Source Fire: A Young Adult Fantasy (Arcturus Academy Book 5) Page 9

  “Tomio,” I croaked, my heart breaking for him. He had to be in shock.

  “No, I’m fine. See?” Tomio lifted a hand and in his palm sat a small orange flame; the mud on his hand began to sizzle. “Nothing happened to my fire.”

  My mind whirled as I stared at his flame, unable to compute. It made no sense.

  Shereen came tromping over, expression resolute. “Fred’s out. Greg?”

  Greg just shook his head without looking up.

  “Tomio?” Shereen snapped, grabbing a box from the back of the Aurora and setting it on the vehicle’s truncated hood.

  “I’m fine,” Tomio repeated, his words just as short and clipped as hers were.

  We watched her, wide-eyed and wondering what to do next. She unearthed a first-aid kit and pulled out a bottle of clear liquid. Opening a plastic bag containing a bandage, she glanced at her hands to make sure they weren’t too dirty, then sent me an inquiring look. “Saxony?”

  “I’m fine, too.” I felt anything but fine, but if Tomio could say it, then I could say it.

  “Ryan still has his, as well.”

  I could have told her that of course he did, he had a green idle, same as hers and same as mine, but I held my tongue.

  “Listen.” Shereen whipped the top off the bottle and dabbed the liquid on the bandage before splashing through the water to Greg, where she began to clean his wound. Greg didn’t react. Other than his head bobbing with her ministrations, he didn’t wince or cry out. He was like a zombie, but based on the few words he’d said, he knew exactly what was happening, what had happened.

  “The four of you have to go on without us,” she said. “These men can’t continue. Take one Aurora and the Tinger, I’ll take the other Aurora, which still works, thank God, and get them back to camp. I’ll drop them off and come after you as soon as I can.”

  At the red Aurora, Basil and Ryan helped Fred get into the box. When they got him seated, Basil stayed with him and Ryan came splashing over to us. An impressive goose-egg had already formed over his right eye.

  “We’re too late.” His eyes flashed. “Too late to stop this snuffing, but not too late to stop the next. The bastard is only nineteen kilometers from us. He’s there, right this second. We can’t waste any time. Come on, Greg. On your feet, buddy.”

  Ryan’s movements as he crossed to Greg to help him up were tightly controlled. He snapped off his words the way Shereen did, all action and intention. His gaze flicked to Tomio as he gave him a once over, head to foot, then back to his face where it gobbled up Tomio’s expression and body language, like he was starved to understand. His eyes widened. “You’re okay?”

  Tomio nodded.

  “Thank God for that.” Ryan bent to help Tomio get Greg to his feet. The newly bereft mage could hardly put one foot in front of the other. They escorted him to the Aurora where his comrade sat, slouched like a beaten boxer. Basil opened the passenger door and they somehow got the wide man into the front seat.

  Grasping my arms, Shereen pulled me to face her. Her gaze was molten. “You go on. You get him,” she whispered, squeezing my biceps, her fingers biting into my flesh. “You kill him. You end him for what he’s done to our friends, for what he intends do to you, and me and them.” She jerked her head toward Basil, Tomio and Ryan, who were making their way back to us. Every expression was stiff and grim.

  She released me and stormed through the mud to the Aurora with the damaged ex-magi. The way they sat there--slouched and broken, like they’d just had news that their entire family had been killed in a plane crash--was heart-rending.

  I looked toward the mountain, my mouth tasting metallic. Nero was on the other side of that ridge, but he wouldn’t be for long. Our window would close fast.

  The drone was nowhere in sight. It would be circling the ridge, looking for Nero. Now that we were too late, we didn’t have to care about alerting him.

  I made sure my earpiece was on and jammed it into my ear canal, but Mehmet was silent.

  Basil got behind the Tinger’s steering wheel as Tomio took the passenger’s seat. Ryan climbed into the black Aurora’s driver’s seat and I got in beside him as the engine rumbled to life. Looking back over my shoulder, I watched the red Aurora make a circle and head up the short embankment where it had tumbled, leaving a muddy gash in the tundra; a small spot of tragedy marring an otherwise perfect and endless terrain of marsh grass and reflected pockets of sun.

