Pop and Nan never spoke of the Resistance in front of me. But late at night, I would hear them murmur of how the rebels freed Scholar prisoners while striking out at the Martials. Of how fighters raided the caravans of the Martial merchant class, the Mercators, and assassinated members of their upper class, the Illustrians. Only the rebels stand up to the Martials. Elusive as they are, they are the only weapon the Scholars have. If anyone can get near the forges, it’s them.
The Resistance, I realize, might help me. My home was raided and burned to the ground, my family killed because two of the rebels gave Darin’s name to the Empire. If I can find the Resistance and explain what happened, maybe they can help me break Darin free from prison—not just because they owe me, but because they live by Izzat, a code of honor as old as the Scholar people. The rebel leaders are the best of the Scholars, the bravest. My parents taught me that before the Empire killed them. If I ask for aid, the Resistance won’t turn me away.
I step toward the grate.
I’ve never been in Serra’s catacombs. They snake beneath the entire city, hundreds of miles of tunnels and caverns, some packed with centuries’ worth of bones. No one uses the crypts for burial anymore, and even the Empire hasn’t mapped out the catacombs entirely. If the Empire, with all its might, can’t hunt out the rebels, then how will I find them?
You won’t stop until you do. I lift the grate and stare into the black hole below. I have to go down there. I have to find the Resistance. Because if I don’t, my brother doesn’t stand a chance. If I don’t find the fighters and get them to help, I’ll never see Darin again.
IV: Elias
By the time Helene and I reach Blackcliff’s belltower, nearly all of the school’s three thousand students have formed up. Dawn’s an hour away, but I don’t see a single sleepy eye. Instead, an eager buzz runs through the crowd. The last time someone deserted, the courtyard was covered in frost.
Every student knows what’s coming. I clench and unclench my fists. I don’t want to watch this. Like all Blackcliff students, I came to the school at the age of six, and in the fourteen years since, I’ve witnessed punishments thousands of times. My own back is a map of the school’s brutality. But deserters are always the worst.
My body is tight as a spring, but I flatten my gaze and keep my expression emotionless. Blackcliff’s subject masters, the Centurions, will be watching.
Drawing their ire when I’m so close to escaping would be unforgivably stupid.
Helene and I walk past the youngest students, four classes of maskless Yearlings, who will have the clearest view of the carnage. The smallest are barely seven. The biggest, nearly eleven.
The Yearlings look down as we pass; we are upperclassmen, and they are forbidden from even addressing us. They stand poker-straight, scims hanging at precise 45-degree angles on their backs, boots spit-shined, faces blank as stone. By now, even the youngest Yearlings have learned Blackcliff’s most essential lessons: Obey, conform, and keep your mouth shut.
Behind the Yearlings sits an empty space in honor of Blackcliff’s second tier of students, called Fivers because so many die in their fifth year. At age eleven, the Centurions throw us out of Blackcliff and into the wilds of the Empire without clothes, food, or weaponry, to survive as best as we can for four years. The remaining Fivers return to Blackcliff, receive their masks, and spend another four years as Cadets and then two more years as Skulls. Hel and I are Senior Skulls—just completing our last year of training.
The Centurions monitor us from beneath the arches that line the courtyard, hands on their whips as they await the arrival of Blackcliff’s commandant. They stand as still as statues, their masks long since melded to their features, any semblance of emotion a distant memory.
I put a hand to my own mask, wishing I could rip it off, even for a minute. Like my classmates, I received the mask on my first day as a Cadet, when I was fourteen. Unlike the rest of the students—and much to Helene’s concern—the smooth liquid silver hasn’t dissolved into my skin like it’s supposed to. Probably because I take the damned thing off whenever I’m alone.
I’ve hated the mask since the day an Augur—an Empire holy man—
handed it to me in a velvet-lined box. I hate the way it gloms on to me like some kind of parasite. I hate the way it presses into my face, molding itself to my skin.
I’m the only student whose mask hasn’t melded to him yet—something my enemies enjoy pointing out. But lately, the mask has started fighting back, forcing the melding process by digging tiny filaments into the back of my neck. It makes my skin crawl, makes me feel like I’m not myself anymore.
Like I’ll never be myself again.
“Veturius.” Hel’s lanky, sandy-haired platoon lieutenant, Demetrius, calls out to me as we take our spots with the other Senior Skulls. “Who is it? Who’s the deserter?”
“I don’t know. Dex and the auxes brought him in.” I look around for my lieutenant, but he hasn’t arrived yet.
“I hear it’s a Yearling.” Demetrius stares at a hunk of wood poking out of the blood-browned cobbles at the base of the belltower. The whipping post.
“An older one. A fourth-year.”
Helene and I exchange a look. Demetrius’s little brother also tried to desert in his fourth year at Blackcliff, when he was only ten. He lasted three hours outside the gates before the legionnaires brought him in to face the Commandant—longer than most.