The Heart of the Phoenix

by Brian Knight

  Katie predictably was the only one with the answer.

  “The fifth state of matter is called the Bose-Einstein Condensate.”

  “The who whaty-what?” Zoe frowned at Katie as if she’d started speaking in Portuguese. “You’re making stuff up.”

  “She is not,” Erasmus said, flashing them all with his uncannily wide grin.

  Katie stuck her tongue out at Zoe.

  “A Bose-Einstein Condensate is a dilute gas of bosons created in a lab and cooled to almost absolute zero,” Erasmus explained. “A similar state of matter exists in the unformed space.”

  “What’s with the science lesson anyway?” Ellen had started losing interest after her first wrong answer.

  Flanna had no idea what they were talking about. She prompted Penny’s memories for anything to do with science, but got only a surly grunt of dismissal. Apparently Penny wasn’t as sciencey as Katie either.

  She had hoped Penny’s memories would be better organized in her own head by now, but she still had to chase them down more often than not.

  “Because,” Erasmus said, some of the excitement leaving his voice, “when you girls start shooting magical bolts, fireballs, and lightning everywhere, when you change the weather and make trees grow an inch a minute, the energy you’re using doesn’t come from nowhere.”

  “It’s an Albert Frankenstein Condor,” Zoe said.

  Ellen started giggling.

  “I’m ashamed to know you,” Katie said.

  Flanna waited patiently for the point of the lesson.

  “Not exactly,” Erasmus said. “Energy is liberated from matter, and matter is condensed energy. My theory is that magical energy is a liberated form of that fifth state of matter.”

  “Fascinating,” Zoe said, and yawned.

  Erasmus sighed.

  “Shut up and get your book,” he said. “I’ll just sit and spin for a while.”

  They all turned to stare at Flanna.

  “What?”

  “Call Rocky,” Katie snapped. “He has the key.”

  Flanna was lost for a moment, then remembered Penny’s homunculus, and the key Penny gave to her little gray man for safe keeping.

  “Rocky,” Flanna called out, nervous about how he would react when he showed up. Would he know she wasn’t Penny?

  They waited for several seconds, then Zoe called out to him as well. When minutes passed without Rocky showing up they turned to Flanna again.

  “Well?” Zoe’s tone, her attitude since she’d come home after her lunch out with her parents and Susan, was beginning to make Flanna angry.

  “Well what?” Flanna snapped. “He’s not coming.”

  “Forget this,” Katie said, throwing the pair of them a dirty look as she retrieved the old chest they kept their book locked up in from its hiding place in the burnt out hollow of the old ash tree.

  “Are you sure this is wise?” Erasmus paused his spinning to watch Katie take aim at the box with her wand.

  Instead of responding, she blasted the brass lock on the front of the box. Her spell ricocheted off and smacked the cliff face above the mouth of Ronan’s cave.

  “Maybe we should just call it a night,” Ellen said in a carefully neutral tone.

  Grumbles of agreement followed, and they went their separate ways.

  As Flanna stepped back through the door and into her bedroom, she heard Ellen say, “I wonder where Rocky is?”

  * * *

  Penny thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep on the hard floor of the cell, but exhaustion won out and she began her first full night as a prisoner with a strange, lucid dream. Not of her sister this time, but of a strange place of stone walls, high ceilinged rooms, and tight corridors where she was sure no human would fit. In the dream, she was not human, but something else.

  She watched the floor as she ran, saw oversized gray feet slap against the stone and oversized gray hands swinging from stick thin gray arms.

  She’d seen feet and hands like that before.

  She was a homunculus.

  She heard voices but didn’t understand the words they were speaking. She wondered if she’d lost the ability to understand English when she’d switched bodies, then decided that probably wasn’t the problem. The problem was that everyone in this place spoke Pig Latin, or something like that.

  She saw the tunnel’s end just ahead, and slowed. It opened into a larger corridor with humans in black robes, humans in flowing red cloaks, humans in soiled tunics carrying slop buckets and mops, baskets of bread and carafes of something that smelled like spoiled apples.

