Into the Fire

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Want More?

  Prologue

  **Warning, this preview contains swearing.**

  July 12, 1982 — Transition Year Zero

  The jump went far easier than Aedynan expected it to, and far easier than it had a right to. It had been more than five-hundred years since trans-dimension travel had been banned, and only the domestic jump requirements of society’s day-to-day operations, and the crystal spirits’ unforgettable knowledge, kept the ability within reasonable reach.

  Still, when he’d sat down at the controls and accessed the extra-dimensional navigation menu, his hands had been shaking.

  Only a week ago, he’d been tooling around the hangar, partaking in the admittedly-relaxed summer hours of his internship in the Chadaki Mountains at Dalinar University’s crystal research lab, when the news had hit. The picture of the hangar kept popping into his head—the hangar’s half-ewed roof, the smell of summer heat in the air, the light breeze cooling the sweat on his skin, the pattern of scattered yellow and green Bingani leaves strewn across the grayed asphalt. Aeryn, his sister, had been beside him, her angular face pulled into a grim uncertainty, unsure of how to take the news. The cold, hesitant panic as he realized the scope of the mutation’s reach.

  He swallowed hard, pushing the image away. A sick feeling rolled through the bottom of his stomach. His mouth, along with most of his throat, was dry and sticky, tinged with the smell of stomach acid from when he’d thrown up several hours ago. His eyes were, too. It felt as though the muggy, stale air were wiping at them with strands of soft cloth. Sweat dripped down his face and neck, wicking into parts of his dirty shirt, and he was very aware of the hush of people gathered both around and behind him. Twelve people was pushing the limits of this ship’s life support capabilities, but they didn’t have much of a choice.

  It was either push it, or die.

  Aeryn looked little better. Sitting in the copilot’s seat, her face tinted orange by the color of the display, the black of her uniform blended with the shadows beyond her. She looked as drawn and pale as he felt, her eyes wide and bagged, rimmed with red veins. Her hair fell in a straight line beside her face like a curtain. Her lips pursed.

  “Did we?” he asked.

  Did we make it? He’d meant to ask. External data blacked out the second one made a jump. His screen only showed the route calculations. The main screen was still blank,

  Her shoulders moved back as she took a breath. Eyes still on the screen, she nodded once.

  There was a collective breath behind them. From the back, someone—a child, maybe—gave a quiet, scared sob. He swallowed again.

  The main screen shivered back to life. Orange dots appeared, popping up like fireflies in the grass. Three, then six. Twelve. Thirty.

  Another breath. This time more finite, with a degree of relaxation and relief that the other hadn’t quite been ready to give.

  The other ships had made the jump, too.

  Data scrolled down the side. Aedynan caught glimpses of atmospheric readings, topographical measurements, grid placements… It was a similar planet to Lur. Same ratio of oxygen in the atmosphere, similar amount of water, an above-average ability to support life. The government had got that much right, at least. Considering the data had been well over a thousand years old, Aedynan had expected it to be more myth than science. It was supposed to have life, too. Human life. Civilization.

  The ship swung around, adjusting itself. They barely felt the maneuver. Not like he would have on his his jetbike. Beside him, Aeryn’s fingers fluttered over the console, building commands as she interacted with the data stream. A muscle in her jaw tightened, then relaxed.

  “There’s a city,” she said. “Right below us.”

  Their ship had no windows. When she switched the main screen over to camera and map function, he cringed at the sudden brightness. Blinking, it took a few seconds to recognize what he saw.

  The city spread out in a grid pattern, the tops of its boxy downtown office towers petering into larger, less-organized blocks as the buildings spread out. Hemmed in by a range of tall, jagged mountains, the city was concentrated on the top of a hill that took up nearly a third of the valley, and clearly divided its slope into upper and lower sections.

  Vehicles moved on the roads, looking like metal ants in a hive.

  Aeryn’s fingers flew over the dashboard. “We’re off mark a bit. Too far east.”

