In A Burning Room

by TS Ward

  I stepped to the side as she reached for me and the sand crumbled off the edge of the building’s roof.

  It wasn’t a long way down, but I landed with a huff, stumbled forward, and launched into a run.

  Wooden walls behind me made up the buried building. The fire burned low and cast a flat orange light across it, long shadows over the dunes that rose up, and mine a stumbling thing that lead me toward the crashed plane.

  Each step that I dug into the sand jarred the ache in my head.

  “Jack!” The woman shouted over the wind. “She’s lost her damn mind!”

  I stopped at the top of the dune to catch my breath, to give my heart a chance to stop beating so hard against the bruises on my ribs.

  The soldier stood on another dune, a silhouette against a backdrop of orange clouds and lightning. The one-eyed soldier was next to him, a long rope held tight in his hands as a groaning noise crested the hill.

  The noise was the creaking of bones, like some giant creature that slithered across the Wastes, and then… a sail. A patchwork sail propped up by a crooked mast.

  “Jack is back!” A small voice sang over the wind.

  All the air left my lungs in a rush.

  “Jack is back, Jack is back, Jack is back!”

  Icicles grew in my lungs with each panicked breath. I am dreaming. I am dreaming a vivid dream. He is a dream. Percy is a dream. That boat is a dream. Boats on land and my little bear—it’s a dream.

  His familiar mop of curly black hair leaned over the side of the boat, his arms outstretched as he jumped off to land in Jack’s arms. I watched him with my heart on my tongue, ready to spill out of my mouth. I wanted to hold him, to have his arms wrapped around my neck the way he did to Jack, but if he was real—hell, even if this was a dream or a simulation—I turned and ran.

  A part of me broke and was left behind with him. A glacier calving.

  As much as it hurt, he wasn’t safe with me. He wasn’t safe near me.

  My hands ran through my hair as I stumbled across the dunes. A sharp, shuddered breath rattled my ribcage. Even if I looked at him, face to face, and pretended I didn’t know him, James knew. He’d tell that truth until they believed it wholly.

  Why did I tell him? How could I be so stupid?

  The sand whipped up by the wind burned where it hit my skin.

  He isn’t real, I tried to tell myself. He isn’t real, it’s a trick, it’s only a trick. But his voice was clear and vivid, so exact, and his curls, his outstretched arms…

  I choked back a sob and climbed a dune achingly slow. The sand was under my fingernails, in my mouth, stuck to my skin and inside my boots.

  I hated it. I hated it so much.

  The top of the dune collapsed under me and sent me rolling down to the bottom. The sand was in my clothes, crunched between my teeth, and stung my eyes. I swore it was tearing me apart on the inside. It hurt. My chest ached. I wanted it gone. I wanted to be gone.

  I wanted to find my father and grab him by the lapels of his suit jacket as this orange sand spilled from me like water across the white marble of his office floor.

  I wanted to demand why he would send me to this hell and play such a cruel trick on me. There was nothing here besides imposters, simulations, and fake dream people in a sea of never-ending sand.

  I crawled forward.

  Those black, rocky outcroppings that poked out of the ground every so often gave off waves of heat, even in the dark in an approaching storm.

  The rock was a shelter from the wind. It was bent on the far side and stuck out at weird angles, like a cave with holes punched through the walls, mostly filled in with sand. I stayed there, in the dark shadow, my eyes squeezed shut against the pricking tears and my arms wrapped tightly around my knees.

  Percy wasn’t real. He couldn’t be real. But I couldn’t wake up.

  He was just a kid who would be terrified of me, terrified of my Sceptre blood, terrified to get hurt, and I didn’t want to hurt him. Not him, not anyone. I wanted him to be safe. I wanted to lock myself in my dark room where I could never hurt anyone. Especially him.

  He’s not Percy. He’s not, he’s not, he’s not, he’s not.

  My head ached. It throbbed. I pressed the heels of my hands to my temples and clamped my jaw shut. I couldn’t be the monster in his nightmares. I couldn’t be the same as his scary man, the same as James. My hands shook. I shook. I curled tighter around this hole torn through my gut.

