Into the Fire (The Elemental Wars Book 1)

by K. Gorman

  “He in the engine room?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  Two minutes later, she was stepping through the hole in the wall, her nose wrinkling as a cool, damp smell rose in the air. Chunks of concrete lay scattered across the floor, and when she came inside, her shoes slipped on a layer of dust. Aiden still hadn’t replaced the overhead light, but a series of work lights had been set up, glaring around the engine’s black, boxy bulk. Data streamed on the orange, horizontal screen.

  Aiden sat under one of the lamps, tipping his chair back as he read a piece of paper. His hair stuck up, the soft orange glowing white in the light, and his blue shirt had black, tar-like smudges stained across it.

  Curling her fists into her sleeves, she picked her way across the room.

  “You got it fixed, then?” she asked.

  He looked up at her voice. As she edged into the light, feeling heat sink through her clothes, it reminded her of the Phoenix.

  But that warmth was gone now. That light had blown out.

  “Not really.” Slowly, he stood up. He swayed, steadying himself on parts of the machine. “The soldiers did a number on it. It works, but it’s not complete.”

  He seemed to be just as tired as her dad, but she guessed there weren’t many that could do his job. Just he and the other two Mages—and who even knew if they all had the same education he had. He’d said he was the Mage version of an engineer, after all.

  “The shield’s stable, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he said.

  “That’s good.”

  Another long silence. Aiden studied her.

  “But you’re actually wondering about something else, aren’t you?”

  She nodded. The work light struck a sharp shadow over his face as he stepped away from the engine.

  “Dad told me what happened,” she said. “I… I can’t feel the Phoenix anymore.”

  He pulled a pen from his pocket. “I can’t scan you anymore—not without compromising the shield. But we can try the transfer again.”

  She held out her hand, and the bruise from the I.V. ached as he drew the mark. A few seconds later, ink was drying on her skin, and the smell of permanent marker made her wrinkle her nose again.

  They waited, watching the mark.

  When a few seconds passed and nothing happened, she tried to pull for power—to reach out along the Elemental link it should have created.

  Nothing.

  No glow. No life. She felt only ash. Ash and cold smoke.

  She tried not to show her disappointment, but her jaw muscles tightened, anyway.

  Aiden slipped the cap back on the pen. “Don’t think too much about it. It can probably be fixed—”

  “It burned up, didn’t it?” She’d seen the news coverage. The Phoenix had lit the sky on fire. It had left her.

  She swallowed back a lump in her throat.

  “Yeah. And something’s blocking the transfer sign. I can’t scan—”

  “—without killing the shield.”

  She didn’t have magic, but she wasn’t normal, either. Aiden had already made it clear that he still intended to keep her onboard, even if they couldn’t do anything about her right now.

  He gave her a pitying look.

  “Jo’s been meaning to teach you how to shoot,” he offered.

  She didn’t want to learn to shoot. She wanted to hide.

  And she knew just the spot.

  Chapter 44

  The memorial was silent. Mieshka held her phone ahead of her, its light providing a thin solution for the darkness. Without the Phoenix to power it, only the lights in the first hallway still worked. The rest—the names, the message, the screen hovering in mid-air—no longer glowed. The fountain was the sole source of sound, the rippling water echoing alone in the chamber.

  Without the usual weight of her backpack, she felt exposed. One of her shoes scuffed against the ground, loud in the quiet. After a few minutes of idle searching, she found what she was looking for—a couple of bullet holes biting into the tapestry, about head-high. She examined them, swiping her thumb over her phone’s touchscreen as it dimmed. The air smelled of smoke.

  Memories flashed back. Jo said she hadn’t killed anyone in here, but she had caused a lot of pain. They would remember her. Her lip curled as she touched a carved phoenix. With what she’d done, the monsters were her peers.

  Well, they had been her peers. Briefly.

  The Phoenix was gone.

  She pushed the memories away, shivering in her jacket. Ryarne’s winter pushed through the tunnels. There was no warmth left in this place.

  The stone dug into her side. There was no warmth in her, either. The ash in her soul was cold. She’d guttered out like a candle in its own wax.

  Her phone’s screen timed out, and the hall went black. She slid down the wall and slumped at its base. In here, she hid. Her dad had taken to fretting whenever she came home. Sometimes, his hands shook when he hugged her. It was too much for him.

  She thought of her Element, how it had filled her. For a few brief moments, it had been her entire world—fire, filling everything between the horizons, raging, burning, shielding. The Phoenix had promised an eternity of warmth.

  She was not warm. She couldn’t even transfer anymore. What did that mean? What the hell did that mean?

  Hugging her knees, she made to put the phone back in her pocket, but stopped when it vibrated, its chirp echoing in the room. She skimmed the message that popped up.

  Chris.

  “Want to meet?”

  The text glowed in the dark, bright against the black backdrop of her phone. She hadn’t seen him since the fire. Both he and Robin had left cards in the hospital. They had both stormed Cyprios, too. Mieshka had trouble picturing it.

  She thought of the Underground. It frightened her a little, but it was interesting—and the people down there had risked their lives to defend the shield, even if they were safe.

