by Jeff Hook
“Why does it seem as if all the council heads only existed to teach us a lesson?” he said out loud. He knew immediately that he should have kept it to himself. No one interrupted lessons with questions. Did the others even have questions, ones they suppressed, or were they perfectly content with repeating what the teacher said?
They all turned and glared at him. Why did he have to be like this?
“Everyone has a lesson to teach us,” said the teacher piously. “Elders more so. And each leader of the Elder Council most of all.”
“That’s just like Karugo,” muttered one of the kids, voice laced with derision. “Questioning things.”
Karugo did the breathing exercises. He would get through this. He would let the class go back to normal. He pasted on a smile and nodded at the teacher. “Of course,” he said tightly. “We learn from everyone.”
The other students turned to the front again, but Karugo could feel the shame of what had just happened. It didn’t matter what Grandpa Toraburu said about ‘hero hair’… Karugo was a failure. A reject. It was clear no one in the village wanted him, but most were too nice to say so. Too nice to say that he wasn’t nice enough.
He was too impulsive. Too excitable. Asked too many questions.
He’d tried being like them, but it always ended in a reckless display of curiosity or anger. He just couldn’t live like the others. How was he the only person in the world who felt like this?
Heat rose in him like never before. This wasn’t even an especially bad provocation, but the anger he felt made all his previous emotions seem like simple agitation.
They’d treated him like dirt, in their own too-nice way, just because he was different! They were staring at him again.
His fists were clenched tight. He started the breathing exercises again, tried to be normal, tried to calm his own disturbance, but his rage wouldn’t let him. The Elders would be horrified if they saw him like this, but he didn’t care. He stopped doing the breathing exercise and clenched his jaw instead.
He ignored the class’s collective gulp, the teacher nervously biting her lip, Hishano getting up from his seat and preparing to pounce.
“Look at me!” he yelled. “Stare all you want! I’m not gonna fake being like you anymore. I’m gonna be me! You can all go—”
That was when Karugo’s entire body, to his great surprise, burst into flames.
2
Protector
Hishano gasped in amazed horror. Karugo was always disturbing the harmony and making trouble, but he’d never caught on fire before.
Poor guy. Imagine being so angry that you caught on fire! Hishano had to help him… although, strangely, Karugo wasn’t screaming, frowning, filing a request for correction, or any of the other things someone might do when they were in physical pain. No, he was smiling!
How could he be smiling? When fire went outside the proper bounds it hurt things, and being completely engulfed in flames was definitely outside the proper bounds.
Within moments the smile faded. “You’d understand if you felt it too,” said Karugo to the class at large, reacting to their shocked faces. He stalked toward the door.
The wooden door.
Connected to the wooden walls.
For all the talk of stonemasonry, this school building was constructed entirely of wood, because how could they predict a student catching on fire?
Hishano had to stop Karugo before he set the entire place ablaze. He ran toward Karugo and the door, but he was too late.
Karugo grabbed the handle with a fiery hand and opened it, starting a blaze that would slowly spread and… Hishano flinched just thinking of it. Early deaths were what happened in the Time of Chaos, before Tandoku Island was founded, before all the outer devils destroyed each other.
Should he put out the fire that was starting, or should he continue to chase after Karugo?
While he hesitated, he heard a cracking sound.
Dust fell from where one of his classmates had her head stuck in the ceiling, and the girl’s feet dangled in the air. How had that happened?
One of the boys started swelling up, inflating to two and then three times his normal size, with no signs of slowing.
A girl’s hands turned to knives.
The rest of the students screamed and ran around in a panic.
Meanwhile the fire spread, consuming the door frame. Soon it would reach the rafters and then… how could he save both Karugo and the other students?
He grabbed a girl who looked calmer than the others, merely anxious instead of paralyzed with fear or running around causing chaos. “Take them to the back doors. Save as many as you can.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“What I always do,” said Hishano.
Ever since they were young children he’d cared for Karugo, kept the boy out of trouble as best he could, and today — despite all the insane things that were happening around him — would be no different.
There was no time to take the back exit, so Hishano ran through the blazing doorway, feeling the flames sear his skin as he passed from the chaotic schoolhouse into the bright light of day.
Outside, Karugo was running away from the schoolhouse and toward the crossing. Hishano followed, sprinting harder than he ever had in his life. For the sake of both Karugo and the town, Hishano had to catch him and put out the fire before he got hurt — and before he could accidentally light any other buildings on fire.
Karugo had caused so much trouble, had been the focus of his life for so long, that he didn’t know what would happen if either of them died. He crashed into the flaming boy, knocking him to the ground.
“Stop being on fire!” yelled Hishano.
He tried to smother the flames on Karugo’s body, starving bits of fire from getting air, but it was no use. Karugo was slightly taller, slightly wider, and every time Hishano stopped protecting an area the flames would burst back into life.
His flesh was searing. He’d accidentally touched a coal before and this was like that, but the agonizing pain was all over his body.
