Wildefire

by Karsten Knight

  “But we can,” Ashline said, and felt a bit odd using the term “we,” as if she belonged to some sort of club.

  “Does it make it any better when you see who’s holding the stick that’s poking you through the bars of the cage?” Eve shook her head. “Take right now, for instance.

  Are they wandering around your school because they’re just curious about human life? Or are they just mulling around because they smell deity nearby and they want to get into your head?”

  The word “deity” echoed within Ashline’s brain as if she’d inserted her head into the clock tower bell right as it was being rung. “So we are gods, then.”

  Eve raised her eyebrows twice. “Cool, ain’t it?”

  “Then why are we—”

  “Then why are we stuck in teenage bodies, forced to go through puberty and endure the embarrassment of high school just like everyone else?” Eve finished for her.

  “The first of many questions.”

  “Because the gods aren’t like we’ve been told they 227

  are,” Eve said, and Ashline could all but hear her sister’s soul buzzing. “Not some malevolent immortal beings sitting on the top of a mountain, or ruling the earth from the clouds. We’re flesh and blood and bone and breath and laughter and pain, just like everyone else. . . . Only, unlike everyone else, we’re reborn every century or so with no memory of the last time and forced to live it all over again from scratch. We’re not immortal in the sense that we can’t die; just immortal in the sense that we end up back here.”

  “We’re reincarnated . . . as ourselves,” Ash said, trying to piece it all together.

  “Ash, we’ve been here before!” Eve grabbed her sister’s arm excitedly. “Many times—thrown onto the grid-dle and then tossed back into the pancake mix, over and over again. Who knows the things we’ve seen in all our years, all our centuries. The cities rising, the cities falling.

  Distant lands, our lovers, our wars . . .”

  Ash closed her eyes, probing the recesses of her mind for memories waiting to be unlocked, of faraway shores and old friends.

  “But something is wrong,” Ash said.

  Eve gave a her a sideways glance, up and down. “You mean besides the mismatched pajama set you’re wearing now?”

  “Good to see that you’re still a brand snob even on this side of mortality.”

  “If I’m going to be a goddess,” Eve said, “there’s no 228

  reason I shouldn’t look like one too.” She winked.

  Despite the toxic wasteland of history between them, Ash couldn’t help but laugh. “So nothing’s up? You’re just here on a social visit, or scoping out new schools?”

  Ash frowned. “You’re not . . . you’re not planning to enroll here, are you?”

  “Trade in world travels for a calculus textbook?” Eve rolled her eyes. “I’m just here to see my baby sister. Just like last time.” Eve bit her lip as if the last four words would take her someplace she didn’t want to go.

  Just like last time.

  “Okay, spill.” Ash crossed her arms. “We share the same DNA, Eve. I know exactly when you’re spraying on bullshit and pretending it’s perfume.”

  Eve looked back out over the quad; four of the Cloak had disappeared, off into the woods maybe. Two of them still lurked outside the athletic complex. “I know I’ve made mistakes along the way, Ash, but you don’t always have to believe the worst.”

  But Ashline refused to be suckered. “Stuff that hurt puppy look into your Coach bag, and just tell me what the hell is going on.”

  Eve huffed. “You want the truth, Ash? We’re all going to die.”

  “Yeah, you just said that. From the sound of it, we’ve died a whole lot.”

  “Well, this time we aren’t coming back,” Eve blurted out, as if a water main inside her had burst.

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  A boreal cold filled Ash, like a permafrost had formed beneath her skin. “What?”

  Eve slipped both hands through her tussled hair. “For the last few generations, fewer and fewer of us have been making the return each time. At first it was only a few . .

  . and then entire pantheons disappeared, lost somewhere in the limbo of time. And now we’re all convinced that the Cloak have somehow found a way to interfere with our regeneration.”

  “You keep saying ‘we,’” Ash said. “And you certainly aren’t referring to you and me.”

  “When I was traveling, searching for other people like us,” Eve explained, “I met a group of gods living up in Vancouver. They were led by some sort of divine being called Blink. Wears a mask. Creepy as hell. No one could explain to me what he was, or how they’d found him, only that he wasn’t like us, or humans, or even the Cloak.

