by India Arden
“That’s it, then? One try?”
“After that, there wasn’t enough Arcanum to experiment with. They drank the Font dry to form the Prime Tetrad and spent the rest of their lives building the first distiller.”
“But it’s not as if poor Grace was the only one who couldn’t handle the Arcanum.” He leaned in. The dirt-scent of patchouli intensified. “Rumor has it that the reigning Tetrad’s got a botched Transfiguration on film.”
They did. I’d seen it. And I still had nightmares. The tone of his voice as he asked about it made me distinctly uneasy. Like maybe his eagerness went beyond medical curiosity. I cut my eyes to the wall, where sequins glittered in the creases of the brocade. But when I shifted, the light caught them just so, and I saw they weren’t sequins at all, but the metallic bodies of dead flies, exactingly glued into abstract patterns. Sterling’s objective wasn’t to heal, I realized. He was testing the boundaries of life.
Or death.
I shrank away from his touch, and he went on as if he hadn’t even noticed. “I’ve heard estimates that over the years, as many as fifty Aspirants haven’t survived.”
Maybe. Certain countries could be pretty secretive. “Hard to say.” I turned away from him and faced the wall. I felt ridiculous for projecting an entire personality on someone just because he’d shown me a glimmer of kindness. I’d interpreted his actions as compassion, but for all I knew, Sterling just got off on playing with parasites.
“I’m tired,” I said. Which was true.
On so many levels.
“Do you want me to stay here while you sleep?”
Damn it. He really did sound as if he cared…then again, maybe he was just humoring me. Trying to gain my confidence so he could pump me for juicy information about failed Aspirants. But the last thing I wanted was a reminder of what I’d seen when I lifted the corner of that tarp. “I’d prefer you leave.”
He stood up. Without his weight on the inflatable lounger, I sank deeper into the squeaky plastic. “I hope you’re not just saying that to see if I’ll insist on staying, because I don’t play those games. I’m basically a loner, myself—and the other guys respect that.” He turned off all but the dimmest lamp, then paused in the doorway and added, “The way I see it, friends are the people you’re most comfortable asking to leave you alone.”
22
I’ve heard that if you dream about falling, you’d better wake up before you hit the ground. Otherwise, you might die in your sleep.
I’d never dreamt about falling. But I did dream about Aspirants being consumed by the Arcanum.
Usually, when I dreamed about Transfigurations gone wrong, I was witnessing it from the audience. I was young in these dreams, since my only frame of reference (up until I’d seen Flood Transfigure, anyhow) were some old-school home movies, and the ceremony I’d attended as a child. There I would be, in those dreams, playing with my plastic pony while my red-faced brother squalled in my mother’s arms, and when the Aspirant on the dais turned, instead of a sigil on his torso, there’d be a smoking hole.
Turns out, the real thing was even gorier than I’d always imagined.
The dream I had in Sterling’s bed while I recovered from my Arcane cleanse started off like the innumerable Transfiguration-gone-wrong dreams I’d had before. Except…it wasn’t. The first thing I noticed was my feet flat on the floor, not dangling off the edge of the seat, swinging. Moonbeam was no longer in my hands. My red-faced baby brother wasn’t there, either. And my mother?
The figure on the dais turned to look at me, and there she was. Not much older than I was now. She didn’t have on the couture dress she’d worn that day—an asymmetrically structured silk floor-length gown…red, of course—but the pajama-like unbleached linen garments of an Aspirant.
Initially, I was thrilled that the Arcane Tetrad had finally decided to challenge over a century and a half of exclusion and choose a female Aspirant to Transfigure. But then I remembered that Mom was no Aspirant. Just the mother of Fire’s legacy.
I tried to rise from my seat and stop the ceremony, but I felt like I was underwater. My limbs were leaden and my movements were sluggish. All the while I struggled to stand, Mom held my gaze. She didn’t seem happy, exactly. But she did look satisfied. Determined, too.
“No!” I screamed. Or tried to…it only came out as a whisper.
