by K. Gorman
She was right.
With a thunk, a row of lights switched on high above her head. As she squinted in the sudden light, another row switched on, and a third one after that. The pattern continued until the whole room was lit.
Well. ‘Room’ had been an understatement. The place was a hangar, its high ceiling secured by a complex pattern of metal framing. The walls were a darker mix of concrete than the floor, with bare pipes and naked wires snaking in lines and bends across them. The lights, suspended from the ceiling’s framework, were bright and industrial. They burned with a baseline hum.
The ship stood in the middle, the only thing in the hangar except for a few cardboard boxes to the far right. It was smaller than she’d expected—maybe the size of a school bus from the pointed tip of its nose to the flare of its tail—and it had a triangular shape, its head tapered to a sharp point, and straight, fixed wings swooping out from its middle to the back end. At first glance, it appeared black, but it soon became apparent that it was more than that—its color so rich that it appeared to drink the light in. It reflected the room through a dim, oily sheen.
Aiden returned from the light switch, rubbing his hands.
“Don’t worry, he doesn’t bite.”
‘He’? Weren’t ships and other things like them traditionally referred to in the feminine? Maybe the Mages had other traditions. Mieshka took the hint, following him to the ship’s side. Only once did she glance back at the now-closed elevator.
Closer to the ship, she noticed there were no joints or seams in the metal. It appeared to have been made of one continuous piece, with no break or disruption. Her reflection distorted in its side like through a funhouse mirror.
Aiden patted it gently before he splayed his fingers against its side, as he’d done on the wall in the memorial. This time, Mieshka felt something pulse in the air before the orange lines sliced open a door in the black surface. It hissed back just as the wall in front of the elevator upstairs had.
She was starting to see some correlations.
“Ladies first.”
She peered inside. Lights glowed to life from beneath the floor’s grating, under-lighting a cramped space with smooth black surfaces and a chrome-like trim. As she watched, the controls began to glow with a familiar orange light.
She found a couple of handles on the inside of the door and hauled herself up the three-foot step. Her sneakers clunked onto the grating, and her head automatically ducked. Up front, a console was arranged in a semicircle, alight with many orange symbols. The tops of two chairs blocked out part of the console’s glow—pilot and co-pilot, she assumed. A bright white light flicked on over the pilot’s seat.
She shuffled forward as Aiden climbed in after her.
“Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to the center chair.
He squeezed by to tap a few keys on the front console. Three screens flicked on. The center one displayed a video feed of Buck and Jo loitering around the hangar, with their weapons highlighted and magnified on the leftmost screen. The rightmost screen was completely filled with text.
A soft hiss distracted her. She looked back just in time to see the door close, the edges briefly glowing orange as it sealed her inside and cut off the outside light.
Now I’m stuck here, alone, with a strange man in his spaceship.
She decided not to count just how much was wrong with that. Sliding around the chair, she leaned heavily on the armrests as she sank into it. The light shone down on her head and arms, warm against her skin.
“It’s not going to hurt, is it?”
Aiden gave her an alarmed look. “What?”
“The scan.”
“Oh. No. Of course not.”
He hunched close to the console, gaze returning to the screen. She looked away, feeling heat rush to her face—well, what did she know about planes? Or spaceships? But his tone had been absent and distracted rather than judgmental. She doubted he’d thought much at all about her. And, from the grease and oil stains on his shirt, and the utterly bagged look on his face, she suspected he’d been interrupted from something else to investigate her potential magical claim.
He slumped back into the chair, watching the screen.
“It’ll just feel warm. Won’t take long. Just relax.”
She tried to follow his advice, settling against the chair’s rigid cushion. Her gaze went to the center screen. The outside feed of Buck and Jo had been replaced by a single string of words, looking like a command in a computer. A soft whir sounded overhead. The light grew warmer, touching her skin like a tropical sun. A warning about tanning beds slipped briefly through her mind.
