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In A Burning Room

Page 33

by TS Ward


  On one side, the water halfway up the dam pulled debris into the grates and the newly punched hole. On the other, I saw all the way down, inside the turbine rooms where the crushed planes were lodged.

  Water rushed out around their mangled forms, roared loud, and stirred up mist into the air.

  The lake would drain through the river, all the way past Conleth, into the Great Lake. The farms would run dry. Power would run on backup. Redbird and Conleth would have been plunged into darkness, if Conleth wasn't already in ruins, and Redbird only briefly.

  My stomach was a twisted mess. My head pounded against the roar of the water, and my skin burned even with the chill of the mist that rose to soak us all over again.

  I never thought this Sceptre blood could have done such damage, and here I was: the weapon set loose on the Empire. Creation from destruction. It was pure destruction and nothing more.

  We crossed the road over the dam's spine one quad at a time. Fitz, with Roam. Jack, with Pucks. The Genesis, alone, surveying the damage done, crossed over the crumbled cement with a dark pit that opened up inside her.

  It would take months to come back from this, months to rebuild, and even longer for the effects left on the fields. Crops would yield less. The Empire would eat less. The less fortunate would starve. The value of ration cards would skyrocket, the value of transports hijacked by rebels—

  I steeled myself. Took a deep breath.

  Everything according to plan. Everything.

  Was this destruction part of the plan? The fallout from this, when the rebels planned to usurp my father, when they planned to place the iron crown on my head, was it all planned? Pilot, sitting in his glass box, somewhere in this world, smiled at the strings he'd pulled.

  Conleth, Percy, and now Redbird, now the whole of the Empire damaged with this, by this, this poison blood in me. In my father. In my brother. In Astra.

  It made me sick to think Percy shared in it.

  The road between the dam and Redbird was paved, unlike the rest of Conleth. A smooth road, slick black with weedy trees that grew on both shores. The mist of dawn caught the soft light of the sun in beams scattered through branches and leaves.

  It was too soft, too hopeful, for the reluctance that made me hang back from the others, that drew constant goosebumps over my skin. The calm before the storm, the storm that brewed over the mountains so darkly beyond these trees.

  I remembered a time when we went the other way. When my mother and I sat hand in hand in the back of a canvas truck. Clary picked her nails with a knife across from us. Who are you hiding from? What are you hiding from?

  Everyone. Everything.

  We drove into darkness then; we rode into darkness now.

  ———

  I staggered into a different darkness.

  Black ink pooled underneath me.

  Twinkling diamonds sparked light from within themselves, scattered in endless reflections across the mirror plane. I saw myself, reflected in pieces, curled on my side with electric blue eyes open and clear, hair a mop of damp silk fibres that mixed with the pool and my clothes. The same ones I left the Embassy in—the same jacket, the same pants, the same boots that I lost in the muddy riverbed between the red desert and Conleth. It was all the same, and I thought I was something similar to the girl that left the Mirror Hall just then.

  Uncertain, unwilling, untrusting.

  “Hello? Hello, are you there?” A voice haunted this mirrored hall, as clear and crystalline as the quiet plink of a smooth stone bounced across still waters. Crystal clear like the shining mirrors in the Embassy and the tall glass tower in Redbird across from the Manor, smoother than the gold-inlaid white marble floors in both places, and sad like the statue in the garden.

  I sat up, and the ink dripped off me and splashed in black ripples. I was being swallowed by my own mind.

  “I don’t remember which of us said you were dead first. It might have been me. I think I said you were dead so that he’d stop looking. He made a plaque and put it on your statue in the garden, and he said you were dead but—that was after I forgot everything, and I screamed, I said he was a liar, and the Lumen dragged me back to the Manor across the green field in front of the soldiers.”

  “He used your lie against you.” The water rippled from her voice, from her feet slowly walking up behind me. She wore black, but one of Ellie’s scarves was tied around her throat in a bright splash of ruby red. “It hurt him. It hurt you."

