The Burning World

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Andreas hurled the bag at his mother. “I would expect this behavior from Janus, not you, Mother!”

  Dunn dodged. The bag sailed by her shoulder and landed on the climbing rope net attached to the other side of the slide.

  She shook her head. “If they perceive you, they’ll take you, not that it will make any difference whatsoever.”

  “Daisy, she’s talking to you, isn’t she?” Rysa said.

  Something squeezed around her waist. Something that felt like the arms of her friend. Was Daisy holding onto her? Rysa gripped the air as if she gripped arms.

  And Dunn was pumping out calling scents Rysa could not differentiate, which meant she was probably pumping out ‘ignore Daisy’ on levels not even Andreas could counter.

  But Rysa had Daisy. She had to hold that abstract thought in her mind. She was in physical contact with a living, breathing woman who needed her help; a woman who, to Rysa’s mind, wasn’t even as noticeable as the ghosts infecting new-space. Maybe she could get Daisy out of the playground and let Andreas deal with his mother. “Can you walk with me?” she asked. Carefully, she pulled Daisy toward the gate.

  The arms on her waist held her firm.

  Rysa looked up at Dunn. “Let Daisy go. Please.” She extended her hand to her great-grandmother. “We spoke to Harold. We know what’s happening.” She pointed at the sky. “We need to figure this out together. We can’t if you’re holding hostages.”

  “Hostages?” Dunn looked up at the sky. “You’re the Prime Fate of the Dracae and you think I’m holding hostages?”

  Andreas walked toward the slide. “Come down.” He held out his hand.

  Dunn pointed at her son. “Did Harold tell you that it’s the end of the world?” She bounced a little on her toes. “Did he happen to mention that your little adventure with Aiden Blake opened a rip,” she waved her hand in the air as if new-space had a direction, “and that Marcus’s brother’s ghostly attempt to help us woke the fuck up what’s on the other side?”

  “Yes, Mother, we know.”

  Andreas sighed and slowly, deliberately—and obviously fighting his mother’s calling scents—took another step closer. “Mother. Come down. Please.”

  Dunn dropped her butt onto the plastic hut over the top of the slide. “Trajan thought we had five days to bring all the pieces together at his base of military austerity. That we could get our battle lines in place. Now it looks like we’re going to be lining up while doing the battling.” She laughed. “That’s my boy! Always planning. Always keeping his empire ticking and on time. But he was wrong. We had five hours because they lost the element of surprise.”

  She looked at her wrist as if looking at an invisible watch. “We’re down to what, now? One? Half of one?” She threw her hands into the air. “Does it matter?”

  “Why are you giving up?” Andreas bellowed. “We fight with what we have and we fight until there is no fight left in us.” He closed his eyes. “It’s the end of the battle that matters.”

  It’s happening, hissed Rysa’s dark Fate. It’s starting.

  The blade manifested again, but this time it rippled up her arm, over her shoulder, and across her chest, like armor.

  “Well, well,” said Dunn. “Looks like we’re not the only ones with new abilities, huh, daughter?” Her body stiffened like a baseball player who was just coming into a new skill—amazed that her body had the muscle memory and the ability to do what she wanted it to do, and still very conscious of her own amazement. Then she laid her hand flat against the plastic under her feet.

  Green spread downward through the red plastic under her palm.

  “It’s true.” Andreas pointed at the changing plastic.

  Non-living material was beyond Shifter control. Rysa’s father believed that Shifters needed to hijack the enzymes and proteins of a living body in order to affect change. That without the correct infrastructure in place, the “goods” of a Shifter morphing, enthralling, or healing couldn’t “move.”

  There was nothing living about the slide under Dunn’s feet.

  “Plastics mostly, so far.” Dunn pointed over her shoulder. “Brick, too.” She lifted her hand away. “Daisy made a retinal scanner do her bidding.”

  Rysa held up her blade-armored arm and pointed at Dunn. “Have you been healing her?” she yelled.

  Dunn lifted her hand off the plastic and the color change stopped. “Activation healings take continual recharging, even from me.”

  Rysa scooped a rock off the ground and whipped it at Dunn so fast Andreas didn’t realize what she was doing until the rock had already whizzed by his head.

