Through Fire

by Parker Jaysen

  The dragons seem to have forgotten us.

  The comms rebooted and are showing green across the board, but the guild is still out of touch. No idea why.

  My head is better. The top of the canyon wall had spawned a slab of slate the size of our carriage. Any closer and I’d be dead, of course, but its impact had flung a cinder avalanche at me, knocking me into the carriage. Those helmets weren’t designed to guard against concussion.

  And there’s Vick. I can only imagine what goddamn stupid heroics she went through to bring me back in, and she’s not talking about it.

  But something has shifted, in her, in me, us. We’re casual? We’re comfortable. We sit together on the same side of the kitchen bench when we eat, legs touching.

  “I’m thinking of trying to get Paulus going,” she says.

  God help me, I feel a jolt of fear that it means she wants to get back to normal life, back to life without me.

  But we can’t stay here forever, she’s right. We have to get out of the Gap, and we’ll have a better chance with two oxen.

  “What if we just accept that it’s not Paulus for now?” We have his control panels spread out on the floor between us. A frustrating couple of hours later, and they’re on, there’s even through-current, but they’re not communicating.

  “Get him walking, don’t worry about the rest for now,” Vick continues my thought like it’s her own. “That might work. Give Daisy some extra muscle, let her lead though.” She catches my eye. “I like it.”

  Okay, it feels like I have Vick back, and I don’t want to fuck anything up. I just nod at her instead of saying something wrong, or awkward, or pushy.

  It is a good plan. Get us through the Gap, get somewhere we can give Daisy anything besides ashcakes, and we might not finish the mission in more than 41 days.

  So we start. Vick suits up, and this time, with a defiant stare, she includes her helmet. Damn fool, she could have died saving me. My own suit was gashed when I fell, but Paulus’s repairs took precedence. We’ll patch everything when we break for the night.

  Something else has changed: Vick doesn’t go into the washroom to strip.

  She’s always been the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. She pulls off her tee-shirt, and underneath she’s only wearing a tank top. I’m not sure why she’d even wear that in the heat, but it doesn’t really hide her body from me.

  And she knows it.

  She catches my eye and then shrugs into the canvas suit.

  It’s possible that I’m hypnotized.

  We were never that kind of a playful, exhibitionist couple, but she has a look in her eye that makes me tremble a little.

  “Help me?”

  You learn how to read signals when you’re an adolescent. You learn what’s appropriate sometime soon thereafter. It’s not appropriate for me to haul her into my arms right here in the middle of hell, just because I think I’m getting a signal.

  I settle the helmet on her lean shoulders, trigger the latches, and wait for her thumbs-up. Then she steps out into the canyon.

  I’m concentrating on keeping the heat down around her, and so at first I don’t realize she’s switched from talking to Daisy to talking to me.

  Sort of?

  “If we don’t make it through,” she says.

  I scramble for my controls and hit my mike. “Can you repeat?”

  “The panels are seating fine,” she says after a long pause.

  These viewports are no good for this. The tempered glass is so thick that everything has a blue-green cast, and they’re angled to cover the view to the horizon. But I can tell Vick’s almost motionless. I imagine this is what deep-sea divers look like excavating the Orlando sites.

  She shouldn’t stay out there much longer.

  “How many more?” I ask instead of “tell me what you were saying, I’m desperate to know what you’re thinking.”

  “Halfway done.” Through the port, I see her bend down and pick up the next control unit. “They’re seating fine.”

  There’s a long pause while Daisy noses at Vick’s toolbox, and Vick laughs and goofs off with Daisy before opening the next access panel under Paulus’s flank.

  “Okay, I don’t know what you heard,” she says after a while. “But it’s important that you know.”

  The opaque viewports, the comms static, everything seems to want to keep me from reading Vick’s precise state of mind. I sink down to the floor of the carriage, headset pushed up to my ear like it’s my lifeline.

  “I was thoughtless. I was unforgiving.”

