In A Burning Room

by TS Ward

  Silence hung in the air between us, but the noise from the camp still rumbled and drowned out those distant thunder clouds that blotted out the stars on the horizon.

  Fitz’s shoulders dropped. He ran a hand over his face. “I don’t regret doing this. Getting you out of that place, I mean, away from him. I’m just sorry you have to look in him in the eye still.”

  “One day that will change,” I murmured.

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “I believe it. I’ll make sure of it.”

  I caught my tongue between my teeth and looked up at him with a frown. The soldier that stood in front of me now was barely anything like the angry man I met under the heat of a brand-new world.

  “Thanks, Fitz. For talking with me.”

  “Yeah, yeah, princess.”

  “I mean it,” I said, “Especially because you hate me. It says a lot, that you would listen.”

  He looked away as he worked his jaw. His eye scanned the horizon beyond me.

  “You know, kid, I don’t hate you. I never did. There are just some things that never leave you, and while your things are a little different from mine, you understand. I hope you do. I just figure there’s no point being so angry for things when here you are, being so comfortable around my nephew after that Sceptre.”

  I shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I be? He’s good. Real good.”

  “He is, and I’m damn proud of him. I’ll do anything to keep my nephews and nieces safe.” He looked back over his shoulder at our tents and gestured toward them. “Why don’t you go get some sleep? Conleth is just on the horizon there. It’ll be a full day of travel, so get some rest while you can.”

  Sleep was the last thing I wanted. I wanted to be awake and aware and here.

  My eyes settled on the storm clouds that rolled over the desert’s edge from the north, and I remembered a dream about those static electric shocks that pierced through Redbird. White lightning that hung heavy, that dragged tails across the ground in bursting sparks. I felt it through my skin.

  “There’s a storm coming,” I told Fitz, and then paused. “Rain. When was the last time this place saw rain?”

  He shook his head. “Never, as far as I remember.”

  “Before the Fraxinus War, probably,” I murmured.

  “Rude.” He laughed it off, but I didn’t mean it like that.

  The orange sand below my feet was still. There was no wind now to swirl it into smooth waves. The wooden buildings below us were dry tinder, most of it charred from fire, brittle and weak. Dry, creaking, rotted, breaking—it was all just dust full of air cavities ready to collapse under weight or water.

  I hoped the storm didn’t reach us.

  “At least we have a boat.”

  “You’re thinking what I’m thinking,” he chuckled. “Thing won’t get very far in mud. And I’m serious about getting some sleep. Just because you slept for two days doesn’t mean you don’t need it. Go wake up Jack, tell him to come on watch instead.”

  He was the one who needed to sleep.

  The lightning in the distance made a faint static hum in the air. “I’m not waking him up.”

  26

  All I saw was darkness. There was no sound, no smell, no feeling, nothing, nothing, nothing—

  Something in the darkness brushed against my cheek and I screamed.

  I tried to scream, but I didn’t hear the sound of it. I was numb, frozen, but I swore I felt it swimming in this nothingness with me.

  Shhh, a voice in my mind told me. Shhh, Soren, you’re alright.

  Black. That was the colour of it. It was something blacker than black, a complete darkness that wrapped me up like water, water that filled my lungs and my mouth and my nose and deafened my ears.

  But it wasn’t water, it was air, or maybe—

  Shhh, shhh, the gentle waves of a lake whispered. Silence, and then shhh, like water receding from the shore, that trickled over the granular rocks as it pushed and pulled and smoothed the sand, ate away at it, eroded.

  The stars sat unmoving below the waves.

  Shhhh. The water left the shore like diamonds that dripped up into the void of space, a cascade of shattered glass that fell up and up and up and turned into millions of tiny lights that filled the galaxy.

  Shhhhh.

  The murmured sound slowed to dissonant hum.

  Hands pierced the stars and tore up the blackness like it was made of fabric. Tiny threads fell through the black water.