  “She was right about you!” Rysa yelled. “You’re a selfish bitch!”

  She picked up a second rock, but Andreas grabbed her arm.

  Her energy blade pulsed onto her neck like a living mass of goo, then pulled back.

  Andreas blinked and his fingers twitched, but he didn’t let go.

  Rysa dropped the rock.

  Andreas moved closer to Rysa. He eyed the glow of her blade as it pulsed around his hand. A flash of assessment moved across his face.

  His face softened and he returned his attention to Dunn. “We don’t have time for this,” he yelled. “We need to coordinate and prepare. You need to step up, Mother, and do your job. You can play with your new ability after we solve the problem about to roll over all of us.”

  Wait. Hadn’t Rysa been holding on to something—someone—moments ago? She looked around.

  Dunn laughed again. “This new ability is what will stop what’s coming.” She frowned and tucked her hand into her pocket. “No. Not stop. It’s literally unstoppable, like a comet or meteorite.” She looked up at the sky. “Just like a comet or meteorite.”

  Dunn looked down at Andreas for what seemed like the first time. “We were six and two, under the tree,” she said.

  “Where’s Daisy?” Rysa asked, but neither Andreas nor Dunn seemed to care.

  Rysa cared, though. Cared because the world shouldn’t be slippery anymore. Not Daisy. Not the so-called Whispering One. Not the clicking and the locking of the universe, or where all the pieces fell. Not their incomplete knowledge of what was about to trash their planet, and not how they were supposed to stop it.

  No more unknowns. She was Rysa Torres Drake, the Draki Prime and the healer of dragons, the carrier of the energy blade wrapping itself around her torso. She was, somehow, in the center of this hurricane. She, Daisy, Ladon and Dragon, Anna and Sister-Dragon, Dunn, Daniel-Adrestia, Billy….

  They, along with so many others, were the Legion.

  Are you a Whispering One? Rysa asked her dark Fate. Are you one who is not supposed to be here? Because her dark Fate was the Ambusti Prime, a version of Rysa that was not.

  Did new-space somehow allow… what would Gavin call it? Alternate timeline crossovers?

  But the crossovers weren’t clean. The hurricane winds held obscuring debris, and to all the other Fates, that debris looked like fog because they weren’t in the center of the storm.

  But how the hell were Rysa and the Legion supposed to stop a scouring force of nature?

  She looked down at her other arm. Her blade energy had moved completely across her body and was now creeping toward her other palm, and toward her toes.

  Dunn pulled the black bag she carried to her chest. “Which Progenitor morphs to the will of the universe? Who takes the abuse? I’ve always done the Whispering One’s bidding.” She hugged the bag. “We need someone who can control the cage on the other side.”

  Daisy, Rysa thought. She means Daisy.

  Rysa swiped up another rock to throw at Dunn. “Let Daisy—”

  “Quiet!” Dunn yelled.

  Andreas’s mouth snapped shut. All the ambient chatter around them stopped. All the noise of the cops, all the whispers and the speaking. It all stopped.

  Dunn’s eyes narrowed. “The cage is the chamber of the cannon. Trajan’s base is the bore. Terry is the ordnance. And you…” She pointed at
Rysa. “You’re…”

  Dunn blinked.

  “What?” Rysa whispered. What was she in all this?

  You know what we are, her dark Fate said.

  “No, I don’t!”

  “It’s always me,” Dunn growled. “I’m the one who changes for the world. I’m the one who births babe after babe after babe. I’m the one who sacrifices and who takes the punishments. I’m the one who always hides in plain sight.”

  She sniffed as if she smelled something no one else did, then she laughed.

  Rysa opened her mouth, but she couldn’t speak. Burn it out, she pleaded with her dark Fate. Burn away her enthralling. Please. She can’t do this. She can’t! I need to be able to think.

  Dunn sniffed the air. “Show yourself, bea—,” she said.

  A hand slapped over her mouth. A small hand of a small woman much like Dunn herself.

  Anna and Sister-Dragon had climbed the slide from behind. They were here. They’d snuck up on Dunn and everyone else.

  But it was too late. Dunn had gotten out her command.

