In A Burning Room

by TS Ward

  “Never said he was smart, did I?”

  “He burns when he’s angry,” I told her. My hand rested against the pocket that hid the gold and ruby ring. “He hates feeling unwanted. Abandoned.”

  She looked at me with a piercing gaze. “You don’t have to remind me what I did.”

  “I wasn’t trying to. I meant...” My heart chased the words back down my throat.

  I looked down at the crowd gathered.

  The rebels and our small little crew stood behind Rabbit and Pucks as they tried to get a glimpse over the dunes. The sand was loose and a darker, muddier orange than it had been yesterday, stirred up by the sandstorm and left in sharper slopes.

  The Sailer had been lifted just a little higher by the storm and the view gave us a swirled sea of red that disappeared for miles until the gray sky and smoke met it.

  “No matter the cause of this,” Rabbit’s words reverberated around the camp, interpreted by Grin—the tall guard—this time. “The people of Conleth have been our allies, endangering their own lives for our cause. What sort of people would we be if we didn’t offer our hands to them when they are in need, just as they have done for us?”

  His words were followed by a roar of agreement and raised fists.

  Conleth was an ally of the rebellion. They were a green town, paid for by the Empire, owned by the Empire, and they sided with the rebels—that was why he let them burn. That was why he let the sky go dark with smoke, why he let Mercury take out his frustrations on a town full of farmers.

  It was a message. It was a warning.

  I left Ellie on the Sailer and slipped over the edge that was pressed to the dune. The crowd we had around us was scattered and easier to pick through than it had been in Warren, and I found our group in a matter of seconds.

  “Who was in Conleth recently?” I asked them.

  “I have been,” Pucks drawled. “Our Talon men as well.”

  I looked between them and stepped closer to keep my voice lowered. “What was it like? Politically. Soldiers present, officials, that kind of thing. Anything that would suggest they were working with rebels?”

  He shook his head, and then his thick eyebrows twitched. “Well, they would know already, wouldn’t they? Since that’s where they found us. Found you. I can’t imagine they would think no one knew you were hiding there.”

  “Right,” I muttered as Roam’s words came back to me. “What else—the crops? The water? What was that like?”

  “They sowed the fields but nothing was growing when we went through,” Fitz said.

  “Because the dam was shut. Pumps were off.”

  I looked at Jack with a frown and shook my head. “Why would the pumps be off? That would keep the water in Redbird and flood the shorelines and… Is there a drought? I mean the Wastes is obvious, but with the farms?”

  He looked grim as he nodded. “That’s why they’re off.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that Conleth is dry and barren and there would be nothing stopping the Empire from attacking them. That’s exactly what I didn’t want to hear.” I squeezed my eyes shut, pinched the bridge of my nose, and sighed. “By the stars. By the stars.”

  ———

  Dark plumes of smoke hung thick in the air, merging with the gray storm clouds that rolled overhead. The orange light came from the western horizon, where the sun pierced between the heavy layers. Orange sand, a sliver of red sky, and then darkness smothered the world above.

  Friction flooded the air all around. I felt it in the base of my skull where it coiled like a whip ready to be snapped.

  It was hard to tell the difference between the sunset and the glow of fire.

  I stood at the front of the Sailer, fingers wrapped tightly around the rail and a hand in my pocket, wrapped around Percy’s little wooden plane.

  The long barrel of a rifle was level with the horizon next to me, black and shining. It made me shudder with nervousness. It made the scar on my stomach prick with the memory of a bullet. Jack held the rifle without a second thought, without any thought, staring through the scope with such a steady hand that it frightened me.

  I flinched away from him every time the Sailer tried to knock us together, but that gun held its target with precision. It surprised me that he could stand against the shifting sands and do that and it shouldn’t have. He was my shadow, wasn’t he? He had to be good, if not the best, at all of these little things.

  “You going to shoot someone with that thing?”

  He didn’t look away from the scope. “If I have to.”

