Chương 5: In Charge

The woman found the body first. Her hands stopped moving over the rubble, went still against a stretch of coat sticking out from under the rock. She dragged at it once, twice, hard enough to tear her nails, before she understood what she was looking at. A body with no head. The scream that came out of her didn't sound human. She rocked back on her knees, pale brown hair stuck to her face with sweat and dust, both hands pressed over her mouth like she could shove the sound back in.

"This is his fault!" She twisted around, finger jabbing toward the Saltbearers.

"This is all his fault! They sent us down here with one competent man and three cowards!" Nobody stopped her.

"The Cinder Office could've sent a real guard!" a man shouted from somewhere in the crowd, voice cracking.

"Instead they gave us this. Bastards who can barely keep his own men alive!"

"Yeah!" Another voice, closer.

"We're mining their salt! Least they could do is send someone who knows what he's doing!" Solstice stood beside Lere near the back, watching Murren. The scarred Saltbearer hadn't moved. His hands had curled into fists sometime in the last minute, knuckles white, jaw locked so tight a vein stood out along his throat.' Can't they shut up. We're already trapped down here. Screaming isn't going to dig us free.' His eyes dropped to the rubble blocking the only way out.

He looked past the wreckage, toward the tunnel curling deeper into the dark. Only way left was forward. Forward, and hoping the other end wasn't another wall.

"—and you," the woman kept going, voice breaking apart at the edges, "you couldn't even—" The rest of the sentence never came. Solstice caught the motion out the corner of his eye, a blur of pale wind, there and gone before his mind finished registering it. The woman's upper body slid off her hips and hit the ground before the rest of her did. Particles bled into the air around Murren's outstretched hand, thin and fast, gone almost as soon as they came.

His eyes tracked them this time without the pain that had dropped him earlier. Bearable now. Barely. The cavern went dead silent.

"I," Murren said, voice low, "am in charge." Nobody answered him.

"Do you understand?" His voice climbed, cracking through the quiet the same way the wind slash had cracked through the woman a moment ago.

"The Cinder Office put me on this expedition. Not you. Not him." He swept a hand toward the miners.

"Me. And if anyone's got a problem with how I run things, you can join her." He pointed at what was left on the ground. Azel edged forward, palms out, head bowed low enough that Solstice almost felt embarrassed watching him.

"Murren. Everyone's scared. Nobody's questioning your authority, we just—" Murren's fist caught him mid-sentence. Azel went down hard, and Murren followed him to the ground, knuckles rising and falling, again and again, until the sound stopped being a punch and started being something wetter. Nobody moved to stop it. Nobody dared.' Wow. What an anger issue.' Murren stood eventually, breathing hard, blood dripping off his knuckles onto the stone.

He wiped his hand down his coat and looked around like nothing had happened.

"We go deeper," he said.

"Find another route. Another vein with an exit, or a way around this one. Anyone who slows us down gets left behind." His eyes swept the crowd, daring someone to argue.

"Move." Lere leaned in close, voice low enough only Solstice could catch it.

"We follow him. For now." His eyes flicked to what remained of Azel.

"Guy's uncontrollable. Don't give him a reason." Solstice didn't answer. He watched Murren stalk toward the far side of the cavern, trailing a line of miners too frightened to do anything but obey.' Cinder sends men like that to guard salt and calls it protection. Cheaper than sending someone who won't kill the workers himself.' He crouched and scooped a chunk of Pale Salt off the ground into his coat, then the pickaxe, then a lamp still slick with somebody's blood.

He fell into step behind Lere, who fell into step behind the group. The tunnel widened the deeper they went, walls glowing faint blue where they caught the lamplight. Solstice's eyes caught on the vein running through the rock, ore the color of deep water, threaded with something that didn't look like salt at all. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. A miner slowed to look at it.

"This vein's got a lot of Uron in it. Don't usually see that with Pale Salt."

"Never," someone else agreed.

"It's copper or salt. Uron doesn't sit with either." Solstice stopped walking. He reached out and touched the ore, and something buzzed up through his fingertips before he could pull back, a current with no source that yanked at something behind his eyes and didn't let go.' What is this.' Lere stopped too, brow furrowed.

"You good?" The lights came a second later, the same threads he'd seen twist around Murren's hands in the fight, hovering soft and slow over the ore instead of screaming through the air. When his fingers moved, the lights moved with them, drifting sideways like he'd nudged them by accident.

