In A Burning Room

by TS Ward

  “I’m reporting an incident involving the Genesis.”

  “The Emma Genesis. Who you believe to be the Sceptre Ganymede?”

  “Correct.”

  I couldn’t breathe, sitting there with his voice echoing around the mirrors as if he stood in the room, leaning over me, voice slick in my ear. His voice a worm that crawled under my skin and wouldn’t stop wriggling. It made me sick.

  “Go ahead, James. Explain the incident. As much detail as possible.”

  “Ganymede’s quarters had been compromised. She had been injured. As a result of that, and as a result of my being the Duchess’ shadow, she was relocated to my quarters.

  “I had a dream one night that was unusual. It was incredibly vivid. It almost seemed more real than you sitting in front of me right now. There was a… meadow. A glade, whatever you want to call it. It was green, greener than anywhere I’ve seen in the Empire recently, with grass that I could feel against my skin. Even when I woke up, I could still feel it. There were trees around the border and this darkness beyond them that I couldn’t see through, but the sun was golden and warm—like honey. I kept thinking that the entire time without trying. Honey.

  “At first, I didn’t think it was a dream. I thought it was a simulation. But simulations don’t have that much detail. They don’t make you feel grass and sunlight. They don’t put thoughts inside your head. It was either a dream or it was real, but either way, I saw Soren—Ganymede, sitting in the center of this place. Her back was to me. I don’t think she knew I was there at first. But then…

  “There was a boy. This child. Maybe five or six years old. He looked like her. He had her hair, her eyes—a Beckett, clearly. No doubts about that. She called him Percy and… little bear. I think the strangest part was how normal it seemed to them. When they noticed me it was a shock. Like I wasn’t supposed to be there. When I woke up, I heard her talking in her sleep. ‘Percy, it’s okay, it’s okay.’ After that I—”

  The recording cut off, but in my mind it was still going. I knew she was the Genesis. I knew she was lying about it. I knew the boy was real. I made her confess. I made her confess, and I kept it a secret. For a price.

  A price that I didn’t pay.

  “He’s lying.” The certainty in my voice bled from fear. The dream was real, but my little bear… He was the dream. That was all he ever was to me. A dream and nothing more. Something to keep me sane within this tomb. My gaze drifted to that photograph and I knew it was him. Percy. My little bear. “I am not your goddamn fairy-tale little Genesis.”

  The Emperor crossed the room in quick strides, the champagne flute clinking against the table as he slammed it down, the liquid splashing up the lip. He spoke with one hand gripping the back of my chair. “You’re right. You haven’t proven otherwise. Time is running out. The boy is a perfectly viable candidate.”

  “A child that vaguely resembles something James dreamed of will not save you,” I spat, my voice rising sharp with panic. I wanted him to be real. I so badly wanted him to be real, so that one day I could escape this place and find him and be free, but not like this. He was a child. A damn child. “One Sceptre will not save you! If it was possible, we wouldn’t be in this situation at all!”

  “Would you rather I have James send him to Astra?” His voice was rich with venom and the bite was sharp.

  I held my tongue.

  “I didn’t think so,” he muttered, stepping back.

  The champagne sparkled in front of me. The images of my mother’s dark and curled hair, of my little bear, were vibrant in my mind. A burning rage to match the sun. Heat spread through my veins. The static sparked through each nerve. I snatched the glass and drained it, rising from my chair. The feet scraped against the marble.

  “Sit down,” my father ordered, “I am not done here.”

  “I am.”

  “Soren.” He strode forward, reaching out to grab my arm. “I spoke with Pilot.”

  I spun around, stepping out of his reach.

  The man was made of ice. Ice in his eyes, ice in his veins, ice in his touch and his voice. Ice and ice and ice and marble and champagne—the marble king to match the marble castle. I was going to put cracks in them both. The rumble of thunder in my bones, the sharp sting of lightning in my veins. It would tear this Embassy to the ground.

  “Don’t you dare!” I whipped the champagne glass into the mirror behind him, shattering them both. The pieces rained down like diamonds and poured across the floor. “He doesn’t get a say in any of this!”

