Into the Fire

An Excerpt from Into the Fire:

Prologue

The jump went far easier than Aedynan had expected it to, and far easier than it should have. It had been more than five-hundred years since trans-dimension travel had been banned, and only the domestic jump requirements of society’s day-to-day operations—plus the crystal spirits’ unforgettable knowledge—kept the ability within reasonable reach.

Still, when he’d sat down at the controls and accessed the extra-dimensional navigation menu, his hands had been shaking.

Considering they were fleeing a literal apocalypse, a little shaking was getting off light.

It still felt unreal to him, as if, as cliche as it sounded, this were just one awful fucking dream that he just couldn’t fight his way out of. Everything had happened so fast—the crystals, the mutation, the spread, news of his parents and grandparents’ deaths along with the rest of those who couldn’t flee the epicenter state quickly enough, the vidcom footage of the Maanai spreading, turning entire forests black in minutes and looking like a living thing as the entire world caught a glimpse of what the crystal’s exponential growth rates actually looked like.

Gods. Only a week ago, he’d been tooling around the levi-vehicle lot, partaking in the admittedly-relaxed summer hours of his internship in the Chadaki Mountains at Dalinar University’s crystal research lab. The picture of the hangar kept popping into his head—its half-hewn roof letting in a light breeze, bringing the smell of summer heat in the air, the scattered pattern of yellow and green Bingani leaves across the dark gray asphalt, the slight chill on his neck as his sweat cooled in the shade. Aeryn, his sister, had been beside him, her angular face pulled into grim uncertainty as she’d delivered news of the mutation. Cold, hesitant panic had seized his chest as his engineer’s mind had processed the scope of the mutation’s reach and calculated the potential outcome.

He swallowed hard, pushing the image away. A sick feeling rolled through the bottom of his stomach. His mouth, along with most of his throat, was dry and sticky, tinged with the smell of stomach acid from when he’d thrown up several hours ago. His eyes were dry, too. It felt as though the muggy, stale air were wiping at them with strands of soft cloth. Sweat dripped down his face and neck, wicking into parts of his dirty shirt, and he was very aware of the hushed crowd gathered both around and behind him. Twelve people was pushing the limits of this ship’s life support capabilities, but they didn’t have much of a choice.

It was either push it, or die.

Aeryn looked little better. Sitting erect in the co-pilot’s seat, her face tinted orange by the color of the display, she looked as drawn and pale as he felt, her eyes wide and bagged, rimmed with red veins. Her hair fell in a straight line beside her face like a curtain.

As he watched, her lips pursed together.

“Did we?” he asked.

Did we make it? he’d meant to ask.

As a side-effect of transition protocol, external data blacked out the second one made a jump. His screen only showed the route calculations. 

The main screen was still blank, making only a dim, barely-visible rectangle at the front of the ship.

Her shoulders moved back as she straightened, the professionalism she used as a crutch pushing through her iron-stiff spine. Eyes still on the screen, she nodded once.

There was a collective breath behind them. From the back, someone—a child, maybe—gave a quiet, scared sob. Aedynan swallowed again.

The main screen shivered back to life. Orange dots appeared, popping up like fireflies in the grass. Three, then six. Twelve. Thirty.

Another breath. This time more finite, with a degree of relief that the other hadn’t quite been ready to give.

The other ships had made the jump, too.

Data scrolled down the side. Aedynan caught glimpses of atmospheric readings, topographical measurements, grid placements… It was a similar planet to Lür, with the same ratio of oxygen in the atmosphere, a similar amount of water, and an above-average ability to support life. The government had got that much right, at least. Considering the data had been well over a thousand years old, he had expected it to be more myth than science. It was supposed to have life, too. Human life. Civilization.

The ship swung around, adjusting itself. They barely felt the maneuver. Not like he would have on his jetbike. Beside him, Aeryn’s fingers fluttered over the console, building commands as she interacted with the data stream. A muscle in her jaw tightened, then relaxed.

“There’s a city,” she said. “Right below us.”

Their ship had no windows. When she switched the main screen over to camera and map function, he cringed at the sudden brightness. Blinking, it took him a few seconds to recognize what he was seeing.

The city spread out in a grid pattern, the tops of its boxy downtown office towers petering into larger, less-organized blocks as the roads moved away from the center. Hemmed in by a range of tall, jagged mountains, the heaviest density was concentrated on the top of a hill that took up nearly a third of the valley and clearly divided its slope into upper and lower sections.

Vehicles moved on the roads, looking like metal ants in a hive.