"Hey." Solstice looked at Lere.

"You seeing what I'm seeing?"

"Uron," Lere said, tapping the vein again.

"Cinder uses it for the big furnaces in Furnax. Didn't know that?" Solstice's stomach dropped half an inch. Lere wasn't looking at the lights. He was talking about the metal"Right," Solstice said.

"Forgot."

"Weird, right?" Lere crouched next to the vein, thumb running along the ore.

"I've done five expeditions and never once seen Uron sitting in a salt vein."

"Yeah…" Solstice said while still looking at the ore.

'He's not seeing it.' He glanced past Lere at the other miners, none of them so much as slowing down.

'Maybe nobody is.' He looked back at the lights hovering where Lere's thumb had just been. They'd shown up around Murren's hand mid-slash. They'd shown up now, around a rock that had never swung a fist in its life. Only one thread connected the two. He touched the ore again, and the lights answered, curling loose around his hand like they recognized it.' Is this my Domain?'

Forty minutes of walking later, the tunnel spilled into another chamber, walls thick with Pale Salt and more of that deep-water Uron threading through the stone. No dwellers waiting this time. Murren called the halt without looking at anyone, and the group dropped where they stood. Solstice sat against the wall. Lere folded down beside him a moment later, breath fogging thick in the cold.

"You're quiet," Lere said.

"Unnervingly quiet. I do all the talking and you just nod at me like a broken doll."

"Better than talking." Solstice glanced toward the far end of the chamber, where Murren stood alone, knuckles still dark with blood.

"Maybe you should try it. Before Scarface over there decides you talk too much." Lere snorted, quiet enough not to carry.

"Fair." Solstice let the silence sit a moment before breaking it himself.

"How'd you know your Domain was Expansion?" Lere glanced at him. Solstice hesitated, then added, "You're Nameless, right? Nameless people don't get Domain Ceremonies. So how'd you figure yours out?" Lere blinked, surprised by the question, then shrugged like it cost him nothing.

"Just felt it. Whenever I'm in a space, I get this sense of wrongness if something's off about the size of it. Like my body knows the room better than my eyes do."

"Can you tell how far this cavern runs?" Lere laughed.

"Why're you asking me? Isn't your Domain the same as mine?" That was a lie, and Solstice had known it the moment it left his mouth back at the ridge. He still didn't actually know what his Domain was.

"Recently manifested," Solstice said instead, flat and even.

"Still figuring out how it works. Figured I'd ask someone who's had more practice." Lere tilted his head.

"How old are you, anyway?"

"Fifteen. Sixteen. Not sure."

"You don't know your own age?"

"Stopped counting." Solstice shrugged.

"Don't remember my birthday either." For a moment, Lere looked sad. Then he shrugged and continued.

"I think you're asking about the expression, right? From what I've learned, two people can have the same Domain, but that doesn't mean they'll use it the same way." He raised a finger.

"The expression is different for everyone. It's how your Domain actually manifests and how you learn to use it. So even if two people have Expansion, neither one is necessarily going to look or work the same." Solstice nodded in response. Lere raised another finger.

"For instance, I can tell this vein is huge. Bigger than any vein I've explored before. But there's so much magic concentrated in here that I can't tell exactly how far it goes." He shrugged.

"That's just how mine works, though. Yours could be completely different."

"I see," Solstice said, his thoughts already moving.' Lere's Domain is Expansion. But the way he described it is nothing like what I'm feeling.' He glanced at Lere. The boy was still watching him.' He's useful. If I stay on his good side, he might come in handy later.' Solstice smiled, awkward and too wide, muscles unfamiliar with the shape. Lere recoiled.

"Ugh. Don't do that. That's disturbing." Solstice let the smile drop and said nothing else. He sat back against the cold stone, watching Lere rub his palms together and blow into them. The fever the salt had given him was already fading, warmth bleeding out through his skin same as everything else in his life. His eyes drifted to the Uron vein glowing faint along the far wall.' Whatever this light is… it isn't Expansion.' Solstice stared at the faint threads drifting around the Uron.

If Lere was right, then a Domain wasn't just a name. It had an expression. A way it behaved. A way its owner could feel it. And Solstice felt none of what Lere had described. He didn't sense space. He didn't feel distance. He didn't know what his Domain was doing. He only saw these things. He watched one of the floating threads curl around his fingertip before disappearing into the dark.' Then what is this?'