Liquid Fire (50 page)

“In Haleakala crater?” Jewel finished, head twisting toward the slope. “It’s
extinct
—”

“Dormant,” Philip said. “Maybe not so dormant anymore.”

“Crap,” Jewel said. “Oh,
crap!
Should we, like, move or something—”

“It’s the
least
probable candidate,” Philip said, “and for any normal-sized explosion, I think we’d have time to get to safety. From something the size of Krakatoa—well, Jewel, I can’t precisely tell you where would be safe. It was heard thousands of miles away.”

I thought about what the Grinder had said about hatching causing extinctions, but I didn’t know how much of that was poetic license, how much was as a result of an explosive hatching, and how much was a result of a mountain-sized fire-breathing creature roaming the earth.

My tattoo shifted, and I got a disturbing sense of . . . protest. Like a denial that my Dragon would ever do such a terrible thing. I frowned. I wasn’t clear whether this was a real voice, or me talking to myself. I wondered how I could ask a question without giving up too many secrets.

“The way Nyissa told the story,” I said carefully, “made it sound like the Krakatoa explosion was so bad because of the war—because the hatching was disrupted and went wrong. Do you think a normal hatching could cause that kind of damage?”

“I don’t know,” Philip said, “but the scientists that
I’ve
talked to think that as the Earth ages, it becomes harder for dragons to hatch normally. That worst case scenario I mentioned? The Cambrian extinction may have been caused by a clutch of dragon eggs detonating.”

“Jesus,” Jewel said.

“May He help us,” I said. The Grinder was right.

My cell phone vibrated with a text, and I pulled it out, afraid of what new horror would be dumped upon us. But when I stared at my phone, I wanted to whoop. But Jewel was standing right there, so I controlled my expression, simply nodding and putting it away.

“So . . . we’ve learned we’re in the right place. Philip, even that’s no excuse for my behavior. When I set out to practice tonight, I really didn’t anticipate that I’d end up half a mile in the sky. I’m sorry.”

“It was worth it to see Iloa’s face,” Philip said. “Still . . . he could cause problems.”

“I have an idea,” Jewel said. “Let me apologize, because this is my fault.” She twisted her delicate hands around each other, glancing at me, embarrassed. “I added my magic to Dakota’s practice. I wanted to see what would happen. I’m sorry.”

“I have a better idea,” Philip said. “We’ll
both
apologize for her. Together, we can smooth any ruffled feathers—and Dakota cements her fearsome reputation.”

“Hey,” I said.

“Someone has to back up all that bravado,” Philip said. “It sure can’t just be you.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said. “No, seriously, thanks—and again, I’m sorry.”

“No worries,” Philip said, putting his hand on Jewel’s shoulder. “Besides, that gives the two of us a chance to catch up.”

“Do you have dirt, Special Agent Davidson?” Jewel asked.

My friends walked back the path to clean up my mess. I watched them go, then turned on my heel and purposely strode toward the cabin, hoping I could quickly find my laptop, get on line and check my email. That last message ping on my phone had set a fire under me.

———

If I’d read the title right, Alex had just sent me every fireweaving manual in existence.

53. Ye Gyde of Secryts

After I received Alex’s email—and spent the next two hours downloading an enormous rip of the
Gyde of Secryts to ye Weaving of Fyre
—I took a moment to savor the irony. I had to download the latest version of Adobe Reader to open a three-hundred-year-old document.

I’d texted Cinnamon for help, but it had to be past two a.m. in Atlanta, so I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t get an answer. Either she’d turned in early, or, more likely, was late coming back from her midnight run—weretiger sleep patterns are weird. Regardless, I was on my own.

In the kitchen of our cabin, I’d spread out everything I had on the case: my notes on the hatchsign, Philip’s seismic maps, the DEI’s dossiers on Daniel and his likely fire ninjas, and the photos of the symbols that the ninjas had left everywhere from Maui to Moreland Avenue.

The promise of immortality was screwing everything up. Everyone around me had their own agenda, their own secrets, all about what liquid fire could do, how they could get it—and how they could keep it. I was convinced that the answer was cracking that code.

I had to know what Daniel was trying to tell Jewel.

I didn’t know precisely what I would find. Details of Daniel’s demands? Or, given Jewel was still being a little cagey, the secrets he demanded she keep? It was too much to hope for a location, but I hoped to find a magical signature I could track, some clue—anything.

