by India Arden
The other guys couldn’t spare any attention for him, though. Man-Bun’s dark hair fell from its clip and cascaded down his back as the Arcanum concentrated something in his essence and rendered him more potently himself. He tore open his flowy silk shirt so abruptly, buttons went flying. Emblazoned on his middle was the sigil I’d so recently seen on Flood. He looked down at it in wonder and declared, “Rain! How cool is that? Rain!”
Who knows if Goth Boy’s skin ever saw the light. When he rucked up his black T-shirt and exposed a lean swimmer’s build, his skin glowed ivory beneath it. On that smooth, pale chest, the square spiral sigil for Earth had appeared. Though he was just as full of wonder as his compatriots, he simply gave a tiny laugh of disbelief, and chuffed out the word, “Sterling.”
Transfigurations were never a sure thing. Some people just couldn’t handle the Arcanum. As for Edward? “Don’t you dare fail,” I begged the monitor. But my fear was unfounded—his Transfiguration was already underway.
When he finished his eerie train-whistle of an inhalation, he closed his eyes and rode the change, solemnly, like he did all things he deemed important. This guy? He found importance in everything, and if it wasn’t there already, he imbued it from his limitless store. He trembled, his cheeks flushed, and in a powerful show of welcome, he spread his arms wide as his tank top crumbled to ash. On his chest was the diamond-upon-diamond symbol I’d grown up with all around me: the sigil of Fire.
Tendrils of smoke rose from his body as the last remains of his shirt were consumed. He took a deep, cleansing breath, and announced, “There’s no turning back now. Everything I’ve done in my life has led up to this point. From here on out, my name is Ember.”
15
If we were back at the compound, I would know what to expect next. A day filled with handshakes and back slapping. Hundreds of visitors jockeying for position. Fake congratulations and even faker smiles. All the pomp and glory you could stomach, and then some.
Not here. Just four guys—four!—sharing an experience.
Maybe that was the way of the Rebels. Doing what they could to stay out of the spotlight, hoping the spotlight didn’t find them anyway.
The Arcane Masters’ Transfiguration ceremony was so fresh in my mind, I was puzzled by what happened next. The guys formed a circle and held out their hands. I took it for some kind of Rebel high five, but when the sigils lit up, I realized the Arcanum was involved. Palm to palm, they pressed their hands together, and the sigils glowed brighter. Zephyr said, “Omigod—guys—It’s happening. Everyone focus. Everyone try.”
“We got this,” Rain assured him.
Their faces scrunched in concentration, and the sigils glowed steadily. The glow peaked, and then began to ebb. There was a collective gasp as they released the breath they’d been holding, and they dropped hands.
Confused, Zephyr said, “Did it happen? I felt something happen.”
Rain shook his head. “That can’t be all. Yeah, there was a connection, but I don’t think it was a Bonding.”
Hold on…what on earth was a Bonding?
Sterling said, “Maybe there needs to be a point for us to Bond. Like we started a car, but without a destination in mind, all that we accomplished was idling in place.”
Zephyr was talking fast. “Fine—we need a destination? We need a goal? I’m all for it—but we have zero clue what the Bonding can accomplish.”
He looked to Ember, who was the only Rebel who hadn’t weighed in. Ember gestured toward the door and said, “Maybe we haven’t cracked the code of the Bonding. But now we’ve got inside information at our disposal.”
“Off to the pallet jack,” Rain announced.
“Leave the ridiculous pallet jack,” Sterling said. “I’ll go get her.”
He strode out of my line of sight, and I started switching cameras to try and track him and get some idea of how their headquarters were set up and see what connected where.
“Should we have told him not to mention the Transfiguration?” Zephyr asked.
Ember shook his head. “We owe her the truth. She risked her life—maybe not to give the Arcanum specifically to us, but to get it away from her brother. And that’s worth something.” I felt a grudging admiration toward him begin to form, but then he ruined it all by adding, “Besides, as long as we keep her quiet, she doesn’t pose much of a threat.”
