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John Montaño hadn’t been sleeping well as it was, but his last night on the Queen Margaret was a doozy.
It was early evening before the night shift, their last night aboard, and John was dreaming. He’d gotten lost in a big hospital and was wandering through the halls. Screams issued from the rooms he passed. People were trapped behind thick walls of glass. Their faces contorted as they pounded on the glass, trying to warn him. Someone had sealed them in there, and was now hunting him.
He looked to his left. His enemy stood there, face and body in shadow. John yelled—his enemy had hurled a whirling mass of glass shards at him. Then his alarm went off and he awakened to see—and feel—yellow fire streaming from his palms. His pillows were airborne; he’d attacked them in his sleep. “Fuck!”
He leapt off the bed, buck naked, as his flame struck the pillows in midair. One smacked into the wall by the bathroom and the other two bounced back onto the bed covers. Feathers scattered, trailing smoke. Flame residue dripped from his fingers onto his feet. He hopped back. “Ow!”
A fine fucking mess, Juanma.
Then his training kicked in. He marked the beat of his heart and made a wrenching twist around some corner of his mind. Spacetime spun away, carrying his body with it. Now he faced out into a different place entirely. The place where his ace powers grew.
John could still feel his body back there somewhere. His heartbeat—that meat metronome in his chest—had grown louder, and the atrial beat, the lub half, had ended as he’d twisted loose. But the ventricular beat, the DUB, came on languidly, and deepened to a pitch more felt than heard as it slowed almost to a halt. He was fully here now: outside of his body, outside of time. Now he could pause to think. To plan.
OK, he’d somehow had triggered his ace without meaning to and set the frigging room on fire. The headline sprang into his head, unbidden: “Chubb’s ace art detective fuels panic as flames spread through ocean liner.” Or, worse: “Nocturnal emissions! Candle’s nightmare flames burn down the Queen Margaret.”
He visualized the cabin in his mind. Pillows down there and over there—smoke detector up there—window there—door across the cabin. Burning feathers airborne. This called for red flame, he decided. And blue. Lots of blue.
John moved into the vast energy forest. Cables and spires of flame—reeds and bundles—columns and jets of fire sprouted up and vanished. They seemed to sense him, somehow, and moved as if responding to his attention. Or perhaps he was the one who moved. It was impossible to tell because nothing here behaved the way it should. Perhaps the flames floated in some arcane energy flow he couldn’t detect, the way kelp in an ocean current might (if those kelp were blazing-bright and multicolored, say; if they grew to the size of sequoia trunks and city ‘scrapers, and were supercharged with trillions of volts of raging energies …). Perhaps the cause of the movement was those unseen giants, passing through.
His first trip here had been involuntary. The virus, as it triggered, had thrown him into this inferno-world. That had been almost half his life ago, when he was a boy of seventeen in Boston. His body had lain in a hospital bed long enough to get bedsores (the traces of which still scarred his ass) and for the doctors to declare his state permanent, vegetative, before he’d figured out how to get back.
Nowadays, while here, he counted his heartbeats, as fervently as his mother had counted her rosary beads back then. He never stayed longer than he had to. For one, he couldn’t afford to. At five heartbeats, his body collapsed like a puppet with cut strings. At a hundred, his lungs stopped working on their own. Besides, this world …dimension…whatever it was…wasn’t what you’d call human-friendly. More lived here than just the fire tendrils. Beings so immense, so monstrous it was impossible to know what to call them. To even see them all in one go. He’d long since learned to shut them out.
Nope—nobody down here but us fire motes!
The tendrils, though: those he could bear to look at (some more so than others). He still wondered what had possessed him to reach out for a thread of fire that first time, when he was caught in the grip of the primary wild card infection. It had certainly saved his life. He’d still be stuck here—or, more likely, dead; long since unplugged from life support—if he hadn’t touched that first cord of flame.
It was the yellow he’d reached out to first, and its force had blasted him all the way back into his body— nearly killing him in the process. But the green had happened to be nearby and had moved into his body with him, healing the damage the yellow had done.
That first encounter with the flames had been so traumatic that it had taken John a long time to work up the nerve to try harvesting other flames. Red, green, and purple weren’t so bad—not by comparison to the other three. But without his green, he’d have been simply another wild card statistic. What followed were months and years of figuring out which colors he could touch safely and training himself to wield them. First green. Then red. Then yellow. Blue. Purple. Black. (There were flames of other colors, as well. He still hadn’t tried any of the others. Truth to tell, he was afraid to.)
Six is plenty. More than enough.
The individual fire strands peeled away from the red fire trunk he’d found and rejoined it, pulsating languidly: carnelians, burgundies, crimsons, roses. This crop looked good. He teased out a clump of cherry red, and the energy tendrils gravitated toward him: syrupy flames licking at his hands, rolling over themselves in gobs.
