Scorched Earth

by Randall Pine

  “It’s building a person!” he said, his voice tight with the thrill of a new magic.

  “I think it’s building the person who belongs to the footprint,” Virgil said.

  They watched as the ripple fern wove together its shoots and stalks, forming the shape of a woman, fingers and eyelashes and ears and all. It was like watching an invisible artist form a remarkably lifelike human sculpture in fast-forward. When the last stalk closed up over the figure’s skull, completing the sculpture, the stalks began to pop with tiny buds. After just a few seconds, the buds coated the woman-sculpture like chicken pox, and then, all at once, they burst open, exploding in a massive puff of fern leaves. It happened so suddenly that Simon and Virgil both jumped in surprise, and when they settled back down, they stared at the sculpture in amazement; the fern leaves had sprouted and spread in the perfect shape of the woman’s cloak, including the hood that she had pulled down over her head.

  “It’s her,” Virgil murmured in awe. He circled the sculpture, inspecting it from a safe distance. “It’s her exactly.”

  “Incredible,” Simon whispered.

  The fern leaves waved in the breeze, in the exact same way that a full cloak would move. But then Virgil realized that there was no breeze, and that the fern-cloak was moving on its own. “What’s it doing?” he asked, alarmed.

  Simon’s eyes grew wide with amazement. “It’s remembering.”

  As they watched, the leaves began to rustle faster and faster, and soon the motion effect was completely seamless.

  Then the ripple fern raised one foot and took a step forward.

  Virgil nearly jumped out of his skin, and he shrieked with surprise. But the fern-statue didn’t seem to hear. She took a second step forward, grabbed the bottom half of her cloak, hiked it up over her ankles, and leapt across the creek.

  “I get it!” Simon said aloud, though perhaps not fully aware that he was actually speaking what he was thinking. “The ripple fern shows what happened. It’s like watching a recreation of the woman from that day.”

  “No kidding,” Virgil muttered. He was already a few steps ahead of Simon on that one. “So what do we do?” he asked, watching the ripple fern step quickly up the far side of the creek bed.

  “We follow her,” Simon replied.

  They jumped across the creek, slipping a little in the soft earth, and hustled after the fern. It moved quickly, for a plant, and as they found themselves winding through the trees, Simon started to breathe heavily. “We should do more cardio,” he suggested.

  “Speak for yourself,” Virgil replied, also breathing hard. “I’m in great shape.”

  After a few hundred feet, the ripple fern stopped, walking briskly up to a big, moss-covered boulder sticking up out of the dirt. Simon and Virgil watched from a safe distance, even though Simon was fairly certain that the fern-statue couldn’t actually see them, but could only go through the same motions that its original source-woman had.

  Still, he figured...better safe than sorry.

  The ripple fern put her hands on the stone and gave it a mighty push. It tilted back easily, like it was on hinges. And upon closer inspection, Virgil and Simon found that it was on hinges—two rusty hinges secured the base of the boulder to a hidden metal chute that was buried beneath the ground, and that fact now became visible as the rock tilted backward, revealing the open space beneath. The metal chute sank down into the earth, further down than they could see from their vantage points. There was a ladder fastened to the chute that led down into the darkness, and the ripple fern slipped down onto the ladder and disappeared into the underground chute, closing the boulder behind her.

  Virgil blinked at Simon. “Don’t tell me you want to go down there,” he said.

  Simon frowned. He very much did not want to go down there. “This might be our only chance of finding her before she strikes again,” he groaned. “I think we have to go down there.”

  Virgil sighed. “Being the heroes of Templar sucks.”

  They pushed back the boulder and gazed down the square hole into the darkness below. Simon pulled out his phone, clicked on the flashlight, and aimed it into the void.

  The light didn’t even come close to finding the bottom.

  “Paper-rock-scissors to see who goes first?” Simon suggested.

  Virgil nodded. It was standard operating procedure.

  It only took two throws for Simon to win the best of three.