Annoyed, I slapped a row of toggle-switches to their opposite position. I caught a glimpse of Sterling cruising down a hallway on his bike, but he was in and out of camera range in less than a second. But a new bank of cameras wasn’t the only thing I’d activated.
At my elbow, a phone rang. I grabbed the handset and said, “Hello?” But on the other end was nothing more than the squeal of transmitting data as a fax machine the phone was mounted on chugged to life. Thermal paper spooled from the front of the machine in a glossy curl. It dropped to the floor atop a pile of old junk faxes filled with timeshare ads and pre-digital spam. I might’ve figured the current ad was more of the same, if there hadn’t been a shot from one of the compound’s security cams on the page. If it weren’t for me being in the picture.
I didn’t remember Ember and me holding hands.
Apparently, we had.
It looked more like he was dragging me along like a water skier than taking me on a romp through the garden. But still. It’s amazing how the situation shifts when you see it from outside yourself.
I checked the top of the fax to see where it had originated: Corona PD. The automated systems in place between the police and this security station were never dismantled when Lerman’s shut down. I scanned the APB.
Reports indicate that a known Rebel entered the Arcane Masters estate in an attempt to disrupt the Transfiguration ceremony. The subject killed Master Fathom and abducted a member of the household. During the law enforcement response, the subject fled and remains at large. Ransom demands have not yet been made.
Bad enough Blaze would get away with what he’d done to Fathom…but pinning it on Ember? I didn’t think I could hate him even more than I already did. He never ceased to amaze me.
The subject is considered armed and dangerous. If encountered, do not directly engage. The Arcane Masters are offering a reward of $25,000 for tips leading to a successful arrest and the kidnapping victim’s return.
There was a gentle tap on the door. I wanted to wad up the paper in frustration, but I quelled the impulse. The Rebels needed to know what they were up against. I wheeled myself over on the office chair as Sterling let himself in. “How are you?” he asked.
Everything that was going on…and he was worried about me? I blinked back tears that had no business being there. I’d allowed myself a good cry in the shower, and that was that. “What difference does it make?”
“Aurora,” he said, so serious it sent a chill of gooseflesh rippling down my bare forearms. “I’ve had the Arcanum. I’ve Transfigured to Earth.”
“Oh,” I said noncommittally.
“And I think I can close the wounds on your foot.”
“Wait—what?”
Grove, the current Earth Master I’d grown up around, was a strange, quiet man who spent his days in his private courtyard garden. I’d never seen the plot myself, but according to the whispers of the staff, he was obsessed with bending nature to his will. Flowers the size of Volkswagens, trees that could fit in the palm of your hand. Anything he could do to warp things into something they’d never meant to be.
But the last time I checked, I was no plant. “That’s not how it works.”
“Shh.” He placed a finger to his lips. Glitter sparkled in his chipped black nail polish. “No spoilers. If you tell me what I can or can’t do, it’ll take all the fun of figuring it out on my own.”
He folded to his knees in front of my rolling chair and eased my bandaged foot onto his lap. The light of the security station wasn’t exactly flattering. His messy black hair had brownish roots and the telltale sheen of hairspray, and his dark lashes
were smudged with three-day-old eyeliner. I’ve never been into a man who wears more makeup than me, I reminded myself. So, the sight of him on his knees was definitely not hot.
Sure, Aurora, you keep telling yourself that.
As he drew my foot onto his lap, the ugly fluorescent overhead light caught a silvery pendant that dangled over my instep. Nickel wire wrapped around a chrome ring in the shape of a lopsided pentagram…or maybe it was supposed to be an anarchy symbol. Nothing you’d see at the estate, very high-school-art-project. Chintzy—but fitting. Sterling wore his ragged black finery like it was ermine and gold.
No one but a doctor had ever really touched my leg before. I fantasized about Sterling running his fingers up my calf. He didn’t, though. Just cradled my bandaged foot in his lap. What a disappointment…er, relief.