  Ladon! she pushed. Why her dragons? Why didn’t Dunn save her wrath for the overwhelming, invisible monster about to roll over all of them? Why do harm when she should help?

  Rysa’s blade energy pushed up her neck and onto her chin.

  Sister-Dragon growled. The plastic under her talons snapped. She ripped off a chunk and, still invisible, threw it at the gate.

  Anna grinned. The beasts had many ways of “showing themselves.”

  Anna pushed and Dunn screamed as she toppled off the slide.

  Her enthrallings released. A cop behind Rysa yelled “Did you see that?” and another yelled “Why couldn’t we talk?” The reporter said, “Are you recording?”

  Daisy appeared no more than two feet from the base of the slide. Daisy, who looked too pale and too hot.

  Dunn twisted in the air like a cat and landed on her feet. She skipped once, rolled out of the momentum of her drop, and came to a stop in front of Andreas, one hand on the cold ground and the other holding her bag against her chest.

  She looked up at the gate and the street. “You are my great-granddaughter, Ms. Torres.” She stood. “Plus extra from Andreas, and I suspect from your mother’s line, as well. I was in what is now Germany a century before Janus stole your mother’s mother from her people.”

  Rysa’s blade energy coursed over her nose. She inhaled sharply, her body thinking that it was about to be smothered, but the air continued to be the same cold, slightly-tangy semi-urban air it was a moment ago.

  Dunn tilted her head as she watched the energy move upward. “You are active both Fate and Shifter,” she murmured. “You carry Praesagio tech in your blood. But this… whatever it is you manifest… this is something different.”

  She reached out to touch but Andreas slapped away her hand.

  Dunn growled. Andreas did not back down.

  “The two halves of the Dracos love you deeply,” Dunn said to Rysa. “They always have and they always will.”

  Ladon, his plate-armored black leather jacket zipped up around his neck, stalked through the gate. “Touch her and I’ll snap your neck, Dunn.”

  She pointed at Ladon. “She has always been your Achilles heel. Do not put her life above the world’s.”

  “What are you on about?” Ladon’s muscles tensed as if he wanted to punch Dunn in the face.

  Dunn looked up at the sky. “I think both the past and the future are trying to limit the damage that is about to be inflicted on the present.” She looked down at the playground surface. “But the actions taken to limit the coming damage have uncoupled us from fate.”

  The energy flowed over Rysa’s eyes.

  Nothing changed, yet everything changed, and Rysa didn’t know how, or why. The playground looked exactly the same as it had before. Dunn looked exactly the same, as did Ladon. She couldn’t see Dragon, but she felt his presence circling behind Dunn, just as she had before.

  But something was new. Or maybe new.

  And Daisy burned with her activation fever.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Dunn, being held back by Ladon, peered at Rysa’s face. “All I wanted was to be myself for these last few hours,” she said. “To be Cecilia. To set down my Progenitor burden before I finally shuffle off this mortal coil.”

  Isn’t that what they all wanted?

  “You don’t set down a weight to become yourself,” Rysa said. “You find the help you need to make it bearable.”

  Rysa ran for the slide, and Daisy.

  Dunn laughed. “From the mouths of babes,” she yelled.

  She turned toward Ladon, but continued to yell. “Is that what she’s done for you? Taken up some of that mountain you’ve piled onto your soul?”

  “Did you know that the President has issued an evacuation for the entire East Coast?” Anna yelled from the top of the slide. “That Praesagio has been evacuating its people and equipment from Asia—not just one county, but from all the nations—for the past week? That Dmitri has declared a state of emergency and has the Russian military working with NATO? That Trajan told the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean governments that they need to evacuate their cities the moment Daniel told you we only have five hours left? This is bigger than you, Dunn! It’s bigger than your whining. It’s bigger than all of us, and I swear if you attempt to enthrall us again, my Dragon will rip off your head!”

  Daisy, helped by Andreas, stumbled toward Rysa.

  She was hot. Too hot. Rysa could see the sweat on her forehead from ten feet away.

  “Pull off her jacket!” Rysa yelled as she pulled off her own. She needed skin-to-skin contact.

  She pulled off her t-shirt.

