The Burning World

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Andreas frowned. “I can’t.”

  Mira opened her mouth. She attempted to speak, but the calling scents kept her quiet.

  “Dunn enthralled him to fetch the midnight blades for her,” Derek said. He pointed at the scabbard. “You have the blades. No one here is going to stop you from leaving with them.”

  Andreas stopped on the edge of the kitchen area. He looked first at Mira, then at Sandro, and pain visibly etched his face. When he turned to Sister and Sister-Dragon, the etching blossomed into a pallor. When he turned to Ladon, it had wilted into fear.

  His friend, this man Ladon called brother, was visibly shaken and terrified.

  “This is the same shit she did to me while I lived with her,” Derek said. “She was always more subtle with me. And with Andreas.”

  “I would never have allowed her to continue, if I had realized how she controlled the minds of those around us,” Andreas said.

  No one understood why she kept Derek with her for three decades, or why she made him long immortal without healing his blood disorder. Ladon doubted Derek would ever get an explanation.

  The night of the party in Chicago—the night Derek met Sister—Andreas had been instrumental in his escape.

  We will help you, Ladon signed. Andreas flooded the area with ‘silence,’ not ‘no talking,’ so Ladon talked.

  Damned enthrallers were as manipulative as Fates.

  Andreas patted the daggers. “I know,” he said. “Mom says the Whispering One wants the swords. She enthralled me to come get them from your armory.” He tugged at the scabbard, then rubbed at his face.

  The ‘silence’ cleared from the air, but not the ‘calm’ and the ‘comply.’

  “Take the damned blades!” Sister shouted. She pointed at Sister-Dragon’s computer. “Trajan outed the Fates and the Shifters. Brother, Brother-Dragon, and Rysa just met the real enemy. We have other, more pressing issues right now than your mother’s desire for baubles.”

  Release all of your enthrallings, her face said.

  Andreas looked from Mira to Rysa, then back to Mira. “I need to know where to take these.” He patted the daggers again. “Mother is not answering her phone.”

  Mira stepped forward. She reached out her hand. “Come. We’ll find her. I’ll help.” She smiled, and her musical seer filled the cave. “But the Dracae need all their—”

  Rysa’s mother coughed. Her hands rose out in front of her body as if were sleepwalking. “Ismene?” she whispered.

  Sandro caught her before she dropped to the ground. “Mira!”

  Andreas yanked back his calling scents. Ladon and Sister both inhaled as if breathing for the first time today. Dragon flashed and pranced to the side, and his sister mirrored his hide and his movements. Both beasts flanked Mira.

  A detailed, dense, dragon-perceived image of Mira Torres’s body hit Ladon full force. Derek squinted, as did Sister.

  Rysa stared at Andreas.

  “Thank you,” Sandro muttered. He placed one hand on Mira’s belly, and his other on her face. “Mira….”

  Rysa’s seers unfurled. They poked and they probed as if she dared the what-was-is-will-be fog to cross her.

  “Dad!” she screamed. “Ismene’s dead!”

  Sandro swore in Spanish.

  Rysa saw the death of her Burnerized aunt? Did the monster in their vision have something to do with Ismene’s death? Did Billy? Trajan? Ladon reached for Rysa.

  Andreas stepped between them. “I need a Prime to guide me back to my mother,” he said.

  Don’t do this, Ladon thought. “Don’t—”

  Awareness left him. He felt only one blink of his eyes between the moments. Only one inhalation. But when he perceived again, Sandro sat on the cave’s rock floor with his back against the library clinic door, his shirt off and his wife huddled against his bare chest. Sister and Sister-Dragon stood in the center of the open area, both as stunned as Ladon and his beast.

  “What did he do?” Sister breathed.

  Dragon reared up. He stretched out his great neck and looked out over the fields. His sister ran to the open vault door.

  Derek is cold, she pushed.

  “Where is Rysa?” Ladon asked. She wasn’t with her parents.

  Derek staggered in. “Rysa has her phone,” he said. “She said to follow but not to interfere. She has the situation under control. She said because of the enthralling, this is the safest option for Andreas.”

