea what I was actually doing. What I made instead was a Defense Boost that would fight off anything they gave to me. I hid away as much as I could. But after a while they realized I was just buying time and started poking me with needles and making me take stuff to pry the truth out of me. They told me they’d stop if I agreed to do something for them. Something to you, Rue.”
Chills run down my arms.
“But when I refused, they decided to try to extract any and everything I knew about your magic from my memory synapses. Your cuffs… well, arms now, I guess. They’re determined to get them off in one piece, as long as it takes. That’s why they haven’t killed you.”
Jhamal and I glance at each other.He was right.
