Into the Fire

by K. Gorman

  Heat flushed Mieshka’s face. Her eyes felt puffy. She wiped them with another tissue. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be—”

  “No, no—I shouldn’t have asked,” Robin said. “I wasn’t thinking. You’ve got a history, I get it.”

  Mieshka shook her head. “No. I’m not a good friend. Friends should be able to talk about anything.”

  “I—what? Seriously?” Mieshka heard more than saw Robin’s eyebrow twitch up. “Dude, your mom just died. I think you get a fucking pass.”

  A small silence stretched between them. She squeezed her eyes shut as more tears leaked through. When she swallowed, her throat had a hard, raw lump in it.

  “Lansdowne kind of sucks, anyway,” Robin said.

  “Fiona will be there,” Mieshka said. “And Satori.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not like we don’t see them every day.”

  But you are closer to them than you are to me. It had been like that in Terremain, too, when they’d moved there a few years back. This time, Mieshka didn’t the energy to spend making new friends. It was just happenstance—a shared encounter in the hallway one morning—that had pushed Robin into befriending her.

  Mieshka didn’t answer. Robin had moved, twisting away from her. “Besides, that looks way more interesting.”

  She looked up with a frown, following her friend’s gaze. At the next corner of the hallway, wedged into the wall opposite her so that she hadn’t noticed it beyond the jutting shutters of the business next to it, a smooth, arched doorway led into a dim corridor. Blue light flickered within, making a silent dance on the walls.

  “What is it?”

  “The fire mage’s temple.”

  “Temple?” Her eyebrows shot up as she studied the doorway. It had an ornate trim—like leaves—wrought in a material that was paler than the rest of the hallway’s beige accents. Marble? They used marble in temples, right? But why build a temple here, in the middle of the subway mall?

  “That’s what everyone calls it. They say that the fire mage’s ship is under it. You know about the ships, right?”

  The mages had crash-landed on this world. They’d used their ships—special ships, all black metal and magic—to slice through the dimensions, fleeing the collapse of their old world. That, technically, made them refugees. But the government treated them much better than it treated people like Mieshka.

  There were three in Lyarne, and a fourth in nearby Terremain. Their elemental magic powered the cities’ defense shields.

  “I’ve seen pictures.” Robin helped her up, and she swayed a little as she balanced. Echoes followed them as they walked up the hall, carrying the cacophony of the station.

  They paused at the threshold. Inside, the light dimmed, reduced to two dancing tubelights on the ceiling. They had a watery cadence to them, as if they were cast through ocean waves—which struck her as odd for a fire temple, but she was far too focused on the walls themselves to give it much thought.

  It was as if the mythos of an entire world had been condensed into a single place.

  She’d seen pictures of tapestries before, and scrolls. Old ones, where the scene just kept moving and moving, showing more and more of its story or purpose as it went. This had a similar feel to that, albeit with a more encyclopedic theme, as if the artist had attempted to put every single mythological creature they knew about into a single piece.

  To her left, a winged horse flew above a giant, tentacled sea monster. Spirits of the earth and sky erupted across a mountainscape, filling the land and air in minute detail. Underworld creatures slithered and crept in a cold world beneath them.

  And, above them all, residing at about her height in the mural, a large, patterned eagle skirted the sun.

  No, not an eagle. A firebird. A—she fished for the name—Phoenix.

  Lurian mythology was quite similar to Terran. If she tried, she could probably put a Terran name to most of the creatures.

  Under the dancing light, they appeared to move.

  Mieshka’s ragged breaths seemed to grow louder as they progressed. Their shoes tapped on the stone floor. The hallway was so quiet she heard the books in her backpack shift. Where earlier she’d felt the press of people, she now felt their absence.

  The hallway funneled them into a circular room divided into two clear parts. The inner consisted of a small, shallow amphitheater, with the outer being a continuation of the hallway they’d just exited. A three-tiered fountain bubbled on the opposite side, taking up most of the center, its waterfalls shivering in the blue light. Two small, wizened trees flanked its front. At its back, where the first waterfall splashed down from its highest point, a screen hovered in mid-air. Its transparent backing marked it as alien.