  “Aw, come on,” Virgil whined. “You cheated.”

  “Maybe you should try throwing something besides scissors every single time,” Simon countered.

  Virgil snorted. “I don’t throw scissors every single time,” he muttered. But rules were rules; Virgil clicked on the flashlight on his own phone, held it carefully in one hand, and lowered himself onto the ladder, moving slowly downward into the darkness.

  If the woods themselves were quiet, then the vertical tunnel beneath the ground was as silent as a tomb. All Virgil could hear was the ringing of his own ears and the scuffling sounds of his feet dragging across the metal rungs of the ladder as he descended. He kept looking down, trying to see what was waiting for him in the murky darkness below, but because of his grip on the rungs as he climbed down, the flashlight on his phone was of very little help; the beam kept veering in this direction and that direction, depending on his grip, and it almost never pointed straight down.

  So he descended into darkness, praying he would hit the bottom soon, and that the ripple fern wouldn’t be waiting for him when he got there. Everything he understood about the fern—which was very, very little—pointed to the idea that the plant sculpture couldn’t react to his presence, but a semi-sentient magical fern wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you could hold to normal rules of logic and expectation.

  Then he took one more step down, and his foot came to a rest on soft, solid earth. Virgil exhaled with relief. “Found the bottom,” he called up to Simon, who was about halfway down the ladder. Simon had left the boulder tilted backward, and a bit of sunlight filtered down through the opening to the hole. It looked so far away, not much bigger than a nickel from Virgil’s perspective. “We might be deeper than the subway,” he said.

  As Simon continued his careful climb down the ladder, Virgil shone his phone flashlight in a circle, inspecting their new situation. The ladder had led him down to a small clearing under the earth, with a long tunnel breaking out in one direction. If his bearings were right, the tunnel headed east, toward the Appalachians.

  Simon made his way to the bottom of the ladder and joined Virgil on the ground. He wiped his hands on his jeans and reached for his own light, shining it down the tunnel. “I don’t see the fern,” he said, squinting down the earthen hallway. “Did you lose her?”

  “Well, I would say maybe we lost her,” Virgil said pointedly. “The woman in the cloak must have been moving a lot more quickly than two guys who have no idea what this tunnel is, or where it goes, or why it’s here, or what’s waiting for them down in the darkness.”

  “Fair point,” Simon admitted.

  Virgil frowned as he peered down the empty tunnel. “So what do we do?”

  “You always ask that like you don’t already know the answer,” Simon replied.

  Virgil sighed. “Yeah. I know.”

  Then, in unison, they said, “We go after her.”

  “I went first down the ladder,” Virgil pointed out. “It’s your turn to go first.”

  Simon frowned. He couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted to do less than walk down that tunnel. But fair was fair. He held up the light in front of him, and he began to creep down the hall.

  They moved in silence, each of them feeling the skin on their shoulders prickling with fear of the darkness, and of the unknown. Simon had a pretty good handle on the history and workings of Templar, but he had never even heard so much as a rumor about undergro
und walkways connecting different parts of the city. Yet the tunnel didn’t seem newly-constructed; the dirt wasn’t freshly wet, but crusted over with mineral deposits, as if it had been dug out many years before. But it only went in one direction, and as far as the flashlight could uncover, there were no branches in the tunnel, so if they followed it to its terminus, even if they didn’t catch up to the ripple fern, they would still find the place where the woman in the purple cloak had surfaced. And that would be an important piece of the puzzle. He opened his mouth to say as much to Virgil, just for the sake of breaking the silence, when suddenly he saw a flash of brilliant white flash at the far end of the tunnel.

  It surged toward them, as fast as a bolt of lightning.

  “Stop!” Simon screamed. Instinctively, he dropped his phone and threw up his hands, conjuring two heavy shields. They exploded into being in the nick of time; no sooner had they formed than a heavy bolt of lightning cracked against them, driving Simon backward, his feet dragging through the hardened dirt.

