The Burning World

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  So now she was ADHD self-shaming? “You are not helping,” Rysa said.

  Her dark Fate let go. “You got yourself into this mess. You used your seers instead of saving what little equilibrium you had left for the important job.”

  Yeah, saving the world. The important job. But they still needed to get to where they needed to be in order to do that job, and if hellhounds ate them out here in a field, the getting wouldn’t happen. And without the getting, there would be no saving.

  A tear sat at the corner of her dark Fate’s eye, a little glistening bead of sorrow on the face of the was-not Rysa. “Ladon and Dragon will stop the hounds.”

  They’d die in the dirt ripped apart and bloody and broken. Dead. Just so she could save her strength and hold together what little control of her erupting abilities she had left.

  “Is this why you want me to let you out? Because you think you’d do better? You would have used your seers and you would be choking right now, too.” Because her dark Fate might be dark, but she was still Rysa.

  Her dark Fate looked away.

  “Let me unbind fate,” Rysa whispered.

  Her dark Fate blinked. “Remember, my talisman is Burner. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Rysa whispered.

  “Do you remember what happened when you activated? How you were in the arms of a living dragon?” her dark Fate asked.

  “Yes,” Rysa murmured.

  “My talisman held my hand while I activated. My Burner.”

  “Billy,” Rysa whispered.

  “Yes. Billy.”

  “But he’s not here.”

  Her dark Fate looked at the metal shed. “He won’t let you down.”

  “Okay.” She’d have to have faith in her Burner. “Will my Ladon be okay?”

  The blade pulled back from Rysa’s wrist. The shielding contracted. All her Ambusti energy, all her shimmering and her fire, rolled up Rysa’s arm and formed a torque around her neck.

  Her dark Fate’s eyes turned black. The inside of her mouth glowed. She made activation spit.

  The torque pushed over Rysa’s chin to her lips.

  “Wrong question,” her dark Fate said, then she kissed Rysa.

  Did Rysa swallow her own energy, or did her dark Fate fill her mouth with the spit?

  Whatever she did, it burned. Rysa coughed.

  What did her dark Fate do to her?

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The Ambusti Prime’s kiss slipped down Rysa’s throat and through the constriction.

  Rysa gasped. Air suddenly, completely rushed into her lungs. Oxygen hit her blood. And fire cleared her mind.

  Ladon squatted next to Rysa and touched her lips. “What’s happening to you?”

  Her lips? She touched her mouth. The skin around her lips did feel cracked and chapped, and it hurt when she moved her jaw.

  She breathed, at least for the moment. Her body continued to rebel, and to cycle up into its deferred double-activation, but swallowing her dark Fate power seemed to have boosted her innate abilities.

  Her fire burned too bright, but she was fire, and her body danced with itself as if it understood what was happening. Her dark Fate gave her a new, blistering equilibrium.

  But it wasn’t Rysa. It blazed like a white-hot version of her ADHD and it belonged to a version of herself who didn’t exist—and who had failed.

  She needed her real-world balance if she was to succeed and survive this.

  “You look like shit,” Andreas said as he set Daisy down next to Rysa.

  She ignored his comment and touched Daisy’s face and neck.

  Andreas nodded toward the bright light. “I sent the Seavers to the helicopter to help the pilot and the enthraller who came with Billy.”

  Rysa nodded. “Watch for Gavin, okay?”

  Andreas stopped checking his firearm. “What?”

  Rysa stood up straight. “Did you really think your mother’s enthralling was going to keep him from Daisy?”

  “Heh,” Andreas said. He patted Daisy’s arm. “You heal. He’ll be fine. You have my word.”

  Daisy shivered, but didn’t respond.

  Andreas frowned.

  “Go help!” Rysa said.

  Andreas stepped back. “Aye, my Prime.” He nodded one last time, glanced at Ladon, then ran toward the helicopter.

  Rysa watched him go. “Daisy, can you hear me?” she asked. Her friend felt ice cold. “We’re safe. Ladon and Dragon are right here. There aren’t that many hellhounds.”

  “You’d think I’d be done with activating by now,” Daisy said. Her lip trembled and she shook.

