In A Burning Room

by TS Ward

I was shaking. A woman stood in the center of the sim room, black hair pinned up with shining silver clips, and a slender silver sword held delicately in her left hand. It was her. It was her, here, and I was fighting her. My head felt full of cotton. The world turned black around the edges with green and purple and orange starbursts in the darkness. Her knuckles tasted metallic with the copper tang of my blood on them.

  “Who is she?” Rabbit’s hands moved in quick bursts. “Speak, girl!”

  “Oh, by the stars, Soren. I knew you weren’t ready for this. You’re failing so horribly we might have to start over again.” She took one step forward, and I flinched like she just pulled the trigger of a gun aimed at my head. A small smile worked at her pursed lips. “At least this time we know what really motivates you.”

  I took a deep breath and curled my hands into fists. Anger burned through my head and snapped me back into myself.

  I didn’t raise my voice. I spoke like she stood two feet away, and not fifty. “Say those words again and I will gut you like a fish.”

  A laugh erupted from her, but her face didn’t change. It didn’t look right. “Who knew you had the gumption to keep that boy a secret from me? I have him now. And the others! He’s such a good boy, so sweet. He misses his mother dearly.”

  A Lumen stood next to her with a black box held between its hands. A drone rested on top. It was a small box, but knowing her, my stomach was hollow with fear.

  That pain I felt in that dream pierced my skin. My head shook before the thing was even in the air as tears pricked the backs of my eyes.

  The drone was loud compared to the quiet thrumming of the planes’ engines, but it was fast, coming to hover in front of me.

  I didn’t take it. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to look.

  “A gift, Soren. Think of it like… a warning.” Hell.

  The drone lowered the box to the ground and tore back across the river. I shook so violently, sucking in air through clenched teeth as Rabbit stuck his staff out to flick the lid off the box.

  A choked noise left Jack.

  Oh god oh god oh god—my chest ached so much.

  I would rather a bullet between my eyes, I would rather kill her with my bare hands, but I didn’t make a sound as much as I wanted to scream my heart out. I didn’t move a muscle.

  It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault, my poor little bear—his pale hand was laid out in the box, so small and soft and—and his fingers were curled around that knife. That bone knife carved to look like a bear, the way Jack’s was carved to look like a fox, the knife that I gave to him in a dream. The blade was coated in drying blood.

  “He’s a child!” Tiger’s voice was rough, broken as Rabbit crouched and fumbled for the box’s lid to hide it away again. “He’s just a child, you—”

  He couldn’t seem to find an appropriate word, but Tiger continued with a string of curses I didn’t expect from an eight-year-old.

  My eyes ran blurry. I stumbled, but somehow kept my feet under me despite the sudden wild tilt to the world.

  I touched Jack’s arm as he snapped the rifle up to rest against his shoulder, to place her in the crosshair, making him pause with his finger on the trigger. The camp was silent behind us, but I felt them with the static that charged with my rage. I felt them trying to figure out what was in the box, I felt them slowly start to understand, I felt the electric spark of anger blossoming through them.

  “Jack,” I breathed, tapping his arm with a finger.

  It was barely a movement, just the smallest twitch, and then the single bullet in his rifle seared the air—and he didn’t miss. An eye for an arm. The shot crushed through her and the woman stumbled back with jerked movements.

  She was still standing, twitching, with a hole burned through her forehead. The hole sparked sporadically with electric blue bursts. The shining metal underneath glinted through the torn and burned silicone skin.

  She was a robot. I felt it. I saw it. Still, I had hoped to hell that she had braved her fear of the orange stain of the Wastes to come in person. I hoped to hell that she underestimated the fire that this sparked inside me.

  The bullet was a prelude. It was buying time. Somewhere, behind us, further up the river, the dam was still churning power.

  Astra turned back to the plane, paused with a foot on the steps. “Before I go, Mr. Talon. This Lumen model is quite expensive. Considering you are a constant obstacle in all my plans, if you get in my way or damage anything Vulta again, I will wipe your family off the face of the Earth and make you watch as I do so.”

