And a world where women could be blazing talented Firemakers.
Rough hands shook my shoulders, much the same way the cook in Crylon used to. “Get up. The sentries are here. We have to go out the top.” Adam’s urgent voice chased away any thoughts of my past service in the kitchens.
I scrambled to my feet, pulled on the coat, and covered my head with my hood. Panicked, I patted the ground for the rest of my gear. Gone. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted Adam. I shouldn’t have unloaded everything I’d found, shouldn’t have shared, shouldn’t have fallen asleep at all.
The guy was a trained sentry. He’d physically assaulted me once, and now he’d left me abandoned in a cave in the middle of an Unmanifested village—with his sentry brother on my tail. Anger clawed through me with the desperation as I turned uselessly in a circle, trying to see something in the absolute darkness.
“Come on!” Adam hissed, sending a river of relief through my veins.
I sprinted in the direction of his voice, my tired muscles groaning and my injured feet bursting with pain. I hadn’t had the time or the means to dress them properly before falling asleep.
Adam pushed me in front of him. “Climb.”
Easier said than done. See, I didn’t dare light my fingertips, and I didn’t think darkness could be this, well, dark. The stone had small divots in it, a far cry from stairs. I had to balance on tiny footholds and dig my fingertips into the unyielding rock.
Adam never spoke, but his breath came hot and close. Every step felt like needles in my feet. My fingers flinched with each touch against rock. I moved too slow, like I was underwater, but the thought of plummeting to my death forced me to check and double-check each hold before I leaned my body weight into it. The chill in the cavern pulsed against my exposed face and made the pain in my fingertips more pronounced.
Eventually the passage narrowed, and I stopped, unable to continue. “What now?” I adjusted my feet to hold my weight and shook the stiffness out of my hands.
“Here, let me go first. Hold this.” The rough canvas of a pack met my frozen fingers as he shoved it at me. I grunted under the weight, then sucked in a breath as Adam put both hands on my waist and somehow squeezed past me using invisible footholds. He released me quickly, apologizing, and took the pack again.
I heard him brush his hand across the rock. He mumbled something to himself. He finally released the breath he’d been holding. “There it is. Step here,” he whispered, fumbling for my hand and placing it on a ledge in the stone. “Feel with your feet, it’s like a ladder.”
“Step where?” The rock felt slippery, with no ridges for even so much as a fingertip.
“Hold on with your hands. There’re rungs carved in the stone for your feet.”
Shouts echoed below me, but I didn’t look down. Adam and I cursed at the same time, and then he stepped, climbing straight up.
He moved above me, but I never touched his shoes, never caught up to him. He used a blast of wind to blow open a hole, and a beam of moonlight brightened the passage.
Then his gloved hand found mine, and he hauled me out of the hole. Thankful to be surrounded by fresh air again, I bent over and took several deep breaths.
“Let’s go.” Adam started down the hill, and I jogged to keep up. I wanted to ask him what time it was, how those sentries had found us, how many miles to Gregorio.
I said nothing.
We passed through the trees, paused, and ducked into an alley. Then to a house. Building by building, we crept toward the towering city wall. And the closed gate, the one separating us from freedom.
Adam moved with the precision of a trained sentry, something that didn’t bring me comfort.
He darted into the shadows next to the wall. I followed and asked, “And now?”
“There’s a burrow around here somewhere. Goes right under this wall.” He stomped the ground next to the stones, moved a few feet to the right, and stomped again. I kept glancing behind me, expecting to see looming shadows in the shape of sentries.
Finally, on one of Adam’s stomps, the ground echoed. He dropped to his knees. He scooped away the earth and sent a blast of wind into the hole.
“Follow me. Push this through.” He removed the pack and slithered in on his back, head first and pushing himself through with his feet. As he disappeared, a slight tremor of panic shook my body.
No way the bulky pack could fit through that hole. I didn’t know how Adam managed to fold his broad shoulders into it. I couldn’t contort myself like that.
