Into the Fire (The Mieshka Files, Book One) (16 page)

Meese cleared her throat. Robin realized she hadn’t said anything for a few minutes.

“So, the Fire Mage just teleported in and stopped a bullet? Did he teleport you back out?”

“No,” Meese said. “We walked.”

That was all she said. But her face said otherwise.

“That’s it?”

“Yep.”

Robin raised an eyebrow. Meese was lying.

“So you just went home after?”

“Yes.”

Again, Meese held her stare. Whatever it was, she wasn’t going to tell Robin.

A chirp interrupted them. Meese pulled at her phone and glanced at the screen.

“Shit,” she said, and started shovelling macaroni into her mouth.

“What?”

“I have to go,” she said between bites.

“Now?” Lunch was nearly over.

“Yeah.”

Chris was quiet. Robin watched as Meese, mouth full, scooped up her backpack and left. A limp hitched her to the left.

As the cafeteria door closed after her, Robin realized her mouth was open again. She closed it and turned to Chris, who was still eating.

“What was that about?”

“Something to do with the Mage.”

She studied him. He wasn’t meeting her eyes. He’d been with Meese. Underground. Supposedly. It had been their date.

Time to get to the bottom of this.

“Tell me more about this ‘Underground’.”

It didn’t rain, it poured.

Buck nosed the SUV through traffic. Water pelted down the windscreen, teeming so hard onto the street there was a mist-like back-splash two feet high. It never rained in Lyarne. The city couldn’t handle it.

Mieshka’s thoughts returned to the Underground.

“Hey, Buck,” she said.

Buck glanced over from the driver’s seat. His window wavered with water.

“If the Underground was buried because of flooding, did the Water Mage stop that problem?”

“She did.”

“So, with her gone…would the water come back?” She looked pointedly outside. Buildings were shrouded from the deluge.

“It’s already started.”

“Could Roger stop it?”

“No. He can’t do Mage spells.”

Interesting. Shouldn’t she be the same as him? If new-world magic couldn’t do the spells, how was she supposed to track the crystals?

Maybe Aiden had an answer. Or the Phoenix.

Her jaw tensed at the thought. Everything happened too fast. Last week, she’d been a normal girl. Well, maybe not a normal girl. A normal refugee girl. There was a difference in this city.

“Roger creeps me the hell out.”

The SUV nudged forward a car length. Farther up the congested street, the traffic light turned red. The rain gave it a halo.

“Roger creeps everyone the hell out.”

Buck had returned to staring through the flooded windscreen. His face was blank, but she saw the corner of his lip twitch.

She grinned, warming her hand in front of the heat vent.

It took them half an hour to reach Aiden’s office.

Mieshka’s feet squelched on the linoleum. It was colder in here than the car.

Soon, she’d never be cold again. The Phoenix would see to that.

She pushed the thought from her mind. Buck kept pace with her as she limped up the stairs.

Jo sat on a couch beside a crutch. Gun parts lay on the coffee table in front of her. With her bandaged hand, Jo had difficulty cleaning the part on her lap.

Perhaps feeling Mieshka’s stare, Jo looked up from her work. Mieshka dropped her backpack by the door, and her wet hoodie on top of it. It dripped onto the floor.

Aiden sat behind the desk in the corner, the glow lighting his face. His eyes looked more bagged than yesterday.

“It’ll be a while. I have to swap the program on my engine,” Aiden said. “It’s taking longer than I thought.”

Mieshka joined Jo on the couch. Jo didn’t look up.

“Wet out?” The stiff wire brush looked awkward in Jo’s hand.

“You’re right-handed, aren’t you?”

“Good guess.” Jo moved the brush across the metal. Oil shined on the surface. The movement was as stiff as the bristles. Watching them, Mieshka formed a plan.

“Me, too.”

Mieshka slowly dried. The Fire Mage had interior heating. They sat in silence.

When it came time to reassemble the gun, Jo swore softly. She leveraged parts against her thigh as she tried to slide them back together.

Mieshka perked up. This is what she had been waiting for.

“Here,” she said, “let me.”

Jo raised an eyebrow. Mieshka met her stare. After a moment, Jo moved her hand back.

Aware of being watched, Mieshka took the pieces from Jo’s lap, glanced them over, and slid them together.

“Next is…” Mieshka had already picked it up from the table. The bruise on her hand made it awkward to push into place.

Jo settled back and watched as Mieshka reassembled the gun, piece by piece. When she was done, she put it back in Jo’s lap, muzzle turned toward the door.

Silence. Jo picked it up and examined it. “Thought you didn’t like guns.”

“I’m getting over it.”

Behind them, she heard: “Where did you learn that?”

Aiden and Buck stared at her over the monitor.

“My mom.” At their stunned looks, she continued. “She was going to teach me to shoot, but she never had time.”

She saw them process the past tense.

Jo slid the gun into its holster. “I’m sure we can find time to teach you.”

“But not today.” Aiden stood up, squeezing past Buck. “We need to talk, Meese.”

Was everyone using her nickname now? She stood up, her still-damp shoes squeaking on the linoleum as she moved around the coffee table. Her skin prickled as she followed Aiden to the engine room.

Inside, static snapped over her hand. The air was heavier than she remembered. The pulse of energy reverberated in her chest.

“It’s working harder now. Before, the shield’s program was spread out over all three crystals. Now, one crystal works for the whole city. Just like Terremain’s.”

