In A Burning Room

by TS Ward

  Fitz’s brow was drawn low over his eye. A snarl tugged at his mouth. “You’re a real martyr, princess, but that’s all just fantasies and fairy-tales. Sooner or later you’re going to figure that out.”

  I shook my head slowly. “I will always stand on the side that I create for myself.”

  He started to say something, but the snap of a twig underfoot made us both freeze. I was so focused on proving my stance to the both of us that I forgot to pay attention to the drift of the static and the ripple in the air as two soldiers moved down the trail toward us.

  They held guns, flashlights flicked off at the sounds of a whispered argument through the trees. I watched Fitz lift his hands with his palms facing forward as a flashlight snapped on.

  “Turn around slowly,” a young boy’s voice commanded. “Put your hands up.”

  I copied Fitz, clamped my teeth together as I turned and met the boy’s eyes, and squinted as he ran the flashlight over my face. It was bright and blinding but the dark mark of those guns aimed straight at our chests made it hard to blink or breathe.

  The boy studied me hard, glanced to his partner, and then chuckled. “You know, I almost thought that was her, right? The Emperor’s precious little baby. You know how we were just joking about that?”

  “What was the joke?” I asked, smiling as politely as I could.

  “We’re the ones asking questions, here, ma’am—”

  “Don’t call me ma’am. My name is Soren. Beckett.”

  I raised an eyebrow at both of them, smiling for real when their expressions shifted from their exposition of power to sudden horror. They looked at each other briefly, and then dropped the guns to hang from straps at their sides, each shooting a hand up to salute.

  I crossed my arms. “What are your names? No titles, just names.”

  The boy stumbled over his own tongue. “I’m Mills and he’s Chance, ma’am, uh, I mean…”

  “Mills and Chance. Listen, Fitz and I are at the end of a very important mission and the longer it’s interrupted the more urgent it gets. I would love to stick around and hear the jokes you make at my expense but there are real issues in this world we have to attend to, if you don’t mind.” I looked between the wide eyes of the two of them, and offered a thankful nod when they stepped aside and let us pass.

  Fitz stayed close to me, as a soldier protecting the Emperor’s daughter would.

  I leaned in to whisper to him. “Did they lower the age limit for enlisting?”

  He laughed under his breath. “That’s what eighteen-year-olds look like when you’re nearly ten years older than them.”

  “I am not,” I hissed, and then paused. “Oh, hell. I am.”

  “If you think you're old, just imagine how I feel.”

  We slipped off the trail as soon as we were out of sight of the two boys, my pride slightly scathed at the idea of being so much older than I’d put any thought into over the past few years, but it washed off quick when our silent movements brought us to the edge of the green field and the fence that separated the wilds from the groomed sculpture.

  We stood in shadow, directly across from Manor.

  It sat an ominous thing, cast in darkness surrounded by lights that lit up the haze of a soft rain like the sun.

  The green was blinding and sharp and the opposite of the Wastes—the Wastes made of decay and vacancy, and this made of a synthetic that would never face the same fate. It was a bright scar under the stormy sky that hid a sliver of a moon, the glowing shadow of my childhood home perched high above Redbird.

  It was a mansion more than a manor, a castle more than a mansion, and to the girl who crept through the hedge maze and the garden to reach the forest at night, it was a prison.

  I saw my mother’s statue from there. I felt the fake grass that my heels dug into and the scream that tore up my throat and the hard metal grip of the Lumen’s hands wrapped around my arms in a vise I could not break. Seeing that statue now made me think of bird boned Roam.

  Those children were too young to be wielding guns in the dark like they were.

  Rabbit’s people were too thin and hungry to live in this Empire and not be angry.

  Soldiers were killing kids and stealing them from their families and if that wasn’t a self-explanatory wrong, I didn’t know how else to explain it. Percy was one of them. My little bear was one of them. I was one of them. Me and Arden and all the other Pluto Sceptres.

