In A Burning Room

by TS Ward

  “What do I matter to her? What the hell do they care?”

  My hands ached for the chance to break something. A nose, a jaw, a glass of champagne sent sailing across the room to smash like diamonds against the mirror. I kept my hands in fists.

  “Why am I here? Why are you doing this to me?”

  He didn’t say a word.

  The room rang with the echo of my words, reverberated sharp against my ears. I wasn’t sure if he heard it. I wasn’t sure if he heard anything. He turned his back, walked patiently to the table, worried his cufflinks and the hem of his jacket, and sat down on that ornate chair at that ornate table.

  He picked up his fork and knife again. He ate. He sat, he ate, and he stared straight ahead at my empty chair with the hint of a smile and a shadow under his eyes.

  “Please!” I cried, “Answer me!”

  His knife slipped against the plate. That muscle in his cheek twitched again.

  “Please, I… I’m scared.”

  I crossed the room to him, pressed my shaking hands to the table, and watched as he refilled his glass and gulped half of it down.

  I wanted to break it. I wanted to rip it from his hands and shatter it and let the liquid gold spill over the white marble. Maybe the waste of his precious champagne would have more of an impact than a girl’s death.

  “I’m scared.”

  His hands grew still. He didn’t look at me. “Soren, sweetie, I know. I know.”

  “Then tell me. Help me understand. What am I giving myself to?” I sank to my knees, trembling. Don’t let Arden die for nothing. If you want change, make it happen.

  He breathed deeply. “Astra is the Apotelesma of the Fox Council. You know that. What they want, what she wants is—she wants to carry out the future that Charles Ryan envisioned, but she doesn’t think it can work here. She doesn’t think that this world can handle it, and if it could, it would not contain it. It would not contain the Emma Genesis, it would not contain you.”

  “What does that mean?” I stood up slowly.

  “It… I…” He sighed as he rested his elbows on the table and dropped his head into his hands, the refracted light of the chandelier glinting on the metal of his ring. “You have to let her explain it to you. I can’t do it justice. I cannot put the immensity of it into words. The Emma Genesis is a weapon, the Genesis is life from destruction, destruction to create anew. It is the restart button for all that we know. It is inevitable. It will tear you apart from the inside.”

  From the inside. Like poison, like a cavity in a tooth.

  Do you understand now? Do you remember? Is that enough to make your mind up?

  I closed my eyes, breathed in, but the air tasted like salt and my chest felt tight. I was sinking. Water pooled across the floor, buried the white marble, muffled the sound of the champagne glass shattering against it when I whipped it across the room and screamed in another time, in my memory.

  Do you know yourself now?

  Do you know what you are? Do you know what you do?

  “I am a weapon,” I whispered weakly.

  The electric wire hand of this god reached through the water and held me, pulled me up into a light that was so bright my eyes stung with pain.

  Then, this god murmured, then it’s time. In time, that’s what they say, isn’t it? You’ll remember in time. This is time.

  I was made of sparked light in the same way this god was, in a similar white, and where we touched our wires twined and blended. We were welded together by the brightness of each photon like a spark running from the tip of my finger into someone else to draw a memory. But—this god was different. This god was the one in control, merging with me, and it knew me. It knew every part.

  Do you know what you are? Do you know what you do? Do you know yourself now?

  “I—I—”

  Everything was black and blue and cold.

  The water bubbled like champagne with the breath I had held in my chest. It rose with the taste of the drink to the moonlight shining in streaks through the surface waves. It undulated, danced just out of reach of my fingertips. The bubbles shone like diamonds, like stars.

  “How long can you hold your breath?” Arden’s voice floated to me, all soft and murmured and drifting through the water the way a jellyfish swam.

  Echoed, almost, or just… arriving in waves.

  I turned.

  My toes found the gravel bottom of the lake, on the edge of total darkness. My hair was a softened cloud of black that drifted in the gentle edge of a current, like seaweed, like the silken feathers of a bird in a slow-motion flight. I rested. On the lake bottom shallows, I rested in slow-motion, everything drifting as if time slowed down, seconds to minutes to hours.

  As long as I need to, I told her.

  As long as I need to, I told Clary, on the shore of the lake in Redbird, when we were young. When we were children and we’d only just met, when we’d both snuck away from home and pretended that we didn’t recognize the heritage of each other’s vibrant eyes and braided hair.

  Arden spoke from the darkness in front of me, from the cold depths where the water fountained up from below. I couldn’t see her. I couldn’t see anything but the shining pillars of silver light from a moon so distant and small that rested so high in orbit above us.

  “What about when you’re unconscious? How long can you hold it then?”

  We’re going to find out, I told her, just… don’t touch the water.

  “There are worse ways to die around here,” she laughed, and the sound bubbled like music, bounced off the walls of the chamber in perfect tune. “Hurry, Soren, they’re coming. We’re running out of time.”

  The static stored under my skin, in the hollows of my bones, erupted in pulses.

  I buried myself in the skeleton of the sim room for a week, breathed with the circuitry, learned it inside and out, the dusty taste of electricity dancing on my tongue as I drank it in starved gulps. I felt it now. It brewed like a storm in the pit of my stomach.