  The bone carved handle of his knife was stuck in his belt, and a similar knife in the box at my feet. I wanted to take them both and sink them directly into the spine of that thing that wore her face.

  “I’ll hold you to that,” Jack feigned a laugh. “That includes my wife’s family? And all the cousins? Might take you a while.”

  I was frozen. My hands shook. My shoulders shook. The sharp sting of static fed through the earth and the air, stabbed through my heels, pricked my skin. It fed the rage burning in me.

  There is a fire within you, baby girl. A burning rage to match the sun.

  Astra didn’t say anything. She looked at me, eyes scanning, and I was made painfully aware that I wore that damn moonlight and star-shine ring. That my hand on his arm was the only thing keeping me steady on my feet.

  She didn’t know.

  It was the one thing I could still hold over her, the one thing keeping James that much further from me. But she looked at me, and then looked at him, and the expressionless face of her Lumen skin didn’t give anything away.

  “Don’t get smart with me, Talon.”

  The Lumen boarded the planes. Their engines fired louder as the outer shells faded from black to the background of the Wastes. They left, but the box was still here. Percy’s hand was still here.

  Rage. A burning rage.

  “Soren!” Roam’s voice carried across the dirt behind us. “What is it? What’s in the box?”

  I closed my eyes and tried to picture him. Percy, sitting in the tall sweet grass in the warm, honeyed sunlight, braiding pieces of grass together with his little bear cub paws.

  It wasn’t real. It wasn’t, it couldn’t be. He was okay, he was whole, he was unharmed. It was fake, like the fake Astra, and the knife—the knife that I—

  Jack's voice was strained. “We’ll get him back. He’ll be okay. He’ll be okay.”

  He’ll be okay.

  The static coiled around me. I felt it in the air, felt it warped around the shape of the planes as they took off from the sand.

  The blue shroud, they called it.

  It was a wave, a tsunami that rushed from me, that raised every hair on every rebel until I saw them, felt them in my mind. Every single one a hive of blue against the sparkling dark.

  The static gathered, climbed, arced into a bolt that I felt up my back, that pierced the planes mid flight.

  My hands twitched, fists clenched at my sides. My lip curled with the force.

  Static burst in every nerve as I felt the shape of the planes, felt them slow and pause, tugging against that blue shroud like the bullets.

  It was like getting hit by a collision wall at full speed. Like a bullet in each nerve. Burning and sharp. A drop of blood was on my lip.

  A thick silence flooded my ears, drowned out everything but my hard pulse, everything but a faint ringing that seemed to echo.

  The planes were stripped of power. They careened through the sky, through the static that sparked off the metal, and I was shaking. Darkness clouded the edge of my vision.

  I let go.

  It was an elastic snapping, the static crushing me under an incredible force. Pale blue danced wildly around me as I collapsed with a gasp to the dirt, the box sitting hapless before me.

  Little bear.

  “No,” I heard Jack growl through clenched teeth, and then his hands grabbed me, hauling me back to my feet. “Stop them, Soren, stop—”


  The hulking, black mass of the planes disappeared beyond the camp. Smoke and a horrific boom rose into the too-quiet air, metal against stone, and then something that chilled me to the bone—the sound of roaring water. The dam.

  Rabbit grabbed my shoulder and spun me around to face him, his eyes drilling deep into my soul as his voice thundered inside my skull.

  Who was that? What sort of monster is that woman, that robot?

  I shook my head. It was all I could manage. So, this is how you do it.

  Who is she?

  “Astra Beckett,” I told him, voice hoarse. “Not Empire.”

  If not Empire, then what? He demanded, his fingers digging into my shoulder.

  “Vulta.” I turned away from him. I knelt in front of the box again.

  My stomach churned like a stormy ocean as I opened the lid just enough to work out that knife. It felt solid. It felt just like Jack’s. But it was a bear that stared back at me, not a fox. I held it tight in my hand, half expected it to vanish, and pressed my other hand to the top of the box.