  She’d left without a word. I hated her for it. I’m the unforgiving one.

  “I kept thinking I’d come back, I’d say I’m sorry, you’d yell at me, and we’d be fine again.” She pauses, I assume to do something fiddly with a panel. “And then so much time went by, and now you’re stuck with me here, and I’m sorry now, still.”

  It is impossible to be clear, to understand her every nuance, and I need to.

  Also, I need to answer her. “I’m sorry too,” I say, and there’s no more nuance in my answer than in her apology.

  “I just want you to know,” she says after another pause.

  This is dreadful. I want to shout, “what is it that you want me to know?” because it feels like she’s apologizing for the breakup.

  “In case something happens,” she says again.

  Even through the static I hear the hoped-for sound of Paulus’s maneuvering systems whirring back to life, and Daisy actually squeals with delight and the bonk I hear is probably her pawing at his outer plating.

  I stand back up.

  I don’t know why we broke up. Maybe it was the promotion. Maybe she didn’t feel comfortable with me being a mission lead.

  Maybe I came on too strong.

  Maybe she fell out of love.

  Just about every night for two years, I’d sifted through a thousand reasons for it as I tried to fall asleep in an empty bed.

  In an armored carriage, over a staticky comm, it doesn’t feel like the right time to ask.

  If she didn’t quite mean “the past is the past,” at least she doesn’t keep a cold distance any longer.

  We play cards. Cards! We read, even aloud to one another.

  She is watchful, but we are traveling through hell with a crippled ox team. Of course she’s watchful.

  When we’re through the Gap, the comms have enough juice to get a scratchy signal from Maura.

  “We thought you were dead,” she says, and we can hear their excitement over the comm.

  Vick grabs the mike. “We lost Paulus, but we fixed him enough to pull. We should still make it by day 41.”

  “Understood,” Maura says.

  Out of the worst of it, Vick is lighter, happier. She chatters with Maura for a while about guild business, the teams assigned to later legs, how the lake weather is – just chitchat.

  And when Maura signs off, Vick is still light.

  One of us makes a mistake. I’m not sure which of us it is, because it’s early morning and I’m sleepy. It’s probably me.

  She’d come into my bunk in the night after using the washroom, and I’d just rolled over to let her in and gone back to sleep.

  So in the morning, I think it’s me, I think I’m the one who reaches for her, and then I’m wide awake.

  Her eyes are glittering, fierce.

  I start to pull my hand back, it’s at the hem of her tank top, and she grabs my wrist and guides my fingers up, along her side, and just under her breast.

  Invitation, order, I don’t care which. I can’t stop either way. I close my hand around her breast and I’m so instantly ready, instantly wet for her. My heart pounds.

  She shifts and pulls the shirt up enough for me to see her, that her nipples are hard. Hard hard hard.

  She says nothing, and so I kiss her. She is open-mouthed, meeting my tongue with hers like she’s been waiting two years to kiss me.

  I pull away and push her shirt the rest of the
way up, so that I can see her breasts in the dawn light. “Allie,” she whispers. I kiss one rock hard nipple, and then the other.

  She arches.

  If I take her nipple into my mouth, one of us will come, I think, and I’m not sure which. She’s stretching her fingers towards her pajama bottoms, this is going to burn fast out of anyone’s control, and I do not care. I suck her nipple into my mouth and she jerks. “Please.”

  “This?” I say around her nipple, and I pinch the other one lightly. She never loved hard pinches.

  “Allie.”

  She wants me to make love to her. She’s telling me in every way besides asking me outright. Her fingers are in her waistband, her eyes are on mine.

  I’m so terrified I can barely breathe.

  I push one of her hands away and put my hand into her pajamas.

  Jesus Christ, she’s not faking anything, and if anything that makes me more afraid. I push my hand further down, while her fingers grip my other arm. She’s wet, so miraculously wet, and when my fingers finally enter her, she cries out.

  “Shh,” I say, and I find her mouth again.

