In A Burning Room

by TS Ward

  He sank to the cot with a nod, his hand roughing up his hair. “You said it. I’m a soldier.”

  I remembered the ease he held that rifle with, how his shoulders straightened when he stood in the Embassy, and now the way his voice changed when he gave his report of Conleth’s aftermath.

  “A good one.”

  “No,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “Far from it. One hundred and forty-four people are missing or dead, most likely dead, people who, as a soldier, I am supposed to protect. There are so many people who I was supposed to protect who are now dead and not… not just Conleth. I’m supposed to protect you, and you’re covered in bruises and scars, and I’m supposed to protect Percy, and he… by the stars.”

  I set the brush down on the table and crossed the tent, fixed the mess he made of his hair, and recited a memory. “We can’t control what the universe gives to us, but it gave us the stars, the stars that we use as guides through the long and dark nights. The stars will lead us from this path of destruction, so, by the stars, we will no longer be defeated by ourselves.”

  “What the hell is that from?” Jack laughed softly.

  “It’s something Astra said. My aunt, my father’s sister,” I shrugged and stepped back, crossing my arms. “If she gave me anything it was a curse. By the stars. That’s what I said, when she told me that. I was just being difficult. And then spiteful. And then it became… that. I meant that you keep saying it, but when she said that she was telling me that I can’t control what happens to me, but I can control what I do with it, so don’t… don’t blame yourself. You’re only one man.”

  He reached out and squeezed my hand. “She also gave you a telescope, right?”

  “And a crippling fear of the dark and small spaces,” I muttered, pulling away and crossing the tent. I folded my arms over my chest as I paced.

  Percy’s scream was fresh in my mind and so was the jarring pain that had torn through my arm and fractured through my body.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, breathing words through the narrow spaces between my teeth. “He’s not in Redbird. If he’s not in Redbird, he’s with her, and she handles the difficult Sceptres, and if he’s with her then he isn’t okay and I don’t know where he is. I don’t know where she hides. I don’t know how to find him.”

  A frown shadowed his face as he leaned forward, elbows on his knees where mud climbed from boot to pant leg. He stared at the ground with his cheek caught in his teeth.

  “How do you know that?”

  “How else?” I muttered, hands pulling braids into my hair again. “I saw it in a dream. But not where, beyond not Redbird. James said he was giving him to Astra. I don’t know where he is.”

  “Asa will know.” He looked up at me with a strange certainty. “He will. If he doesn’t, then we make her come to us.”

  “They want to kill him,” I hissed, “She’ll think they want her, too.”

  He ran a hand over his mouth and then roughed up his hair again, studying his boots. “We just have to get there before they do.”

  He gestured toward the wall of the tent. Rabbit’s people, he meant.

  “You think they would let me leave? You call them allies but they’ll sooner walk me to the gates with a gun to my head than allow me to go ahead of them—and don’t you dare say you would go alone. They don’t draw the line at Percy.” I stopped pacing and met his eyes, a spark of an idea reflected in them vibrantly.

  I shook my head.

  “I would at least know where he was.”

  “You can forget that idea right now, Jack Talon,” I warned, but it was soft and weak.

  He would know where Percy was, but I wouldn’t know where either of them were. He would be alone, and he would be in danger, and he would be hurt. Like I was. Like Percy, screaming against a vivid pain in a dream.

  My heart stammered in my chest and made my bones feel frail—bird-boned, like Roam, and suddenly I understood the woman.

  “We’ll talk to Rabbit.”

  ———

  A group of women armed to the teeth stood outside the medic tent. Their eyes followed us, but they were soldiers for the rebels, soldiers for Rabbit, and they didn’t flinch.

  The medic tent’s walls were rolled up and tied to the support bars to let in light and fresh air and without a clear entrance, the women formed a circle facing out at the barren fields and the Wastes. It made me nervous to see the black guns held casually in their arms, their fingers resting easily near the triggers.

  The looks that they shot at me with narrowed eyes and twitching lips were not comforting at all.

  “Soren!” Tiger pushed past two people inside the tent and raced across the dirt, a grin plastered across her face as she tossed her arms around my waist. “We can get Percy now, right? They said when you wake up, we can rescue him.”

  “We have to talk to Rabbit first,” I told her, “And then we can.”

  She let go with a nod, worked her hand into mine, and pulled me away from the medic tent, toward the river that split Conleth from the Wastes.

  There was hardly a difference now.

  When I was as young as Tiger I had nightmares that the sand had piled up around Redbird, all the way up the mountain like a tsunami of gritty red, that the mountains were turned to dust. I hadn’t dreamt like that in a long time.

  The girl led us between another set of tents, pressed up against the wall of a long building. Ahead of us the flaming orange dunes were visible between the structures.

  I didn’t miss it. I didn’t miss the sand that made every step laborious, reflected the heat of the sun to draw sweat, and the way the grains got everywhere and in everything.

  “Do you have a plan?” Jack whispered. “If you think he’s not there, then what?”

  I pulled away from Tiger’s grasp and fell into step with him, both of us slowing.

