Pacific Fire

by Greg Van Eekhout

  But not all these times were horrific. There was the day he lost his virginity to Cassandra, and he saw himself as the thin, awkward kid he was, looking ridiculous as Cassandra helped him along.

  Daniel theorized that when his brain couldn’t quite process what was happening to him, it tried to bail out of his body like a pilot from a crashing plane.

  Now, he watched himself be led by Paul to his mother’s quarters. Paul looked self-possessed and confident. Daniel looked lost.

  She sat at a desk with her back turned to him, her hair the color of iron, her spine rigidly straight. Aside from the desk, there was a canvas cot with a thin pillow and blanket, and a table upon which sat a tray with a half-empty carafe of coffee and an uneaten sandwich.

  She was on the telephone, her end of the conversation consisting of grunts, some sharp “no”s, and silences that sounded like condemnation.

  “Mother, I brought someone,” Paul said.

  She waved a hand. “Just a moment. We’ve had a bit of a prison breakout.”

  “Sister Tooth can handle that,” Paul said. “This is more important.”

  Exasperated, she snapped a final order: “Just keep them away from the hangar. I’m not changing the schedule for this.” She hung up and spun around on her chair, and Daniel saw his mother’s face for the first time in twenty-two years. He felt as if he’d been grabbed by a tide, yanking him free of the mooring to which he’d been desperately clinging.

  It was his mother. Daniel loved her, and he was going to murder her son.

  * * *

  She rushed to him, her face registering shock, pain, joy, or some blend of all three. Ultimately, it was unreadable. Daniel held himself stiffly as she embraced him, and if she noticed, it didn’t lessen the strength of her hold. Despite his intentions, he loosened and returned her hug. He was surprised by how slight she seemed, how small. Of course, the last time he’d seen her, he was only twelve.

  When she finally pulled away, she studied his face in a way that made Daniel wonder if she was going to count his fingers and toes. She’d find his pinky missing, and he thought he might enjoy telling her the whole story of Otis’s betrayal.

  She sniffed and wiped tears from her cheeks, very much like a person weeping with authentic emotion, and stared at Daniel with frank wonder, as if he were a newly discovered kind of creature.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  She stepped back and kept her hands on his arms and looked him up and down.

  “Daniel…” she began, then paused to gather herself. “Daniel, my Daniel. What are you doing here?”

  “That’s not important,” Paul cut in before Daniel could respond. “This is a busy time. But I wanted to be here to see this. To see my mother reunited with her son. And to have a last dinner with you. It’s perfect. The family together, finally, during an amazing time.”

  He beamed. He really did seem so happy.

  “I’m here to sabotage your Pacific firedrake, Mom. But Paul caught me. Please don’t be too mad.”

  She opened her mouth but was at a loss for words. Again, she composed herself. “This is all so much. Paul, couldn’t we delay?”

  Paul took his time answering. “No,” he said softly, as if it pained him. “I’m sorry. The timing’s critical. We lost one of the storm generators—”

  “My fault,” Daniel said with good cheer.

  “—which put us back at least half an hour. Any longer, and the vitalizing mixture could go beyond the conversion point, or the dragon’s tissues could necrotize. I don’t want to risk it. I’m sorry.”

  Daniel liked the way Paul described immensely complicated osteomantic processes without pomp. Then he realized why he liked it: it reminded him of his father. And then he stopped liking it.

  “Shouldn’t you be supervising this insane endeavor?” Daniel asked him.

  “I am,” he said, tapping his head enigmatically. “But there’s not much to do at this point. The pot’s on the stove and just needs to climb to the right temperature. That’s a metaphor.”

  “Well, then by all means, let’s eat before you have to go get stewed.”

  * * *

  Daniel sat down to dine with his mother and golem: roasted peppers and mushrooms sautéed in garlic, fingerling potatoes, greens, and a cabernet, all set out on a table with a white tablecloth and a single candle. It was a small table and the distances were too intimate.