  Penny poked her head out of the tunnel and waited until the hallway was empty before darting out and across the hall to another of the narrow tunnels used by the citadel’s domestic homunculi.

  It was a close call, she could hear more people approaching as she ducked into the new tunnel. She had no idea where it led; she had no idea where she was trying to go, only knew she needed to find someone. She had been searching for a day now, and was no closer to finding the one she was looking for. The girl... the red girl.

  She had seen other homunculi in the big hallways and rooms with the humans, but it wasn’t safe for her because...

  She couldn’t remember why, but she knew it wasn’t safe for her. If she was seen, if she was found, she would be killed, and would never find her...

  Penny... my Penny.

  This corridor was shorter, and ended in a narrow vertical shaft with iron pegs driven into the stone for climbing. She went down until she found solid stone beneath her feet again, found herself in the center of a hub, a half dozen tunnels radiating out from the spot where she stood. Not knowing which way she should go, she picked one at random and just went.

  What a strange dream, Penny thought.

  She exited the tunnel into a steam-filled chamber, a bathing room with pools of hot water, and stepped aside as another homunculus sprinted for the tunnel with a basket of wet towels and clothing. It looked into her eyes for a moment, its brown eyes not really seeing her, then passed, too busy with its work to take note of the one difference between them.

  The eyes, she remembered. The difference was her eyes.

  She approached one of the empty, still pools of water, and gazed down at its mirror surface, into a gray face with bright green eyes.

  * * *

  Penny jolted awake, desperately holding on to the remnants of the dream before they could fade. Like the dreams of her sister, they didn’t.

  She had been seeing through the familiar green eyes of Rocky, and she thought she knew what she was seeing.

  The citadel above their dark cell.

  Rocky had followed her to this world somehow, and he was looking for her.

  Rocky was here.

  Chapter 11

  Faces in Crystal

  Flanna was up with the sun and dressed while Zoe was still tangled in her sheets and snoring. She watched the driveway through the window above her bed until she saw Susan climb into her van and drive away, and then descended into the house. She didn’t like being here, but if she had to suffer the place, she preferred to do it alone when possible.

  She didn’t feel comfortable immersing herself in the Conjuring Glass with Zoe there, and with nothing else to do but wait, Flanna decided to have a closer look at that silver tree and the crystal spheres.

  She closed the living room curtains before drawing her wand, and spent the next half hour trying to tease the secret from the smiling faces trapped in the crystals, but they had no discernible magical properties. They weren’t magical relics, touching them with tips of her fingers or wand revealed nothing, and simply holding them was equally useless, but when she held the crystal with her mother’s smiling face and closed her eyes, reaching out to it with her mind, there was a flash of an image, something that lasted barely more than a moment.

  Her mother, she thought it was her mother, but it was hard to be sure when her aunt wore an identical face, squeezing a man’s hand. The man had red
hair, and a smooth, unscarred face; her father, almost certainly, and before whatever fight or accident that had left its mark on him.

  A sharp pain shot through her head from temple to temple, breaking her concentration and shattering the vision.

  Is it a memory?

  She thought it might be, though it made little sense to her that her mother and the Phoenix Girls would choose to use such receptacles to contain mere memories. If the preserved memories were important enough to make copies of, surely they would have chosen something less breakable. If Flanna remembered the nature of preserved memories correctly, no one except for the memory’s owners would be able to recall them from their objects, and if the crystals were somehow broken, those preserved memories would swiftly escape and dissipate like fog in a breeze.

  Flanna replaced her mother’s crystal on the tree and decided to go outside onto the porch, to sit alone and in silence, to enjoy the day.

  She had the morning to herself for approximately another hour before Zoe’s mother and father came around from the side of the house where they parked their sleeper cab.

  “Good morning, Penny.” Reggie had a voice as large as he was. “Is my daughter still sleeping?”

