Excerpt: The Sky Is Open

It was dark in the vents – dark, stuffy, and stinking of dust and metal. That’s got to be some kinda contradiction, Tamias thought, as he elbowed his way down the next stretch of black, breathless metal tubing. I mean, what are vents for other than circulating air?

Except letting him and halfsies named Tiriel steal into the forbidden, mythical bowels of the bastion’s laboratories. But that was supposed to be a given, really. Otherwise they wouldn’t have made all those movies with various commandos sneaking through them to save the day, right?

The air was still and stagnant, with the same thick quality as a slowly evaporating pond coated with mucus colored scum and drying foam. Tam’s ears were pricked in the hope of catching any sound of danger, but the only thing he could hear was their slow, shuffling crawl: clothes catching on metal and low, quiet breathing. In the distance, he thought he caught the whistle of wind through the pipes, but only faintly.

He sneezed and Tiriel hissed at him angrily, smacking at the small of his back with a fist. Tam winced away from the punch; Tiriel only seemed to hold back with a chosen few, and apparently Tam wasn’t one of them, so it hurt. “Quiet,” the halfsie growled. “They’re going to hear us!”

“Dude,” Tam replied, but only half heartedly. Any more emotion would make him choke on the stale dust. And he didn’t really feel like arguing with Tiriel, because after a deluge of verbal abuse, Tiriel would win. He always did. It was possible he always won because Tam didn’t ever really feel like fighting about any of the things they ended up arguing over, or because Tam wasn’t exactly the most eloquent Strider ever to walk the walls of the City of Lights. Either way, he rolled his scrawny shoulders in as close to an approximation of a shrug as the vent would allow. “Whatever. But I get the feeling we’re waaaaay too far in for anybody to hear us, even if we start screaming.”