  And to think that the Emperor in his glass tower had the nerve to cry tears as fake as this grass over a woman who he had lied to—with her friend, to have a son, and then to tell his own daughter she was dead.

  And speaking of his daughter—

  His daughter stood at the edge of his reign with a rebellion at her back. Anger at what he had done to all those people and to her broiled like the storm that he created above the city. Redbird was no stranger to a bit of rain and thunder, something celebrated for the health of the farms, but this city that shone so brightly as a diamond in the rough of marble mountains had never seen what a Sceptre like the Emperor’s daughter was about to do.

  He liked his champagne so that was what it would rain.

  38

  Marble lay at my feet.

  My footsteps were cracks of thunder against it, the controlled chill in the air a precipitation of ice on my skin.

  The lobby was empty, as grand as anything my father would step foot in. It was pristine, with his favourite crystal chandeliers hung above between the balconies of the lower offices of government. I stood under them and stared up at the light refractions that mesmerised me as a child but only now served to make me dizzy.

  It was a kaleidoscope for a princess who didn’t know any better.

  The white marble was like ice compared to the sand and the dirt and the rocky forests, slick and shiny. It reflected the cold of the room back to me. Everything was always shiny and polished and gleaming and perfect.

  He had to have it that way. He had to have some way to distract from the cracks in his own façade.

  I felt the anger that spurred me forward turn to ice in my chest.

  “Are you sure he isn’t gone already?” Fitz muttered.

  He spun as he took in the lobby and the upper layers of balconies. They formed circles that grew tighter and tighter until there was nothing but the painted glass dome of a celestial sky. The stars were holes where hidden lights shone through and the night sky was a bruised watercolour. The chandelier hung from it in a crystal cascade.

  “Sounds pretty empty.”

  I shook my head. “No. He’s waiting for me.”

  I searched for the static that surrounded us, glossed over the sharp lines of the wires under the floors and hidden in the walls, and the wires that lit the bulbs in the chandeliers. The computers on the lobby desk were dormant squares.

  There was no movement—no humans, no Lumen, except: a small box in the wall high above, metal and quiet as two doors slid open and shut on a form. It was so far and faint I almost missed it, but there was no mistaking the Sceptre and his pulse of static.

  “Mercury is coming,” I whispered.

  Fitz set his hand on his pistol and followed my gaze as I chased the elevator down the bank. “What do you plan to do about that?”

  The elevator slowed and a ding chimed across the lobby with an echo.

  I didn’t have a plan. I made it all up as we went along. The simulations for my part were reactionary rather than offensive, all of my choices focused on the defense.

  I wasn’t a fighter, but each second that brought James closer made the lightning curled around my bones burn brighter and hotter. I held my breath as the doors slid open, and the dark mark of him stood languid behind them.

  He stepped out slowly, eyeing Fitz up and down. “You brought the wrong one, dear. It should have been the one with two good eyes, that way he’d really see it coming.”

  “See what?” I frowned, moving closer to the Talon soldier.

  “His death, clearly�
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  Fitz drew his pistol and aimed it over my shoulder, his eye trained on his target with steady precision.

  He didn’t hesitate. I felt his finger pull at the trigger, and then a burst of sound deafened my ear. It rang out across the lobby, high pitched and squealing in the aftermath. The small vibration rocked the crystal chandelier enough that a pale, twinkling chime rang out.

  I pressed my palm over my eardrum and worked my jaw.

  “And if you had both eyes, maybe you wouldn’t have missed,” James cooed, his voice coming from underwater, but I knew his heart pounded in his chest as much as mine.

  Heat brewed in him, and I saw the hem of his fire suit under the suit he wore—black on black on black. He was liquid fire behind the narrow-eyed look he cast at Fitz, and then he turned those smoke gray eyes on me as his tongue flicked out over his lips.