  Flanna gave a curt nod, not trusting herself to speak with this man. She was aware from Penny’s memories that Zoe’s frighteningly large father was a shaman of some kind. She wasn’t aware of his powers or limitations, and she didn’t want the opportunity to learn them first hand.

  Dana whispered something that might have been hello sweetie.

  Reggie stopped and closed his eyes. He swayed for a moment, as if temporarily losing his balance, and then opened his eyes again. They were rolled up to the whites. His lips moved, and then he smiled.

  Upstairs, Zoe screamed.

  “Dad, don’t do that!”

  Reggie’s eyes returned to normal, and he grinned down at Flanna.

  “She’s awake now. Come in and I’ll make breakfast.”

  Trying to hide her amazement, Flanna nodded. She waited until both were inside before rising to join them.

  He just stepped out of his body, without spells or preparation, for nothing more serious than a joke.

  She hoped this man would be well away from this town when her family arrived.

  She met Zoe in the hallway, and they stopped to regard each other for a moment. Zoe’s eyes were narrowed slightly. She looked confused, distrustful.

  Flanna wanted to speak, to put her at ease, but didn’t know what to say. Her hand rose unconsciously to the back of her neck, and the magical tattoo of her family sigil covered by a fall of thick red hair.

  “Are you okay, Penny?”

  “I’m fine,” Flanna forced a smile. “Why?”

  Zoe shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. You just haven’t been yourself the past couple of days.”

  She needs to go too, Flanna decided. I may be able to fool the other girls for a while, but not Zoe.

  As if she’d caught a whiff of Flanna’s thoughts, Zoe gave her another quick furtive glance as she walked past her and into the kitchen.

  * * *

  Torin awoke to find Penny sitting next to him, staring down at him. He’d flinched away from her in reflex, pulled himself into a sitting position against the wall, and asked her what she was doing hovering above him while he was trying to sleep.

  “He’s here,” Penny whispered.

  Torin stared at her for a long, silent moment, not understanding.

  “What do you mean, he’s here?” Torin swept a tangle of hair out of his face and scratched his chin through the long, unkempt beard. “Who’s here?”

  Penny looked around, as if there might be spies lurking in the far dark corners of the cell, and when she was certain it was just them and Ronan still sleeping a few feet away, she leaned close and whispered in his ear.

  “Rocky, my homunculus.” When he didn’t respond, she elaborated. “The gray man Ronan gave me for my birthday.”

  “I know what a homunculus is,” Torin said. “Why do you think yours is here?”

  Penny described the dream she’d awoken from that morning, pausing only when Ronan awoke and stood behind her. She finished with her mad dash down the tiny little corridor that ended in the big washroom. Torin nodded as she described the halls and rooms she’d seen through Rocky’s eyes, and when she finished talking, he looked over her shoulder at Ronan, and smiled.

  “This could be very good, Ronan.” He turned back to Penny. “You look like you could use a little more sleep, Little Red.”

  “I’m not tired,” Penny said. “I just woke up.”

  “I think we can get her back to sleep with some meditation,” Ronan said, as if Penny hadn’t spoken.

  “Good,” Torin said, rising with a grunt of effort and stretching his morning lethargy away. “Let’s start right away. I bet she could get a nap in before the food arrives.”

  “Why are you so determined for me to take a nap,” Penny said, beginning to feel very irritated.

  “Because you just might be able to dream us out of here,” Torin said.

  * * *

  Flanna ate quickly and left the kitchen while Zoe was still in full flow with her parents about her last year and a half in Dogwood, carefully navigating around the magical mayhem she’d gotten up to with her friends. She needed to get away from them before she exploded with pure irritation. Flanna had never had friends her own age at home, she had no cousins or siblings her own age in the citadel, and her father said it wasn’t proper for her to mix with the common people. She spent most of her time alone, or in studies with her tutors. She was having trouble relating to Penny’s friends, especially Zoe, and Zoe’s father scared her a little.