  He leaned back in the chair. “As long as we’re on the same planet, I don’t care. They seem decently advanced. Can you tell if—?”

  “No magic,” she said, anticipating his question. “The reports were wrong. They have no defensive shield, no conduits, no—” She made a frustrated noise. “No infrastructure.”

  People murmured behind them. He felt them crowd closer to the console. Aedynan raised an eyebrow at his sister. “I guess that means we have the upper hand.”

  A new voice interrupted him, resonating from the comm speaker beside him. “Actually, there is magic.”

  The screen to his left shivered on. Safya, her face as slick with sweat as his, eyes even redder than Aeryn’s, appeared on the feed. She still wore her school jacket, and the amulet from her familial clan hung below her collarbone. Behind her, silhouettes crowded the deck. Her ship was as packed as theirs.

  If Aeryn had any problem with her clan, she didn’t show it. She keyed through the data, barely glancing at Safya’s video feed. “Where?”

  “It’s latent,” Safya said. “Inactive. From what I can tell, it hasn’t evolved yet.”

  “That won’t last,” Aedynan said.

  Aeryn dismissed them, her lip curled. “That doesn’t matter. There’s no infrastructure.” She seemed to be stuck on that word. “They can’t do anything. A couple of hedge-witches won’t hold against mages.”

  Safya leveled a withering look on her, which Aeryn missed. She was too intent on the data stream. ‘Hedge-witch,’ and terms like it, had been used to describe her people’s magical abilities.

  “It’ll be a problem later, if they learn,” said an elderly voice. The back of his chair bumped forward, and a fold of soft robe fabric brushed his forearm as Elder Kenmin leaned forward and gripped the edge of the dashboard with a gnarled hand. “If they decide they don’t like us.”

  Aedynan’s screen shivered as Safya shared her data with him. With a few quick touches on the console, he parsed it apart. She was right—there was magic. Not as active or abundant as it had been back on Lur, but enough to interact with the deeper scans Safya had done. He was right, too. They would have the upper hand, especially since most of Lur’s military fleets had made the jump with them.

  But they were not here to conquer. Nor were they in any position to. All of those ships were filled to the breaking point with as many evacuees as they could fit. Only two, the Lekene Empire’s Nightblade and the Forcusian Raconte, had kept their full military compliments. They were refugees. As much as it gutted them to admit it, and as much as they were in denial, the Maanai mutation had been their extinction event—and they had survived. The old world, and all they had left behind, was dead to them. The plan now was immigration and integration.

  If they wanted to survive intact, they would have to make nice with the locals.

  Their guns, and their magic, would at least guarantee their safety while they did so. But that was all they were for.

  “I think,” Aedynan said after a few moments, “that we have bigger worries.”

  “There’s some sort of airfield to the south,” Aeryn said. “I’m picking up activity
.”

  Like that, for instance. He switched his attention to the field. Activity from other ships seeped in through the network links. Behind them, and at the side of the small ship, visible through the block of standing passengers as only an orange glow on the walls and ceiling from the tertiary screens, several other people were working on communications and other scans. Aeryn had a comms chat up on her side.

  It took the local airfield another ten minutes to scramble their jets into the air. Then, through a single ship to ship radio signal picked up and transcribed by the Recconaiteur’s ship crystal, the first contact was made and the Transition began.

  Chapter One

  October 23, 2002 — Transition Year Nineteen

  The bomb broke over Lyarne’s valley, smoke and debris flying through the blue, cloud-smudged sky like pieces of grit blown across paper. By the time Mieshka Renaud snapped her head up, the explosion had spread like a gritty gray hand, its distended fingers hugging the slight curve of the city’s mage-powered defense shield. The sound concussed through the backs of Uptown’s skyscrapers a few seconds later, loud enough to make her skin and bones feel the vibration.