  “Sedate her,” he told Carson, turning away from me. “Put her on the plane.”

  “What?” I turned to Carson and held a finger pointed at him as I backed away to the doors. “Come near me and I’ll hurt you. I can get on the damn plane by myself.”

  I looked that soldier dead in the eyes as I backed out of the room. That green was so similar to the meadow in my dreams. Sweet grass and honeyed sunlight mingled together. His face didn’t ask a question anymore. He looked ill now, and despite the sun-kissed tone of his skin, he was paler than the moon.

  I have a fire within me. A burning rage to match the sun. I will melt myself to iron and steel if it means saving that little boy. I hoped they could see that in me. I hoped they knew this mission wasn’t going to go as planned.

  2

  The darkness of the dream was persistent. I tried to imagine myself in the meadow, tried to imagine the warmth of the sun dripping off the lush leaves in golden dewdrops, but that dream wouldn’t come.

  I was lying on the cot in my dark room. The fluorescent lights at the center of the ceiling glowed dull, humming, the edges blurred by dizziness and the reluctance to enter this dream. My fingers clutched the fabric of the thin mattress in an attempt to still my mind.

  The room was built to ground me, to calm the static that ran through my Sceptre blood, but I buzzed with heavy electric current.

  “Sorry?”

  I jolted upright and found the floor with bare feet, hissing at the chill. A layer of water coated the dark rubber, filling up the room steadily, silently, and fast. “Percy? Where are you?”

  “Sorry!” His voice came from everywhere all at once. “Why is it dark?”

  I stood up and spun around, searched the darkness for him, searched under the cot for a hint of the small boy. My little bear.

  Guilt rocked through me. I was supposed to keep him a secret. I was supposed to keep our dream a secret, our dream in our green meadow surrounded by trees whose branches hung heavy with leaves, where we laughed in a sea of tall sweet grass that hid him up to the top of his curly hair. This dream—he had never found me in my dark room before.

  I kept turning despite the dizziness that threatened to knock me to my knees. Panic rose with the water. The chill of it climbed up my shins.

  I called to him. “Percy, where are you? Come here, please, I don’t see you.”

  “I’m right here.” His voice came from behind me.

  I spun around, confused when I only saw the black shadow of the room, but then he lifted his head up and half the panic left me in a breath.

  He was almost a reflection of me; his hair black and curled, his eyes celestite blue. The freckles were unlike me, unfamiliar and new, but on him they were lovely and adorable. He was always adorable and soft and gentle, even as his eyes widened and his lip quivered.

  I crouched down and held my hands out with a small, careful smile. “Don’t be scared. This is just… This is just the place where I live, outside of our dreams.”

  He set his small hands on mine and raised an eyebrow. “It’s wet.”

  “Not usually,” I muttered. “Actually, I’m not sure why it’s like this.”

  “You can fix it. Can’t you?”

  I shook my head slowly.

  I tried to think of a way to distract him, until I could fix it. There was too much static noise to focus on the dream properly.

  “How about I tell you a story? You like airplanes, don’t you? Remembe
r how I told you I left the Embassy, that I was in the Wastes? Now I’m somewhere else. Want to know where? On a plane, way up in the sky—”

  “I don’t like planes when they crash.” He whispered the words like a secret he wasn’t supposed to be telling.

  I blinked. “What do you mean? Who says they crash?”

  He dug a hand through his pocket, returning it palm up to mine. A small toy plane carved from wood sat shakily on his hand, and seeing it, I could almost hear the distant and quiet sound of engines. “My soldier friends. And Rabbit.”

  The water was still rising. I wanted him to wake up from this. He shouldn’t have been there, seeing that room. He should have been in the tall grass playing his games in the warmth with the trees and their vibrant green leaves spread wide in the golden light. Not here. Never here.

  My father’s order was an intruder in my mind. Bring me the boy, or James brings him to Astra.