But I’d been hoping others could solve the riddle for me—relying on Cinnamon to crack it, cajoling Philip to pass it to the NSA, even leaning on Jewel to tell me outright. But what if Arcturus was right? What if I wasn’t a dim bulb tattooist who needed to rely on others?

What if I had the smarts to crack the code?

Now, I had no illusions—I wasn’t an NSA-trained codebreaker, and I couldn’t multiply million-digit numbers in my head. But even Cinnamon, budding genius, was consumed by punishing self-doubt when her defective early education left holes in her knowledge.

Fortunately, ignorance is correctable.

Cinnamon and I had already gone over the code, both individually and in consultation with Philip’s experts, so I focused on the new piece—Alex’s fireweaving manuals. These were the secrets Jewel was trying to hide. The ones Daniel threatened to maim her for performing.

Here had to lie the answers.

I stared into the text, trying to read the arcane script with its ancient spelling:
ye who vse yese rvnes, ivdge karfulli, ye magiks of fire . . .
Then it hit me—the spelling of the fireweaver’s text wasn’t just archaic. It used
y
for
th
everywhere
—as if even the spelling was a code.

I skimmed the text—
u
everywhere was
v
,
j
was
i
,
qu
was
kw
,
z
was
x
 . . . and there were two different variants for all the common vowels, used seemingly at random. So common letters were split up, and rare ones combined—breaking the frequencies. Perfect for a code.

That
was what had stymied the NSA, the DEI, even Cinnamon—the alphabet of symbols. Without knowing what they corresponded to, you needed an enormous amount of text to guess the letter frequencies—but the fireweavers tuned their spelling to destroy that information.

But
what were the symbols?
I searched the document for the word
code
and got dozens of references, none relevant.
Cipher
yielded nothing, not in any spelling, not
cypher
or
cyfer
or
sifer
. Symbol—nothing;
simbol
—hundreds of matches, effectively useless to me.
Alphabet?
No.

Then, on a guess, I tried
alfabet
—and found the phrase
ye alfabet of rvnes
.

It was a table, mapping runes to the peculiar spelling of the fireweaver text.

“Bingo,” I said, pulling out a piece of tracing paper and laying it over the latest message.
Every
symbol in the ring was found in that table in the document Alex sent me. Soon, I had a ring of letters written down—sixty letters, in fact, in five concentric arcs. And all still gibberish.

I stared into the ring, willing it to resolve like a set of Cryptoquotes. Nothing.

What had Philip said? A good field code had to be simple enough to be encoded quickly, something an agent could easily remember, but still baffling to the enemy. And for a practitioner using magic to send a message, what would be simpler than the rules of graphomancy?

I stared into the smallest disc, at the runes etched on its surface, at the symbols and lines that connected them. Beyond the obvious lines, there was a logic, like one of Cinnamon’s cat’s cradles, a spiral woven through the lines that hit every letter in a specific order.

I traced the pattern, but the runes were gibberish. Of course. Encoding the letters along the lines of the magic would be as obvious as writing them out in straightforward order. Damn it! How would Cinnamon do this? She’d be able to crack this code between two of her tics!

Or maybe not. I realized the whole idea was hopeless because the disc was symmetric—for each path through the maze, there were many others like it, formed by rotating the pattern. Twenty-four of them, in fact, one for each possible starting point—each letter in the outer ring.

No, there were only six letters in the center ring. You could only turn the pattern six ways. I tilted my head, like Cinnamon would. Six ways break it into groups of ten—not along the lines of the magic itself,
but along the paths that a fireweaver would use to create it
.

Six ways. Once, Jewel had said there were seven hundred and twenty different ways to do the basic spinner’s weave . . . but Cinnamon had called that “six factorial.” Could it be as simple as writing out the message along the tracks that
had to be
left by a fireweaver’s poi?

I paged back through the manual. Before the rituals, before the spells, before the expert moves—back to the basics, the firespinning equivalents of the skindancer’s dance of the Five and Two. Sure enough—
the simplest spins had magical numbers.
The weaves were complex enough that an outsider wasn’t likely to figure out how the letters were laid down, but . . .

To an initiate, the code would practically write itself.

I pulled out my practice poi and swung them experimentally, imagining the arc. The message would be written inside from outside, five letters out, five letters curling back. I picked an arc and got PSWIL and OSTFR—nonsense. Wait, OST FR . . . and my name was FROST . . .