  She’d heard the mages had brought some technology from their old world. This must have been part of it—her own world hadn’t even come close to this level of advancement. It looked like she could throw something right through it and it wouldn’t even blink. Three rows of symbols glowed on it, burning with the orange-yellow of the fire element. Mieshka had seen the mage’s old language before—her school had added mages to its curriculum last year. The characters had a strange Asiatic-Cyrillic shape, as if they’d taken a Russian design and folded it into a Korean letter building system. which made them seem both familiar and foreign to her. They pulsed in the air, glowing like embers.

  Two steps separated the center of the room from the pillared hallway circling its perimeter. The stone tapestry of mythic creatures continued along the wall, accompanied by more fiery text that lined the room’s outer wall. She ducked behind a pillar, a hand tracing its ribbed edges, and followed the hallway. The light from the letters cast the stone floors in a soft red haze, with the rows of letters reaching close to the ceiling. Each column of text had only two or three words, and maybe fifty rows. They looked clean, uniform, and organized.

  Exactly like the ones on her mother’s cenotaph.

  Mieshka sucked in a sharp breath, feeling the pain flare within her. She forced herself to step back as her throat tightened. Her eyes did a slow circuit of the room, taking in the letters, the tapestry, and the fountain at the center of it all, its single, short passage burning with the same quiet presence as the rest of the text around her.

  Robin stood in front of it, her dark hair catching the mix of red, blue, and green from the center, a concerned look on her face as she only just realized that Mieshka hadn’t followed her into the center. “You okay?”

  “This isn’t a temple.” Mieshka swallowed as her voice broke, staring up at the burn of the main screen. “It’s a memorial.”

  And the main screen was its epitaph.

  Chapter Two

  Two hours later, twilight dimmed the small apartment Mieshka shared with her father when she got home. She took a step in, closed the door behind her, and dropped her keys on the floor.

  She stared at them. Tears blurred her eyes. As the sob rocked through her chest, she smothered it with her hand and leaned her forehead against the wall. Closing her eyes, she started to count. When she got to ten, she rubbed her wrist against her face and peered down through the blur.

  Most of the light came from the balcony door at the far end of the apartment, filtered through a series of vertical, gray fabric blinds. It wasn’t much, but it glinted on the metal sitting next to her foot.

  She left the keys where they were.

  Shrugging her pack from her shoulder, she walked through the hall. To her left, the kitchen opened through the living room, along with a bisecting hallway that led to the washroom, laundry room, and both bedrooms on the right. She glanced to its end, wiping her nose on her sleeve. The last door had a dim line of light between it and the floor.

  Dad was home.

  She slumped her backpack onto the couch, missing the junk mail and magazines that had piled on the arm. Unsorted laundry occupied the rest. On the coffee table, old pizza boxes stacked like a bachelor’s block tower game. Some were starting to smell.

  Reelin
g back the blinds on their balled cord, she slid the door open and stepped over the sill. Their view was of the next apartment and the narrow alleyway between. Every week, the sanitation department emptied the dumpsters at the end.

  The dead remains of a few potted plants also welcomed her into the chill. The Balcony Garden Experiment had been short-lived. Plants couldn’t live with neglect.

  She hunched over the rail and watched the light fade from the alley. It was a gradual process, and one that made her huddle more and more into her hoodie as the chill rose. Eventually, the alley’s lights switched on, beaming an industrial yellow-orange into the gritty shadows.

  Behind her, the shuffle of socked feet announced her father’s arrival. He slid the door closed behind him and joined her, the railing wobbling as he leaned against it. She watched the flicker of a television set in the opposite building, one floor up. A car alarm went off, its sound muffled by distance. Eyes wandering to the dumpsters seven floors down, she thought of the pizza boxes. If she threw them, maybe she could get them in.