  Andreas yanked Daisy’s jacket off her arms and dropped it to the ground behind her.

  Rysa wrapped her arms around her friend. She pulled Daisy’s t-shirt up over her bra and her friend gasped as the cold winter air hit her bare skin.

  Violent shivers moved through her body and to her lips. “Ry… Rysa…”

  “It’s okay,” Rysa said. “You’ll both be okay.”

  “You’re…glow… glowing,” Daisy said.

  “I know,” Rysa answered. “It won’t hurt you.”

  Behind them, in the park, Anna scrambled down the slide enclosure. “Dunn!” she yelled. “Help your daughter!”

  Dragon, still invisible, pushed against Andreas, and wrapped himself around Rysa and Daisy.

  “Dragon’s here. Do you feel him?”

  A dragon-perceiving appeared around Daisy. Not over her, or outside of her, or as an image. Rysa felt what the dragons felt of Daisy’s overheating body. She smelled her friend’s ramped-up fear. She tasted Daisy’s animal-oriented calling scents.

  And she knew the ache in her kidneys and the constriction in her throat. She understood that Daisy had been concentrating her own healing on her uterus and on the embryo she carried to the detriment of her lungs and her heart and her brain.

  Because no matter how scared she was of being a mother, or how shocked she might be, or how angry and surprised, the baby meant a lot to her.

  “I’ve got you,” Rysa said.

  Daisy crumpled into Rysa’s embrace. “I’ve been healing myself. I’ve…”

  Andreas’s baritone filled the playground. “I swear to all that is good in this world, Mother, if you don’t—”

  “Quiet!” Dunn yelled.

  Damn it, Rysa thought. Not now.

  Quiet did not mean silent. “Press your face against my neck,” she whispered. The more skin contact, the better. “Hold on.”

  Rysa fired every bit of healing her body could muster into her friend. Every bit of past-seer-fueled memory of what her own body did to fight her double activation. Every bit of present-seer-shaped curl of her healer’s guard-dog-like abilities. Every future-seer-made ounce of hope. Every bit of love. Everything Daisy meant to her, and to Gavin, and to Ladon and Anna. Everything she meant to the dragons and to Andreas.


  Everything.

  Rysa gasped. She couldn’t breathe. Pain ratcheted up her spine, into the base of her skull, then back down her backbone like a bouncing wave. Her legs gave way.

  She let go of Daisy.

  The winter snapped onto her suddenly overheating, burning, splotchy skin.

  “Rysa!” Ladon bellowed. “Dunn! Release us. Now!”

  He broke Dunn’s enthralling. He was losing his own control.

  “Ladon?” Rysa whispered.

  “Get out!” Dunn screamed. “Everyone but Daisy get out now!”

  Daisy had her. The dragons cushioned her fall. Andreas cupped her face and blew ‘heal’ calling scents into her mouth.

  Ladon wrapped her jacket around her shoulders. He looked up and a blast moved between him and Dragon.

  Ladon lifted her into his arms and carried her toward the gate. Andreas looked back at his mother, and followed, as did Anna and Sister-Dragon.

  “Ladon…” Rysa said. “Break this enthralling…”

  Ladon looked back at Dunn, then down at Rysa. “Dragon says he thinks you burned out the Praesagio sniffers in your blood.” He looked over his shoulder. “Dunn! Do something!”

  “She can’t,” Daisy whispered. “She’s not manifesting the same control of her alchemist abilities as I am.”

  “What?” Ladon said.

  Another wave of energy moved between him and Dragon, then outward toward Anna and Sister-Dragon. The beasts could hear everyone and were passing along information.

  Daisy followed them toward the gate and touched Rysa’s cheek and leaned close. “Thank you,” she whispered. She opened her mouth to yell at her mother, but only a whisper came out.

  Daisy let go and ran to Dunn.

  Ladon’s neck reddened. Both dragons roiled. If he lost his invisibility, the camera crew would see him and…

  Rysa gasped. She gripped Ladon’s arm. Where was her blade energy? Was it helping? Making things worse?

  Hey, Ambusti Prime, help me out here! she thought.

  How? her dark Fate answered. This was not part of the script. For the first time since her dark Fate manifested, she sounded frightened.