Memory of Fire

by Holly Lisle

I have a sister, she thought, and realized why June Bug had been giving her those odd looks.

  Her mother had had a child with an off-worlder.

  A lot of unhappiness around their house right around the time that she'd turned ten suddenly fell into place—and with it, her mother's remembered absence, taking care of some old woman up in High Point for months on end. And Mama's inconsolable grief when she came home at last, reporting that the old woman had finally died.

  If I'd had to walk away from Jake after he was born, I damn near would have died, too.

  A sister. A sister left behind, captive in that castle. And how the hell were they going to manage to get her out? They'd blown their easy chance. They weren't going to be able to just waltz into the place a second time and spirit her out.

  "She's a half-breed?" Eric asked, and the strangled sound of his voice brought Lauren back to the present.

  "Yes."

  "All of you saw her? You're sure of this?"

  A scattering of yesses from around the table. "The master of the castle paid Willie and Deever and Tom to kidnap us so that we could teach her magic," Terry Mayhew said. "One of those Orians told me the three of them got a castle, and servants, and a whole mess of other stuff in exchange."

  June Bug still stared at her hands. Eric gripped the edge of Lauren's old pine table so hard his knuckles looked ready to pop out of the skin. "Oh, Christ," he said, putting his head down on the table. "Why us? Why now?"

  "What?" Lauren asked.

  "Doesn't concern you," Eric said. "This is a Sentinel problem."

  "I just found out I have a sister," Lauren said softly. "And she's a prisoner in the castle we just came from, and she needs our help. I'd say it damned well does concern me."

  Eric looked at her and slowly shook his head. "She's not your sister. She's a disaster of unimaginable proportions—like the volcano that wiped out Pompeii, or maybe the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs."

  "From where I'm standing, she's my sister."

  Eric pressed his fingertips to his temples and closed his eyes. "The Sentinels have a law dealing with human-offworld crosses. The Sentinels require that every such person—man, woman, or child—be put to death. Humanely, if possible, but immediately. Crossbreeds are chains that tie together two universes that aren't meant to be chained. Their simple existence brings devastation to both the worlds that gave them life—not through any malice or evil intent on their parts—just because they were never meant to live."

  "Meaning you intend to kill her."

  "Oh, Christ. I swore to uphold the Sentinel laws—to put the good of all humanity above the good of any individual human. To hold life sacred…but first and foremost, to protect my world from anything that could destroy it."

  "Meaning you intend to kill her," Lauren repeated.

  "Meaning I don't know what the hell to do."

  June Bug still stared at her hands, and Lauren saw tears running down the old woman's creased face and falling untouched to the table.

  Bethellen said, "She saved my life." Other Sentinels concurred.

  "The Sentinels murdered my parents. I'm not going to stand by while you murder my sister. I don't care what your laws say."

  Heads snapped around to stare at her.

  "The Sentinels didn't murder your parents," Bethellen snapped.

  But now June Bug looked up, her face a crumpled wreck. "Some of them did," she said. "Because they'd brought Orians here, and because they were in regular association with them, and because they were doing magic for the Orians, tampering in Oria, just the same as the Old Gods did when they came here. And because Walt and Marian refused to move to a big city where they couldn't keep an open gate once they got caught. I voted against it, but I was in the minority."

  All the other Sentinels were staring at her. Pete, standing by the doorway, looked like he couldn't believe what he was hearing. Lauren, still sitting on the floor, felt grateful for its support.

  "Who?" she asked. "Who killed my parents?"

  "Mostly people long dead," June Bug said. "The old sheriff, Paulie Darnell. Mac MacAvery." Eric jumped at the sound of his father's name, and stared at June Bug with disbelief on his face. "Rulan Sweeney, who ran the auto body shop in town back then. Willie Locklear, of course—the last of them still alive. They couldn't have done it without Willie. They didn't know about Molly, or it would have been her, too." She drew a deep breath. "They didn't think you could do anything with gates either, Lauren, or it would have been you as well."

  June Bug laid her head on the table and her shoulders shook. "She was the kindest, most beautiful, most generous woman I ever knew, your mother," she said between sobs. "I fought them with everything I had. When I knew I'd lost, I called your parents and told them they had to leave—that the Sentinels had passed sentence on them. Didn't tell them who I was, tried to disguise my voice, but I figure they probably knew. Best I can figure, Walt and Marian were just doing what I told them to do when they were killed. The bastards had already doctored their car."

  "You never turned them in?" Pete asked.

  "Sentinel business," the old woman said, lifting her head just a little, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. "Sentinel business stays between Sentinels. Always. No matter what. No matter how we feel about it. It's a damned ugly thing sometimes. But it's the only way."

  Pete turned to Eric. "You have people here confessing to being accessories to murder, discussing the possibility of another murder, for chrissake. And you're participating in the discussion. Jesus God, Eric. You suggested that maybe you should murder a girl you were tearing the town apart to find just days ago. What kind of insanity is this?"

