“Of course not, Perry. Would you have supported his decision?”
“No.”
“As I heard it,” Roar continued, “Lodan was heading toward the Horns.”
“To Sable?” Marron asked.
Roar nodded. “There’s a place people speak of,” he told Aria. “A place free of the Aether. They call it the Still Blue. Some say it’s not real. Just a dream of a clear sky. But from time to time, people get to whispering about it.”
Roar looked back at Perry. “There’s more noise than I’ve ever heard out there. People are saying Sable’s discovered it. Lodan was convinced.”
Perry sat forward. He looked ready to spring from his chair. “We need to find out if it’s true.”
Roar’s hand settled on his knife. “If I go to Sable, it won’t be to ask questions about the Still Blue.”
“If you go to Sable, it will be to deliver my sister as you should have.” Perry’s tone had grown cold. Aria’s eyes darted from Roar to Perry.
“What happened to the Fins?” Marron asked. He calmly cut his meat into a perfect square, like he had no idea of the sudden tension in the room.
Roar took a long drink before he spoke. “The Fins were already weakened when illness hit them in the open. Then the Croven came and took the strongest children into their fold. To the rest . . . well, they did what the Croven do.”
Aria looked down. The sauce on her plate had begun to look too red.
“Terrible,” Marron said, nudging his plate away. “The stuff of nightmares.” He smiled at her. “You’ll soon leave this all behind, my dear. Perry told me your mother is a scientist. What sort of research does she do?”
“Genetics. I don’t know much beyond that. She works for the committee that oversees all the Pods and the Realms. The Central Governing Board. It’s high-level research. She’s not allowed to talk about it.”
Aria was embarrassed at how it sounded. Like her own mother couldn’t trust her with information. “She’s very dedicated. She left to work in another Pod a few months ago,” she added, feeling the need to say something more.
“Your mother is not in Reverie?” Marron asked.
“No. She had to go to Bliss to do some research.”
Marron set his wine down so fast it spilled over the edges of the crystal, soaking into the cream table linen.
“What is it?” Aria asked.
Marron’s rings winked red and blue as he gripped the arms of his chair. “There’s a rumor from the traders who came around last week. It’s only a rumor, Aria. You heard what Roar said about the Still Blue. People talk.”
The room turned around her. “What’s the rumor?”
“I’m so sorry to tell you. Bliss was struck by an Aether storm. They said it was destroyed.”
Chapter 25
PEREGRINE
Perry stood outside Aria’s door, his lungs pumping air like a bellows. There was plenty to like about Marron’s. Food. Beds. Food. But all the doors and walls gave him a pathetic range on tempers. He thought of all the times over the past week he’d wanted a break. Just an hour without breathing in Aria’s ache, or Roar’s. Yet here he was, practically sniffing under Aria’s door.
He didn’t catch anything. Perry put his ear to the wood. Fared no better. Swearing under his breath, he jogged downstairs. He entered a room on the first floor, bare save for a large painting that looked like accidental splatter, and the heavy steel door of an elevator. Perry punched at the buttons. Paced until the door slid open. There were no buttons inside. The steel box dropped to only one place. Marron called it the Navel.
Ten seconds in, he started to sweat. He continued to drop, deeper, deeper, imagining all the steps he’d taken to climb the mountain in reverse. The elevator slowed and stopped, though his stomach kept going for a moment or two. He remembered the feeling from his first visit. A hard one to forget. Finally the door opened.
A smell as damp and thick as breathing dirt came to him. He sneezed a few times, striding through a wide corridor toward the source of light at the end. Crates were piled high along the walls. Even on top, they were littered with odd things. Dusty vases and chairs. A mannequin arm. A thin paper screen painted with images of cherry blossoms. A harp with no strings. A wooden box full of doorknobs and hinges and keys.
He had explored every one of those crates the last time he’d come. Like everything at Marron’s, the bits and pieces stashed in the Navel had taught him about the world before the Unity. A world Vale had discovered years before him in the pages of books.
Perry followed the clutter to the end of the corridor, nodding to Roar and Marron as he entered a large room. A bank of computers took up one side. Most were ancient, but Marron had a few pieces of Dweller equipment, sleek as Aria’s Smarteye. There was also a wall-sized screen, like in the common room above. The image he saw on it was of the plateau they’d crossed before the final climb to Marron’s. The colors were odd and the image was murky, but he recognized the caped figures moving around tents.
“I had a microcamera set up,” Marron said from a wooden desk. He controlled the images on the wallscreen from a thin control palette. Aria’s Smarteye was on his desk on a thick black board that looked like a piece of granite. “It won’t last long with the Aether, but it’ll help us see what they’re doing until then.”
“They’re setting up to stay, that’s what they’re doing,” Roar said. He sat on the lone couch, his feet kicked up onto a small table. “Another ten added since the last count, I’d say. You’ve finally got a tribe following you, Per.”
“Thanks, Roar. But it’s not the kind I wanted.” Perry sighed. Would the Croven ever leave? How was he going to get out of here?