  He was . . . something else. He scared the shit out of me at first, but in a time when I didn’t know who to trust, Blink was the first to give me answers.”

  “So you’ve been taking orders from this Blink, and you don’t even know what he is?” Ashline asked. But even then she was thinking back thirty-six hours to when she’d been standing on the beach, taking orders from a scroll that had been given to her by a blind girl, who had in turn dictated the message from a strange man that had shown up on her porch.

  “We’re all just marionettes, Ashline,” Eve said softly.

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  “Dangling, dancing, waiting. You can pretend like you pull your own strings, but in the end your only hope is that you’ve landed in the hands of someone who knows what the hell they’re doing.”

  “No one pulls my strings,” Ashline whispered.

  Eve ignored her. “I was in San Diego last week, trying to track down a Celtic goddess who was on the run.

  She caught me by surprise with a golf club and knocked me out cold. A freaking river goddess and she decides to go Sopranos on me with a nine iron. Didn’t wake up for hours. But while I was out, I had a vision. A vision of a girl on a boat, being transported to some tropical coast. A vision of a girl who looks just like you and me.”

  Ash frowned. “Was she about this high”—she spread her arms apart—“and as deadly as she is soft-spoken?”

  “So you’ve seen the visions too, then!” Eve squeezed Ashline’s hand.

  “Who is she?”

  “If I had to take a guess,” Eve replied, “I’d say we’re seeing echoes from the last time we were here. Some interested parties must have kidnapped us for their experiments. . . . Blink is under the impression that lodged somewhere in those echoes is the answer to how we can restore the cycle—to how we can live forever again.”

  “And you believe him,” Ashline said.

  “You’re damn right I do!” Eve shouted, loud enough that Ash actually glanced far across the quad toward the faculty residence. “It’s a cosmic joke, that we live all of 231

  these lives but get to retain none of it. None of it!” Her finger darted toward the blue glow bleeding softly through the windows of the athletic complex. “I’m sure they’re somehow to blame for this. I want them dead!” She slammed her fist down on the roof, and Ashline jumped to her feet as a shock zapped her through the seat of her pajamas.

  “Lower your voice!” Ash hissed.

  Eve clambered to her feet. “Come with me, Ash. I know I blew it when I came to Westchester last year, but that’s why I’m here—to ask you the right way. Come with me. Best-case scenario, we beat the system and we get to roam the earth the way we were supposed to. Worst-case, you get to spend some time with your older sister, and in style. Not drowning in boredom with your nose in a calculus book.”

  She actually means it this time, Ashline thought. And so she was hopeful when she replied, “I have a better idea.

  Let me finish out the rest of this school year—there’s barely a month left—and then we’ll have the entire summer to hash this thing out.”

  Eve paused. “You mean in Westchester.”

  “They miss you.” If only you could see Mom’s face.

  “This isn’t like electi
ve surgery, Ash. You don’t just schedule it for when it’s more convenient for you. Eternity doesn’t wait until after finals.”

  “What about tennis season?” Ashline joked.

  Eve didn’t laugh, but instead toed up against the 232

  edge of the roof. “There’s a fiery tide coming, and there’ll come a time when you’re going to have to decide where you stand. Do you want to be just a flicker in history? Or will you stand up and be a torch in the tide? So you can wall yourself here in your snow globe a little longer and pretend like your dances and tennis matches and bonfires are the sun around which your world revolves.” She tapped her head. “But this time you can trust that I’m not going to abandon you. I’ll be seeing you, Ashline,”

  she said.

  And she stepped off the roof.

  Ashline nearly fell off herself as she stumbled to the edge to look down. A sudden upward gust spiked up from the earth, so hard that it hit Ashline like an upper-cut beneath her chin. By the time she was able to regain her bearings, Eve had somehow survived the three-story fall unscathed and was already dashing across the quad toward the main gates.

  At precisely the moment when Eve passed between the stone pillars, the building’s heating unit on the roof grumbled on.