Aeryn’s fingers flew over the dashboard. “We’re off mark a bit. Too far east.”

He leaned back in the chair. “As long as we’re on the same planet, I don’t care. They seem decently advanced. Can you tell if—?”

“No magic,” she said, anticipating his question. “The reports were wrong. They have no defensive shield, no conduits, no—” She made a frustrated noise. “No infrastructure.”

People murmured behind them. He felt them crowd closer to the console, and he raised an eyebrow at his sister.

“I guess that means we have the upper hand.”

A new voice interrupted him, resonating from the comms speaker beside him.

“Actually, there is magic.”

The screen to his left shivered on. Safya, her face as slick with sweat as his, eyes even redder than Aeryn’s, appeared on the feed. She still wore her school jacket, and the amulet from her familial clan hung below her collarbone. Behind her, silhouettes crowded the deck. Her ship was just as packed as theirs.

If Aeryn had any problem with Safya’s clan, she didn’t show it. She keyed through the data, barely glancing at the video feed. “Where?”

“It’s latent,” Safya said. “Inactive. From what I can tell, it hasn’t evolved yet.”

“That won’t last,” Aedynan said.

Aeryn dismissed them, her lip curled. “That doesn’t matter. There’s no infrastructure.” She seemed to be stuck on that word. “They can’t do anything. A couple of hedge-witches won’t hold against Mages.”

Safya leveled a withering look on her, which Aeryn missed. She was too intent on the data stream. ‘Hedge-witch,’ and terms like it, had been used as a slur against her people’s magical abilities.

“It’ll be a problem later, if they learn,” said an elderly voice. The back of Aedynan’s chair bumped forward, and a fold of soft robe fabric brushed his forearm as Elder Kenmin leaned forward and gripped the edge of the dashboard with a gnarled hand. “If they decide they don’t like us.”

His screen shivered as Safya shared her data with him. With a few quick touches on the console, he parsed it apart. She was right—there was magic. Not as active or abundant as it had been back on Lür, but enough to interact with the deeper scans Safya had done. He was right, too, though. They would have the upper hand, especially since most of Lür’s military fleets had made the jump with them.

But they were not here to conquer. Nor were they in any position to. All of those ships were filled to the breaking point with as many evacuees as they could fit. Only two—the Lekene Empire’s Kreena and the Bildanese Agnisimemnat—had kept their full military complements.

They were refugees.

As much as it gutted them to admit it, and as much as they were in denial, the Maanai mutation had been their extinction event—and they had survived. The old world, and all they had left behind, was dead to them. The plan now was immigration and integration.

If they wanted to survive intact, they would have to make nice with the locals.

Their guns, and their magic, would at least guarantee their safety while they did so. But that was all they were for.

“I think,” Aedynan said after a few moments, “that we have bigger worries.”

“There’s some sort of airfield to the south,” Aeryn said. “I’m picking up activity.”

Like that, for instance.

He switched his attention to the field. Comms traffic from other ships seeped in through the network links. Behind his chair and at the side of the small ship, visible through the block of standing passengers as only an orange glow on the walls and ceiling from the tertiary screens, several other people were working on communications and other scans. Aeryn had a comms chat up on her side.

As Aedynan sat back in his chair to wait, a dissociated calm slid over his mind. Watching the cluster of organized frenzy on the ground as the local airfield scrambled their jets into the air, it felt as if the entire world had quietened around him.

It was out of his hands, now. He’d got them here. His job was finished.

Ten minutes later, through a single ground-ship radio signal picked up and transcribed by the Agnisimemnat’s ship crystal, the first contact with the local population was made, and the Transition began.

Chapter One

The bomb broke over Ryarne’s valley, smoke and debris flying through the blue, cloud-smudged sky like pieces of grit blown across paper.

By the time Mieshka Renaud snapped her head up, the explosion had spread like a smeared, gray hand, its distended fingers hugging the slight curve of the city’s Mage-powered defense shield. The sound concussed through the backs of Uptown’s skyscrapers a few seconds later, loud enough to vibrate straight through her skin and rattle the marrow of her bones.

Few in Uptown reacted to the raid. It was, she’d found, a point of pride for them. The war had been going on for the better part of a decade now—most of her sixteen-year life—and Westray, her country, was not winning. Outside of Ryarne’s shield borders, only Terremain, the next city over and the one that guarded mouth of the mountain valley that led to Ryarne, remained unoccupied. Barely fifteen percent of what had once been Westran territory.

But Ryarne’s shield was unbreakable. Nothing got past. And everyone knew that.