  “Cold out.” Her dad’s breath rose in a mist, backlit by their sidelong neighbors. He wore an old, pale blue work shirt, the top two buttons undone, and his sweatpants had food stains on them. The orange alley light glinted off the thin metal frame of his glasses.

  She nodded, jaw tightening. She’d drawn her hood over her beanie long ago, though the chill still seeped in through the neck. Her cheeks had gone numb, and her nose. She did not shiver.

  “How was school?”

  “Fine.”

  “Any homework?”

  “Of course.” Her tone was snippy. She gritted her teeth as a lump slipped back into her throat. The cold pricked at new tears, but she forced her voice to stay even. “Robin showed me the fire mage’s temple.”

  “Temple?”

  “Yeah. Turns out it wasn’t a temple.” She drew a breath, feeling the pain inside her. “It was a memorial instead. Probably for all the people they lost in their old world.”

  The quiet thickened between them for a moment, and she felt a hard lump stick to her throat. The railing trembled under her arm. Bitterness grew in her chest.

  “Why did we come here?” Her question hung in the cold. She didn’t look at him, knowing what his answer would be. The bitterness quickly turned to anger, fueled by an old rage that collected in her stomach like dead blood. Her nerves frayed like a bad firework.

  “It’s safer here,” he said.

  “I can’t visit Mom,” she said.

  “She’s with us—”

  “—in our hearts? There’s a lot of things in my heart right now, and she ain’t one of them.”

  “Mieshka—”

  “No! What can you say? What can anyone say?” She was yelling now, not caring how her voice echoed through the alley. Above them, a neighbor closed a balcony door loudly.

  “I’m sorry that—”

  Rage flashed ahead of her thoughts. “Sorry? Sorry doesn’t help! Fuck!”

  Her hand smacked against the railing. The cold numbed the pain.

  “Mieshka, calm down,” he whispered, hissing across the two feet that separated them. “We have to get through this. Remember what the psychologist said. Count—”

  “I’m sick of counting. It doesn’t help. Who are you to tell me what to do? You just hide in your room all fricking day. And order pizza. I can’t live on pizza!”

  “Mieshka!” His voice rose. “Keep your voice down. I know it hurts. Believe me, I know. I lost her too.”

  She choked, the alleyway blurred around her.

  “I lost both of you.”

  A sob hiccupped through her as she turned away. She slammed the door open on its tracks and sped into the dim, dark room, past the couch with its piles of laundry and junk mail, past the stacked, moldy pizza boxes on the coffee table, and straight into her room.

  She slammed the door behind her, breathing hard. Tears slid down, carving raw streaks into the cold of her cheeks. She ripped a tissue from her desk, nearly taking the box with it. Sinking onto her bed, she curled into the mess she’d left the quilt in this morning.

  It was starting to smell too.

  God, I’m sixteen. Mom was supposed to be here.

  She clawed the quilts up to her and hugged them to her chest, lowering her head into the top and closing her eyes. After a few minutes, she heard the balcony door slide open again. Her dad shuffled in, his feet pausing outside her door a few seconds later.

  She twisted around to stare at it.

  He moved on. She listened as his bedroom door opened, closed.

  She rested her head back into the quilt, eyes closing against its familiar softness. The cold had followed her in, and it numbed her skin for a long time afterward.

  Chapter Three

  Aiden. Twenty years had been enough to get used to the name. It wasn’t far from the original, after all. Aiden, Aedynan—what did spelling matter, so long as people could pronounce it?

  Of course, phonetic transcriptions hadn’t worked for everyone. But, considering what else they’d lost…

  He let out a slow breath, closed his eyes, and leaned his head back until it rested on the floor beyond the lip of the mechanic’s crawler he lay on. Magic pulsed in his left hand, a couple of glowing orange runes that soon faded back into his skin as his attention dropped. He’d been under the shield engine for hours, attempting to rework its energy paths and tweak its build in order to solve the city’s latest defense quandary—a job which both him and Sophia Laforest, formerly Safya Git’sial, had been working at for days and which both of them had deemed near-impossible to complete at its start. The third component of their shield engine management trifecta, Michael Seif, formerly Krolir Seif, had walked off with his engine’s earth crystal, leaving the engine dark and the other two crystals, Aiden’s and Sophia’s, struggling to pick up the slack.

