by TS Ward
They didn’t burn because of the flames next to them. They burned because James made them burn while he had me distracted.
What branded it into my mind the most was the lack of fight.
Seven people, five older women and two young men, all knelt in the dirt with flames wrapped around them, and they didn’t move. They collapsed slowly, just logs in this bonfire James created, tumbling to burnt and ashen corpses.
Burning, and they didn’t scream. They didn’t panic. They didn’t try to douse themselves.
They just stared at me.
Expectant, waiting, as if I could save them, as if the rain would help, but it was too late.
I felt rage.
I felt pure rage and lightning manifest within me and it burned as hot as Conleth did. I was a match, and he was the matchbox, and this town was the strip on the side of it that sparked the flame. There was nothing left of me, nothing but the charred ghost of me.
It wasn’t just a white-hot anger that inhabited my shivering body—there was an emptiness that ate away at me.
I was a void in this universe, a black hole collapsed in this mud under rain and heavy smoke, breathing against a pain in my ribs and lungs and crawling on numb limbs toward those seven—eight—people who were more than gone.
They were boiled blood and teeth and cinder and the bones of their hands and wrists and all the other thin places.
They filled me with memories so vivid that I relived them.
Pluto One, a young girl, an acrobatic tiny thing we called Nim. She was an accident. She climbed up the collision walls all the way to the rafters of the hangar. The shock was just a warning. It was the fall that killed her.
Pluto Two. Arden. I didn’t even see her die, just James standing over her body when I surfaced in the pool.
Pluto Three. The brother of Venus. Viktor was a large man who didn’t talk but he was soft and he made the light dance with the shadows and could mask a room in darkness and make his skin glow with bioluminescence. He made it dark. He made it like the void space of the tank and the dark room. I always hated the dark. That was panic.
Pluto Four was the strongman who just wanted to get out of that damn place, who pushed himself harder than anyone else, who didn’t give up no matter what that meant. Wolfgang. His mother was an engineer and my last resort was in desperation and when she saw what I did she pulled a gun. I deserved it. He didn’t.
Pluto Five lost her entire family when Wolfgang died and their mother tried to kill me. She had perfect aim no matter the weapon and hated me with every fibre of her being and when she broke out of the training wing and stole a gun and showed up outside of my dark room in the middle of the night, she used that aim and that hate. She shot me. She shot me, and I fought her off with claw and tooth until James and the Lumen got to us—I didn’t see what happened to her after, but if her mother was any indication of the punishment, she was dead.
Pluto Six. A young girl who claimed to be twice my age, who healed unusually fast, who moved like lightning and had a voice like a gentle river. Zenith, the sweetest angelic creature, who told me she forgave every little thing I had ever done right before she tried to slit my throat with a sliver of glass. She didn’t work fast enough to avoid real lightning.
Pluto Seven. The volunteer. The one who wanted to help his family, who could do so much damage with that sonic pulse and the air around him, but he held back because he was afraid of it. Evan. He begged for an end, after everything. James pushed us both too far.
In front of me there was another row of seven collapsed against one another on the ground and it was like I had killed fourteen—fifteen, for the man the Lumen shot. I couldn’t see their faces but my mind gave them faces anyway: Nim, and Arden, and Viktor, and Wolf, and Aubrey, and Zenith, and Evan—all of them stared back at me through the pale smoke that rose from cracks in their damaged bodies, like they were alive and seeing and accusing.
They were dead because of me. These people were dead because some screwed-up bastard had a tantrum over me, over marrying me—
“Fuck!” I screamed, the word raw in my throat, harsh and vulgar against the ears.
I curled over my knees. My mud-covered hands grabbed the rain-soaked braids on my aching head. An agonized, all-tooth snarl passed over my face, sobbing breaths sucked between the small spaces.
That word wasn’t enough. There wasn’t a word in existence that would cover everything inside me at that moment, but it was close enough, and I hissed it over and over again until my throat was too sore.
My bones were made of glass, crystal clear and thin and stretched and heated to melt, then dropped into water so cold that they shattered but didn’t fall apart. The sharp edges cut through my numb skin, a horrific ache against blue knuckles.
My lungs were raw and full of smoke that coated my tongue and throat with the taste of ash.
The mud held me down. The rain made me shiver so violently that I swore I would fall apart. But inside my skull there was pressure. It crushed against my brain, exploded outward, and I felt this monstrous thing buried in my blood so vividly.
Cold. Electric. Charged.
Blood dripped from my nose.
I was done with this, with this knife pressed in a soft place in my spine and the dirt under my feet that crumbled away over the sheer drop I couldn’t see the bottom of.
I was sick of it.
I climbed to my feet with my nerves splintered. Each agonizing step away from those eight bodies sent lightning bolts up my legs and my spine and into my brain. The clouds mixed with the smoke of burned buildings and burned flesh and lit up with small white flashes around me.
Tunnel vision fogged my eyes. I couldn’t see a damn thing except what was right in front of me.
Silhouettes started to form there, but I wasn’t sure if they were real or hallucinatory. Ghosts, just ghosts that swam in purgatory, ghosts that were there because of me.
