In A Burning Room

by TS Ward

  Below us, orange light filled the air. The sound of it didn’t reach my ears, or maybe it did but I was slipping in and out of this void space between awake and asleep.

  Stars all around exploded with vibrant colours that pierced and stung, and then nothing.

  3

  “Asa Beckett’s goddamn daughter!”

  Heat seared me. I was melted to the ground, pressed to something hard and burning. Pain drilled through my skull.

  “We’re kidnapping the Emperor’s daughter, Jack, the Duchess, for the love of…” The voice hissed roughly, loudly, and carried through thick, hot air toward me. It sounded slow to my ears, and the tone in his voice told me they weren’t used kindly. They were poisonous sounds. “What was the plan? Tell me. Tell me what we agreed on with Moon Rabbit. I want to know, because clearly I must have missed that part.”

  “It’s a rescue,” the other man answered. His voice blended with the heat and the warmth. “We’ll take it up with Rabbit when we get there.”

  “Who says we’re going to see him after this mess? We’ll bring the Empire straight to the camp and the kid,” Fitz grumbled.

  His words cut a ragged tear through the heat that slowly cooked me alive. His anger was thicker than the air and made my heart beat hard against my throat, turned my mind to an image of James in the training room when I broke his nose.

  I tensed, turning from liquid metal to steel. You made me bleed, he growled.

  You look better for it.

  Jack hummed close by and spoke quietly. Something much colder than the air was pressed to my head. A damp cloth. “They already know where they are, and I’m not leaving him alone. We just need to beat Mercury there, so we can warn Rabbit and take off with Percy. We’ll go to Clary.”

  Fitz sighed loudly. “We’re in way too much trouble, kid.”

  Jack fell silent.

  My eyelids felt too heavy to open. I was lying blind and helpless and set alight with the heat that scalded my skin. It was all too much—these two rogue soldiers, this pounding headache, the heat making it hard to breathe.

  “Rabbit wanted the weapon, not the girl. He’s not going to help us if we don’t bring him our side of the deal.” He sounded like he was pacing across rough sand, his voice fading and growing louder and fading again. We were in the Wastes. The damn Wastes. “What the hell are we supposed to do about that?”

  Jack was much calmer than his uncle. He took the cold cloth away and pushed back wet strands of my hair from my forehead before setting it back. “Worry about it later. We need to get her to Ellie before anything else.”

  Ellie? Ellie Carson?

  Fitz laughed. It was a bursting, forced sound. “Say the Sceptre wakes up. What then? She doesn’t seem too pleased with you. Or anything, to be honest.”

  “Just—” He started to raise his voice, and then collected himself, starting again. “Just let me handle it. Let me talk to her.”

  “And what? Jack Atlas Talon is going to charm his way out of this?”

  “I know her,” he insisted. “Just trust me.”

  A real, bellied laugh rose from Fitz then, and if my ribs weren’t tender from bruises and my chest only half-filled with air, I might have laughed with him.

  “You know the Duchess? You, the weedy little farm boy from Redbird, know her. And how would that come about?”

  I tried to pry my eyes open, but the bright light that scattered between my eyelashes was too harsh and I wanted to keep listening now. I wanted the answer that Fitz was searching for.

  He was quiet for a moment, and then his voice grew a little hoarse. “Finn.”

  The sunlight left smudges across my vision. My arms didn’t feel like my own, full of cement and numbness, but I slid them up to rest across my eyes. The back of my hand slid over one eye.

  “You waking up, Sparky?” Jack pulled the cloth from my forehead, now warm and nearly dry.

  I peered up past the space between my thumb and forefinger, where he blotted out the light. My throat was too dry to answer and moving hurt, but I managed some croaked noise as an affirmative.

  His green eyes drew lines at the corners, his teeth flashing as he smiled at me.

  “The plane,” I whispered, because it was the only thing I could think to say. I coughed against the scratching of the words when they crawled up my throat.

  His smile disappeared. “I know.”

