“One for you,” Misol said, and gave the first to Forge. “And for you.” She passed the other to Clink. The women turned them over in their hands, brows furrowed.
“This is sel, isn’t it?” Clink asked.
“Yes it is,” Aella confirmed. Her eyes shone as she leaned toward the two women, practically radiating curiosity.
“What you want us to do with it?” Clink demanded. “We’re not sensitive. Wouldn’t be here if we were, would we?”
“You’d be surprised,” Detan muttered.
“Hush,” Aella ordered him. “All you have to do is to stand on opposite sides of the room, and hold those tight. Can you do that?”
The women exchanged a look. It was Clink who asked the pertinent question, “Why?”
“We’re going to put Detan here through his paces. See how much he’s learned.”
“And if we refuse?”
Aella’s excitement dimmed like a snuffed candle. “There are quite a few people in this prison who would like dearly to have some time alone with you two, after your assistance in Ripka Leshe’s escape. I can arrange that meeting, if you’d like.”
They swallowed in unison. “That won’t be necessary.”
“Excellent.” Aella was all warm smiles and friendly chatter as she ushered the women to their places. “Now, Detan, this is for you. Get to know it well, you have only a few moments.”
She thrust a third bladder of selium into his hands. He turned it over with care, tracing his thumb along the seams, extending his sel-sense just enough to know the exact shape of the selium hidden within. How it pushed against the leather, how it’d found a little weakness in one of the seams and was bunching up against it. Selium was good at that. At finding the weak points and pushing, pushing. Maybe he was kindred spirits with the gas after all.
Aella snatched it from him, and before he could complain the sack was back over his head.
“Now.” Soft footsteps, fading to silence. “You must work your little deviation upon just this sphere, understood? It alone is not being held by the women. It alone will not harm anyone, if you manage to control yourself and set fire to it and only it.”
“Set fire?” Clink blurted.
“Erupt may be a better word,” Aella corrected with slow care.
“Erupt?”
“Hmm? Yes, erupt. Like the firemounts. Now hush,” Aella ordered. “I’m shuffling the women’s positions now, so that you cannot rely on their placement from before the bag was pulled over your head. If they speak, or make the slightest noise, they will be moved.”
Detan closed his eyes and strained, struggling to listen for the patter of their footsteps. Aella was the lighter of the three, and her step was soft against the stone, but she paced and paced, until he couldn’t tell where she’d begun and where she’d ended up.
“There,” she said. “The sphere is placed. Find it. Destroy it.”
Sweat beaded across his forehead, sticking to the bag. “And if I can’t?”
“Neither of these women will eat again until you do.”
Right. He really hadn’t known what he’d expected, but it wasn’t that. Pain for himself he could handle, but watching the two women who saved Ripka starve to death just wasn’t something he was willing to do. But neither was he willing to blow their hands off. Which, of course, Aella knew.
Get it over with, he scolded himself, and let his body relax, slumping, as he gradually grew in awareness. He started with his toes, feeling and flexing every muscle, working his way up until he was aware of every last crease of his forehead. That was the easy part.
He waited until his breath came smooth and easy, then reached out. His sel-sense flared within him, drawing from an old well of anger and hurt. It boiled through him like fire, seared his soul like something far worse. He wanted to flinch away from the power, from the potential that lurked within him. Had spent the past few years of his life doing just that. But he couldn’t. Not any more. That was why he was here, after all. To examine that fire, that great gaping maw of rage, and bend it to his will.
Detan probed his anger. His arms tensed. He forced himself to ease them, struggling to find a balance. If he relaxed too much, he lost his edge, couldn’t force the selium to slam itself together and burst apart. But neither could he grow too tense. He knew all too well the devastation he was capable of when he let his rage take the reins of his talents.
He was cold. Absolutely shivering. Sweat streaked down the muscles of his bare back, coalesced in a river along the valley of his spine. How long had he sat there, sweating and fretting? He couldn’t think of that. Couldn’t let the passing time worry him. Someone shifted aching feet, impatient. He zeroed in on the sound and couldn’t pinpoint who it was. Not that that was the point. If he cheated this test, he cheated himself.
He gave up on hesitance, reached his sense with deliberate care to examine the sources of sel in the room. Three, as promised. All of them hauntingly familiar. Which one had been his? Which one had Aella let him hold in his hands?
Cruel as she was, she wouldn’t have cheated him in this. Wouldn’t have given him an impossible task to solve. Though her reasons eluded him, she desired to know the secret of his abilities – and its limits – just as sorely as he did. Perhaps more, he sometimes thought. There was little that woman wouldn’t do to achieve her goals, and Detan had his boundaries.
He let the three globes fill his mind. Held them like shining stars in the dark, fireflies disrupting the wave of his sense reaching out from the center of his being. Five strides away, six, and five again. Three points of a triangle of which he was the heart, the center, the core of destruction. He held them all, turned them over. Compared them not to his memory but to each other. Equal in size, Aella would have made sure of that. But one… One felt denser, somehow, crammed tight, bulging against the seams with eager gluttony. He discarded it.
The second and third hung in his mind now, and he imagined a bright line of light bridging them as he weighed them against each other, sought new methods of comparison. Aella would not have made the trick so obvious as to pack two of the globes tight-full. Or would she? Devious creature that she was… He jettisoned the thought. Nothing to be gained down that path, nothing at all. Aella’s psychology wasn’t what he was trying to figure out. This wasn’t game theory, this wasn’t a gambling hand. He either had the flavor of the globe, or he didn’t. And if he didn’t, some poor woman would die.
Some woman who had helped Ripka. Saved her life, most probably, when the Remnant was boiling with riot over the rumor of a blue coat in their midst. Her face filled his mind, the harsh regard of her stare when he said something irritating a warm balm. He pushed her away. This wasn’t about her. Wasn’t about Tibs or his Auntie or New Chum or any other soul that had the misfortune of having earned his affections.
Focus. Weigh the two. Feel them out. Identical in density, or as near as could be achieved by human hands and talents. He suspected that if he dug deeper, if he reached into that miniscule level of the world that bare eyes couldn’t see – that he only glimpsed when the injections were fresh in his veins – that he might find a difference otherwise undetectable. Nothing intentional though, unless Aella had much more refined sensitives hanging around here who he had yet to meet.
She didn’t have that. But she knew he could push himself that way. Had been trying to make it second nature to him. An idea struck. Stoking the coals of his rage, banking them to keep them hot, he focused in on one sphere and reached for those fine particles. Nothing. He turned his attention to the other. Imagined what he was looking for like dust in the air, drifting, invisible until the glint of sun hits just right. Imagined his anger as that light, his rage the source of that sun.