The Brilliant Dark

by S. M. Beiko

  The very air will try to take what makes you, claim it, and wipe it out. No hungry worms this time, but Roan definitely did not recognize him.

  Eli didn’t know if he had the patience to remind her, let alone the language to bring her back. At least they both spoke snark rather fluently.

  “You think you can threaten me with that?” Eli deflected, grinning, though he was really testing the limits here. “Look at the scar on my forehead. Whose handiwork do you think that is?”

  Her sharp stare flicked to where he’d indicated. He hated to admit that having her not look him directly in the eye, even for a second, was a great relief. The flame got closer as she surveyed his face, pushing his hair out of the way and pressing her thumb into the knotted blemish.

  “Easy!” he snapped. Her hands were rough, warm. His chest tensed.

  The flame lowered — so did her hand. “We are enemies, then.”

  Eli ran his tongue over his teeth, picking the words carefully. “At the start we were. That was my fault.” She leaned back on her haunches, listening; sweat gathered on his jaw. “But you and I, we’ve been through some . . . things. World-altering things. Things that made us allies.” He wanted to say friends but felt that’d be pushing it. There was nothing friendly about this Roan.

  For a second, her face lost some of its tight suspicion, and the words rushed out of him: “We fought together. We came to this world together. You’ve forgotten, but I can make you remember. All of it. If you let me.”

  Roan stood slowly. She came around to Eli’s right side, hands on her hips. She sighed, and he felt foolish with hope.

  She kicked him over onto his stupid face.

  “If I don’t remember you,” she said, almost bored, “it’s likely because I chose not to.”

  Eli felt the rope across his chest tighten, squeezing the argument out of him. She had gripped his bonds from behind. “I’ll admit there’s something familiar about you. A bad taste in my mouth, you could say.” Suddenly Eli was being dragged backward, on his side across the ground. He struggled but got nowhere. “You talk of things long past, but how can that be? I’ve always been here. There was no before the Deadlands for me. As for you, well. You’re an interloper. I watched you fall from the sky myself. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just another beast to be gutted, though you’re more talkative than the others before you.”

  “Wait,” Eli huffed. “Wait, stop —”

  She dropped him back onto his stomach. He jerked as his bare feet touched fire over an empty ledge.

  Then Eli was hauled upward and above the smoking firepit Roan had nearly dumped him into. He lurched to a stop, twisting as he spun slowly like a rotisserie chicken over a bonfire while Roan tied the line off at a spike of rock in the wall. The harness around his trunk dug through his sweater, cutting into flesh where she’d sliced the wool away, back at the bog. He could barely breathe.

  “Now,” she went on, businesslike and dusting off her hands smartly. “Talkative works to my benefit. Information has its rewards. Shades are chatty, too, but when they’ve become corrupted, they become Bloodbeasts, so you can see my predicament. Are you either of the two? Are you both? Are you something new entirely come to rip my throat out? I’m very torn.”

  Eli tried to swallow, dragging air through his nose as he stared down into the deep, flaming hole less than three feet below him. The cuffs of his pants singed. His flesh would blacken before the ropes would.

  “Pretty speech. I can’t see you being torn about this, though, no.” His throat was dry, strained as a hanged man. “You’re enjoying this. I don’t blame you.”

  Roan smiled, lifting her shoulders in an airy shrug. “I could have killed you while you slept. But you’re right. Where’s the fun in that?”

  Eli didn’t have the breath to snipe further, icy dread creeping. Roan may not remember him, but she certainly sounded like him, the Eli who would have done the same thing to her were the tables turned, once upon a time.

  “You’re still you,” he hazarded. “You won’t kill me. You can’t. You’re not like this.”

  She flicked invisible dirt from her shoulder, ignoring him. “Killing you wouldn’t help either of us, you’re right. But when a beast is desperate enough, that’s when you learn the most about them.”

  Her finger pointed above him like a gun. The floating flames near the line suspending him moved nearer to the rope.

