by Claire Luana
Making camp took all of about four minutes. The tent had been destroyed in the tengu’s attack the night before, so they unrolled their bedrolls in a haphazard circle and flopped onto them, taking off boots and reaching into packs for hard food that could be munched on while horizontal.
“I’ll take first watch,” Stela said. She was dead on her feet, swaying slightly on exhausted legs.
“You had first watch last night,” Hiro said. “You should get some rest. I’ll take first, then I’ll tap Emi in.”
“You had a pretty exciting night yourself,” Stela protested. “You need sleep too.”
“I’ll take a short watch,” he said. “I’ve got Ryu to stay up with me. I’ll be fine.”
She clearly didn’t have the energy to protest because she crawled into her bedroll without another word.
Silence descended over the frozen valley as his friends succumbed to sleep. The heat bubble that Leilu had been burning around each of them began to dissipate. A cold breeze blew across the snow. He shivered and walked for a few minutes towards the center of the valley, trying to warm himself.
“Never thought we’d be all the way out here,” Hiro said to Ryu.
The ascent and the cold hadn’t seemed to bother Ryu. He was a creature of spirit, after all. Hiro couldn’t help feeling a pang of jealousy. To be mortal was very inconvenient at times.
“The life of a burner and seishen is never dull,” Ryu said.
“That’s the truth,” Hiro chuckled, looking up at the stars. They were so bright and clear here, it was as if he could reach out and touch them. He could see all of the constellations he had learned about as a child: The black tortoise that guarded the northern star. The phoenix standing in the south with the winking red star as its eye.
“Do the seishen have stories about the stars?” Hiro asked.
“Of course,” Ryu said. “See that one up there? It looks like a cross, but then two little stars hang down from the bottom star?”
Hiro searched the multitude of pinpricks in the sky until he saw the cluster Ryu referred to. “I see it. What is it?”
“It’s the seishen elder,” Ryu said. “The stars in the horizontal line of the cross are his wings, the other his head and body and the two little stars are his legs.”
“The elder taught you a constellation that looked like him? Why am I not surprised?”
“He was here for the making of the world,” Ryu said.
“I wonder what it was like,” Hiro mused.
“You can ask him from hell,” a quiet voice said behind him.
Hiro whirled around, almost losing his footing in the thick snow.
Before him stood Geisa, wearing a look of hatred that chilled him more than the arctic air ever could.
Hiro tried to shout for the others, but he found he couldn’t speak. His throat was hot and angry. He grasped at his neck, trying to scream, but nothing came out.
Ryu dove for Geisa with a powerful leap, but a bolt of lightning snaked from the clear sky and hit him, tossing him into the snow. He scrambled to his feet and she hit him with another bolt, and then another.
Hiro barreled into her, desperate to draw her attention from Ryu. They tumbled together into the snow, but before he could strike another blow, a strange fever fill his body and his mind, turning his vision red.
She rolled him off her into the snow, kneeling over him so her face hovered above his. “Cooperate, my Hiro,” she whispered, “and I won’t kill your seishen. Try to wake the others, and he dies. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
“Now,” Geisa said, pulling him to his feet. “Let’s go meet your god.”
Hiro walked in front of Geisa as if in a feverish dream. She rested the blade of a sword across his shoulder, kissing his neck with the cold steel. Not that she needed the weapon. At this time of night, he was as helpless as a lamb. He schooled himself not to panic and tried to think, his thoughts moving sluggishly through his fevered mind. Was Ryu all right? They had left him lying motionless in the cold snow. And why did Geisa want to free Taiyo? She had no love for the sunburners, or their god. When he thought about the things she had suffered at the hands of the sunburners, in their prisons…he knew her treatment of him would not be gentle.
“Why do you want to free Taiyo?” he finally asked. His voice was hoarse.
“I thought I should meet the god who taught his followers such respect for women,” she said. “He’s a model for the rest of us.”
Hiro pushed down his frustration. “Tell me the real reason. I know you worship the tengu, that you’re a part of the Order of Deshi. Why do you want him free?”
