The Burning World

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  “Mom?”

  Dunn pointed at the sky. “History will call it the Incursion.”

  The reporter turned to her cameraman. “Please tell me you got that.” Then she pointed her mic toward Dunn. “What can you tell us about what’s happening?”

  Dunn swiped to grab Daisy again, but Rysa was faster. “It’s me, okay? Me.” No matter how hot she felt, or how her throat threatened to constrict again, it had to be her.

  Dunn stumbled backward. “Maybe you can do what the Whispering One wants. Maybe you can’t.”

  She looked up at the arch of color over the mountains. “If it’s you, then you won’t be here for the briefings,” she muttered. Then she shook as if someone had jolted her spine. “If it’s Daisy, then…”

  She trailed off, and frowned again.

  Daisy scooped the shards one by one off the ground and pushed them back into the bag. “What do I need to do, Mom?”

  Rysa reached to yank the bag from Daisy’s hand, but stumbled and dropped to her knees next to her friend.

  They knelt next to the shards of Rysa’s grandfather’s talisman, the bits and pieces of an impossible blade shattered by a mountain. Rysa and Daisy, a double-active, over-active Fate-Shifter and the First Alchemist.

  All either of them wanted was to finish school and to immerse themselves in their work; Rysa in documenting, mapping, and studying the ecosystem of the cave, and Daisy in starting her veterinary practice. They both wanted families. They wanted to move into the what-will-be in a way that did well by them and by the world, in a balance that would take them into their long immortal lives without destroying their souls, or anyone else’s.

  It was supposed to be good, the future. Rysa had the support she needed with Ladon and Dragon. Daisy had Gavin and her Shifter family.

  It should have been good.

  Rysa looked up at the sky.

  The last shard—the same one that had been encased in the glass, the one given to Dmitri and which he had delivered to Trajan and Hadrian—gleamed extra bright, as if fire danced in its soul.

  Daisy touched it gently, but recoiled.

  “Fate has abandoned us,” Dunn said. “Why can’t we abandon fate?” She pushed at the air as if pushing away someone invisible.

  Not a dragon, Rysa’s present-seer whispered. Dunn argued with the Whispering One.

  “I don’t care,” Dunn growled. “Figure it out.”

  She walked to the reporter and swiped her phone from her hand.

  “Hey!” the reporter yelled.

  Dunn glanced down at the screen. “You want to know what I know?”

  Rysa tried to cough. She tried to use her healer to fight the pain in her chest. Her overactive abilities had begun to compensate for Andreas’s healing enthralling.

  Ladon dropped to his knees on the other side of Rysa.

  “What if my calling scents ramp up again?” How the hell was she supposed to help if no one would be able to be within thirty-five feet of her?

  “Your enthralling ability no longer functions,” Dunn said.

  A targeted, intense brew hit Rysa full in the face.

  “I will kill you, Dunn,” Ladon growled. His neck muscles tensed, as did his back, and all the calm she’d found for him, all the improvements to his soul, evaporated in front of her eyes.

  Ladon-Human, a god of war, manifested. “I will shred your bones,” he said from deep in his chest.

  Daisy’s eyes rounded. She looked up at her mother. “I’ll do it, okay? I’ll do it. Leave Rysa and Ladon alone!”

  Ladon… you can’t… she pushed. Dragon might hear her. Dragon might stop this. Ladon couldn’t be this man again. This wasn’t him. Not anymore. Not…

  Dunn tossed the phone into the air.

  It exploded, but not in an explosive way. It disassembled. Each piece, each part, floated in the air as if she was drawing a schematic of its parts.

  The reporter gasped. “How is she doing that?”

  Ladon stood. “If my wife dies, I will rip this city down to its foundations.”

  The reporter and the camera guy backed away. Andreas put his hand on Ladon’s shoulder. “Brother…”

  “Let. Go.”

  The arches in the sky flashed back to red, yellow, and blue.

  Andreas stepped in front of Ladon. “Brother-Dragon!” he yelled. “We need your help!”