  The indignation Andreas’s calling scents had held down erupted. Ladon slammed his fist into a kitchen cabinet door.

  The wood cracked and sharp, blistering pain ratcheted up his arm. Pain that cleared his mind. Pain that allowed him to focus.

  Andreas, operating on the orders of his mother, just took Ladon’s wife.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The base…

  Daniel pulled off his headset. It bounced soundlessly across the open seat next to him, a sonic victim of the deafening engines and pulleys of the rotored machine flinging them into the future.

  The visual optimizers continued to flicker and strobe. He could unplug them from their port on the back of his head, but both his seers whispered no. Wear them. Don’t let the battery die, either. If the battery dies, the buffer would clear and he’d lose numbers.

  He didn’t think too much about the optimizers, or their flickering display he could not see, or Eric, or how Dunn sent Andreas back to the cave. Dunn hadn’t seen fit to enthrall out his questions about Ms. Pavlovich’s health, but he kept quiet anyway. His future-seer, though still laden with the fog, did whisper that someone should keep an eye on her, so he did. They’d left behind her boyfriend, so someone had to.

  Dunn told Gavin Bower to ‘stay here’ but there were ways around such an enthralling. Telling the kid what to do would have caught Dunn’s attention; hopefully he’d listen and call Ladon.

  Ladon knew what to do, as did Andreas Sisto.

  Daniel let his present-seer look: Yes, Andreas and Mira had returned to the cave and were, right now, collecting the swords.

  Daniel and his group, it seemed, were about to confront an emperor.

  His pinging present-seer gave him the exact positions of their copter taxi and all its passengers. The copter hovered two feet above the ground just outside the only discernible landmark within sight—a small, concrete shack. His present-seer picked it out with no issues, but the flickering optimizers would have missed it completely—it blended perfectly into the gray-white snow.

  Harold slid open the copter’s side door.

  The Nebraska-Wyoming winter burst into the copter on the back of the rotor’s slicing spin. Frozen air chopped against Daniel’s face. He squinted, suddenly very aware of his eyeballs under the optimizers, and sneezed. Dunn, though, inhaled as if she’d finally found the freshest, best air on the whole planet.

  Daisy Pavlovich, the woman who had helped rid Daniel’s body of Aiden Blake, had spent the entire three and a half hours in the copter with her eyes closed and her head resting against her seat. Sweat beaded on her forehead.

  When he asked if she wanted the help of his seers to monitor her body’s changes, she’d only gripped the hand rests and shook her head.

  He’d monitored her sporadically anyway, doing his best to seem unobtrusive and to make his seer touches part of his now near-constant present-seer pinging.

  No fever. No increased appetites. Just a lot of willpower and… changes.

  He didn’t have enough medical knowledge to judge the safety of her pregnancy. He didn’t use his future-seer to check, either. It seemed invasive.

  What do you care? oozed from the back of his head.

  Quiet. He would say no more. Addy needed to learn her place.

  Daniel curled his hand around the copter’s hand rest. Cold buffeted his body through the open door and crawled from his knuckles to his fist as a slow, biting ache.

  The Wyoming-Nebraska border in early January reminded him of the worst of his northern European winters.
Of the years inland and away from the calming, warming effects of the ocean. Of places like the Russian Empire and the gothic darkness of Bavaria.

  Daniel watched the whipping snow with Addy’s present-seer, and wondered about all the little parts of the cold clarity into which he was about to step. About the patterns that emerge from the clouds of crystals. About the mirages and the songs of the howling winds. About the smells that fly by too fast for him to catch, much less label.

  About the hologram of reality bursting in the spaces between each and every randomly-moving little reflective surface.

  He shook his head. Addy’s brain, as psychotic as it was, had turned out to be a treasure trove of scientific facts as random as the snow outside. Black holes, holograms, some eleven-dimension explanation of the universe called M-Theory. Seemed she liked to spend her downtime between murders reading Scientific American.

  But when he looked out at the snowfall, at the small, nondescript concrete shelter that Harold said was the entrance into the base, he had to wonder just how random it all truly was.