  By the time the lights in the faculty residence flashed back to life, Ash was halfway to the door. She flung it open with every intention of making a stealthy escape back to the girls’ dormitory.

  The siren exploded, wailing into the silent night.

  Startled by the noise, Ash lost her footing and pitched down the stairs. The edges of each and every step 233

  hammered into her unforgiving flesh—pajamas served as poor armor—and by the time she rolled beneath the red cord roping off the stairwell, she felt like a human bruise.

  Remarkably, Ash landed in a half-crouch and immediately barreled down the hallway. Momentum nearly carried her past the stairwell, but she grabbed hold of the door frame and hurled herself down the stairs. When she hit the last flight, she grabbed hold of the railing and hurdled over, dropping the remaining eight feet to the landing below.

  The victory of a clean escape was clenched in her hands as she shoved through the front doors of the academic building and into the night. . . .

  . . . Right into the open arms of disappointment. For the second time in less than a week, she ran straight into Headmistress Riley, decked out in a bathrobe, slippers, and an expression that screamed ten shades of displeased.

  The headmistress cinched her bathrobe tighter around her waist. Her arms wriggled across her chest.

  Ash, who had frozen midstep, lowered her dangling foot to the ground. She clapped her hands together twice, as if she were ridding her palms of extra dirt. “Good news,” she said. “I got the generator up and running, and the security system still works. Score!”

  Ashline didn’t have very long at all to wait in the headmistress’s foyer. She had barely sat down when the 234

  receptionist, a round-faced girl who looked barely out of high school herself, nodded toward the door. “She’ll see you now.”

  On her way toward the office, Ashline leaned over the receptionist’s desk. “Quick question—are there any prizes for having two visits to the headmistress’s office in one week? Like you hang a monogrammed coffee mug on the wall for me?”

  The girl glanced at the headmistress’s door, before she allowed a slight smile to break across her face. “Like a frequent flyer program?”

  “Ms. Wilde,” Headmistress Riley’s voice boomed from the office.

  Apparently patience was not a virtue today.

  Ashline grimaced. “On second thought cancel the mug.” She tapped twice on the receptionist’s desk. “And let the DMV know that I’ve changed my mind. I would like to be an organ donor.”

  “Good luck,” the receptionist mouthed.

  The headmistress was hunched over the pristine chestnut credenza in the back of her office. When she turned around, she held an electric teakettle, steaming faintly like a smoking gun, and gestured to the black leather chair, which Ashline’s butt was becoming all too familiar with. “Do you drink tea?”

  “Black tea usually,” she said, and complacently dropped down into the seat of doom.

  “You’re in luck.” Headmistress Riley placed a teacup 235

  in front of Ashline and filled it nearly to the brim. Then she removed a tea bag from a wooden box and dipped it ceremoniously into the half-boiled water.

  For a few minutes they steeped their tea without a word. Ash opened her mouth to say something at one point, but the headmistress, sensing an apology perched on Ashline’s lips, merely held up her hand to prolong the silence. At last, when Ash herself felt ready to boil over, the headmistress took a cautious sip of her tea, and her eyes fluttered closed peacefully. When they opened again, the pupils staring across at Ashline were alert and shrewd, but not unforgiving.

  “The biggest mistake you can make,” the headmistress said slowly, “when it comes to tea, is not steeping long enough. It’s a matter of poaching the most flavor, of realizing potential. Pull the bag too soon, and you’ve merely burned your tongue with a cup of bitter water.”

  Ash took a tentative sip of her own tea, which was still hot enough to burn her mouth, and the soapy taste reminded her why she rarely went out of her way to drink tea. “Do I sense a metaphor for students somewhere in there? Or maybe life in general?”

  The headmistress sniffed, and with a half-smile replied, “Sometimes a cup of tea is just a cup of tea.” She set down her cup. “In any case I need the caffeine after last night.”

  Ashline bowed her head. So this was going to be exe-cution by guilt-trip. “I’m sorry, Headmistress.”