  She’s pushing up into my hand, and my fingers find her clit. I want to bring her in, I want to give her what she’s begging for, and I want to make it last long enough to hold me over when I’m missing her again.

  She bites my lip when she realizes I’m delaying her, and I grin over her mouth.

  “Shh,” I say again.

  I know her rhythm as well as I know my own. She leans into me, kissing my neck, my collarbone, as I pull her towards orgasm, until her body is convulsing around my fingers, and then she is limp against me for a long minute.

  We don’t compound the mistake by going any farther. Maura interrupts us anyway, just then, to give us the coordinates for a good falls crossing. I get up, still in my bedclothes, my own breasts aching foolishly, and go across the carriage to get the mike.

  Vick sits up to watch me, somberly. She pulls her tank top down with a faint smile, and puts her fingers to her mouth.

  Something flickers in her expression when I sit at the kitchen bench to log Maura’s instructions, and she swings her legs out over the edge of the bunk and gets up.

  Sahra dragons are the main falls dragons. They aren’t all that big, but they are goddamned electricity demons. They have some affinity for the lightning and they pull giant sparks from the water and blast anything in their path.

  My damping won’t do much against them, but Vick should be able to knock back a dozen at a time.

  There will be at least that many.

  There are also, apparently, new demons. Maura is not exactly a fount of knowledge on these – reports have been sparse.

  “Bolts won’t kill them, and they climb sheer metal like they’re made of magnets,” she says.

  Sheer metal, like what a fucking carriage is made of? Great.

  Vick brings two plates of powdered eggs to the bench. “What about fire?”

  “We don’t know,” Maura says. “They seem to avoid the Gap, so maybe.”

  Of course, here we are, two mostly fire-mage types, but not the kind who shoot fire from our fingers.

  “What are we calling them?” I ask.

  “Unnamed at this point,” Maura says after a pause.

  New demons, possibly fire-vulnerable, no idea, one damaged ox, and I still have Vick’s essence on my fingers. Just the notion makes me feel a hot wetness between my legs.

  It’s been a bit of a big morning already.

  A handful of the new demons are waiting along the road towards the falls.

  They seem half-hearted, rushing the road but backing off when Daisy snorts. I climb into the roof viewport to try to get an idea of their armor.

  There are garish, spiny ridges running along their backs and tails in pinks and greens. It’s impossible to say whether they serve a function or are ornamental. Even the spikes on their foreheads look decorative – pink and purple and sparkly. They’re a child’s idea of a fairy dinosaur.

  Well, you can’t judge a demon by its spikes. We all know that.

  Not only are they half-hearted, they seem particularly stupid. One tries to take a bite out of Paulus and screams in what sounds like agony, and they all disappear for hours, as though Paulus and Daisy and the carriage are all the same type of armored creature.

  Eventually they come back and perch sullenly on the cliffs ahead of the falls.

  “Fluffy, aren’t they?” Vick says. But she’s not fooled, either.

  She hands the binoculars back to me, and I try to get a count. Possibly ten now. Maybe they have to overwhelm in numbers, which is why they’re hanging back instead of attacking again.

  “How many blocks do you think it would take to get them all?”

  “Supposing they’re horse-sized, and they come in formation? Probably six at a time. So a couple of fast blocks could take out this set.”

  It’s worrying. We don’t know if brute force will actually kill them. If bolts don’t, it’s hard to know what will.

  Bolts kill anything.

  Blocking can send them over a cliff and keep them away from us, though.

  Vick stiffens and her face goes slack for a moment. It reminds me of – no, Alice.

  This is why guild members getting together is a bad idea. I’m so distracted by her.

  “Two dragons,” she says in that faraway voice. “But they’re just circling.”

  So for now we’re in a wait-and-see mode. We keep trundling towards the falls; there’s a ledge we can shelter under, probably enough to let us both sleep at the same time.

  I admit, I’m hoping that Vick will just come to my bed at bedtime.