“Hey!”
Something caught my foot. A hand closed around my ankle. I pulled away, my heart racing a thousand miles a minute. Someone was lying on the ground, half dead, mouth slack and eyes hazy, and a shirt soaked in a red that the rain and mud couldn’t wash away or hide.
“Soren!”
I sank down into the mud, closed my hand around theirs, and gently, gently rolled sparks through their nerves as I searched for something that this person held on to.
A memory of a smiling woman with the prettiest brown eyes and the roundest cheeks who picked flowers from a field of the greenest grass. There was so much love in this person’s heart for that smile and the way the woman tucked a coil of dark hair under a yellow bandana.
There was a soft smile on their face, but their eyes were unseeing.
“Soren, hey, hey,” a murmured voice was next to me, and hands that pulled mine carefully from the person in the mud. “Come here. Come here, darling, come—”
I slid my arms around his neck and sank limply against him, closing my eyes tightly but those images were still there.
I didn’t have happy memories to think about in a moment like this. There wasn’t a single damn thing except for those miniscule moments in a dream in a meadow with Percy.
I choked on the words that crawled up my throat. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry… sorry—”
His hand rested on the back of my head as he hummed a song that sounded almost familiar. It was what he had been humming earlier, when I woke up, and there was that resonant tone in the earth that calmed me and warmed me and I was almost certain that it was him.
He ducked his chin and kissed my shoulder. “It’s not your fault. It isn’t. This wasn’t you, this isn’t you. Don’t blame yourself. Promise me. Promise me you won’t blame yourself.”
Behind him, one of those silhouettes turned into a man stumbling around like a zombie.
His skin was a blistered mess on half of his face and his eye a gouge of red. He shook so violently but he looked around like he was ce
rtain he was dreaming and I wished it were true. I wished he could wake up from this dream and be at home in his bed with a house that wasn’t burned down and a pub he could walk to for a drink to wash away this nightmare.
“Soren,” Jack whispered into my ear. His breath was warm. He was warm.
I didn’t want to touch him, but I didn’t want to let go. Mercury was in my head. Do you live how he wants you to live, or how you want to live?
The man turned to us as he smeared blood and something else across his face with the back of his hand. My mind screamed that I knew what it was. He looked at me with the ghost of the eye he had left, looking and looking while he slowly got closer. One of his feet dragged through the mud.
“You’re frozen, Sparky.”
Jack smelled like gunpowder and rain, but this man carried the smell of seared flesh. It was a smell I didn’t know how to describe, too horrible to compare it to burned meat, but that was the closest thing because that's what it was. The only difference was the amount of blood, and the smell of that reminded me of so many things.
It made my stomach churn.
“You…” the man slurred, raising a hand to me like he was pointing, but his fingers didn't listen. “We kept you a secret. For Clary.”
My heart pounded against my chest. Clary.
I clung to Jack so tightly that he had to fight me to pull away, and I would’ve let go but I couldn’t. I was frozen there, knelt in the mud as he stood up to face this man, but then he lunged toward me, screaming about secrets and how it was my fault that this happened.
I know I know I know I know.
His hands wrapped around my throat. They felt like they belonged to a mannequin. I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want to hurt Jack. So I laid there and stared up at him, at his eye that didn't see me as I was right then.
Jack rammed his shoulder into the man’s ribs, knocked him to the ground, and fell across me. He fought to pry the hands from my throat, grappled desperately as the mud made his grip slick. He tried to hold the man down without hurting him more.
He was a wild animal. He screamed at Jack. He was saying you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you. He repeated the word again and again. You, you, you, you, you.
You. He snapped his head to me. His breath wheezed out from more places than just his mouth. Jack’s forearm pressed to his throat and the man’s hands grabbed at his face in desperation.
I crawled up next to Jack, slipped my hands under the ones that clawed at him, twined my fingers around them. The feeling made me shudder but the electric tingle shot up through his damaged nerves anyway.
Navigating him was a maze, a puzzle, and it took what felt like centuries to finally reach the end and to tell his brain to calm down, relax, there’s no pain, there’s no threat, you’re okay, you’re okay.
There was a room. The floors were dark stained wood that was marred and roughened and worn down again by years of use. He sat in a corner with a couple of friends and a brother, nursing a pint of amber beer.
It was noisy for a Tuesday night, and he watched a woman with bright red hair wipe up the empty tables as she talked feverishly with the other girl behind the counter, the one cleaning glasses. The one with the wild black hair that shadowed her face but still couldn’t hide those damn blue eyes. Those damn Beckett blue eyes.
I shook the image away, but it was like trying to dry off in the rain. More came too fast.
The red-haired girl disappeared into the back of the pub, and a moment later the door cracked open and a chorus of laughter rolled into the room. Heavy boots thundered loud on the hardwood floor. It was the sound of soldier boots, and immediately the entire pub shut up, casting weary glances.
They were scared. All of them. They were scared that the girl would be recognized and that they would pay for it. They were scared to be conscripted, they were scared for their children, and they were scared to die. They were especially frightened that the girl didn’t disappear like the other.