  The hands wrapped around me and I was so small, held in the grip of some god, pulled up gently to breach the surface so fast the stars turned into little white lines that streaked past in a dizzying blur.

  Cold. That was the first thing that I felt.

  I was so cold and these stars looked like snowflakes as they fell down around me and this god was made of pinpricks and trails of white light that pulsed in this dark void.

  I was hallucinating. That’s what this was. I had been hallucinating since the beginning.

  I was still in the Embassy, still in the dark room and still in the sen-dep tank.

  The ceiling and the floor were made of mirrors that reflected the universe infinite and this god waited before me in silent expectation.

  This god, made of the crushed white light of clay molded into the shape of a person.

  “Am I dreaming?” I spoke softly. I had a mouthful of downy feathers.

  Almost, this god spoke in rhythmic hums.

  “Oh. Okay,” I breathed, and then I paused in the silent and still air. “Who are you?”

  Who are you? This god whispered, and held out a hand of white light—the static that coursed through nerves and gathered in bundles formed the shape of one, with a finger aimed past me. He needs you to help him. Give him a weapon.

  I turned around. The action sent ripples across the mirrored stars that bounced off each other and came back to me.

  The air in my lungs was sharp and cold and I was soaked to the bone. In front of me, a dark shadow blotted out the stars like a storm cloud alight with blue lightning.

  I lunged forward and dropped to my knees on the surface of this lake. The mountains and the lights of Redbird were upside down below me.

  “Percy?” My hands shook as I rolled him over, and my heart stopped beating in my chest.

  His eyes rolled back. Only the whites showed through an oxygen mask that covered his head like a deep-sea diver. I pulled him to me with a gasped breath, held him tight as I rocked back and forth.

  My chest ached like it was full of salt water. He looked like he was floating in it. His hair was soft as it drifted and formed a black halo around his paled face.

  Give him a weapon, this god hissed in the back of my skull. Pounding and insistent.

  What weapon?

  What’s the first weapon you think of?

  The static. The electricity that ran through my veins, that lit up my nerves like that storm cloud that rested above and below me. The storm in my head.

  What’s a storm without rain? What was a storm without rain? When was the last time this desert saw rain?

  That’s a tool, I was reminded by this god, not a weapon.

  Jack’s knife was clear in my mind.

  I felt it, the carved bone handle in the shape of a fox and the curve of the sharpened blade. I held it in my hand and watched the stars reflect off the silver metal and cast distorted light across Percy. This knife had Talon carved into the bone handle, just like Jack’s, but this knife was a bear for my bear cub and I folded it into his hands.

  The mirrored walls of the universe twisted like a kaleidoscope of diamonds, folded in on me, and then—

  ———

  Pale light left photon trails between the trees, between the grass blades warped under heavy dewfall. It circled Percy where he was nestled into the root cradle of the big oak tree. In his hands he held that knife carved into the shape of a bear and a miniature version of the Sailer carved from wood with a small piece of fabric for the sail. The mast wa
s made from a stick.

  “Percy?” I called to him.

  I tried to move closer but the grass had grown thick in our absence and the blades were sharpened to wrap around me. They held me there in a quicksand of sharply sweet grass that grew tall too fast.

  My little bear had eyes of white.

  “Percy! Percy, I—”

  I collapsed to my hands and struggled against this meadow that wanted to swallow me whole, struggled to get my legs free and to tear my hands from it, but the grass grew like weeds and the wildflowers sprouted thorns and my little bear didn’t move, didn’t listen, didn’t respond.

  “Percy!”

  A grave of sweet grass was made for me here. It devoured until those light trails were only behind my eyes and the sunlight of the meadow was lost to the pricking sharpness of thorns and the darkness.

  The kaleidoscope sparked to life, sent me back into the dizzying hell of a mirror room with scattered stars and galaxies.