  “Brother-Dragon?” the reporter looked around. “Is that some secret ops term?”

  Andreas pointed at the reporter. “Be quiet.”

  “But…”

  “Observe and learn,” said Dunn. The enthralling curled out from her mouth and made a beeline directly into the reporter and the cameraman. It passed by everyone else.

  The cameraman backed toward the fence but he kept the camera up.

  The shards of Janus’s talisman lifted from Dunn’s bag into the air one by one and formed a black, shimmering sphere around the phone’s parts. Their speed picked up, and soon the entire structure—phone bits and shards—looked like a spinning, whirring gray ball suspended three feet off the ground.

  Dunn held out her hand and the surface of the ball changed into the projection of the Earth’s surface: No clouds. Green and brown land masses. Blue oceans. Cities marked. Borders delineated.

  The sphere rotated so that Cheyenne pointed toward the reporter and the camera.

  Dunn lifted her hands. The sphere rose up, and the projection brightened.

  “Here be dragons,” she said. The projection zoomed in so it showed the playground.

  “Mom! What are you doing?” Daisy screamed.

  “You have been invisible long enough, Great Sir,” Dunn said. “Great Lady. It’s time.”

  Ladon lunged for Dunn, but she held out a hand. He stopped moving.

  A line of visibility rolled across the dragon snout directly over Rysa’s head. It rolled along his neck, to his chest and the forelimbs he had planted on either side of her burning body. Then it rolled down the plaited bumps on his back, and to the tip of his tail.

  Behind Dunn, Sister-Dragon blinked into visibility, going from not there to a fully, blindingly-visible white light.

  An angelic light. Both dragons shimmered like Heaven above.

  Rysa’s present-seer answered why: Anna knew Dunn would force the dragons into visibility, so they decided to be as beautiful as possible.

  Thank you, Rysa pushed. Thank you, Anna.

  The reporter screamed. The cameraman, to his credit, did not drop his camera.

  “These are the dragons you must protect,” Dunn said. The sphere floating in the air rotated so that Japan faced the reporter. A bright orange dot expanded over Tokyo.

  “Because,” Dunn said, “they are the dragons who will protect you from the ones who have come to do us harm.”

  Rysa looked up at the energy swirling around Dunn and, for a split second, she was sure she saw another woman. A small woman in a Praetorian Guard uniform with scabbards on her back and Poke in her hand.

  Dunn’s face softened. She dropped her hand, but the sphere stayed where it was.

  Another orange dot spread out along the Japanese coast, over Osaka, and another, over Fukuoka.

  Then another, over Seoul, South Korea.

  “Are they destroying Japan?” the reporter screamed. “Korea?” She turned in a circle. “What’s happening?”

  “One of us needs to be on this side,” Dunn said. “One on the other.”

  Daisy looked at Rysa and Ladon and Andreas. Then she extended her hand to her mother.

  Dunn shook her head. “We reset fate today.”

  The shard ball imploded like a Burner. It snapped down to nothing but a distortion in the cold air directly in front of Dunn.

  “Mom…” Daisy said.

  “Remember that I always loved you, Daisy, and you, Andreas. I’ve always loved you too, Ladon and Ladon-Dragon, and Anna and Anna-Dragon. Tell Derek that I am so, so sorry for what I did to him. I didn’t understand the whispers. I didn’t, and I hurt hi
m on top of the hurt he already had in his soul. Remind Daniel about what I said about Addy. And fully heal Marcus for me, please. Harold will be okay.”

  She spread her fingers as if they were angel wings. “Trajan knows the river he must navigate. Do not allow him to flood the banks. Hadrian will be both friend and foe. And Daisy, your father, for all his hardline attitudes and his bluster, is a good man.”

  She turned to Rysa. “Your Burner will be here. He always comes. For all his chaos, he is the one common thread through all the cycles. Tell him the future will remember his songs.”

  Then she turned to Andreas. “Tell my daughter’s young man to keep his family safe.” She lowered her chin. “Tell him he is future-important. His brother, too. Tell him I always had faith that you all would find your way home.”

