Burn the Skies

by K. A. Wiggins

  No. No time for regret, not right now. The water is rising, roaring through the tunnels, nearly at the door now, and there is time for only one thing. One last word with the last person I ever expected to have to say goodbye. But that’s not what she needs to hear from me.

  And, whatever she has been or done to me, here at the end all I want is to give her this: “Well done, dreamwalker,” I say, as the water crashes around the corner. “You did it. You completed your mission.”

  She smiles and closes her eyes—and I can’t just let this happen. I focus on the waves, unchaining my rage and fear and desperation. The air stirs, curling the leading edge of spray back into the waves. There’s a beat of tension, a moment where the water almost bubbles out around my own wave of force, and I’m really doing it—I’m holding back the whole ocean for her—

  My control slips. My energy gutters like a flame in the breeze. I used too much fighting her. Even at my best, I could barely stir the air in the waking world. The forest isn’t here to help, and Squishy can’t or won’t provide the same kind of link to the waters.

  The sea races in, battering our body against the remaining concrete. It froths its way to the ceiling and past, curling back from the walls and ricocheting off on its quest to continue up and out.

  I remain.

  The roaring grows distant. Bubbles cluster against the ceiling.

  Finally, all is still but for the drifting of short, dark hair in the current.

  This is wrong.

  It should feel different. More . . . I don’t know. More something. Freeing, or empty, or shattering, or—or anything but numb. If I were truly stone, this emptiness wouldn’t feel so wrong. But there is nothing left here for me but failure and a lifeless shell, so I chase the mounting sea up, break through its surface, and keep climbing.

  The prisoners are gone from their dorms. All of them.

  I continue, past Ravel, still rocking in his lightless cell. The Mara who tormented him have moved on. They’re occupied elsewhere, with the final dregs of their feast.

  I arrive as Lily hits the floor, an empty-eyed doll draped over the prone forms of her adoptive father and her aunt—and the very world seems to shake at her fall. Her mother’s corpse has been heaped with the others in one of the side rooms. The enforcers have been kept too busy to cart the dead off properly.

  “I failed,” I admit redundantly, still absolutely numb, as if the icy depths have seeped through to my very soul.

  “I know,” Ash says, staring at the fragile line of Lily’s arm where it reaches for Ange’s limp hand.

  “Oh, is the other one here too?” Maryam flexes her hand, working out a cramp. “I wasn’t sure if you would last beyond our dear Cadence’s passing, darling. I’m so glad you’re still with us.”

  “You promised not to hurt him.” But of course she can’t hear me.

  “Apparently, she sent for me as soon as Cadence, uh . . .” He swallows hard, choking on the loss. “Sorry, C.”

  Maryam twirls her fingers in a hurry-up gesture. Two enforcers muscle Ash over and through the field of dead.

  “I was lying,” I blurt, desperate to get the words out the end. “Or hiding. You were right all along. I was scared. Not of you, but of what it would do to me to be seen. But I was wrong, Ash. I was wrong to hide. I can do it, I know I can. I can choose you back. I would have, if we had more time. I will—I mean, I do. Choose you. Even if it’s only for a moment, I choose—”

  “I know.” His voice thick, blood running down his face, his eyes fixed on Lily’s corpse. “It’s okay. You did your best. I didn’t want anything from you but the truth. Go now. Don’t stay for this part.”

  “Can’t you fight her or something? Don’t just . . .” I trail off, weary beyond words. Why should he fight? Why should any of us cling so desperately to this pointless, hopeless life? The barrier is crumbling. The Mara are gone—or, no, actually, they seem to mostly be here, still. Maryam’s feast has drawn their full attention. I’m not sure they’ve even realized they can escape.

  “They will,” Ash murmurs. “The sea must be filling the gaps right now. It’s not their element; they can’t pass through. But when the tide turns, they’ll go. There won’t be enough food to keep them.”

  “And good riddance,” Maryam says, her eyes shining. “It’s about time those monsters left my poor city in peace.”