  “It hurt to leave,” I breathed out.

  Roam knelt in the inky pool behind me and gathered my hair behind my shoulders. “Am I dreaming? Is that what this is?”

  “You are,” I murmured, “That’s what this is.”

  Her fingers pulled knots and tangles from my hair with gentle strokes, collected the strands in pieces between her knuckles, and braided carefully. “This is what he wanted from you.”

  “It is. I am the Genesis.”

  My mother was careful with her hands. “What does that mean for you? What will he do?”

  “He?” A laugh bubbled up from somewhere in my chest, caught in my throat, and burst against my teeth. “None of this is up to him. Astra is the one hiding in the dark and pulling all the strings. She is the one who planted this thing in his head with that journal.”

  Her eyes caught mine in our reflections, dark amber with wide pupils caught in the sap of them. Pretty and less incriminating and I only wished that mine had come from her instead.

  “Astra… she’s lost her mind, Soren. Don’t play her games. It only ends horribly.”

  “No,” I whispered. “Her mind is perfectly intact inside her skull.”

  “Still—”

  “It’s not about playing her games!” My voice snapped in the close air like a whip slick with the void oil we knelt in, the oil that poisoned the world and my head and dampened the static burning through my marrow. “You don’t understand. I have no say in any of this.”

  Her hands rested on my shoulders like a heavy weight, and despite the thinness of her bird bones, held me still in the rippling void. “No one can decide what happens to you. No one. Not even a Sceptre like Emma Ryan. Make your own choices—”

  “He started this. All of this. Pilot did. He started it with Finn dying in the street, just to bring Jack into this.” My bones quaked beneath aching muscles, my voice an earthquake behind my tongue. “And I… I don’t know if it was worth it.”

  “Every second of happiness is worth the hour of pain.” She tried to smile but there was a lie hiding under those words that we were both well aware of.

  “It wasn’t fair to do that to him,” I choked out, “And then for this, this mess. I don’t blame him if he hates me.”

  Her hands softened their weight, suddenly feather light and gentle. “Most things aren’t fair, Soren. Most things in life are tough and far out of our control and we just have to live with it and make the most out of it. I am certain beyond a doubt that he doesn’t hate you, but believe me, I know what it is like to love someone so deeply and to have that ripped away so harshly. Especially when there’s a kid included in that love.”

  “I keep forgetting that you left someone, too.” I dropped my head to my palms.

  She rested her cheek against my shoulder and wrapped her arms around me like a pair of protective wings, one hand hooked over a thin wrist. She was a thin woman and her eyes held some sadness, but she kept her chin up. She kept her shoulders squared.

  The Empress of a land that is more wild than free, more gore than glory, a cinnamon and honey queen of the wildlings who should not be caged.

  “Would you like to see him? Before… before we get caught up in this coming storm.”

  The mirror plane was softly quiet, but a breeze rippled across a pool of water above my head, and branches with yellowed leaves were tousled in the reflection below me.

  I saw the peaks of the mountains around the farthest edges of the lake. Behind one, the sun sat in a white haze, and behind the tower
of Redbird, the moon was made of the same white haze. “Just—close your eyes. Breathe in.”

  Open your eyes.

  The water crashed heavy, a tsunami tidal wave that knocked the air from my lungs until I was gasped for it, struggling to find breath.

  You lived for hours under the surface of a lake, I told myself, but panic rushed through my blood and stirred up the static in my bones and I felt the arc of it surge from fingertip to fingertip as a last defense but—water was not fended off by electricity.

  Hands grasped my arms.

  I twisted, searching through the inky blackness hiding beneath this lakebed. The mud was as clutching as her fingers in my skin and it swallowed my feet as I tried to pull her up. She only pulled back.

  Breathe out. Breathe out, you forgot to breathe out, you breathe in and then out in and then out and in and out and in and out and

  I breathed the liquid from my lungs, coughed it out until I breached the surface of the still lake.

