Dark and heat and light. A tightness across his chest, growing tighter. The dark withdrew as the light grew, his closed eyelids turning red as a sun in . . . a place he couldn’t recall, slipping away by inches.
Remember, warned his mother, weaving her thoughts into his in a cross-stitch, clarifying years of gaps, of things he had purposefully cut out, building emptiness to convince himself he wasn’t already empty. Remember to always keep yourself close. You are alive in the land of the dead. The very air will try to take what makes you, claim it, and wipe it out. You’ve only just taken back what you lost. Remember how. Remember why. Remembering is what will rebuild the door back to living. Not just for you, but for —
Eli opened his heavy eyes, nostrils flaring with the burning. “Christ!” He tried to pull back from the fire in his face but couldn’t get far. The flame banked with his exhale, and when the white dots cleared from his vision, Eli saw the flickering blaze was held in an outstretched palm, and above it an impatient, twisted mouth.
Roan’s mouth.
“What the hell are you doing?” Eli croaked. There were other things he’d wanted to say to her now that he’d found her, but best to deal with the immediate threats.
He was lying on his side, shoulders tight to his ears. His knees were bent under him, stiff, locked. He tried to move his hands, wrists grinding at the small of his back, ankles much the same behind him.
Confusion turned into panic. “A little much, Harken, don’t you think?”
She kneeled next to him, face blank, head cocked. “What’s that word you keep calling me, demon?”
Demon? This was . . . less than ideal. “Your name, you Lost Boy reprobate.” Eli struggled against the knots, tried to pull his arms up, but realized more bonds were tight around his chest and waist, binding him in a full harness. Thorough. Eli scowled internally.
“This is ludicrous! You have eyes in your head — I can barely stand let alone do you any harm. Let me go.” He tried to master his face, at least, but he still had a right to be pissed.
Roan twisted her wrist and the flame seeped back into her skin. “And how else was I supposed to carry you back here?” She stood with a snap of her thighs, moving away behind Eli so he couldn’t see what she was doing. “Besides, I had to sleep, and I don’t know what kind of demon you are.” He heard her laugh once, oddly ominous. “Not yet, anyway.”
His heart slammed into his chest like a spooked horse against its stall. “What are you doing?” Eli tried again to pull himself up, dragging his body forward by inches; there was heat at his back, though the ground under him was sharp and cool. He needed to rein in the ever-rising panic and catch his breath, turn it into a piece of wind in his loose, flexing fingers . . .
A boot came down hard on his hands and he screeched.
“Best keep your tricks to yourself,” Roan said above him. The smirk was gone from her voice.
“Nng,” Eli grunted. “This really isn’t necessary, Harken. I don’t know what you think I’m going to —”
The boot heel crushed his knuckles into the ground and he cried out.
“You said we were the same. I’ll admit, you’re the first demon I’ve seen to mimic living flesh, but this world gets smarter each day. I won’t allow it to outsmart me.”
Suddenly the pressure was gone, and Eli finally breathed, shaking as Roan stalked away across the dark shale. Cold sweat ran down the back of his neck, and he managed to turn his head just enough to see her over his shoulder, but she was measuring him, arms folded, deciding what to do next.
A blaze wound around her body like a loyal dog. Eli’s jaw tightened.
I could always reach into her mind, he thought. But with that look, she’d likely finish me for it.
Instead, Eli tried to get back to basics and figure out where they were. Put simply, by the look and smell of it, they were in a cavern — cold, earthy. Beyond the entrance, ten feet from where Roan stood, inkier darkness. Night. What struck Eli the most, however, were the floating ambient flames scattered around them in the air, casting dancing shadows from blades of damp rock. A constant dripping echoed somewhere in the distance, but from where Eli had been tied up, he couldn’t tell how deep the cavern went; into the dark at the back of it were pinprick lights, more little flames.
How deep it went didn’t matter just then. This was Roan’s domain, and he wasn’t going anywhere until she allowed it.
Or until he bested her. And if not through a contest of strength, then it’d have to be wits and will. Two areas where Foxes and Owls were evenly matched. Damn.