  His face whipped to hers. “I was good and desperate before you planned to roast me,” he shouted.

  “Desperation is survival, demon. And at least with desperation comes the truth. That’s all I’m after.”

  Eli’s face contorted. “I’ve already told you the truth!” he said, voice cracking. “I came here for you! To save you! I can see what a bloody mistake that was.”

  “Save me from what?” she asked almost sweetly. Eli cranked his head to watch the line above coming apart strand by strand. “How can you save me if you can’t save yourself?”

  “Let him burn,” came another voice from the dark. Eli tensed, looking beyond Roan to the white pinpricks he’d seen earlier. Not more floating flames in that hollow black — eyes, advancing. White-coin eyes in Fox-shade heads, at least ten of them coming into the light.

  “Whatever he is,” said another shade, thrusting its snout towards him, “he will try to tear you down with his intentions.”

  Oh good, a peanut gallery. He’d had his fair share of brushes with Owl shades, and Roan, like Demelza, seemed aligned with them.

  Eli’s eyes stung suddenly, which surprised him more than Roan. “You’re going to make me beg, aren’t you?” He grimaced, jerking his head at the shades. “The dead have nothing to lose. Burn me, and you lose everything.”

  The shades yipped. “Demon,” they hissed, “enemy.”

  Eli stared steadily at Roan, only at Roan, the fire dancing wickedly over her impassive face. Would she listen to him over the souls clinging to her heels?

  He hadn’t wanted to do this, but it was the only tactic he had left.

  Please, Eli sent the thought out at her like an offering, penitent. He saw her eyes widen, and he reached further. Please, Roan.

  The images flooded out of him and over her — Winnipeg. The two of them locked together as they plummeted through the Pool of the Black Star. The Golden Boy in a deluge. The pressure of his arm around her over a wide open sea. A golden tether, tighter than the one she’d bound him with now, pulling her free from poison darkness. Remember me, he repeated into her head with all the desperation she demanded of him. Remember yourself.

  Eli felt all the force of her rage as she shoved him out of her mind, heard the furious roar from her mouth as she launched a volley of flame at him. The line above him snapped, and his heart lurched as the pit raced up to meet him.

  As he exhaled, the wind rose.

  The torrent of air pushed out of Eli’s lungs and leapt into his crushed hands, then burst outward again like cannon shot, slicing the lines holding him, and throwing him into the nearest wall.

  He crumpled, groaned.

  Hands were clenched into his sweater, hauling him over and holding him up. The hands were shaking.

  “What did you just do to me?” Roan snarled into his face.

  “You wanted the truth,” he croaked. “I tried to . . . show you.”

  “You put things in my head! Against my will!” She shook him as if trying to keep him from blacking out. “I should kill you now!”

  He put a weak hand to the centre of her chest and she went still. “Do what you want,” he said, “just kindly stop rattling me around.”

  She breathed unevenly under his palm, like an animal in a trap. He let his hand drop. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know doing that . . . always creeped you out. But I didn’t put anything in your mind. I just showed you my own memories. ”He winced. “Yours are deeply buri
ed. Locked away.” By what, he couldn’t guess. An outside force, or something she’d done to herself?

  Roan’s face struggled between rage and confusion. He expected her to roast him there and then, but instead she loosened her grip, let go.

  Her mouth was a hard line. “It took you long enough to free yourself,” she said.

  Eli stiffly rubbed his wrists. “So that was a test, then? To see what I could do?”

  She shrugged. “As I expected, you can’t do much. I don’t know how much use you’ll be to me, after all.”

  Use?

  Strange air whuffed through the back of Eli’s head, and he caught sight of a Fox shade’s pinprick eyes hovering over him. “You would’ve been better off to burn him, lady,” the shade advised. “This one will trouble you until the end with its hollow talk.”

  Eli jerked up and the shade danced away into a cluster of the others that stood by the cavern entrance. He thought he saw the tall, floppy ears of a Rabbit amongst them, but it shimmered away into the night before he could get a closer look.