  I was chaos brought into a calm dream state, stirring up the mirror-like water until the ripples turned into waves, my heart a drumbeat of heavy raindrops against the reflection of a sun-brightened sky.

  My voice was a hoarse shout into the void. “Roam! Mom, mom, mom! Wake up. Go back, wake up!”

  Send her back, this god’s disembodied voice floated around me.

  My hands slammed down.

  The lake grew still and silent.

  “What was that? What happened?”

  My father’s shadow fell over me, but the sun was in the wrong place for it. A shadow cast by moonlight. When I looked back at him he wore it like a robe and a crown, with his chin ducked down to look at me knelt at his feet. His shoulders were heavy with the weight.

  The Emperor of a land that was never his, his name all glory and no truth, a moonlight and stardust king of galaxies who should never have gotten so close to a black hole.

  My hands were washed of the sandy lakebed when I brought them free of the water.

  I searched the bruised knuckles and their shaking form for something resembling either of them.

  I had her bird bones, slender fingers, and thin wrists. I had a complexion somewhere halfway between them, though more bronzed from the sun and closer to hers now than it had been in the Embassy. I did not have her honey and cinnamon wild soul that was hidden by strong shoulders. I did not have the moonlight and stardust dusting my shoulders, glowing like some angelic being bathed in starlight.

  I was the delicate and sun-bleached bones of some ancient beast that pierced the cracked earth of an ancient dried up river.

  I was salt pillars, standing tall until something got too close—and then crumbled.

  A fossil lost and found millions of years later. A water-soluble compound.

  “Soren? I’m fairly certain I was very awake a few moments ago. Care to explain why you’ve ripped me from a riveting conversation with Carson and have thrown me into the lake of unconsciousness?” He started to adjust his sleeves, pausing when he looked at the still hands of his golden watch.

  “You need to leave. Leave Redbird.” I stood up, the water splashing around my knees.

  It wasn’t what I meant to say, but I was overcome with it. The sudden dawning of understanding that the rebels wouldn’t let him out of this alive, that the Emperor couldn’t be impeached.

  “They’re going to kill you.”

  “I know,” he said softly.

  My heart was an aching thundercloud behind my ribs. Dread dripped tar through my veins. I couldn’t find a single breath to fill these hollow lungs.

  He looked at me with a tight-lipped smile and eyes that crinkled at the corners, shadowed with purple. I know. I know. Of course he knows.

  “Please don’t—don’t, dad, don’t let them. Please.”

  “I love you too, baby girl.” The words drew out a crack in his voice. He was the steadiest person I had known for my entire memorable life, and his chin quivered, and it was like the world turned inside out.

  The sky darkened with storm clouds so heavy with rain and friction that they blotted out the sun, flashing with electricity that was more bark than bite. The water of the lake was cold around my knees. The air was warm and humid and thick. I could almost pinch it between my fingers and hold it in a tangible substance that dampened my skin.

  My shaking hands wove into my hair and caught on the loose braids that Roam left there.

  I pressed my tongue between my teeth but it did nothing to stop the words that tore up my throat on the back of a scream. “No! That isn’t what you’re supposed to say! You aren’t supposed to just—to just give in. You’re the Emperor, you’re my dad, you can’t—you can’t—you can’t die! You can’t, it—it’s not allowed. I won’t allow it.”

  The hardness in his smile softened and put lines in his cheeks. “I am so proud of you.”

  “Stop it!” My voice cracked thunder that rumbled in my soul. “Stop it, please, this doesn’t have to happen like this. It doesn’t have to be the only option, it doesn’t have to be dictated by a kid and your psychotic sister, they aren’t—they aren’t fate, they don’t know every single happenstance occasion and variation that can occur at any given moment, so—so—so stop!”

  “I’ll see you soon,” he sighed, and he pressed his fingers to my forehead with the lightning of his Sceptre blood coursing through him—

  ———

  This god sat cross-legged in my mind.

  A white tendril ocean in a sea of black nothing, a humanoid form of something that was far from human.