Eli tightened his abdomen and pulled himself to sitting, easing against the far wall. She watched him do this and didn’t move to stop him, the fire at her back banking with a shift of her shoulder, the tilt of her inquisitive head. She seemed taller somehow, though Eli realized that as long as he’d known her, Roan had been prone to hunching her shoulders. Living like a wild animal improved her posture, at least. Eli failed to stifle a snicker.
Roan bared her teeth. “I could kill you now, demon, if that’s what you came here for.”
Eli coughed, trying to prevent himself from falling into a hysterical spasm. “It’s just too much, honestly.” He shook his greasy hair from his eyes. “I only wish you could see the irony. You’d be the first to point it out.”
He scrutinized her clothing, handmade, far from the jeans and hoodie he’d seen her in last, her feet and hands wrapped in fabric, forearms and calves armoured. Her garnet blade was lashed in a belt. Who had outfitted her? Who had trained her? Gods knew she was barely battle-blooded, even after Zabor. Now she was a one-woman army. She even seemed . . . older.
How had she changed so much in so little time? How had she surpassed Eli?
And why did it annoy him so much?
There was a spark quick as flash paper. Roan slid in front of him then, the flame she’d snatched from mid-air engulfing her hand and hurtling towards Eli’s face. His body tensed.
“You act like you know me,” Roan said. The light seemed to be pulsing beneath her skin. Her eyes were bright. “How? ”
The very air will try to take what makes you, claim it, and wipe it out. No hungry worms this time, but Roan definitely did not recognize him.
Eli didn’t know if he had the patience to remind her, let alone the language to bring her back. At least they both spoke snark rather fluently.
“You think you can threaten me with that?” Eli deflected, grinning, though he was really testing the limits here. “Look at the scar on my forehead. Whose handiwork do you think that is?”
Her sharp stare flicked to where he’d indicated. He hated to admit that having her not look him directly in the eye, even for a second, was a great relief. The flame got closer as she surveyed his face, pushing his hair out of the way and pressing her thumb into the knotted blemish.
“Easy!” he snapped. Her hands were rough, warm. His chest tensed.
The flame lowered — so did her hand. “We are enemies, then.”
Eli ran his tongue over his teeth, picking the words carefully. “At the start we were. That was my fault.” She leaned back on her haunches, listening; sweat gathered on his jaw. “But you and I, we’ve been through some . . . things. World-altering things. Things that made us allies.” He wanted to say friends but felt that’d be pushing it. There was nothing friendly about this Roan.
For a second, her face lost some of its tight suspicion, and the words rushed out of him: “We fought together. We came to this world together. You’ve forgotten, but I can make you remember. All of it. If you let me.”
Roan stood slowly. She came around to Eli’s right side, hands on her hips. She sighed, and he felt foolish with hope.
She kicked him over onto his stupid face.
“If I don’t remember you,” she said, almost bored, “it’s likely because I chose not to.”
Eli felt the rope across his chest tighten, squeezing the argument out of him. She had gripped his bonds from behind. “I’ll admit there’s something familiar about you. A bad taste in my mouth, you could say.” Suddenly Eli was being dragged backward, on his side across the ground. He struggled but got nowhere. “You talk of things long past, but how can that be? I’ve always been here. There was no before the Deadlands for me. As for you, well. You’re an interloper. I watched you fall from the sky myself. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just another beast to be gutted, though you’re more talkative than the others before you.”
“Wait,” Eli huffed. “Wait, stop —”
She dropped him back onto his stomach. He jerked as his bare feet touched fire over an empty ledge.
Then Eli was hauled upward and above the smoking firepit Roan had nearly dumped him into. He lurched to a stop, twisting as he spun slowly like a rotisserie chicken over a bonfire while Roan tied the line off at a spike of rock in the wall. The harness around his trunk dug through his sweater, cutting into flesh where she’d sliced the wool away, back at the bog. He could barely breathe.
“Now,” she went on, businesslike and dusting off her hands smartly. “Talkative works to my benefit. Information has its rewards. Shades are chatty, too, but when they’ve become corrupted, they become Bloodbeasts, so you can see my predicament. Are you either of the two? Are you both? Are you something new entirely come to rip my throat out? I’m very torn.”