  “They made me,” I continued. I tasted that ocean in my words. Navy blue, dark gray. “They made all of us. And they have Percy. They have all your children. The only one who knows how to find them is my father.”

  Rabbit looked at me as confusion and rage twisted the features of his face, drinking in my words. The air was heavy with silence from the crowd that watched us. He looked to them, to Tiger, and then his shoulders dropped and those coal black eyes drilled into mine.

  Go.

  34

  The box was dark against the wood that burned underneath it, against the mountain and the silver mark of Redbird a star beyond the flame, another day closer.

  It could have been more than just an arm. It could have been him, wholly. The thought made my heart pound harder in my chest than it ever had before.

  My little bear. He was in Redbird, so close, just on the horizon in the mountains that peeked over the hills, and we left him there. We left him alone. We let him get hurt. I let him get hurt.

  I held the bear knife in my hands.

  Jack had cleaned the blood from it when he inspected every tiny detail in comparison to his fox carved handle, tossing it aside when the reminder of his brother became too much.

  I gave it to him, to Percy, in a dream. I gave it to him because that voice in my head had whispered give him a weapon.

  At the same time, my father’s words in a similar dream came to me. Do not let those things feed you lies. It was this god who told me to give him a weapon, the very thing that Pilot had told me to embrace.

  I could have given him anything, and I gave him a knife that hurt him more than it protected him.

  Roam sat down in the dirt beside me, reached out to pull the blade from my cold fingers, and turned it over. “They’re a matching pair. I know how Jack got his—a one of a kind, hand-made gift, the maker dead before he could make another. How does something like that find a match so similar?”

  I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to admit that this thing I had been avoiding, the thing I had been running from for years, that it was real.

  The ring was proof enough. My dreams shared with Percy were proof enough. You cannot force the truth into a dark corner any longer.

  “Soren,” she pushed, “Tell me. Is it real?”

  I swallowed everything that climbed to the surface and gave a curt nod.

  She breathed out sharply. “I was almost hoping you would lie to me.”

  “Maybe I was, I don’t know,” I muttered, eyes tracing over the carved edges of the bear and the etched lines of Talon in the metal of the blade.

  It was sharp, curved at the tip, but not made for cutting bone. The memory of his scream made the world around me spin in a dizzying blur.

  The memory of the pain was a bolt up my arm.

  I pressed a hand to my eyes, to block out the light and flush out the memory. “I felt it. I heard it. In a dream. It keeps repeating in my head and… I knew it was real. I knew it was real and I didn’t do anything to stop it.”

  She reached an arm behind me and rubbed my back softly. “You couldn’t stop it from here, baby girl, but when we get there, we will.”

  “I could have. I could have, I mean, I made that,” I threw a hand toward the knife. The fire sparked off the blade. “And this. This ring, that was in a memory, and there are so many things I don’t remember and it’s driving me crazy because I still feel the things I felt, I just can’t remember why.”

  “You will,” she said, and then looked up at me with her amber eyes glowing in the light of the fire. “When you were studying for school and couldn’t remember anything, do you know what I told you? Let your brain do the work. It’s all there. You just need to stay out of the way.”

  The memories I had came back in dreams and vibrant images.

  When I lost them, I was in silence. I was floating in the dark. I had no feeling other than the static, saw nothing other than the blue of my own mind.

  Salt water. That’s what Pilot said. To allow yourself to remember. To let this god in. The salt will wash you clean.

  The salt of a fresh water lake, of Redbird, dripping down the mountains into smaller lakes and rivers. And one that saw the ocean across the drowned land.

  I stood up, voice soft. “I’m going for a walk.”

  ———

  The lake reflected the stars, something like Redbird's Black Sky besides the fact that the stars dripped from the dome of the sky all the way down to the horizon. In this clear lake, I could imagine the scent of salt without touching it.