He couldn’t put out the fire, he couldn’t stop Karugo from burning himself up, but he could at least keep the boy from running into town and setting anything else on fire.
Sweat covered Hishano, only to sizzle away moments later. He was drying out and boiling alive, all at once.
If he died here, who would protect the island?
“Your hair,” laughed Karugo, his eyes wide with delight. He certainly didn’t seem like someone who was burning alive. “Your hair! It’s like mine!”
“What?”
Hishano didn’t hear the answer because, behind him, the schoolhouse exploded.
3
The Other
Karugo couldn’t believe his eyes — Hishano had not only developed spiky hair, but it had changed color as well. No longer was it the perfect dark green, but instead a gold even brighter than his own.
He barely had time to recover from this shock when he heard a gigantic crack from the direction of the school. Where the building used to be there was now only a giant inflated student, scattered lumber, and a bunch of normal-sized students — tiny at this distance — running around screaming. The giant student’s hair was just like Karugo’s, just like Hishano’s, drawn toward the sky in golden glorious spikes.
What was this amazing event? There was no place to have school anymore, which was already awesome, but then he found that so many of his classmates… they were just like him! Had they been hiding it all this time? Was that why Hishano was so careful to not let him act out?
And then there was the feeling of joy, of freedom, that had come bursting out of him alongside the flames. An exhilarating feeling of life.
That feeling ebbed away as his flames died down.
He found himself missing the fire.
It wasn’t that he wanted to hurt Hishano or catch the building on fire — he was appropriately dismayed by that — but the feeling of being on fire… i
t had been more true, more correct, more real than anything he’d ever felt.
He crawled out from under Hishano and inspected the damage. The other boy’s shirt was burned off, showing pale green skin that was tinged with red but relatively unharmed. He rolled Hishano over and saw a big burn on the boy’s chest, but the burn marks were somehow shrinking.
Whatever was happening, his tormentor was okay for now.
At the schoolhouse, the overgrown boy was shrinking back down to normal size. He’d burst out of his clothes and was ashamedly covering himself up as he shrank. Karugo checked and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw his own clothes were unharmed by his flames.
What was that energy he had touched, that let him create an inferno around himself without getting hurt or even burning off his clothes?
Karugo concentrated on his hand and tried to get the flames to come back. If he thought really hard he could get little bits of fire to appear on his fingertips. The disturbance was lessened, but it wasn’t completely gone yet.
Maybe the world had changed forever!
He looked to the sky and saw something strange. There was nothing obviously wrong, but the arrangement of clouds was off somehow, in a way he couldn’t explain. It was as if the wind had blown the wrong way and messed up the patterns, but that was clearly impossible. The Elders controlled the island’s weather perfectly.
Then again, they controlled the island’s population perfectly as well, and somehow Karugo — and, apparently, Hishano — had happened.
The clouds, as they were right now, were kind of beautiful.
The speckled shore was also strange. There was nothing unusual about the glossy black stone beach, made smooth by centuries of tides, or the sparkling yellow crystals that stuck out of it at seemingly random angles, but where water met stone there were two bizarre creatures emerging from the waves. They were shaped like humans, but their skin wasn’t the yellowish-green tone of a real person. Instead, one was black like the beach he stood on while the other was pink-white like the northern sands.
“Outer devils,” said Hishano. The boy had completely healed somehow, and now stood beside Karugo to stare at the shore. “I thought they all destroyed each other a thousand years ago.”
Maybe after today, once Hishano had witnessed all these crazy things, Karugo might not seem so unusual. Maybe he could finally get some freedom from that watchful gaze…
The outer devils started pulling yellow crystals from the rock, which caused a predictable reaction in Hishano. He ran toward the pair and started yelling at them. “Don’t pick up the crystals! They are for Elders only!”
The two strangers ignored Hishano. An admirable trait.
Hishano got to them and started pulling at the black one’s hand. In response, the outer devil lifted the boy up with one arm then tossed him away.
So cool.
Then he pulled out a long metal blade shaped like a giant, slightly curved knife and started pointing it at Hishano. “Stay away!”
Not so cool.
——
“I told you, those are for Elders only,” said Hishano, ignoring the big knives the devils were pointing at him. “Why are you breaking the rules?”
The black devil sighed. “I guess we’re doing this. I’m Jack. This is Freddy. Where’s your leader?”
“I can take you there,” said Hishano brightly, “but you have to promise to follow the rules.”
“You annoy me,” Jack grunted.
“Why do you want those crystals, anyway?”
“Because this Timonite will make us rich, you ignorant savage,” said Jack, grabbing him by the throat. “Natural wealth is wasted on you.”
Hishano wasn’t sure what all of those words meant, but the way he spoke… Hishano had heard Elders whisper in that growling tone only once or twice before, but this man did it confidently and loudly while choking Hishano with his left hand and waving a very long, sharp knife back and forth with the other.