  Next to Dunn, the woman in the Praetorian Guard uniform raised a midnight dagger as if to strike. Dunn nodded once. The dagger dropped just as Dunn stepped into the point in space, the implosion that was Janus’s talisman, and she vanished.

  “Mom!” Daisy yelled. She slammed her hand down onto the one remaining shard.

  But Dunn, the Progenitor of the Shifters, had decided to ignore fate.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Daisy touched the one remaining shard and the playground changed.

  She and all the equipment were up high, on a plateau. The Dragon’s Rock, but it wasn’t the Rock. It couldn’t be the Rock. It never was the Rock.

  The swings creaked. Lightning flashed. Daisy looked up at the roiling storm overhead.

  Rysa hung chained to the clouds. Phantoms swirled around her, some nipping at her skin, some screaming in her ears.

  “Rysa!” Daisy yelled, but her friend didn’t call back. Her friend couldn’t hear her. “Rysa…” Daisy whispered.

  Did her mother pull her into new-space? Were they all trapped here, on this mirror-version of the Dragon’s Rock with its swing set and slide?

  A drop rolled along Rysa’s arm. It clung to her elbow and jiggled when she screamed. Then it fell onto the ground next to Daisy’s feet.

  The grass squirmed. It wiggled and it hissed and it moved as if it was an animal—and where the drop hit, it burned as if touched by acid.

  The little squirming grass-shade imploded before vanishing into a tiny, explosive puff.

  Daisy looked up at her friend again. Rysa shed Burner acid.

  “Do you remember, at the base, when Hadrian said that we’re all seeing different viewpoints into new-space? That we’re getting fractured information and that none of us could see the whole picture?”

  Daisy yelped. Her mother stood right next to her, so close they touched elbows, except her mother had not been there a moment ago.

  “You are not here with me, daughter,” Dunn said. She adjusted the strap of her black attaché bag, which, somehow, had come over with her. “My transfer caused enough of an energy burst that the shard can now, for the moment, act as a communication conduit. If you had come across, you would be talking to me right now from where I stand.”

  Her mother inhaled. “Do you remember what Hadrian said about how many of us have fractured information? It’s like that old parable of the blind men and the elephant.”

  Daisy nodded.

  Dunn pointed at Rysa up in the clouds. “In new-space, that elephant is too big for us to talk to each other around it. Its trunk is in new-space New York and its tail is in new-space Los Angeles, and we are not physically close enough to share information.”

  The Rysa in the clouds shouted again. “So Rysa up there is in New York and you and I are in Los Angeles?” Daisy asked. “How does that work?”

  “It has to do with new-space physics,” said the other woman, the small woman in a Praetorian Guard uniform, who had manifested directly off Daisy’s other elbow.

  This time she didn’t yelp. “You’re the Whispering One.”

  The new woman extended her hand. “Maria Romanova,” she said. “I am the Ghost Progenitor.”

  She wore two of the Dracae’s fingered scabbards on her back but only one sword, and a dagger belt that held her version of the two daggers, George and Ringo. Daisy sort-of shook her hand. She felt no contact, but Maria responded as if they touched.

  “New-space is built out of one of the physical dimensions we are used to, plus two other dimensions not utilized by the higher-order physics.” Maria nodded toward Rysa. “Plus a second time dimension.”

  Extra physical dimensions? She’d read something about theories suggesting the universe might have eleven dimensions and not just four. New-space used two of those normally-unused physical dimensions? Plus another type of time?

  “How can there be another type of time?” Extra dimensions made little sense, but extra time made even less.

  Maria looked up at Daisy with her silver-ice Progenitor eyes. “There are people who are going to figure this out very quickly after the Incursion closes. Humans are smart that way.”

  Daisy nodded. She had to believe that someone would figure this out. Someone had to. Otherwise, there would be no new-space in which to build the cage that would stop the Incursion.

  Was the Rysa in the clouds experiencing a different flow of time? Was fractured time another reason for the gaps in their information? “Why am I seeing Rysa up there in the clouds?”