He closed his eyes and pressed the fingertips of one hand to the floor. “This would be so much easier if we were outside.”
“Listen,” I said impatiently. “Everyone’ll be looking for you guys.”
“Maybe so, but this is important. I need to learn my boundaries.” His eyebrows drew together as he focused. I may have used the opportunity to check out his features. He had really long eyelashes. They’d be feminine even without the eyeliner. “It’s so easy to get lost in the Arcane. The Transfiguration lit up something in my head, and now it feels like solid matter is a sham, and I’m more aware of the spaces between particles.”
The guy who’s on my side sees atoms, while my psychotic brother’s throwing fireballs. Great.
He pressed his fingers harder into the linoleum. “It would be so easy to get lost in there. Like a mandala of winding passageways. Like a gorgeous spiderweb sparkling with dewdrops. Like a whirling dance with no beginning and no end.”
More like a guy who’d been to one too many raves. But even as I bit back the urge to tell him to hurry, I recognized that old familiar tug that heralded the presence of magic, that non-physical barometric shift of pressure that accompanied the engagement of the Arcane. It felt nothing like the power that crackled around my brother, though. It felt deeper, somehow. Older. The difference between a campfire and a mountain.
Sterling summoned the Arcana…and then he directed the power into me.
Sensation flooded through my foot, but I had no name for it. Hot, cold, pleasure, pain, all the normal feelings I had names for were mere shadows compared to the bright-hot surge of Arcane energy that pulsed through me. It was over too soon, just a taste that left me longing for more, but staggered with wonder from the glimpse I’d had of those mystical tendrils he’d described, the bonds that connected everything to everything else, and him to me.
He threw his head back and gasped, not the creepy train-whistle inhalation of a Transfiguration, just an expression of wonder—one that I echoed. I’d studied the Arcana my whole life, and never had I imagined it could be flowed into another human being. “You felt that?” he asked breathlessly.
“I did.”
Eagerly, he plucked off the gauze. “Sweet.” He smoothed his fingertips down the sole of my foot—and normally that would be too ticklish to bear—but an aftershock of the power we’d shared thrummed through us, and instead, I just felt the delicious echoes of our connection. How hot would it be if he tipped forward and mouthed my toes…?
He looked up, met my eyes, and declared, “Flesh is an illusion, just like everything else. We’re nothing more than lumps of clay.”
I sighed. I was such an idiot for letting my imagination run away with me. I’d been thinking about him touching me—he’d been thinking about dirt.
“We have to show the others,” he said, and offered me a hand up from the office chair. I took it—it was either that or shove him out of the way—but the spark between us had ebbed to a normal, human touch. I grabbed the fax printouts and joined him in the hallway, where he mounted the bike, then patted the bar in front of him. “All aboard.”
“You’re mocking me.”
“Not at all.”
I tested my weight on my foot. “I can walk.” I glanced down at my arms. The bruising had faded to yellow, and my scorched palms no longer stung.
“It’s a pretty long way—and, not to call my own abilities into question, but those scars are still fresh. I’d give them some time to settle before I ran any marathons. Come on,” he patted the bar again. “It’ll be our secret.”
It was a long way. We’d navigated several excruciating stretches of hallway on the pallet jack. Without a word, I heaved myself up on to the bar side-saddle and did my best not to construe anything from the way he wrapped his arms around me. He had to do it if he wanted to reach the handlebars. That was all.
Still, I was lightheaded from the scent of patchouli—of Sterling—that I couldn’t make sense of the route we’d taken. Just that it really was a lot faster to travel by bike than by pallet jack.
True to his word, Sterling let me off in the hallway and left his bike leaning there against the wall. When he opened the door, I realized why I’d been turned around. And it wasn’t that I’d been distracted by the patchouli. He’d brought me to the break room I’d seen in the monitor, the one where the Rebels had all Transfigured.
