The Rebels of Gold (Loom Saga #3)(2)
If she were more in her right mind, she never would have given him the chance to say the name. Nor would she have risked giving away how much that single utterance meant to her with her traitorous face. Horror and heartache swept across her like a burst steam pipe, no doubt altering the landscape before she could patch the rupture. In a matter of moments she mastered herself once more—but Louie watched her closely, and the scalding emotion had left its mark.
“Quite a little upstart, that one.” Louie made a display of picking lint off his knee to hide his satisfied grin. “Are you certain she’s not a Rivet? Because she seems to be redesigning the world according to her own secret schematics.” His eyes returned to her slowly in the wake of her silence.
Arianna struggled to keep her face impassive, to betray nothing, to give up no more weaknesses—for Florence’s sake, if no one else’s. But her heart screamed for any word of the young woman who had been her ward for years. The less she said before she had full control of her mind, the better.
“You don’t know . . . do you?” Louie whispered like a child just discovering where their parents hid the sweets.
“I know enough.”
“Where are we?” He called her bluff without so much as blinking.
“Mercury Town,” Arianna surmised. The slowly widening grin—almost a snarl—on his face convinced her she had guessed wrong. “Oh? Did you find some new hole to terrorize?”
“Mercury Town is the hole.” Louie shifted, bringing his left foot off his right knee and settling it to the floor. Leaning forward, he placed his elbows on his narrow thighs. “I suppose it’s going to be hard to strike a deal with you if you don’t understand the situation you’re in.”
“What makes you think I’d strike a deal with you?” She hated the feeling of ignorance. It was like drowning in a sea of ink, the world obscured, clarity lost. Her mind didn’t know how to proceed in such a void.
“I have no doubt you’ll prefer it to the alternatives.”
“And what are those?” Give me information, her hungry mind pleaded. Something, anything. She needed just enough for a direction. For a strike to her flywheel to get things moving again. Her magic was slow, body aching, mind stunted. Something had to improve, or everything would break.
“Alternative one.” Louie held up a skeletal finger. “I keep you here forever, and harvest you as I would any of my other pets.”
“Resorting to harvesting and trying to pass off black organs? That’s a new low, even for you.”
“Black organs? No, no.” He let out a wheezing chuckle and lifted another finger. “However, that does bring me to alternative two—I sell you back to your Florence and her rebellion for the heftiest sum I can imagine.”
“Florence wouldn’t pay for me.” Arianna hoped. She didn’t want the girl to waste any resources on her. She didn’t want Florence to risk anything further by being near Louie and the dangers that seemed to lurk perpetually around him.
“Oh, I think she would. How else will she live up to her promise of producing a Philosopher’s Box?”
Arianna barely missed the final point over the ringing in her ears.
“Or three . . . You cut me in on the deal to produce the infamous box. You show me what’s been making you so deadly all these years. You show me the schematics that let you bleed gold.”
All at once, the pain vanished. The buzzing between her ears stopped. And everything went numb.
Florence
Wind blew dust over the ramparts of Ter.0, curling around the ghosts that were the only other occupants of the crumbling glory of a world long lost.
It was a wasteland of sand and rock, littered with hollowed skeletons of gnarled iron and cement that rose insistently from their shadowed graves. Florence tilted her head back to gaze at the shifting skies and semi-translucent clouds that swirled between worlds. Her pale companions played a game of hide-and-seek—mostly hide—with the moon.
She was the only creature alive here. She was the beating heart and shallow breaths of a land forgotten. She was the only remnant of life to return to this broken corner of their world.
No, she wasn’t the only one. She was merely the first. All of Loom would come to converge in this once-hallowed place of knowledge. They would return, and the Vicar Tribunal would be born anew.
It was a beautiful idea—one she’d believed in enough to shoot a dangerously stubborn vicar between the eyes for. But now Florence was forced to admit her hasty plan that led her to this point hadn’t been thought through as much as she would’ve liked.
Somehow, everything would work itself out, as it had her entire life.
The next morning, Florence moved again. She traversed the cracked earth and rubble toward a structure that was once a distant point on her horizon. Like a mighty hand’s fingers stretching up from the horizon, five points reached toward the sky as if to grasp the universe.
Florence trudged along. She didn’t have much—just the basic necessities she’d collected in Ter.2.3 before chartering a boat. Her pack grew lighter with each fading night.
On her seventh day in Ter.0, she crossed through the gate. The wall housing it had been blown apart on either side, but the gate still stood, a symbolic entrance standing in defiance of time—and Dragons.