“So I can kill him, of course.”
“You can’t kill a god,” Hiro said, his eyes widening in alarm.
“Are you sure?” she asked, drawing closer to him, taunting him.
Hiro said nothing. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t even know exactly how he was supposed to free Taiyo. Explanation and facts were Kai’s business. He traded on instinct. Action. Two things that were doing him no good at the moment.
Geisa chuckled softly. “To come all this way, only to realize that you were the key to the destruction of your god. How delightfully ironic.”
“Even if you think you could kill Taiyo, which you can’t,” Hiro said, “Kai is still freeing Tsuki while we speak. Tsuki will stop you.”
“You still don’t see, do you? This has been in motion for a very long time. It has been my task to follow your desperate little mission up this mountain, just as it has been my companion’s task to follow Kai.”
“You won’t catch her by surprise. She’ll be ready,” Hiro said.
“Not even your clever Kai will be ready for a threat from the inside.”
Hiro missed a step, stumbling in the snow. The cold of her blade nicked his neck. One of Kai’s companions was a traitor? Fear for Kai blossomed inside him, and his fevered heart began to hammer. He had to warn her somehow.
“That’s the thing about flying too close to the sun,” Geisa said, her eyes shining in the moonlight. “You’re likely to get burned.
When the tropical sun rose that morning, fierce and bold over the horizon, Chiya flew to the neighboring island and rowed the little boat back to their shore. Colum, boasting of the impressive volume of his lungs, volunteered to dive into the warm water to confirm that Tsuki was in fact waiting for them below.
After several dives, he emerged from the sparkling sea, gasping that he had found her. Though a welcome development, it didn’t solve the larger problem—namely, how to get Tsuki off the sea floor.
They had been arguing for hours when Jurou emerged from the forest and sat down, joining their circle.
“Where have you been?” Kai asked crossly.
He smiled pleasantly, picking a rosy fruit off the pile that lay on the canvas of Kai’s flattened pack. “I think better when I’m moving.”
“Uh huh,” Kai said, watching in strange fascination as he dug his long fingernails into the flesh of the fruit.
“It looked like she was in a stone burial box,” Colum said. “It had a carving on the top of some sort of figure, though she was tough to see under several hundred years of barnacles. The coral reef has grown around it. It might take hours to break the coral and free the box.”
“And even then, we haven’t a clue how to retrieve a stone box from the bottom of the sea,” Jurou said.
“So basically we’re back to square one,” Chiya said, leaning back on her elbows in the sand.
“We know she’s down there,” Colum said. “That’s something.”
“Anyone have any ideas?” Kai asked.
Jurou muttered to himself, as if working through options, but Chiya and Colum said nothing. Eyes averted, hands drawing circles in the sand. Kai didn’t have any ideas either.
“Let’s take a break,” Colum finally said.
Kai rolled her eyes, but it wasn’t a half-bad idea. Her brain had been spinning in circles for hours.
“Fine,” she sai
d. Kai walked down to the shore and sat in the sand, looking out over the waves at the spot where Tsuki lay.
“Mind if I join you?” Chiya asked, standing uncertainly on the sand behind Kai.
“Please,” Kai said.
Chiya sat down next to her, hugging her knees against her chest. She looked vulnerable for a moment, despite her muscled form. “She’s so close,” Chiya said. “I can almost feel her.”
“Me too,” Kai said. “I wish I could figure out how to get her up here.”
“We will,” Chiya said. “It’ll come to us.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” Kai said, wishing she could explain to Chiya the camaraderie she had begun to feel for the other woman.
“Me too,” Chiya said. “This is the sort of mission I imagined I was signing up for when…well, you know. Last time.”
Kai remembered the fateful day in the citadel courtyard when Chiya had signed up for Geisa’s special “mission.” She shuddered at the truth of it, that the women had been used as part of an experimental burner breeding facility.
“That was unforgivable,” Kai said quietly. It wasn’t until she learned about the facility that she had known that former Queen Airi was well and truly mad.