She caught his eye. Terremain’s shield didn’t work very well. The suburbs had been evacuated when the bombs tore through their streets. Terremain’s population was crowded into the core area. When the raids came, everyone squished into the bomb shelters.

In Lyarne, the shelters remained empty.

Aiden was silhouetted against the screen. Orange limned him.

It was very dim in there. Aiden still hadn’t replaced the bulb. In the light of things, she didn’t blame him.

Energy crackled through her transfer mark. It slid up her skin, warming her bones. The air thickened around her. She had the impression of something large in the room with them. It brushed against her, omnipresent, with a warmth similar to that of Aiden’s ship. She shivered as it pressed close in her chest, remembering eyes like ash staring at her soul.

Aiden plunked himself down in front of the screen and slid a USB key into the console. The screen filled with data. He gestured to the left.

“There’s a chair somewhere.”

She found it against the wall, its painted aluminum vaguely reflecting the orange glow. Carrying it over, she winced as the metal dug into her hand.

“Okay, so. Before we transfer the Phoenix into you, I thought I’d run you through what’s going to happen. And the basics of controlling an element.”

Mieshka leaned forward in her chair, stretching the muscles in her shoulders. Energy beat all around her. The transfer mark made her hand fall asleep. She’d been careful to wash around it this morning.

At her silence, Aiden continued. “So, you’ve already experienced a partial transfer. The full transfer will be the same. The ship will lock you into the chair again. It’s paranoid like that. Those lines will come back, they act as a, well—psychically, everyone has a spirit form. Whenever you dream, you use it. That psychic form is connected to your physical form at certain points on the body. The lines represent a system that hijacks that link.

“Normally, this is so a human can chat directly with the interface of a computer. In your case however, you’re like…” he trailed off.

“A USB key?” Mieshka supplied helpfully, looking at the one glinting on the console.

“More like a tablet computer. With really complicated programming. Built by aliens.”

In the dim, Mieshka raised an eyebrow. He really hadn’t rehearsed this speech.

“I thought you were the alien.”

“That’s dependant on point of view,” he said.

Mieshka closed her eyes and leaned back. The chair creaked under her.

“So, the crystal transfers into me, and I get a shit-load of power that can maybe find the other crystals?”

“That’s the idea.”

“A human engine without a removable crystal, then?”

“Yes. I guess you got that bit. It’ll offload a lot of power into you, so I want to teach you the basics of using it beforehand. Remember when you made fire before? Now, you’ll learn how to put it out.”

A fire the size of a teacup lapped into his hand. Cradled in his palm, the flames left dances of retinal burn in the background. Heat sunk into her face.

“Put it out,” he said. “Focus.”

She felt through her link and dampered it with a thought.

“Good,” he said. “And again.”

The fire reappeared, bigger and hotter. It was blue this time. She didn’t get it on her first try.

“Go for the base first. That’s what firefighters do.”

She did. It piddled out.

“Good,” he said again. He smiled.

“How am I doing that?”

“With your mind. Psychic sense. Like everything, it needs exercise to become strong. In lieu of that, knowledge can help.”

The air prickled around her; the tingling from the transfer extended up her arm. She didn’t trust that smile.

“Again,” he said.

The room roared. It wasn’t dark anymore. Heat beat into her, choked her throat. Mieshka forced herself to stay in her chair, staring as the flames brushed the ceiling. Not an inch of the room was bare. She couldn’t see the walls anymore. Even Aiden was on fire, though he didn’t seem to mind.

Well, at least her hair was dry.

Aiden turned his head back to the computer screen. How he could see it in the blaze, she didn’t know.

“Sometimes it helps to move about,” he said.

She stood. Fire licked at her knees. It didn’t hurt. It reminded her of the Phoenix’s fire. The transfer mark buzzed into her bones. Which magic was she channelling, Aiden’s or the engine’s?

It didn’t matter. Letting go of the thought, she walked into the fire.

Go for the base
, she thought.

She did.

All thoughts of the Phoenix disappeared as she worked. It took a long time to put it all out. The room grew steadily darker, until only a tealight of a flame wobbled by her feet.

She stepped on it.

“Programming’s just about uploaded,” Aiden said. He hadn’t turned around. “You ready?”

Stifling a yawn, she nodded. It was quiet all around. She sat back down and squirmed. Somehow, she’d managed to get a bruise on her butt.

Her cell phone rang. She pulled it out, glanced at the screen, and raised an eyebrow at the Caller ID.

“Why are you calling me?”

Aiden looked over sharply. “My office phone?”

As he took it from her hand, it stopped ringing. Mieshka sat up nervously as he shifted through the Caller ID. A second later, a text rolled in. She craned her neck to look at the screen.

SOLDIERS.

Aiden said something she didn’t understand. It didn’t sound nice. He leaned over the engine’s console, fingers flying over the keys. Soon, an image of the stairwell popped into view. They were just in time to see Jo fly past and disappear down the next flight. An instant later, the picture was full of armed men.

“Well, shit,” Aiden said.

CHAPTER 11

Somehow, seeing them on camera made it surreal. There hadn’t been any sound from outside.

“Any other way out?” Mieshka said.

“No. The whole room is reinforced with steel, though.”

“Steel and an angry Fire Mage?” A nervous laugh fluttered out of her.

Aiden didn’t reply. He stared at the screen. There was a hollow look to his face. Mieshka swallowed the next laugh. Magic hadn’t helped the other two Mages.