Into the Fire (The Elemental Wars Book 1)

by K. Gorman

  A grin cracked Aiden’s dry lips. “I would pay good money to see any of them take you on when you have the Phoenix backing you.”

  In a surprising show of teeth and an uplift of mood, she returned his grin with one of her own and an exhale of air that might have been a laugh. “Right? I don’t think he’s connected those dots yet.”

  “Parents tend to do that, in my experience. Children are to be protected, and all that.”

  “Yeah. He’s always been protective, but I think he’s gotten extra-protective since Mom died.”

  Her jaw tightened, a quick strain of muscles under skin as she looked away. She’d come level with him now, walking with only a small hitch in her stride.

  “I’m not a child anymore, though,” she continued.

  Now, it was Aiden’s turn to laugh. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen. Almost seventeen.”

  “All right, all right. Give it another year and a bit, and you’ll be drinking and voting with the rest of us.” He paused. “When did your mother pass?”

  This time, she did stop—but only for a bit.

  “This summer. July. Shot on the mountain front.”

  “I’m sorry. I…”

  He trailed off, his attention switching to in front of them. The tunnel mouth was just ahead, the side of the dead string of bulbs on the wall glinting in his light. Ahead, the double-wide door was cut solidly into the wall, the two panels wrenched permanently open.

  Voices sounded from within. Artificial light shivered on the interior walls, coming from farther inside.

  He flicked his own light off, placed Mieshka’s wrist in his hand, and took a moment to cast a shield—a couple sigils sliding onto the back of his hand with a jittery energy before releasing into the air. Warmth washed around them.

  Mieshka moved her attention from his hand on her wrist to the air in front of them. “Was that a shield?”

  Perceptive. Maybe she was feeling more than he’d thought through the transfer mark. It still glowed on her wrist, the link between them like a thin leash.

  “It is. Stay close to me.”

  Aiden stepped forward. As they rounded the corner, a trio of flashlights immediately flicked in their direction, blinding them.

  All conversation halted.

  He stopped, wincing in the glare. “Turn those fucking things down, or I will break them for you.”

  The light lowered. Dots of retinal burn danced in his vision. Despite having only three flashlights, nearly ten people crowded the small hallway. At least two had guns pointed at him.

  He cleared his throat. “Are you the people who were chasing a teenage girl down with guns? What the hell is wrong with you?”

  A tall, broad man shoved his way to the front of the crowd. His words slurred when he spoke, and a few drops of spittle arced through the light. “What the fuck have you done with Lady Sophia?”

  Lady Sophia? Good God, which nether-realm had this creature crawled out from?

  “I’ve done nothing to or with Sophia.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No bullshit. Why would I hurt her? I’m looking for her, unlike you.”

  “They wouldn’t fucking let me look for her.”

  Gee, I wonder why? He couldn’t imagine Roger giving this man the time of day, let alone trusting him in a search party.

  A fourth flashlight bobbed into the far end of the tunnel, then froze. Without giving it a direct look, he watched it rise in a slow circle, flash twice, then go dark.

  Hmm.

  Another man stepped forward, this one tall and slender, with a quiet, watchful presence. When he spoke, it wasn’t with the other man’s bluster, but with a quiet, unflappable certainty.

  “Fuck you. We know you did it.” His arm rose, another gun aiming at Aiden’s face.

  Through his grip on her arm, Aiden felt Mieshka begin to shake. He glanced to her. The paleness of the light washed all color from her face, and a few muscles in her neck trembled. Her eyes looked small, dark, and afraid.

  Even the Elemental link between them had begun to shake.

  Okay, maybe they needed to end this before her panic inadvertently used that link to burn everyone within firing distance.

  “I didn’t take her, and you are wasting my time.” Without looking away, he allowed his tone to lift, carrying beyond their small group. “Jo?”

  The soldier’s voice drifted back down the tunnel from behind the men. “Permission to kick ass, sir?”