  I pressed my hand over the place on my arm where I felt Percy’s pain as my own. “I know he’s gone, I… I heard him talking to her, in a dream, and James said he was going to give him to her, and I dreamed about my father and he wasn’t wearing his watch which meant that she was there or would be there because she hates the ticking sound that watches make. She has him. She hurt him. I felt it.”

  “They’re only dreams—”

  “No,” I hissed, but I remembered saying the same thing to Percy, and I remembered Percy saying the same thing to Astra, and I remembered the certainty that had been in my mind that this was all a simulation, that it was all a trick to make me admit it. “He had a knife just like yours, but it was a bear, not a fox. It even had your name on it.”

  He looked at me with concern biting at his lip, and then he smiled. “See? That proves it. They’re only dreams because this knife is one of a kind.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t so sure.

  After all, this ring that I worried on my finger had been gold and ruby, and now it was fit for a Beckett. A Talon. I caught my breath at the thought. That was all it was, right now—a thought, rather than a memory, the ghost of emotion for him slowly gaining strength. Is this ring just a ghost, too?

  I always wanted a different name, but finding it like this was strange and terrifying.

  “He’ll be fine,” Jack said, and I wanted to believe him.

  Tiger whistled from ahead of us, a hand on her hip as she looked back from where she stood on the charred porch. The house was mostly intact and perched on the edge of the storm-wet river. Her other hand swept toward the ajar frame of a screen door.

  “By the stars,” I breathed out slowly, and steadied my heart before following Tiger inside.

  The dark room was lit by electric lanterns that left a faint hum in the air and against my skin. The pale light reflected off the shapes of people gathered in the room, just outlines until my eyes adjusted from the bright sun outside, all of them quiet as the floorboards creaked loudly underfoot.

  Moon Rabbit sat in an arm chair, pausing in the middle of a sentence when his eyes landed on me. His jewelled h
ands hung in the air where he spun his words. “Welcome to the world, Beckett.”

  Around the room, the eyes that had been focused on him turned to me, all of them trying to see the girl who was a cold blight against them.

  The girl who was born in marble halls under crystal chandeliers to a champagne drunk Emperor, a girl who contrasted starkly to the desert-stained rebels who wore the mud and their wounds as their fashion. The only things we had in common were the purple crescents that rested underneath every eye and above every hollow cheek.

  They watched me like wild animals, waited for me to flinch, wary and crouched on the sharp edge of a knife.

  “You said we were protected,” a voice called out. “You said our children were safe!”

  Pain waivered their voice, so thick that it coated the room with another layer of silence. I searched for the eyes that matched but they all looked down now, all of them finding something else to focus on rather than the accuser and the accused and the cause for it.

  I stood frozen.

  I remembered the words of that man and the memory he had, the memory I had, inside that pub. We kept you secret. For Clary. You, you, you. You said we were protected. You said our children were safe. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what I did.

  What the hell did I do here?

  What the hell did I do?

  “She never said you were protected. She never said that your children were safe.” Roam’s voice came from behind me.

  I caught her reflection in the glass of a portrait that hung on the wall above Rabbit. She was bird boned, like my father always said, but it allowed the words to bounce off the bars of her bird cage ribs with a resounding loudness that filled the room.

  “She showed you. We came here, to Conleth, a city right on the doorstep of the place we were fleeing. We came here because we knew the kinds of people that you are, the kinds of people who would help two women and a baby and an old man. You chose to help us. Regardless of who we were. Knowing the risk. You helped us. And when the time came as it inevitably does, she gave herself up to protect us, all of us, all of you. She gave up her mind and her body. She didn’t just promise you something and turn her back and walk away. She gave herself entirely and that is more than can be said about any leader in recent history.”

  Rabbit lowered his chin as if his head suddenly wore an iron crown. “We aren’t here to cast accusations. We aren’t here to advocate for ourselves, either. We are here to solidify the plans that we have to save everyone’s children.”

  I pressed my teeth together until it hurt. “They took the children?”

  “Seven,” he answered, his eyes charred black as they met mine. “They came in with their guns and aimed them at the little ones. They had no choice, and that was made entirely clear when they shot the eighth dead in the street.”

  “Shot,” I breathed. Finn. “Who did?”

  “The soldiers! The soldiers killed my baby!” The agonized cry of a woman wrenched at my heart.

  The soldiers. I ran a finger over the ridge of the ring.

  Rabbit reached down to the floor next to his chair and came back with his staff, pressing the end into the wood floor. The other end nestled into the crook of his arm.

  He leaned forward and hesitated. “There was a group of armed men who arrived two days ago. They left with seven children and murdered an eighth. Shortly after they left, Mercury and the Lumen arrived, presumably to clean up the mess.”

  They weren’t soldiers. They were Astra’s.

  Conleth burning had nothing to do with the children and it had nothing to do with the Empire or the woman secretly pulling the strings. What happened here was because of a temperamental child who had found a difficult to move object in his way.

  I realized, suddenly, what he meant. He couldn’t marry me because I was already married. I looked at Jack and breathed out unsteadily.

