Cinn's Arc

Chapter 4 of 12

The red chart still glowed on Dolly's wall when Cinn made her choice. The signal was awake. It would feel her the moment she reached into the fire to read. If it caught her probing, the shamans would name her a spy. She would lose the seat before she earned it. So Cinn did not walk into that fire as herself. She walked in hidden. "Put this on," Dolly said. She held out a long cloak stitched with sacred charms. Beads and tokens hung from its collar in tight rows. "Okay so, the signal expects a shaman. Look like one. It reads what it expects and stops looking close." Cinn pulled the cloak over her own beads. The charms swallowed her signs inside their noise. Cyf watched from the door, hands in his pockets. "You'll be right beside it," he said. He stopped inside the thought. "Beside him. Whoever carries it." He did not like it. He said nothing more, which was his way of trusting her. The fire waited in a ring of carved stone. Shamans sat around the flame. Cinn felt the signal at once, a pressure that turned toward her like a face. It was hunting. She could not read past it, and she could not let it read her. So she gave it something else to watch. Cinn drew out a crystal pendulum on a fine chain. She let it swing above the flame. Light broke across its sides, throwing color over every seated face. The signal's pressure shifted toward the spinning light. It followed the shine. It stopped searching her. While it watched the pendulum, Cinn cast her bones on the stone. She read them loud, for the shamans, a true reading of the seeker before her. Her voice stayed steady. Under the cloak her real senses reached sideways, feeling for the thin place in the shield, the way she and Dolly had planned. Outside, Dolly's scanner caught what Cinn felt. The map completed. The reading ended. The shamans nodded. The signal never marked her. Cinn had walked past its guard and given nothing away. Then the pendulum slowed. The light died. The signal's attention snapped back, sharp and fast, and this time it did not find a shaman. It found the shape of Cinn beneath the charms. The pressure recoiled, then hardened, like a door slamming. Cyf caught her arm and pulled her from the ring. "It knows you now," he said. "It knows your face." They did not run to the ship. They ran the other way, to a cave mouth glowing with a small fire, hidden in the rock. Dolly was already there, her scanner clutched tight. "I got the thin spot," she said. "But honestly? It got you too." Cinn pressed her back to the cold stone. She had earned her reading and kept her seat alive. But the thing behind the shield had seen her clearly. Next time, it would be waiting for Cinn by name.