  Those in the back of the group swung around. Two of the lights flashed over her, skittering over her chest and arms, illuminating her grim, emotionless visage. She was only a few meters from them and held a thick, heavy-looking rifle across her chest.

  He suppressed his grin. Moments like this were why she got paid the big bucks.

  “Granted.”

  She sprang with a yell that filled the space. Mieshka flinched beside him, but the small crowd of people flinched more. Several bolted down an intersecting alley, taking one of the flashlights with them. Within a single second, she’d taken down one of the men and disarmed another. A third had his yell cut off with a heavy thunk, and the lights found him on the floor a moment later. As the remaining flashlight beams focused on her, she slammed the butt of her rifle against the underside of a fourth man’s jaw. He fell.

  Watching the fight, Aiden leaned down to Mieshka, who still trembled in his grip.

  “This is why I keep her around. Saves me the trouble of ass-kicking. Plus, I think she likes it.” He lifted his head. “Ah, here comes her second. And third, too, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Another flashlight bobbed into sight down the tunnel. A few seconds later, Buck and Mo joined the fray.

  The rest of the men—four, by his count—fled down the intersecting tunnel. They let them go, skimming their lights over the wounded who remained. And the one guy who’d decided to stay down.

  Jo stood near the left-hand wall, her face a snarl as she clutched her right arm in front of her. Blood gleamed against the skin of her hand.

  “Fuck me,” she said. “Bugger had a knife.”

  Buck went to her, taking the hand without comment and examining it under his light.

  Aiden glanced to Mieshka, giving her a quick scan. She appeared to have recovered—the shaking had stopped, anyway, but he wasn’t sure she’d quite registered just how many people Jo had beaten down.

  They should probably leave before she did, considering she was still pulling on his link.

  “Looks like I’ve got a matching set, then,” he commented, pushing her forward. “Let’s get you both back to the office and patched up. Then, Jo, you can go find Mieshka’s friend Robin, who has apparently gotten lost down here while performing an act of bravery.”

  Chapter 21

  Sophia drifted. She couldn’t see, couldn’t feel—couldn’t even breathe.

  But, then again, she didn’t need to. Not here.

  The Between was a hard place to get to, but Sophia’s people had a name for it—which didn’t mean she understood it any more than anyone else did, but it at least gave her a point of reference.

  It also awoke memories.

  Firelight, burning on a dark beach in her teenage years, glinting off the dusty blue metal of her brother’s levi-car parked to the side, the smell of cigarette smoke and afna seed paste tempered by occasional twitches of an unambitious coastal wind, the water rippling and choppy despite this—they’d been in the lee of a rocky outcrop, she remembered, and of trees that shook with the rattle of dry leaves.

  Early spring, then.

  The Maihavi climate had been so different from the northern mountains of the Dalinar University. Different, too, from Ryarne’s freezing winter.

  Idly, she wondered if any of her friends from back then were still alive.

  Probably not. Although her country had possessed some of the inter-dimensional ships capable of escaping Lür, it had been a simple numbers game in the end.

  Ninety percent of the w
orld’s population had not made it off-planet. For some countries, like Bildan where Dalinar University had sat, they’d possessed the majority of Lür’s wealth and power—which had equaled more Transition-capable ships.

  For hers…

  Well, her people had never been particularly numerous. She’d be surprised if more than fifty had escaped.

  Now is probably not the best time to be thinking of death. Especially death by Maanai, since that was how the device had taken her in the first place.

  She’d recognized the box when it had rolled in. She’d seen enough of them on the Lürian equivalent of television dramas to know what they were capable of. Hell, she’d even written an essay on their workings early on in her university career—transitional space like this had been part of her post-grad focus. Although possessing a basic autonomy AI and capable of other things, the boxes had been used largely to escort criminals to and from prisons, suspending them in a partial pocket-dimension that interacted just enough with the real world to allow back-and-forth transfer.

  It didn’t, however, suspend bodily function.