  It felt like being shot. It felt worse.

  I pressed my hands to the earth underneath me. Rough grains of red-orange sand pushed back. I had felt the sunlight that melted over my skin like liquid gold. The wind played with my hair, tangled it into a mess, and tore up the sand in a way that the simulations couldn’t. The soldiers’ black uniforms were stained with the colours of this world, and a bird-boned, raven woman cried and felt solid and warm under my hands.

  Grains of sand. A warm sun. Wind that bears a storm. It is real. It is real. It is real.

  Something hit the outside of my hideaway and made me jump further inside. The rock groaned and echoed hollow in the small space as the silhouetted figure crouched to the sand and ducked his head down to peer in.

  “Hey, come on,” Jack held out a hand, “Come get out of the storm.”

  Just as he said it, a crack of lightning tore through the sky above us, and the thunder rumbled into the earth. He held up the side of his jacket to protect himself from the tear of the sand.

  “Can I come in, at least?” He laughed, but he didn’t wait for a response. He ducked into the small space and tucked his knees up, settling in beside me. The shelter barely allowed for it. “These storms aren’t something you want to get caught in, Sparky.”

  I wrapped my arms tight around my knees and swallowed the lump in my throat. There was one thing I needed to hear.

  “Is this real?”

  “What?” He frowned, his eyelashes weaved into a darker shade as he squinted in confusion. Freckles were dotted across his nose, visible in the flashes of lightning. “What do you mean? Is what real?”

  Grains of red sand stuck to the black fabric of my pants. Grains of it. Individual grains that shifted under foot, that made climbing the dunes difficult. Grains that danced in the wind in coloured plumes under a blue, blue sky in the day, and the silvered moonlight at night. And the sun—sunlight that tasted like honey and sunflowers even in a delirious state. It looked real. It felt real.

  “Say that it is,” I whispered, eyes closed with hope.

  He was quiet for a long time while he studied me, and then his voice was barely louder than the wind. “It is. It’s real.”

  I looked at him again, searched his face.

  He didn’t look like a simulation. He looked like a soldier. Dark crescents were under his eyes and by the stars, that damn question still rested in the green of them, as if he couldn’t quite figure out what kind of animal I was.

  I reached my hand out to him, fingers outstretched, and watched the thoughts run through his mind as he hesitated. He set his hand on mine.

  He was warm, like the desert sun, and his pulse jumped in his fingertips. The smallest hint of static rested in the atom space between us. I felt it through every part of me.

  “Say it again,” I told him, and listened for the lie to spark in him.

  He worked his jaw and squeezed my hand. Pure belief flooded his words. “It’s real. You, me, them, the Wastes. This storm. It’s real. Why wouldn’t you think it was?”

  “He’s real. The kid.” Say that he is, I wanted to beg him, but I also wanted to scream that he wasn’t, that he was just a trick, something to get me to admit my darker Sceptre blood and to give in to them, to being their Genesis. To my father, to Astra.

  “…Percy?” He said slowly. “He—yeah, he’s real, but… What is this? Why are you asking? What’s going on?”

  Thunder roared loud, the vibration heavy in my bones.

  I closed my eyes and breathed in slowly.
The storm air felt like ferrofluid on my tongue and dripped down my throat, drawn to the electric shock rolling through me with each strike of lightning. Behind my eyes, the storm glowed bright blue, but the soldier was… green? No, something closer to turquoise.

  He was vibrant and pale and brighter than the storm and completely different than anyone else I had done this to, and he was telling the truth. He’s real. This is real.

  “Tell me a lie,” I whispered.

  “Tell you… why?” He flinched when a flash of lightning drew a spark from my fingertips that spiked into his nerves.

  I pulled my hand away, folded them together against my knees, and breathed out the static.

  The air sparked blue inside the small shelter.

