by Jodi Meadows
“We’re waiting for the sylph.” I turned a page in the temple book and scribbled out a few more possible translations. “And Cris.”
Whit cocked his head at me. “Wait, how will Cris be here? He died during the riot on market day.”
I groaned and dropped my face into my hands. “Stef. Your turn.”
She sighed. “You promise if we tell him enough, he’ll start to remember?”
I nodded, face still buried in my hands. “It worked on Sam. The magic will crack and fade, but it takes time.”
“I’m sitting right here,” Whit muttered darkly.
“Cris is a sylph now.” Stef headed for the kitchen area, an empty coffee mug in hand. “When Deborl trapped Cris, Ana, and me inside the temple, Cris sacrificed himself in order to free us.”
“You were inside the temple?” Whit asked.
I slammed the temple book shut and grabbed my notebook. “This is what Cris told me: five thousand years ago, Janan was your leader. The leader of all the humans, as far as I can tell. He was just a man, nothing more. But he craved immortality, so he gathered a group of warriors and went hunting for the secrets of eternal life. Something big happened. I don’t know what. I’m studying the books, trying to understand. Then Janan and his warriors were imprisoned in towers all across the world. When his followers—you—heard of his capture, they went to free him.
“They—you traveled until you reached an immense wall ringing a single tower. But when you tried to free him, he said the phoenixes had imprisoned him because he had succeeded in his quest: he’d discovered the secret to immortality.”
“And then what?” Whit asked.
“Then . . .”
Stef lifted an eyebrow, a silent question. Did I want her to say it?
I shook my head. No. No one else needed to bear that guilt. And . . . it was easier if they didn’t know.
Sam looked at me with a sudden and penetrating curiosity, as though he could tell I held back something important.
I averted my gaze and continued speaking. “Then Janan shed his mortal form. He became part of the temple, which was already infused with phoenix magic, and began the journey to immortality. True immortality, without the cycle of life and death and rebirth. He wanted you all to wait for him. He wanted to come back and rule you as he had before”—so he’d told them—“so he caused you to reincarnate.”
Stef nodded. “We allowed Meuric to bind us in chains inside the temple, and then Janan became part of the temple. We were all bound to him.”
From across the room, Sam’s gaze was dark and heavy and grieving.
“Does that mean—” Whit glanced from me to Sam and back. “Oh. You’ll never be reincarnated, will you?”
I shrugged and opened the temple book again. “It’s not important.”
“It is—” he started.
“It’s not. There’s nothing we can do about it, and even if we could change it, the cost is too great.” I tried to focus on my work, but my vision was misty. No matter what happened, this was it for me. I had this one fleeting life.
I had to make the most of it.
“All right.” Whit’s voice was soft; he was only conceding because he wouldn’t argue with a girl who’d live only once.
I didn’t look up from the book, but I could feel everyone’s stares. Their pity.
Sam’s grief.
“It’s not important,” I repeated. “After Soul Night, no one is getting reincarnated anyway. Not even you. The next time someone dies, they’re gone forever.”
A heavy silence descended on the lab, this simple and terrifying truth a smothering snow. I should have said it more gently. They all knew the truth, but they probably didn’t appreciate being reminded any more than I enjoyed being reminded about my newness.
After a moment, Sam took a seat across the table from me. “We keep talking about Janan ascending and returning and how it will destabilize the caldera enough that it erupts, but what does Janan’s ascending actually mean? Will he stay here? Go somewhere else? Be corporeal or not? You said he doesn’t have a mortal form anymore. Will he be just a soul flying around?”
“If you can say he even has a soul,” I muttered, but Sam’s words struck something else inside me. No mortal form. Just a soul flying around.
Like sylph?
“He was human once.” Stef leaned against the wall, her arms crossed. “He must have had a soul at some point.”
Less sure, but unwilling to argue, I turned back to Sam’s question. “I don’t know what will happen, or how. That’s why I’ve been trying to translate these books.”