  Few in Uptown reacted to the raid. It was, she’d found, a point of pride for them. The war had been going on for the better part of a decade now—most of Mieshka’s sixteen-year life—and Westray, her country, was not winning. Outside of Lyarne’s shield borders, only Terremain, the next city over and the one that guarded the mountain valley’s mouth, remained unoccupied. Barely fifteen percent of what had once been Westran territory.

  But Lyarne’s shield was unbreakable. Nothing got past. And everyone knew that.

  Which meant it was easy to pick out the refugees in the crowd. People who, like her, couldn’t quite ignore the raids when they came.

  Pressing her fingers into the straps of her backpack, she watched the smoke spread.

  Down in the valley, the buildings of Lower Lyarne glittered in the sun. The lower city was less developed than the busting, metropolitan-esque Uptown, full of residential burgs and big box warehouse outlets. She’d been down there only once in the few months she’d been here. A lake, its waters gleaming in the distance, straddled the farthest, easternmost point of the mountain valley, surrounded by cul-de-sacs on one side, a cookie-cutter suburban settlement on another, and a mix of forest and farmland where one part of the mountain range bent the land up at its east. Most of the reason Lyarne was still free, and so defensible, were the mountains. Young, steep, and sharp, Westray had exploded the fifteen roads than had once led through them, making them impassable except by air. And anything coming in by air was repelled by the shield.

  A glint flashed to the left of one of the taller peaks, a tiny fleck of light that might have been the bomber returning to its base.

  Mieshka repressed a shiver, closed her mind to it, and swiveled away.

  Her friend waited next to the subway stairs. Robin was a new friend—a new friend who insisted on calling her ‘Meese’ instead of Mieshka, a move that the rest of the class had been quick to echo. A couple inches shorter than Mieshka’s five foot eight, the two shared the same pale skin tone but were otherwise opposite. Robin had black hair to Mieshka’s orange, blue eyes to Mieshka’s brown, and a loud attitude that sometimes steamrolled right over Mieshka’s small voice.

  She didn’t look up when Mieshka joined her, only turned toward the subway stair, her attention still glued to the screen of her phone. “I see the war’s still on, hey?”

  Mieshka winced. Even after two months here, it still hurt to hear about the war, and Lyarne’s blase attitude toward it chafed at her emotions—which was stupid. They’d come here to escape the war, not have it follow them. They’d wanted the attitude.

  But some pain was just too hard to push back.

  Perhaps sensing something, Robin glanced up from her phone, eyes bright and alert as they found Mieshka’s face. She hesitated. Then, still hesitant, she lifted an arm up and put a hand on Mieshka’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. Nothing gets through the shield.”

  Mieshka’s fingernails bit into the palm of her hand. Images flashed at the edge of her mind, memories from Terremain of news stories and snippets of video when the bombs did get through, the percussion of hundreds of bombs testing the weakening shield all at once, exploding so close to the city center that it took thirty minutes for their smoke to clear, the tense, huddled waiting in her school’s underground shelter.

  The world around her began to close. First by sound, then sight. Noticing this, she closed her eyes, let out a breath, and pulled herself back together.

  When she opened her eyes again, Robin had already started down the stairs. Her navy blue hoodie bobbed in and out of sight as the crowd swallowed her. Above, in the reflection made by the plastic-glass shelter that curved over the stairs, the bomb smoke dissipated in the sky. Gold light, transformed with a slate blue color from the shade of Uptown’s buidings, tinged the clouds and touched the white crowns of the mountains.

  The next breath was easier. Still stiff, she began to follow Robin down into the station. Wind from the subway rushed up, making the sides of her jacket flap and, with the crowd of the station around her, she felt a bit like a fish going downstream. Feet stamped around her, hushing the howl of the tunnel. About halfway down, her shoulders began to relax. At the bottom, payment gates opened to her left, and shops on her right. The crowd shifted. She ducked around a newspaper stand, moving more on habit and instinct than any conscious effort. Robin vanished, then reappeared.

