Into the Fire (The Mieshka Files, Book One) (5 page)

Sounds disappeared.

There was no ship, no console, no Aiden. Just pure, abyssal black.

She couldn’t feel her body anymore.

She couldn’t hear her breath.

Silence. Nothing. Darkness. A place without time.

A tiny prick of light appeared. In this infinite place she couldn’t tell if it was in the distance and getting closer, or simply growing larger. Slowly, it shifted into the shape of a bird, red-orange wings beating against an unknown wind. Their sound was quickly swallowed by the dark.

As it grew closer, she saw that it was a large bird. It had a wingspan wider than her arms, and its body was made of a deep red-orange colour. On either side of its tail, two feathers trailed like a peacock’s train, their deep ochre colour ending in an eye of yellow-gold. Its body seemed to move between solid and flame, blurring in parts. At the end of a long, slender neck was a tapered head. It tilted, staring with eyes like white, burning ash.

“Mieshka,” it seemed to say. Words moved like thoughts in this dark place. Heat shimmered around it, matching the fire that now coursed through Mieshka’s bones. It drew slowly closer, its outstretched wings unmoving. Perhaps it didn’t need them to fly.

Those white-hot eyes blinked once, and its head dipped lower.

“I have been waiting for you,” it said. Its great wings beat once, and the power of a thousand suns raced through her soul. It didn’t hurt.

Its wings stretched out once again, spreading to the horizons in this infinite place. Fire crackled with thought. She would never be cold again, it promised.

“I have been alone,” said the Phoenix, ashen eyes blinking fire like tears. “Now you are here.”

It raised its head in a cry—a long, fierce, musical cry that shook her non-existent lungs—and it vanished.

Everything went black. Again. And cold.

Her hands gripped the armrests. Slowly, she lifted them off. There was no resistance. Putting them safely in her lap, she sat up and looked around. There was no light, but she heard a noise behind her.

“Are you okay?” Aiden’s voice came from beside her, close to the floor.

She swallowed. Her whole body tingled.

“I think so.”

Fire slipped into the air like a wayward will o’ wisp, illuminated the dead console to her left. She flinched away from it. Warmth danced over her skin.

“I pulled the kill-switch. Once you get out of the chair, I’ll turn the power back on.” The firelight danced over Aiden, who lay on the floor with his head under the console.

She did so stiffly, careful not to touch the armrests again. The tingling turned to pinpricks as she squeezed around the chair. She stepped over his legs, ducked her head away from the low ceiling, and moved from the console. Her shadow stuttered wildly across the hallway.

“What happened?”

“Your magic happened.” He fiddled with something underneath. Metal scraped against metal.

She waited. He didn’t elaborate.

“There was a phoenix talking to me.”

The scraping stopped. The fire guttered briefly, reflected in the shadowy walls. The chrome gleamed.

“This ship is kind of special. It runs on a sentient power force, just like the shield. It figured out that it could transfer into you.”

“Transfer into me?” She wasn’t a computer.

He slid forward until his head cleared the console, and leaned against the navigator’s chair. The fire moved with him, settling near the floor. Its light glittered in his eyes.

“We might as well have this talk now. Do you want to sit?”

She glanced at the pilot’s chair, which remained dark. Sitting hadn’t worked well the last time. Still, she lowered herself to the floor and crossed her legs, leaning against the corner of a wall.

“Have you heard of living evolution?”

She shook her head. She’d studied evolution in class two years ago, but never heard of ‘living evolution’.

Aiden continued: “It’s like evolution, except it happens during a single lifetime. No need to pass on genetic material and evolve through descendants. Magic in this world is new and weird. Not really like in my home world. My home world developed with magic, so our sciences reflected magic. Here, well, think of the world as one big organism. A foreign body comes in, and the organism develops defences for it. Like antibodies for a virus. Magic sprang up in response to us Mages crash-landing in this world. It’s unpredictable and random, so the old technology works at odds with it sometimes.”

He cradled one hand in the other. She saw where the fire had burnt the skin.

“So, I’m like a white blood cell?”

“More like an antibody. From what I saw, your magic allows you to channel stuff. Basically, if we had let the Phoenix continue, you’d be a full-blown Fire Mage with its power. Quite a bit of power, mind you. Probably, if I’d left you alone, you might have lived a few years—maybe even the rest of your life—without knowing magic. But I’m running out of time. I need an apprentice.”

She hadn’t quite followed him.

“So you’re a virus?”

He stared at her through the fire. “A body will develop antibodies for anything it doesn’t understand. It’ll even kill the wrong type of blood.”

Right. She understood that.

The firelight pronounced the shadows on his face. For a moment, he almost looked like her father, with the lines grieved into his skin. His eyes held hers steadily.

With the next flick of flame, he was the Mage again, waiting for her response.

She curled her sleeves around her fists.

“Why do you need an apprentice?”

He leaned forward with a smile, teeth glinting in the light.

“Magic is dangerous. Can’t let you whippersnappers run amok with it now, can we?”

His smile dropped at her raised eyebrow. The navigator’s seat rocked as he leaned back. “Sorry. I’m not old enough to say ‘whippersnapper’. There’s more than one reason. An apprentice gives me security that what I know won’t die with me and my old world. I can’t teach my mercenaries—they don’t have magic—and I can’t write it down. Tried that, doesn’t work. There’s only so much you can learn from a book. With magic, you gotta learn by
doing
.”