  I pressed my lips together and rested my forehead against my knees. It was dark enough between the lightning strikes and the sand whipping across the dunes that I could pretend for a few half seconds that I was in the Embassy, in my dark room, that this was a dream, that I would be safe and awake as soon as I opened my eyes.

  He reached out to me, but I felt it coming and jerked away, twisted to the opposite corner of the shelter, and shouted, “Don’t touch me!”

  “We were just—what is going on with you? Roam said you’ve lost your mind and I’m half tempted to believe it right now unless you tell me what’s happening. You haven’t so much as looked at me, and you’ve barely said anything but when you do it’s either full of anger or doesn’t make any sense at all. You took off into a goddamn sandstorm, Soren. You saw Percy and turned and ran.” His voice was under-toned by thunder that I felt deep in my chest.

  I didn’t want to be stuck under this black rock with this damn soldier. The static ran through my blood and turned into a chill. “You don’t know what’s going on? You don’t know what’s going on. Okay, yeah, because you were just taken hostage by a couple of rogue soldiers, because you woke up in some hellish place and things that only exist in dreams, in your head, have just been dropped in front of you, but please, tell me that you don’t understand what’s happening! Tell me that I have lost my mind as if I don’t already think that! You don’t get to do that to me and then sit there and yell at me knowing I’ve been in that damn prison for as long as I can remember.”

  He grew still, rigid. A frown pulled at his eyebrows and drew worry lines at the corners of his eyes. He had small cuts across his cheek from the sand that found its way in on the wind.

  “When you look at me,” he breathed, “What do you see?”

  I looked away and bit my tongue.

  “Soren,” he hissed and leaned forward. “Who am I? What am I to you?”

  “A soldier! You’re just a soldier!”

  My voice echoed in the silence between the lightning and the thunder and the sand that grated harshly against the rock.

  The storm grew quiet.

  Even in the dark, with the soft blue glow of static in the air, I could tell he was pale. He looked like he was about to puke and his strained voice only solidified the thought.

  “Just a soldier. Just a soldier? Why? Because I didn’t get you out sooner? I was trying, Soren, but I didn’t know where you were. I never stopped looking. I didn’t even know where Roam and Pucks took Percy—”

  “Stop, just, stop! By the stars, Talon, you don’t understand, do you?” I squeezed my eyes shut for a second against the headache that grew stronger, as I tried to keep the static contained within me. I didn’t want to hurt him, as much as the urge to was there.

  “Jack,” he corrected me. He shook his head. “Tell me what I don’t understand.”

  My eyes stung suddenly. The world felt fake in the dizziness that swam through my head.

  “Soren, I’m sorry, but I…” His voice trailed off as he leaned forward.

  I watched a thought turn over in his mind that took a while to process. His teeth bit into his cheek and his hands worried together, his elbows hooked around his knees. His eyes bore into mine with so much scrutiny that it made me flinch and turn away.

  “Stop it,” I muttered.

  “No, I…” He cut his words off again and shook his head, starting again with cautious words. “Do you know who I am?”

  I stared at the dark rock beside me. “Jack Talon.”

  He was quiet, and when he spoke his words were stretched thin from a tight throat. “I mean, more than that. More than my name. Are you trying to cut me out or do you really have no idea?”

  “I don’t know!” Annoyance pricked my words. “I don’t know who you are!”

  My voice rang sharply around the small cavern, thrown like daggers at this soldier who flinched at the words. He reacted as if it hurt. He looked like it hurt; teeth flashed behind a grimace, eyebrows scrunched low, hands curled tight into fists. And his eyes pierced through me, the green dulled in the dark.

  He sat frozen. A muscle twitched in his jaw as he worked out what to say. “Why not?”

  The wind whipped sand across the opening of the shelter. I watched it bounce off the sleeve of his jacket and spill to a pile on the ground next to him, a miniature version of this red desert. I pressed my hands to the sand on either side of me, ran my fingers through it, the grains caught under my fingernails.

  “Soren,” he spoke hoarsely, “Why not?”

  “Why not what?” I snapped at him. “I’ve never met you. Ever.”