  I closed my eyes and let out a shaky sigh. “Why?”

  He was quiet as he held a canteen out to me.

  I dragged myself up onto an elbow, accepted the water, and drank as much as I could before the heat knocked me back down to the sand. It was pale under the high sun, but still too damn orange. I rolled to my side and curled against it, my arms cushioning my head, and wished that it would all just go away, that I could just go to sleep in my dark room instead.

  But—hell, that was the sun, warm and bright and much more than I remembered. My skin craved the yellow light the way that plants did, but the heat of it would have me a husk before long, dried up on the desert sand.

  “Think you can stand, Sparky?” Jack took the canteen back.

  “Think you can use my name?”

  My head felt like a boulder held up by a toothpick. The air smelled like copper and my skin felt like a nosebleed and I remembered the blood that dripped over my lip. Nothing was there now. No dried remnants were on my chin, but my mouth was still flavoured by it. I was bruised, but that was nothing new.

  This damn desert was like walking on the sun. Careful what you wish for.

  I pushed through every ache that screamed at me to stay down until somehow, miraculously, I found my feet under me.

  The world was a spinning blur of red sea and charred black rocks that jutted out like islands as far as the horizon would allow. It was sand for miles in every direction, and it was such an odd colour. Terracotta clay dried into sharp little shards. The black spires were old buildings, old trees, old objects turned into unrecognizable things, things that dripped dark and dust like melted glass.

  The horizon wavered from the emanating heat, and all I could think of was James, Mercury, how he burned with fire worse in his anger.

  “Fitz!”

  The soldier’s hands grabbed me, hooked around my shoulders. My brain rattled against my skull with the force of it. It was loose, unscrewed, and suddenly my knees gave up the fight and I collapsed back to the sand. Air wheezed from my chest.

  Fitz knelt over me as fireworks burst across my eyes and sparked against the bright copper of his hair and his pale, sun-marred skin.

  “Listen, princess,” he spat. “You’re going to tell us where the weapon is and we’ll drop you off safe and sound in Redbird—”

  “Weapon?” I hissed back, the words forced on a thin breath. I didn’t have any weapons, other than the one that was embedded in my DNA, the static that coursed through my veins and burst in my nerves. And right now, I couldn’t even tell him where that was.

  Jack pulled the man back.

  The sun flashed bright and turned everything white with starbursts that pricked sharply against the backs of my eyes. My ears rang with a piercing whistle, a whistle that carried me into the darkness, into the nothingness of unconscious void space. I felt like liquid. I felt like air. There was no substance to my bones except the pounding thunder in my skull.

  The world faded as the fire of the Wastes melted me to glass.

  4

  Shafts of dusty light blinked in and out of existence. It was a flickering and vibrant red that was softened around the edges where it came into the small room between wooden slats.

  Darkness sat between the empty spaces.

  I drifted in those hollow places between lights, and in the back of my mind a distant electric static started to drip like a tap that I couldn’t reach, the droplets cold as they splashed against my skin with a light shock.

  “He was so heartbroken,” a choked, breathy voice was close to me, interrupted by a muffled sob. “Every n
ight he sat by the door and waited for you to come home. He didn’t understand why you didn’t just come home. Sorry come home? He’d say. Sorry come home now?”

  Rose drifted through the air.

  The scent was so strong and sharp, distinctly floral, that it made my nose itch. It filled me with memories that I had pushed to the darkest spaces of my mind, where I imagined the rest were kept, somewhere at the bottom of a cold ocean.

  There were roses in the garden behind the Manor in Redbird. Roses that my father gifted in little sparkling glass bottles—to my mother, at first, out of love, and then to Ellie to thank her, and then to Lourdes to keep her happy. To keep her quiet.

  To keep Pilot a secret.

  The woman took a shaking breath and exhaled long and slow. “He started to talk about you like you were still there. It was like… It was like he was secretly meeting with a ghost of you in the middle of the night. I didn’t sleep because I thought… I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought.”