  Its hands bled puppet strings through another dimension. It stared straight through me. It, because I didn’t know what else to call it other than this god, because it wasn’t made of anything other than light and questionable ethics.

  If standing next to my mother and my father the words that came to mind to describe us were cinnamon, honey, moonlight, stardust, fossil, and salt pillar, then standing next to this god I was nothing but flesh and blood. I was skin, easily bruised and pierced and coloured by a sun that was frighteningly larger than anyone truly understood. I was flesh and muscle and a simple concoction of non-complex organs that functioned similarly to millions of others. I was bone, easily broken and shattered and crushed and splintered, built in a shape that did not intimidate or show strength or courage in any way that I wanted it to.

  This god was me—or, the version of me that Vulta and its Apotelesma saw. A complex, unsolvable puzzle of electric current in an amplified neural network. A jellyfish. It was a jellyfish lost in the current of the universal ocean. This god was nothing like me.

  I think we’re more alike than that, the voice murmured in the back of my mind.

  “We’ll only be alike when you’re human.” I sat opposite the white light form, my own white electricity dull and pale next to this god. “We’re made up of entirely different parts. We were born from different stars.”

  Do you know what the stars taste like?

  “I’m sure you’ll enlighten me,” I muttered.

  The puppet strings on the tips of this god’s fingers jolted with a brief flash of red, a red like rubies in the sunlight, like damp rose petals laden with dew drops.

  Raspberries. The elements that make up this galaxy taste like raspberries. Here. Try one. This god held out a hand separate from the two puppeteering, the atoms splitting with colourful bursts into a perfect third with a star held in the palm.

  A blue star, miniscule and impossible.

  A boiling surface glimmered against the palm as this god poured it like sand into mine, and closed my fingers around it until it was molded back into its proper shape. Round, with small flares that burst between the fingers. It had a gentle warmth. It was weightless. It rested in my hand with a quick tremor shaking through it.

  Go on. Press it between your teeth, let it drip nectar down your throat, it’s alright. This is the food of gods, after all. Every star swallowed is birthed anew.

  Another puppeteer string tw
itched with a pale blue light, and I didn’t imagine that something blue could taste like a red fruit but—I placed it between my teeth and it turned to liquid light that shone from my mouth.

  The taste that coated my tongue was sharp and sweet and horribly delicious. I felt it drip down my chin like it was an overripe fruit. Like a raspberry flavoured peach from the garden in Warren.

  I should warn you—the smell of the same elements that taste so sweet is intoxicating. Play carefully in your sandbox, star-eater.

  “I’m not like you,” I said, but my voice was wet with condensation and the sound was lost in the depths of the universal ocean. Saltwater filled the pores of my skin and the warmth of a star burned me up inside and I’m not like you was a weak defense when I’d just tasted the food of gods without a second thought. “I’m not. I’m not. I’m not.”

  If you’re not, then wake up. Wake up and act in futility, try to save your own life and die anyway like every other little soul on that Earth of yours. This god smiled.

  It didn’t have a mouth but I knew the feeling of the electric current, the patterns in the neural network that told the muscles of the face to pull upward in these two spots.

  “I don’t want to save my own life. I want to save all those little souls.” I felt that smile grow wider, the spark of interest rattling this god’s stardust brain.

  I didn’t know what this god was but I was unnerved and comfortable at the same time and it was the strangest feeling, to be so rooted with another being and yet to have my skin crawl in its presence.

  You felt you were akin to a god earlier—

  “And it was wrong. It was… it was wrong, that wasn’t—it wasn’t me who thought that, that was—that was letting you in. I thought we were the same. Briefly. Then, not now. We aren’t anything similar.” The aftertaste of a star was something metallic and hollow against my tongue.

  How will you win, if you’re so afraid to accept this for what it is?

  “What is it?”

  A death, maybe two, maybe three, maybe dozens of innocent lives lost. The start of a war. A revolution of unrest against a ruler ruled by another. Starving little souls, thirsty little souls, but… what’s one death if it means you save the rest?

 

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