  “Did anyone tell you how he lost that eye? Because he didn’t shoot straight. He had the guts to have a steady hand when he shot his wife and daughter but not when he tried to shoot himself.”

  A knot twisted in my stomach at those words.

  In some way, I knew. In some way—but I didn’t want to believe it.

  I looked at Fitz and the vein that swelled in his temple, the redness that flooded his face that wasn’t from the sun in the Wastes, and the way he grit his teeth so hard against the pain of a memory.

  I couldn’t imagine it. I would do anything to get Percy away from Astra, away from the program, but to do that?

  It was horrific and sickening and I wanted to look at him like he was a good man for the sake of his nephew, but I couldn’t believe that it was a possibility.

  I couldn’t believe that anyone thought death was a far better fate than being a Sceptre.

  Their graves were marked in the wildflowers with Finn and Grey.

  Fitz wheezed out a pained noise between his teeth. “I didn’t. Shoot. My wife.”

  “Yes, you’re right!” James dared to laugh while he sat at the end of a pistol muzzle held in a tight grip that shook. “No, you didn’t, that was us. Well, I wasn’t a soldier then. Still, we shot her when she attacked our men. You shot the girl.”

  “She was protecting Sammy,” he growled, “And I—I was never going to see her again either way. You can’t be scared when you’re dead. You can’t be hurt when you’re dead.”

  “No! But you could be alive, she could have been so alive, Fitz Talon!” James shouted across the lobby.

  He laughed hysterically when Fitz took another shot that deafened me further. He was unscathed, and waved a hand to me with a grin spread across his face.

  His muffled voice felt like wet cotton in my ears. “Come along with me, dear. These kinds of things run in the blood. I would never hurt our children. Can you say the same about a Talon man?”

  Fitz snapped his gaze to me, that green eye muddy from rage and pain. “Jack ain’t like his uncle, princess. I can swear on that.”

  My heart was a pounding ache inside my chest and my throat was slick with the idea.

  He tried so hard. To protect Percy from that Lumen—he tried and he fought even though it was a goddamn Lumen and there was no way he could stop it, even risking the knife his brother gave him in its silicon neck.

  He wanted to start a war for the boy.

  But if we reached the end and his hands were still as steady on a gun as they were now, if we were backed into a corner and the only options that we had were insurmountable pain and fear or a gentle and free death—

  I stepped toward James, toward Mercury, into the heat that emanated from him and out of the chill of the marble and crystal lobby.

  Fitz swore, but all that was in my mind then was Jack on the ground in the middle of a chaotic market, surrounded by yellow flowers with Finn in his arms.

  He would give anything to bring Finn back from that same death. He would never do that to Percy.

  My hand wrapped around his as the heat of him melted the anger in my chest. I searched for the electricity in the room and in me in two simultaneous moves, like this god when it held out a star and still pulled the strings.

  That star blossomed raspberry bursts against the back of my throat, sent sparks through the wires of the chandeliers until it was too much and they sparked with flame in the bulbs.

  I stepped around James with his hand held tight in mine, traced the lines of his lightning scars with sparks of white light that burned in a different way than his fire did.

  I remembered how it felt to be touched by him, how it sickened me like poison, how his hands and his knuckles and his boot in my ribs felt, the heat and the cold simultaneously, the fear and constant worry that the door to my dark room would open and he would be on the other side and I wouldn’t have the strength left to run sparks through him—

  “What are you doing?” He choked against the pain of it all.

  I caught Fitz’s eye over his shoulder and jerked my chin toward the elevator. He didn’t need a second hint.

  My voice was a whisper in the Sceptre’s ear. “You were never in control. It was all a trick. It was all a spark inside your own head. None of it happened. You just had to believe it did.”

  “No,” he growled through clenched teeth.

  A sharp twinkling sound cascaded down from above, and in the same moment, I gathered the static through the bones in my arms and forced my hands to his chest.

  White light burst nuclear bright in the air.