Eli tried to swallow, dragging air through his nose as he stared down into the deep, flaming hole less than three feet below him. The cuffs of his pants singed. His flesh would blacken before the ropes would.
“Pretty speech. I can’t see you being torn about this, though, no.” His throat was dry, strained as a hanged man. “You’re enjoying this. I don’t blame you.”
Roan smiled, lifting her shoulders in an airy shrug. “I could have killed you while you slept. But you’re right. Where’s the fun in that?”
Eli didn’t have the breath to snipe further, icy dread creeping. Roan may not remember him, but she certainly sounded like him, the Eli who would have done the same thing to her were the tables turned, once upon a time.
“You’re still you,” he hazarded. “You won’t kill me. You can’t. You’re not like this.”
She flicked invisible dirt from her shoulder, ignoring him. “Killing you wouldn’t help either of us, you’re right. But when a beast is desperate enough, that’s when you learn the most about them.”
Her finger pointed above him like a gun. The floating flames near the line suspending him moved nearer to the rope.
His face whipped to hers. “I was good and desperate before you planned to roast me,” he shouted.
“Desperation is survival, demon. And at least with desperation comes the truth. That’s all I’m after.”
Eli’s face contorted. “I’ve already told you the truth!” he said, voice cracking. “I came here for you! To save you! I can see what a bloody mistake that was.”
“Save me from what?” she asked almost sweetly. Eli cranked his head to watch the line above coming apart strand by strand. “How can you save me if you can’t save yourself?”
“Let him burn,” came another voice from the dark. Eli tensed, looking beyond Roan to the white pinpricks he’d seen earlier. Not more floating flames in that hollow black — eyes, advancing. White-coin eyes in Fox-shade heads, at least ten of them coming into the light.
“Whatever he is,” said another shade, thrusting its snout towards him, “he will try to tear you down with his intentions.”
Oh good, a peanut gallery. He’d had his fair share of brushes with Owl shades, and Roan, like Demelza, seemed aligned with them.
Eli’s eyes stung suddenly, which surprised him more than Roan. “You’re going to make me beg, aren’t you?” He grimaced, jerking his head at the shades. “The dead have nothing to lose. Burn me, and you lose everything.”
The shades yipped. “Demon,” they hissed, “enemy.”
Eli stared steadily at Roan, only at Roan, the fire dancing wickedly over her impassive face. Would she listen to him over the souls clinging to her heels?
He hadn’t wanted to do this, but it was the only tactic he had left.
Please, Eli sent the thought out at her like an offering, penitent. He saw her eyes widen, and he reached further. Please, Roan.
The images flooded out of him and over her — Winnipeg. The two of them locked together as they plummeted through the Pool of the Black Star. The Golden Boy in a deluge. The pressure of his arm around her over a wide open sea. A golden tether, tighter than the one she’d bound him with now, pulling her free from poison darkness. Remember me, he repeated into her head with all the desperation she demanded of him. Remember yourself.
Eli felt all the force of her rage as she shoved him out of her mind, heard the furious roar from her mouth as she launched a volley of flame at him. The line above him snapped, and his heart lurched as the pit raced up to meet him.
As he exhaled, the wind rose.
The torrent of air pushed out of Eli’s lungs and leapt into his crushed hands, then burst outward again like cannon shot, slicing the lines holding him, and throwing him into the nearest wall.
He crumpled, groaned.
Hands were clenched into his sweater, hauling him over and holding him up. The hands were shaking.
“What did you just do to me?” Roan snarled into his face.
“You wanted the truth,” he croaked. “I tried to . . . show you.”
“You put things in my head! Against my will!” She shook him as if trying to keep him from blacking out. “I should kill you now!”
He put a weak hand to the centre of her chest and she went still. “Do what you want,” he said, “just kindly stop rattling me around.”
She breathed unevenly under his palm, like an animal in a trap. He let his hand drop. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know doing that . . . always creeped you out. But I didn’t put anything in your mind. I just showed you my own memories. ”He winced. “Yours are deeply buried. Locked away.” By what, he couldn’t guess. An outside force, or something she’d done to herself?
