by K. Gorman
“Ah, there we go.” Aiden sat upright, watching his mirror of the data. From his pocket, he took out what looked suspiciously like a USB flash drive. A chart popped up, minimized to the corner, and was instantly replaced by a second one. At the bottom of the screen, she recognized the graph of a heartbeat.
It looked a little fast.
“Cool. So, there’s your magic, and, uhh…” He drifted off, squinting at the screen.
The light continued to get warmer. It felt nice after the cold of Lyarne’s autumn. It heated her right down to the bones. Her eyes felt less raw and dry than before, and their lids drooped under the light. She smiled, wiggled down into the seat, and closed out the world.
The light pulsed like a heartbeat. Her smile faded. Something clicked above her, and her wrists pressed down hard on the chair’s arms.
She couldn’t move.
Her eyes snapped open. The screen no longer raced with data. Instead, it had only two words. In English.
Hello, Mieshka Elena Renaud.
She jerked upright—or tried to. Her back fixed to the chair, as if the cushions were a magnet for her spine. The pulse continued, beating into her bones. A curl of smoke lifted into the bright light. She wrestled against the armrests, staring at the words.
“Uhh, Mr. Fire Mage? Aiden?”
“Yeah?”
He hadn’t looked away from his screen, which still showed a graph. The metal end of the USB drive gleamed in the console.
On her screen, the writing changed.
I will not hurt you.
Uhh, yeah. No thanks. She gritted her teeth and struggled against the hold the seat had on her, but her arms wouldn’t budge. She inhaled a shaky breath of air.
Okay, don’t panic. It’s probably just some kind of weird security thing.
She jerked as something invisible brushed her skin, feeling like the tips of feathers. A second later, orange lines awoke on her knuckles, sliding across the skin in the same way as they’d slid across the black metal hull of the ship’s door. She felt them follow her arm up, leaving a warm track and disappearing under the cuff of her sleeve.
“Is this part of the scan?”
Aiden finally looked over. He stared at her, a small frown cutting into his brow. The heat traced up her neck and around her jaw, and his eyes went wide. He turned back to his console and typed a few flurried commands.
Nothing changed. Heat sank into her shoulder blades.
He swore.
The lines covered most of her body now. A glow rose from her cheek. Aiden scrambled out of his chair and made to grab her. When his hand entered the light, and there was a sharp hiss.
Fire snapped up his fingers. He snatched them away.
Seeing this, she renewed her struggle against the chair, slamming her back against it in an attempt to shake her arms loose. The lines slid into her eyes. She felt their warmth pool in her irises, trace across her forehead, sink into her mind.
Everything went black.
Sounds disappeared.
There was no ship, no console, no Aiden. Just emptiness.
Her body had disappeared, too. She couldn’t feel her heart anymore, couldn’t breathe.
But there was something.
She felt it in a similar way she’d felt the brush against her skin earlier, and a little in how the lines had traced into her skin—not so much in the warmth they brought, but in a connection of energy that plugged into her the way she could plug her phone into her computer, which was an odd sensation to experience.
A tiny prick of light sparked in her vision. In this seeming-infinite place, she couldn’t tell if it was in the distance and getting closer, or simply growing larger. Bit by bit, like a shifting cloud on the horizon, it formed into the shape of a bird, its red-orange wings beating against an unknown wind. Their sound was quickly swallowed by the dark.
As it grew closer, she saw that it had a wingspan wider than her arms, and its body was made of a deep burnt orange color, with an undertone of red flowing beneath. On either side of its tail, two feathers trailed back, part peacock, part swallowtail, their deep ocher color ending in a decorative eye of yellow-gold. Its body seemed to move between solid and flame, blurring in parts. At the end of a long, slender neck, its head tapered into a sharp point, like a predator. Its eyes were like white-hot burning ash.
“Mieshka Elena Renaud,” it said. Words moved like thoughts in this dark place, and they came across more like a computer text-to-speech program rather than natural speech, but it felt as if it were tasting her name on its tongue—testing to hear how it sounded. Heat shimmered around it, around her. It drew slowly closer, its outstretched wings unmoving. Perhaps it didn’t need them to fly.
Those white-hot eyes blinked once, and its head dipped lower.
“I have been alone, here,” it said. The great wings beat once, twice, and its fire coursed through her skin, filling her body.
It didn’t hurt.
Its wings stretched out once again, spreading to the horizons in this infinite place. Fire crackled with thought.
She would never be cold again, it promised.
“I have been alone,” it said again, ashen eyes blinking fire like tears. “Now, you are here.”
It raised its head in a cry—a long, fierce, musical cry that shook her nonexistent lungs—and vanished.
Everything went black again, but this time the temperature felt cool to her skin, as if she’d been standing in front of a heater. A draft blew across her neck. The edge of the chair dug into the backs of her knees.
She was back in the ship.
She jerked her arms off the rests and launched to her feet, smacking into both the console and the chair on her way out. There was no light, but a noise came from the left.