“If you kill him, it might anger the other natives,” said Freddy, the thin pink-white devil. “We don’t have Sam to protect us anymore.”
“I thought you were done acting scared now that you lost your power.”
“Just because I’m half-blind doesn’t mean I suddenly turn stupid. But think: do you really want to kill them, or is that the dampness talking?”
“It’s the dampness,” admitted Jack.
“Are you ready to see our leaders?” choked Hishano.
Jack looked wistfully at the crystals, loosening his grip on Hishano’s throat but not letting go. “Okay…”
That was when Karugo charged the group, slammed his fingers into Jack’s chest, and lit the tips of his fingers on fire.
4
Rescue
While Karugo jogged toward Hishano and the two devils, he had a realization: if he took the devils down and saved all of Tandoku Island, then everyone would have to love him. They might even let Grandpa Toraburu back on the Elder Council!
He turned his jog into a sprint and charged toward the devil that was choking Hishano. As he did so, he focused on pulling power into his hands. It wasn’t the satisfying blaze he’d experienced in the school, but little bits of flame flowed from his fingertips. When he landed those fingertips on the man’s shirt it took a second, but soon enough it burst into glorious flames.
“What in the depths?” said the devil, jumping back while slapping his clothes to put out the fire.
Hishano stumbled backward and rubbed his neck.
The white devil pulled out his big knife and hacked at Karugo. Karugo leapt to the side and the blade narrowly missed him. He gained his footing as quickly as he could, but he was barely stable — and definitely not ready to dodge again — when the next stroke came.
Hishano bounded in between Karugo and the blade, waving his arms. One of them happened to knock the knife to the side, making it graze his shoulder instead of slice through his head — Hishano yelped in pain, but didn’t retreat.
Karugo took this opportunity to rush the thin white devil. He knocked the man to the ground, pounced on top, and put all ten fingers against him.
“Run!” said Hishano. “We have to run!”
Karugo looked up to see the black devil standing above him. The man grabbed Hishano around the neck with one arm, getting him in a headlock, and kicked Karugo. “Do that fire thing again and your friend gets it,” he said.
“Listen to Jack,” said Hishano. “I was just about to show him to the Elders when you came and interfered.”
Interfered. He’d tried to help, put himself in danger in order to earn their love, and that was what they called it.
He felt sick.
He rolled off the white one, stood up, and turned to Jack. “Fine. Go see the Elders. They’re just going to annoy you.”
“Annoy us, eh? Maybe we need to show them we’re serious. Right, Freddy?”
“Maybe we try talking first? We already hurt the boys,” said Freddy, pleading. Then his face lost the pinkness and became even more white. “What will the Elders do when they find out? If this mere boy can use his power with all this... dampening... can you even imagine what the Elders must be like?”
“You’re right. We have to come in looking innocent, friendly.”
“That’s right,” said Hishano. “Now if you—”
“We should cut their throats and put them in the ocean before anyone finds out.”
“No!” said Hishano and Freddy in unison.
Karugo decided that this was his time to save the day. Now Hishano would acknowledge him.
He rushed Jack, who pulled out his long knife.
“We can make this okay,” said Freddy. “Right, kid I stabbed?”
“Definitely,” said Hishano. “Our Elders are nice people.”
Karugo was within the range of Jack’s long knife. The devil stabbed forward, but Hishano grabbed the man’s arm at the last second, so the two-foot knife barely missed. Karugo ran alongside it, fully aware of how sh
arp the blade was. He grabbed Jack’s arm and tried to push his fire through... but nothing happened.
The fire was gone.
Jack started laughing, so Karugo kicked him in the shin.
Because of that distraction Hishano was able to break free. “Run!” he yelled again.
The boys fled.
Behind him, Karugo heard Freddy sigh. “Now we do have to kill them.”
Their footfalls were loud on the rocks. Karugo and Hishano started off with a small lead, but the two devils closed the gap quickly.
Karugo was shocked at what he was feeling. This was the first time in his life he’d truly been in danger, when he’d faced a challenge beyond staying awake in school. This day was not planned out, not regimented and scheduled. Anything could happen. If they ran too slowly, they could even die!
He felt fear, yes, but he also felt… alive.
——
The devils were closing the distance, but Hishano worried more about what would happen if he and Karugo outran them. He’d heard the legends about the giant weapons that destroyed towns and the wars in which the outer devils completely destroyed themselves. This remnant of the old humanity, did it still have that destructive power? These two had the temperament, with their casual theft of the sacred crystals and their talk of throat-slitting.
But his goal, always topmost in his mind, was protecting Karugo. If he stopped, then Karugo would go charging back and put himself in danger again, so Hishano kept running. The Elders would figure out how to deal with these two once they got into town.
The Elders always had a solution.
But by the time they had left the stone beach and reached the grassy fields, before they were even a quarter of the way to town, the devils had almost caught up.
He heard Freddy whining: “Why couldn’t this place have been uninhabited?”