  “Pucks, are we slowing down or what?” Fitz shouted across the wind. “The drop off is coming up fast, old man!”

  Drop off?

  The horizon was a jagged edge that didn’t change, and my stomach flipped. This desert was like an ancient ocean bed, and where the shallows met the deep end there was a sheer drop.

  The closer we got, the more I saw of the smoke plumes and the vibrant orange that lit up the ground, the more I saw of the farmland spread out as far as the eye could see—barren, sun-baked farmland.

  “Pucks!”

  “The bridge is burned!” He hollered back, gesturing to the charred remains.

  When I looked at him, his round cheeks were red and a wild grin spread across his face. I couldn’t help but think he was mad.

  This is crazy, I wanted to shout at him, but he had a plan and by now it was too late to stop.

  “She’s had a good run, kids!”

  Jack drew in the rifle and dropped to a knee. “Doesn’t mean she’s made to fly!”

  “She’s a boat, dumbass, not exactly made for land either,” Ellie piped in, but she was already bracing herself with Roam huddled next to her.

  She wrapped her blue scarf tighter around her head.

  “One thing’s for sure,” Pucks laughed into the wind. His coat tails billowed out behind him like a pirate in white with a long beard to match. “She was made for water and she’s been itching for it since. Hold onto your hats!”

  Jack grabbed my hand at the last minute, yanked me down next to him, and braced me with an arm stretched over my back and a hand around the rail.

  I did the same, leaning into him with a nervous laugh. “He’s mad! There’s no water!”

  “Don’t worry, Sparky,” he told me. “I have you. Just don’t let go.”

  “Reassuring,” I muttered, and then the sound of sand against the hull of the Sailer stopped.

  It was almost quiet.

  The occasional burst of gunfire rang across the desert’s edge with the electric growl of the bikes, and then the vertigo caught up with me and my stomach did somersaults. I clung to Jack more than the boat.

  The air whistled past. Pucks held us aloft for as long as he could manage, and then the ground greeted us harshly.

  The back hit first. The Sailer creaked and groaned in protest of what we were putting it through. Cracks echoed through it like snapping bones. When the front hit, we nearly flew over the railing, but I planted my feet against the bow and I didn’t let go, even as we slammed against the deck with bruising force. The boat slid over ground that was slick and wet. It started to tilt to one side.

  “Damn,” Jack muttered, “Just when you think it worked out.”

  I wrapped an arm around the railing again. “What now?”

  “Now we let go.” He looked behind us. Worry settled into the curve of his mouth. “We’re last off, Sparky, before the thing tips.”

  “You said don’t—”

  He jumped before the words were out of my mouth.

  I didn’t see him hit the ground, but the boat was starting to roll and my heart was in my throat. I didn’t see what happened to any of them.

  I pulled myself up to my feet and clutched the boat as I watched the dark mud splash viciously, getting closer and closer as the Sailer tried to dump me off. It was like jumping out of a crashing plane—I had no choice.

  I jumped.

  My feet hit the ground hard. Th
e mud wrapped around them and pulled me to a sudden stop, knocked the air from my lungs as I was flung into a roll, and I threw my arms up to protect my head.

  The mast of the Sailer dredged up the mud inches from me as it snapped with a crack as loud as close thunder. The sail drifted through the air above in torn strips like a pale orange cloud.

  The mud was thick, the surface hard and cracked. It cradled small puddles of copper tinted water and held my arms and feet hostage. I tried to pull myself free. The suctioning grip of it squelched as I tore my limbs out and twisted, searching the riverbed for the others. Above, where the sandy cliff hung, Rabbit’s people followed us effortlessly.

  Jack was the closest, but he moved away from Conleth, waded through the ankle-deep mud to get back to the others. Ellie stood over Roam with hands under her arms, trying to help her up. Fitz helped Pucks work his way across the wet earth. The old man still grinned wildly.

  It was such a complete change from the desert, a mile-wide river bed with small snaking trails of water through the deepest places, a dark red colour full of iron and rust and copper. It was caked to my clothes and my skin and I already lost one boot to it. I kicked the other off to make it even—they were full of sand anyway, and now mud.

