In A Burning Room

by TS Ward

  “Soren, please—”

  “No! Don’t you dare try to avoid this. Was it planned?”

  The lakebed dipped deep beneath me as I moved away. Storm clouds broiled in refracted plumes of black, lightning snaking through them in blue and white liquid lines.

  “Pilot—you let him murder Finn. He was a child. They were both children! They—was it for Jack? Because you knew it would cross our paths?”

  He shook his head and adjusted the cuffs of his sleeves. “I didn’t plan anything then. You sought him out. He chose to become a soldier. You both snuck around as if we didn’t see what was happening. That was you, and him, planning your own lives.”

  “That doesn’t answer me,” I hissed. My fists were held tight at my sides.

  He was quiet for a long moment, and then he sighed. “Pilot saw what would happen and he didn’t understand the pain that it would cause. He saw the future, he saw a brief glimpse of what you and Jack would become as a result, and he made it happen. He didn’t stop and think of the thousands of other ways that could have happened naturally, but it helped. It helped me figure out his ability. It helped me teach him what to do with it.”

  “You mean to say that as a result of you lying to your wife and having a bastard child that a little boy died unnecessarily, but that’s okay because you have your own little boy who can tell you the future, who can tell you how to win a stupid game?” The thunder rumbled in the clouds and in my bones. I wasn’t sure if it was him, or if I was becoming like him, as a storm that walked the earth.

  “Yes, I suppose,” he breathed the words out like they hurt.

  There was a weight on my hand. A sliver of moonlight that hung heavy with the fabric of a life that was slowly being threaded together, a life that was separate from me suddenly.

  I watched the dots connect like constellations inside my mind as much as I wanted to turn away from the screen that presented it. My stomach broiling as a stormy sea, the storm brewing in fractal patterns around me. He saw a brief glimpse of what you and Jack would become.

  “I don’t understand,” I sputtered, “I don’t—why would you… why him? Tell me why.”

  “You never smiled so much as when he—”

  “Don’t tell me you did this to make me happy as if you have the right to choose for me! Don’t tell me that you knew what you would put me through, that you stitched my life with his to make yourself feel better about what you were doing because that is not how the world works. You do not get to choose.” The words rattled around my chest like debris caught in a hurricane. I was quaking, the world around me a shimmer.

  The Emperor stood in a black suit soaked to the knees in lake water and adjusted the cuffs of his jacket. He didn’t look at me again. “Soren, I don’t have time to talk about this.”

  “One second in a dream can be a slow and quiet infinity,” I whispered. The words came from some cove of a memory pool that I couldn’t quite reach the bottom of, but they tugged a half smile onto his face. “You have all the time you need. Just tell me what is happening, tell me why it’s happening, because I don’t know. I don’t know. I want to know.”

  He tucked his chin down and kept his eyes on his hands. “I will see you in Redbird.”

  I hesitated.

  There weren’t enough words in my head to properly convey the anger inside me, to properly tell him how utterly monstrous he was, for Finn and for Conleth and the Pluto soldiers and for putting Jack through this—he didn’t deserve it.

  None of them did.

  But I stood there and I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything. I thought a few words, rolled them around on my tongue, but then I swallowed them like I swallowed everything else. Like bitter medicine. Horrid but necessary.

  I wanted to scream at him, felt the rage bubbling up from my chest, but I bit my tongue.

  I bit my tongue and I didn’t make a sound.

  31

  The night air was cold and smelled of rain.

  It left a chill on my skin, in my lungs, and made my breath cloud in front of me. Heat warmed the base of my neck, pressed to my back. An arm draped over me held a blanket up to my chin.

  I froze as my eyes scanned the darkness.

  It’s Jack. Just Jack. I exhaled a breath.

  I found his left hand in the darkness, his arm tucked under my head and a pillow, and I ran a finger over gold band with a frown.

  I couldn’t deny my own truth any longer than I could deny the quiet and casual kindness that he gave to me sooner than anyone else. After all, there was a man who stayed with me, who slept soundly on a narrow cot, who wasn’t afraid to be near me or to admit his heart without saying as much.

