by K. Gorman
Footsteps thumped on the stairs. They held their breath, quietly kneeling on the ground. A crack between the wood allowed a slight amount of vision into the next room.
They settled in to wait.
No one moved. A small current of air shifted against Ketan’s neck. He slid the Fire crystal from his back, cupping it between his hands through the fabric. The warmth was soothing. Like a rock that had been stuck in the sun all day.
Thump, thump, thump.
They held their breath.
A second later, the soldier stepped into view.
She looked much more impressive up close. The light streamed in from the street, painting broken squares on her winter camo. Dirt scuffed her elbows and knees. A buckle on her ammo belt blinked in the light.
The wood creaked as she rotated, scanning the area with her gun.
There was nothing relaxed about her. The look on her face was expressionless. Cold. Dead-serious.
This was a woman trained and ready for combat.
She kept her back to the wall, stepping sideways to fully scan the room.
When she got to their hiding spot, she paused.
The scope trained on the wall directly above them. Chest height, if they’d still been standing. His heart hammered against his ribs. He heard the breath catch in Devin’s throat. The other man made a move to do something with his bottle, but Ketan stopped him. He put a hand on Devin’s, feeling the sodden rag soak kerosene into his skin. He squeezed once.
Then, he called his Element.
Fire burst on the back wall behind the soldier, far enough from the windows that the light wouldn’t reflect onto the street. Golden flames crackled quietly, rising higher as the soldier stepped toward their hiding spot. It crept across the floor, moving like a living thing.
Which, technically, it was. It was his puppet, and he could make it dance wherever he wanted. Sweat dripped down his forehead as he concentrated. His skin heated as his Element activated. Devin would feel it, too, just like he had felt it with Meese.
Fire Elementals ran at different temperatures than others. Didn’t matter if they were hot. The fever would never kill them.
He had tried, once. Tested his limits. He hadn’t thought he’d need it in the Underground. It was supposed to be a safe place—a place where refugees from Terremain could come to hide, live normal lives.
Losing the war had changed that.
He pushed more power into the fire, feeling it flare across the room. Light shifted over the floor, finally catching the soldier’s attention.
She whipped around, gun at the ready.
But bullets couldn’t kill fire.
She took a few steps back—an instinctive motion, he thought—before her logic returned. Smoke filled the air, tinting the ceiling a faint gray-blue color. The light from the window caught on the metal on her uniform, making it glint with her every movement.
A second later, she glanced back down the stairs.
Then, she was gone.
They heard the sound of her boots as she raced out. The door below banged open, slamming against the outer wall as she left.
Ketan and Devin breathed again.
Slowly, they stood.
Ketan was the first to emerge. He worked a cramp out of his leg as he stepped into the room, stretching the strain out of his thighs. The fire slowed its burn, made languid by his actions. It acted like a friendly pet, albeit one that was twelve feet high and raged with the heat of a forge.
Devin gaped. “Whoa.”
He’d said that before, when he’d seen the crystal. Ketan looked up, studying the flames on the far side of the room. It felt good to use his Element after so long. Good to use it for more than just a parlor trick. Like a runner stretching into a sprint after days of people asking him to jog.
Heat filled him, unbounded. Unrestrained.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s pretty cool.”
“Can you do more like that?” Devin stepped closer, hesitating. The fire might have been on the edge of the room, but the heat that beat at them was intense. “Like, all over?”
“You mean, can I burn the shit out of things?” He straightened. A slow grin fixed on his face. “Yes. Yes, I can.”
Burning the dolls seemed like a distant memory now. Heat unfurled inside of him, rising like the Phoenix Mieshka had described.
“Nothing like the Mage, though,” he admitted.
“Well, duh. But still, it’s pretty sweet.” They stood there, watching the flames lick up the old, curled wallpaper. They left black soot in their path, smoothing the wall.