The faint barking of dogs filtered into my ears. My pulse quickened. Contortionist or not, I knelt and shoved the pack into the opening. I followed head-first on my stomach so I could use my legs to push.
Just as I knew it would, the blazing pack jammed. I rammed it with my shoulder, bracing myself against the frozen ground. Adam called for me to push while he pulled.
Status: Stuck.
I lay half inside the tunnel, half outside. The barking grew louder, and a faint rumble disturbed the earth. We tried again, Adam pulling while I pushed. The pack maybe moved an inch. Maybe.
“Can’t you use air pressure?” I growled, nowhere near loud enough for him to hear.
“Wrong direction.” His answer came faintly through the tunnel.
Barking: Increasing.
Earth: Full-on shaking.
Sentries: Yelling. Close by.
“Adam, let’s leave it. Push it back so I can get through.”
He pushed. I pulled. The bag stayed.
I thought about climbing out and torching anything that moved. But unless I killed both sentries, that wouldn’t solve my problem.
“Adam! Unpack it! Hurry—pull out whatever you can.” I dug in my feet and pushed. My shoulders burned after a few seconds, but the bag inched forward. I couldn’t tell if Adam was doing anything, if he was even still there. He could’ve run off as soon as he realized the backpack was truly stuck.
The barking settled upon me. I expected a sharp set of teeth to clamp down on my ankle at any moment. With a whoosh of noise, the bag unjammed, and I fell flat on my face.
Tasting blood, I scrambled into the tunnel just as an ice-cold hand gripped my right calf. “Gotcha,” the Tarpulin sentry said.
I cried out and sent my Element to my right foot. It burst into flames, igniting the blisters into raging infernos of pain, but the fingers released me.
“Adam!” I yelled, the hollow sound mixing with the smell of melted rubber. He didn’t answer as I clawed away from the sentries.
“Get this gate open!” the sentry bellowed. Cursing followed. Pounding feet thundered above me.
I scurried through the tunnel, my heart battering my ribs at the thought of emerging on the other side alone. It wouldn’t take long to open the gate, and I had no supplies with which to survive on in the wilderness.
Desperation and anger spurred me forward and when Adam pulled me out, the bag already repacked and on his back, I didn’t wait for instructions.
Lip bleeding, and with my right shoe missing, I ran.
“I thought you’d left me.” My breath stuck in the winter sky as white clouds. I balled one hand into a fist and held the other in front of me, pouring fire to erase the snow. Adam didn’t reprimand me, even though I was broadcasting our position with shooting flames and a cleared path. He also didn’t answer.
It didn’t take long to open the gate, and we’d barely crossed the first field when the buzz of the hovercraft sounded.
I vaulted a limp wire fence and cleared a path down into a ditch. I shot a plume of fire to the right and then the left, melting the snow for a hundred feet in each direction. My feet should’ve been screaming in pain, but I couldn’t feel them. I didn’t know which sensation was worse.
“Left,” Adam hissed, splashing down next to me.
“I’ll catch up,” I said, turning right. Sloshing through the calf-high water, I shot another fireball, clearing more of the ditch. I ducked and turned back the way I’d c
ome.
“Good idea,” Adam whispered when I caught up to him. He motioned for me to go first, and we crept, almost on our knees, toward the snow bank still frozen in the ditch. I held my hand over it, melting it in a much subtler manner.
“Culvert ahead,” Adam breathed behind me. “Crawl in, don’t come out the other side.”
The metal cylinder ran under a snow-covered road. I scooted inside and turned to see Adam refreezing the ice over the ditch. The last of his frigid wind died as he joined me in the culvert. I hunched over to squeeze inside, pulled my knees to my chest, and massaged some heat back into my shoeless foot. The metal bit through my jeans with an unrelenting chill, and my foot stung with newly-realized pain.
Mere moments later, Patches’s high voice carried across the frozen darkness.
“Melted in both directions.” A pause and then, “Okay, but if you kill her, I’ll kill you. She’s mine.” The steel in Patches’s voice made my blood run cold.
“Wow,” Adam whispered. “He really hates you. Sentries don’t normally care how the hunted dies.”
