Turn Away
Chase staggered out of the mine, tried to hide the fact that he’d staggered, and decided he didn’t care.
“Lord,” he muttered at the sky. “I don’t doubt I deserve the ague, but does it have to be so blasted hot?” Despite the frosty air, his malaria was somewhere between the fever and sweating stages of its latest cycle. He felt like his fire had rebelled and started searing him from within.
His forearms hurt the worst. Da’s filthy bone-grafts ached at their joins, probably inflamed by all the other sicknesses coursing through his body. The surprising warmth in the lower tunnels hadn’t helped. Nor had the near confrontation with Amadi.
“It can’t be nightfall yet,” the Afrii had said upon seeing him.
“It’s not,” he’d answered. “But—”
“Then get out of my sight.”
“I wasn’t trying to be in it. But Da wanted me to help with the search.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“And I’m not offering it. Just let me pass.”
He’d been tempted to tell the mighty Black Resurrection who it was that had saved him from Fara’s endless neck snappings. But with the big fellow dead, who would support the claim? And it didn’t square things. Chase still had the carnage at Omnira to answer for on Judgement Day. Among other sins.
Even so, Amadi could have been a little less haughty.
“What did you find?” Da asked, sticking his head out of the cart as Chase stumbled to it.
“No sign of the boy, but I found Amadi. He’s still looking.”
Da scowled. All the man did these days was scowl. And bark orders. “Did he say anything?”
“Go a different way,” Amadi had murmured when Chase tried to edge by him in the tunnel.
“Why?”
“Because if you go this way, you’ll run out of air. And I won’t be able to choke it from you later.”
“He said some pleasant things about murdering me. Nothing about the boy.”
Da grunted. “The Espans are all searching too?”
“Yes. How is Jie doing?”
“None of your concern. Go back and find the boy.”
Chase locked his knees to prevent them from buckling. “Can Haru go? She can move faster through the tunnels.”
“Always negotiating, aren’t you? Fine. Watch Isaura.” The Han withdrew into the cart again, leaving Chase alone in the wind. At least the chill felt good right now.
He wished Da would let him see Jie, though. She’d collapsed after saving them from the originals’ ambush the day before, and her brother had laid her in the back of the cart. He hadn’t allowed anyone else to visit or tend to her since.
Instead, Chase had been searching for a phantom boy in the mine, or guarding Isaura, or babysitting Bolin. Certainly not sleeping, the only thing he wanted to do right now if he couldn’t help Jie.
But rest would have to wait. “My turn to mind Captain Messy Bottom,” he told Haru after he’d staggered into the small office building they’d commandeered from the overseers. “You’re on mine duty.”
“Chase Chase!” Bolin cheered from a corner, where he was wrapped in several pairs of clothes and playing with a toy monkey.
Haru eyed Chase and slid a chair to him. “Sit before you fall.” She threw a sympathetic look to Isaura, who was gazing out the opposite wall’s window. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Isaura nodded, what little Chase could see of her eyes glinting dangerously. She didn’t look all that steadier than him; she still had a knot on her head from the blow Mateo had given her during the battle. She’d taken a similar shot from Da in Bayano. Too many more of those and she’d be in real trouble.
Chase sat heavily—and gratefully—in the chair Haru had offered him. “For what it’s worth,” he said in Anglo once the Nippon had mussed Bolin’s hair, grabbed her bone-spear, and slipped through the door, “and I’m sure it’s not worth much, but here it is anyway: I’m sorry.”
Isaura kept staring out the window.
“Truly sorry. For all of it.”
Still no response.
Chase sighed and leaned his head against the chair’s backrest. “And Lord help me, when I say all of it, I realize how much ‘it’ really is. There’s this.” He gestured at Bolin and his monkey. “And there’s Fort Kaska—that church I burned.” Hell’s bells, how many ways had he wronged this woman? She and Amadi had every right to hate him. “I know there’s no way to make it right, but …”
“You saved me once too,” Isaura said softly. “In LaFlorida.”