After a few seconds, the light seemed to thicken—as if a second bulb had just switched on. A dust mote drifted in front of her face, glowing. Data began to roll down the screen in front of her.
“Ah, there we go.” Aiden sat upright, watching his mirror of the data. From his pocket, he took out what looked suspiciously like a USB flash drive and inserted it into a slot at the side. A chart popped up, minimized to the corner, and was instantly replaced by a second one. At the bottom of the screen, she recognized the graph of a heartbeat.
Her heartbeat?
It looked a little fast.
“Cool. So, there’s your magic, and, uhh…” He drifted off, squinting at the screen.
The light continued to get warmer, feeling nice after the cold of Ryarne’s autumn. It heated her right down to the bones. Her eyes felt less raw and dry than before, and their lids drooped under the warmth, relaxing. She smiled, wiggled down into the seat, and closed out the world.
The light pulsed like a heartbeat. Her smile faded. Something clicked above her, and her wrists pressed down hard on the chair’s arms.
She was stuck fast.
Her eyes snapped open. The screen no longer raced with data. Instead, it had only three words. In English.
‘Hello, Mieshka Elena Renaud.’
She jerked upright—or tried to, at least. Her back fixed to the chair, as if the cushions were a magnet for her vertebrae. The pulse continued, spreading into her body. A curl of smoke lifted into the bright light. She wrestled against the armrests, staring at the words.
“Uhh, Mr. Fire Mage? Aiden?”
“Yeah?”
He hadn’t looked away from his screen, which still displayed a graph and a data stream. The metal end of the USB drive gleamed in the console.
On her screen, the writing changed.
‘I will not hurt you.’
Uhh, yeah. No, thanks. She gritted her teeth and struggled against the hold the seat had on her, but her arms wouldn’t budge. Throwing her head back, she inhaled a shaky breath of air.
Okay, don’t panic. It’s probably just some kind of weird security thing.
She jerked as something invisible brushed her skin, feeling like the touch of feather tips. A second later, orange lines awoke on her knuckles, sliding across the skin in the same way as they’d slid across the black metal hull of the ship’s door. They left a warm track, following her arm up and disappearing under the cuff of her sleeve.
“Is this part of the scan?”
Aiden finally looked over. He stared at her, a small frown cutting into his brow. Then, the heat traced up her neck and around her jaw, and his eyes went wide. He turned back to his console, typed a few flurried commands, and glanced back.
Nothing changed. If anything, it sped up. She felt the lines slide over her scalp and slip down her forehead.
He swore.
Warmth touched her cheek—another set coming to join up. As she struggled to get free, Aiden scrambled out of his chair and made to grab her.
When his hand entered the light, there was a sharp hiss.
Fire snapped up his fingers. He snatched them away.
Seeing this, she renewed her struggle against the chair, rocking her back against it in an attempt to shake her arms loose. The lines slid into her eyes. She felt their warmth pool in her irises, trace across her forehead, and sin
k into her mind.
Then, everything went black.
Sounds disappeared.
There was no ship, no console, no Fire Mage. Just emptiness.
Her body had disappeared, too. She couldn’t feel her heart anymore, couldn’t breathe.
But there was something.
She felt it in a similar way to how she’d felt the brush against her skin earlier, and a little in how the lines had traced into her skin—not so much in the warmth they brought, but in a connection of energy that plugged into her the way she could plug her phone into her computer.
Which was an odd sensation to experience, considering she was not a computer.
A tiny prick of light sparked in her vision. In this seemingly infinite place, she couldn’t tell if it was in the distance and getting closer, or simply growing larger. Bit by bit, like a shifting cloud on the horizon, it formed into the shape of a bird, its red-orange wings beating against an unknown wind. Their sound was quickly swallowed by the dark.