Roan’s face struggled between rage and confusion. He expected her to roast him there and then, but instead she loosened her grip, let go.
Her mouth was a hard line. “It took you long enough to free yourself,” she said.
Eli stiffly rubbed his wrists. “So that was a test, then? To see what I could do?”
She shrugged. “As I expected, you can’t do much. I don’t know how much use you’ll be to me, after all.”
Use?
Strange air whuffed through the back of Eli’s head, and he caught sight of a Fox shade’s pinprick eyes hovering over him. “You would’ve been better off to burn him, lady,” the shade advised. “This one will trouble you until the end with its hollow talk.”
Eli jerked up and the shade danced away into a cluster of the others that stood by the cavern entrance. He thought he saw the tall, floppy ears of a Rabbit amongst them, but it shimmered away into the night before he could get a closer look.
Eli coughed awkwardly. “You going to give me back my personal space, Harken?”
She blinked then stood, slapping the dust off herself. “I’m not going to kill you, but I don’t trust you.” She moved away, as if she’d made up her mind. “You can’t stay here.”
Dumbstruck, Eli watched as the bulbous flames in the air around Roan made contact with her body, sliding back into her and leaving Eli in the advancing dark like an afterthought.
“You’re kicking me out?” he said. “You beat me within an inch of my life then toss me to the metaphysical curb?”
She was quiet for a while, looking past Eli and at the shades fidgeting behind him. With a jerk of her head, they bounded out of the cavern, their fox-yips sounding like taunting laughter in the echoing night.
Roan squinted at Eli. “Where did you come from? When you fell.”
The only light left in the cavern was the blazing pit between them. Eli pointed upward. “The Roost. What’s left of it, anyway. Before that, somewhere in the Atlantic.” He stretched his legs out in front of him. “We came here intentionally, together. But things haven’t exactly been going to plan since we were separated.”
“What plan? Came through where?” Her flames licked upward, and for a second it looked like they wound through her hair like a child’s fingers.
Eli just groaned, shaking his head. “Somewhere that gets farther away the more we bicker about it. I told you. I can show you everything and we can be on our way to —”
“Enough,” she snapped. Her hand was around her own throat. “I’m not going anywhere. Least of all with you. You can rest here, and in the morning you’ll go. To where, I can’t say I care. You’re nothing to me.”
Eli was, for the first time in a long time, speechless. Roan had always been a pigheaded, stubborn brat, but going further with her like this was obviously dangerous. Part of his power had been restored to him, but it wouldn’t be near enough. If she came at him again, that’d be it.
He tilted his head in momentary submission, then looked back up. “You said you were expecting to get some use out of me. May I ask what for?”
She stopped mid-turn. “You may, but don’t expect me to supply the answer.”
She’d needed him for something. Eli clung to the opportunity. “Why don’t we make a deal, then? You’re a Fox, yes? Foxes love deals, I hear.”
Her mismatched eyes ranged over him, calculating. Either way, he didn’t have much to lose.
She walked around the fire pit then, running her hand and arm through it thoughtfully. “What sort of deal?”
Eli got to his feet, even managed to straighten despite how his back protested. He opened his arms. “I show you how useful I can be. You allow me that one chance, and if I don’t prove worthy to you, then I walk out of this hole and the considerably busy life of ne’er-do-welling you’ve got going here.”
She didn’t look at him. A gob of fire bounced between her hands in lazy arcs.
“Roan Harken.” She spoke the name mockingly, as if he’d made it up to insult her. “What kind of a name is that, anyway?”
Eli was out of gambits. “The name of my friend.”
The flame disappeared and one hand went to Roan’s side, brushing over the sword hilt.
He swallowed. “Perhaps you could use a friend, too, but I won’t presume. Since we’re starting from scratch again. It was hard enough the first time.”
“Hard for who?”
Eli realized he’d been clutching the edge of his sweater in his hands. He wiped the moisture from them, jaw relaxing. “I’ll let you guess.”