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  Headmistress Riley waved her hand and leaned her weight back into the chair. “It wasn’t you who woke me up—although don’t think for one second that students sidestepping curfew and breaking into prohibited, dangerous areas of campus is something I enjoy dealing with at three a.m. But no, I was lying in bed sleepless when the power went out, and if I hadn’t gone for a late-night round with my flashlight, you probably would have made it back to your bed unnoticed.”

  “Why the insomnia? Something troubling you?” Ash blurted out, letting her inner psychologist take control before she remembered that she was talking to a school administrator. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

  “This isn’t a firing squad,” the Headmistress interrupted her. “And you don’t need to apologize for taking an interest. To answer your question, it’s nothing specific. I’ve been experiencing a general feeling of unease lately. The wind feels different, the rhythm of the school feels different. This tea tastes different. It’s sort of like when you’re standing in the water with your back to the ocean and you feel the tide retract around your feet as a wave swells behind you.”

  Ashline blinked. “I think that’s the most real answer I’ve ever gotten from an adult who wasn’t my mom.”

  “I don’t know how we can expect our students to evolve into adults if we speak to you like you’re children,”

  the headmistress replied, with the weight of thirty years on her tongue. “In fact, that’s why I invited you here 237

  this morning. Not to punish you. Not to take you out of third-period French, though I’m sure that came as some relief to you. Just to talk.”

  “Well, that’s merciful.” Ash took another sip of her tea. “I thought you were going to make me step into the orange jumper again and do some forest cleanup.”

  Although that did have its perks the last time.

  “Ashline, I had trouble getting to sleep last night after I escorted you back to the girls’ residence. Not just because of my insomnia, but because at first I couldn’t get your motives to line up. We catch Jimmy Brennan trying to break onto the roof with a bong, that makes sense to me. Then we find Antoine Devers with a crowbar and a couple of bottle rockets—fire hazard, but I get it.

  You, on the other hand . . .”r />
  “Make absolutely no sense?” Ashline finished for her.

  “Not at first.” The headmistress clasped her hands on the desk between them. “Not until I remembered Lizzie Jacobs.”

  Ashline’s teacup tilted; hot tea spilled onto her lap.

  She yelped as it soaked through her jeans and burned her leg, but she managed a shrill, “Excuse me?”

  “Come on, Ashline. I was willing to avoid the touchy subjects on Friday, but it’s time to get real. A girl died on the roof where the two of you were having an argument, and eight months later our generator goes down during an electrical storm and you head up to the roof of the academic building.”

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  She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. “Are you trying to say that I went up to that roof because I have a death wish?”

  “No,” the headmistress said emphatically, but handed her a handkerchief to clean up the spilled tea. “This isn’t a discussion about suicide. But I have to wonder if there’s some residual guilt you thought you’d shoveled dirt over by going to a prep school on the other side of the country, and it won’t stay dead. So on a whim, on a sleepless night, you rashly decided to tempt fate.”

  Ashline dabbed frantically at the tea on her lap, which was causing her even more discomfort now that it was cooling. “With all due respect, Headmistress, isn’t wandering around a roof hoping to get struck by lightning the same as having a death wish?”

  “There are two types of people in this world, Ashline,”

  the headmistress said. “Those of us who fear what we cannot control, who sit in the driver’s seat of life and take charge of our own fates. And then there are those who fear choice, those so burdened by the mistakes that they’ve made that they seek solace in what they cannot control, knowing that no matter the outcome, at least it wasn’t their fault. I challenge you to figure out which one you are.”

  Her mind replayed what Eve had said the night before. Was she pulling her own strings? Or was she just a marionette in the hands of somebody else? “I’d be lying if I said I haven’t screwed up a lot in my life. I’d be lying 239

  if I said I don’t see Lizzie Jacobs in my dreams.” She took a deep breath, because between exhaustion and the bad memories the headmistress was dredging up, she was swaying dangerously over the precipice of tears. “But some things you have to face alone, so I’ll explain last night to you in the most honest way I can right now. I woke up. I followed my past onto that roof. I confronted Lizzie Jacobs’s killer. And then I came down with the prayer that my sleep would be dreamless. End of story.”