  It wasn’t a lightning strike. It was the aether of a storm gathered all at once with the strength of a swallowed star collapsing. He landed hard against the marble, slid across it, curled on his side under the shadow of the chandelier that fell over him.

  It didn’t touch him, but the crystals shattered and scattered like a strange snow across the lobby floor.

  I turned to Fitz, breathing hard against ribs turned to glass. “Get in the elevator.”

  He nodded, pressed a hand to the call button, while his other still gripped the pistol at his side. I followed him into the small white cube, pressed a finger to the number that would bring us to the floor where my father’s office was.

  The button lit up with a yellow glow, and the doors slid shut with a casual ding.

  The ride was long enough to make the silence and the small space awkward. I didn’t know what to say, or if I should say anything at all, but the silence was a heavy weight that pulled down on me worse than the force of gravity this elevator left on our shoulders.

  “I know Jack would never hurt Percy, but for a moment I doubted it, because I am absolutely certain that Elise thought the same of you.”

  “You hurt him,” Fitz muttered, bristling against my words.

  I wasn’t sure if he meant my little bear or his nephew, but either way he wasn’t wrong, and all I could do was offer a curt nod. I hurt Percy on the Sailer, because I had been dreaming about James and the dark room, and I hurt Jack when I married him and left, not once but twice.

  I remembered that day. The elevator was coming to a stop, but in the time between now and then I remembered every second, and I swallowed it down and saved it for another time when I could afford to feel an ounce of love and kindness.

  It was all I could do not to sink to the floor and wrap my hands tight around that memory and watch it like a dream until all of this was over, to find the uncontrollable happiness that flooded me—

  The elevator doors dinged open.

  I held a hand out to Fitz to stop him from walking out, scanning the floor for a glimpse of my father. It was empty. It was empty, but an erratic coil of energy on the top floor paced and stirred up the atmosphere.

  “Ah,” I murmured, pressed the last button, and stepped back as the doors shut. “A meeting at a long table.”

  I left my heart on his office floor as we rose again, and again the doors dinged open.

  I left my breath back at the remains of a farm that had been bright and vibrant on the lips of a man who I wanted nothing more than to see again.

/>   I left my guts shattered on the floor of the lobby with the crystal chandelier and a frayed fire of a man who I wished wouldn’t get up. But he did, and he pressed the call button to the elevator that sent a signal all the way up to the white box we stood in.

  It wasn’t a dark room, but it was close enough.

  The room that we stepped out into wasn’t the Mirror Hall, but it was close enough.

  I breathed in as we left the white room and felt the entirety of the electric current fill my bones to replace what had damaged Mercury, to cut him off from a quick recovery and force him to take every step of the stairs from the ground up.

  It sparked in me, white light on my skin, as if I were an exquisite art piece in a room made of glass and marble.

  Marble that was as white and cold as slick glacial ice, and my father the black shadow at the end of the sea that the long glass table made. An orca, a killer whale, a predator in the arctic.

  We were reflected against the darkness outside the windows, turned to mirror by the night, and it was like we were back where we started. Not the Embassy, but Redbird.

  “What was the point of it?” I walked to the opposite end of the table and took my place.

  “The point was to get you here exactly as you are,” he smiled. It was a wavering thing that struggled to come and failed to stay. “There’s a plan in motion and it has been since that day, when Pilot’s ability was revealed to us. Astra has tried to steer it one way and I have tried to steer it the other. How are you feeling?”

  I pressed my hands to the edge of the glass and forced a short laugh. “I’ve left pieces of myself in places I didn’t expect.”

  My father was a strange sort of creature to me now—he sat like an Emperor, had the framing of one, and a face that was too much like Pilot for anyone to deny his ancestry now. But there was Percy in him, too, and that filled the hollowness inside my chest with frantic butterflies. The blue eyes were so similar, and the curve of the brow, and I imagined Percy growing to look a little more like him and a little more like Pilot, but, for all of that, they were hardly alike at all.