  “Your soldier friends. You have soldier friends? Little bear, you shouldn’t talk to soldiers. It isn’t safe. They’ll take you away, to a place like this—”

  “To you?”

  “No, no, I’m not there anymore, I… I’m coming to find you, but then we have to go. We have to leave. Okay? I’ll be there soon.” The water soaked through my clothes, up to my waist and around his chest.

  He held the plane up just in front of my nose, oblivious to the threat of the water. “On the plane? Rabbit said he was going to make one crash, but Tiger said that planes go really high up in the sky and high up is scary. It’s scary on top of Warren, but Tiger said that planes go twice as high. That’s all the way to space.”

  I grabbed his shoulders. “What plane is going to crash?”

  “The plane the soldiers are bringing. Are you really on a plane? Can you see the stars? Are they big?” A light sparkled in his eyes at the thought of the stars, and if the situation were different, I would have smiled at the idea that he loved the stars just like I did.

  I ran a hand over his hair and felt each strand against my skin, as if he was real and solid and there, as if I was awake. I closed my eyes and breathed out slowly, my stomach twisting and my heart pounding—he was. He was real. There was a picture of him and my mother, my mother who was dead, who my father said was dead, and it all seemed so wrong. He wasn’t supposed to exist. She wasn’t supposed to be alive.

  I opened my eyes. “What are their names? The soldiers. Do you know their names?”

  “Jack and Fitz,” he smiled, pushing the plane closer to my face. “Jack made me this. He said I can show you when they bring you back but I can show you now. See?”

  “Pers, listen to me,” I insisted, sick with the fear snaked around my heart. “I have to wake up. When I do, I’ll come find you, okay? I’ll come find you and we’ll go find a meadow just like the one we dream and we’ll be safe. We’ll be together.”

  His face lit up, a gap-toothed smile brightening the room. “Promise?”

  With my lips pressed tight together, I nodded.

  “Wake up!” He shouted at me, “Wake! Up!”

  I fell back, startled, gasping as the water splashed and swallowed me, the cold shocking. I tried to find the floor, to push myself back up, but nothing was there, and I was sinking, sinking, sinking—

  ———

  I jolted awake.

  My hands fumbled for the clasp on the harness that held me against the seat. It was just a dream. My head buzzed with static that emanated from the plane. It was just a dream. It was just a dream.

  But I was gasping, struggling to catch my breath, and the thought of finding my little bear, of finding a meadow to be together in—by the stars, it was such a sweet and lovely dream.

  Across from me, the two Talon soldiers sat rigid in their side-by-side seats, Fitz hissing to his nephew.

  “I am telling you they know.”

  The harness came loose under my hands and I wriggled free of it, pushed up from my seat onto unsteady legs, and made my way up the plane to the cockpit.

  A mass of circuits pulsed behind the closed door, a jumble of blue glowing behind my eyes. It was too much of a mess for my exhausted brain to make sense of, but I felt the tingle through my bones.

  It was a lot, but nowhere near what I had felt at the hands of Astra. I felt the raw surge of lightning jolt the marrow of my bones because of her.

  I pressed my fingers to the handle and flinched when a sharp pop of static glowed bright for a split second.

  “What are you up to, Sparky?” Jack Talon appeared next to me. He leaned against the wall next to the door, his thumbs hooked to his jacket pockets, his eyes squinted as he looked at me.

  Sparky? I bristled at the name, ignoring him as I tried to crank the door open. The handle turned; the door didn’t budge more than an inch. I tried again, putting all my weight on it, but it didn’t shift.

  The soldier smiled, but his voice held no humour. “You aren’t going to talk to me at all, then?”

  The window was dark, but I cupped my hands to the glass and peered through, attempting to see something. The door was jammed, and this wasn’t an autopilot, and there was no response to my hammering against the door. They’re going to crash the plane. The pilot needs to know. Nothing but faint lights on the console were visible, and those were briefly blotted out by a dark shape.

  The pilot paced back and forth, something held in his hand. Something that emanated static so strange and unfamiliar that I stumbled back in worry.

  No. He already knows the plane is going to crash.