  Which meant that, sooner or later, they’d have to let her out. The box’s safeguards would ensure that.

  For her, that time came sooner rather than later.

  One second, she was floating in a timeless, fathomless place, unable to feel her arms or legs except as abstract components and ghost-limb syndrome.

  Then, she was tumbling onto a hard, dark-colored floor in an awkward jumble of arms and legs.

  Her elbow took the brunt of the fall. She sucked in a harsh breath as pain shot through her arm. Her hip, shoulder, and knee followed suit, and her back smacked hard into a wall. She tasted blood in her mouth as the impact jarred against her teeth.

  But she didn’t waste any time. She caught a brief glimpse of a cell—tiny, little more than two paces, with black walls and floor, a toilet sitting at its far end, and Michael hunched over in the corner, looking either asleep or dead—as she scrambled to her feet. Magic snapped across her knuckles, ready to fight.

  A hole in the front panel clacked shut before she could try.

  Michael’s annoyed voice spoke from behind her. “Put that out before you hurt someone.”

  Okay, not dead or asleep, though she might have preferred one of those options. She ignored him, taking her own analysis of the situation. Heart pounding, her attention split across the wall, searching for a crack, a whole, another opening—anything she could launch an attack through. When it became clear that it was useless, and nothing was about to come through and kill her, she turned around.

  His tone had set her teeth on edge. It always did—but at least, he’d spoken in their old language. He didn’t usually deign that much with her. She didn’t bother to hide the grimace that crossed her face as she regarded him from across the narrow cell.

  He sat on a small cot next to the wall, looking a bit rougher than he usually did—understandable, since it had been several days since he’d disappeared. Under the light, his skin looked drawn and jaundiced. A gritty patchwork of stubble lined his chin. The bones of his knuckles stuck out like ridges on the back of his hand.

  His eyes were the worst, though. Sunken into his skull, his token dark irises—a distinctive genetic identifier of his family—played an awful contrast against the white of his sclera.

  He looked like a man possessed.

  He wasn’t, though. His tone of voice was, unfortunately, as distinctive as the dark of his eyes. Especially when he was talking to her.

  Resisting the urge to add a sneer to her grimace, she kept her face blank and lifted her attention to the rest of the room—her prison, now. It was a much larger priority for her. And there was something off about the walls.

  When she took a closer look at them, the blood drained from her face.

  They had the same smooth, seamless, jet-black color as her tablet, engine, Aiden’s ship, and every other piece of Lost Tech that had made it over from Lür—but, where Lost Tech had a glossy, almost obsidian texture to it, this had a rougher, matte-like finish.

  Which meant it was pre-exposed.

  Panic jolted through her system. Within a heartbeat, she doused the spells that ran across her hand and forearm, cut off all ties to her Element, and dampened every thought of magic.

  It was like shutting an iron door into place.

  “Is that—?”

  “It is.” His tone had taken a slight change from before, giving the impression that he was speaking to a particularly slow child.

  She ignored him, staring at the walls. “Really? Pre-exposed?”

  “See for yourself.”

  Her lip curled, but she didn’t spare him a look. When she moved, her legs were rigid and stiff, unwilling to bend. Her elbow and hip still throbbed, but she ignored him, stepping up to the nearest wall for a closer look.

  It didn’t show her reflection at all—not even a change in color.

  In fact, it looked like it were absorbing the light.

  She reached out and pressed her palm against its surface.

  It felt warm.

  An old, long-disused swear snarled from her mouth—her first language, this time. She snatched her hand back, mind racing.

  Lost Tech was made of Maanai, a crystal-like material with the ability to grow and channel magic. With considerable time, ambition, and scientific talent, Lür had managed to cultivate the material and develop it into something programmable. By the time Sophia had been born, Maanai-developed technology had permeated almost every facet of Lürian life for centuries.

  But, in its raw form, Maanai was notoriously unstable.