  “No fever anymore,” Rysa said. “That’s good, right?”

  Daisy semi-snorted, semi-groaned. “Gavin’s going to get himself killed.” She tried to duck away from Rysa and stagger toward the helicopter, but Ladon wouldn’t let her pass.

  “Both of you need to get on the bus,” he said.

  “Gavin will be fine,” Rysa said. Bower luck would keep him alive.

  Daisy leaned toward Rysa. “You look like you swallowed burning gasoline.”

  Rysa touched her lips. “It’s a side effect of my energy blade.” The blade was gone, as was the shielding.

  Daisy grimaced and clenched her belly. “I tried,” she said. “I thought that since I was already an active healer I could save this baby.”

  Rysa’s seers whispered the what-is and the what-might-be. They chattered about coulds and shoulds and might bes. They warned of miscarriages and broken relationships and harm. They pointed at pain and death and the end of the world. All that was to become dire swirled around Rysa and Daisy like a cyclone. But nothing they said felt true.

  Rysa reached into the cyclone. She extended her seers and she cut through the pain and she latched onto the one what-will-be that she was going to make sure happened.

  “I can help.” Babies, she thought. Alexei and her little sister Lyric and little Will. Her own children with their metallic eyes and their black, wavy hair. Ladon, a smile on his face, laughing as he leaned against the Dragon’s Rock and yelled “Come back here, you scoundrels! You know I can’t follow you up there!”

  The future she needed to make real.

  “Goddamn it, Rysa, no seers!” Daisy said. “You burned out your sniffer-bots, remember? You have nothing holding your abilities in check. You and I both know that if you overuse again Andreas’s calling scents won’t be enough.”

  Daisy pushed Rysa away, but stumbled herself. Ladon drew her back next to Rysa.

  “I’m carrying you both onto the bus,” Ladon said. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure he had a clear path to the door.

  Rysa needed to help Daisy before Ladon threw them both over his shoulders like a caveman. She needed to find the correct path into the future. The true path for her and her family.

  Sniffer-bots, Rysa’s seers whispered. Sniffer-bots, Rysa’s own mind thought. “Can you see the sniffer-bots in my blood?”

  Daisy looked her up and down. She frowned and leaned closer. “Yes. They’re—”

  “Good.” Rysa pushed her hand under Daisy’s coat and fired a massive bolt of healing into her friend’s belly.

  If she’d said more, there would have been an argument. Ladon would have gotten his way and all of Daisy’s willpower would have been turned toward figuring out how to save the world.

  And Daisy would have carried on and this chance would have vanished forever.

  The fire inside Rysa erupted. It stabbed and pricked like little fireworks going off inside her cells as it bubbled up her arms and crawled along her skin. It fought her own body’s will and it snacked on her blood, bone, and nerves.

  All that Andreas’s calling scents had been suppressing flared up into a bonfire. All her added dark Fate power roared. All the screaming hunger of her Fate abilities and the shifting, mercurial draw of energy from her Shifter. Her “tentacles” and her “guard dog” and…

  Ladon caught her before she dropped to the ground.

  H
er dark Fate floated directly in front of Rysa again. “You are insane,” she said.

  “Now’s not the time.” What if Daisy didn’t have the same semi-formed realization about Rysa’s sniffer-bots? What if she wasn’t up to saving Rysa? What if her bots were too broken to reactivate and save Rysa’s body from destroying itself?

  Her dark Fate looked up at the Incursion. “Insane and stubborn.”

  “I need to build this version of the what-is.”

  “So you are rejecting me?”

  “Looks that way.”

  Her dark Fate looked up at the Incursion again. “Fuck Terry and his bullshit,” her dark Fate said. “Fuck that little punk bastard. Fuck him for hurting Billy. Fuck him for taking my friends and my family.” She touched Daisy’s cheek.

  Rysa inhaled what she was sure would be her final breath.

  “Fuck him for doing the invaders’ dirty work. Fuck him for what he did to Anna and fuck him for what he did to Ladon.” She reached out to touch his cheek, but pulled back her Ambusti hand.