What?
He studied her from the side. He’d spent a few months wandering that Espan territory after leaving New Kent, the settlement he’d founded and failed. But the only woman he’d aided had been a whore in a soldier’s camp. She’d been locked in a shack, her face so dirty and bruised Chase could barely make out her features. Yet he remembered her hair: long, auburn, and intricately braided …
Like Isaura’s.
Oh Lord, it had been her.
He knew she’d been raped—he’d seen glimmers of it through the Red Wraith’s memory mash on the earthen pyramid. But he hadn’t realized where.
“You fired the soldiers’ quarters,” she said. “To give me a chance to escape.”
He’d set other buildings blazing as well that night. It was the first time using his fire had felt good, closer to holyfire than hellfire.
“Without your distraction, I’m not sure I would have made it out of that miserable place. I owed you everything—once.”
Chase winced.
“But not now. Now you’ve undone all the good you did. Now I owe you nothing, and you owe me my son.”
He glanced at the boy. Bolin still played in the corner, content to ignore a conversation he couldn’t understand. “I didn’t want this.”
“And yet you abetted it.” Isaura gripped the window sill. “Pollas en vinagre, you helped two strangers kidnap my boy and bring him thousands of miles, to the Mine of god-damned Death.”
Chase winced again. “The purple haze—”
“Don’t you dare blame it on that. Haru told me how it works, how you can get around some of it if you try long enough. You cooperated with more of this than you had to.”
There was no denying that.
“And this from a man who knows what it is to lose a child.”
Kip. She knew about Kip. Knew about that terrible day in New Kent, when he’d lost his temper and first manifested fire—hellfire that time for sure—fire that had ashed his brother, incinerated their house, and turned his boy, his sweet, yearling boy, to black dust and a bubbling stain. She knew.
But how? It must have been through the Wraith’s memory mash. Maybe she’d seen clearer in it than he had. Not that it mattered. Yes, he’d done unspeakable things, some of them to her. But she didn’t need to judge him for this. He’d already judged himself.
Chase’s voice felt hot when he finally spoke. “You have no right to—”
Isaura lifted her hands high and slammed them back down on the windowsill. “I have every right. For a pretty smile, you helped a Han puta steal my child. You helped a Han bastard who bashes me in the head every chance he gets and threatens to make me kill my child.”
His anger wilted.
A second later, Isaura’s head drooped too. “Did you know Da ordered me not to touch or look at Shoteka? After you went into the mine, he said that. Now I can’t so much as peek at my son out of the corner of my eye, even when he tugs on my dress. The child I’ve journeyed thousands of miles to reclaim. I have to turn away. I have to turn away from my son. He’s playing right there, just behind me, and all I want to do is hold him. But that bastard’s evil haze won’t let me.”
Chase wasn’t sure, but he thought she might be crying. He squelched the impulse to comfort her. It was hard to imagine a worse idea.
“He’s walking now,” Isaura went on, her tone lower, her cadence slower. “And talking. Except not in Esp
an—only Mandarin.”
Anglo too. But mentioning that was almost as bad an idea as hugging her.
“It’s only been six months … Yet it’s been six months. Six months of learning and growing and changing. Six months I missed. Six months for him to forget me.”
Chase cleared his throat. “I’m sure he remembers you.”
Isaura shook her head. “I want him to, so badly that sometimes I feel like he’s calling to me. But no—this is another thing you’ve helped do. Maybe the worst of all: erasing a mother from her son’s memory.”
Was it possible to feel smaller? “I’m sorry.”
“I almost believe it, but …” She paused, her eyes widening.
“What?”
Isaura tried to look away from the window, but there was only so far she could move her head without bringing Bolin—no, Shoteka; that was his real name—into her field of vision.
Chase eased himself out of the chair and worked his way to the other side of the window. “Is Amadi back?” The office had a clear view of the mine entrance, but the opening was empty. The Afrii was nowhere in sight.
A woman was, though.