  They were Fates. They were bound to a path, and nothing—nothing—a Fate did was random.

  Nothing.

  So perhaps Addy’s present-seer—or his future-seer—had long whispered for her to learn all she could about the state of modern theoretical cosmology, particle physics, quantum mechanics, string theory, biophysics, mechanical and electrical engineering… the brain in which he lived had an awareness of higher level maths he hadn’t known even existed until he fully awoke in Addy’s head.

  She carried no sense of supernatural awe for new-space, only the awe of a difficult problem in need of solving.

  Addy buzzed at the back of their shared mindscape. She twitched like a woman high on adrenaline, like someone artificially held at a too-alert state for too long. But then again, Addy always felt as if she was about to snap.

  Leave my body, she hissed.

  You know I cannot do that, he hissed back. Murderer.

  Her psychic claws came out. She meant to slash. But Daniel slapped her down. Be quiet, Adrestia. You are not helping.

  She quieted. I am not helping.

  He should probably be surprised his command worked, yet he was not. Nor did he feel surprise at his lack of surprise. Either way, it was not something he was supposed to think about, so he pushed both the command and Addy away.

  Dunn also pulled off her headphones, as did Ms. Pavlovich. The cold screamed into the copter and slapped Daniel out of his reverie. Answers were their goal, not musings about math and science.

  Besides, one could not build a model with little to no information about the variables involved. And if one was to be a good future-seer, one needed to know what to look for.

  A new cramp warped his belly. Let the cold soothe his aches. Let it chill the heat of his Fate’s fear.

  When would his future-seer work again? When would Addy’s present-seer show more than the solid, specific, physical environment? Even Marcus was having difficulty reading the recent past.

  Bound by fate, they were, inside a blinding whiteout of a storm.

  Harold jumped out of the copter first. Dunn jumped next, followed closely by her daughter. Marcus and Daniel jumped last. The security detail stayed on the copter.

  The co-pilot saluted from his window at the front, then the copter rose steadily upward. They had their orders—refuel at a nearby airstrip, then make their way east. The entire Praesagio Industries North American fleet—plus the fleets of six other major tech corporations and at least three small airlines—were on their way to the major urban areas of the East Coast.

  Another Burner video had surfaced within half an hour of Trajan’s outing video, this one three incoherent Burners who took down a wing of the North Carolina state capitol building.

  Trajan immediately sent his fleets. “Burners,” he’d warned. “We’re here to help.”

  Daniel’s future-seer whispered something completely different: Trajan’s people had started evacuations. They were using the Burner story as cover. The fog blocked why.

  There’d yet to be any official government action, but that could not be far behind. Again, Daniel’s future-seer told him nothing. No sense of imminence, no terror in the face of an oncoming onslaught. No indication beyond the fog between him and the what-will-be.

  Dunn had been correct; fate had abandoned them. They were all bound to it, yet it ran off into the unknown, him at one end of the chain and fate at the other.

  The only sense he caught now, the only understanding he had, was that the chain uncoiled and that soon—very soon—it would pull tight.

  Then they’d all be dragged to their deaths.

  Daniel pulled his jacket tight and followed Harold down a non-existent path toward the small concrete bunker. They trudged forward and the snow quickly found its way into Daniel’s socks. The cold shock to his ankles made him move faster, and he quickly overtook Dunn.

  Dunn pulled the Tsar’s gaudy ruby ring from her pocket. “She says this is hers.” She looked down at it for a long moment, then handed it to him. “She says you are to give it to her when you two meet.”

  “Why don’t you give it to her yourself?” It seemed obvious to Daniel who Dunn meant by “she.” The bauble on his hand interacted with new-space. It had allowed Daisy to see Aiden Blake, and it hid its wearer within the what-was-is-will-be. “You’ve been talking to her.”

  The “she” had to be the Whispering One.

  Dunn frowned. “She says you will understand when the time comes.”

  Addy snickered. So blind you are, oh great future-seer.

  Daniel must have growled, because Dunn narrowed her eyes. “Take it,” she said.