The one hand left the hilt. The other stretched out towards him.
“One night and one chance,” she said. “Then you’re gone.”
He hesitated, wondering if he’d be burned for his own trust, but he clasped her hand in his. Her skin was still somehow cool — everything about her was control. No more girl burning up from the inside with unchecked power and unflagging uncertainty. He was hers to destroy if she decided.
She pulled away half a second after contact, whirled, and stalked to her dark cavern corner.
“I’m Eli, in case you were wondering,” he called after her dumbly.
“I wasn’t,” she said, crouching and watching him unblinkingly.
Eli scoffed, then shook his head. “You’d find this all funny if you were in your right mind, Harken.” He pushed his fingers into his eyes, muttering, “You’d find it funnier because you never were.”
She continued staring. Evidentially, she wasn’t going to shut her eyes until he did.
Eli returned to his own designated rock wall. The fire in the pit went down like a curtain but didn’t extinguish all the way. He didn’t relish lying down on the hard floor, but it was better than staying upright for any longer. Growing heavier with each breath, he splayed out like a star, shut his eyes, then placed a hand over his chest, where he had every night, reassured and haunted by the Moonstone.
“Friend,” Roan muttered suddenly, hand to her chest, rubbing absently. When she caught him looking, she frowned, so he rolled away, facing the wall.
It took hours before Eli fell asleep, his heartbeat finally slowing beneath his hand.
“So what did Roan need Eli for?”
It was the next day — if days could be called that here — and Saskia had laid awake all night in Baskar’s tree, replaying this information. She wanted more of the story. She knew it was the key to bringing Roan and Eli back and helping them do what they’d come here for.
Baskar had met Saskia outside of the open bole, dipping their characteristically tilted head at her as she climbed awkwardly out.
“Good day to you, too,” Baskar sniffed, avoiding the question with one of their own. “What have you got there?”
Under Saskia’s arm was the tablet — she’d been testing the Onyx’s receiver to see if she could get any messages through. Still nothing. “Before I came here, I received a message from . . . someone else who came through. You wouldn’t happen to know Barton Allen, would you?”
She’d waited till now to ask, especially knowing what little she’d discovered about this mysterious Heartwood tree she had yet to investigate.
Baskar shrugged. The odds and bobs of their shell reminded her of all the things she used to collect on walks as a child, disparate bits completely at home when put together. “I know no one else living but Roan and Eli. And you. Saskia.” They spoke her name carefully, tipping their lopsided, lopeared head down at her. “You are very interested in Roan and Eli,” they continued. They couldn’t exactly frown, but it came across in their high voice. “They’re enemies, if you did not already gather that.”
She clicked her tongue, and they walked together around Cinder Town’s epicentre. “Uh huh. But I think they can become allies again.”
“But they were enemies before even that,” Baskar recounted with the air of the lecturer, as it had been yesterday. “So you see, it is inevitable that the story repeats itself.”
Saskia shook her head. “If they break the cycle, they can accomplish their original goal of —”
“Shh!” Baskar pressed a twiggy finger to where their mouth would be beneath the mask. They passed by a few Hounds, who had their heads pointed towards them, semi-sneering with their burning eyes.
“I have only just returned to my mistress’s good graces,” Baskar reminded her. “Keep your machinations to yourself, thank you.”
Saskia was agog. Baskar really didn’t want to talk about Ancient. Already a bad sign. “If you didn’t want to help me, why bother telling me any of this at all?” She prodded Baskar’s side, but they only peered over at her. “You love stories. Theirs is central to this entire world. And if I’m going to know the General’s enemy, then . . . I need to know it all.”
Now she was taking a page out of Chancellor Grant and the ETG’s playbook. Study them so you can conquer them. Or get them back in their right minds. That Saskia had to do this at all was unfair, to say the least. She’d already done the work to get down here. Surely they could stop moving the goal posts.
“A story for a story,” the archivist intoned. Saskia wondered what Baskar had been like in life; if they’d been this insufferable, for instance. “Tell me a story of you now. Who is Barton Allen?”