  A lump formed in my throat. I turned from the door and walked back down the length of the plane. A slight incline as it lowered its nose made it difficult. I gripped the handholds lining the roof and moved to the door.

  Fitz Talon raised an eyebrow at his nephew as I passed.

  “We aren’t at the jump point yet, princess,” Jack called out to me.

  I wheeled on him, making him stop dead in his tracks. “Do not call me that.”

  “If it’s the only way to get you to talk to me, I will.”

  He held the bars above his head, swaying against the movement of the plane. His expression was serious, a muscle jumping in his jaw as he searched my face.

  I shook my head, snapping, “I don’t owe you conversation.”

  He blinked, lips parted and that question in his eyes again, slow to follow as I backed away from him. “Sure, you don’t, but it would be nice if you gave it a shot, at least.”

  This exchange didn’t make me want to, but for the sake of getting off this plane in a timely fashion, I put on my best fake smile. “I don’t know who you think you are, but maybe when we’re off the crashing plane and on the ground—maybe then we’ll have a conversation that you’ll wish you never asked for.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  Something exploded in my brain.

  Pain rippled out against my skull. I screamed as the lights in the plane snapped off and darkness flooded everything.

  I wasn’t sure if it was just me, my anger, or the power switching off in the plane, leaving all the electricity and static to flow straight into me, or both.

  My hands clutched the fireworks of pain and came away, searching for the wet of blood—I’ve been shot, my mind repeated over and over—but there was nothing. Nothing but vertigo and the floor of the plane rising to meet me.

  Jack lunged forward and caught me, uttering a curse.

  The plane was a mess of wires and noise and lights before. Now it was nothing but silence, the creaking of the metal body, the wind tearing past outside, and the engines that slowed with a gut-wrenching rattle.

  The only light left came from the small porthole windows and the blue moonlight. It was a growing quiet so eerie that shivers traveled down my spine.

  “The crashing plane,” the soldier repeated, as if he got the joke suddenly. It wasn’t a joke. The plane was crashing and my head burned with pain and my arms, my legs, they were made of jelly. He held me up with his arms wrapped arou
nd my waist. “Okay, Sparky, I’ve got you. Fitz, clip her to my harness.”

  “What the hell is wrong with her?” The other soldier was already there, lifting my head to look at me. There were four of him, at least, and the taste of copper in my mouth. “Her nose is bleeding. Why is her nose bleeding?”

  “We’ll figure it out, just get it done and open the door. Now, Fitz!” He barked the order and stumbled as the plane angled further into an imminent nosedive. He struggled to get his harness attached to me one handed, Fitz helping hurriedly.

  I felt blurry. Fuzzy, and not that electric fuzziness that came from the dullness of the fluorescent tube lights in my dark room. It was a different kind of fuzzy, like something soft was curled around my brain, numbing everything but the harsh pain. I didn’t like the feeling. It made my stomach float against the drop of the plane and buckled my knees and left my arms hanging uselessly by my sides.

  Consciousness was a battle to keep my grip on, but we were jumping out of a plane, and—parachute, parachute, parachute!

  I blinked in and out of the dark behind my eyes, vaguely aware that I couldn’t feel a single ounce of the static and vaguely aware that I wasn’t equipped to jump out of a plane.

  The soldiers know. They’re helping. Right?

  A rush of wind and noise deafened me and added pressure to the pounding ache in my skull, and then the weight of the plane was gone. A strange silence took over everything before the wind tore past again.

  Pale moonlight spun wildly around me. A distant speck of red below was briefly blotted out by the hulking metal meteor the plane made. Only gravity and the open sky bore down against me and this soldier, the ground coming up much too fast for far too long.

  The parachute releasing hit me like a wall.

  Whiplash knocked the air from my lungs and jerked my head back, but despite that strain and the sudden halt of our descent, the soldier kept a tight grip on me.

  “See? I’ve got you. We’re alright. Everything’s alright.” He spoke into my ear, too loud for the thrumming ache in my skull, but still gentle and warm enough that I almost believed him.