  He thought Paul might abstain from food and drink to keep his system pure for the vitalization, but he took small portions of everything, even the wine. Daniel supposed a little tannin and alcohol wouldn’t adversely affect a ten-ton firedrake.

  Daniel poured himself a full glass and tossed it back. “You know who I wish were here? I wish Uncle Otis were here. I think I’d eat him. I know he’s not osteomantically nutritious, but it’d be such a nice way of honoring what he’s meant to me.”

  “Daniel’s upset,” Paul helpfully explained to their mother.

  “Not at all. Let’s catch up. When I last saw you, Mom, you were taking off to San Francisco with my brother, and you left me with dear Otis. He trained me as a thief and hired osteomancy tutors, and then he eventually sold me to the Hierarch and nearly got me killed. So that was my life. How’ve things gone for you, Mom?” He speared a potato.

  “Daniel,” his mother said, not with disapproval, or with hurt, but with the old edge he remembered. Daniel had never feared her. She was his protector. Right up to the moment she left. Hearing that warning tone in her voice reminded him of her steel. In Los Angeles, she was Messalina Sigilo, from Northern California, not just wife of a brilliant and well-placed osteomancer, but a mystery unto herself. No one ever quite knew what to make of her, but they sensed it was smart to fear her. To others, that tone of voice was a threat. To him, it was strangely comforting. It made him even sadder about everything.

  “I guess we can catch up later, after Paul’s dived into the soup. But first, I should probably expand on that comment about me being a saboteur.” He refilled his glass. “What I meant by that is I came here to kill the dragon.”

  His mother neatly excised a potato with her fork and knife and chewed it thoroughly, her eyes searching Daniel’s.

  “We can’t be angry with Daniel for wanting to destroy our project,” Paul said, being a good brother. “He had no way of knowing we’re involved with this. As far as he was aware, this entire thing was conceived and managed by Otis and the Los Angeles osteomancers. If that were the case, I can’t say I’d blame him. In fact, once the project’s complete, you’d be doing us all a favor if you burned Otis alive.”

  “I’m starting to like you, Paul.” He checked his watch. “How are we doing for time? Can I ask a few questions before you have to … you know, do stuff?”

  “I have some time.”

  “This one’s for you, Mom. I just want to make sure I’ve got this straight: You’re trading Paul’s life in exchange for a living dragon?”

  She took a small sip of wine. “I’m not trading anything. This is Paul’s project. He’s been working on it for his entire adult life.”

  “But you’re still letting him jump off a cliff in an act of lunatic self-immolation.” He turned to Paul. “That’s a metaphor.”

  Paul raised his glass.

  “Daniel,” his mother asked patiently, “what did your dad teach you was the highest form of osteomancy?”

  It’d been a long time since lessons with Sebastian Blackland. He recited the answer: “The purest expression of osteomancy isn’t using magic, it’s being magic. Not consuming the remains of an osteomantic creature, but becoming an osteomantic creature. I’d like to ask the rest of the questions. I don’t feel like being quizzed.”

  “Paul isn’t sacrificing himself. He’s becoming himself. He’ll still be with us, on this earth. I’ll be able to see him, to talk to him, to love him. But he’ll be different. He’ll be elevated.”

  “That’s a pretty twisted version of the lessons my father taught me.”

&n
bsp; “Sweetheart, no. It’s really not. It’s what he wanted for you. It’s what we both did.”

  “You wanted me to self-immolate?”

  “We wanted you to achieve the greatest osteomancy you were capable of.”

  “What if I wanted to be a professional baseball player?”

  “Then we would have found you the best coaches and bought you a really good mitt. Did you ever want to be a professional baseball player?”

  “Naw. I got hit in the eye with a ball once and set it on fire.”

  “That’s an osteomancer’s approach to things,” she said, as if capping a well-constructed argument.

  His mother and father had been united in their desire to make Daniel strong, to give him gifts of magic, to fulfill his father’s ambitions, to serve his mother’s mysterious agenda. This had the ring of truth, and Daniel felt the tug of the lure. He had her here, now, talking. Finally, all his questions would be answered. He’d understand why she fled to San Francisco. Why they’d never been reunited. Why she abandoned him to Otis. He’d learn the purpose of his pain.