  Her mother and Maria Romanova looked at each other. “We don’t know,” Maria said. “We’re in new fate-territory here.”

  Something pulled on Daisy’s gut. She felt yanked in a direction she didn’t understand.

  “We’re going to lose you in a moment,” Maria said. “Listen closely. The cage needs to be built across all five physical dimensions.”

  The Whispering One pressed her lips against Daisy’s ear and whispered her instructions. They swirled around Daisy like an enthralling—a very specific, very targeted enthralling that Daisy’s body was supposed to understand.

  But she hadn’t yet finished activating. Her body still slipped and slid, still rolled and pitched. She hadn’t yet righted her path into the future.

  If she didn’t find the correct path, she’d lose the baby. She’d lose the entire world.

  Another acid drop rolled off Rysa’s arm and hit the slithering shade-grass under their feet. Another little implosion-explosion popped like a sparkler next to her toes.

  The pulling feeling happened again, as if she slid in a direction that wasn’t real.

  “Do you understand, Daisy?” her mother asked. “Terry knew going in that this was his destiny. A Burner explosion fires across all five physical dimensions. Get his implosion into the eye of the Incursion and his death will be enough to shut it down.”

  Maria’s instructions churned around Daisy, and yet the acid dropping from the phantom Rysa in the clouds meant something, too. Something she was supposed to understand as well.

  A man appeared directly in front of her. He flickered like a jump-cut movie ghost, like someone had run him through an image processing program. He wore Victorian clothing, trousers that buttoned, and a hand-stitched leather jacket over a tied shirt.

  He looked a lot like Marcus.

  “You’re Timothy Drake,” she said. She was seeing Daniel and Marcus’s dead brother.

  “Aim,” he said.

  Daisy glanced at Maria first, then her mother. Neither of the other two women noticed Timothy. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  He opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “Pitch. Roll. Yaw. Slide. Push,” he said. “Cadence. The Ambusti Prime will guide the Draki.”

  “What?”

  “Daisy?” Maria Romanova touched her arm, or would have touched her arm, if they were in the same space. “Do you understand what you need to do?”

  She was supposed to give life to the self-replicating elements because the chamber of the cannon needed to blast out five-dimensional, high-caliber artillery.

  Timothy flickered again. “Coordinates and control.” Then he vanished.

  They needed
to fire a mortar at the correct time and in the correct direction. She looked up at the Rysa in the clouds.

  Who, on Earth, always knew how to optimize responses to maximize an outcome in the present? Who saw the future?

  But the fuse always burned up. The fuse went with the bomb.

  And so did the chamber.

  There had to be another way. They were in new fate-territory. Her mother ignored fate, so why not Daisy and Rysa?

  Daisy would make another way. She might be about to die, but that didn’t mean Rysa had to. Or Ladon and Brother-Dragon.

  Above Daisy’s head and behind roiling storm clouds, the Incursion pulsed too big and too cold. It sucked inward until it looked no different from the stars, then it pulsed outward again with its blue, red, and yellow—then orange, green, and violet—rings as if it spun on an axis she could not fathom.

  Slide and Push, she thought. Axes I don’t understand.

  The world righted. Cheyenne’s winter cold slapped her hard across the face.

  The activation aches returned, as did the wooziness. She was alone now with her body’s slipping and sliding. Her mother was gone and Rysa could no longer offer her healings.

  Daisy turned her own healing ability inward and once again tightened it around her belly.

  Under her hand, on the playground surface, lay the last shard of Janus’s talisman. The same shard her mother had carried. The one they had brought with them from Australia to The States.

  It shimmered like it always did, but now it looked hot and woozy, like her—but it wasn’t the shard that made her jerk back.

  Three concentric circles surrounded the shard, the outer red, then middle yellow, and the inner blue.

  As she watched, the surface under the rings pulsed upward like waves, and changed to orange, green, and violet.

  Daisy looked up at the sky. The Incursion had vanished, but it wasn’t gone. It had slipped over the western horizon as it swung over the widest continent in the Northern Hemisphere—and over the most populated lands on Earth.