“Are you okay?” Aiden’s voice came from beside her, close to the floor.
She swallowed. “I think so. What the f—” She caught herself and bit off the swear. “—heck was that?”
Fire slipped into the air beside her like a wayward will-o’-wisp, illuminating the dead console to her left and making her jerk. She flinched away from it, creeping farther back into the shadows toward the back of the ship.
“Don’t worry. That one’s mine.” Aiden’s head and shoulders were stuck under the console like a mechanic under a car, the shadows flickering in the light. He waved one hand to her, a golden-orange rune glowing on its back that she suspected was supposed to make her feel at ease. She took another step back, eyeing the floating wisp of fire. The air smelled like smoke. Firelight shivered over his body, glinting on his watch and his belt buckle. “Looks like the crystal got a bit… active. I pulled the kill switch on the connection. I’ll turn it back on in just a sec.”
As he fiddled with something underneath the second console, and a quiet sound of scraping metal rose into the air, she gave the main console and its two chairs a hard stare. Then she took yet another step back. “What was that bird I saw?”
The scraping stopped. “You saw something?”
“Yeah. Big flaming bird.” She hesitated. “Was that a delusion?
“Ah. No. Not a delusion.” The scraping started up again, but only briefly, this time. “This ship is kind of special. Instead of electricity or jet fuel, it runs on a sentient power force.”
“The bird I saw?” She’d seen one earlier, she remembered, back on the stonework tapestry in the memorial upstairs. “A Firebird? Phoenix?”
“Their Lurian name translates as Sunbirds, but I suspect they’re the same mythological spirit.”
Uh huh. And that still doesn’t explain what happened.
“It said it was alone,” she said.
He stopped. “It spoke to you?”
“Yeah.” She lifted her head, watching him. “Why? Was it not supposed to do that?”
He grunted. “They’ve certainly never done that before.”
Her eyebrows rose. “How many people do you take down here?”
“Zero, so far. Well, only Buck and Jo, b
ut they don’t count. Same with Sophia.”
She had no idea who Sophia was, but now didn’t seem the time to ask. “So, it’s not like you have a large data pool to draw from about this.”
He paused. “Ah. I see. I miscommunicated. By ‘never before’ I mean that, in the entire written history on Lur, crystals spirits have never spoken with anyone. Not directly, anyway.”
“I was connected to the console,” she said. “It had me stuck to the chair.”
“But it contacted you through your mind. That’s the difference. It makes it significant and unusual, but not illogical.” He squirmed, poking his head out from under the console. A second rune glowed on his other hand, pulsing slightly. “Ready?”
He’s going to turn the power back on.
She swallowed, then nodded.
He head, and the second rune, disappeared back under the console. On the floor, the rest of his body gave a jerk, as if he were lunging for something.
A whisper of energy pulsed through the space. In the next second, a series of clicks and whirs sounded around her as the lights flickered on, the ship rebooting.
“Before it went, ah, active, I got a look at your stats.” He squirmed back out from under the console and hauled himself to his feet before turning back to the secondary console. Data scrolled up its screen, seemingly returning to where it had left off. “You have an atypical brand of magic. Normally, Terran magic has mimicked our elements, but yours doesn’t.”
She gave the pilot’s chair a wary look, then took a long breath and folded her arms around her abdomen. “Yeah, I’m kinda still stuck on the part where I actually have magic. I think there must have been a mistake somewhere.”
“Nope, no mistake.” Aiden jabbed a finger at the data on his screen. “It’s right there. If it makes you feel better, you’re not the first.”
“I thought Terrans weren’t supposed to have magic?”
“That’s… an inaccurate misinterpretation of historic texts. According to you and your history, magic didn’t exist, but we detected it on arrival. It’s different, and smaller than Lur had, but it exists. You just weren’t using it.” He blew out a breath and straightened, glancing around before making a gesture back toward the chair. “We might as well have this talk now. Would you like to sit?”
She stepped another inch away from the chair. “Nah, I think I’ll stand.”
“Yeah, I don’t blame you. I booted him in a disconnected mode, which is kind of like the safe mode on your computer. He can’t manipulate the systems anymore.”
There was that ‘he’ again. Now that she’d met the Firebird, she could understand it. The entity had appeared as gender neutral to her senses, but she supposed if it hadn’t spoken to any of them before…
“Have you heard of adaptive evolution?” Aiden continued.
She shook her head. They’re studied evolution in class two years ago, but she’d never heard of ‘adaptive evolution.’
“It’s a term with a couple meanings. In this instance, it refers to evolution that’s triggered as a direct result from an outside influence.”
“Uhh.” She frowned. “Isn’t that most evolution? Like those moths evolving to favor black coloration as a direct result of coal pollution?”