  On the shore above, the smoke plumes were heavy and the amber light below them was permeated with muzzle flash and the pop pop pop of semi-automatic weapons.

  Screams sent shivers down my spine.

  I didn’t think. I ran through the mud with both of my boots gone, raced into this headfirst without any consideration of what was ahead. Bullets, fire, smoke, screams. That was all I knew.

  The screams were the only things that mattered.

  “Soren!” A voice chased after me, a hoarse shout in the wind.

  I felt it at the last minute, the streak of disjointed energy, smooth and sharply sweet like lithium, that tore through the sky along the riverbed. It veered straight for me, blue and mechanical, a tin can of silver Lumen shell with emotionless blue-light eyes set on me.

  It slowed, like a missile caught frozen in time, hovering two feet above the ground. Prometheus' thrusters roared and turned the mud to stone under the heat of them.

  The robotic voice was warped around the vowels. “State your name and rank.”

  The thing was dented and scratched and didn’t look directly at me, pocked with bullet marks that marred the metal and a slice in the silicon neck.

  I didn’t move as I answered with a lump in my throat. “Soren Beckett, the Sceptre Ganymede. The Duchess. Prometheus, stand down.”

  The Lumen turned its head to stare at me silently.

  It hovered with the roar of the thrusters loud in my ears and scanned me repeatedly. I felt it connect with its orders, the sudden change in it aggressive. It went on defense, rocketed forward to wrap its mechanical hands around my arms, and lifted me off my feet to propel us into the air.

  “Ganymede reports to Mercury,” it chimed.

  The dark gray smoke enveloped me, obscuring everything from view except for those damn electric eyes that stared straight at me, round and bright and Beckett Blue. I clung to the machine, stepped on its feet, and hoped fiercely that it didn’t malfunction and drop me.

  Ganymede reports to Mercury. I would rather fall.

  Crackling fire nipped hot at my heels as the Lumen descended, its thrusters wheezing out air in bursts to slow our arrival, and then it dumped me hard onto the solid ground.

  The smoke was in my lungs, choking me with a charcoal coating on my tongue. The heat of the burning buildings on either side cooked me alive. I knelt on the ground, an arm pressed over my mouth and nose to try to alleviate some of the smoke, which only smeared mud across my face that dried up in the heat.

  In front of me, through the orange haze of fire, the silhouette of a man prowled toward me.

  He was in his fire suit, skin tight from wrist to toe to jawline, and his hands were glowing embers. Golden light rippled around his red-hot fists as if he held flashlights to his palms.

  “Hi there,” he called out, nearly shouting over the roar of the fire and the gunshots that were so faint compared to it. He walked up to me and paced back and forth with hands grasped behind his back. “Welcome to the party. You’re a little early, but that’s alright. Everyone is just so excited to have you. They wanted to do something special for the return of their special Duchess—light a few candles, have a little bonfire, you know? Do you like it?”

  I climbed to my feet, unsteady, barely breathing, but I was burned with an electric charge so strong that it bounced pale sparks over my skin. They were blue-white starbursts that stabbed needles through my nerves. There weren’t any words that I could string together to express the anger that boiled in my chest and tensed every muscle in my body.

  I stumbled toward him and slammed my hands into his chest.

  I screamed my throat raw.

  It was a horrible sound and I hated that it was there, bubbling up from the twisted knot in my stomach, instead of words that could tell him exactly how I felt right then, but I had been using words for days and he never listened anyway and I was sick of this.

  He grabbed my wrists in a flash and tugged me against him. He grinned and laughed and was out of control and he was burning down this town and all of the people in it and Lumen marched—no, dragged people single file down this road.

  They set up a firing line of prisoners who couldn’t fight back for the lack of oxygen.

  One collapsed to his hands and knees, mud covered, and looked up at me with a grimace and bright blue eyes that pierced mine. His voice was a torn up and tattered noise. “How could you let us burn? After all we did for you! After everything Clary did for you!”