  It was so goddamn obvious that I was angry with myself for looking past it.

  He closed his hand around mine. A hum gently rumbled from his chest and a groggy voice soft in my ear. “Go back to dreaming. The sun is kinder to worries than the dark.”

  A lump formed in my throat when the memory of a sun-drenched market rose up, and the reminder of the words my father had spoken in a dream.

  The sickly taste of guilt coated my tongue. “Was it just circumstance?”

  “Was what?”

  I struggled to get the word out. “Us.”

  He didn’t say a word for a while, didn’t move. Even his breath against the back of my neck stilled.

  A hot flush darkened my cheeks when he laughed softly. “The circumstances allowed me to know you. The paths might be set in front of us, but they can’t force us down either one. They can’t make you love someone.”

  I pulled my hand from his and tucked mine together against my chest, shrank in on myself, and ran a thumb over this thing that I pulled into existence from a memory I didn’t even know I had.

  It didn’t exist, and here it was, existing, and I knew damn well what it was and who put it there but my mind couldn’t put the words in the right places to admit it. I could call it moonlight strung with star-like diamonds, but I couldn’t think to say—

  The sun like honey dripping golden had put it there.

  Jack pulled his arm from under me and sat up, reaching over me to find my hands again. He ran a thumb across each of my knuckles and suddenly the silver on my finger burned like fire.

  “It isn’t fake, Soren. It’s real. Really real.”

  “You gave me this,” I murmured, “Because you wanted to.”

  “Because I wanted to, because you wanted to, I thought—I thought when you said you already knew and you just wanted to hear it from me that you meant this. I thought you remembered.” He spoke softly, an ache hidden in the strain of his voice. “And then I thought that maybe the ring you were wearing wasn’t the same one I gave you, that maybe I was just being hopeful.”

  I pulled myself up to sit cross legged across from him, to look him in the eye. “You are. Being hopeful. And I don’t think you should be.”

  Confusion brought even more shadow across his face, and it was like a knife in the stomach.

  “What do you mean?” He breathed sharply. “Soren, don’t tell me not to be hopeful when hopeful is all I have. I could be angry, I could be upset, I could be a million things instead of hopeful but if I wasn’t I don’t know where I would be. It would be a very poor way to live if I didn’t hope to find you around every corner.”

  My heart thundered inside my chest.

  I wanted to tell him about Pilot, to make him understand, fully. I wanted to tell him that he put us in such a devastating scenario with the sole purpose of stitching our futures together, I wanted to tell him that my own father thought to do the same if we could only be happy for such a little while in comparison to the amount of time that we both ached and cried and felt pain—it wasn’t fair.

  It wasn’t fair to him, to think that we made our own decisions in this, that it was all serendipitous, that we weren’t manipulated. But. But.

  I didn’t remember him, and we had spent six years apart, and it hadn’t stopped this.

  “How
can you—” I caught the words against the lump in my throat. “How can you look at me like that? How can you? I’m no good for you, Jack, you shouldn’t waste your time on me.”

  He shook his head. What little light we had in the tent shone against his eyes and the curve of his cheek as he smiled. “It’s not wasted time if you enjoy every second that passes.”

  “But it’s fake—”

  “No. No, it’s not. Here,” he held his hand out to me, palm up. “Do your thing.”

  I hesitated, but I breathed deep into my bones and sought out a spark and touched it lightly to his palm.

  Deep indigo and violet light danced behind my eyelids, and I felt warmth flood through me, sweet like honey. The lake was different in his mind than it was in my dreams. I saw myself standing in front of him, the stars reflected in my eyes, and my voice so different than I heard it.

  You aren’t looking at the stars, Jack. You have to learn where your home is in this universe.

  I already know.

  Really. Then where is it?

  Right in front of me. It’s you.

  I let the static fall away. My hands trembled against his as I remembered what happened next. He held up the ring that burned against my finger and said he did his best to capture my favourite stars, so that I’d always have them. So that I’d always have him.