Aiden yawned. Silence stretched out between them again. She felt a yawn pulling at the back of her jaw, too.

“Also, magic
is
dangerous. If us Mages didn’t have the shield to worry about… well, we’d probably have more apprentices. Maybe even set up a school.”

Mieshka remembered she was skipping. She hid her wince.

“Buck said there were other people with magic. Besides Mages.”

“There are. One’s with the Water Mage, one’s in Terremain. ” He paused. “There are several in Mersetzdeitz, but then everything’s in Mersetzdeitz, isn’t it?”

She smiled at the joke. That was what they said about Mersetzdeitz. Pretty city, bigger than Lyarne, and untouchable on its plateau. Mersetzdeitz was Lyarne’s ally, bordering Lyarne’s mountains. Several train tunnels connected the two.

And yes, everything was in Mersetzdeitz.

She shifted where she sat. The edge of the wall had dug into her back.

“Is there anyone else in Lyarne?”

“I don’t suppose there is.” Aiden shifted, too, sitting more upright. “Your guess is as good as mine. The only way I can track magic is by sending Buck out with the Bee—er—Energy Detecting Device.”

So that’s what it was called.

“You don’t have to decide now, but I’ll need an answer within the week. I really am short on time.”

He made to get up. She followed him, knee cracking as she stood.

“I’ll talk to my dad. Will I miss school?”

“Any more than you are now? No. I won’t wreck a perfectly good Lyarnese education. But there is one thing.”

He’d stopped just as she’d thought he would pass her.

“I need to put a tracking spell on you. As insurance. Hard to keep track of people, these days.”

She froze. More magic?

He must have seen the look on her face, because he quickly added: “Don’t worry, this won’t hurt.”

That’s what he’d said before.

A few blocks away, at the top of an Uptown highrise, James Redenbacher sat behind his desk and enjoyed the sun-filled scene of Lyarne’s sloping cityscape.

He wore a tailor-made, well-pressed, slate-grey suit over a dove-grey shirt, with a pair of gold cuff-links that his wife had given him on their last anniversary. His tie was a metallic robin’s egg blue, and his shoes had been polished this morning.

His office was warm, with a large, flat-screen TV built into the bookshelf on the wall opposite the windows. His desk, equipped with a few secret panels, had been ordered from a carpenter in Mersetzdeitz. Its top was protected by a rectangle of sage-green leather, on which sat a small laptop computer and a large glass of alcohol.

When the phone rang, he turned his thoughts to the latter.

“Yes?”

He listened for a moment as the person—the Swarzgard military’s commander—uttered a few formalities. By the time the commander had finished, Redenbacher’s left hand pressed down hard upon the desk’s leather so that his emotions wouldn’t show in his voice.

“Thank you, Commander. I would like to get down to business. My daughter is waiting for me at home.”

Which wasn’t true. She had band practice today. He simply did not want to spend more time on the phone than he had to. He could already feel the stress churning his gut.

“Yes, the new men have settled into the lower levels. Gerard will see that they are looked after.” His eyes locked on the glass of alcohol at the reminder, then turned a dead stare out the window. “The first prisoner has not tried to escape. I think he recognized the material.”

Just think of it as renting out space
, he told himself. A seagull flew by his window, its small, refined body and black-tipped wings making it a northern—Russian—seagull, as opposed to the fatter ones he usually saw by the lake.

His fingers drummed on the desk.

“They plan to take the next one tomorrow, as per your command.”

He wasn’t sure why the commander was talking to him. He supposed it was a courtesy. Gerard ran the operation, really. Redenbacher was just the landlord.

The commander began to wrap up the conversation. Redenbacher relaxed. He swivelled his chair to see the small bar in the corner, eyes slipping over the various, dark-coloured bottles. He suspected he was going to need more than one glass tonight.

What was treason, anyway?
He mused. He’d never sworn an oath to Lyarne.

Somehow, he didn’t think a court would buy that.

Mieshka let the apartment door close behind her, reducing the hallway’s light to a gold crack at the bottom of the frame. Sunset was long past. From the far side of the dark living room, light from their neighbour’s television flickered through the vertical blinds.

The pizza boxes mounted high in silhouette. She didn’t breathe as she passed them. They were a war of attrition she was losing with her dad.

Down the bisecting hallway, a pale crack of light was the only sign of life. He never came out of his room.

Anger stirred like old, dark blood.

She shook it off, flicked on the light, and walked to the door.

“Dad?”

There was a muffled sound on the other side.

“What is it, Mieshka?” His tone was sharp. Had the school called already?

Something scraped the other side of the door. At the bottom, the crack of light flickered. When a shadow moved across, she backed off a few steps.

The door dragged as it opened. As her dad’s face appeared in the gap, she suddenly doubted the wisdom of coming to him.

He’d been a researcher before Mom died. Surely grief hadn’t killed all his skills.

He rubbed his eyes, which looked even more bagged and lined than they had last night. She wondered if he’d been crying.

“School called. You missed class?” His voice was rough and grating. Mieshka had planned to snap off something about administrative clerical errors, but thought better of it.

Truth was always a good place to start.

“Yeah. There was a… problem in class. So I left. I’ll tell you about it later and you can get angry at me or the school or whatever. There’s something else we need to talk about.”