  A single mutation had turned it from the benign, helpful technology they used into a dark, deadly, magic-eating crystal.

  Which was why, back in the day, they’d treated all Maanai before use. Exposed it to a chemical anti-growth agent to neuter its capabilities.

  The cell’s walls had not been exposed.

  The room was quiet for a minute, neither of them speaking. Michael watched her, his dark eyes malignant. Above her, the room’s sole, mercury-based lightbulb flickered in its socket, the coiled filament burning with an audible hum. She cast a glance up at it when it flickered a second time.

  Then, she clenched her hands into tight fists, held them for a few seconds, and released, letting go of some of the anxiety and tension she’d been collecting in spades over the last few days. The cell wasn’t big enough for pacing, but she made a small circuit of what space there was. Michael’s stare bored into her back and shoulders.

  In a way, the Maanai cell made things simpler—it meant she couldn’t do anything. Not with magic, anyway. And, without magic, their options were limited.

  Unless we could… No. She shook the thought from her head even before she finished it.

  With this much Maanai, any spell could set the mutation off.

  She turned her attention back to Michael. Now that she looked, she could see the stress on him. Blood shot through parts of his eyes, one of them so bad, it appeared as though he’d been punched. Exhaustion darkened and puffed the skin below them, giving him an expression that her mom used to call ‘owl-eyed.’

  “I suppose they can hear what we say,” she mused, giving the room another cursory onceover. She didn’t see a traditional Terran microphone, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t hear. If they’d managed to make an entire cell out of pre-exposed Maanai, she bet they had other gadgets, too.

  Closing her eyes, she leaned her back against the wall. An uneasy warmth spread through her shoulder blades, which she tried to ignore. “Do you think they have a translator?”

  He gave her another annoyed look, the top portion of his lip tightening. For a second, she didn’t think he’d respond, but then, he nodded toward the far Maanai wall—the one in which the hole had disappeared before.

  “With resources like this, I don’t see why they wouldn’t.”

  She made a huffing sound through her teeth, part laugh, part hiss. “It’
s a shame you don’t speak Maihavi,” she said, referring to her mother tongue. “They certainly won’t have translators for that.”

  “Why would they care what no-name, inbred savages had to say?” he said. “Yours was not Lür’s finest culture.”

  Yeah, there was a reason she and Michael didn’t get along.

  She wondered if anyone would come to pull them apart if she decided to prison shank him. Not that she had anything to shank him with currently, but there was water in the toilet.

  Granted, the toilet was also made of ceramic, which was in his domain. And neither of them were above using their Elements for attempted murder.

  Twelve suns, I’m thinking about using toilet water to spike into his neck, and it’s only been two minutes.

  “You’re one to talk, black blood,” she said, then switched her attention to the wall.

  His Bildanese had a subtle smoothness to it, as if his accent sliced off the top portion of the sounds so they’d lie flatter on the tongue—a variant of her own speech, which rounded them out, but it had put him tiers above her in Lür’s classic social status.

  Sometimes, when he opened his mouth, she was glad there’d been an apocalypse.

  His was an endangered racial attitude.

  “They can’t have smuggled this much raw Maanai off-world,” she remarked, switching topics—as much as she wanted to hit him, nothing would come of beating on her prison cellmate. Plus, she might need him later to dig a tunnel or something. “Someone would have noticed. Maybe a tube or two. How long to grow out that much? A year?”

  “Three hundred and eighty Terran days for one tube at room temperature,” he said, not even hesitating at the calculation. “One hundred and three at premium.”

  She resisted the urge to raise an eyebrow—three days in a cell had given him some time to think, obviously. “That’s quick. And if they’ve been growing it since we landed?”

  “Several thousand megatons, depending on the circumstances.”

  Too much.

  “We have to tell someone,” she said. “Council ought to know.”

  “Really.” He cracked a dry smile and leaned back, one hand making a vague flutter of fingers toward the walls surrounding them. “And how do you propose to do that?”