  The mourning. The black. The attitude. They all came from a version of the what-will-be where the Maker of Burners had already made her pay for her mistakes.

  Her dark Fate touched Rysa’s burned lips.

  Rysa’s body had had its skirmishes—her fever after she activated as Shifter, and her entire lifetime of ADHD, and her sparring with her dark Fate—but it never had been a war.

  No, Rysa Torres Drake was the United Nations. And the United Nations needed to decide that the world was more important than their individual cultural differences.

  Her dark Fate handed the reins of her Ambusti power to Rysa. “I didn’t know if it would happen,” she said. “I thought that I would have to take control.”

  “What are you talking about?” Rysa murmured.

  Her dark Fate looked away, as if she was speaking to someone Rysa could not see. “You’re a paradox, like the Whispering One. You are the version of me—us—who has never happened before. You may be the wrong mix—Fate and Shifter—but you’re not. I think you’ve been making yourself all this time.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rysa whispered.

  Her dark Fate leaned close. “Perhaps Terry’s chaos carried me here. Perhaps I rode in with the Whispering One.” She looked up. “Perhaps something completely different is happening. We are echoes that are not supposed to cross, you and I.”

  Her dark Fate handed her black jacket to Rysa. She handed over her black warrior’s pants. And the fullness of the blade. Its shape and lines and intensity. “You can do this.”

  Rysa looked at Daisy, who carried more color in her cheeks than she had for a long time. Health all but burst from her glowing skin. Rysa’s overactive healer had done its job.

  She looked at Ladon’s terrified face.

  She tried to inhale again, but she couldn’t. So much for being the United Nations and being a body that worked together.

  “Yes, I can,” Rysa said, and took the reins from her dark Fate.

  Her dark Fate kissed Rysa’s forehead. “Be the best of us,” she said, and vanished forever.

  Chapter Fifty

  Rysa’s hand rose. She reached for something Daisy could not see—and all hell broke loose.

  Not hellhound hell. Not flailing or thundering. New-space broke loose just outside the Praesagio Industries touring bus.

  Force lines spiraled out of Rysa as if she were the sun. Red sparkles turned to blue, then bright white. She shimmered, then reflected, then blasted power.

  But she wasn’t breathing.

  The energy whipping around Rysa carried an order and a pattern that, to Daisy, felt like a bubble. If she stuck her hand into it, would it pop? Would popping it hurt Rysa?

  Daisy grabbed Rysa’s shoulders.

  Rysa’s pupils enlarged to the point Daisy saw only a sliver of her friend’s gray-green irises. Rysa clasped at her neck. Her skin paled.

  “I can’t see your bots inside all this… this…” Energy? Fireworks? What flipped around Rysa wasn’t real. It was new. How was Daisy supposed to manipulate something she couldn’t even name?

  “Damn it, Rysa!” Daisy said. “Stop sacrificing yourself, okay? Don’t do it anymore.”

  Ladon’s neck clenched as he helped guide Rysa to the ground. “Take her,” he said. He stood, his neck still clenching and a bright, tight band of communication moved between him and Brother-Dragon.

  Ladon caught a semi-visible, leaping hellhound by the throat.

  He snagged the damned thing by the neck with his bare hands and slammed it against the side of the bus.

  “All right, then,” Daisy said to Rysa. “We can’t be distracted by snapping hellhound bones, can we?” She tilted her friend’s head and opened her mouth.

  Please work, she thought, and sealed her lips over Rysa’s.

  The calling scent she forced into Rysa’s throat was not oriented for animals, or for people. It was made specifically for the Praesagio sniffer-bots in Rysa’s body.

  ‘Function’, it said.

  Rysa gasped as the code hit her blood.

  ‘Operate correctly within the environment in which you swim.’

  Daisy reprogrammed.

  Then ‘Do your damned job.’

  The sniffer-bots in Rysa’s blood rebooted.

  Rysa’s healer surfaced. The chaotic, whipping energy calmed. The tentacle-like lines that had to be her seers cleared. Her body stabilized.