  She caught up to her at their gate. Together, they flattened their school cards against the sensors and walked through. The train schedule scrolled across a marquee close to the ceiling.

  “We’re hitting the Lansdowne gaming booth, right?” Mieshka skimmed the text. “Five minutes?”

  Robin nodded. Already, queues had formed where the car doors would stop. Robin and Mieshka stood between two of those, toeing the red line that warned of the platform’s edge. Three tracks lay in the dark gravel four feet below. The middle one was yellow where the paint had not turned into a dark rust brown. On the other side, a concrete wall rose, papered with several recruitment posters. In each, a female soldier held a large gun, their rank and division sewn into their uniforms.

  The one across from Mieshka was a sergeant. Artillary insignia marked her left breast. Below, the caption read, ‘For Victory!’ in bold, italicized text.

  And death, she thought, remembering the dark, sarcastic add-on her mother’s unit had given it.

  She sucked in a quiet breath and dug her fingernails back into the flesh of her palm as an image of the funeral came to her—the hard, numb disbelief as they pulled an honor decorated white casket around the cenotaph and unveiled her mother’s name in the black marble. Even now, she was still having difficulty grasping that her mother had been in that casket. And that she was, right now, buried in the cemetery to Terremain’s north.

  She took a slow breath, trying to shut down the grief that threatened to spiral within her.

  Okay, so maybe now’s not the best time to think of that. Or ever.

  “Hey,” Robin said next to her. Her gaze had gone to the posters, too, snapping up from her phone long enough to give them a study. “Your mom was a soldier, wasn’t she?”

  Mieshka stiffened. The world closed in.

  Fuck. No. Not not. Not here.

  Her hands shook. She turned away, into the station. People shoved at her, pushing, crowding. She shoved back. Announcements crackled over the intercom. Robin shouted after her.

  Need to get away. Too many people. Too much noise. I need to be somewhere else.

  The crowd parted. Mieshka darted through the opening. She smacked into the gate, fumbled with her card, stumbled past when it clunked open. Too many people came from the stairs, so she shied away to the left, deeper into the tunnels. Someone grabbed at her, shouted. She broke into a rough sprint. Shops slid past, then a set of lockers and a washroom. A train screamed past at the next
platform. She kept running.

  Soon, it was just her, her breath, and an empty hallway.

  She slowed. Then stopped. Bending over, she leaned her hands on her knees and caught her breath, ignoring the rapid beat of her heart and the silence around here. Tears pricked at her eyes. A few slid to the floor, with the promise of more on the way. She wiped at them with an angry sniffle, cleared her throat, and straightened back up.

  Okay, where is this?

  Both Lyarne and Terremain had an extensive tunnel system—a symptom of population and cold winters—so this wasn’t the first time she’d wandered off the normal paths. This looked abandoned, as if it had once led up to an Uptown shopping or business center but had long ago dried up. The shops here had closed. Heavy padlocks kept their metal curtains shut. Behind a metal cage, window fliers advertised a sale six months expired. Rubble filled the room behind the dusty window. It smelled different here. Musty, but lighter than the closeness and dampness of the platform.

  No one was around.

  Wiping at her eyes again, she stepped over to the wall, shrugged off her backpack, and slid to the floor. Ignoring the falter of her breath, and the way her vision blurred, she unzipped the pocket of her pack and pulled out a tissue. In the distance, the thin wail of a leaving train echoed up the hall, accompanied by the chirps of the auditory warning systems.

  Closer, footsteps tapped on the scuffed tiles.

  Mieshka bowed her head as she dabbed at her face, letting a curtain of orange hair hide her eyes. Her throat choked up. A sob racked through her.

  Grief was an ugly feeling.

  Someone stopped in front of her. After a moment, Robin crouched down. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Mieshka curled away, reached for another tissue. Her voice trembled when she spoke. “I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to go to Lansdowne today.”

  Robin squeezed her shoulder. “We don’t have to go to Lansdowne today.”