Free Quartz by Rabia Gale Page A

Isabella looked at him with somber sympathy. “I am sorry.” She touched his shoulder briefly.
    Her unexpected empathy picked at that scabbed-over wound. Rafe thought he’d become reconciled to his exile from the agri-caves of his boyhood home, but sudden memories of Grenfeld pierced him. The heavy warm smell of soil, the fresh green scent of growing things. The white glow of the quartz pillar thrusting up from the earth and into the ceiling of the vast main cavern. The songs of the workers, their faces shining with sweat, as they sowed and weeded and picked upon the stone-rimmed terraces.
    Since the onset of his sickness, Rafe couldn’t endure the presence of any of the great veins of quartz. But his memories insisted on painting the hollows and contours of the agri-caves as happy places. For a moment he ached to be a boy again, lying in the wheat, plucking berries with purple-stained fingers, basking in the yellow blaze of the megalamps.
    But that life could never be Rafe’s. His brother was Lord Grenfeld now. He was the one who consulted with the Chief Grower and walked the fields and that was just as it should be.
    “Good thing I’m only the younger son,” Rafe said cheerfully. “A life of placid farming wouldn’t suit me at all.”
    “Perhaps,” said Isabella.
     
    Rafe felt the Liberty Caves quartz as a tingle in his feet, a tingle that traveled up to his stomach and became a ball of lead. The entrance to the agri-caves was on the opposite side of a small valley, a saucer-shaped depression that had been blasted down to bare rock. Walls rose sheer and multibanded one either side of the performers as they traveled down a broad path into the valley. The road’s slope was gentle enough for transport carriers to bring in compost and take away produce.
    The firedancers surged forward when they got to level ground. Agri-caves meant fresh food—warm ripe berries, tender greens with crumbs of black dirt still clinging to them, fresh-picked carrots and corn and whatever else might be ready according to that particular cave’s schedule.
    Isabella dropped back to walk at the rear with Rafe. “Are you all right?”
    “I will be, as long as I’m not in charge of digging up tubers for tonight’s stew,” he said, trying for some humor. His skin felt flushed and warm, and anxiety jangled within him. Once he had thought his hypersensitivity to quartz might actually be useful as a surveyor, but the wretched disease manifested only around worked quartz. Being here now only reminded him of the home he could never return to again.
    Unless he really
wanted
to go into a convulsive fit, smash his head on a rock, and drool all over himself.
    “I don’t think we’ll get so much as a shriveled-up tuber for tonight’s dinner. Look ahead.” Isabella pointed.
    They’d rounded a bend in the road. The entrance was directly ahead.
    An entrance separated from them by a tall chain-link fence, a field’s worth of barbed wire, mage lights mounted on tall posts, several battered machines, and soldiers in Blackstone red and black.
    Rafe’s head throbbed. He slipped his hand into his pocket and gripped the stolen device from the train. It fit his hand as if it had been made for it, and he focused on its creased surface as he walked into a tangle of searing light that only he could see.
    Through the pain lancing his skull, he caught Burgess’ words as flashes, “…custom, man, tradition… centuries old… no wanderers are turned away from the caves!” And jagged splinters from the Blackstone senior officer “…change in policy… no one allowed save authorized personnel… leave… or be arrested…”
    The light intensified, blurred his sight, threatened to explode his skull.
Please don’t let me have a fit right here, right now!
Rafe backed away… if only he could slip back up the road… the quartz here must be close to the surface, to cause this kind of reaction…
    Isabella grabbed his wrist.
    “What are you doing?”