  Eli coughed awkwardly. “You going to give me back my personal space, Harken?”

  She blinked then stood, slapping the dust off herself. “I’m not going to kill you, but I don’t trust you.” She moved away, as if she’d made up her mind. “You can’t stay here.”

  Dumbstruck, Eli watched as the bulbous flames in the air around Roan made contact with her body, sliding back into her and leaving Eli in the advancing dark like an afterthought.

  “You’re kicking me out?” he said. “You beat me within an inch of my life then toss me to the metaphysical curb?”

  She was quiet for a while, looking past Eli and at the shades fidgeting behind him. With a jerk of her head, they bounded out of the cavern, their fox-yips sounding like taunting laughter in the echoing night.

  Roan squinted at Eli. “Where did you come from? When you fell.”

  The only light left in the cavern was the blazing pit between them. Eli pointed upward. “The Roost. What’s left of it, anyway. Before that, somewhere in the Atlantic.” He stretched his legs out in front of him. “We came here intentionally, together. But things haven’t exactly been going to plan since we were separated.”

  “What plan? Came through where?” Her flames licked upward, and for a second it looked like they wound through her hair like a child’s fingers.

  Eli just groaned, shaking his head. “Somewhere that gets farther away the more we bicker about it. I told you. I can show you everything and we can be on our way to —”

  “Enough,” she snapped. Her hand was around her own throat. “I’m not going anywhere. Least of all with you. You can rest here, and in the morning you’ll go. To where, I can’t say I care. You’re nothing to me.”

  Eli was, for the first time in a long time, speechless. Roan had always been a pigheaded, stubborn brat, but going further with her like this was obviously dangerous. Part of his power had been restored to him, but it wouldn’t be near enough. If she came at him again, that’d be it.

  He tilted his head in momentary submission, then looked back up. “You said you were expecting to get some use out of me. May I ask what for?”

  She stopped mid-turn. “You may, but don’t expect me to supply the answer.”

  She’d needed him for something. Eli clung to the opportunity. “Why don’t we make a deal, then? You’re a Fox, yes? Foxes love deals, I hear.”

  Her mismatched eyes ranged over him, calculating. Either way, he didn’t have much to lose.

  She walked around the fire pit then, running her hand and arm through it thoughtfully. “What sort of deal?”

  Eli got to his feet, even managed to straighten despite how his back protested. He opened his arms. “I show you how useful I can be. You allow me that one chance, and if I don’t prove worthy to you, then I walk out of this hole and the considerably busy life of ne’er-do-welling you’ve got going here.”

  She didn’t look at him. A gob of fire bounced between her hands in lazy arcs.

  “Roan Harken.” She spoke the name mockingly, as if he’d made it up to insult her. “What kind of a name is that, anyway?”

  Eli was out of gambits. “The name of my friend.”

  The flame disappeared and one hand went to Roan’s side, brushing over the sword hilt.

  He swallowed. “Perhaps you could use a friend, too, but I won’t presume. Since we’re starting from scratch again. It was hard enough the first time.”

  “Hard for who?”

  Eli realized he’d been clutching the edge of his sweater in his hands. He wiped the moisture from them, jaw relaxing. “I’ll let you guess.”

  The one hand left the hilt. The other stretched out towards him.

  “One night and one chance,” she said. “Then you’re gone.”

  He hesitated, wondering if he’d be burned for his own trust, but he clasped her hand in his. Her skin was still somehow cool — everything about her was control. No more girl burning up from the inside with unchecked power and unflagging uncertainty. He was hers to destroy if she decided.

  She pulled away half a second after contact, whirled, and stalked to her dark cavern corner.

  “I’m Eli, in case you were wondering,” he called after her dumbly.

  “I wasn’t,” she said, crouching and watching him unblinkingly.

  Eli scoffed, then shook his head. “You’d find this all funny if you were in your right mind, Harken.” He pushed his fingers into his eyes, muttering, “You’d find it funnier because you never were.”