  “I don’t understand,” the headmaster said, toeing his fireproof boot through the blackened rubble.

  None of us did, and none of us had the energy to say me either, as we moved through the crevice in the rock.

  We’d found the epicenter. It hadn’t been difficult given that we had precise coordinates, but we’d had to slide through a crevice in the mountainside and hike over rough, rocky ground.

  It looked like a blast site. The same stones that were mottled gray and covered in moss outside the blast site, had turned black inside the site. Everything seemed dusted in a coating of sparkly charcoal. The red rubble of the mountain ridge where we’d parked the amphibious vehicles was also turned black, as were all pockets of dirt.

  “It’s like Vesuvius.” I squatted and scooped up a handful of what looked like volcanic sand. Black, and glittery where it caught light, the larger pieces made a clinking sound like glass, when they were tossed against one another, or kicked. We spread out within the blast circle, inspecting it. No blast had actually taken place, not one that we’d heard or that Mehmet had seen by drone, but I couldn’t help but assume there had been an explosion of some kind, or in the very least, an event.

  The site was cradled in the mountains, partially hidden under an overhanging rock and partially open to the sky. Whatever had happened had caused a ring of black some eighty feet in diameter. Where the black stuff met the unaffected rock and ground, it was jagged with outwardly shooting marks, like a starburst. The charcoal-like substance wasn’t a coating, either, or if it was, it ran deep. Digging through the crumbly, now-fragile rock—so brittle it could be broken and crushed by hand—revealed only more layers of it.

  “Any ideas, Ryan?” The headmaster had been kneeling, and let a handful of the stuff fall to the earth as he got to his feet.

  Tomio and I looked at Ryan, who had so far said nothing.

  Ryan tossed a volcanic rock to the side in an irritated gesture, clearly annoyed. “Why does everyone think I know everything?”

  He turned his back and toed through the rubble like that was the end of it.

  Tomio caught my eye. All I could muster was a shrug.

  Basil let out a pent-up breath. “Let’s go then. There’s nothing else we can do here. He’s obviously gone. How? No idea. But we’ll soon know where. We have one more shot at this.”

  Ryan threw his head back and screamed at the sky, making me jump. Then he stomped away in the direction we’d come, disappearing through the gash in the rock.

  “Yes. Precisely,” Basil said, his voice even. The headmaster began to follow Ryan, but moving slowly as he studied the blast marks.

  I moved to join Tomio when a glint drew my eye to a low overhang, and the rubble beneath it. When light caught the rubble or dust, it did glint, but this had been a different kind of reflection: larger and brighter, like there was something smooth and irregular there. Squatting at the overhang and peering beneath it revealed more broken, blackened stuff. Tomio came to join me as I pawed debris and fragments away from where I’d seen the gleam.

  “Find something?”

  His question brought Basil back to us. He stood over us with his hands on his knees, watching as I pulled away refuse for a better look. When I’d revealed what had reflected the light, we leaned back in unison, staring.

  The headmaster was the first to speak. “Looks like part of a huge broken egg-shell, sort of.”

  It did look a bit like that, albeit not as even-surfaced nor as neatly oval as an egg. Tomio picked up a shard. It was curved and smooth on the convex
side, like it had once been part of a sculpture, or a vase. Basil straightened, bumping his head on the overhang. He took off his toque and shoved it into his pocket, wiping his brow with his inner elbow. “We might have to admit that we’ll never know what happened here.”

  I scooped up a handful of the broken stuff. “Yes, we will. We will know exactly what happened here.”

  I took off my own toque and began to fill it with shards and debris. When I had filled the hat, I took off my ponytail elastic and put it around the opening, pinching the toque shut and making a perfect little sack.

  “Come on.” I crawled out from beneath the overhand, took out my phone and snapped a few photos, then headed in the direction of the vehicles. “I need to get to a phone, stat.”

  Part II

  Mesopotamia

  8

  A Remote View

  Tomio rested a foot on the open door of Basil’s Evoque. His eyes were far away and troubled. I checked the time on my phone, though I’d checked it only two minutes ago. The train from Blackmouth was due in six minutes.