“Then let’s do that.” Sam picked through my notebook, finding my potential translations of strings of symbols from the books. “This symbol means Heart, city, and prison?” He pointed at a circle with a dot inside.
I nodded. “That’s my best guess. You’ve mentioned the wall in the north before.”
Sam hesitated. “Yes. I remember the wall.”
“Cris told me about another white wall in a jungle.” I’d repeated this story to Sam already, and Stef knew it, but Whit hadn’t heard it. “He said he was collecting plants and came across crumbling white stone. When he climbed on top of a tall piece, he realized the stone had once been a huge wall, which circled a collapsed tower. There was enough rubble around the tower to indicate it had once been as tall as the temple in the center of Heart.”
“But there were no other buildings,” Stef added. “It was like Heart, but without our homes and the Councilhouse, if you looked at it from above, it would look like a circle with a dot in the middle.”
“Right. And I’m guessing they were all prisons, like the temple inside Heart originally was for Janan. Cris told us that all the warriors with Janan were imprisoned separately so they’d never join forces again. That also begins to explain why Heart is built over a caldera that size, even though it’s entirely impractical.”
“Why?” Whit asked.
“Because it was a prison. It was meant to deter people from coming to rescue him. The other prisons we know of are in the frozen north, and in the jungle where not even the water is safe to drink. Who knows where the others are?” None of my friends would be able to remember the locations, even if they’d seen them. Not without a lot of prodding and leading questions, and I could only offer leading questions if I had an idea of where to start. Like Sam’s death. Or symbols Cris might have seen. “Maybe under the ocean, or in deserts, or high on a mountain where the air’s so thin you can’t breathe. They could be anywhere.”
“To be fair to us, though, Heart didn’t look dangerous at first.” Stef frowned. “Except for the geysers and mud pools and fumaroles . . .”
I nodded. “You were on a quest to find your leader, anyway. You believed he’d been wrongly imprisoned, because that’s what you were told.”
“Who told us?” Whit asked.
“I’m not sure. Cris didn’t mention.” I frowned and tried to recall everything he’d said, but those hours in the temple were a blur. I’d been so afraid and depressed.
“And how’d we get the key?” Stef asked. “Someone must have taken it, because otherwise, Janan never could have gotten out to speak to us, and we never could have gotten in.”
I doodled spirals in the margins of my notebook. “If phoenixes built the prisons, it seems likely they would have had the key, as well. Someone must have stolen it from them.”
“That seems like a reasonable conclusion,” Whit said, but I wondered how much of the conversation he was actually retaining. “Perhaps your books will give us the answers.”
“That’s my hope.” I turned the page. The spiral of writing was easy to see now, and I’d gotten better at spotting the symbols I knew, without having to search for them. But it wasn’t enough. Time was running out, and what if I deciphered the text only to realize it was a list of complicated instructions that I couldn’t possibly complete before Soul Night?
What if the books only told me I was too late to stop
Janan?
I couldn’t think like that.
“Well, let’s keep working for now.” Sam turned my notebook toward me again. “Just tell us what you need us to do, and hopefully the sylph will show up soon. It took them about a week when we were here before.”
“Thanks.” But we’d been here a week and a half now. Either they’d come, or I’d misinterpreted their actions before, and they wanted nothing to do with us.
Shrill beeping jerked me from my slumber.
In his sleeping bag next to me, Sam squinted around the front room, looking just as confused as I felt. “What’s that?” Whit echoed the question from his place on the sofa.
It was Stef’s turn on the bed. We all looked up at her as SED light illuminated her face, making her skin eerily white. “We have to go.” Her voice was rough with sleep, but something in her expression snapped. “We have to go. Now.”
Everyone scrambled up, elbows and knees thudding on the floor, and within five minutes, we’d swept our belongings into backpacks and rolled up our sleeping bags. When everything was ready, we turned off the lights and headed outside, leaving the soft thrum of the machine in the lab.