It wanted to bite deeper into the wood, but Ketan didn’t let it. He’d come this far. He wouldn’t lose control over the fire now. That was what his year of training had been—not so much finding his limits as finding his ability. The ability to control his powers in public and not incinerate every asshole he came across.
Devin eased to the window.
The street below had filled. If the soldiers had any qualms about the fire, they sure weren’t acting on it. You think they’d at least have reported it, made sure there was no one in the building—but no. They ignored it. The larger line of troops moved in front of them now, soldiers in disarray. It wasn’t like the neatly lined marches he had seen on TV. They did not move in sync. Some of them hardly moved at all.
Definitely an army in retreat.
A techno song broke the silence. Devin pulled out his phone, scanned it. “Comms are back on.”
The fire roared, crackling merrily, sinking deeper into the floorboards. Ketan started to call it back to him, to rein it in. Embers glowed at its touch, winking like orange and yellow stars on the dark wood.
“Hey, you want to see something cool?” Devin said.
“Cooler than my Fire?”
He held up his phone, toward Ketan. Ketan squinted, the text too small to see.
“The Water Mage is closing the Underground,” Devin said. “She’s got our shield up.”
*
Finding the Underground access point required more inter-building maneuvering than Ketan had thought possible. In an aboveground city, one simply didn’t think of all of the windows, balconettes, and rooflines, but the rafter system made each one accessible. Devin only had to jimmy a few window sashes to get through.
It took them ten minutes to reach the exit.
In the Core, the buildings had similar heights. A few exceptions broke free of the rule, with the tallest stretching up some seventeen stories before it hit the ceiling. He’d heard that these connected to aboveground buildings whose owners had Underground connections. But older ones, like the neighborhood he and Devin moved through, peaked at only four or five stories.
Climbing through them was an exercise in juxtaposition. Wood changed to laminate, broken tile, bare concrete, and back. Each new building formed a different pathway. Some were like highways, with hallways that led straight through to a window on the other side.
Others, not so much.
A series of townhouses had them crawling through attic space in order to find a connection between each segment of house. Once, they crept along the sloped roof of an old Victorian manor. A rusty weathervane nearly impaled them in the dark.
They moved steadily west, old wood creaking under their boots. The marching on the street paralleled their passage, muffled by the walls they passed through.
In the last building, something changed.
“That’s not normal light, is it?”
It shone through the tall, dusty windows, casting the room in a ghostly haze. Acting more like plasma than light, it appeared to shift and shiver, undulating like one of those old lava lamps.
He strode to the window and peeked out.
They’d reached the end of the road—a fact made obvious by the wall of dirt that had been carefully cemented in on the Core’s side. It reminded him of mountain passes, where the hillsides had been stripped of trees and concreted in place to stop landslides.
Except, normal con
crete didn’t glow.
A veil of light shifted over the wall’s surface, fitting itself into every crack and cranny like a vacuum-sealed piece of glowing silicon. It looked almost like water, pressed into a semi-solid shape that defied gravity.
Or a very badly done special effect from an old movie.
But this was real life. As he looked closer, rubbing the glass to clear his vision, he recognized little shifts in the light.
Mage symbols slipped through the wall like fish—well, maybe not fish. More like the single-celled organisms he’d seen in high school microscopes a couple years ago.
A door stood open at the bottom of the wall. Soldiers funneled into it from the streets, bottle-necking at its entrance. A few others lingered beside the door, not moving.
He recognized them.
The Water Mage leaned against the wall. The shield—at least, that’s what he assumed it was—shivered behind her like a plasma waterfall. Blue light outlined her form. Symbols shifted over her skin like glowing tattoos.
She made an impressive sight. One the soldiers wouldn’t soon forget.
Roger was harder to spot. Ketan found him in the shadows, skirting the scene with more of the Society’s people. Now that he knew to look, he spotted more Society members lining the upstairs windows, the alleys, the road, all watching the procession retreat.