  He laughed and shook his head, leaned forward, and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “You don’t remember…?”

  “No, I don’t—”

  “You don’t remember me.” His voice broke the more he spoke, and it was like poison in my veins. “You don’t remember any of it?”

  “I don’t! I don’t remember anything! Stop it, just stop, stop…”

  My hands clutched my head as I curled into myself. Panic burned under my skin. It hurt to try and remember. It hurt to think about it. My memory was trapped behind steel and cement, there but just out of reach, just frustratingly beyond my reach no matter how hard I tried to touch just one thing. Anything.

  I remembered glimpses of a childhood spent in the halls of the Manor, in Redbird, and wandering through the garden alone. I remembered staring up at the stars through a telescope gifted to me by my aunt Astra. I remembered black sand beaches and how cold the ocean felt. I remembered my mother whispering to me: there is a fire within you, baby girl. A burning rage to match the sun. I remembered my father shouting at me: she’s dead, Soren, dead and gone.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack whispered.

  “What for?” I growled against my knees.

  “Everything,” he said, and a dull flash of lightning ruptured in the air. “Whatever happened to you that’s made you forget all… everything. This. But if you hate it this much, if you really want nothing to do with us, we’ll get you to Redbird and you can go back to whatever it was you had and forget us all over again.”

  I turned my head and touched a finger to the orange sand, traced constellations into the rough grains. Ursa Minor, the little bear, and then Perseus, and Vulpecula.

  I didn’t want to forget anything. I wanted to remember. I remembered the constellations, but I barely recalled what my mother looked like when she smiled. I barely remembered her at all, and yet that woman, that raven-haired woman with the amber eyes and the thin shoulders—it was her. I knew it, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it.

  I wiped my hand on my pants. The colour stained like rust against the black.

  I did hate it. The sand was everywhere, uncomfortable, and the day was heavy with an unbearable heat, the night lost under a sandstorm. I hated this desert, but I hated the Embassy, too.

  James would be sent for Percy if I returned without him. He would probably be here soon either way. Even Pilot couldn’t determine what would actually happen, only the possibility, and if he kept the kid a secret from our father for this long…

  He was planning something. That boy had a damn plan.

  “I can’t leave Percy,” I whispered. Saying
his name out loud was painful, a chest full of sharp things that made it hard to breathe. Saying his name out loud made him real. “I can’t.”

  “He’s not going to Redbird.”

  “I know! I mean—if they find him, they’ll hurt him like they—but I can’t leave him. I can’t. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.” My hands clutched my elbows around my knees. I felt like I was drifting out to sea with no way to navigate the mile-high waves. I had two options: drown, or starve.

  Stay with Percy and bring them to him, or leave him without my protection.

  Jack cleared his throat. “Why don’t you come see him? Before the storm picks up again.”

  5

  Voices hissed back and forth.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s coming. Give her a minute.”

  “You trust her alone?”

  Silence, then—

  “There’s a sandstorm. She doesn’t have much choice right now.”

  The scent of roses met me before the pale lantern light did.

  Battered old couches surrounded a low table, all stained orange from the Wastes that had found every crack it could to get in. No firelight bled through the wood panels now, not even a drop of moonlight, but the lanterns cast a dull yellow hue and thin shadows.

  Romana sat at the end of one couch, perched on the edge. She looked up when the floor groaned underfoot. Beside her was a husk of a man, smaller and even more bird-boned than she was, made mostly of coiled white hair and a long, thick beard, his mustache groomed into two perfect loops. His cheeks rounded and his eyes squinted when he saw me, the smile that flashed warm and jovial.

  “Soren—” he started to say, but then.

  A boy with freckles scattered over a button nose and a smile so wide that I could see he was missing a tooth. A soft little bear cub with a mop of curly black hair.

  He jumped in front of me, leapt out with a playful roar, and looked up at me with those wide eyes the colour of a glacial mountain lake, and I was lost in them. I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t one of Astra’s humanoid Lumen—their eyes were human enough to fool anyone—but I didn’t care anymore.