  My heart pounded in my chest. “Rabbit. When I was a kid, I used to sneak out. In the middle of the day, in the middle of the night, soldiers marching on the green lawn or not, Lumen patrols along the perimeter or not. Even through my own house where I could walk freely, I knew all the ways out and in. I knew every pattern big or small. I know the weakest points and the darkest trails in the forest. I know how to get in and I know how to get out and I know where Percy was and I know where to find the information that will tell us where these children have been taken. I am going to go there and I am going to do that.”

  “We can’t go forward until our wounded are healed,” Rabbit signed.

  “The wounded can stay here with Ellie and some help and you can lead your people to follow but I am going ahead, before they destroy all of the information they have, before they take Percy further away than he already is to some place I don’t even know the name of. Before you kill my father and throw away every bit of information he can give about what the hell is going on.” I didn’t want to argue it.

  I stepped back and started to turn.

  A sudden rush of static in the air washed over me and I froze. It was thick and viscous and rolled across the building. A slight rumble in the air made the portrait on the wall shake. It felt familiar. It felt too familiar.

  “Listen, princess—”

  “No, no, Rabbit, there’s—”

  “—there’s no way I’m—”

  “There’s something here.”

  I turned and pushed through the gathered crowd with my shadow on my heels.

  33

  I couldn’t feel anything.

  I stood on the shore of the muddied riverbed. The static was brief and oppressive but I felt it. I felt it, and now nothing but exhaustion and weakness inhabited every part of me. My head was more clouded than electric. But they were there. They were there, I was certain about that, but there was nothing.

  Focus, Soren, focus!

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and squeezed my eyes shut, tried to reach through the darkness and the starbursts of colour behind my eyelids, shaking, my breath shallow. I pushed for that hint of static that sat just out of reach. Focus, focus, focus.

  The taste of copper sat on my tongue.

  “Soren?” Jack touched a hand to my back. “You don’t have to do this.”

  I snapped my eyes open, turned to him, and clutched his arm as I searched for that hint of electric current that coursed through him and made a home in the hive of his brain. I felt that, at least.

  “I felt it. It was like that plane, over Warren, like a wall of pure static, and now it’s gone.”

  “I know. I felt it, too.”

  “Did you? Because everyone else thought I was crazy.” I pulled back from him, scanning the Wastes opposite us again. “I didn’t feel it when James was there and I just—I don’t want them to take Tiger. I don’t want to fail her, too.”

  “You haven’t failed anyone,” he whispered.

  “I…”

  A sound caught my attention, something that pulsed against my eardrums, low and humming. It reverberated inside my chest, rumbled through the earth under my feet, emanating out from the edge of the Wastes where orange clouds started to swirl into the air. There was a shimmer in the middle of each dust devil, a glint of light.

  Planes, camouflaged against the sky and the sand, three of them perched neatly in a row.

  “Weapons!” A rebel yelled over the camp.

  Jack’s hand dropped from my back as we moved out into the open, into the sun, to stand directly across from the arriving army. He whistled and waved behind us, slowing down as Fitz jogged up and tossed him his rifle.

  “You should be hanging back with that thing,” Fitz grunted.

  He shrugged. “I’m right where I need to be.”

  My hands shook. My knees felt weak.

  Uneasiness crawled up my throat and I tried to swallow it but its claws were buried deep. Each step brought us closer to the planes that slowly shifted from sky blue to coal black. Each step brought my heart further into my mouth.

  Whatev
er reason they had to be here, it wasn’t good. The fact that they weren’t already spilling Lumen out onto the sand was barely comforting—they didn’t expect a fight.

  Rabbit’s staff sparkled with sunlight through the crystal. He met with us just past the tents at the struts of the burned bridge, his eyes as dark as the machines, and Tiger on his heels.

  “Empire planes?”

  “Lumen transport,” I answered. “Not sure about the Empire part.”

  Hydraulics wheezed as the doors opened slowly, lowering stairs to the sand.

  Shiny black Lumen marched down the steps one by one from the two planes on either side, their eyes three red dots, sleek and fluid and more ominous than any others I had seen. Red eyes. These—these made my skin crawl. They were beetle-like death machines that marched in single file to the edge of the sandy river bank, guns prepared but not aimed.

  “Not Empire,” I wheezed through a tightened throat, “Definitely not Empire.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Rabbit growled next to me, trying not to take his eyes off them.

  I tried to breathe deep but it came sharp and shallow against my ribs. It means this.

  A woman stepped down from the center plane, straight black hair pinned up with shining silver decorations. Her movements jerked and her chin twitched with each step, but she held herself regally in a sleek black armoured outfit. A cape hung over one shoulder, flowing like a waterfall as blue as those eyes that pierced mine.

  I couldn’t breathe. Looking at her, here, with the sand staining her feet and the bottom of her cape orange—I held my breath and stood frozen because my brain couldn’t figure out how to do anything else.

  Rabbit slammed the staff against the steel struts. The impact reverberated up through my feet.

  Tiger’s voice carried loud across the river gorge. “Who the hell are you?”

  “What a sweet little girl!” Her voice was a punch to the gut with how friendly it was. “Who am I? Soren, sweetheart, it’s impolite of you to not introduce me to your friends.”