  It would be nice to meet them.

  She texted back.

  “Yes.”

  The End

  Want to find out if Meese gets her Element back? Keep reading for Cat and Meese, a free short story set in between Into the Fire and Firebird.

  Cat and Meese

  by K. Gorman

  When Aiden, Ryarne’s only Fire Mage and Mieshka Renaud’s current instructor, sends her after Kitty, a rogue Elemental with a crazy past, she isn't sure what to think. Kitty has hidden out in the Underground, a very literal underground city that's a mix of war heroes, deserters, refugees, criminals, and everything in between. It's a place she has been before, with mixed results.

  Without the help of her Fire magic, she is understandably anxious about venturing down below—especially with final exams looming over her high school grades.

  But the Fire Mage insists that she'll be okay. And you know what? He might have been right…

  …If the crazy in Kitty’s past hadn’t come back to kill them.

  *

  “Got something for you.”

  Mieshka Renaud glanced up as she walked in, halfway through the motion of taking her backpack off, and resisted the urge to lift an eyebrow at the Fire Mage sitting in the corner of the office. They were alone in the room—Buck and Jo, the Mage’s two bodyguards, were probably off finding takeout like they did on most evenings—and the office had a relaxed quiet to it. The gray, cloudy light of the outside drizzle filtered through the windows on the left, casting a cool light over a few feet at the side of the room before the overhead fluorescents took over. The screen of Aiden’s computer lit his face in a pale glow. He hadn’t even looked up when he’d spoken.

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s someone you should find. Underground. She can give you some answers.”

  Ah. Right. This time, she didn’t resist her urges. A grimace bared her teeth as she shook her head, a cocktail of old emotions boiling up—anger, fear, guilt—as she finished crossing the last few paces to the nearest couch, shrugged her b
ag the rest of the way off, and shook the cuff of her sleeve away from her water-slicked hand. The rain hadn’t quite made it through her jacket, but her pants, shoes, and socks were all soaked.

  “She got the answers to my finals?”

  As if to accentuate the point, the textbooks inside her bag made a satisfying thunk as she dropped the pack the last few inches to the floor.

  Underground. A place she’d been avoiding for the past month—ever since it had become clear that she was never going to get her magic back, despite whatever beliefs Aiden might hold.

  He ignored her.

  “She’s a weird kind of Elemental. She might have more answers than you think.”

  She paused. As the Mage’s apprentice, she knew what an ‘Elemental’ was. By the way magic had evolved on Lür, the Mage’s home planet, and was evolving on Terra, her planet, it followed a set of mostly Elemental guidelines. Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Electricity, Light, Dark, and Telepathic, all color-coded according to the Mage’s structure—but there was a hefty difference in ability between an Elemental and a Mage. Where Elementals could manipulate the raw power of their element, Mages could cross into other elements and do hugely complex spells.

  Technically, Mieshka hadn’t even been an Elemental. Her magic had been too weird for that.

  Until she’d absorbed the Phoenix and landed straight into Fire Elemental territory.

  But the Phoenix was gone. Dead. She’d smashed it across the sky as protection when the city’s shield had failed, and that had burned out every last wisp of its power. And her status as Aiden’s apprentice was tenuous at best, kept going only by theories, speculation, and more than a little pity.

  They all knew what saving the city had cost her.

  The old, heated emotions bubbled in her chest again. For a moment, it was all she could do not to break down right there—the grief, and the guilt, ripped at the inside of her chest like claws. She tensed her fists, forced her clenched jaws to relax, and fought to keep her voice under control, carefully not looking at him.

  “Answers to what?”

  “To whether or not the potential in you is really gone or not.”

  And there it was again. That hope.

  The computer whirred quietly, the soft noise filling the silence between them.

  “You said it was gone,” she said.

  “No, I said it had burned up.”

  “What’s the difference? It’s still fucking dead.”

  This time, he did cock an eyebrow, finally glancing over from his seat by the computer to pin her with a stare. “You’re familiar with the legend of the Phoenix?”

  “Of course.”

  Even if she hadn’t been, her obsession over the past few months would have cured her of that. Though she’d slowed her search down over the past month, she doubted there was a Phoenix, Firebird, or Sunbird-related website that she hadn’t browsed. She’d even scoured through the city’s library, looking for references.

  So, yes, she was more than familiar with the legend of the Phoenix—and specifically the whole ‘rise from the ashes’ rebirth thing that seemed to be its schtick.

  But it had been two months since the bird had died inside her. And she felt those ashes. Every time she reached for the power she once had, that was all she could feel.

  “You think she’ll know what happened to it? How to…” She swallowed, her breath sticking in her throat as she struggled to form the words. “Get it back?”

  “I think it’s a good idea to talk with her. But, you have to find her first.”

  She shook her head, then made her way over to him. “Who is she, anyway?”

  He tilted the screen so that she could see. A blurry screengrab from a security camera showed the defiant visage of a dark-skinned girl flipping off the camera, with part of the image brightened into a flare of light where her other hand would be. The date stamp in the corner was a few days old.