  “Jack,” I breathed.

  He shifted forward, slipped his hand around the back of my neck, fingers woven into my hair. “No one chose this for me.”

  I nodded. Set my hands on his cheeks. “Even now?”

  “Even now.”

  My heart fluttered in my chest as my thumbs brushed the stubble on his cheeks. I rested my forehead against his, my breath unsteady, and he pulled me in. He kissed me. Soft and cautious, and as much as it felt like coming home, a strange sadness gripped me.

  A tear slipped over my cheek as he whispered, “I’ve wanted to do that for longer than you know.”

  ———

  Percy sat in the meadow, facing away from me, that carved bear knife stuck into the dirt next to him.

  The sunlight was the warmest it had been, the grass the tallest and greenest and calmest. The light dripped over his dark curls and turned them a shining red copper, something unfamiliar to me, a blanket of sunlight that made me pause on my way to him. The way the golden light hugged him was familiar, but not on him.

  He was starlight. He was a constellation of sparkling silver stars, spun from silver thread. He was blue eyes and blue-black curls. He was a child of the moon—and yet the yellow sun was a kindness to soften him. The golden light sweetened him like honey and made his age more apparent.

  I knelt in the grass and inhaled the sweet floral scent of the wildflowers. The earth was warm under me, a gentle vibration rumbling beneath my fingertips.

  Just seeing him was enough to calm my heart.

  “Percy,” I murmured.

  His head twitched at his name, but he didn’t turn. He sat still. “Mama?”

  “Percy, it’s me, it’s…”

  I reached a hand forward, to touch my fingers to his narrow shoulders, but paused an inch above. I wasn’t softened by the sun. I was a marble statue in a marble hall with silver ichor coursing through me, cold and so much like my father and my aunt that it terrified me, the idea of touching him.

  The idea of bleeding the chill of a Beckett into that golden light terrified me.

  “I’m coming, Percy, we’re coming. You’ll be okay.”

  “Dreams aren’t real!” He said the words as if he was insulted. “Dreams are in my head, when I sleep. I don’t go outside my dreams. My dreams are mine!”

  I breathed out the flowers that had filled my lungs barely a minute ago, crawled closer, reached for him without fear of what I would do—I had hurt him before and he laughed it off.

  The meadow darkened around us.

  I pressed my hands to his arms and kissed the top of his head, whispering, “I’m here. I’m here, little bear, I’m here.”

  “I meant… I meant that I just can’t have your dreams, that’s all,” he whimpered, leaned back into me, but his arms were held out in front of him. Stiff, still, like they were tied down. “Other people have dreams too, not just me, but I can’t see them. That’s impossible. Impossible.”

  “Impossible for you,” I told him. I didn’t know if he could hear me. “I hope.”

  “You’re crazy!” He shouted, and my heart pounded. He looked to the carved bear knife pierced into the ground beside him and shook his head, shivered, pulled as hard as he could to get away. “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! I found it! For real, I found it, I—no! No! Mama!”

  I closed my eyes tightly, wrapped my arms around him. Salt water tears spilled over and all I wanted was to pull him wholly and completely into this dream, to pull him from the aether and to hold him safely in my arms here, in this sweet grass meadow.

  “Shhh,” I hummed, “Shhhh. I’m here, little bear, I’m here.”

  His scream was as piercing as the sudden pain that shot up through my arm—no, his arm. His arm. A shock of pain that was sharp and sawing. He screamed so horribly.

  I squeezed my eyes shut tighter and let the pain flow into me instead of him, until he breathed heavy and ragged through clenched teeth, leaning limp in my arms. But the pain—it was a wicked fire cut straight through to the bone.

  I breathed shallow and tried to control it, but it was raging. It was an inferno. It engulfed my whole arm, my neck and shoulder, my back, my entire body—

  32

  I screamed myself awake.

  The sound erupted from my chest and quickly halted as I lurched forward and tore the blankets away, clutching at my arm.