  She sat up. “Wow,” she breathed. She pointed at the new corpse next to the bus. “That’s a dead hellhound.” Then she grinned and kissed Daisy. “You be magical!”

  Ladon’s perplexed—or not so perplexed, Daisy couldn’t tell—grin caught Rysa’s attention. She jumped up and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Hey, gorgeous!” she said. “I fixed Daisy and she fixed me.” She kissed him full on the lips. “I really like you, ya know.”

  He pulled her slightly behind him and against his side in the semi-conscious way he did when he protected someone who wasn’t fast or strong. “Careful,” he said. “We’ve seen three species so far. They’re coordinating and acting as a pack and they’re starting to compensate for whatever you did earlier.” He nodded to Daisy. “Thank you.”

  Rysa’s seers danced toward the copter as a triple helix of sound-like waves that arched up and over the shed. Her familiar musical, wind-instrument-like touch followed.

  “Billy’s here!” She pointed at the shed and the bright light and chopping sound of the helicopter on the other side.

  “I see your seers,” Daisy said.

  Ladon looked questioningly at Daisy.

  “She healed the last of my activation fluctuations and I rebooted her sniffer-bots.” She stood. “I’m good now, Ladon. The baby’s good.” Let the baby be their beacon of hope. “And…” She pointed at Rysa.

  Rysa thumped Ladon’s chest. “We need Daniel’s visual optimizers.” Her seers rang out again. “Too many people have died.” She shook her hands like a swimmer warming up. “No one threatens my dragons and gets away with it. We need to do this. We need to stop this.”

  Battle-hardened Ladon surfaced. His stare changed from assessing to knowing, and from calm to ice hard.

  But not for Rysa. For her, his eyes held everything Daisy had seen in his looks during the time they lived in her attic: Love. A longing for the problems to end. Need. Repentance. A call for help and a call that said he would do everything he could to help.

  And a distinct pleasure from watching his wife in one of her hyperactive moments. He would never admit it to anyone, but Ladon liked watching his wife bounce around. He liked the puzzle she created, and he most definitely enjoyed her movements.

  The big, lethal Ladon, the man with a big, lethal Dragon, was one hundred percent human.

  They were all one hundred percent human, no matter their abilities. They were people. Brother-Dragon and Sister-Dragon were people. They were of the Earth.

  Rysa was correct; too many people had died. Too much land h
ad been sacrificed. They’d lost nations. Entire continents. If the invaders made another pass, they would take Africa. South America. Her birth home, Australia.

  In this moment, in her visceral memories of Perth’s clean, fresh air and animal calls and the bird songs that are universal to everywhere on Earth but so very different in Australia than they are in North America, Daisy understood the importance of her job.

  And that she was going to die. Rysa was going to die, and likely Ladon and Brother-Dragon, too. They were going to die, but they were going to give the world a fighting chance.

  “Where’s Billy?” Rysa asked, then ran for the helicopter.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  The helicopter’s massive rotor whipped the winter air into a gale-force storm. The pilot had aimed the copter’s spotlight at the field. A blinding blade of white shot into the inky darkness and, at least for now, dissuaded the stalking hellhounds from approaching.

  Rysa pulled her mother’s pink hat tighter over her ears, lowered her head, and ran for the copter’s open back end.

  The white containment unit took up almost the entire interior and looked unsettlingly like the cleanroom into which Trajan had trapped her when her enthraller was out of control. The same cleanroom Billy blew the door off of so he and Derek could track her through Praesagio’s Portland laboratories.

  The unit screamed Trajan.

  Rysa picked up a headset and walked up to the containment unit, but not too close, in case the Burner Progenitor could lean out of Billy better than anyone guessed.

  Billy stepped toward the unit’s window. “Hiya, princess,” he said.

  She waved at the window. Billy—or his passenger—had burned a hole in the glass. “Looks familiar,” she said.

  The creepy little naked man occupying the same space as Billy pivoted around the duct- taped Poke and tried to lunge at the glass. Bleached, curly yet somehow combed and styled hair covered his head. His golden-bronze skin literally crawled in tiny waves along his arms like the side of a snake, though Rysa’s initial disgusted response might have colored her perception.