  She reaches for Ash’s head. She doesn’t make it. Her fingers are the first to go, shrivelling and curling, claw-like, skin turning papery, nails thick and yellow under flaking polish.

  “Ah,” she sighs, her honeyed voice turning hoarse and dry. “Finally.”

  She raps Ash on the head with thick knuckles. “Don’t forget to let my boy out before you go. He knows what to do, how to start over, where the supply caches are. Look for more on the other side of the inlet, if needed.”

  Her spine curls, flesh sagging from her bones, hair falling in clumps. She nods, her withered lips curling. “My boy,” she sighs, wilting back onto her throne, a withered shell with oddly bright eyes peering in fanatical satisfaction to the last.

  From the distant, numb place where I now exist, I watch dispassionately until the beautiful, powerful, terrifying architect of our suffering is no more than dust and scraps of fabric stretched over misshapen fragments of bone.

  “Cole—” Ash starts.

  By the time I look over, he’s gone too, folding to the corpse-strewn floor with a sigh, wide, dark eyes filmed over with the telltale pearlescent sheen of the Mara-taken.

  And then he gets up.

  Chapter 31: Taken

  The ghosts have all gone from the edges of my map. Tired of the borderlands, they’ve left for the real world once more.

  My nightmares are real. I knew this, of course, but I’m not sure I really understood it. Not even when I travelled into Cass’s inner self to heal his broken ghost.

  But that’s the thing. They were all broken. Every one of them trapped inside the barrier with the Mara. Not just the Mara-taken, but the others, too. I think everyone who’s died inside this city ever since the walls went up has been trapped, the Mara feeding on the fading vestiges of their dreams even beyond death.

  But the walls are crumbling and the monsters are still here.

  Only, apparently, what they’ve really wanted all along wasn’t just dreams, but flesh as well. They’re wearing my friends like badly fitting suits, slipping beneath the skin and deep into muscle and bone, in some cases before the corpses have a chance to get cold. Ash still moves with some measure of grace, as does Ange, and Lily. Amy, not so much.

  They even march Cadence and Haynfyv out from under the surface, water streaming off—and out of—their cold, sodden forms.

  I’m grateful now to the uncanny but persistent numbness. It lets me gaze dispassionately on the macabre spectacle without succumbing to screaming madness. It’s more than loud enough around here without my adding to the pandemonium.

  Maryam’s grand scheme has failed. The barrier has not crumbled into nothingness. It has only grown smaller. The combination of Cadence’s campaign of destruction and the sea’s relentless force carved a layer clear through its base, but the remaining dome simply dropped a few stories, settling into the gap.

  The Mara romp through the tower, sucking the souls from the remaining workers and inhabiting their newly-emptied corpses, either unaware or uncaring that their hunting ground has shrunk and their prey been pushed to the brink of extinction. Beneath the waves, a fresh batch of sea monsters cavort with the long-trapped ones of my city, seemingly content to hunt the bounty of fish and other sea life newly swept in on the waves.

  This is the new normal, but it won’t last. Nine Peaks still hasn’t struck. Though the barrier is nominally in place, fissures and flaking dead patches mottle its remaining surface. I don’t know exactly what form the dreamwalkers’ coming attack will take, but my chances of propping up the damaged dome against a force of nature equal to or greater than the sea are vanishingly s
carce.

  Not to mention, I’m not all that motivated. It’s hard to see anything past the tortured, decaying souls of my friends. No longer clustered around the seam between worlds, ghosts roam everywhere. The air is thick with what’s left of them. Death was only the beginning of their torment. Now that the Mara fully have their hooks in them, their suffering is seemingly unending, fuelling the monsters’ power and feeding them long after the flesh has been stolen.

  I almost welcome whatever Nine Peaks has in store for us. If only they could burn us all up, monsters and ghosts alike scorched into oblivion. But if they destroy the barrier without annihilating everything within, the horror my city has become will only be the beginning.

  “Are they close?” Ravel whispers.

  He’s taken to talking to me. At first, I ignored his muttering. He was halfway insane, anyway. I can’t release him. Can’t free him. No point in giving him false hope.