I didn’t want to see this, but something in the back of my mind flickered by like ancient movies on film reels. It was the man, sitting in the dark corner of the bar, as he caught my eye, and then the pub door that cracked open and the laughter that filled the room with silence.
We didn’t have any warning that time—there was a group of soldiers with their heavy boots that created a thunderous applause at their entrance, and one of them—one of them was Jack.
One hell of a pub.
I tore my hands away and fell back into the mud on arms that shook and tingled.
Everything was a livewire inside me. I didn’t want to touch anyone again.
I climbed to my feet, my breath hitching when I backed into something solid and warm. I stumbled away, staring down at the man who was lying there staring back up at me as his mouth gasped for air like a fish.
Someone put their hands on me and I couldn’t stand it—I twisted away, jumped back from them, looking at the scene before me. Jack, knelt in the mud, and Fitz, standing with his hands clutched to his chest.
I must have shocked him for that look he speared me with.
The man in the mud stared blankly. He wasn’t gasping for air. He wasn’t fighting Jack anymore.
I didn’t know where I was going, but I needed to get away from this mess. I needed to get away from the blood that coursed through my veins, electrified and deadly and monstrous. I was monstrous.
I was made of Sceptre blood. It was pain. It was danger.
I killed seven people, and I was responsible for these ten more that I had seen so far, and for each one that grabbed at me as I passed by.
I was responsible for this destruction and the destruction caused by my ancestors. I never wanted this ash to crumble under the weight of heavy raindrops, rain that tried so hard to douse the worst of the flames that still raged, and to wash away blood from damaged people.
It could never wash any of this away.
It was unforgivable. I was unforgiven, and I didn’t know how I would ever look at James without the image of this town branded into my mind, the image of all of these people as they reached out for me with desperate eyes like I was somehow capable of fixing this. If only. If only.
If only I could.
28
The room was dimly lit.
The sky was somehow brighter with no stars and no moon than the room was with dull lightbulbs.
The room and the rubble existed in the same place.
The walls and the roof, with no rubble, no ash, and no wood turned to charcoal in the shape of chairs and tables, all of it untouched by this mess.
But then there were no walls and there was no roof, and rubble was piled around me from the collapsed upper floor and ash coated everything in a thick, damp layer. Everything was turned to charcoal in the shape of chairs and tables.
When I blinked, I was in the room. When I blinked again, I was in ruins.
I sat behind the bar counter, arms wrapped around my knees.
Voices called my name in the distance, but they were ghosts, and I didn’t want to see them. They would know where to find me.
That man did.
He sat in the corner with his friends and was terrified because of the soldiers who weren’t supposed to know I was there. And I just stood there. Because Jack Talon walked into the damn pub and I was too startled—or scared—or nervous—something, I couldn’t quite figure out. I couldn’t remember.
I didn’t want to remember, but I kept seeing his face in between these half-second eternities and I felt—just felt something, the way I felt something when I saw Percy outside of a dream.
It was almost panic, or worry, or relief.
My hands ran down my face, shaking and numb with cold, and I held them out in front of me. I stared at them.
They were dirty. It was in my fingernails, in all of the thin lines and crevices, dirt and red sand and mud and blood. My veins were blue and my skin was pale and so goddamn cold, but the thing was—the air wasn’t. It
was just me. I was blue and chilled to the bone like the cold came from inside, and maybe it did.
A cold heart. James wasn’t wrong.
Cold, like a machine with circuitry and batteries, cold like metal, cold like a Lumen, like a Sceptre soldier with a celestial name. Ganymede. That was what I was. Named after a moon orbiting Jupiter, and what was a moon but a satellite?
A machine that skimmed along the surface of a planet’s gravity, not quite there but not quite not.
A tool. A sceptre. A monstrous machine, a weapon—and weapons didn’t use themselves. There were guns, and there were people who used guns. There were Sceptres, and there were people who pushed them. There was Ganymede, and there was Mercury, and there were seven people who died by my hand and there were countless others he killed because of me.
He was a murderer. I was a murderer.
“Soren? Are you here?”
I jolted at the sudden sound above my head. My heart leapt against my ribs, and without thinking I swore out loud—under my breath, but it was quiet and dark and I knew they would find me eventually. Why would they even bother?
Roam stepped around the bar, her arm held against her in a makeshift sling and a cut across her forehead.
Immediately I was flooded with the sick feeling of guilt for forgetting that they were hurt. That they were in danger. Roam and Pucks and Percy and Ellie and Fitz and Jack and Tiger and Rabbit—selfish, stupid child.
That was what I was, and Roam looked at me with such wariness that I was certain she must have thought the same thing.
She lowered herself to the ground next to me, slowly and carefully, and huffed out a breath of aches and pains.
Her voice was a tired croak. “I don’t know why I bothered asking. I knew you were here. Permission to approach, I guess.”
“I’m not an animal,” I muttered. “A monster, but not an animal.”
She rested her cheek against my shoulder and closed her eyes tightly. There were wrinkles at the corners of them and gray hairs speckled through the dark strands that shadowed them. She seemed old, right then, or just tired.