  “Her name’s Kitty, and she’s an odd sort of Electric Elemental,” Aiden said. “Derrick, the Electric Mage over in Terremain, took her in as an apprentice several years ago, though I’m not sure how much instruction he’s actually given her—from all I’ve heard, she tends to just wing it with her powers. With electricity, you can kind of get away with that.”

  “So, she’s like Roger, but with Electric instead of Water, and minus the creepiness?”

  Roger was the Water Mage’s apprentice. She’d run into him a number of times when she’d been going Underground. He played a pivotal leadership role down there, and had even organized the raid on Cyprios that had helped save the city after the company had decided to turn traitor to their country. He was also, hands down, one of the creepiest, most violently frightening individuals she had ever meet. Not creepy in a pedophilic or weird-guy-asking-for-her-number way, but creepy in a way that she always suspected he moonlighted as an assassin in his off time.

  She skimmed through the text below the picture—Kitty’s basic description, including age, height, weight, and criminal record, was all written down. Nothing really stood out until she reached the note about a mental condition at the bottom.

  She lifted an eyebrow. “She’s not psycho, is she?”

  “Not until now.” At her look, Aiden continued. “I’ve talked to Derrick. He says the dead guy wasn’t her fault.”

  Now, both of her eyebrows were up. “Dead guy?”

  Aiden scrolled down and highlighted a section of the text she hadn’t seen yet.

  Great. He wants me to go Underground to find someone with a mental condition, a dead body in their recent history, and who can shoot electricity.

  “And you think she’ll have answers for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come she has answers and you don’t?”

  “I do have answers. I just can’t access them right now.”

  Right. Because his shield engine was too busy generating a shield to run a scan on her, and the Phoenix had been his spare crystal. He theorized that the Phoenix was still inside her, but lately, she’d taken that theory to mean she’d be carrying its spiritual dead body inside her for the rest of her life. Where before, she could channel other people’s powers through herself, all her attempts to do so after the Phoenix had transferred into her had been blocked. She couldn’t even use a physical transfer mark written on her hand anymore.

  She let out a slow breath and tilted her head back, taking a moment to mentally weigh her options.

  On one hand, finals were coming up.

  On the other hand, she’d spent the past month studying for them. And Kitty might give her an answer she was actually looking for.

  She brought her head back down and opened her eyes, meeting Aiden’s stare.

  “All right, where is she?”

  *

  When Upper Ryarne had been built, its foundations had been cemented over the bones of its predecessor. The burial and subsequent elevation had, so she’d heard, been a necessary step to manage the city’s recurrent flooding problems. Being surrounded by mountains, and having changed the valley’s original topography so much, an increase in the spring snow melt had seen some places in the original city get absolutely screwed by water—so they’d buried it all and built up.

  Back then, they could afford to do that.

  There’d been a lot of resistance to the move—she’d read all this in both the city and the library archives—but it had happened.

  And now, seventy years later, the refugee crisis and housing shortage had led to people excavating the old city’s still-remarkably-intact bones, remodeling them with varying forms of plumbing and electricity, and moving in.

  It wasn’t pretty—well, it was in some places, especially if you had a particular penchant for abandonment and urban decay. It was a lot of old buildings and practical tunnels, with walkways crossing through old, dead office buildings and former houses rather than on the old streets since it was easier to do only a partial excavation rather than the full dig a street needed, which turned the Un
derground into a multi-level maze with numerous dead-ends, switchbacks, and cryptic graffiti.

  The rain hadn’t quite dried on her jacket, and the chill it made pressed as smotheringly close to her as the tunnel walls seemed to, but she preferred that closeness. It felt comfortable and familiar, unlike the cold indifference of the rainy, wintery streets above. And it was quiet down here. A crude line of naked bulbs ran along a string of wires on one side of the walkway, casting a mix of light over the concrete and brick that made the tunnel—this one was a bona fide tunnel rather than a walkway inside of a building—and the stale air tickled at her nose.

  She wasn’t sure how deep she was, but a few minutes later, when she started down a small stairway, her phone chirped to let her know that she’d walked out of tower range. Nowadays, with the pairing of the Mage’s Lürian technology with the native Terran systems, most communications signals could transmit through the dense rock and soil that buried the Underground, with the only trade-off being a shortened range.

  Soon, she started seeing the first signs of civilization.

  The tunnel broadened out, filling the floor with the remnants of what had once been a city street, complete with crumbling asphalt and broken traffic lines. On the left, a single store from what had once been a strip mall stood out, its façade simple stucco siding with shopfront windows displaying its merchandise—racks upon racks of guns—and a neon sign that read Mo’s.

  Most stores payed tribute to the larger contenders of the Underground as a way of keeping their windows intact and their products unstolen. As opposed to stories she’d heard about gangs and larger criminal organization, she didn’t think Roger and his group actually went around breaking windows and stealing things, but she did know they ran down quite a few others who did. The payment also acted as a tax to help pay for Underground maintenance, future excavations, any bribes they needed to pay the city to keep the electricity coming—et cetera.