“It’s okay, Aurora.” She spoke directly to me across the sea of guests, and somehow, the silvery Arcanum vial was already in her hand. “Sometimes, the safest thing to do…is disappear.”
With that, she raised the vial to her lips—
And the world around me shifted as someone shook me awake.
“Hey, Princess. Rise and shine.”
I found Rain kneeling beside Sterling’s bed. His hair was pulled up in its man-bun and he’d found himself another flowy shirt from the bins to replace the one he’d ruined in the sewers. This one was paisley, not floral.
I knuckled my eye. It was surprisingly un-crusty. “What now—you’ve decided to use sleep deprivation as a tool to pry Arcane secrets out of me? If I knew what this Bonding thing was, I’d tell you.”
“Chill, baby girl. We’ve got worse problems now than mastering the Arcanum.”
I pushed up on my elbow. The mattress gave a plastic squeak. “What do you mean?”
“Bad enough Ember’s plastered all over the news for kidnapping you. Now those assho—I mean, your family—is pinning those dead bodies on him, too.”
“That makes no sense at all. Those men died from the Arcanum.”
“We all know that, but the Masters haven’t gone public about the extractor. As far as your average person is concerned, there was only one dose of Arcanum—the one that Transfigured Flood. According to the story, those guys in the courtyard died trying to stop Ember from abducting you.”
“This can’t be happening.” I tried to wrench myself off the pool lounger, floundered, and had to resort to accepting Rain’s hand up. Those long-fingered hands of his were surprisingly strong. Which I hated that I’d even noticed.
Sterling’s little room was hidden away in a mechanical area of the department store I wasn’t yet familiar with. Rain and I had to scale several industrial metal staircases to find those ubiquitous fluorescent and linoleum hallways I’d only begun to learn. Maybe I should have been grateful for all those stairs. The climbing meant he couldn’t try to transport me via pallet jack.
“Where are we going?” I asked, when we hung a right where I expected to turn left. “Or am I not allowed to know?”
“I don’t expect you to take my word for any of this,” Rain said. And before I could assure him that I did, he added, “Besides, if a picture is worth a thousand words, a newscast must be priceless.” He led me to a massive metal door marked Electronics. It was so heavy, he had to put his shoulder into it to make the thing budge. He held it open, mockingly chivalrous. Expecting a “Princess” remark to follow, I shot him a glare…and then I realized a glare was a luxury I’d never been able to afford. Not back at the compound. My whole life, I’d had no choice but to take whatever treatment was given to me, ally myself with the brother I was afraid of, and sink quietly into the background when I couldn’t stand it anymore.
How odd to be pleased about the option to glare.
The room beyond the heavy door felt vast and dark. There was a hardness to the inside of the warehouse, with all its concrete and metal, plexiglass and linoleum. It was as if my body could sense the lack of living, breathing stuff, like fabric and wood. It didn’t just sound different—the air felt different, too. Hollow, harsh, cold. When I crossed the threshold, I felt the atmosphere tingling across my forearms. Not just industrial, but electronic.
The air seemed to crackle across the back of my tongue while bluish light flickered all around me. Not fluorescent bulbs this time, but the cathode rays of dozens upon dozens of massive TV sets. An entire wall of TVs.
Really old TVs.
“They were a sales display
, once upon a time,” Rain told me. “Back in the Riots, TV sets were the first thing looters cleared out. But these were bolted into a steel grid…probably to stop them from falling on curious customers trying to mess with the controls.”
Four folding canvas camping chairs faced the huge bank of televisions, three of them occupied. Ember leapt to his feet when he saw we’d arrived and strode over to me. “You’re awake—you’re okay.” He’d charged over to me so quickly, it almost seemed as if he would sweep me into an embrace, like long-lost friends and relatives do in schlocky movies. But we didn’t have that long-standing connection, and he must have realized by the time he reached me. He stopped awkwardly, as if he’d bumped up against some kind of invisible force field. “Are you okay?”
I hurt all over, but that could have been from sleeping on the pool float. “I’m fine. What’s going on?”