  Then, when he wouldn’t shut up, I told him exactly what was going on behind the locked door of his isolation cell. He didn’t take it well, but after a brief period of shunning, he seems to have caved to the need to talk to someone once more.

  “Flame? Are they close yet?”

  “They will be if you don’t shut up.”

  He considers this. “At least I’ll make a pretty monster.”

  “Am I supposed to laugh?”

  “You could always try to console me.” He smirks. Then shivers. “I think the monsters forgot to turn on the heat this morning.”

  “Or they ate the last of the building engineers.”

  “Or that. Cole, for real, though: are they close?”

  I ignore him and his forlorn tone, and the way he’s rocking in the dark, alone and afraid, and desperately hoping for someone to come and throw open the doors to let the light in.

  It’s hard to see him when Ash’s shade is in my way, half his face shredded, the rest contorted in a rictus of pain. He’s got hold of Lily’s ghost, somehow, and is dragging her by the neck, her head tilted at an awful angle, her teeth clamped in an empty grin as ichor boils from the pits of her eyes.

  I turn away from their pawing hands, curling myself smaller. As if that will help. Everywhere I turn it only gets worse. Cadence—and her parents. Ange, and Liwan. Amy and Sam. The dead crowd around me as if . . .

  As if they’re as desperate for my attention as Ravel is.

  “I know you’re there, flame,” he says. “Talk to me. Please.”

  The floor shivers beneath him. Perhaps the foundations are so damaged by the ocean’s release that it will fall and end the walking nightmares entirely. I consider sharing this promising hypothesis with him. But he’s not the only living being that would be wiped out if Refuge crumbled.

  Maryam’s stolen children, the untouched youngest ones, are still held in their chemically frozen sleep not far away. They’ll be invisible to the Mara until they wake, or at least uninteresting. Some few other living humans run from the monster-ridden undead or cower in odd corners of these halls too. Death by crushing or by soul-sucking nightmare is hardly likely to be an appealing choice.

  I start to explain. Stop before I get a word out. He’s a monster in his own right. He used me, hurt me, drew me into the same darkness he has been trapped in so long.

  He also saved me, freed me, helped me in the only ways he knew how. “I don’t have anything to say that can help. Yes, they’re close. Yes, they’re coming. Yes, they’re probably going to suck out your soul. But don’t worry; I’m sure you’ll be just as much of a pest as a ghost. If not more so.”

  “Thanks darling, you always know what to say to make me feel better,” he whispers, eyes closed, still rocking. “So I guess it’s my turn. If I had the chance to do it all over again, I would still come back for you. I can feel you rolling your eyes, flame. ‘Oh, that Ravel. Such a tease. Tee hee.’ You know you’re thinking it.”

  “I have never thought, said, or so much as imagined the phrase ‘tee hee’ in my life.”

  He snorts. “As always, glad to expand your frame of reference. For real, though. Sorry. I wouldn’t change a minute I got to spend with you. Not even the ones you spent glaring daggers. Those were some of my favourites if you want the truth.”

  “You’re sick.”

  He shrugs. “Aren’t we all? But let me finish. I’d do it all again, for me. I’m selfish like that. But if I weren’t, if I were more like—like him. Sparkie—you are sure he’s dead, flame?”

  Ash’s grimacing shade waggles Lily’s squirming form under my nose. “Oh yeah, he’s dead.”

  “Good. But if I were more like him, maybe I would have been able to protect you. To give you the world without hurting you. To let you be free of this place. So, uh, sorry I wasn’t your hero, I guess.” He sniffles, rubbing his nose. “It really is freezing in here.”

  But darkness doesn’t mean the same thing to me. I can see the heat rising under his skin, tinting his face red from collar to the tips of his ears.

  “And here I thought you were supposed to have a way with words.”

  “You know me, flame. Always another angle up my sleeve.”

  The Mara in their skin suits really are getting closer. When they’re wearing humans they don’t seem to be as powerful, but they are reasonably clever. They’ll find a key or improvise a battering ram once they get hungry enough.