Which meant it was easy to pick out the refugees in the crowd. People who, like her, couldn’t quite ignore the raids when they came.

Pressing her fingers into the straps of her backpack, she watched the smoke spread.

Down in the valley, the buildings of Lower Ryarne glittered in the sun. The lower city was less developed than the busting, metropolitan-esque Uptown, full of residential burgs and big box warehouse outlets. She’d been down there only once in the few months since she’d arrived. A lake, its waters gleaming in the distance, straddled the farthest, easternmost point of the mountain valley, surrounded by cul-de-sacs on one side, a cookie-cutter suburban settlement on another, and a mix of forest and farmland where one part of the mountain range bent the land up at its east.

Most of the reason Ryarne was still free, and so defensible, were the mountains. Young, steep, and sharp, Westray had demolished the fifteen roads than had once led through them, making them impassable except by air. And anything coming in by air was repelled by the shield.

A glint flashed to the left of one of the taller peaks, a tiny fleck of light that might have been the bomber returning to its base.

Mieshka repressed a shiver, closed her mind to it, and swiveled away.

Her friend waited next to the subway stairs. Robin was a new friend—a new friend who insisted on calling her ‘Meese’ instead of Mieshka, a move the rest of their grade had been quick to echo. A couple inches shorter than Mieshka’s five-foot-eight, she shared the same pale skin tone, but they were otherwise opposites. Robin had black hair to Mieshka’s orange, blue eyes to Mieshka’s brown, and a loud attitude that sometimes steamrolled right over Mieshka’s small voice.

Robin didn’t look up when Mieshka joined her, only turned toward the subway stair, her attention still glued to the screen of her phone. “I see the war’s still on, hey?”

Mieshka winced. Even after two months here, it still hurt to hear about the war, and Ryarne’s blasé attitude toward it chafed at her emotions—which was stupid. They’d come here to escape the war, not have it follow them. They’d wanted the attitude.

But some pain was just too hard to push back.

Perhaps sensing something, Robin glanced up from her phone, eyes bright and alert as they found Mieshka’s face. She hesitated. Then, still hesitant, she lifted an arm up and put a hand on Mieshka’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. Nothing gets through the shield.”

Mieshka’s fingernails bit into the palm of her hand. Images flashed at the edge of her mind, memories from Terremain of news stories and snippets of video of when the bombs did get through, the percussion of hundreds of bombs testing the weakening shield there all at once, exploding so close to the city center that it took thirty minutes for their smoke to clear; the tense, huddled waiting in her school’s underground shelter.

The world around her began to shutter on itself. First by sound, then sight. Noticing this, she closed her eyes, let out a breath, and pulled herself back together.

When she opened her eyes again, Robin had already started down the stairs. Her navy blue hoodie bobbed in and out of sight as the crowd swallowed her. Above, in the reflection made by the plastic-glass shelter that curved over the stairs, the bomb smoke dissipated in the sky. Gold light, transformed to a slate blue color in the shade of Uptown’s buildings, tinged the clouds and touched the white crowns of the mountains.

The next breath was easier. Still stiff, she began to follow Robin down into the station. Wind from the subway rushed up, making the sides of her jacket flap, and with the crowd of the station moving around her, she felt a bit like a fish going downstream. Feet stamped around her, hushing the howl of the tunnel. About halfway down, her shoulders began to relax. At the bottom, payment gates opened to her left, and shops on her right. The crowd shifted. She ducked around a newspaper stand, moving more on habit and instinct than any conscious effort. Robin vanished, then reappeared.

She caught up to her at their gate. Together, they flattened their school cards against the sensors and walked through. The train schedule scrolled across a marquee close to the ceiling.

“We’re hitting the Lansdowne gaming booth, right?” Mieshka skimmed the text. “Five minutes?”

Robin nodded. Already, queues had formed where the car doors would stop. Robin and Mieshka stood between two of those, toeing the red line that warned of the platform’s edge. Three tracks lay in the dark gravel four feet below, the electrified middle one yellow where the paint had not turned into a dark rust brown. On the other side, a concrete wall rose, papered with recruitment posters. In each, a female soldier held a large gun, her rank and division sewn into her uniform.

The one across from Mieshka was a sergeant. Artillery insignia marked her left breast. Below, the caption read, ‘For Victory!’ in bold, italicized text.

And Death, she thought, remembering the dark, sarcastic add-on her mother’s unit had given it.

She sucked in a quiet breath and dug her fingernails back into the flesh of her palm as an image of the funeral came to her—the hard, numb disbelief as they pulled a Westran honor-decorated white casket around the cenotaph and unveiled her mother’s name in the black marble. Even now, she was still having difficulty grasping that her mother had been in that casket. And that she was, right now, buried in the cemetery to Terremain’s north.