“See for yourself.” Deliberately not touching me, he guided me to the folding chair he’d just vacated and gestured to the flickering wall of TVs.
In his seat, I caught the faintest whiff of the campfire-and-leather scent of his jacket, but didn’t bother chiding myself for noticing. I was too busy making sense of the wall. Every set was tuned to the news, maybe a half-dozen channels in all. Closed captioning played on some, picture-in-picture on others. A laundry basket filled with remotes was on the floor at Zephyr’s feet. “Let me know which one you wanna hear,” he said. “It’s best to let me work the remotes.”
“He’s got a system,” Rain added.
One broadcast was already audible—I just needed to match it to its video. Once I found it, the confusing array of images began falling into place. “It’s fine.” I pushed up out of the chair Ember had given me and, hugging myself, slowly approached the TV wall.
The death toll continues to rise in the chaos of yesterday’s kidnapping at the Arcane Masters Estate, as visiting emissaries return home from a Transfiguration ceremony they’ll surely never forget.
Footage rolled of the compound teeming with cars and bodyguards, and a glimpse of a dignitary ducking into the back of a black sedan. The video had been shot from outside the gates with a zoom lens. No way would the Masters give anyone free reign to just record at will. They needed to control what was seen.
The picture changed to a shot of my father, looking official and somber in a dark suit, no tie, top button undone. Still alive, then. He was surrounded by bodyguards. I didn’t recognize any of them, but their stance was unmistakeable. When they shifted, though, I caught sight of someone I knew all too well. My brother, Blaze. Just a glimpse, lurking there in the background. But he was watching Dad with a fiery intensity that chilled me to the bone.
“The kidnappers have not yet made any demands,” Torch said. “We’re hoping that means my daughter Aurora is alive and well, but we’re bracing ourselves for the worst.”
“What possible reason would we have to hurt anyone?” Ember snapped, as if the TV could hear. Zephyr shushed him. I opted to not mention the Fourth Street Bridge.
“Yesterday, the Rebels returned—and while they have not yet stated their purpose, I suspect they were attempting to abduct my son. It’s a rarity for Arcane Masters to sire children, but DNA tests confirmed that both Aurora and Blake do carry on the line.”
“What the hell?” I blurted out. My mother’s fidelity was in question? Since when?
“You’ll notice he called your brother Blake,” Zephyr said. “Not Blaze. Does that mean he doesn’t know about Blake’s Transfiguration, or that he’s deliberately covering for your brother?”
Either scenario seemed possible. I shook my head in frustration.
“To what purpose the kidnappers would exploit my children,” Torch said somberly, “I can’t begin to guess. Three Aspirants, upstanding young men with their whole lives ahead of them, gave their lives yesterday defending us from the bloodthirsty Rebels.”
If my father had seen the bodies—and he’s such a control freak, I couldn’t imagine anyone could keep him from looking—how could he have possibly thought they’d been killed by anything as mundane as a weapon?
The picture changed to a security cam still of Rain and Zephyr crossing the courtyard. It must have been chosen carefully, from many frames of footage, and zoomed in to ensure that not only were they recognizable, but that I didn’t appear anywhere in the frame. The shot zoomed out to half-screen, and the image of Ember that had been circulating filled the second side.
A bland newscaster voice said, “These Rebels are still at large. Police consider them armed and dangerous. If you encounter any of these men, do not approach. Call 911 and report their location.”
Back to Torch. “If you have any information, any at all, please….” He choked up and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I just want my daughter back.”
The Arcane Masters are offering a hundred thousand dollar reward for any information leading to the Rebels’ apprehension and the recovery of the victim. Just call the tip line on the bottom of the screen. Back to you, Jim.
Zephyr muted the audio while Rain gave a low whistle. “Twenty-five grand was a lot,” Rain said. “But now they’re playing hardball.”
“That reward is an insult,” Ember said. “Maybe he’d turn on his loved ones out of greed, but around here, people have principles. Their beliefs mean something.”
“A hundred K?” Rain said. “Sure, it’s not much by their standards, but in this neighborhood, that’d buy you a hell of a lot. A whole new life.”