  He drained his glass again and refilled it.

  There was something he’d been taught a long time ago. If you had to do a thing, a thing you didn’t have the nerve for, a thing that could result in disaster, but something you had to do, then you didn’t hesitate. If you loved someone, you told them. You didn’t worry about their response. If you were at war and you had a weapon that could defeat the enemy in a single attack, you didn’t fret about the aftermath. You just dropped your bomb.

  He’d learned this from Otis.

  Daniel reached for the saltshaker and knocked over his wineglass.

  “Oh, shit.” He stood and reached across the table with his napkin to stop the flood of red from reaching his mother and golem. Hidden in the napkin was his jar of poison. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” As he clumsily mopped up and made drunken apologies, he used the napkin for cover and poured three drops of the poison into Paul’s wineglass.

  “You can tell us apart because I’m the clumsy one,” he said to his mother.

  Laughter was a rare thing for Messalina Blackland Sigilo, but she actually laughed at this. “Isn’t that a liability for a thief?”

  It was a good-natured jibe, and some of the tension left her shoulders and jaw, and she looked even more like the mother he remembered.

  “Sorry, Paul,” Daniel said.

  Paul stood. “It didn’t even touch me. But it’s time Mother and I got to the hangar. Daniel, I’m so sorry we didn’t have longer. And I truly wish I could have you there to witness this. But I’ll have to keep you away until after the vitalization.”

  Daniel righted his glass and poured himself the last drops from the bottle. “A quick toast first. For, I don’t know—not success, because I still think this is a perverse idea and I don’t want Otis Roth within a thousand miles of a weapon of mass destruction. But we have to toast. You pick something, Paul.”

  “To reunions.” Paul lifted his glass of cabernet and Mother Cauldron’s poison. “To the one we just had, and to a better one in the future.”

  They all brought their glasses together. Daniel thought of stopping Paul from drinking. Was Paul his brother? Of course he was. And he was, without question, his mother’s son. How could Daniel murder him, even to prevent him from becoming a monster?

  Just short of touching his glass to his lips, Paul threw his wine in Daniel’s face.

  He turned to his mother. “Daniel was going to poison me,” he said simply.

  Venom burning his face, Daniel fell.

  EIGHTEEN

  The magic smelled strong and delicious in the space beneath the hangar. Sam wanted to drink it into his cells. He wanted the magic to mine its way into his bones, to settle in his marrow and simmer. This was a good place for him.

  He and Em and Moth crouched among the thick concrete pillars supporting the hangar floor. There was little room to maneuver, almost all the space crammed with machinery. Seawater roared through massive pipes, into copper onion-dome boilers. Hundreds of smaller tubes rose to the ceiling, like the pipes of a great, steaming organ.

  Moth wiped away sweat. “So, the dragon’s cooking above us, and we’re in the oven?”

  “I think so,” Sam whispered. “Argent’s plans weren’t specific about the dragon-vitalization machinery, but most osteomancy requires a heat source and a medium.”

  “I don’t like it,” Em said. “Where’re all the cooks?”

  It was a good question. The real osteomancy—precisely controlling the soup of magical essences around and inside the dragon—was likely happening upstairs. But there should at least be some engineers monitoring the machinery. Not to mention guards.

  Moth removed one of the rukh eggs and a length of fuse wire from his bag. “I say we blow this shit up and burn the soufflé now, while we have a chance.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Em said. “If the soufflé’s already made, then it’s practically indestructible. We have to get closer to it so we can use the toxin.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “I’m not sure, but that’s what Cassandra Morales told us.”

  “Cassie said that? Okay, then.” Moth seemed disappointed, but he wasn’t going to argue with his old friend’s counsel. “So, out of the oven, into the fire.”

  They continued on ahead, deeper into the metal forest, looking for a route up to the hangar.