  Daniel took the ring. Gold glistened. The ruby sparkled. The royal crest of the Russian Tsar gleamed in the early morning light. And…

  Maria, it whispered.

  He almost dropped it. It almost danced off his hand and onto the palm where it belonged, because the damned thing had a purpose.

  He stuffed it into his pocket.

  Dunn pushed him forward and they followed Harold into the bunker.

  The door slid closed and the roar of the winter air ceased. The hiss of a forced air furnace took its place, along with the electrical hum of many small and hidden machines. An obvious elevator door with a retinal scanner activator took up one complete wall. Another scanner sat on the lone metal and wood desk in the middle of the room, as did a lone terminal.

  Harold ran his hand over the desk. “Without the codes, this is as far as I can get you, ma’am.”

  Dunn walked to the retinal scanner next to the elevator door. “Daisy.”

  Ms. Pavlovich blinked once, then walked over to her mother.

  Sweat still clung to her skin, even though they’d just walked through the snow, and Daniel began to doubt his original present-seeing of an absence of fever. His present-seer clearly said Ms. Pavlovich was not well.

  Dunn lifted her hands high to place them on her much taller daughter’s cheeks. “Heal, love,” she whispered.

  Daisy nodded, and most of the unwellness around her vanished.

  Dunn continued to hold her daughter’s cheeks. “I am so sorry,” she whispered.

  Doubtful, Daniel thought. If she was sorry, she wouldn’t have activated her daughter in the first place.

  Sorry? You are in no place to judge, little boy, Addy snarled.

  Daniel rubbed his forehead. Seemed Addy had decided to take up the slack from his easing menstrual cramps.

  Dunn held her hand over the retinal scanner. “Do you feel the patterns, daughter?”

  Ms. Pavlovich nodded. Marcus and Harold watched in rapt attention, but Addy’s poking distracted Daniel.

  “Quiet,” he whispered.

  Dunn pulled her hand away from the scanner. She stepped from Daisy and to Daniel. “Addy, sweetie,” she said, “we all need to be on-point right now.”

  No enthralling, just words.

  Addy wanted her knives. Sh
e wanted to twirl them between her fingers to feel the process. To allow it to distract her mind. But Daniel did not carry her knives, nor did he carry a gun.

  Part of him still did not trust that he’d always be able to keep control.

  “She’s feeling murderous, ma’am,” Daniel said.

  Dunn sighed. “Of course she is.” She flicked her hand toward his heart dismissively.

  “You could make this permanent,” Daniel flicked his own hand at his heart. “You could make it so we don’t have to worry about her anymore.”

  Dunn’s face hardened. “No.”

  Daniel pointed at Ms. Pavlovich. “Yet you activate your daughter without her consent. She’s pregnant. You gave her no options. You didn’t even allow her to ask questions.”

  Dunn’s hard face took on a hint of surprise. “She would have agreed to her activation.”

  “How do you know that?” Daniel’s words echoed through the little shack. “I’m the future-seer here. Not you.”

  Dunn pushed him against the wall. “Your seer isn’t working properly. Marcus’s seer isn’t working properly. Consulting you was not an option.” She let him go. “Not that I would have, anyway.”

  “Then why the hell are we here with you?” She had no real need for him, or for Marcus either, for that matter.

  “She’s here with us,” Marcus said. “We asked her to help us find you.”

  Harold nodded his agreement.

  Daniel stood tall and smoothed his jacket over his breasts. “So she’s hijacked this operation? She’s enthralled all of us and likely harmed her daughter.”

  Ms. Pavlovich frowned, but she did not respond. Daniel didn’t know if she stayed silent because of her enthralling, or because, like he had earlier, she’d decided to observe.

  Dunn poked her finger into Daniel’s chest. “I will not bind Addy for you.”

  “Why?” She’d bound everyone else.

  Dunn, the Mother of Shifters, this woman with her mercurial attitude, stepped back from Daniel. She tipped up her petite chin. “You are not my circus, Daniel Drake, nor are you one of my monkeys.”

  “You’re the one who—”