  Clary.

  James waved a hand and the Lumen that held the man lifted its weapon. It shot him in the back of the head. It didn’t drop him. It kept its hold on the limp corpse and lowered the gun to its side.

  A flash of white light erupted in the friction of the heat, lightning that jolted pure energy straight through us, that turned my bones to lightweight glass. It exploded like a grenade of solid static.

  The culmination of my anger gathered in white lightning.

  James flew back, but I kept my feet rooted to the ground, fists clenched at my sides.

  “How dare you!” I screamed at him. Pale blue wisps slithered around my arms like snakes, coiled up as whips of lightning that stung my skin. “Look at what you’ve done! You’re a monster, James, a damn monster. How could you ever expect anyone to marry a man like you? How?”

  He looked up at me and shuddered, his head twitching.

  I was putting on a brave face but pure rage festered in the stare he gave me and I was terrified.

  His mouth twisted in a sneer as he climbed back onto his feet, holding a fist up in the air. The Lumen leveled their guns against the heads of their prisoners.

  “What I’ve done? This is you, Soren, this is all on you, you… you… you—whore.”

  I saw his hand coming down, felt the Lumen’s circuits send the trigger signal. I closed my eyes, breathed in the square lines of their electronics with the taste of steel in the back of my throat, and shivers of static rushed through me.

  The Lumen dropped their arms and the prisoners as they powered down.

  “What the hell have I done?” I hissed at him.

  Dark lightning scars were etched in curled patterns in his skin. They stretched up the side of his neck and face.

  His eyes shone a pale gray, bored through me as he stalked across the space between us, and his voice was a cruel growl. “I trusted you, Soren, I loved you, and you’ve gone and screwed it all up. You screwed everything up.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re going to have to tell me what I did because I don’t remember a damn thing.” I stood strong against him, my heart pounding and my feet planted in the dirt. “Tell me what I’ve done. At least you can have that over everyone else.”

  He tilted his head. “You we
re supposed to marry me.”

  I nearly laughed. “So what’s the problem then? Did the Emperor make different arrangements?”

  “He must not love you, if he hasn’t said anything yet.”

  Something coiled in my chest, as if the smoke didn’t make it hard enough to breathe already. I shook my head and stepped back. “My father? Do you really think he talks to me about his plans?”

  “No, not him, the soldier, Soren!” James breathed out smoke. “I could kill him.”

  Panic coursed through me as words poured from my mouth. “What? What do you mean, the soldier? Which one?”

  Something dripped on my cheek.

  The rumble of thunder pressed down on the earth and the break of rain chilled the air. Fat drops burst against my skin.

  James did not glow like embers. He was cold, getting colder, and the relief of the rain winning over the fire was stolen along with every ounce of heat in my body. It was a painful kind of cold that made my head buzz. The world spun around me.

  He took my hands and held them against the sharp edge of his jaw. The numbness that took over my limbs did not let me pull away. “You’re so scared to be cold-hearted like every Beckett, and here you are, like ice.”

  There was no feeling in my legs.

  I collapsed, frozen to my core as the rain soaked my clothes and plastered stray hair to my face. He let go of me and took a half step back, contemplated for a moment, and then his boot connected with my side.

  I couldn’t feel how hard he hit through the cold, but I was curled up in dirt in a blink, dirt that quickly turned to cold mud, staring at a row of prisoners who were burning—a quiet sob tore through me.

  “God, look at you. It’s a wonder you’ve made it this far without me. I’m not done. Your mistakes won’t ruin us.” He spoke mostly to himself, but he knew I heard. He knew, because he threw a sickening smirk down at me. “But they won’t go unpunished. Astra will adore Percy.”

  Prometheus was next to him and the sound of thrusters filled my ears along with thunder and I was left cold.

  The smell of burning flesh and the sizzle and pop of it—I laid there, bathed in the smoke and the aftermath of a cruel Sceptre’s tantrum.