The first thing that hit me was the color. I’d only seen the Lerman’s breakroom in black and white, and I hadn’t been prepared for the unappetizing yellow walls and the dated blue tile backsplash. The second was the hubbub around the sink. “If we don’t run the disposal,” Zephyr was saying, “it’s gonna stink. You remember last time we ran out—it smelled like a freakin’ corpse in here for weeks.”
“I just don’t get it,” Rain said. “I checked the reservoir a couple of days ago and we had easily enough water to get us through to the next rainfall. Easily.”
Zephyr shook his head in exasperation. “We can’t use our drinking water—there’s five of us here now, not four. If we run out of that, we’re screwed.”
“Maybe there’s a blockage in the pipes,” Rain said. “Because a day’s worth of water can’t just…disappear.” The two of them stopped debating over the garbage disposal, and together, looked at me.
“How long of a shower did you take?” Zephyr asked carefully.
“What difference does that make?”
Rain groaned. “I made a whole point of letting you know our water wasn’t on the city grid.”
“And I was supposed to deduce you were running low? What do I look like, a plumber?” Tough words, but I could feel my cheeks blazing. Because he had told me. I’d just been too busy feeling sorry for myself to give any thought to what it meant. In an effort to change the subject, I said, “You’ve got bigger problems than your garbage disposal. Take a look at this.”
The paper did its best to curl up, but I smoothed the fax onto the break room table and weighted it down with coffee mugs. All four guys bent over the alert and read.
“The fax machine is working now?” Zephyr said lightly, in an attempt to cut the tension. “Wow. That’s some photo.”
Ember shook his head. “These accusations should come as no surprise. It’s what the Arcane Masters do, commit atrocities and point the finger at someone else.” He looked up at me, eyes blazing. Literally. The irises glowed now, like sun shining through amber. “Do you see how they operate?”
“You have to admit, it does look like you’re abducting me—you had an actual conversation about putting a bag over my head.”
Sterling piped in, “If you’re really fixated on that, we can still do it. There’s plenty of bags around here to choose from.”
Hard to say if he was actually kidding. I ignored him. “And you can’t judge everyone by the actions of my brother. He’s skated through his whole life doing whatever he wants with zero repercussions. Of course he blamed Fathom’s death on you. You made yourself the perfect scapegoat by breaking in to the estate. And now that you’re Transfigured, it gives you plenty of motive.”
Sterling placed a black-nailed hand over the fax, and said to me, “How do you kno
w that?”
“The Transfiguration? You…told me.”
“I told you I Transfigured. Just me.”
Damn it, I was usually a better liar. Had a few hours with the aggressively sincere Rebels eroded the skills I’d been fortifying my entire life? “I must have just assumed, then. The decanter was heavy.”
Zephyr glanced up at a security camera in the corner of the ceiling. “Wouldja look at that? The little red dot says hello. We’re on tape.”
There was no denying it, then. “Look,” I said, “I’m part of this whole mess. Whether you like it or not.”
Ember grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me around to face him. He was intense before his Transfiguration. Now, his gaze practically scorched a hole right through me. “I’ve tried to protect you from the worst of the fallout and make sure you had plausible deniability.”
“I never asked for your protection,” I snapped.
“You shouldn’t have to ask. I saw your own brother try to burn you alive.”
“I don’t care about my brother. I serve the Arcanum.”
“I wish I could believe you,” Ember said, “but there’s too much at stake here for you to be anything less than a hundred percent.”
That stung. “I’m telling you, I’m not with Blaze—how else can I say it to make you understand?”
“Actually…” Rain cut in smoothly as he eased me out of Ember’s grasp with a sinuous grace, like he’d stolen me off the dance floor and left my partner waltzing alone. “Not to jump to any conclusions, but I got a different vibe off Aurora when she was being, ah, less than truthful.”
“A psychic vibe?” Zephyr asked. Not mockingly, either. Not like one of my brother’s cronies would have.
Rain gave an easy shrug. “Tension? Emotion? Hard to put into words—honestly, vibe is the best way I can express it—but when she said she wasn’t in here spying for her brother, I believed her.”