Red fire, despite its appearance, wasn’t hot. In fact, it was cool to the touch and easy to snare: a mild sensation, compared to some of the other flames. It was also incredibly useful; he could use it to create structures. Including, for instance, a smoke barrier to minimize damage and seal off the room while he harvested the more challenging blue to quell the fire.
John coaxed streams of pulsing cherry loose from the thicket and lured them into a swirling sheath around him as he let his life force pull him back toward his body. You had to be patient with red, though, and it took a while for the threads to find the entry point and latch on. Eventually the tendrils found the entry at the crown of his head. They tried to suck him back into his body as they flowed in, but he resisted, and hovered at the threshold. Doing so bought him more time, and while suspended partway there, he could tolerate the pain of the flames better.
They pressed through the blood vessels in his scalp and collected in pools behind his eyes, sinuses, and ears like the world’s worst migraine. They slid, molasses-slow, through his facial veins and internal and external jugulars, and from there down into his chest, lungs, and heart.
He’d seen videos. To the outside world, when he summoned the fire he looked like a man lit up from t
he inside. The first time, the red flames’ pressure in his face, limbs, and chest had been agonizing. He’d thought his heart would explode. “Mild”? By comparison to most of the others, perhaps. But he had adapted. Now it was little more a throbbing ache that spread through his head, chest, belly, and limbs as the fire followed the trails of his blood vessels.
Time and space continued to tug at him while he collected more of the red. His first heartbeat had just finished, quarter-speed, and a second beat was about to start. Clock’s ticking. This’ll have to do.
He shut off the flow, twisted back into himself—and shoved the red stream out through his blood vessels with the full force of the second heartbeat. As fire surged into the arteries lacing his lungs he opened his eyes—it coursed up the brachial arteries and then down, through his arms and into wrists and hands. Already, he saw, yellow flames were licking at the covers, and smoke coiled upward from bedding and floor.
He shot a stream of crimson flame from his right hand, sealing instructions into it as it left his fingers. Blazing, cherry-red tendrils spun up and encased the smoke detector in a translucent, flickering dome of light. More of the glowing red spilled out from the dome and spread across the ceiling. With his left hand, he sent a second batch of streamers to coat the upper walls: burning red snakes struck the ceiling along its edges and traveled out and down. He shot one last stream of red at the desk, coating his laptop. Then he was out of flame, and his third heartbeat had finished. Get a move on.
He twisted away again, back to the other place.
Finding a good patch of blue, as usual, turned out to be more of a challenge. The energy fields shifted unpredictably here, and distance behaved even more strangely than time did. He couldn’t simply look at a tendril and will himself over to it. Objects that seemed nearby one moment were far away the next, or would vanish entirely, while another set of energies appeared suddenly somewhere else.
He got lucky. A blue flame trunk soon moved into view: a whipping cable of eye-piercing indigo—dark brilliance, bigger around than a city block. It swung near, shedding waves of deadly blue fire. Even the other fire cables steered clear. He didn’t reach for it (he never touched the main trunks). Instead, he gestured-called-teased the crackling flame coronas that arced out from its boundary layer. Soon a large tendril budded off. He called to it and it spun out from its parent, blazing sapphire, and slithered toward him.
Blue flame here wasn’t heat. Nor cold, either, not exactly—though it certainly froze what it touched. Rather, it was a nothingness. An anti-energy. A stillness so complete it seared worse than the hottest flame.
He tugged at the tendril, backing up, nudging other cords and clumps out of his way, and the hostile blue energy surged-lurched-coiled after him. As John approached the entry to his body, the blue fanned out and enveloped him in cold fire, and the force poured in and lanced his skull. It hurt.
Blue preferred to trace its path along the bone structures, the ligaments, and tendons: it etched frigid agonies across his nasal bridge and cheekbones and jaw—pierced the tiny bones in his ears—sank icy daggers into the rotator cuffs at his shoulders, spread across his collarbone. His lungs sucked in a sharp breath. He tasted smoke in his throat, and coughed.
His fourth heartbeat had begun by now, a deep thrum in his chest, and the smell of smoke was stronger than before. Better hurry. He closed the entry point—dispelled the indigo-bright cord attached to his crown, back there—and with a dizzying yank turned all the way into his body.
John opened his eyes. Flame had taken hold at the end of the bed, and smoke was billowing up, spreading along his red barrier on the ceiling. Angry blue snakes ran the maze of his bones, demanding an exit. John obliged. He shaped the power as it spattered outward from his curled fingertips—he was forcibly pinching off the flow to control its rate; he didn’t want to blow a hole in the wall. He snared the flames in a spiral long enough to shape a sphere of blinding-dark sapphire, then released it with a snap of his hands.
The first blast struck the burning bedding and caused a flurry of carbon dioxide snowflakes to burst out in a puff. In the blast’s wake came a clear liquid stream that splashed violently onto the bedding, knocking it askew and coating it in a thin layer of ice. The stream was liquefied air, cooled to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit. It raced across the frozen covers in beads and sputtering rivulets—pooled in crannies—and then a wave spilled over and splashed onto the pillow on the floor, instantly snuffing out its flames. The last of the liquid air skittered around like manic beads on the carpet till it re-vaporized.