An old woman, lean as a blade and crawling like an invalid. What Chase could see of her skin suggested she was an original, probably of the same tribe that had attacked the mine. But she was caked with so much dirt and dried blood that it was hard to be sure.
“She’s not a threat,” Isaura said when she followed his eyes.
“She has a rope,” Chase noted.
The old woman was dragging a knotted cord behind her. It wasn’t coiled in the same way the attackers’ bombs had been, but he didn’t doubt the woman could do something nefarious with it.
And the purple haze demanded he not risk it.
Isaura reached for his arm as he moved toward the door, but her aim was off—probably because of the blow to her head—and she didn’t come close.
Dodging her upset his own equilibrium, however, and he couldn’t regain it in time to avoid lumbering into the door and driving its handle into his gut. But the purple haze didn’t care that he was winded, compelling him to yank open the door and tumble through it. “Kill anyone who means us harm,” Da had ordered, and the old woman didn’t seem like she was making a pleasure call.
Isaura careened to the door but went no further. She probably wasn’t allowed outside. “Let her go!” she hissed. “You can fight this. Haru said you’ve had the haze longer than her, that it should have faded the most for you. We can’t beat it yet, but you can.”
“I can’t,” Chase said through gritted teeth, pushing himself to a stand.
“Try, damn you. Be the man you were in LaFlorida.”
That hurt. But this wasn’t as simple as sidestepping one of Da’s minor requests. And even doing that much was still difficult. The haze had to be thin enough, and he had to be able to picture his will burning through it, like a ray of sunlight piercing the morning fog. No, in this instance, that wiry little Han had explicitly commanded him to guard against any more original assailants. The haze was strong on this point, thick and impenetrable.
“Are you going to leave me in here with Shoteka?” Isaura asked when Chase took a halting step toward the old woman.
“Isn’t that what you want?” he muttered. But she couldn’t pick the boy up, couldn’t even look at him. Not without breaking through the haze’s densest layers. Like she was asking him to do.
“Huitaca!” Isaura called in Espan, apparently abandoning her attempts to influence him. “Watch out! They see you!”
The old woman peered at the office building, saw Chase, and accelerated her crawl into a scramble. She’d probably lain in wait since yesterday’s ambush had failed, somehow surviving last night’s bitter chill while she recovered her strength and bided her time. Now she’d be inside the mine within a minute. To do what? It didn’t matter. He had his orders.
Chase took another step toward her, then another and another, each stride longer than the one before. Then he was running, pushing past the ague and the lack of sleep and all the rest of it, fueled by the haze’s insistence that he comply.
Within moments, he was within range of the old woman, his pistol was out, and he was praying his fire would abandon him, as it always seemed to when he needed it most. He didn’t want to do this. La Mina de la Muerte was a terrible place, maybe the worst on Earth. It surely deserved whatever harm the old woman meant to visit on it. And he was sick to death of carrying out other people’s directives. If the Lord would let him turn aside, even just for a second … maybe he could pretend to be that man from LaFlorida again.
But Chase felt the hot looseness billowing up from his core, and he knew before it reached his arm that he wouldn’t be able to squelch the fire, wouldn’t be able to prevent it from pouring out his pistol. So he bent the flames instead, ramming his will through a tiny hole in the purple fog and finding just enough control to arc the blaze around the old woman.
“Hallelujah!” he yelled. The Lord was with him. He’d defied Da, more directly than ever before. If he could keep doing it, maybe he could shed the Han’s shackles after all.
But then Chase saw what he’d hit instead, a figure that had emerged from the mine with Amadi.
A teenage boy, screaming soundlessly as his stone-colored hair and skin ignited.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Trader
Da was out of the cart before Amadi’s anguished yell finished echoing around the mine. The Afrii’s deep voice was unmistakable. So was his anger.
The reason for it became clear when Da saw the mine entrance. Chase was standing in the foreground, his pale face contorted with horror as he lowered his pistol. Nearer the arched entry, Amadi was helping a burning boy roll along the packed earth in a futile attempt to extinguish the flames.