As it grew closer, she saw that it had a wingspan wider than her arms, and its body was made of a deep orange color, burnt, with an undertone of red flowing beneath. On either side of its tail, two feathers trailed back, part peacock, part swallowtail, their deep ocher color ending in decorative eyes of yellow-gold. Its body seemed to move between solid and flame, blurring in parts. At the end of a long, slender neck, its head tapered into a sharp point, like a predator’s. Its eyes were like white-hot burning ash.
A Phoenix.
“Mieshka Elena Renaud,” it said.
Words moved like thoughts in this dark place, and they came across more like a computer text-to-speech program rather than natural speech, but it felt as if it were tasting her name on its tongue—testing to hear how it sounded.
Heat shimmered around it, around her. It drew slowly closer, its outstretched wings unmoving. Perhaps it didn’t need them to fly.
Those white-hot eyes blinked once, and its head dipped lower.
“I have been alone here,” it said.
The great wings beat once, twice, and its fire coursed through her skin, filling her body.
It didn’t hurt.
Hesitating, she reached out. As she did so, she noticed that her own hand burned, crackling with a core of fire that she hadn’t been aware of before.
The Phoenix stretched its wings out once again, spreading to the horizons in this infinite place. Fire crackled with thought.
She would never be cold again, it promised.
“I have been alone,” it said again, ashen eyes blinking fire like tears. “Now, you are here.”
It raised its head in a cry—a long, fierce, musical cry that shook her nonexistent lungs.
And then, it vanished.
Everything went black again, but this time, the temperature felt cool to her skin, as if she’d been standing in front of a heater that was no longer active. A draft blew across her neck, the coldness of the air making her spine stiffen. The edge of the chair dug into the backs of her knees.
She was back in the ship.
She jerked her arms off the rests and launched to her feet, smacking into both the console and the chair on her way out. There was no light, but a noise sounded from her left.
“Are you okay?”
Aiden’s voice came from beside her, close to the floor.
She swallowed. “I think so. What the f—” She caught herself and bit off the swear. “—heck was that?”
Fire crackled into the air beside her like a wayward Will O’ Wisp, illuminating the dead console to her left and making her jump. She flinched away from it, creeping farther into the shadows toward the back of the ship.
“Don’t worry. That one’s mine.”
Aiden’s head and shoulders were stuck under the console like a mechanic under a car, the shadows flickering in the light. He waved one hand to her, a golden-orange rune glowing on its back. She suspected that was supposed to make her feel at ease, but it only increased her tension.
Christ. Magic.
She took another step back, eyeing the floating wisp of fire. The air smelled like smoke. Firelight shivered over his body, glinting on his watch and his belt buckle.
“Looks like the crystal got a bit… active. I pulled the kill switch on the connection. I’ll turn it back on in just a sec.”
As he fiddled with something underneath the second console, and a quiet sound of scraping metal rose into the air, she gave the main console and its two chairs a hard stare, then took yet another step back. “What was that bird I saw?”
The scraping stopped. “You saw something?”
“Yeah. Big flaming bird.” She hesitated. “Was that a delusion?
“Ah. No. Not a delusion.” The scraping started up again, but only briefly, this time. “This ship is kind of special. Instead of electricity or jet fuel, it runs on a sentient power force.”
“The bird I saw?” She’d seen one earlier, she remembered, back on the stonework tapestry in the memorial upstairs. “A Firebird? Phoenix?”
“Their Lürian name translates as Sunbirds, but I suspect they’re the same mythological spirit.”
Uh huh. And that still doesn’t explain what happened.
“It said it was alone,” she said.
He stopped. “It spoke to you?”
“Yeah.” She lifted her head, watching him. “Why? Was it not supposed to do that?”
He grunted. “They’ve certainly never done that before.”
Her eyebrows rose. “How many people have you taken down here?”
“Zero, so far. Well, only Buck and Jo, but they don’t count. Same with Sophia.”
She had no idea who Sophia was, but now didn’t seem the time to ask. “So, it’s not like you have a large data pool to draw from about this.”
He paused. “Ah. I see. I miscommunicated. By ‘never before,’ I mean that, in the entire written history on Lür, crystals spirits have never spoken with anyone. Not directly, anyway.”