  The bolt of lightning didn’t evaporate like a normal lightning bolt. It held steady, fizzling against Simon’s shields with electric fury. The power surge was constant, and as hard as Simon pushed back with his kinesthetic shields, the lightning pushed harder, and it dragged him backward through the tunnel.

  “It’s a trap!” Virgil cried. He stumbled backward, his eyes wide with horror as he tried to stay ahead of Simon’s retreat. He tripped over a clump of hard earth and fell onto his seat, then crab-walked back toward the ladder, his heart racing. “Simon!” he screamed, his throat tight with helplessness.

  Simon didn’t reply. Simon couldn’t reply. He was using all his energy and all of his strength to hold the lightning bolt at bay. It was obvious now that the jagged line of pulsing light and power was the same type of lightning bolt that had shot out of the energy column on the West Templar High football field and had impaled the members of the football team. If it broke through his shield, it would impale him, too, and he would be fried from the inside, dried up, with nothing left of him but a skeleton wrapped in pinched, papery skin.

  Beads of sweat formed on Simon’s forehead and spilled down his brow as he gritted his teeth and pushed back against the lightning bolt. It surged forward, crackling with power, and Simon’s outer shield began to split. The energy was flaking away pieces of the solid orange surface, and the entire kinesthetic plate began to break, the interior splintering like ice cracking under a weight. “I can’t hold it!” Simon screamed.

  “Fifty more feet!” Virgil screamed back. In truth, he had no idea how many more feet Simon had to go before he reached the ladder back up to the surface. He was terrible with numbers. But it seemed both believable and achievable, and so he ran with it, pushing himself back to his feet and running toward the end of the tunnel.

  Simon tried to say that he didn’t have fifty feet worth of strength left in him, but only got as far as “I don’t have—” before the bolt cracked completely through the first shield. The orange shards of the kinesthetic barrier fell away, and Simon threw up his other hand, taking the brunt of the lightning bolt with his new shield. The surface of that one instantly started flaking away. “Virgil!” Simon cried, directing his voice backwards over his shoulder. “Refraction!”

  Virgil turned pale. Refraction was a new spell that Llewyn was teaching them, and it was complex. They’d dedicated three whole days to it over the course of the last two weeks, and neither Simon nor Virgil had gotten it right. One time, during an attempt that went extremely wrong, Virgil had actually managed to split Simon into three separate pieces. Thankfully, a byproduct of the spell was a serious numbing component; Simon didn’t feel anything, and Llewyn had pressed him back together in half of a flash, so there was no lasting harm done.

  But still. Refraction was very much a work in progress.

  “It’s not ready!” Virgil hollered back.

  But Simon was insistent. “Refraction!” he screamed again. His new shield was splintering, and he couldn’t form enough magic in his spent left hand to conjure up another one. It was clear that his only chance of survival was to get back to the ladder, and he was alternating backward steps with the skidding of his sneakers against the dirt from the force of the lightning bolt, but it was slow going. He couldn’t run backward; he wasn’t great with balance to begin with, and the added push of the lightning would knock him off-kilter, and he would trip, there was no question about it. He would hit the ground, and then the lightning would hit Virgil, and even if it didn’t, it would fill the tunnel, and their chances of escaping without being burned up by its energy were low. Besides, the thing seemed to have some sort of built-in homing system; anytime Simon scooted a little to the left or a little to the right, the bolt moved with him, keeping his chest directly in its sights.

  Odds were that even if he fell, the mystical bolt would follow him to the ground, and he wouldn’t make it out of the tunnel alive.

  “Refraction!” he cried. “Now!”

  Virgil gritted his teeth in panic. It was highly likely he would split Simon into pieces again, or maybe something worse. Something that would kill them both. But if he didn’t refract the lightning bolt, it would break through Simon’s shield. There wasn’t enough room in the tunnel for Virgil to scoot by, throw up his own shield, and take the attack head-on, and at the rate the thing had cut through Simon’s first shield, it still wouldn’t give them enough time to reach the ladder.