  She sensed that if things were different, if she’d grown up here with Zoe, or if Zoe had grown up in the citadel, they could have been friends, but she was a Phoenix Girl, and worse, had taken a part in Penny’s life that should have been Flanna’s.

  She was on her way to the back door, when she noticed the basement door at the far end of the utility room. She stopped and considered the door for a moment, waiting for any of Penny’s shared memories of the room behind the door to awaken in her. A short moment later they did, and she recalled the dark and dusty basement with mortar and stone walls, and floorboards that creaked and bent beneath her feet.

  She hadn’t bothered with the basement in her search on the house the day before. Penny’s ugly, twisted wand was hidden in the attic bedroom, but Flanna decided to have a look anyway. The dark and quiet appealed to her. Even if she couldn’t do a proper search just yet, she could hide herself away for a while.

  She found the light switch—she was amazed by how quickly she was growing used to the oddity of electricity—and flipped it. A single dangling bulb flickered to life at the bottom of the steps, and she descended.

  Flanna gave the shelves of dusty boxes and crates a quick inspection, not bothering to look through more than a few on the lowest shelves. She found nothing to interest her, and moved on. There was a large and sinister looking machine hanging from one corner of the ceiling, a machine that blew hot air into the rooms above when it got cold, and a larger machine crouched in the corner beneath it, a coal burning furnace of the sort that was more familiar to her. There were similar machines in the citadel where she’d grown up. They were used to boil water and supply steam through pipes in the stone walls. The steam helped warm the always-cold interior of the citadel, but the pipes also delivered it to different rooms for different purposes. The kitchen used steam to heat water and to cook food, the bathing rooms used it to heat deep pools of water fed by natural springs, and the washroom to clean clothing and linens.

  She had heard that the Fuilrix’s former servant and tutor, Erasmus Pi, had once built an engine to convert steam power to electricity, but after testing it only once, declared it unsafe and pulled out the fuses so it could not be restarted. Flanna did not know what a fuse was and did not care, but she wished the electricity machine had worked. Sh
e was beginning to understand how useful that intangible, and by all accounts dangerous, substance was.

  Almost as good as magic.

  The old furnace in Penny’s basement was cold and long unused, Flanna suspected, and there were none of the pipes and wheels she’d seen attached to the furnaces in her home. She knelt and tugged at the handle, stiff with years of dust and grime, and finally turned it. The door swung open, but there was nothing worth seeing inside so she closed it. Standing, she saw an odd warping of the wall in front of her. This was the only wall not made of stone down here, but of large flat slabs that looked like wood, but weren’t.

  Plastic, she thought, running her fingers over it, or something like it. Plastic was another oddity of this world, and it was everywhere. It seemed like almost everything here was made of it. She felt a seam between two sheets of the artificial wood paneling, and dug her fingers into the gap. When she pried one of them swung away with a groan of rusted hidden hinges, and she found another room, hidden for years by the smell of the stale air and thick blankets of cobwebs.

  Inside was a treasure trove of artifacts from the Phoenix Girls’ past, a secret apparently lost to the current generation. If Penny had known about this room, then Flanna would have known, and she didn’t think anybody had set foot inside it for many years.

  There was an assortment of old robes, gowns, cloaks, masks, and boots. They looked ceremonial, but she didn’t think they were magical in any way. A table almost overflowing with wands, a few walking sticks and staffs that she thought also functioned as wands, and other assorted tools were of more interest.

  She found one wand barely the length of her hand, tiny and plain with a clear crystal point, and picked it up. She tried a simple spell, lighting its tip to better see to the corners of this secret room, and smiled. It wasn’t a strong wand, she certainly wouldn’t want to have to fight with it, but it would be adequate for most simple magic.

  Next she found an assortment of old brooms and a large moth-eaten carpet rolled up against the wall, flying implements maybe, but of no use to her or anyone else. The casters these artifacts belonged to were most likely all long dead, and the artifacts would work for no one else.