John had broken out all over in gooseflesh. The cabin’s temperature must’ve dropped by a good twenty degrees. He delivered a smaller spray of blue flame out to chase down the last of the burning feathers, which were still settling onto the dresser, desk, and carpet. Another snow flurry fell throughout the cabin.
He used his last bout of blue flame to make a small ice devil. It spun around inside the room, gathering remaining wisps of smoke and condensing them into a ball of soot, which it dumped onto the fancy burgundy carpet. John frowned at it. Oops! That’ll leave a stain.
He dusted ash and ice crystals from his hair and went in search of his phone. It had gotten buried under the tourist brochures for Miami, Myrtle Beach, and Baltimore, all the stops the Queen Margaret had made while on her way up from Havana to Manhattan. A Gideon Bible had fallen from the drawer of the bedside table, which had gotten knocked onto its side. He didn’t remember doing that.
He snatched up his phone and sent a text to his second-in-command on this detail, Rashida Thorne.
Can you come by? I need a hand.
While he was texting, the red shield began dribbling off his desk, as well as the walls and ceiling. It oozed down in red filaments, flame confetti streamers. They pooled on the carpet here and there but did no harm, merely flickered like dying embers as they melted away. Rashida responded.
Be right there. Uhhhh … everything okay?
He spent a few seconds with his thumbs over the keys before giving up the attempt at words, and just sent her a poop emoji and a shrug.
* * *
John had time to pee, tug on shorts and a T-shirt, roll the singed bedding up in the mattress pad, and drag it onto the floor before Rashida’s tap landed on the inner door. He let her in, put out the Do Not Disturb sign, and latched and bolted the door.
“Brrr! Turn your AC off, John—it’s not that hot out.” John caught a faint whiff of her hair oil as she passed. He nipped at his lower lip with his teeth. Down, boy. You boss, her employee; remember?
They were both bi (well, technically he was bi; she was pan), nonmonogamous, and … well, there was chemistry. She was full-figured, Black and Native American, with a background in modern dance and criminal justice. He loved her dark-skinned face and wide, freckled nose, and he loved her full-throated laugh, which never failed to disarm him. She had insight into people, and a relentless pursuit of truth that often made him feel secretly that she should really be leading the team—not him.
They’d flirted mercilessly, back before he’d been promoted, and had had a brief fling after the death of one of their team members. Once the gig was over they’d gone out for drinks to talk it through, and fallen into each other’s arms for a weekend in the sack—cried, comforted each other, and had amazing sex—and then agreed not to do it again. (Chubb was strict about coworker coitus, even before he’d gotten promoted and the power differential had entered the mix.)
She surveyed the room now. “Bad sleep, I take it?”
He grimaced and rubbed the back of his neck. “Something like that.”
She eyed the scorch marks on the bed and the sodden mess of burned fabric and feather and foam on the floor. The beads of water dripping down the walls. The knocked-over furniture. The spray of soot on the carpet.
“Jesus, John.” She struggled for words; gave it up. “At least you didn’t set off the smoke detector.” She looked at him. “Did you?”
“No.
You would have heard.” Probably everybody on the ship would have heard. “My bad. All my bad. Look, can we just … fast-forward through the color commentary?”
She laughed. “Sorry. Whatever you say. I’ll call the Beef in.”
“Not just yet. I need Arry out there with the horn till I can get this taken care of. Just because we haven’t seen trouble yet doesn’t mean we won’t.”
The gig this time was providing security for a traveling art exhibit. John led a five-member team—two aces, two nats, and a joker. Arry (“The Beef”), Ariadne Cerigo, was John’s other direct report—though you could really count her as a team of four all on her own.
Her card had turned almost ten years ago, in her mid-forties. Strictly a joker; no special powers, but a two-ton minotaur with wicked six-foot-long horns, an impenetrable hide, and a battle mace the size of a battering ram could rack up a lot of hit points pretty damn quick. Not to mention that as the mother of five, she had inculcated a deft blend of other talents: de-escalation skills and bullshit-put-up-with-which-NOT attitude, in the face of which even the most testosterone-fueled disagreement tended to resolve itself quite readily. Extra bonus points: she played a mean hand of poker and never got drunk or did stupid shit or created drama. So, yeah: her specific dietary and structural support notwithstanding, he wouldn’t trade her for a dozen aces. The fabulous needlepoint she doled out after every mission was just the lovely Maraschino cherry on top.
“Sooo … feeling better tonight?” he asked. Rashida had gotten hit with a bad case of stomach crud from something she ate in Baltimore, and had been hugging the porcelain throne for the past two days. Now their watches were all out of whack.
“Much. Why?”
“If you feel up for it, I’d like you to run a quick read on the room.”
“This room?” He nodded. Her brow furrowed. “Why?”
“Just a precaution.”
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