“I never believed that you could defeat Airi,” Chiya admitted.
“I’m not sure I did either,” Kai said ruefully. “But it seemed like someone needed to try.”
“That’s…” Chiya paused for a moment. “That’s what I respect about you. You try, even when it’s not easy or certain. In fact, when it seems impossible.”
“So I’m completely impractical,” Kai said with a chuckle.
“Basically.” Chiya laughed too.
“I couldn’t have done it alone,” Kai said. “You played a big part in defeating Airi. Nanase too. And Hiro and Quitsu. A ruler is only as good as the people supporting her.”
Chiya nodded. “I don’t envy you. Being queen.”
Kai’s heart thudded. They were so close to the truth. Was now the time to tell Chiya? “You’ve never thought about being queen?”
“I always daydreamed about being Nanase as a kid,” Chiya said. “Not Airi.”
“Nanase is pretty inspiring,” Kai said.
“Agreed. And she…took me under her wing. There were a few of us at the citadel who had been rescued from the desert,” Chiya said. “She made sure we were taken care of. She was the closest thing I had to a mother.”
Kai looked at the other woman, studying the profile of her face. Kai could see her father, Raiden, in that face—the strong jaw, the bright eyes. It was so unfair that they had never known each other and never would. She saw Hanae too, the arc of Chiya’s eyebrows, the fine strands of her hair. It wasn’t too late for Hanae and Chiya. Kai couldn’t keep this secret from Chiya any longer.
“Chiya…” Kai said.
But she didn’t get to finish her sentence because Chiya leaped up. “I’ve got it!”
Kai blinked, her curiosity overcoming the momentum she had gained towards revealing Chiya’s heritage. “Tell me.”
“Do you remember in Nanase’s class when she talked about using the world around you in your burning?”
“I had the shortened ‘we’re going to war’ curriculum,” Kai said. “I’m not sure if we actually covered that.”
“Oh,” Chiya said, disappointed. “Well, she always said a fighter or burner shouldn’t look inward for their power but should look outward, to their surroundings.”
“Okay…” Kai said, restraining herself from shaking Chiya and telling her to get to the point.
“I was exploring our surroundings with my burning. Delving into the land under the island, the sea floor. I think this island chain was created by a volcano.”
Kai’s ears perked up. Volcano meant heat, which meant something they could control with burning.
Chiya went on. “There’s a network of undersea vents along the island. If we could heat one to boiling, if we were controlled about it, we could send a jet of hot water up through the surface right under Tsuki, and sort of shoot her up to the surface.”
“Heat rises,” Kai said, working through the scenario in her head. “But once she was on the surface, how would we move her to the shore?”
“If we could keep her buoyant, perhaps we could snag her with a rope and tow her to shore?”
“Wouldn’t the boat boil in the hot water?” Kai asked, trying to work through the problems.
“We could have one burner in the boat, cooling the water underneath it, while the other works the vents,” Chiya suggested.
“It…it could work,” Kai said. Excitement flooded her before quickly dampening. It was time to share the bitter truth. “Only…I…can’t moonburn anymore.”
“What?” Chiya’s voice was low.
“This handprint,” Kai said. “Ever since I woke up with it, I haven’t been able to access moonlight. Instead, I’m able to burn the white light, like what you get when moon and sunlight are combined.”
“That light seems vastly more powerful than moonlight,” Chiya said. “Couldn’t you use it on the vents?”
“It’s also vastly harder to control. I’m not sure it works on the same principles as moonlight.”
“It’s still worth a try, right?”
“Agreed,” Kai said. It was the only plan they had.
Chiya rose and offered Kai her hand. Kai took it, and they headed back towards the fire pit, where it looked like Colum and Jurou had dozed off.
“Wake up,” Kai said, clapping her hands. “Chiya has an idea.”
Kai and Chiya excitedly explained the plan. When they were done, the two men stared at them with wide eyes.
Colum recovered first. “You expect me to stand in a leaky ol’ rowboat over boiling water, lasso a god in a stone box with a bit of rope, and tow her to shore? Without dying?”