I cringed at the word dies.
“I sense a story I haven’t heard,” Adam pressed.
“I’m sure you have some as well,” I shot back. “I’ll tell you when we’re not minutes from dying.”
“Great. I’ll never hear it then.” Adam’s smile carried in his voice. He rummaged through his backpack and pressed a knife into my hand. “I think I might be better with these, so I’ll keep two. That okay?”
“Fine by me.” I gripped the knife, repulsed just from holding it. My stomach filled with fire.
“I can’t,” I choked out.
“Can’t what?”
I dropped the knife in an ear-splitting clatter of metal on metal. An excited shout rang out, and Adam cursed.
“Come on,” he hissed as he stumbled over me inside the culvert. His boot scraped along my thigh. As if I didn’t have enough physical pain already coursing through my body.
He clambered through the culvert toward the other side. I maneuvered around and had almost gained the opening when a light shone behind me. I turned to look, getting blinded by the beam.
“Get out!” Adam yelled, pulling on my legs. I fell to the ground as Adam unleashed a gale-force wind through the tunnel. Scrambling up, I saw all three knives in Adam’s belt.
He lowered his hands, straightened, and looked at me. “We need to work on your stealth. I bought us maybe five minutes. Come on.”
Then he ran.
I caught up to him, melting the snow so we could move faster. “I’m sorry.”
He grunted and increased his pace.
“Adam—”
“Not now,” he huffed. “We’ll talk later.”
“I can’t kill someone.”
“It’s you or them.”
“No, it’s not,” I panted. “That’s just what they tell you in sentry training. It’s not real life.”
“Oh, yeah? It is now.”
And of course, the blazing Airmaster was right. My fear increased with every footstep, realizing it had been “me or them” for a long time. The anger bloomed inside, ever-present, never-abandoning. I pounded the rage into my footsteps despite my injuries, hoping to drive out the fury so I could allow something else—something better—into my life.
I’d never found that path in Crylon. I’d started running to break the mold I’d been folded into. My new teacher, Educator Ostrund, wouldn’t allow questions. He looked down his nose at me, sneering. “Supremist Pederson has written me concerning your education.”
I didn’t answer. He stayed his hand when I kept quiet.
“He is most worried about the future of Crylon.”
Still, I held my tongue, tucking that vocal part of myself into a tight spot in my chest. The part that refused to mold to reality.
“Shall I assure him you are on target to complete your education with honors?”
What he really meant: Are you going to accept your position in society?
I swallowed hard, quieting the thoughts of Educator Graham and how she’d never asked me to do that. She’d never wanted me to be anyone but myself.
Educator Ostrund rapped my knuckles with his wicked stick. “Well?”
Tears stung my eyes. I balled my fists, now protected in my lap, before nodding. “If I’m not chosen for Council, yes absolutely.”
“Excellent,” Educator Ostrund said, making another note on his infernal clipboard.
That afternoon, with the leafy trees on fire with reds and oranges, I ran. The next day, Jarvis had joined me. He didn’t come every day; he didn’t have time because of his Elemental studies.
Which was just fine, because a week later, I had fire pouring from my fingertips—and Jarvis didn’t need to know about that. I’d wanted to tell him. Blazes, how I wanted to.
But I didn’t.
I’d kept secrets from him, just as he did from me. Would there never be room for anything besides pain, betrayal, and loneliness? Nothing but the emptiness that existed without Cat and Isaiah? Nothing besides the hole in my heart Jarvis had produced? Or the gulf that opened when Patches received his mark and became my enemy? Or the fissure created when Educator Graham was murdered?
I didn’t know. I didn’t trust Adam, but at the moment I had no other options. Running next to me, he pointed to the right. A stream bubbled nearby, the banks pocked with frozen footprints. We ducked into a bank of trees when the hovercraft buzzed behind us.