How many people knew about the Rebels? The owner of every car with its passenger visor down and a spare key tucked under the floor mat. And that was just for starters. Ember refused to believe anyone would betray what he stood for. I might be pretty darn sheltered, but even I knew some people would do a lot worse for a lot less. Maybe I just knew better than to trust so blindly. Ember was an idealist. But in my experience, trusting people only left you wide open to a world of hurt.
“We need to move,” Rain said.
Sterling agreed. “We’ve been careful about not letting our whereabouts leak, but we’ve been squatting here a long time. Triangulate enough borrowed cars, and it’s easy enough to narrow down a search radius.”
“And go where?” Ember asked. “We have electricity here. Computers. Television. If we go hide out under a bridge, we’ll be deaf and blind. Besides, people are looking for us now. Not just conceptually, as in ‘the Rebels’—but specifically. Us. They have our photos. Sure, those pictures were a little grainy, but they were good enough. Why go putting ourselves out there if we don’t absolutely have to? What we need to do is lie low. Anyone comes looking around here, they’ll scope out the sales floor, see it’s been looted and abandoned for years, and move on. Nobody’s gonna poke around the building’s infrastructure, so long as we don’t give them any reason to.”
The wall of television cast flickering light over all of us, so visually confusing that I almost didn’t notice the telltale spark of fire lighting Ember’s irises from within. My father’s eyes did that when he was angry, but Ember’s fire aspect didn’t seem to be tied to his temper. If I was reading it right, it fed from his powers of persuasion. Gooseflesh was prickling my arms, not from the ionic buzz of all those CRTs, but the subtle manifestation of Ember’s power. And he’d very nearly used it to talk me into staying put while my father bribed the Rebel’s supporters into giving them all up.
My brother had to be stopped. And it wasn’t the Rebels’ fault he’d managed to Transfigure. It was mine.
I turned so I was backlit by the TV tubes, faced the four Rebels, and said, “Listen. You’re wanted by the cops. I’m not. If I go down to the police station and let them know I wasn’t kidnapped—”
The guys scrambled to talk over me.
“Too dangerous,” Ember snapped, “way too dangerous,” while Rain said, “Great idea—if your objective is to be dragged back to the compound kicking and screaming.”
I raised my voice to talk over them. “I let the police know I
wasn’t kidnapped, and the only violence that occurred was directed at us.” Reluctantly, the guys shut up and listened. “My ruined dress is plain to see in that footage. I’ll point it out and make them listen. And that’s when I can bring up my brother’s Transfiguration.”
“If you tell people about Blaze,” Rain said, “you’ll be outing the existence of the Arcanum extractor. Are you sure that’s what you want?”
“I am.” I shuddered at the image of Fathom shriveling as the Arcanum was sucked from his body. “It’s too powerful. It can’t exist.” Even if I went down right along with Blaze for supplying him with the parts that made it…it couldn’t exist.
Zephyr said, “We already know what your brother is capable of—and I’m all for putting that thing out of his reach. But would it be safe if it was in someone else’s hands? Power corrupts. Who’s to say the cops won’t decide they need a Tetrad of their own?”
Rain took that idea and ran with it. “Even if we managed to obliterate it, the mere knowledge of its existence will shape the world just as indelibly as the first discovery of the Arcanum. Once people know it’s possible, Tetrads everywhere will be scrambling to reproduce the technology.”
“Change is inevitable,” Sterling said. “We just can’t let it catch us with our pants down.”
They all looked to Ember, who’d been listening intently to their discussion. “Maybe we can’t stop the evolution of an idea.” Ember turned to me and grabbed me earnestly by the upper arms. His strong jaw was set, and his brows drew together. So striking…and my body yearned for him as if I’d been waiting my whole life to be touched. “But, Aurora, please, don’t make yourself a target by going public. There’s got to be another way.”
His irises were flickering topaz. Maybe it was just the influence of his Fire aspect, but I realized I was willing to figure out another way. Because he didn’t order me to stay put. He asked.