Turning his gaze upward, he saw more crouching in the rafters. Blue light gleamed on the guns in their hands.
The Underground defense machine at its finest.
Devin touched his shoulder—the same shoulder he’d punched only two days ago.
“Come on, let’s go.”
Down on the street, the scene was even more surreal. Smoke clung to the air in a haze, and the thick line of soldiers had thinned into a long tail. The column bunched and buckled around the door, which only had room for two abreast.
A thickset man stood next to Sophia, set apart by his six-foot frame and the military uniform he wore. Though he dwarfed the Water Mage, she seemed unimpressed. She barely even looked at him, only nodding occasionally as he spoke. The rifle across his chest had been disarmed, Ketan saw, its magazine removed and placed on the ground beside her feet. A set of leadership stripes decorated his shoulders, marking him as a ranked officer.
Ketan walked in on the end of the conversation.
“I doubt she’ll stop,” he was saying. “Now that we surrendered, she has to do whatever is in Ryarne’s best interest, even if that means turning against her citizens.”
“Should I have killed you all, then?”
Sarcasm edged the Mage’s voice. In it, he heard echoes of what Aiden had said earlier.
Killing would’ve been easier. Less programming.
He thought of the snipers overhead, and whatever else they might have hidden in the rafter system. The only tough thing would have been disposing of the bodies.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” the man said. “These troops have just come back from the front. It’s not fair that they were sent down after their own.”
“I don’t care.” Sophia’s shoulders were set, hunched. Her arms crossed over her chest. “I won’t do this again. Next time, we will kill. You can tell her that.” Her eyes snapped to Ketan. “Aiden’s dropped you, has he?”
He shrugged. “You’d know better than me.”
She tapped her fingertips against her palm, hand by her side. It seemed more a nervous habit than anything else. A small ring on her thumb flashed in the light. Troops moved fast beside them, walking through the door barely two meters away. They openly gawked at the Water Mage, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. A symbol pulsed slowly on her hand, its spindly lines matching one that shivered above the door frame.
Maybe that was what kept the door open. Pretty generous of her to do that, considering the effort it took. And considering how tired she looked. Heavy bags darkened her face. One eye was so bloodshot, it looked like she’d been punched.
This was no second wind, but her fifth or sixth.
“He’ll be here soon,” she said. “He promised to meet me.”
In her other hand, she held the same slim device that Aiden had pulled out of his pocket. Some kind of Lost Tech phone, he guessed.
Her gaze trailed back to the soldiers. “Is this the last of them?”
The question appeared directed to the military man. He stiffened back into motion, having been quietly reassessing Ketan. No doubt dropping the Fire Mage’s name had caused the man to reconsider his earlier evaluation of Ketan and his abilities.
He turned toward her. “All that I can account for, anyway. As for the rest—”
Sophia cut him off with an impatient gesture. “We will send them up when we find them.”
The man hesitated. “Are you sure you don’t want to send any messages to the president?”
The Water Mage crossed her arms. Her lip twisted, and Ketan could’ve sharpened knives on the look she gave the man.
“Oh, I’ll send her a message. Trust me.”
Then, her head snapped back his way. She focused on something over his shoulder.
Heat flared behind him. A second later, Aiden stepped out of the air. Amber symbols glittered on his skin like fireflies.
His light blue eyes fixed on Ketan.
“Oh, there you are. Good. Time to go. Sophia?”
The Water Mage raised one hand in a three-fingered salute. “Peace out.”
Aiden led Ketan back into the Core.
Chapter 51
The bullet burned, flecks of metal spitting off like a malfunctioning firework.
Fire leapt through Mieshka’s shaking fingers. It rose inside her, the Phoenix overlapping her senses like a shimmering, warm blanket. Heat slid in behind her eyes as the crystal spirit took point.
The alley brightened. The faces of her friends lit up with orange and gold, shadows dancing behind them like campfire light.
Jo raised a hand, fingers splayed. Her eyes glittered with concern. “Meese? Calm down, honey.”