  I shook with the current. Drifted with it.

  This god came alive under my skin and sparked a fire in my blood and I was alight. I was the atmosphere in the air that shocked Arden like needle pricks and made her small hairs stand on end and her clothes drift with starbursts of light.

  The water erupted with a neon blue glow and behind my eyelids there were skeletal structures of electrified atoms and molecules and my breath was lost. The sight of it was like bioluminescence in the clearest sea. Blue and brilliant and how could this be real?

  I was made of stardust and the ocean. Microorganisms and anemones as numerous as the stars above and the taste of it was divine, the flavour celestial, and the salt—

  It kept me afloat. The close walls of the sen-dep tank were lit in pulsing blue like that sea in my mind.

  The threaded pulses between the constellations I was created by began to unravel like a puzzle and suddenly there was a star map laid out before me and I knew every single part of it. It floated before me, in the shape of me, and it was written in a language I was only just beginning to understand.

  I plucked a string the way someone might pluck a harp.

  Memory was a difficult, complicated thing. So many bundles of neurons gathered, connected, and then fired in the same pattern emulating the first. The hippocampus, the amygdala—it was all a mess.

  Did you know you can influence the way someone remembers something by choosing a specific word when you ask about it? One word can influence a memory if it suggests something particular. I think, maybe, if I can stick one word with all of the memories I want gone, I think I can do it. I think I can bring them to light all at once.

  “What word?” Arden whispered.

  Breathe. I feel like I can’t breathe without them.

  The electricity gathered in vibrant bursts jolted at the thought and I leaped at it, heart thundering in my chest, as panic and heat flushed through me.

  A sharp pain shot through me like a raging forest
fire. It caught from one nerve to the next and crashed in waves, my muscles alight with it.

  Careful, I screamed at myself, but I just wanted it to be done. I wanted it to be over. I wanted the ache in my chest and the pounding against my skull to be taken away.

  I want to feel again. I want to breathe.

  But oh god, it hurt, it hurt—everything burned. My brain, my flesh, my bones melted to glass, my blood boiling over the electric element of a stove top. Voltage cranked so high with no control—it was like James and the heat that radiated from him—and I knew I could stop it, I knew I could handle it, but it was sudden and unwelcome and the pain shattered me like hot glass dropped in cold water.

  And then—

  And then.

  There was darkness. Darkness and more darkness and some sort of numbness in every part of me. Nothing. Just nothing. A black void where I floated awake and aware and terrified. I’m dead. I’m dead, this is death, this is, this is, this this this—

  A screen blinked to life above me, dimmed as low as it could go.

  Good afternoon, the words glowed. Today is January 13th, 2240. The time is 9:50pm. You are in a secure sensory deprivation chamber. Do not be alarmed. This chamber is designed to de-escalate your abilities. Your estimated date for release is January 13th, 2240, at 10:00pm. Please, don’t harm the attendants on release. They are here to help. The words blinked away, and then: the current time is 9:51pm.

  A Vulta symbol flashed onto the screen—a fox stretching, mouth open, reaching for a star with its tail a comet’s.

  The light of the screen vanished, and suddenly I was back in complete darkness, unable to move, unable to speak. I was numb. I was floating. I wasn’t sure if I was even breathing, and despite the screen telling me what was happening I wasn’t even sure if I was alive.

  2240. How?

  What’s happening? I tried to say, tried to get the attention of the attendants outside the chamber, but I couldn’t feel my mouth. I couldn’t feel the vibrations in my vocal cords to know what I was saying. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t hear anything. Let me out! Let me out, let me out!

  I tried to scream.

  I tried to lift my hands to find the ceiling. I tried to find the electricity running through it to open it myself. I tried, I tried, I tried, and nothing happened. Nothing, in this nothingness, in this endless bloody void of nothing. I was sure if I could hear or feel that I was tearing my throat apart with a scream.

  A light filtered behind my eyelids. Moonlight.

  Less than nine minutes left and it ticked away so goddamn slowly. Something less than an infinity but somehow greater than it and I just wanted it to end. I wanted out. I wanted to crack open this clam shell and crawl out a shining pearl and be perfectly normal.

  The moonlight tasted like cold, salt free water. Full of dust.

  Let me out, I tried to say, I want to see.

  The dusty water was speckled with bubbles. Bubbles from the mouth of someone else.

  Please, I begged, please, let me out.

  There was someone else in the lake. Their arm was hooked around me so tight.

  I didn't feel the air in my lungs. What’s happening? I—

  The surface of the water broke cold against my skin. Water filled my mouth.

  The chamber cracked open with a wheeze. Bright light blinded me. White light, and the silhouette of a man who reached for me. Feeling slowly seeped back into my skin, and the air stung. I was cold and naked and panic made my heart race.

  “Soren? Are you okay?” The man asked.

  I fought a frown onto my face, words failing to fall off my tongue. He seemed familiar but foreign, like I knew him once ages ago, in another life. His eyes were pale smoke gray. His hair was a dirty blond that hung in straight lines over his forehead.

  “Soren, you’re looking at me like you don’t know me,” he laughed.