  “Someone’s here,” Em said.

  Too late, Sam smelled bone.

  In a flash, Moth snatched Em’s bayonet from her hands and nudged the point against the small of her back. “Hands behind you,” he snarled.

  Em clasped her hands behind her, and Sam followed suit. A man and a woman stepped out from behind one of the onion-dome boilers. The man wore a white lab coat and carried a clipboard. The woman wore armor of bone. Her helmet was fashioned from the upper jaw of some kind of reptile, its spiky teeth curving around her face. A large scapula formed a breastplate, and interlocking vertebrae ran down her arms and legs. She unsheathed her sword, brandishing a blade of yellow bone. Outfitted like this, she had to be praesidentum, one of Sister Tooth’s elite troops.

  Sam put the picture together: a technician and his security escort.

  “Am I ever glad I ran into you,” Moth said. “I caught these two sneaking around. I think they’re saboteurs.”

  The praesidentum took in Sam and Em and looked Moth up and down, inscrutable behind the teeth of her faceguard.

  “I usually don’t see uniforms down here.”

  “I know I’m not authorized,” Moth said, “but I saw them enter the ventilation tunnels and followed them in here.”

  “You did the right thing. We’ll take them to holding.”

  She wasn’t buying it, Sam realized.

  Moth realized it, too.

  “Duck,” he said. Sam and Em lowered their heads and Moth swung Em’s bayonet into the praesidentum’s faceguard. The skull helmet fractured into several pieces, and when Moth pulled back the bayonet for another blow, it was obviously unnecessary. The praesidentum lay on the floor. Her head was dented in.

  Moth handed Em’s bayonet back to her, the barrel clotted with blood and hair. He took the praesidentum’s sword.

  “Help us out, and you won’t get hurt,” Sam said to the technician.

  The technician turned his head and vomited. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Anything you want,” he said.

  He led them up a ladder to the hangar above, a space large enough to generate its own weather. The walls and the closed hangar doors seemed very far away through a veil of haze. A concrete tank large enough to house a blue whale dominated the building, its walls latticed by a web of cables and pipes. A few small portholes allowed a view of cascading bubbles inside.

  Technicians worked at banks of blinking lights and gauges and dials. A lot of the lights seemed to be red. The techs flipped switches, checked their instruments, flipped more switches. There was a lot of runn
ing around and tense conversation. Nobody took any notice of Sam and his crew.

  Their hostage peered at the workstations from a distance, frowning.

  “Something wrong?” Sam asked him.

  “I can’t tell from here, but … yes, I think so.”

  “But the dragon’s inside the tank?”

  He nodded absently, looking like he wanted to run over to his colleagues and help them with whatever they were struggling with.

  “How do we introduce something into the tank?” Sam pressed.

  “Up there,” said the tech, pointing far above at a gridiron beam spanning the width of the tank. The beam supported a crane, from which hung a bucket the size of a trash dumpster.

  “Lead on,” Em told him.

  “There’s no way you’re getting up there,” the tech said. “I can’t talk you past the guards.”

  Moth took hold of the tech’s right hand. He caressed the tech’s pinky with his thumb.

  “I’m going to break one finger every ten seconds unless you figure out a way to get us up there. That’s a ruined hand in less than a minute.”

  “Let him go,” Sam said.

  “Don’t worry, kid. I think he’s going to find himself being very clever by the time I get to his fuck finger.”

  “I said let him go.”

  They locked eyes, and Sam counted his own heartbeats.

  Moth released the tech. “You’re the boss,” he said.

  Some shouts came from the workstations, and a few of the technicians left their positions, running not just with urgency, but with panic. Sam was about to question his hostage again when a sharp horn blared.

  “That’s the evacuation alarm,” said the tech, more to himself than to Sam. “The controlling agent must have failed.”

  Hangar doors began to open, slowly parting with low mechanical groans. Technicians sprinted for them.

  Liquid magic spilled over the side of the tank, splashing and sizzling on the concrete floor.