  “I hate when things are inconsistent,” Tomio said.

  “In this case”—I let my head rest against the headrest, knowing he was talking about being an exception to the snuffing rule—“I’m relieved as hell that things are inconsistent.”

  “Yeah, don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled my fire hasn’t been snuffed, too. But it’s so weird.”

  We’d returned to the UK in a reversal of our outbound trip, except that Shereen, Fred and Greg had come with us. Once we’d landed, the ex-magi had been taken to the agency to convalesce, while Shereen had returned to Dover with us.

  When we’d returned to the Academy, Tomio had phoned his old sensei and gotten Junko’s parents number, the natural-born mage who had passed him his fire when he was nine. Junko’s family and Tomio’s sensei, as well as Tomio himself, had made an agreement to go their separate ways after the endowment. They had wanted as little as possible to do with the supernatural heat that had tortured Junko and nearly killed her as a small child. But learning the color of her idle fire, if possible, had become important. Maybe Tomio was green after all, somehow. Maybe we were soul mates and that was precisely why we had no mage bond. Maybe my fire had simply wanted to keep me away from anyone I had lusted after who wasn’t Tomio, and flared up in protest every time I touched non-Tomio in a romantic way.

  Maybe.

  But I didn’t think so, because a bond went both ways. And it wasn’t like there was any danger of lusting after Basil, for example, or Shereen, so I hadn’t fully bought my own theory, even if the idea of Tomio being my fated soul mate was romantic. I wished I’d had another crush that hadn’t been Gage, if only to have more data to work with. My father liked to say that answers presented themselves after enough data had been gathered, and if one didn’t have answers, it was simply because there wasn’t enough data.

  Well, here was another bit of data: When Tomio had called Junko’s parents, her mother answered. They spent some time doing a rapid catchup of the last decade, but the most dramatic change in their lives had been the loss of fire Junko’s father had endured. Tomio wasn’t permitted to give them information but he sympathized. When asked, Junko’s mother couldn’t recall Junko producing any colored flames, but Junko’s father contradicted her. He had in fact seen Junko’s idle when she’d been only two and a half years old, while his wife had worked her usual shift at the hospital.

  It had been late afternoon after a spring rain. He had held Junko’s hand as she’d toddled through the green space, following the winding sidewalk through thick sparkling grass. She’d been delighted by the earthworms, the way they squirmed and writhed across the walkway. She had given a squeal, the kind of squeal only a young child discovering something new and exciting about the world could emit. Along with that squeal had come a flash of fire from her fingertips, making the worm she’d squatted to touch writhe away. The worm’s obvious pain from the fire snuffed the child’s delight instantly, and snapped the idle off the way a lighter can be snapped off, but not before he’d gotten a good view of its startling hue.

  Red. Like a candy apple.

  Which meant Tomio’s fire should have gone out with the third batch, the one that took place while Nero had been in Yangjiang. Liu Xiaotian had lost her fire along with that group. While I hadn’t had much time for Liu, I still felt bad for her and wondered how she was coping. She had struck me as someone with a lot of pride in her capabilities.

  “Did you ever touch her?” I’d asked Tomio, meaning Liu. He hadn’t.

  The other mage who’d lost his fire while Nero had been in Yangjiang was Mehmet, who had confirmed that his idle fire had indeed been candy-apple red. No one doubted that the fires were being snuffed by idle any longer, but Tomio was the exception.

  “The exception that proves the rule,” I mused, as I watched the tracks. We could hear the train now, its whine ushered to us on a wind gusting from the north. We got out of the Land Rover as the train slowed and came to a stop at the platform.

  My stomach was full of butterflies, not only for what Georjie would be able to do for us, but just to see her. I had visited her in Blackmouth at Easter, but that visit felt like ancient history. So much had happened to both of us since then.

  “What does she look like?” Tomio came around the Evoque to stand beside me, scanning the passengers as they stepped through the train’s open doors.

  “Brown eyes. Blond. Slender. Six feet tall. So pretty, it’s painful.”