She took a slow breath, trying to shut down the gaping, sucking hole of loss that threatened to empty her lungs.

Okay, so maybe now’s not the best time to think of that. Or ever.

“Hey, Meese,” Robin said next to her. Her gaze had gone to the posters, too, snapping up from her phone long enough to give them a study. “Your mom was a soldier, wasn’t she?”

Mieshka stiffened. The world closed in.

Fuck. No. Not now. Not here.

Her hands shook. She turned away, back into the station. People shoved at her, pushing, crowding. She shoved through. Announcements crackled over the intercom. Robin shouted after her.

Need to get away. Too many people. Too much noise. I need to be somewhere else.

The crowd parted. Mieshka darted through the opening. She smacked into the gate, fumbled with her card, stumbled past when it clunked open. Too many people came from the stairs, so she shied away to the left, deeper into the tunnels. Someone grabbed at her, shouted. She broke into a rough sprint. Shops slid past, then a set of lockers and a washroom. A train screamed by at the next platform. She kept running.

Time seemed to crunch. Her legs worked hard, pushing her forward, and she was aware of the station passing around her, but her mind shut down for thirty seconds, unable to focus on anything other than the scream of sound around her.

When everything went back to normal, she was alone.

It was just her, her breath, and an empty hallway.

She slowed. Then stopped. Bending over, she leaned her hands on her knees and caught her breath, ignoring the rapid beat of her heart and the silence around her. Tears pricked at her eyes. A few slid to the floor, with the promise of more on the way. She wiped at them with an angry sniffle, cleared her throat, and straightened back up.

Okay, where am I?

Both Ryarne and Terremain had an extensive tunnel system—a symptom of a large population and cold winters—so this wasn’t the first time she’d wandered off the normal paths. This looked abandoned, though, as if it had once led up to an Uptown shopping or business center but had long ago dried up. The shops here had closed. Heavy padlocks kept their metal curtains shut. Behind a metal cage, window fliers advertised a sale six months expired. Rubble filled the room behind the dusty window. It smelled different here. Musty, but lighter than the closeness and dampness of the platform.

No one was around.

Wiping at her eyes again, she stepped over to the wall, shrugged off her backpack, and slid to the floor. Ignoring the falter of her breath and the way her vision blurred, she unzipped the pocket of her pack and pulled out a tissue. In the distance, the thin wail of a leaving train echoed up the hall, accompanied by the chirps of the auditory warning systems.

Closer, footsteps tapped on the scuffed tiles.

Mieshka bowed her head as she dabbed at her face, letting a curtain of orange hair hide her eyes. Her throat choked up. A sob racked through her.

Grief was an ugly feeling.

Someone stopped in front of her.

After a moment, Robin crouched down. “I’m sorry, Meese. I shouldn’t have asked. I wasn’t thinking.”

Mieshka curled away, reached for another tissue. Her voice trembled when she spoke. “I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to go to Lansdowne today.”

Robin squeezed her shoulder. “We don’t have to go to Lansdowne today.”

Heat flushed Mieshka’s face. Her eyes felt puffy. She wiped them with another tissue. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be—”

“No, no—I shouldn’t have asked,” Robin said. “I wasn’t thinking. You’ve got a history, I get it.”

Mieshka shook her head. “No. I’m not a good friend. Friends should be able to talk about anything.”

“I—what? Seriously?” She heard more than saw Robin’s eyebrow twitch up. “Dude, your mom just died. I think you get a fucking pass.”

A small silence stretched between them. She squeezed her eyes shut as more tears leaked through. When she swallowed, her throat had a hard, raw lump in it.

“Lansdowne kind of sucks, anyway,” Robin said.

“Fiona will be there,” Mieshka said. “And Satori.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not like we don’t see them every day.”

But you are closer to them than you are to me.

It had been like that in Terremain, too, when they’d moved there a few years back. This time, Mieshka hadn’t had the energy to spend making new friends. It was just happenstance—a shared encounter in the hallway one morning—that had pushed Robin into befriending her.

She didn’t answer. Robin had moved, twisting away from her.

“Besides, that looks way more interesting.”

She looked up with a frown, following her friend’s gaze. At the next corner of the hallway, wedged into the wall opposite her so that she hadn’t noticed it beyond the jutting shutters of the business next to it, a smooth, arched doorway led into a dim corridor. Blue light flickered within, making a silent dance on the walls.