  The white light gathered and collided like atoms, frantic and fast as it formed something new. It crushed into a ball of light that hovered like a small star with bursting rays that pierced its cacophonous surface until the form was complete.

  Shapeless limbs turned into arms and legs and hands and feet and fingers and toes and a neck with a head. It turned into a system of flashing neural impulses that formed this god that stood before me.

  This god sank to the rippling water, silvered below the surface. This god pressed two ethereal fingers to my forehead and made the world come up to meet me, soaked me in the drained blood of its brethren gods, cupped its hands together and reached deep below the surface of the mirror to bring up molten silver.

  This god poured liquid metal into my throat.

  It is time now, this god told me. The words bounced off the mirror walls and ricocheted around the inside of my skull. It is time now to be reborn. It is time for the star-eater to wake inside these bones.

  ———

  The world was flushed in orange again. The light was red and yellow and warm. No water to drown in and no stars to devour.

  The warm air felt soft against my skin.

  I had the coppery taste of the desert in the back of my throat and something that filled my nose like the carcinogenic smoke of a fire.

  In the hollow places between my bones there came the warm honeyed sound of an earthy hum that echoed the vaguest memory of a song.

  Hmm hm hmmm, hm hm hmm hm hmmm…

  It was a strange feeling. Like being grounded. The air and the electricity filled me like the blood in my veins, calm, and thrummed like the metallic core of the earth. A steady electromagnetic wave that kept my breathing consistent and slow and steady, that kept my heart beating in a casual rhythm.

  I breathed deeply and looked across the tent.

  Roam sat cross legged on the cot where Jack had slept in the night, and I was lying on the ground, curled up in the sand and wrapped in a blanket. She had goggles and a scarf wrapped over her head, and for the first time I noticed the sound of the wind and the way that it tore into the tent.

  A storm threw sand outside, but at least it didn’t sound like there was rain.

  Hmm hm hmmm. That hum was warm against the back of my neck.

  “It’s almost done, I think,” Roam said. She stared at the walls of the tent as they shook in the wind. “Jack?”

  The humming stopped.

  Under the cot, a stick poked up from the sand, twisted and thin. A root, or a tree branch from some tree lost to the desert. A small green bud sat in the crook of it, just as I was with Jack curled around me.

  His arm was under my head, one tucked around me and my hands gripped his forearm tightly in the aftermath of an unsettling dream.

  “I know, Roam,” he murmured.

  “Of course you know,” she sighed.

  “It’s alright. It’s just a minor setback.” His voice was a soft rumble in my ear, and I closed my eyes and drank it in, because it was a sweet, honeyed sound that reminded me of the meadow before it wanted to eat me alive. The more I heard it the easier I imagined Percy being safe and happy there, with his eyes wide and blue. “We’ll get there soon. He’ll be okay.”

  “She was screaming his name, Jack. This wasn’t just some nightmare, it was… it was like… oh, god, I don’t want to think about that, I don’t want him to be right—” she stopped talking with a gasp, and sucked in a sharp breath.

  Jack shifted away from me to sit up. “Asa? What don’t you want him to be right about?”

  “Nothing, I just—forget I said anything, it’s just a stupid thought that doesn’t have any logical—god, just forget it. Forget it. It was foolish to be so hopeful for it.” She shook her head as she pulled the goggles down around her neck. Sand stuck to her skin around a ghost of them.

  “You mean he thinks she’s special. Like his ancestor. Emma.”

  There was silence in the tent, tension in the air taught like sinew. Roam breathed shallow and shaking. “How do you know that? How do you know that name?”

  Jack cleared his throat. “She told me.”

  When did I…?

  “Do you know what that would do to her?” Roam hissed. She swung her feet off the cot and planted them in the sand. “Look at her now, and we don’t even know what the hell is happening! She’s exhausted, but every time she sleeps now, she’s gone!”

  “I—I don’t know the details, I don’t know what it involves,” he stumbled over the words.

