Chapter 5 #2
“There it is,” she murmurs, and takes it, and I let her, because watching her win a piece is worth more to me than the piece.
Hallie is resetting the board for our third game. I lean back in my chair, and my personal crystal is so warm in my pants pocket that I finally notice it and go still.
It’s been warm all day; I realize that now.
My crystal has been a low, steady heat in the pocket since the moment I sat down across from her this morning.
Normally, my crystal only heats like this near a live seam.
I’ve carried it for the last ten years and I have never once felt it do this in response to another being.
“Is something wrong?” Hallie questions.
“No, I’ve just noticed that my crystal is brighter than ever before.”
She smiles wide. “Really? Um…Can I see your crystal?”
I reach into my pocket and draw it out, and it sits in my palm, glowing, a rough shard of Illibrium about the size of my thumb, lit from within, pulsing soft blue-white.
“This is my personal crystal. Every miner bonds with one, when we’re young.
It warms when there’s live Illibrium near.
It wakes me when something’s wrong on the perimeter. It’s been my companion my whole life.”
She stares at it, and her whole face has changed, the wariness gone, replaced by open, undisguised wonder.
“Oh, it’s so beautiful. I’ve never seen an Illibrium crystal this close before.
When I came through the transporter station, they held one up near me, during the attunement test, and it flickered.
The official seemed surprised.” She leans closer.
“I didn’t get to look. They moved me right through. ”
“It’s been warm since this morning,” I tell her. “Since you sat down.”
Her eyes come up to mine. “It has?”
“All day.” I turn my palm so the light of it falls on her face. “It’s never done that. Not over a person. Not once.”
“Can I…Would it be all right if I touched it?”
“Hold out your hand.”
She tugs the glove off her right hand. I look away from her fingers for one disciplined second, because her bare skin is so very tempting. Hallie reaches out, careful, and lays one fingertip against the crystal in my palm.
It flares.
Not dangerously. Not the white-hot warning flash it gives near a bad seam. It brightens, the soft glow swelling up bright enough to throw both our faces into light. I feel the answering heat of it run all the way up my arm.
Hallie gasps. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No.” My voice is rough. “No. It likes you.”
“It likes me?”
“Yes, and it doesn’t like most beings.”
The glow holds steady and bright between us, lighting the small space. For a moment neither of us moves, both of us just watching the thing that’s been mine my whole life decide, all on its own, that it belongs to her too.
Finally, she pulls her finger back, and tugs her glove on, and the crystal dims slowly to its low steady warmth, like it’s sorry to see her go. “I like your crystal, too, Maxon.”
I don’t tell her that the crystal and I are in complete agreement on the subject. I put it back in my pocket.
“Your move,” I say.
I win all three games we play.
And after the third, when I finally, barely, corner her king, she sits back and stares at the board for a long moment. I brace, because some players throw the pieces, some go cold and quiet, and I don’t know yet which kind she is.
Then she huffs out a breath and the corner of her mouth tips up. “You’re going to eventually lose to me. You know that, right?”
“I know.” And I mean it, three or four more games and she’ll have the variant cold and she’ll take me apart.
The strange thing, the thing I’ll turn over later in the dark, is how much I want it.
I want to lose to her. I want to sit across this board and be beaten by the sharpest mind I’ve ever met, and watch her face do that thing it does when she wins a piece, and know I’m the one who got to be there when it happened.
And then the front door opens.
The heavy tread of the crew home from the mine, gear thumping, deep voices, the day’s quiet shattering. They round the corner and see us. My brothers stop and stare. At the board between us, and the abandoned lunch plates, and the way it’s obvious that we’ve been here all day.
“Are you two,” Heavy says slowly, “playing that outrageously boring game that everyone hates except for Rook?”
“He finally found someone willing to suffer through it,” Cannibal laughs.
“And she’s good too, maybe she’s as good as him, if not better,” Scar observes, from the back. He’s looking at the board, reading the positions the way he reads everything, and there’s something almost like approval in it.
“I won,” I protest. “I won all three games.”
“This time,” Scar says. “Give it a few more and she’ll be the one who is winning.”
Hallie claps her hands with delight.
I shake my head.
My brothers laugh, and somebody claps me on the shoulder hard enough to rattle my teeth. And they start teasing me. “Rook finally found a partner.”
Hallie looks at the board, a little flushed, but she’s got a satisfied tilt to her mouth.
Claws says to her, “Are you going to teach the rest of us too, or is this a two-being operation?”
“You couldn’t handle it,” she responds.
And my brothers howl in response.
“Same time tomorrow?” she asks me, quiet, under the noise of my brothers, just for me.
“Same time tomorrow,” I agree.