  Simon was right. Refraction was their only hope.

  “Okay!” he screamed back, wringing his hands with hopelessness. “Okay! Refraction!” He shook out his fingers, which suddenly felt stiff and frozen, now that they were being called upon. “I don’t—” he started, but that wasn’t quite right. He tried again: “I can’t—” But that wasn’t right either. A lump formed in his throat as he said, “Simon, I’m sorry if this goes wrong.”

  Simon didn’t reply. He was too focused on holding the strength of his last shield, which was shot through with cracks and ready to collapse at any second. But he nodded, almost imperceptibly. Virgil saw it, and it gave him a small surge of strength.

  It wasn’t a big surge. But he would take what he could get.

  He closed his eyes and put the heels of his hands together, forming a butterfly with his palms and fingers, just as Llewyn had shown them. Most of the spells they had learned so far relied on them drawing from the strength they carried within themselves, but the refraction spell was different. It relied on external energy. “Yin and Yang,” Llewyn had explained during one of their sessions. “A true sorcerer doesn’t rely on just one source of power. Your inner energy will deplete as you use it. Magic that draws from outside the self will give your body a chance to replenish its internal energy.”

  Virgil was grateful for that now. He could have drawn a decent amount of energy from his gut, certainly. But with that magical lightning bolt crackling through the tunnel, he had a hunch that the energy he could draw from the exterior world was pretty substantial at that particular moment.

  Keeping the heels of his hands pressed firmly together, he pulled back against the strength in the air, dragging out energy like water drops from a rain cloud. Tiny flecks of light shot through the air, most of them flowing down from the lightning bolt, and they collected in the hollow space between his palms. Soon he had collected a bundle of crackling blue energy about the size of a tennis ball within his hands. He held it there, cradled between his palms, fusing the particles of energy together with his will, and he opened his eyes.

  Simon’s splintering shield was a product of his right hand, and with his empty left hand, he had gripped his right wrist, giving the shield extra stabilization. But the shield was almost all the way cracked through, and Simon had just seconds before the bolt shattered the kinesthetic magic and shot through his chest.

  “Virgil!” Simon screamed again.

  A sudden calm fell over Virgil li
ke a blanket. It was the relaxation of shock, with its apathetic detachment and cool calculation. He dropped to one knee, to give himself a sturdier base for the spell. He held out his hands, still joined at the heels, and positioned them directly in front of his chest, where his heart-center could funnel its power most easily through his arms and into the gathered energy. The words of Llewyn’s spell rang clearly between his ears, more clearly than they had the many, many times that Llewyn had actually said them in their presence. “Caelum protero, aeris vorso, aeris verso,” he breathed, feeling the words collect their own special power as they formed on his tongue and escaped his lips. The blue ball of energy began to spin. It turned faster and faster, until its edges became a soft blur of motion. Then, suddenly, it sucked in on itself and disappeared completely with a soft pop.

  “Now!” Virgil yelled.

  Simon dove to the ground, and just as he did, a clear, glasslike wall crystallized in the air between the two men and the lightning bolt. The energy hit the wall, and the wall absorbed its power, then turned it backward and shot it back down the tunnel, refracting the energy in half a dozen different directions. The lightning bolt had become six lightning bolts, zig-zagging along the tunnel and shooting back toward its source.

  The refraction spell had worked.

  “Nice work,” Simon said, breathing a sigh of relief.

  “Congratulate me later,” Virgil said, jumping to his feet and pulling Simon up behind him. “I don’t know how long it’ll hold.”

  They ran to the ladder. They could hear the refraction wall starting to crack behind them. Simon grabbed ahold of the ladder and began pulling himself up. Virgil glanced uneasily at the refraction; the lightning bolt was breaking through. “Faster would be good,” he warned.

  “I’m going!” Simon hollered back. His foot slipped, and he fell down a rung, smacking his elbow on one of the flat metal bars. “Ow!”