Saskia was keenly aware that the Rabbit getting close to her was probably Roan’s ploy. To make Saskia one of her Hounds and make the Onyx her own. But she wanted to trust Baskar.
Saskia looked around, then yanked Baskar into an alcove. They clattered but didn’t come apart, pressed shoulder to shoulder with Saskia as she booted up the tablet and tapped away.
She swiped. “I like to build things.” A few photos were all she’d had at hand to show Baskar, but they leaned in eagerly to look. “I initially got into this mess because of this.”
In the photo gallery, the first thing to show up was the original, terrible sketch Saskia had made of the Deon VR illusion, cribbed from the lore book lying around the apartment and Phae and Barton’s descriptions. “This is the fox warrior, Deon. Roan could change into her, because she had the Calamity Stone. Did you know that?”
Baskar looked from Saskia, to the screen, back and forth. “Roan is Deon now, though. Because she has the Opal.”
Saskia sighed. “It’s not the same.” Nothing was. She swiped through some of the 3D models, and the next thing that came up was a photo of Saskia and Ella.
“Who is that?” Baskar pointed, finger hovering over the screen, then tapping it experimentally. Saskia brushed it away.
“She is someone you love,” Baskar said. “I may have been dead a long while, but I remember that look.”
Saskia bit her tongue with some surprise. Being surrounded by these weird, puppet-bodied shades, she’d completely forgotten that they’d been alive once.
“You said you didn’t remember much of your life,” Saskia recalled.
Baskar took the tablet, bringing it closer to their face, and ultimately bonking it against the wooden mask for bringing it a tad too close. “I remember love. I remember it was a bit difficult, finding any for myself when I did not ascribe to any available gender.” Baskar dipped their head at Saskia, giving the tablet back. “Would it be different for me now, in your Uplands?”
Saskia hadn’t been expecting that question. “People fear what they don’t understand,” she answered. Baskar lifted a shoulder, then swiped across the screen to another picture. A picture of a picture, really. The original had been ripped in half and thrown in the trash, but Saskia pulled it out, carefully taped it up, and taken a digital photo to make sure it couldn’t get lost again.
“That’s him,” she said, coming back around to Baskar’s first question. “Barton Allen.”
In the picture were her and Barton. She had a medal around her neck from the track meet. This was the year Barton went to the Old Leg, thinking he was helping, and hadn’t come home. But before that, all of his running influence had rubbed off on Saskia, and she’d competed at school for the first time. Saskia was on Barton’s back, and Phae had her arms around him.
Saskia shut the tablet off, remembering what Barton had said to her that same night, before she went to bed. They’d both been wired from the excitement, and in a rare moment of quiet, he’d blurted, “I told you, like, a million times about the Battle of Zabor, right?”
She’d shrugged, half-grinning. “A hundred million, yeah.”
“We all came together. All five of us, in that moment where we put Zabor away. It was a weird experience, invading everyone else’s thoughts, being in sort of, like, one mind. I dunno.” He was smiling to himself, trying to find the words. “We all had these little flashes, these visions. I thought I saw . . .” He glanced at Saskia, suddenly sheepish. “Well, I thought I saw a kid. My kid. And I was watching him run a track, and I was so proud of him.”
“Him?” Saskia felt disappointment wash over her, and he saw it.
“Wait, wait,” he said, “let me finish. What I saw was an impression. Son. Daughter. Sibling. It didn’t matter. It was that proud feeling. That feeling that, whoever that kid was, we’d built something precious together. Blood or not.”
He’d taken Saskia’s hand then. “I felt that again today. The exact same feeling. That’s not something I could ever mistake. It was like I was fighting that giant snake, and all my friends were there, and we had done something good and beautiful. Thank you for reminding me of that, Saskia.”
She shut her eyes and swallowed hard. Then something clumsy and slightly pointy took Saskia’s hand. She blinked in surprise to realize it was Baskar.
“Even this far from life, the dead do not forget love,” they said. Then they leaned over Saskia, peering out for any passing Hounds, but the coast was clear. When they came back to her, their strange eyes sparkled. “Roan and Eli hadn’t forgotten, either.”