  My lungs were full of cold, clean air. No smoke. No dust stirred up by careless feet or wind. No potato stew brewing in battered old pots.

  I breathed in and it was sharp and crisp. It dulled the pulsing pain of my ribcage bruise to something softer than the memory of Percy’s pain. A memory that was clearer than any other.

  I stood on a slab of stone just before the sand and winced with every breath and every movement, biting down as I pulled my shirt delicately over my head. The stinging needles of my ribs pierced dully. It was easier to slip from the loose fabric of my pants.

  Goosebumps rose on my bare skin as I stood, a chill running through me, and looked out at the still water.

  My toes touched the edge. It was bitter cold. Breathe.

  “Close your eyes,” I whispered, and the words echoed in my mind.

  Close your eyes, close your eyes. Breathe.

  “Breathe,” I sucked in the clear air, felt it in my throat like water, and closed my eyes to the darkness of the time between midnight and dawn. I opened them to the darkness between the eyelid and the iris. “Walk backwards.”

  Backwards, not forward, because I was stepping backwards into time. Into myself.

  I turned.

  The water at my heels was my guide as I took a step back and caught my breath in my throat on its way to my lungs.

  Shhhh, I thought to myself, listen to the water. You are made of water. You cannot be contained by fists. Shhhh, shhhh, shhhh. Breathe in, and breathe out, and breathe in again, like the waves of the ocean rolling over the shore and receding and coming back again.

  What if I drown?

  The water wrapped around my ankles and pulled me further in. Breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe—what am I doing? What the hell am I doing? —breathe, breathe, breathe—

  Do you want to remember? Yes. Are you sure about that?

  No.

  I wasn’t.

  Why not?

  I was scared. Fear thundered through my heart with a pain like these ribs.

  Scared of what? I was scared to know what I had done.

  What have you done? What did you do to them? What did you do to yourself? What are you doing to yourself, to them, to all of them? The water greeted my thighs and I remembered hands—James? No. Not him. He was never so gentle.

  How long can you hold your breath? A young child asked
me.

  I was young, too. As long as I need to, I told her.

  The water gripped my waist sharply, tightening my guts, and then gripped my chest in a welcoming embrace, thankful that I was there, grateful that I was sharing this with the sea of stars. I waded in water that was heavy and cold, that pulled me under with the anticipated fear in my heart of stepping off the edge of the shallow basin into something so much deeper than the five feet of it that kissed my neck. I stood on my toes without trying to.

  I tasted the pounding flesh of my heart in my throat.

  Breathe. Breathe.

  Shhhh, said the ocean, and the moon thought it was the most beautiful sound. Shhh, the moon murmured, shhhh. Goodnight, sweet ocean, goodnight. Percy slept soundly in a crib under a mobile of planets made by my grandfather’s hands. Goodnight, little bear.

  I let the water hold my body up, floated, breathed in the cold, clear air. The night stretched from horizon to horizon and reflected in the water so perfectly that I drifted in space among the stars.

  You are alone, they whispered to me, you are so alone.

  My ears went under the surface of the water. It muffled and echoed every small thing. The pulse under my skin, my ribs cracking with each deep breath, my fingers that swam between air and sea. Adrift, the stars whispered, you’re adrift in a lonely void. Like us, like us.

  All I heard was silence. Silence and the things within me. Like the dark room, like the sen-dep tank I took my memories away in.

  Give them back to me, I told the stars, give them back, I need them, I need to know! But the stars were silent, blinking. Drifting in a lonely void across the sky. The sky only turned because we turned.

  I imagined the stars scraping against the dome of the sky but—they were so far, unreachable, and the fabric that they were sewn into was unfathomably untouchable. The whispers that fell on my ears were not meant for me. They spoke to themselves, and I couldn’t help but understand. I was alone, too. I was adrift and I was lost and the stars held no memories for me. The stars hardly knew each other.

  Memory is an ocean, not a constellation.

  “And by that, I mean it’ll drown you. Not… look pretty.”