Wren's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

The raindrops were still shouting inside Wren's coat. He stood in the cave under the dead orchard, thirteen stolen names bruised faint on his hand, and knew he could not stay. Every soaked seam of his coat was a small mouth telling the city where he stood. The cots behind him would be worthless if the guards followed the noise here. He spread the coat on the stove-warm stone and pinned back the fold. The drops rolled out in a wet cluster, each one round as a marble, each one wearing a small startled face. They argued at once. "Barefoot boy!" "Third tier!" "Orchard, orchard, orchard!" Their voices were thin but they carried, and he could feel the carry in his teeth. The black cat jumped down from the highest cot. She had a white patch on her chest like spilled milk. She sat between Wren and the drops and stared. She had followed him for forty years and had never once been wrong about a threat. "I can't drown them," Wren said. "They'd shout underwater. I've tried before." The cat flicked her tail at the shelf above the stove. A faceted crystal sat there, long as his hand, striped with pale rainbows. He had pried it from a dry riverbed years ago because it caught light like nothing else. He had never found a use for it. He picked it up. The drops went quiet for one breath, drawn to the shine. That breath told him enough. He held the crystal over the stove and turned it slowly. Light bent through it and stretched into a thin road across the cave floor, out past the cots, toward the mouth of the tunnel. The drops leaned. Their small faces followed the light the way flowers follow sun. "Go on," Wren said. He walked the crystal toward the tunnel. The drops rolled after him, chattering now to the light instead of to the city. "Third tier! Third tier!" they told the beam, and the beam did not care. At the tunnel mouth he stopped. He tilted the crystal so the road of light poured out across the orchard, away from the cave, away from the cots, straight toward the far ridge where the city guards were already coming. He gave the drops one hard push with his bare foot. They rolled off shouting, following the light, and the light led them wrong. Wren watched until the last drop cleared the roots of the dead trees. Then he pocketed the crystal. His coat hung lighter on his shoulders. The cave was quiet again. The cots were still empty. The cat brushed his ankle. He looked at the thirteen names on his hand. The guards would chase the noise for an hour, maybe two. That was all the time he had bought. "We go tonight," he told the cat. "All thirteen. Before the drops stop lying for us."