What was that Cinnamon had said about quirks of the code making things line up?

My heart began thumping in my throat. I tried spinning again and quickly found another arc through it: NDEAI OKTLO—
Daniel took?
Another: NGTOE OMAUI—
gone to Maui?
In moments, I had it. In arcs through the pattern that just looked like nonsense . . .

NDEAI OKLTO STFRO ASSCP NGTOE UIOMA

IBGRN STFRO ISSHE ROAUF BLCLA ANKPL

. . . there was a hidden order, unlocked by the simplest of keys:

DANIE LTOOK FROST SCAPS GONET OMAUI

BRING FROST SHEIS OURFA LLBAC KPLAN

Daniel took Frost’s caps, gone to Maui. Bring Frost, she is our fallback plan.

“Oh shit, this is bad,” I whispered. But not because of what the message said, nor the ominous personal implications of that fallback plan. No, it was because of the key that unlocked the pattern, a key I’d found purely by accident of my name lining up with one of the patterns.

OSTFR. Five letters, taken from FROST . . . letters 4 and 5, then 1, 2, and 3. ASSCP. Five letters taken from S’CAPS . . . letters 3 and 1, then 5, 2, and 4. The whole message was jumbled by repeated application of the pattern 45123, then 31524, over and over, in and out:

31524 45123 45123 31524 31524 45123

Again, there was a hidden order, taken from two simple sets of five letters. Cinnamon had shown me this trick—take a word and write down the order of its letters in the alphabet in order to get a scramble code. Something simple . . . something easy for the recipient to remember:

JEWEL GRACE GRACE JEWEL JEWEL GRACE

My skin felt clammy. My gut clenched. Because I hadn’t just stumbled on it by accident. I’d seen the OSTFR, realized it was a scramble . . . and looked for the first five letter word that came to mind. JEWEL didn’t unlock my name . . . but it unlocked the very next sequence.

And then the two words of her name unlocked the whole rest of the message.

“The message was meant for her,” I whispered. It wasn’t
from
Daniel; it was
about
Daniel, from Jewel’s group—meaning, it wasn’t a ransom message
about
Molokii, but probably instructions
from
Molokii himself. “And like it asked . . . she brought me to Maui.”

I heard a sizzling—and looked over to see Jewel at the door, lit morningstars in hand.

———

“You always were too smart for your own good,” she said—and struck.

54. Advantage, Jewel

I barely had time to raise my hand and murmur
shield
before the blast struck. The ball of flame didn’t burn like a fire, but hit like a linebacker, knocking me sideways out of my seat, and I winced as heat magically rippled from my projected tattoos to my living skin.

I hit the floor and rolled, kicking with one leg, trying to use Taido to get distance and right myself. But Jewel ran forward with me, striking again and again with her morningstars, battering me like they were real versions and not their magical namesakes.

“Go down,” she muttered. “Damn it, Dakota, quit fighting me, go down—”

“Never—had a problem—with that before,” I said, weaving as blows rained down around me. My shields worked against magic, against blows, against bullets—but not fire, which stung like a bitch. “Maybe you should—have stuck to—your old style of foreplay—”

“Damn it!” Jewel said, swinging her fiery balls and chains backward and forward, crossing them at speed before me, creating a flash of magic which impacted my chest and knocked me, winded, against the far wall. “I’m not trying to hurt you—”

“But I’m trying to hurt you!” Nyissa roared, leaping upon her.

Jewel screamed as Nyissa impacted her shield, then stumbled back. I gasped, trying to regain my breath, as Nyissa struck her again and again with her hands like claws, sparks flaring as vampire-hard blows caused her shield to bow and bulge and its flames to flicker, then gutter.

But just when I thought Jewel’s shield would collapse, Nyissa jerked her hand back, shaking it out—and a burn was visible on that pale skin. In that moment, Jewel regained her footing, switched up her weave—and her barrier of flame strengthened, redoubled.

“You want to hurt me?” Jewel said, mock-wounded. “Good luck with that.”

Nyissa snarled, full fangs, then leapt, whirling around Jewel, trying to penetrate her fiery shield, trying to gain advantage. At first, it looked like the advantage was to Jewel; even with vampire speed, Nyissa couldn’t outrun the whirling balls of flame.