“Chase!” Da screamed before sprinting toward the Afrii and the boy. “What have you done?”
The Anglo broke into his own run. “It was an accident …”
Amadi grabbed the boy’s withered hands. “Take my spirit armor! Let it heal you like it did my arm in the mine!”
Then it happened, the most extraordinary thing Da had ever seen: the burning boy shut his scorched eyelids, closed his fingers around Amadi’s, and … changed.
His nails reformed. His hair regrew. His skin regenerated—everything morphed from ashy black to a rocky, gray-brown mix that made him look like he’d stepped out of one of the tunnel walls. Even his eyes and teeth were the color of the mine.
Flames still clung to him, but they only caused temporary damage, minor distortions in his flesh that smoothed away almost instantly. And once Chase reached him and dismissed the remaining fire, there was no sign the boy had been injured.
“I’m sorry,” the Anglo stammered. “I didn’t mean to hit you, and I can’t call off the flames unless I’m close.”
Amadi smashed his fist into Chase’s jaw, sending him flying.
Da approved. “This is the boy?” he said in his barely passable Espan.
The Afrii glowered at his prone nemesis, eyes glinting. Then he shook his hand out and nodded. “His name is Urcon.”
Urcon. The gray boy who could transfer properties, like heat from a cup of tea, the shade of a mine wall … or Amadi’s ability to overcome any wound.
It was everything Da had hoped, the culmination of a plan that had seemed mad even to him when he and Jie fled the Forbidden City more than a year ago. They’d failed at the earthen pyramid, when bad luck and her ill-timed mirroring had ruined their chance to ask for help from the master healer. But the backup plan—the improvised, desperate scheme based on another scattered vision and involving lies, kidnap, and murder—had paid off.
Da breathed a sigh of relief, which quickly turned into a wracking, bloody cough. Yes, the costs had been terrible. He’d done things he could never take back. But they’d been worth it. They’d all been worth it.
“This Urcon,” he said once his lungs were clear. “He can put your
healing in Jie?”
Amadi flexed his fingers and glanced at the boy, who was studying his own hands as his breathing returned to normal. “Do you swear on her life you won’t injure him again, or Isaura and Shoteka?”
Da smiled magnanimously. The Afrii was in no position to make demands. And it was surprising he’d come out the front of the mine. They’d prepared for a rear approach, or a more devious attempt to bargain—maybe stashing the boy first and then asking for concessions before producing him? But perhaps Amadi was smart enough to know that his options were limited when Isaura could be made to do anything required. “If he heals Jie, no one gets hurt.”
The Afrii’s only response was to flex his fingers again. He must have hit Chase hard—the Anglo was still down.
Just as silently, Urcon turned his hands over, gazing at their unburnt palms. Then his stone-colored eyes widened, and he showed his hands to Amadi.
“Yes,” the Afrii murmured. “My spirit armor protects you now. I’m sorry it didn’t earlier. Will you help me with the Han woman?”
The boy took a deep breath and inclined his head.
“Does he speak?” Da asked. But he didn’t wait for an answer. The satisfaction at seeing his plan proven was quickly morphing into eagerness to have it enacted in full. “Chase,” he called in Mandarin to the Anglo, still prone but stirring, “stay with these two while I—”
A scuffling sound emanated from inside the mine entrance. Da looked over in time to see Mateo lift his rifle and smash it down, butt first.
“An old original woman,” the Espan explained as he moved to Da’s side. “Had a rope. Is that him?” He pointed his rifle at Urcon.
“Put it away!” Da snapped. “Chase already burned him.”
Mateo cocked his head, his wooden nose looking even uglier in profile. “Is that why he’s gray?”
“It’s not important. He can heal Jie. Get Isaura and Bolin.” Da didn’t wait to see if his order was followed. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he darted to the cart and opened the front flap. “It’s time, Sister.” Time to finally cure the wasting disease—and the spores.
The Black Resurrection Page 26