  The ground shifted underneath me—a cot, not the ground. It was just canvas on a light frame, a pillow tucked under my head, and a rough blanket pulled up to my chin.

  Something touched my cheek, a cold shock against my head. My brain started to tick again—the soldiers, the plane, the sand, the heat—

  A scream came mangled from my dry throat as I lurched up. My hand shot up to connect the heel of my palm to the woman’s jaw. She fell back with a startled sound, wooden floor creaking where she landed, my name spilling from her lips.

  I leapt off the other side of the cot. It collapsed sideways, dumping me to the ground with a thud.

  “Soren, it’s okay, you’re okay!” The woman had a hand pressed to her jaw, standing in the shadows of the room.

  I vaulted to my feet, stumbled into the wall, and worked out where the door was. Away from the light. Away from the flickering fire and the draft of cold air. Away from the woman. I lunged for it, fell onto the handle and pushed it open. A dark hall waited on the other side and I wavered, not sure which way to go.

  Closer to the fire, right?

  “Soren, wait! It’s okay! You’re okay now, you’re home—”

  I followed the breeze that brushed softly against my skin, trailing my fingers along the walls on either side of me for a hint of electric current, a bite of static, anything. Nothing. Nothing but a weak, distant feeling. Nothing but a dark, small house, and the hallway that ended in another small room, in another dead end.

  “He’s not here,” the woman’s voice murmured.

  I turned and backed into the room. Who?

  “And it’s not home like you’re used to,” she continued.

  She leaned against the wall, arms wrapped around herself, head rested against the old wallpaper. A shroud of darkness cloaked her still, but in the light of the fire that shone through the wooden slats of the patched and broken outer wall, I could see an outline, a colour.

  She was thin, a crimson red scarf wrapped around her shoulders, her hair long and curled and raven dark.

  There is a fire within you, baby girl. A burning rage to match the sun. It was her, the woman from the photograph, the one they called my mother—it was her.

  “Mama?” My cheeks were flushed with heat. I could hardly breathe. She was dead.

  She was supposed to be dead.

  “Soren,” she hummed, choking back a sob with a hand pressed to her lips. “Oh, baby girl. Look at you.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and took in a breath. How is this happening? How is this real? Is it? Is it real? Maybe I was dreaming. Maybe I hadn’t woken up yet. Maybe this was a simulation. I remembered James in the recording—simulations don’t show you grains of sand. They don’t make you feel the warmth of the sun.

  She wasn’t real. She couldn’t be real. But my heart pounded, broke, and I had to make sure. I started toward her, cautiously, trying to find something in her that would give it away, but it was dark and she stood in the shadows and I couldn’t see a damn thing.

  I paused just out of arms reach, scrutinizing. She looked exactly like the photo. Not real. Her hair was a shiny, raven’s wing black. Not real. Her eyes were wide, black without the light touching them. Not real. There wasn’t a single line in her skin. Not real.

  She reached for me, slowly and cautiously, her guard dropped just long enough.

  I ducked and launched past her, racing down the hall in a frantic search for the exit. Doors lined the hall. Just rooms. Dead ends upon dead ends.

  “Soren, please,” she called after me, “Calm down. Just calm down!”

  At the very end of the hall, a staircase led up to a storm door.

  I stood at the bottom, peered up for a moment, and then bounded up the steps two at a time. I heard the woman curse quietly behind me as I shouldered the door open and stumbled onto the orange sand.

  It was packed down like clay over the top of this buried building, swirling in mini tornadoes with the wind that whipped across the moon-silvered dunes. I scrambled across it on my hands and knees until I could stand as panic surged through me and crawled up my throat in wheezing, fast breaths.

  The moon hung low in a misty bed of clouds, a dull rainbow circling it. All around, thick storm clouds rose up tall and towering and dark on the horizon. Pale orange flashes of lightning burst every few seconds. The night was wind torn and threatening, the darkness tangible against my skin, and the smell of smoke permeated the air with a spray of sparks that mingled with the sand.