  Eric looked at him bleakly. "I didn't know about Lauren's parents. I don't know what to do about Molly McColl. But I know the price we'll all pay—the whole world—if I make the wrong choice." He turned to Lauren. "Have you ever been inside Willie Locklear's house? Could you make us a gate to it?"

  Lauren, still trying to get her mind around the fact that her parents' murder had been sanctioned by the then-ruling body of these people, just stared at him, disbelieving.

  "You're going to ask her to do you a favor?" Pete asked. "If I were her, I'll kill the whole damned lot of you, and good riddance."

  "I don't know what the right answers are," Eric said. "But I'm going to show you why it matters. I'm going to take you both to Kerras. But Willie Locklear has the only preset gate to Kerras in the region—if he left it up when he bolted. We might get there and find out he's smashed all of his mirrors, or erased all his gates. I don't know. I can't get us there if he's destroyed the path. But if it's there, I'll take you both."

  "What's Kerras?" Pete asked at the same time that Lauren said, "You think that seeing this place is going to make me all right with the fact that you people killed my mother and father? That you want to kill my sister? I'm telling you right now, you aren't killing my sister. Not now, not ever. You act like this is an either–or situation, like it's either my sister survives or the world survives. I'm telling you there had better be a third alternative, one that includes both the world and my sister, because if you don't all agree that she's safe and she stays safe—and Jake and me, too, while we're at it—then she'll live and Jake will live and I'll live, and you people can make your own goddamned gates and solve your own goddamned problems. Oh, you can't do that? Well shucks. Too bad for you."

  "We don't have to have your help. We have backup coming," Bethellen started to say, and Eric shook his head.

  "Willie and Deever and Tom said they'll call our backup. They never called anyone. And now we can't reach any of our contact nexuses. Either our contact people are dead of the flu, or they're in hiding. Either way, folks, it's just us."

  Lauren glared around her kitchen at the men and women sitting there. "Molly, Jake, and me—no murder plots, no convenient accidents. Not now, not ever. Are you all agreed?"

  They looked at each other and nodded reluctantly.

  "Oh, that's convincing," Lauren said
.

  "They'll keep their word," Eric said. "I swear it on my own life. But let me show you what you're fighting for. Let me show you why this matters. Because until you've been to Kerras, you cannot hope to understand."

  Cat Creek to Kerras

  Since Lauren had never been inside Willie Locklear's house, she had to creep up on it—first forming the gate on the street, then focusing it on the front porch, moving through the front door, and finally locating the parlor. The front parlor had plenty of room for her to bring everyone in, and the mirror there was just a mirror—at least until she finished with it.

  She and Pete stepped through first, lugging the sleeping Jake in his basket between them. The eastern edge of the sky had turned pale silver; true day would be upon them soon, and with it, an increase in their danger as long as they were in Cat Creek. No one watched Willie Locklear's house, though. Unless he unexpectedly returned from Oria, it would make a safe enough hiding place for the next few hours.

  Once the Sentinels had gathered in the parlor, Eric turned to Lauren. "You and Pete come with me. They can wait here until we get back. They all know what Kerras is like."

  He started toward the back of the house, Lauren picked up one side of Jake's basket, and Pete picked up the other.

  "You can leave him here with us," June Bug said.

  Lauren stared at her, then laughed. "Leave my child with Sentinels? When I skate on the ice in hell," she said, and followed Eric into Willie's workroom, still lugging her half of Jake's basket.

  Eric ran his fingers over each of a dozen full-length mirrors that lined the one wall in the workroom. As he did, green fire flickered behind the glass and images briefly sprang to life, then shimmered back to nothingness as he moved on. "He doesn't seem to have done anything to any of them," he said. "They all go where they're supposed to."

  "Then lead on," Pete said. "Unless this is just some trick to trap us someplace and rid yourself of a problem you can't deal with in any other way."

  Lauren said, "I could get rid of him a lot more easily than he could get rid of me. I can make gates; he can't."

  Eric nodded. "I'm not trying to trick you or to hurt you. But you can't understand what we're fighting until you see Kerras. Then you'll understand." He stood before one mirror that looked like all the rest, and said, "The place can't hurt you. You'll be there physically, but you won't have, well, substance, for lack of a better word. Kerras is our upworld, in the same way that we are Oria's upworld. Our most recent Old Gods came from there. It was a beautiful place once. Not all that long ago, in fact." He splayed the fingers of his right hand on the glass, and in the distance the green fire began to build.

  Lauren watched the mirror for images, trying to brace herself for whatever Eric planned to frighten her with on the other side, but she could see nothing. Aside from the green fire that would form their path, the mirror reflected nothing from the world beyond.

  "Pete, Lauren, since you're lugging the basket, you might as well go first. I'll follow after you."

  Lauren shrugged. She knew she could get home from anywhere. She had no worries about being trapped. Pete seemed to draw from her confidence; when she pressed a hand through the yielding glass and hoisted Jake's basket one more time, he was right behind her. They flowed between the worlds, but this time Lauren felt no exhilaration, no breathless wonder as the energy of eternity flowed through her—and no touch from Brian. Wherever he was…he was not here. Instead, she felt a subtle poisonous horror that grew stronger and more insistent the farther away from Earth and the closer to Kerras she moved. Long before she stepped off the road, she knew something had gone horribly wrong; she felt sickened, drained, sapped of all her vitality, and she felt a frightening rage that came at her from all directions and seeped into her flesh and touched her bones and her blood and her mind.