  It was a dream, I told myself, it was only a dream, a bad dream, just a stupid normal dream. There wasn’t any pain left stabbing every nerve, only the ghost of a barely vivid memory.

  The tent glowed as the morning sun pierced through the fabric in long pillars. Mist rose from the storm dampened earth and made each ray stand out.

  I sat on the cot with beads of sweat on my temples and my lungs like bellows to fan the flames of worry in my head.

  Hell, if that was only a dream.

  I took a hard breath, and another, and another, until the rise and fall of my chest was under control and my heart was in less of a panic.

  “By the stars,” I muttered into my hands.

  There was no one in the tent with me. No Jack, no Roam, no Ellie. It felt almost strange to not have them close by when I woke out of a dream, but voices carried from the camp outside the charcoal husk of Conleth. Voices that were distant, numerous, and mixed with the agonized moans of the injured.

  I swung my feet over the edge of the cot and tugged the twisted blanket away to leave it bunched up at the end of the thin mattress. The tent was empty, except for a table, my backpack from the Embassy soaked in mud resting against the leg of it, and a bowl full of water on the top.

  A cloth hung over the edge of it. Steam rose from the surface with the smell of flowers.

  I took advantage of the heat and the fresh clothes folded neatly next to the bowl.

  It wasn’t a hot shower or a hot bath with actual soap, but I smelled of a copper desert and a sun that drew salt from my skin and the aftermath of a raging fire and the smoke of burning bodies—it was enough.

  The sweat of a nightmare clung to me and I replaced it with the smell of roses, breathing deep as the air drew goosebumps against the water on my skin.

  At least the heat of the sun against the tent made drying off easy.

  Clean clothes were a dream—they smelled of rosewater just as much as I did, and something sweet. It was like the meadow, with the golden light and the wildflowers. A relief from the past few days.

  “Knock-knock,” a voice startled me.

  I was half dressed, tugging the shirt over my head.

  “Hell,” Jack said, a grimace pulling a dimple into his cheek. He hooked his thumbs into his belt loops. �
��What’s the bruise from? And the scars?”

  The ache in my ribs was accompanied by purple shaped to the toe of Mercury’s boot. There were others that I couldn’t be bothered to remember the source of, but the scars were old news.

  The scars were from a bullet, from a scalpel dug into the wound to retrieve fragmented pieces of metal and bone where it glanced off my hip. More than once we had broken the collision walls and caught shards in our skin. Another scar was from a burn, another mark of Mercury’s, the shapes of his fingertips.

  I dropped my chin. “How’s yours? Your cut? Holding up okay?”

  “I’m good, but you—”

  “What about Roam? How’s her arm?”

  I looked up at him again, stepped back to sink down next to my bag, digging through for a comb or a brush or something. I found one after a minute of zipping and unzipping pouches and dunked it into the water.

  “And everyone else. Pucks, Fitz, Tiger? How many made it out of Conleth?”

  He watched me tear the brush through my hair with a frown. “Good morning to you too.”

  “You’re a soldier, Jack,” I reminded him, pointing the brush at his chest, “And a farmer. Mornings are inherent, and technically, I am your superior, so… report.”

  His lips parted as he shifted his weight from foot to foot, arms crossed over his chest. “Is that how we’re doing this now? Okay. Okay. First Lieutenant Jack Talon, second infantry under the Sceptre Mercury, reporting to the Sceptre Ganymede. As of 0700 hours this morning the surviving population of the attack on Conleth is counted at nine, from one hundred fifty-three. Seven of the injured passed in the night from the original survivor count of sixteen. Allied casualties are counted at three, two to gunshot wounds and one to smoke inhalation. Allied injuries are counted at thirteen with minor damage that is being treated presently. They are expected to live. We have groups searching the rubble for more survivors and groups retrieving casualties—”

  “Okay!” I held a hand up, turning my head as my stomach churned. “Okay, that’s… I think… I think you should go back to being yourself, go back to just Jack.”