Page 131 of My Noble Disgrace

“Stay!” shouted my father. “Aren’t you going to stop this, Cael?”

Cael shrugged, neither forbidding nor inviting Graham to follow.

Graham kept coming, walking with his wrists cuffed and a brashness I’d never seen from him before. When he got to the edge, he jumped down to the slab, landing on his feet beside me.

My father looked at him as if he wanted to strangle him, but he held back, his fists clenching instead. “You’re not part of this arrangement,” he said.

I stepped away from my father and closer to Graham, reaching for Graham's cuffed hands with both of mine. “You have no authority over him.Orover me.”

Even here, in the midst of our descent into the unknown, Graham’s touch filled me with warmth and comfort. Unlike the weight from my father’s hand, Graham’s lifted me, making me feel more balanced instead of less.

I kept my hands in his, well aware as I did so that my father would be furious, but I didn’t bother to look at him. It didn’t matter what he thought.

As we descended, the surrounding walls turned from marble to dark stone that seemed to be composed of the bedrock of this island, telling me we’d gone far beyond the boundaries of the Academy. We continued to descend until the light from the room above became a distant circle and we stood in darkness.

The circle became smaller and smaller until it was nothing but a pinpoint.

The floor shook, grinding to a stop. It was too dark to see Graham beside me, though I still gripped his hand.

A bright white light abruptly lit the scene, emanating from what appeared to be a doorway cut into the rock wall.

Cael headed toward it, and my father followed.

I let go of Graham’s hands and we both went forward cautiously.

It was more like a tunnel than a doorway, with several feet of rock to pass through. My father’s broad figure blocked most of the bright light ahead, though some still shone through with an unnerving artificial glow, a quality of light I’d only seen from my stolen flashlight.

When I emerged from the tunnel, I pulled in a sharp gasp. Nothing could’ve prepared for the magnitude of the scene—or for the strangeness of it.

We stood in a massive underground cavern as bright as day, the soaring walls lined with an array of smooth metal doors, cabinets, and compartments. There had to be hundreds of them, some small, some large, but I imagined each held some piece of weaponry or technology.

Sunken into the cavern below us was a giant glowing pool. It appeared to be lit from within, as if the ground we stood on had been flipped on its end and the sun shone from the other side, illuminating it in an impossibly bright blue. I stared, both mesmerized and disoriented, trying to make sense of this piece of the past I’d stepped into and how it fit into the geology of the island. In all my dreaming of the arsenal, I’d never imagined that there could be a hollow core leading from the base of the Academy all the way down to the sea, and I couldn’t begin to understand how the founders of Cambria could’ve built all of this and kept it secret.

Behind the pool was the most enormous door of all, made of horizontal segments of stacked metal.

I tore my eyes from the cavern long enough to glance at Graham. He stood open-mouthed, looking as stunned as I felt.

My father’s eyes gleamed, his gaze moving around the room, all the way up to the rock ceiling far above. It was the first time I’d ever seen him look small.

Cael stood with his hands on his hips and a proud look on his face, as if he’d been the one to construct this cavern with his own hands. He looked back at my father. “Ready?”

“Absolutely,” said my father. “Show us our ticket to freedom.”

“Now you want freedom?” I asked. It would’ve been nice if he'd been helping make this happen before now instead of opposing it.

“I told you. I wanttruefreedom,” he said. “Freedom to move around from place to place, freedom to explore any corner of the world. What you were aiming for struck me as nothing but another form of captivity. Spending the rest of our lives on a single island is not my idea of free, wouldn’t you agree?”

“So, it’s not about being with me,” I said.

“Ofcourseit is, Mara,” my father said. “I thought I’d proven that by now. Everything I’ve done is for you!”

I clenched my jaw, knowing that speaking wouldn’t help him understand me. It never did.

Cael headed toward the cavern wall where a large, glossy rectangle was set into the wall. When he touched it, it lit up with text and images. He started to tap the symbols and text, moving his fingers deftly as if he’d done this a dozen times before. He likely had, I realized.

I got closer, wondering what magic could’ve produced something like this. Yes, I’d read about technology and computers in the Academy’s stolen book, but it was such a shock to see it in person that I couldn’t make sense of how it functioned.

“How is it powered?” I asked. I knew the radios worked only with sunlight and I’d assumed the boat Cait took had been the same, but there was no sunlight down here.

---