  “Soren!” The raven woman shouted. “Please, there’s a storm coming.”

  How far could I get? In the Wastes, it was a question of supplies—food, water, shelter. In a simulation, I could run until I hit the wall. So run. Run, run, run. Run until there’s no question. They want to trick you. They want to prove you’re not ready. Prove them wrong.

  I spun, searched the horizon.

  “He’ll be here soon, okay? Jack and Fitz are flagging them in—”

  “Who?” I barked, stepped around her to keep my distance, and spotted the dark plume of smoke billowing into the sky in the distance, the glow of red that lit up the base.

  The plane. If I could get to the plane, maybe the radio systems would function, or maybe my father would send James to search for me, or maybe I’d hit the simulation wall before I even made it halfway.

  The woman took a step forward. “Jack and Fitz?”

  “No, the… You said he’ll be here soon, who? Who will?” I felt the storm, the lightning reaching out to me as the air filled with static.

  She shook her head, astonishment in her voice. “Who do you think?”

  A wheeze escaped me. “Who do I think? I don’t—I don’t know! I don’t get it, I don’t get the point of this, I don’t understand. What do you want? Why is it you?”

  She opened her mouth and shut it just as fast. A frown grew deeper as she pondered my words. She stepped forward and back again when I mirrored her movements, her face twisted into a grimace. “What have they done to you, baby girl?”

  I held up a finger, pointed it at her, and hissed, “You don’t get to call me that.”

  “I’ve always called you that,” she insisted, “I’m your mother, Soren.”

  “My mother is dead!” I yelled, hands tightened into fists at my sides.

  She’s dead, Soren, dead and gone. My father’s voice was loud in my mind. Tears burned at the corners of my eyes.

  What purpose did he have, to make her like this? To bring her back and make me believe it, only to have it taken away when the simulation was done? How cruel had he become?

  Lightning arched across the sky behind her and I felt it, stretching from my right shoulder to my left hand, the spark sharp in my skin. I imagined there must have been some softer strength in other Sceptres—did James feel a gentle warmth, or did the heat make him burn?

  “Why would you say that?” She stepped forward again. “I’m right here. How could I be dead when I’m right here?”

  “You’re not, you’re n
ot real, you’re not real, you’re…”

  There was a statue, in Redbird, of a woman carved from white marble. It marked one side of the entrance to the labyrinth behind the Manor. The plaque at the base said her name, her date of birth, her date of death. Every now and then a yellow flower sat at her feet and I could never figure out who left it there.

  My room had three walls with windows looking out—to the tall silver spire of the tower where my father spent his time, to the green field where the soldiers trained and the roof tops of the barracks where they slept, and to the garden with its rose bushes and hedges and the pond down the middle and the statues of my mother and my father. Mine knelt at the center of the labyrinth staring longingly into the lily pads.

  My mother stood tall and proud and beautiful, her face turned up with a smile toward the Manor. My father’s statue looked at hers with an outstretched hand. I always thought they were so melancholy.

  “Soren, please,” she moved closer again, and as the wind drew her hair back, she looked so much like the woman I remembered. So much that a spear of pain twisted through my chest.

  No.

  I was adamant. I was certain. My mother was dead and my father told me himself, after my accident, after my memories were torn from me.

  He stood in front of her grave at the foot of her statue, nestled between hedges. He stood there with his jaw clenched tight, his wet eyes looked anywhere but at me, and the lines of his face etched deeper than they had ever been.

  He stood there while the Lumen dragged me away from him with a scream that tore up my throat, with my heels dug into the green field while the soldiers stood and tried not to watch.

  I watched his proud shoulders hunch forward in his black suit as he shook.

  “Will you please come inside?” She begged.

  A spark from the fire lit up the amber colour of her eyes, a flash of gold that was there and then gone, and as she raised a hand to push her hair back, another gold flash. A ring, wrapped around her finger. Shining and prominent.

  He doesn’t wear his. When did he stop wearing it?