“This involves evolution that occurs within an individual lifespan, no generations. Terra itself already had latent magical fields, and some Terrans already had an ability to manipulate those fields—they just hadn’t found a need or a method until we came along. In the middle part of the Transition, there were a series of ‘awakenings’ among the populace, which we swiftly controlled and isolated.” He made a placating gesture at the alarmed expression on her face. “Don’t worry, they’re not imprisoned or anything. We just taught them how to use their power and sent them back home. It was pretty small, anyway. I think one air elemental managed to knock over a chair once. Anyway.”
He took a breath. “Think of the world as one big organism. A foreign body comes in, and the organism develops defenses for it. Like antibodies for a virus. When we mages arrived, the latent magic of this world awoke in response to us.” He took a breath. “But it’s new, and it’s weird, and we don’t really know how to work with it. Our old technology—as we both just experienced—works at odds with it sometimes.”
He cradled one hand in the other. She saw where the crystal’s fire had burnt the skin.
“So, I’m like a white blood cell?” she asked.
“Yeah. An antibody. From what I saw, your magic allows you to channel stuff. Basically, if we had let the Phoenix continue, it would have transferred into you and you’d be a full-blown fire mage with its power. Quite a bit of power, mind you.” He sighed. “Probably, if I’d left you alone and hadn’t brought you down here, you might have lived a few years—maybe even the rest of your life—without knowing magic. But I didn’t, and here we are.”
She was still stuck on the whole antibody concept. “So you’re a virus?”
He stared at her through the fire. “You know, I’m starting to think that I used the wrong analogy to describe this.”
“A body will develop antibodies for anything that it doesn’t recognize,” she said. “It’ll even kill the wrong type of blood.”
The firelight pronounced the shadows on his face. For a moment, he almost looked like her father with the lines grooved into his skin. His eyes held hers steadily.
With the next flick of flame, he was the mage again.
She curled her sleeves around her fists.
“What now?”
“That’s up to you,” he said. “By decree of the Council in Mersetzdeitz, I’m duty-bound to look for new magic users—but my duty ends once you’re registered. It’s up to you whether you’d like to or not. There is an apprenticeship program—I know, I know, ‘apprentice’ is an old, really formal word, but the Council is a bit stuffy and traditional and insists it’s the only one that translates properly—that I can offer you. Since I happen to also be a crystal engineer, your particular abilities happen to match my specialty more than they match others. We could find out more about your talents.”
Her jaw loosened.
Okay, this is not what I was expecting to do today.
“It’s a bit sudden,” she started.
“You don’t have to decide today,” he said. “But I do have to keep an eye on you. Magic, as you’ve seen, is dangerous.” He waved his burned hand. “We can’t have a rogue magic user running around—in case your powers manifest in other situations.”
She winced, a picture forming of how that could happen. What if someone happened to have fire magic?
“Buck said there were other people with magic?” she asked. Besides mages?”
“There are. One’s with Sophia, the water mage here, one’s in Terremain.” He paused. “There are several hundred in Mersetzdeitz, but then, everything’s in Mersetzdeitz, isn’t it?”
She smiled at the joke. That was what they said about Mersetzdeitz. Pretty city, bigger than Lyarne, and untouchable on its plateau. The two used to be twin capitals, a long time ago. Nowadays, Mersetzdeitz was a self-governing city-state and, currently, Lyarne’s ally, bordering Lyarne’s mountains. Several train tunnels connected the two.
And yes, everything was in Mersetzdeitz.
She shifted where she stood. The edge of the wall had dug into her back.
“Is there anyone else in Lyarne?”
“I don’t suppose there is.” Aiden shifted too, sitting more upright. “Your guess is as good as mine. The only way I can track magic is by sending Buck out with the detector.” He eyed her. “You don’t have to decide now, but I’ll need an answer within the week. I really am short on time.”
“I’ll talk to my dad,” she said. “Will I miss school?”
“Any more than you are now?” He snorted. “No. I won’t wreck a perfectly good Lyarnese education. But there is one thing. I need to put a tracking spell on you. As insurance. Hard to keep track of people these days.”
She froze. More magic?
He must have seen the look on her face, because he quickly added, “Don’t worry, this won’t hurt.”
She wrinkled her nose, but held still as he lifted his hands, runes glowing again on his skin.
Yeah, but that’s what you said before.
***
Looking for more? I’m in desperate need of beta and ARC readers as I re-launch this series. If you’re interested, please send me an email at [email protected] . Read on for more information.
Want More?
*What is a Beta Reader?
Beta readers are readers who receive an early version of a book, often before it’s gone through the editor. The idea is for them to give the author feedback on the story, characters, and writing—what works, what doesn’t work, how they feel, if it’s boring, confusing, etc—so that the author can then go back and correct those things.
*What is an ARC reader?
ARC stands for Advanced Review Copy. An ARC reader receives an advanced copy of the book—usually either the final copy or almost the final copy. A few typos might be left in as it may be after one editor’s been through it, but before a proofreader’s had a chance to correct it. The idea behind this is for them to read the book early and review the book when it launches.
Things are happening fast with this series, so get in quick if you want either of these! And feel free to ask questions. I’m always happy to answer!
Cheers,
Kelly (K. Gorman)