“What is it?”

“The Fire Mage’s temple.”

“Temple?” Her eyebrows shot up as she studied the doorway. It had an ornate trim—like leaves—wrought in a material that was paler than the rest of the hallway’s beige accents. Marble? They used marble in temples, right?

But why build a temple here, in the middle of the subway mall?

“That’s what everyone calls it. They say that the Fire Mage’s ship is under it. You know about the ships, right?”

The Mages had crash-landed on this world. They’d used their ships—special ships, all black metal and magic—to slice through the dimensions, 

fleeing the collapse of their old world.

That, technically, made them refugees. But the government treated them much better than it treated people like Mieshka.

There were three in Ryarne, and a fourth in nearby Terremain. Their Elemental magic powered the cities’ defense shields.

“I’ve seen pictures.”

Robin helped her up, holding onto her arm as she balanced. Echoes followed them as they walked up the hall, carrying the cacophony of the station.

They paused at the threshold. Inside, the light dimmed, reduced to two dancing tubelights on the ceiling. They had a watery cadence to them, as if they were cast through ocean waves—which struck her as odd for a fire temple, but she was far too focused on the walls themselves to give it much thought.

Her eyes widened as she studied the stone carvings on either side.

It was as if the mythos of an entire world had been condensed into a single place.

She’d seen pictures of tapestries before, and scrolls. Old ones, where the scene just kept moving and moving, showing more and more of its story or purpose as it went. This had a similar feel to that, albeit with a more encyclopedic theme, as if the artist had attempted to put every single mythological creature they knew about into a single piece.

To her left, a winged horse flew above a giant, tentacled sea monster. Spirits of the earth and sky erupted across a mountainscape, filling the land and air in minute detail. Underworld creatures slithered and crept in a cold world beneath them.

And, above them all, residing at about her height in the mural, a large, patterned eagle skirted the sun.

No, not an eagle. A firebird. A—she fished for the name—Phoenix.

Lürian mythology was quite similar to Terran. If she tried, she could probably put a Terran name to most of the creatures.

Under the dancing light, they appeared to move.

Mieshka’s ragged breaths seemed to grow louder as they progressed. Their shoes tapped on the stone floor. The hallway was so quiet, she heard the books in her backpack shift. Where earlier, she’d felt the press of people, she now felt their absence.

The hallway funneled them into a circular room divided into two clear parts. The inner consisted of a small, shallow amphitheater, with the outer being a continuation of the hallway they’d just exited. A three-tiered fountain bubbled on the opposite side, taking up most of the center, its waterfalls shivering in the blue light. Two small, wizened trees flanked its front a green light shining on them from somewhere below. At its back, where the first waterfall splashed down from its highest point, a screen hovered in mid-air. Its transparent backing marked it as alien.

She’d heard the Mages had brought some technology from their old world. This must have been part of it—her own world hadn’t even come close to this level of advancement. It looked like she could throw something right through it, and it wouldn’t even blink. Three rows of symbols glowed on it, burning with the orange-yellow of the Fire Element.

She had seen the Mage’s old language before—her school had added Mages to its curriculum last year. The characters had a strange Asiatic-Cyrillic shape, as if they’d taken a Russian design and folded it into a Korean letter-building system, which made them seem both familiar and foreign to her. They pulsed in the air, glowing like embers.

Two steps separated the center of the room from the pillared hallway circling its perimeter. The stone tapestry of mythic creatures continued along the wall, accompanied by more fiery text that lined the upper part of the room’s outer wall.

She ducked behind a pillar, a hand tracing its ribbed edges, and followed the hallway. The light from the letters cast the stone floors in a soft red haze, with the rows of letters reaching close to the ceiling. Each column of text had only two or three words, and maybe fifty rows. They looked clean, uniform, and organized.

Exactly like the ones on her mother’s cenotaph.

Mieshka sucked in a sharp breath, feeling the pain flare inside her chest, as if an iron jaw clamped down on her diaphragm, punching her with emotion. She forced herself to step back as her throat tightened. Her gaze did a slow circuit of the room, taking in the letters, the tapestry, the fountain at the center of it all, and the transparent screen above it, its single, short passage burning with the same quiet presence as the rest of the text around her.

Robin stood in front of it, her dark hair catching the mix of red, blue, and green from the center, a concerned look on her face as she only just realized that Mieshka hadn’t followed her into the middle. “You okay?”

“This isn’t a temple.” Mieshka swallowed as her voice broke, staring up at the burn of the main screen. “It’s a memorial.”

And the main screen was its epitaph.