  She continued staring. Evidentially, she wasn’t going to shut her eyes until he did.

  Eli returned to his own designated rock wall. The fire in the pit went down like a curtain but didn’t extinguish all the way. He didn’t relish lying down on the hard floor, but it was better than staying upright for any longer. Growing heavier with each breath, he splayed out like a star, shut his eyes, then placed a hand over his chest, where he had every night, reassured and haunted by the Moonstone.

  “Friend,” Roan muttered suddenly, hand to her chest, rubbing absently. When she caught him looking, she frowned, so he rolled away, facing the wall.

  It took hours before Eli fell asleep, his heartbeat finally slowing beneath his hand.

  * * *

  “So what did Roan need Eli for?”

  It was the next day — if days could be called that here — and Saskia had laid awake all night in Baskar’s tree, replaying this information. She wanted more of the story. She knew it was the key to bringing Roan and Eli back and helping them do what they’d come here for.

  Baskar had met Saskia outside of the open bole, dipping their characteristically tilted head at her as she climbed awkwardly out.

  “Good day to you, too,” Baskar sniffed, avoiding the question with one of their own. “What have you got there?”

  Under Saskia’s arm was the tablet — she’d been testing the Onyx’s receiver to see if she could get any messages through. Still nothing. “Before I came here, I received a message from . . . someone else who came through. You wouldn’t happen to know Barton Allen, would you?”

  She’d waited till now to ask, especially knowing what little she’d discovered about this mysterious Heartwood tree she had yet to investigate.

  Baskar shrugged. The odds and bobs of their shell reminded her of all the things she used to collect on walks as a child, disparate bits completely at home when put together. “I know no one else living but Roan and Eli. And you. Saskia.” They spoke her name carefully, tipping their lopsided, lopeared head down at her. “You are very interested in Roan and Eli,” they continued. They couldn’t exactly frown, but it came across in their high voice. “They’re enemies, if you did not already gather that.”

  She clicked her tongue, and they walked together around Cinder Town’s epicentre. “Uh huh. But I think
they can become allies again.”

  “But they were enemies before even that,” Baskar recounted with the air of the lecturer, as it had been yesterday. “So you see, it is inevitable that the story repeats itself.”

  Saskia shook her head. “If they break the cycle, they can accomplish their original goal of —”

  “Shh!” Baskar pressed a twiggy finger to where their mouth would be beneath the mask. They passed by a few Hounds, who had their heads pointed towards them, semi-sneering with their burning eyes.

  “I have only just returned to my mistress’s good graces,” Baskar reminded her. “Keep your machinations to yourself, thank you.”

  Saskia was agog. Baskar really didn’t want to talk about Ancient. Already a bad sign. “If you didn’t want to help me, why bother telling me any of this at all?” She prodded Baskar’s side, but they only peered over at her. “You love stories. Theirs is central to this entire world. And if I’m going to know the General’s enemy, then . . . I need to know it all.”

  Now she was taking a page out of Chancellor Grant and the ETG’s playbook. Study them so you can conquer them. Or get them back in their right minds. That Saskia had to do this at all was unfair, to say the least. She’d already done the work to get down here. Surely they could stop moving the goal posts.

  “A story for a story,” the archivist intoned. Saskia wondered what Baskar had been like in life; if they’d been this insufferable, for instance. “Tell me a story of you now. Who is Barton Allen?”

  Saskia was keenly aware that the Rabbit getting close to her was probably Roan’s ploy. To make Saskia one of her Hounds and make the Onyx her own. But she wanted to trust Baskar.

  Saskia looked around, then yanked Baskar into an alcove. They clattered but didn’t come apart, pressed shoulder to shoulder with Saskia as she booted up the tablet and tapped away.

  She swiped. “I like to build things.” A few photos were all she’d had at hand to show Baskar, but they leaned in eagerly to look. “I initially got into this mess because of this.”