  “Six feet?!” Tomio’s eyes nearly fell out of his head.

  “She’s half-fae.” I said this like it explained her height, but I’d never seen any other fae and neither had Tomio, so I elaborated. “Georjie’s mom, Liz, isn’t particularly tall. She’s a hotshot lawyer, and as human as humans get. Up until recently, Georjie thought her dad was some dude named Brent, who wasn’t particularly towering himself, so Georjie was always conflicted and confused about her height. I mean, it can be handy, you know. She’s got exceptional reach, looks slim in every photo, and her legs go on for days. But kids used to make fun of her in elementary school. They called her Skeletor. Isn’t that brutal? Kids can be so mean. Anyway, Liz never bothered to be straight about her paternity, at least, not until recently, when Georjie learned the truth on her own. I hope Liz feels rotten about that, honestly. Turns out, her real dad is as fae as fae can get, and even glamoured her mom into getting pregnant because he himself was bewitched by a…”

  Tomio was looking at me like I’d sprouted two more heads, and neither of them would be shutting up anytime soon either.

  I wrapped up. “It’s complicated. There hasn’t been time to tell you much about my friends. We’ve been so focused on bringing Nero down. Sorry.”

  “But half-fae—” He looked poleaxed, and I enjoyed it. Tomio wasn’t easy to impress.

  Georjie’s pale blond hair grabbed me by the eyeballs. She emerged from the train behind an elderly couple wearing tweed and moving at the pace of tortoises, which they--now that I was looking--shared similarities with. Maybe it was the matching berets. Georjie held up a long arm, towering over them, a grin splitting her face.

  “Yep, she looks fae,” Tomio observed.

  Georjie glowed with good health and was exceptionally beautiful. If she’d wanted to be a supermodel, she could have done so. But she’d been clueless about her beauty until she was sixteen, mostly on account of jealous girls tearing her down to make themselves feel superior. She’d been painfully shy and nerdy, obsessed with photography and books, and complaining about her mother. But now she looked like a woman who knew who she was, a woman who liked herself, a woman who had seen trouble and dealt with it, a woman of substance, and confidence.

  Not to mention magic, and scads of it.

  Once she’d freed herself from behind the tortoise couple and stepped through the gate into the parking lot, we flew at one another. Tears threatened to spill from my eyes just from the warm, amber smell of her. Sh
e lay her cheek on the top of my head as she pulled me close; being five inches over me, that had become the way of our hugs. I wondered how Targa felt when Georjie swallowed her in a hug. Targa was another three inches smaller than me.

  Georjie released me and looked at Tomio, extending an elegantly formed hand. “You must be Tomio.”

  He shook with her and deadpanned, “Great to meet you, Georjayna. Saxony has told me nothing about you.”

  Georjie’s laugh tinkled out as I loaded her luggage into the back of the Evoque. “Well, sounds like you’ve been a little busy. I’m boring by comparison, I’m sure.”

  “Well, I know that much isn’t true.” Tomio gestured that Georjie should take the passenger side. He got into the back as I slammed the trunk closed, then slid behind the wheel.

  “Thank you for coming,” I breathed at her, exhilarated that she was here. I started the Evoque.

  Georjie waved a hand and pulled a pair of sunglasses out of her pocket. They made her look more effortlessly glamorous than should be legal. “Happy to be of service. How far to the academy? I’m dying to see it.”

  I shot her a grin. “Less than ten minutes.”

  A stab of fear lanced through me that Georjie wouldn’t be able to read anything from the dirt we’d gathered, that it was too damaged to hold memories, and that she’d traveled down from Blackmouth in vain. Well, almost in vain. Seeing her had done miracles for my mood. I swallowed down my fears and put the Land Rover into reverse. We had no data until she tried, and even if it failed, we had to exhaust all options.

  Piloting the Evoque out of the train’s parking lot, I steered us for Arcturus.

  Basil, Ms. Shepherd, Mehmet and Shereen were waiting for us on the front steps of Chaplin Manor as I piloted the Land Rover down the drive. They all knew what Georjie was capable of, I’d given them the best explanation I could. So, naturally they weren’t going to miss her arrival.