“Stay next to me. Don’t talk—Gabe.” He caught my eye before moving into the trees, where the canopy had blocked the snow from reaching the ground. Thankful we wouldn’t be leaving behind footprints, I followed Adam as he muttered to himself, went a few feet, pivoted to the right and paced off a few more steps. This pattern continued until I became hopelessly lost.
“Ah, here.” Adam reached up and clasped his hand around nothing. As he lowered his fist, two cloaks materialized out of the pine needles. Mottled brown and green and made from some shimmery fabric, they looked warm and inviting. He handed me one and put on the other. “Hold still.”
“Where did you get these?” I asked. The folds of the cloak hung in large ribbons, even over the already-too-big coat. I pulled the hood over my head, drowning my face in cloth. I smoothed down the front and looked up, still waiting for Adam’s answer.
He was gone.
I turned in a circle, the long cloak pooling on the ground. Everything looked exactly the same.
Trees.
Leaves.
Rocks.
I took a few hesitant steps in one direction, but it didn’t look familiar.
Nothing looked familiar.
My breath came too fast, especially when the buzz of the hovercraft pressed in around me. I inched closer to a nearby tree, pulling the cloak tighter. I cursed Adam and his stupid command to hold still. My flight had gotten considerably more dangerous since meeting him. And now he’d disappeared again, leaving me alone in the forest with his sentry brother. If I ever saw him again, I’d have a few choice words for him.
Somewhere on my right, the hovercraft stopped. Minutes passed, my heart thumping as loud as a drum. A slight scuffling to my left ignited a wisp of fear in my chest. I wanted to send the forest up in flames, but Adam had said, “Hold still.” I didn’t move, feeling as trapped as I had in Crylon.
I remembered a time when I realized Jarvis had been folded into a mold too. We’d gone walking just before the end-of-year festivities, and he hadn’t held my hand the way he sometimes did.
“Gabby, I wish you a prosperous new year,” he’d said. So formal.
I couldn’t say it back. I’d said everything already. “Jarvis, you—”
He put one finger to my lips and held it there for too long. “I’ll be choosing my Council next month.”
“You’ll make a great Councilman,” I whispered.
What I meant: I’d love to serve as your Unmanifested.
Jarvis understood. He smiled. ??
?I won’t be leaving until April for diplomacy training in Tarpulin. And it will be years before I get a city.”
I doubted it, despite the mandated ten-year apprenticeship that all new Councils served under existing Councils. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
He’d hugged me. Then he’d turned and walked slowly toward the west barracks, his head down.
After nightfall, as I had done many times since Manifesting, I turned my back on the city of Crylon, on the Elemental school, and ran. My feet pounded the forest floor, breaking free from the oppressive mold I’d been caged in all day. When those boundaries broke, I had nothing left for protection. Holes widened inside as reality spilled out. So much had been taken.
I ran longer than I had before. Hours, maybe, simply trying to leave the resentment behind. When I stopped, I leaned against a weathered pine tree, attempting to calm my breath.
But it only became more labored. I felt the agony rise. Though I tried to force it back down, back into the tiny square that had become my heart, it would not go.
And I cracked. Fissures erupted in my carefully crafted armor, and I cried until I had nothing left inside.
And then, like an old friend, the anger came slithering back. It sealed the cracks and morphed into resentment stronger than I’d experienced before. That feeling filled the empty holes and overflowed, overflowed until I couldn’t cry anymore.
I could only hate this new person I’d become—someone who didn’t trust. Didn’t believe. Didn’t let anyone in.
Standing in the forest under that cloak, I used the familiar anger to keep the tears at bay. I didn’t believe Adam would stick with me, a female Firemaker. His disappearance only added fuel to those distrustful thoughts.
A cough sounded like a gunshot in the silence, drawing me out of my own mind. I flinched, though I tried not to. Black boots thudded on the ground, and Felix sauntered right in front of me. I froze, my hands clenched, my body ready for a blade to bury itself into my heart.
Felix looked left, then right. He wiped a hand over his eyes, which opened bleary and blood-shot.
Then he looked right at me.
He glanced away after only a moment, as if he hadn’t seen me. I breathed in…then out, expecting death any second.