Kai nodded. “That sums it up.”
He pondered this for a moment, before he shrugged. “I’m in.”
“Maybe we should wait until sunrise,” Jurou said. “We will be better able to see what we are working with.”
“We need multiple burners to make this work,” Kai said, shaking her head. “Chiya’s familiar with the vents. We do it now. This can work. Right, Chiya?”
“It can work,” Chiya said, though Kai wished it was with a bit more confidence.
And so Kai found herself with Colum in the little wooden boat, floating just shy of the glowing spot that marked Tsuki’s resting place. Chiya stood on shore, preparing to superheat the vents.
“Ready?” Chiya called from the shore.
“Ready!” Kai called, exchanging a look with Colum.
“I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my day,” Colum said, “but this might be the dumbest.”
“We’ll find out,” Kai said.
The water began to roil as Chiya poured heat into the undersea vents.
“Maybe we should back up a bit,” Kai said nervously, but Colum was already rowing them farther from the disturbance.
Kai opened herself to the raging torrent of alabaster light, wishing that it was moonlight’s sweet calming essence. Please, creator, Kai prayed, you gave me this power; help me use it to save Tsuki. She filled her qi with light in a strained effort, opening her senses to the ocean around her, to the grains of wood on the boat, to the sweat beading Colum’s brow. She burned the light beneath the boat, wrapping it in a protective cocoon between them and the ocean as a jet of superheated water and steam blasted up a stone’s throw away.
Kai hastily split her focus, wrapping the cocoon over them so the boiling water pattered harmlessly against a roof of pure energy. She hardly understood what she was doing, but her instincts seemed to know the right approach.
The water continued to churn and boil. Kai’s heart hammered and her breath came gasping in her throat as she struggled to maintain her focus, grappling with the strength of the light to keep their little boat safe amongst the chaos.
“She’s up,” Chiya s
creamed, barely audible over the roar of the water and steam. Amongst the roiling sea, a dark gray mass surfaced, churning about in the waves.
Colum, bathed in brilliant light, screamed over the roar of the boiling sea, “Get rid of this blasted roof! I can’t throw the rope!”
Kai hastily pulled at the power, but it was like trying to trap a thunderstorm in a teapot. She silently cursed the creator for giving her power but no direction for how to use it. Finally, after precious seconds ticked by, through sheer force of will, Kai successfully moved the white light protecting them above, joining it with the light below.
Colum, squinting against the brilliant glow beneath them, took a rope and circled it over his head, preparing to throw at the mass of coral and stone. Kai prayed that the rope would catch on something so they could tow Tsuki to shore.
He let the loop of rope go, and it soared into the boiling water, flying true. He pulled it tight, but it recoiled, coming back to them. He hadn’t caught anything.
As Colum hauled the rope back up, he hissed and dropped it, cradling his hand. It had been superheated in the water. He grabbed a piece of burlap from the bottom of the boat and used it as a rudimentary glove to gather and coil the rope again.
Colum circled the rope again and tossed it. Again, it looked to be on target, but it failed to snag on anything amidst the roiling water.
He pulled it back. “It’s not working! We’ll need to go get her ourselves.”
“I’m not strong enough,” Kai said. Sweat poured from her and her heart thundered in her chest. She couldn’t keep this up much longer. “We’d boil to death. You have to make the rope work.”
“Kai,” Chiya called. Her voice held a tinge of desperation. “Hurry!”
“You can do it,” Kai said.
Colum stood in the rocking boat, circled the rope over his head, and let it go. This time, it snagged on a knob of coral sticking off the gray stone slab. “Yes!” he said.
He tossed the end of the rope to Kai, who tied it off quickly, while Colum sat back down at the oars and began rowing towards the shore.
“We’ve got her!” Kai hollered, feeling her strength waning. Chiya was supposed to keep the pressure of the vent under their location, slowly allowing Tsuki to move along the surface of the water. It was complex burning, and Kai knew Chiya must be as exhausted as she.