  From far away, she heard Pete shouting, "Something's gone wrong! We need to turn back!"

  She felt the same way—but the path flowed in only one direction, and when it deposited her in Kerras, she could neither stop it nor fight it.

  She landed in darkness, in the midst of a silence so absolute that she could not hear even her own breathing. She had the impression of horrible, unthinkable cold, but she could not feel the cold. She sensed emptiness, but she could see nothing. Her hand still gripped Jake's basket, as did Pete's. A moment later, she felt Eric join them.

  They couldn't speak to each other. Sound simply didn't carry. If she had screamed at the top of her lungs, she would have looked like an actress in the era of silent movies.

  She turned slowly in a full circle, and in that circle, she saw nothing, and nothing, and nothing but the cold white brilliance of a billion distant stars that hung over her head, illuminating more nothing.

  Then a sharp flash of white erupted over a suddenly marked horizon, and in an instant, deformed shadows crawled across the world toward her. She could see that she stood on a plain of tortured glass, twisted and boiled and then frozen by some hell-spawned demon or the actions of demon-driven men. In the distance, she made out twisted metal skeletons that clawed skyward or bent double to touch the earth, defeated by gravity and forces she could not imagine. They stood in greasy snowfields, but as the sun rose higher, those snowfields began to steam and boil, and a low-lying fog began to creep across the ground. That groping fog offered the only movement visible anywhere on the slice of planet that she could see. And with loathsome certainty, she knew that what she saw was a fair representation of the whole planet. She had come to the end of a world, to the terminus of a planet's existence and the crematorium for the life, the light, the hopes and aspirations of countless species, countless sentient creatures.

  In the silence she could feel their frantic flight toward hoped-for escape. She could hear the ghostly voices of the dead pleading absolution and a second chance. She could see the shades and specters of green life and blue sky and fecund fertile air and water burned and boiled and raped and slaughtered, and in the bones of the world itself the rage of unjust death, and the rage of the madness that had summoned that death commingled, birthing a blight on soul and hope and spinning that blight out in every direction.

  Hell, she thought. I'm in it—and if I looked around I could find a patch of ice and skate here, and bring a million oaths and curses home to roost.

  She didn't know how this place had come to this evil end. But she knew that she would do anything to keep her own world from such a fate.

  CHAPTER 17

  "We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming…

  "…for a message from the president of the United States of America."

  "My fellow Americans, friends, neighbors. This epidemic that is ravaging our nation must be stopped, and we have within our grasp both the understanding and the means to stop it. In order to halt its spread, we must temporarily suspend all unnecessary travel. With that single clear fact in mind, I am declaring a state of emergency and imposing martial law and a nationwide quarantine until, together, we bring this terrible disease to an end. Let me reassure you that your cities and towns will do everything within their power to maintain emergency services. The delivery of food, medicines, and other essentials will continue uninterrupted. However, private travel will be halted, and the National Guard will be deployed to ensure that the quarantine is obeyed.

  "I remind you that what you do now, you do not just for others but for yourselves and your families. The Surgeon General will now join us to give you health guidelines that you can follow to help keep your families safe…

  Kerras to Cat Creek

  Jake was sobbing when they stepped onto the path back to Cat Creek—Lauren wondered if he'd been crying while she stood stunned on Kerras—if she simply couldn't hear him because sound didn't carry there. No atmosphere left, she thought. It had been hell man-made, the postapocalypse that never made it into novels because you had to have characters to write about—and on that blasted surface not even bacteria could live. She wished she hadn't taken Jake
with her. She feared that the poisoned energy of the place would affect him. Still, promise of safety or not, she wouldn't have left him with any of the Sentinels for the world. She still wouldn't.

  Lauren picked him up and held him and hushed him, and he cuddled against her chest, arms wrapped tightly around her neck. "It's okay," she told him. "It's okay. We're safe, and everything's going to be all right."

  Mothers have been lying to their children since the beginning of time, she thought. Nothing was okay, and nothing might ever be okay again—but this certainly wasn't the time to start telling the truth.

  He looked at her, wide-eyed and wordless, with tears running down his cheeks, then shoved his head into the curve of her shoulder and her neck, and his whole body shook with his sobs.

  She knew exactly how he felt.

  "It's all like that," Eric said. "The whole planet—the atmosphere is frozen on the ground when it's dark, and some melts off in sunlight, but nothing could live there. Nothing will ever live there again. And if you go to Kerras's upworld, it's just the same. Another blasted planet that used to be green and wonderful. And upworld of that…another cinder. As far up as any of us have been able to go, that's all we've found. Dead worlds." He looked at Pete, then at Lauren, then at Pete again. "You know when Kerras stopped being a beautiful green world and became a cinder?"