  Which, with the daily bombings the city received, had put their energy output and reclamation into a negative spiral. Normally, crystals simply reclaimed power from the planet’s latent magical fields—but Terran magic was less abundant than Lurian magic had been. Compared to the old world, it didn’t take much to trip crystal use into a downward spin.

  Hell, just allowing a crystal spirit to manifest would do it nowadays. Outside of the crystal host enclosure and the engine casing, the spirits would likely die.

  A problem, for sure, but not his current problem. The Council over in Mersetzdeitz could deal with the crystal preservation inadequacies. He had more pressing concerns.

  Probably, Michael would be back. The man was, in Aiden’s unbiased opinion, a snobbish, self-serving asshole. This wasn’t the first time he had walked off with his crystal. But they couldn’t rely on probably. Not with ten million people in Lyarne counting on the shield for their safety.

  He opened his eyes again. The bottom of the shield engine stared back at him, a hodgepodge of Terran wires and circuits built into the smooth, obsidian-like surface of the engine’s Lurian body. Made of Maanai, the same energy-channeling crystal substance that had caused the collapse of Lurian civilization, it had, like all others that served in their technology, undergone the eriduat exposure process which halted its growth and produced a tamed, domestic form for the manufacturers to mold.

  It had formed the backbone of modern Lurian life, forming the basis of everything from their ships and weapons to their computers, comms devices, vehicles, public transportation, and, in one insane showcase of wealth and crass, someone’s private toilet. Without the raw form available for growth, exposure, and manufacture, they couldn’t make any more, only change existing structures. It had, therefore, been officially dubbed as ‘Lost Technology’ in the early years of the Transition politics.

  As one of the few crystal engineers left from the old world, its post-Transition remodels and maintenance had been the bane of his existence.

  If they’d been on Lur, he could have simply added a few parts and reconfigured a few internal settings, and his energy cr
isis would have been solved.

  Of course, if they’d been on Lur, there wouldn’t be an energy problem in the first place. The overabundance of latent magic fields would have taken care of it.

  He put down the ruler in his hand, placed his on the part of the engine closest to his head, and gave it a hard shove. The mechanic’s crawler he was lying on scrambled backward, one wheel squealing in his ear before it realigned itself. When the rest of the room came into sight, and he’d counted the requisite two seconds to avoid bumping his head, he hauled himself upright and stripped off the one glove he used to do his work and made an immediate turn to consult with the engine’s dashboard.

  It was ready and waiting for him, displaying in shades of red, yellow, and orange to match the fire crystal inside. With the sentient spirit anticipating his query, it had already plugged in the new data variable and re-run the calculation.

  The graph’s line had moved about half an inch. At best, his latest tinker had bought them another day.

  Fuck you, Michael.

  He clicked his tongue, then straightened, his gaze still narrowed on the graph.

  Yeah, this is a problem.

  But he needed a break. He turned, switching his attention to the rest of the room.

  As far as spaces went, the engine’s containment facility was severely lacking. Built as a simple panic room, it sat in a concrete bunker under his main office and had all the trappings of a modern dungeon—rough, unfinished walls, oil-stained floor, a scattering of furniture so old and broken he was pretty sure Buck had found it in a dump, a sense of creeping despair if one lingered too long… He hadn’t meant to spend so much time down here and, hells, he wasn’t supposed to be. Except the war had lingered on much longer than he’d anticipated, their protection clause had, somehow, not quite been broken—their contract lasted until the first bomb got through the shield, which hadn’t happened—and Aiden had a soft spot for Lyarne.

  Not as much of a soft spot as Derrick had for Terremain, though. As the city’s sole mage, with only a single crystal to defend against the front line bombings, he used his own energy to power the shield.