  I almost ask her.

  But I don’t, and she doesn’t. She grins at me from her own bunk, and I’m not sure what else to do but go to sleep.

  The demons attack at 1:07 a.m.

  Four whomps on one side of the carriage, a godawful scream from Daisy, and then claws on the metal of the roof. The screech of metal is unbearable. Vick lurches to her feet and almost buckles as she throws her block outwards. I grab her arm to steady her and hit the switch for the outside floods. The front viewports light up.

  Daisy is standing in the cone of yellow light, alive. She seems more interested in Paulus than in anything else. I shake my head. You cannot explain the love of an ox.

  “I’ll go out and see how she is,” I say.

  “No, you can’t,” Vick says. “Let me.”

  “That makes no sense. If the demons return, you can block them and protect me. How can I protect you if you go out alone?”

  She was thinking she could do both, I can see it in her face.

  “I will do it,” I say.

  “So you do have opinions,” I think she mutters.

  Oh, Paulus. Patched-up control panels aren’t going to do it this time. The demons have sprayed him with purple spittle, and it has eaten down through one foreleg.

  He’s truly offline.

  Daisy will get the spittle on herself, too, if we leave her yoked to him. I have the tools in my suit, and I start taking the yoke apart.

  “What are you doing?” Vick says in my ear. She’s tired, and she sounds frayed. “You have to tell me what you’re doing, Alice. You have to tell me things.”

  “Paulus is ruined,” I say. The yoke itself has no spittle, miraculously, but after seeing the damage it does, I’m being very careful.

  “Do you need my help?”

  “No, keep them off me, that’s all.”

  I concentrate on the huge connectors. I think I hear distant shrieks of some kind of demon, but then abrupt silence, and I know she’s working on it.

  Unless she faints. I hurry.

  “Sorry, Daisy, my love,” I say to the bewildered ox. I clear my throat and then speak to Vick. “All right, I think you can steer her away from his – carcass. Careful, the spittle seems to be acidic. Demon acid.”

  While Vick’s moving the carriage, I try to see if there’s any
other critical damage from the spit demons. There’s more of the weird decay around one of the side viewports, and it’s sprouting something like mold. The acid hit only minutes ago. Nothing grows that fast.

  Of course, until now I didn’t know there were purple spitting demons, either.

  Daisy obediently moves to an even more sheltered spot in the lee of the cliff. “He was a good friend, sweet girl,” I tell her.

  “This spittle is something new,” I tell Vick. “I’m going to get a sample.”

  “Entry or airlock?”

  I peer at the mold-like stuff in the stark shadows of the floodlights. “Airlock, I guess.”

  It’s definitely growing. This world, it is going to try to kill you one way or another, but molds are more a marsh thing. This is new for the fire lands. Still inside the airlock, I record the mold at three time points, and then we call Maura, even though it’s the middle of the night.

  She’s not as concerned as we expect her to be. “It will accelerate for a bit, and then flare out,” she says. “We’ve seen it a few times.”

  “Would have been nice to know,” I say shortly.

  “Yes,” Vick says. “It’s nice to have all the information.”

  This is the second pointed remark she’s made that seems to be directed at me.

  “Leave it overnight. You could try dampening it later if it’s still spreading,” Maura says.

  “It’s not fire,” I say automatically.

  “Remember, though, the stuff dragons shoot that you can dampen,” says Maura, “only looks like fire, acts like fire.”

  I don’t have much appetite for a lecture on demonic essences. “True,” I say. “I’m keeping an open mind.”

  I strip off my gear and wait for Vick to hit decontam and let me in.

  It’s almost dawn, but I’m suddenly aware of how weary I am. I feel buffeted by demons and confused by Vick and our relationship, or lack thereof.

  I don’t even pull on a nightshirt. I just tumble into my bunk and conk out.

  ACT III

  It’s hard to leave Paulus, even knowing he was never real. He was real to Daisy.