  “Fuck, Soren!” A voice shouted. The air was cold and stung my skin and the white light of the moon silhouetted a man pulling me onto the shore of a lake. “Wake up or I swear—”

  The man stopped laughing when I flinched away from his touch, pulled my knees up, and wrapped my arms over my chest with wide eyed panic.

  “Come on, don’t leave me like this,” he whispered, his hands pressed over my chest, pumping my lungs. Jack. Soaking wet, trying to bring me back.

  I could go back. Or I could stay.

  There was colour on the horizon.

  I wondered if this was what death was like—a jumble. A mix of memories all rambling at the same time, a palette of colours that mingled into something new and never before seen.

  A new flavour of light, the softest needle prick, an emotion made of all others that was so vivid and overwhelming that it was like a religious epiphany.

  Was it like this, for Arden? For the Pluto soldiers?

  There were things that I didn’t yet have the dexterity to drag out of the depths of my mind. But I knew they were there. I knew they existed, but it was like I walked from one universe to an alternate one where it didn’t exist, where it never existed, and the very idea of it was vacant and void and the only way to get back was to keep walking. Like I’d forgotten a word and the only things that came to mind were black cats and bad luck.

  It would come to me eventually.

  Maybe once I forgot I was ever trying to find it, maybe in the next minute, or maybe it would stay missing until I heard it on the lips of someone who couldn’t have known I was searching for it—and then the weighty word of fate would roll around in my mind.

  “Wake up, Sparky,” Jack murmured, “I only just got you back.”

  But our lives had been a montage of just meeting and just missing each other, hadn’t they? Carefully passing by in the streets of Redbird, one of us leaving just as the other got there, happenstance meetings in the strangest of places. Was fate controlled by some unseen force, or was it dictated by the mathematically gifted mind of a little boy named Pilot?

  What was superstition if your life was predestined?

  “Jack Talon,” I heard myself say, but it happened all at once in a million different ways. In a million different lights, in a million different places, under a million different versions of the same sky basked in colours I forgot existed. “Don’t worry about me.”

  The pale look of him didn’t go away the moment he realized I was alright.

  He froze, and his hands shook like leaves in a storm, his eyes glistened with such a vibrant green behind the rain, and those hands that shook ran thunderheads through his hair. His freckles stood out so starkly against the panic induced pallor.

  “This is real,” I started, and my voice was a croak with the taste of the lake water. “I know—I know this is real, because if it was in my head you would be smiling.”

  “Are you serious?” He shifted to the side and collapsed onto the carved beach with a leg tucked under him and his voice a deathly whisper that chilled me more than the water did. “What was that? What just happened? What did you think you were doing—you tried to drown yourself, Soren, I—how could you? How could you?”

  I pushed myself up.

  The ground was rough against my skin, like sandpaper compared to the ephemerality of being conscious in my own unconsciousness. The pale sand stuck to me, coated me at every opportunity, and it dressed Jack too.

  “Drown?”

  “Yes, drown!” His voice was strangled and broken, his mouth set in a grimace, and the tears that dripped over the fear-taut muscles of his cheeks were the only water I could ever drown in. The salt made it sting even worse. “I don’t—I don’t care if it was on purpose or not, you could have died, Soren. Did you—hell, you terrify me.”

  Terrify.

  My eyes drifted up to the sky, to the most vibrant pinks and oranges on the horizon and the darkest navy blues and purples opposite, colours that I felt alive inside of me. I drank them in with desperate gulps to fill the hollow chasm that cracked open inside my chest.

  “I know you now.�
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  His jaw softened and a tremble in his cheek worked at a smile that didn’t last, but it was still there in his eyes when they grew less shadowed, and it was there in his hands that still shook when they squeezed mine.

  I closed my eyes and let my hands remember the shape of his. “I thought that remembering meant it would all come back at once and make me who I was but I’m an entirely new version of myself, aren’t I? The old and the now and the new.”

  He breathed shakily, his shoulders shuddering. “You terrify me, Soren.”

  “I terrify myself,” I told him. “I’m half stuck in a dream.”

  He shook his head as his fingers tore through his wet hair. “This is not a dream. I found you drowning in a lake and the only reason I found you was because you have Sceptre blood and you were lighting up the place like the damn sun. But that was real, Soren, it’s real. It is really, really real and it shouldn’t be.”

  “I would have been fine—”

  “You don’t know that!” The hoarse whisper scratched up his throat.

  He pressed his hands tightly over his eyes and breathed in sharp and quick. He was soft and quiet and purely upset and it hurt me more than harsh words and harsh hands ever could.

  “You don’t know that, I don’t know that, I thought I lost you again. I thought I lost you for good. That isn’t a feeling I ever want you to know.”

  But I did. I did know—it was poison in my lungs, a crushing weight on my chest. It was half of me that was torn away slowly, piece by piece, speck by tiny speck, and I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand it so much that I cut it from myself and burned it in a pyre.

  “We need to go,” I said. “We have to stay ahead of Rabbit.”

  35

  The dam was half destroyed, the cement crumbled down the side of the Wastes.

  Looking over the edge was gut wrenching.