“I was connected to the console,” she said. “It had me stuck to the chair.”
“But it contacted you through your mind. That’s the difference. It makes it significant and unusual, but not illogical.” He squirmed, poking his head out from under the console. A second rune glowed on his other hand, pulsing slightly. “Ready?”
He’s going to turn the power back on.
She swallowed, then nodded.
He ducked his head and disappeared back under the console. On the floor, the rest of his body tensed, as if he were reaching for something.
A whisper of energy pulsed through the space. In the next second, a series of clicks and whirs sounded around her as the lights flickered on, the ship rebooting.
“Before it went, ah, active, I got a look at your stats.” He squirmed back out from under the dashboard and hauled himself to his feet before turning back to the secondary console. Data scrolled up its screen, seemingly returning to where it had left off. “You have an atypical brand of magic. In other cases, Terran magic has mimicked our Elements, but yours doesn’t.”
She gave the pilot’s chair a wary look, then took a long breath and folded her arms around her abdomen. “Yeah, I’m kinda still stuck on the part where I actually have magic. I think there must have been a mistake somewhere.”
“Nope, no mistake.” Aiden jabbed a finger at the data on his screen. “It’s right there. If it makes you feel better, you’re not the first.”
“I thought Terrans weren’t supposed to have magic?”
“That’s… an inaccurate misinterpretation of historic texts. According to you and your history, magic didn’t exist, but we detected it on arrival. It’s different, and smaller than Lür had, but it exists. You just weren’t using it.” He blew out a breath and straightened, glancing around before making a gesture back toward the chair. “We might as well have this talk now. Would you like to sit?”
She stepped another inch away from the chair. “Nah, I think I’ll stand.”
“Yeah
, I don’t blame you. I booted him in a disconnected mode, which is kind of like the safe mode on your computer. He can’t manipulate the systems anymore.”
There was that ‘he’ again. Now that she’d met the Firebird, she could understand it. The entity had appeared as gender neutral to her senses, but she supposed if it hadn’t spoken to any of them before…
“Have you heard of adaptive evolution?” Aiden continued.
She shook her head. They’d studied evolution in class two years ago, but she’d never heard of that concept.
“It’s a term with a couple meanings. In this instance, it refers to evolution that’s triggered as a direct result from an outside influence.”
“Uhh.” She frowned. “Isn’t that most evolution? Like those moths evolving to favor black coloration over white as a direct result of coal pollution?”
“This involves evolution that occurs within an individual lifespan, not generations. Terra itself already had latent magical fields, and some Terrans already had an ability to manipulate those fields—they just hadn’t found a need or a method until we came along. In the middle part of the Transition, there were a series of ‘awakenings’ among the populace, which we swiftly controlled and isolated.” He made a placating gesture at the alarmed expression on her face. “Don’t worry, they’re not imprisoned or anything. We just taught them how to use their power and sent them back home. It was pretty small, anyway. I think one Air Elemental managed to knock over a chair once. Anyway.”
He took a breath. “Think of the world as one big organism. A foreign body comes in, and the organism develops defenses for it. Like antibodies for a virus. When we Mages arrived, the latent magic of this world awoke in response to us.” He took a breath. “But it’s new, and it’s weird, and we don’t really know how to work with it. Our old technology—as we both just experienced—works at odds with it sometimes.”
He cradled one hand in the other. She saw where the crystal’s fire had burnt the skin.
“So, I’m like a white blood cell?” she asked.
“Yeah. An antibody. From what I saw, your magic allows you to channel stuff. Basically, if we had let the Phoenix continue, it would have transferred into you, and you’d have been a full-blown Fire Mage with its power. Quite a bit of power, mind you.” He sighed. “Probably, if I’d left you alone and hadn’t brought you down here, you might have lived a few years—maybe even the rest of your life—without knowing magic. But I didn’t, and here we are.”