  “It would kill her. And now he’s doing the same damn thing to Percy because she wasn’t good enough for him. This. This is why we left, and I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. But I guess it was all inevitable and pointless to even try.”

  Her face was splotched red. She ran the back of her hand under her nose and stood up to cross the tent. Orange light spilled in for a moment and the sound of dull wind filled the tent.

  It was just silence and warmth after.

  My skull felt like it was full of cement but I rolled onto my back despite it and looked up at him.

  I wasn’t sure what to say. But there were words in my mouth anyway, falling from between my teeth. “Making things from nothing.”

  He looked down at me, startled for a moment, and then a frown tugged at his eyebrows. “What? Make… what?”

  “Emma Ryan. She made things from nothing, things that didn’t exist suddenly existed, like…” I waved a hand at the space between us, vague enough that he looked at me blankly. His frown dipped lower when heat flushed my cheeks and made me turn away. “I don’t know. Never mind, Talon, I don’t know what I’m saying right now. I’m losing my mind.”

  “Jack,” he corrected.

  The branch that poked out of the sand under the cot had two small green buds, not just one, like I thought. The colour of them was so similar to his eyes. It seemed out of place in this desert. Jack seemed out of place, and I felt out of myself when he reached over and brushed a stray hair back from my eyes.

  “You aren’t losing your mind.” He continued, and then sighed. “I—”

  “I am,” I breathed, “I’m losing control.”

  “How? Tell me how.”

  I shook my head and pressed the heels of my hands over my eyes. “My dreams, there’s this—”

  The tent burst open suddenly.

  Fitz stood there, breathing heavy as orange sand spilled from the folds of his clothes. “We’ve got a problem on the horizon, kids.”

  I sat up, heavy headed, and steadied myself with a hand on Jack’s shoulder.

  Fitz shook sand out of his hair and gestured over his shoulder. “Scouts spotted something not too far. Smoke. Black smoke. Just on the horizon. Maybe it was lightning, maybe it was Mercury, but either way it’s Conleth. Conleth is burning.”

  Part Three — Ash And Smoke

  27

  “Why the hell would the Empire burn Conleth?” A voice in the crowd wondered.

  From what I gathered, the town was small and vibrant and green, with
farms that surrounded it for acres upon acres of rolling hills. It was born from an Oasis project run by Vulta.

  The lake it sat next to was manmade.

  The town on the edge of the Wastes was fertilized from an external source and the crops they grew started in labs. The people who lived there were paid to work the land, to work businesses that supported the Empire.

  Another voice said, “It doesn’t seem right. It’s a green town.”

  It wasn’t right at all.

  My eyes were set on the gray horizon that chased the night’s storm as worry settled into my gut. Why the hell would the Empire burn Conleth? Why would they let it burn?

  My father wouldn’t endanger the lives of farmers, not without his Genesis. I knew he didn’t want to repeat the Fraxinus War, that he wanted to heal the planet from what we did to it.

  Setting a fire and letting it burn?

  It wasn’t right. It wasn’t him.

  The smoke hung heavy over the sandy dunes and I stared at it from my perch on the Sailer next to Ellie. I caught a glimpse of the image reflected in her hardened eyes as I leaned close and whispered, “Do you remember when James set your house on fire?”

  She raised an eyebrow and the corners of her mouth drew down at the memory of it. “I doubt I could forget it. You remember that?”

  “You shipped him off to the program,” I murmured.

  “He was out of control. I got rid of every match and lighter and anything that could strike a spark, even tried to get him to talk to Lourdes, and then I caught him setting a fire with his bare hands. I didn’t really have a choice.” She sighed and crossed her arms over her chest as she shook her head. “He’s a right screw up, that one.”

  I swallowed the words that always came in response. You’re the one who raised him.

  Instead, I reminded her, “That was when you got divorced and told him he was going to live with Isaac. And he set the fire because he thought you would be forced to live with them, too. As if that would fix everything that was wrong.”