The night was crisp but motionless as we headed east down an overgrown path, continuing away from Heart. Darkness made the unfamiliar ground difficult to navigate, but moonlight shone down, reflecting off ice and snow. Our breaths misted, reverse sylph.
When the lab was out of sight, I adjusted my winter clothes, which I’d thrown on too hastily, and took in the midnight surroundings. “What was that alarm, Stef?” My voice sounded so loud in the darkness.
“A warning that someone had overwritten my commands for the drones. Before, I could keep them away from the lab, searching other areas of Range. But someone else is in control now.”
“Can’t you take back control?” Whit asked.
“If I had more time, and a data console. My SED just isn’t powerful enough.”
“Stef’s Everything Device isn’t everything after all?” Whit teased.
Stef glared, and no one laughed.
“What about Orrin and the others?” Whit asked. “Will the drones be able to find them?”
Stef’s nod was barely perceptible in the dark. “It’s possible, but unlikely. They’re far enough out of Range now. It was the lab we needed to worry about.”
“And he’ll find it,” I added, “because he’s seen Menehem’s research. He wouldn’t come out here himself, though. Not after the guard station.”
“Right.” Stef tapped her SED, bringing up a screen filled with unfamiliar codes. “He doesn’t know what’s in there that we might use to fight back. Menehem has always made Deborl nervous.”
Menehem had probably made a lot of people nervous.
Maybe that was part of what made me so frightening to others: not only was I a newsoul, I was Menehem’s daughter.
We stopped to rest where the wide path dipped into a hollow, keeping us out of sight. Trees and mountains rose high around us, blocking most of the moonlight. It looked as if the path kept going for a ways beyond Range, but it wasn’t maintained regularly. Mostly deer and other large fauna had been using it; tufts of fur had caught on brush, and hoof and paw prints stamped the snow.
There was little evidence of the caravan of exiles passing through, though when I bent, I found snapped blades of frozen grass and twigs, crushed into smeared vehicle tread marks. Time and weather would erase those, and the four of us would leave even fewer traces.
“We should get far enough away from the lab that the drones won’t find us quickly,” Whit said. His voice was harsh on the still night. “And we should get off the path, because won’t that be the next guess? We left the lab and took the path?”
Stef nodded. “I don’t like that it’s so obvious.”
I drifted along the edge of the path, searching for . . . something. I wasn’t sure.
“What are you thinking?” Sam appeared beside me, a warm, dark presence that calmed and excited me. We’d had no time alone, except for the moments before sleep, and those had been exhausted moments, separated by our bedding and a small stretch of floor. We were just close enough that we could see each other and reach to touch, but no more. If we’d been closer, if he’d been holding me at night and I’d kissed him, I don’t know that I would have ever stopped.
I turned my face to the stars. “What do you see?”
“The sky.” He wrapped his arm around my waist, pulling himself close. “Lots and lots of sky.”
“How often do labor drones clear this path?” We were outside of Range now, beyond where people regularly traveled. There was no reason for the path to be so clear. Even the trees above looked as though they’d been pushed aside recently, though not with the evenness of a labor drone. The fallen branches all had jagged edges, as though they’d been ripped from the trunks.
“Not very often.” Sam lowered his voice. “I see what you mean.”
“What lives this way? Trolls?”
“Yes.”
And they traveled this way frequently enough to carve a path through the woods. “Do you think the others would have run into trolls?”
“I don’t know.” Sam tilted his head, listening. I listened, too, to the soft voices on the trail, a pale breeze rustling pine trees, the clatter of some small creature high in cottonwood branches, and a pack of wolves howling in the distance. “I don’t hear anything unusual.”
“Me neither. Still, I agree with Stef and Whit. We need to get off the path.”
We turned toward our friends again, but just as Sam began to speak, a deafening screech came from above.
Everyone looked up at once.
It was shaped like an eagle, but big enough to block out half the sky.
