Such a Daring Endeavor by Cortney Pearson Read Free Book Online Page B

paper free and removes a pen from a drawer. Clearly he’s been here before.
    “Here’s where we’ll want to enter,” he says, sketching out a rough layout.
    “Wait,
we?
”
    “I’m going with you.”
    “No—you’re not.”
    “I can guide you.”
    “No way. Ren. You just got away from Tyrus.”
    “Thanks to you and Haraway.” Exasperated, Ren presses a palm to the table. “You’re my sister; I can’t let you go back there without me, especially not when you’ve never even been to the Triad and I’ve lived there.”
    A guide would definitely come in handy and save me from wandering around like a futz. “Fine. Walk me through the layout, at least. I need to know my way in case we get separated.”
    “Agreed,” says Ren. “So, here…” He draws a crude outline of a courtyard—a small square, really, bordered by columns. “This is where Tyrus has all the new recruits brought in for extraction and training.”
    “Extraction?”
    “Yeah.” Ren tugs at his ear. “Once the last group of deserters got away, Tyrus quit taking chances with Prones.”
    “How kind of him,” I say, biting back all the nasty things I’d like to say.
    “My thoughts exactly. They go through a room here.” He draws. “And once their magic is taken, they go here to await training. Everyone else who wasn’t soldier material got carted off to the Station.”
    “How do they manage with so much stolen magic? How can the Arcs control that many people, especially now?” When I saw it with Talon that first time it made me sick. The masses were shot with poison darts all at once, losing their magic in a huddle in that Station. I doubt the axrats even know the people they took magic from, and yet they have control over them.
    “That much magic only makes them stronger. But Arcs have to keep their victim close by if they want to use their magic.”
    “I remember that girl, Shasa, freaking out and hurrying back to Craven that night,” I say.
    “It’s similar to the way we inject magic to control a device,” Ren says. “Have you operated things or filled a canteen or anything since you got your magic?”
    “Not really,” I tell him. “Talon and I mostly roughed it in the woods while he taught me how to fight.”
    “Well, you taught kids some of this stuff in any case,” says Ren, picking up his aud. The screen alights, and several colored squares tally along the side like bullet points. To my surprise, one of them reads Gwynn’s name.
    Gwynn mentioned she and Ren were in contact before—they can’t possibly be now. Why does he still have these messages?
    “It’s the same thing for Arcs,” Ren goes on, apparently not noticing that
I’ve
noticed he still has her messages on here. “In a sense, we become their devices. They use our own magic to control our actions. It won’t work as well from a distance, but that doesn’t really matter, as they can order us to follow them around.”
    “That’s so twisted,” I say. “How can they tell whose is whose?”
    “They can tell,” he says. “Tyrus had several of us lackeys trailing him, but for some reason he always ordered me to stay directly with him. Others can be nearby, within several hundred feet, even. It’s not like Tyrus can take all his captives with him when he travels, so he just orders them around and they have to obey whether he’s there or not.”
    “Why did they let those people leave Valadir, then?” I ask.
    Ren stares at the table. “It’s difficult for Arcaians to cart around so many subjugates. They may not have known how to handle the excess they’d gotten.”
    I scoff, leaning back to fold my arms. “Excess. Magic can be the
only
emotion a person has access to, and Arcaians take it only to cast it off like it’s nothing.”
    We sit in silence for a few moments.
    “It was Gwynn,” I say. “She was the one who made Tyrus keep you around. Don’t you see? She was trying to protect you!”
    “I doubt that.”
    Ren claimed earlier that