  “What’s the angle, Ravel? What’s this pathetic act going to accomplish? Might as well reveal the trick before it’s too late.”

  He swallows. “Don’t suppose you’d agree to be my girl, seeing as how I’m about to die and all?”

  “Nope.”

  “Or you could forgive me for, you know, stuff.”

  “I could, but then what would we have to argue about?”

  “Whether my eyes are my best feature or my devastating smile?”

  I shudder at his hollow laugh—and the prospect of those light-filled golden eyes clouding over. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think you’ll care about your looks after they take you.” The others certainly don’t seem self-aware about their new fangs and leaking voids and shredded flesh . . .

  “Oh, I’m sure I’ll be a very vain ghost. Pity the monster who messes with this hot bod.”

  Fluffy gives me a jab. My bubble of detachment wobbles.

  “Say that again.”

  “What? ‘Hot bod?’”

  “Definitely not that.”

  “‘Poor monsters?’”

  Squishy bobs agreement. The world speeds up around me, the screeching of the dead raking my ears, the horror of their visible torment drilling into my soul. “Pity the monster . . .”

  “Uh, flame? What is up with the echo?”

  Pity the monsters. It’s so ridiculous it might just be worth a shot. Even Ravel, without his minions, stripped of his web of connections, is nothing more than a powerless boy huddled in a dark room.

  What would the Mara be if I could take away the source of their power? They grow stronger by siphoning off our dreams, tearing us apart thread by thread, even after death.

  But I’m a weaver.

  “Goodbye, Ravel. And thank you. If this doesn’t work, I’m sure you’ll make a lovely monster.”

  “Wait, flame—”

  But there’s no time to waste. I can’t afford to hesitate.

  I reach for the one who scares me the most. My mother.

  THERE ARE THINGS HERE I don’t want to see. I sort through the threads quickly, careful not to waste more than a glance at each set of memories, fears, longings, desires . . .

  This woman deserves some shred of privacy—or that’s what I intend. But her threads have a weight to them, a kind of friction against my skin that pulls me in despite my fear.

  Susan: her face unlined, her long braids dark and thick. She’s scolding the obstinate little girl this woman once was. Another time: teaching, her calloused hands guiding the small, soft ones of a child. Another time: scolding, then laughing, then fighting.

  An
other face appears. My father. Then an infant—a toddler—a child with twigs in her hair, and scraped knees, and a mutinous expression. Cadence.

  Even later still, a journey like so many before. But this time, there’s a growing sense of uncertainty that gives way to fear. Near the end now, a desperate race through a crumbling landscape. Loss. Pain.

  The scraps of her life are still here, ragged and snarled from the Mara’s relentless hunger, tarnished and faded, but somehow still clinging to the framework of her deepest self. She’s not a fragment, not like those poor souls fed into the barrier. She’s still a person. And I am not stone after all, but water and wood and fire, my heart burning as the tears run down my face.

  It doesn’t even take that much to heal her.

  I tie off the last knot and stand back to admire the shimmering fabric of the woman who brought Cadence and I, whatever our current forms, into this world. There’s more love in that weave than despair, more laughter than anger, and not one single loose thread left for the Mara to draw on.

  I almost hate to leave it behind. But there are more ghosts to restore. To heal. I step away from my work, sinking through the smooth, perfect surface that surrounds her deepest self into her dreamscape, only to find myself swept up into a hug.

  She holds me out, studying my features. I open my mouth to apologize, to explain that I’m not her daughter, not really—but a tugging sensation stops me.

  Somehow, I missed one. A stray thread, clinging to me like an anchor. A final, lingering vulnerability that will call out to the Mara like a beacon. I need to go back, to reweave it into the fabric of her life, or else cut it free before they use it to unravel her once more.

  But she touches my face, drawing my attention back to her form in the dreamscape. She smiles wordlessly. She still hasn’t spoken. I—I’m not sure she can. Maybe she’s been dead so long she’s forgotten how. But, though I don’t look anything like the child she left behind, she seems to know me. Or Cadence, rather.