“What is that?” I whispered, dreading, feeling I already knew.
Sam grabbed my hand. “It’s a roc.”
With another terrible screech, the roc shifted its flight. It dove straight toward us.
10
OUTSIDE
“RUN!” SAM DRAGGED me toward the forest. We crashed through the underbrush as the roc keened and spread its wings wide.
Branches cracked. Ice clinked and clattered from above. Talons thumped on the ground behind us. Stef screamed, and I spun to look for her—catching a glimpse of broad brown wings and dark raptor eyes—but Sam jerked me back.
“Come on.” His voice was rough, the order leaving no room for argument.
I stumbled after him, struggling to avoid getting caught in the brush. Rocks and branches and ice snagged at me, but I pushed on with renewed energy when the roc cried and thrashed through the woods. Tree trunks groaned, and huge talons reached after us.
On the ground, chasing prey through the woods, the roc had terrible coordination. Its talons knocked a small tree aside, and they left gouges in the earth as the roc withdrew. Sam and I pushed onward, climbing a small hill, darting around trees. Patches of snow made me slide, but I hauled myself up every time. The forest was quiet, aside from our passage. No birds or small animals made a sound as the roc struggled to reach us.
But its size hindered it now. It couldn’t move through the forest, though surely it could hear our escape. Maybe even our gasping and my whimper as twigs scraped my face and hands.
Finally, Sam allowed us to stop. I bent over to catch my breath. My cheek stung, and a trail of blood leaked into the corner of my mouth, cold and coppery. I wiped it away and scanned the area for our friends. “Where are Stef and Whit?”
“They went to the other side of the path.” Panting, Sam collapsed onto a large rock. He leaned over, head between his knees. His shoulders heaved. “The roc will follow us.”
I collapsed next to him, hyperaware of the thrashing toward the path. The roc cawed and squeaked, and trees groaned under its wrath. More branches snapped, but it didn’t seem like the roc was making progress. I saw only a shadow of movement in the snow-reflected moonlight, but it still seemed much too close for comfort.
“How
long will it follow us?” Adrenaline made my head buzz, and I couldn’t stop checking on the roc.
“Until it finds better prey.” Sam searched his pockets until he found his SED. No alerts of messages from friends. “Will you find out if Stef and Whit are okay?”
I nodded and sent a message from my own SED. “How’s your hand?”
“Better.” He flexed it a little, wincing.
“As long as it’s better.” I stuffed my SED in my pocket. “What next? Do we keep walking? Try to sleep? They have the tent.”
And the roc was right there. I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I could hear it, though exhaustion nipped at the back of my thoughts.
“Keep walking. We’ll head away from the roc; that way it doesn’t draw anything else’s attention. As long as we stay in the woods, it won’t be able to reach us. Then we’ll meet up with the others when the way is clear.”
My SED chirped, and reading the message, I let out a soft chuckle. “Stef just sent those exact thoughts. They’re not hurt.”
“I’m glad.”
I readjusted my belongings and made sure there were no holes or scratches in my clothes. “I’m ready.” The sooner we left the roc behind, the better. Everyone had said leaving Range was dangerous, but I hadn’t realized danger appeared as soon as one left. Menehem’s lab was just beyond the edges of Range, close enough that there were still traps and the occasional drone patrol, so wiser creatures would stay away.
But already we’d walked down a troll path and been attacked by a roc. No wonder everyone stayed in Heart.
No wonder they’d all been so afraid of death when Janan offered them reincarnation.
We began walking, this time mindful of the brush and snow and ice. We were far enough away from the roc now that we didn’t need to rush, and it would be foolish to risk getting injured out here. Rin’s medical training hadn’t been that thorough, and we’d only brought a few supplies.
Sounds of the roc’s thrashing faded behind us, and mice and shrews began moving about the forest again. Probably heading back to their dens. Light touched the horizon, a dull red glow that was barely visible through the trees.