Her whole body was on fire, flames licking through her clothes, driving high into the air. She felt them around her, an extension of herself. They ran over her face, her lips, her eyes. She tasted them on her tongue. She felt them on her skin, scalding and fluttery like molten butterflies.
They were inside her, too, hot as a forge. Burning, flaming, igniting.
Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the Phoenix retreated.
Power rushed out of her.
She collapsed.
“Meese?”
Hands cupped her face. Jo’s touch felt cool to her fever. The world spun around her, light and shadow blending together in a blur. Something hard pressed against her shoulder.
The butt of Jo’s rifle.
Mieshka realized that she was on the ground. The concrete was rough and hard against her skin. Bits of dust and gravel ground into her wrist, snuck into the bandages by her thumb. Her wounds felt numb, beyond pain now. Pulses of heat that ached when she thought of them.
The Phoenix had healed her once before, but it hadn’t done the job this time.
Maybe that had been a one-off.
Her vision swam.
“Mieshka?” Her father knelt beside her. His hand replaced Jo’s, skin smooth and gentle.
She struggled onto her side. The world tilted. “Robin?”
She remembered blood, a scream.
“She’s fine, honey,” Jo said. “Just a scratch, like the one you had before.”
She struggled, trying to push herself up, but Jo pushed her back down. “Stay down for a sec. Let me check you out.”
She felt drained, like before when she’d done that spell. Whatever energy reserves her nap had given had been discharged in one shot.
“The soldiers?”
Jo hesitated. “They’re dead.”
Her breath caught in her throat. She shivered, feeling the concrete rise up as her head fell. Jo caught it before she hit, her fingers strong, cupping her head away from th
e floor.
“Just relax. Don’t worry about them. It’s not your fault.”
Her fault? Had she killed them? Had her power done more than block the bullet?
She struggled against Jo’s grip, craning her neck to see. Heat surged back into her veins. The air in front of her rippled. Jo’s face lit up in bands of gold.
Then, the ground rumbled.
A new voice joined the crowd.
“Get away from her. Get clear.”
Gobardon walked into sight, though she only saw his shoes. They were scuffed, their expensive leather scratched and smeared with dirt. Dust clung to the hem of his pant leg.
Jo didn’t move. Her hand was tight on Mieshka’s arm, trembling against Mieshka’s head. Fire hissed in her ear. Heat rose.
“I’m not going to hurt her,” Gobardon said. “I think I know what’s happening. Let me talk to the Phoenix inside her. I can fix this.”
Jo hesitated for a minute longer, then gave way. When she took her hand away from Mieshka’s head, Mieshka saw that the skin had blistered on the pads of her fingers.
The mercenary quickly hid the wound.
Gobardon knelt next to her. It was an exaggerated motion, taking a few seconds. Her vision shifted, tightened, focused on him. The wall behind him was blacker than she remembered, darkened by soot. It looked like a blast had gone off.
Again, she wondered what had happened to the soldiers.
“Mieshka,” Gobardon said. “Look at me.”
She met his eyes. They were darker than they had a right to be. Even Jo’s, the darkest brown eyes that she had seen, could reflect light—but Gobardon’s? Nothing.
She stared into them, lost in the blackness.
Something clicked. The Phoenix rose inside her, sliding its spirit-body through her skin and locking into place behind her eyes. They flared to life, the only things that reflected in Gobardon’s eyes.
He smiled. “Hello, Abrochdan. Mies’tri engl ya?”
Fire simmered inside her, dragging on the last of her energy. Her hands shook against the concrete, fire wrapping around her fist.
“Be at peace, Abrochdan. Estyien nya shen. Lesthri.” He put extra emphasis on the last word.
And the way his accent curled around syllables, the way the language slid around its vowels, sounded so familiar to her. Maybe it was just because of her history, but she thought she heard a faint Russian lilt where the y’s were concerned.
