Into the Fire (The Elemental Wars Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Cat and Meese

  Author's Note

  Into the Fire

  By K. Gorman

  In collaboration with S. R. Frederick.

  Prologue

  July 12, 1981 — Transition Year Zero

  The jump went far easier than Aedynan had expected it to, and far easier than it should have. 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—plus 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.

  Considering they were fleeing a literal apocalypse, a little shaking was getting off light.

  It still felt unreal to him, as if, as cliche as it sounded, this were just one awful fucking dream that he just couldn’t fight his way out of. Everything had happened so fast—the crystals, the mutation, the spread, news of his parents and grandparents’ deaths along with the rest of those who couldn’t flee the epicenter state quickly enough, the vidcom footage of the Maanai spreading, turning entire forests black in minutes and looking like a living thing as the entire world caught a glimpse of what the crystal’s exponential growth rates actually looked like.

  Gods. Only a week ago, he’d been tooling around the levi-vehicle lot, partaking in the admittedly-relaxed summer hours of his internship in the Chadaki Mountains at Dalinar University’s crystal research lab. The picture of the hangar kept popping into his head—its half-hewn roof letting in a light breeze, bringing the smell of summer heat in the air, the scattered pattern of yellow and green Bingani leaves across the dark gray asphalt, the slight chill on his neck as his sweat cooled in the shade. Aeryn, his sister, had been beside him, her angular face pulled into grim uncertainty as she’d delivered news of the mutation. Cold, hesitant panic had seized his chest as his engineer’s mind had processed the scope of the mutation’s reach and calculated the potential outcome.

  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 dry, 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 hushed crowd 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 erect in the co-pilot’s seat, her face tinted orange by the color of the display, 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.

  As he watched, her lips pursed together.

  “Did we?” he asked.

  Did we make it? he’d meant to ask.

  As a side-effect of transition protocol, external data blacked out the second one made a jump. His screen only showed the route calculations. The main screen was still blank, making only a dim, barely-visible rectangle at the front of the ship.

  Her shoulders moved back as she straightened, the professionalism she used as a crutch pushing through her iron-stiff spine. 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. Aedynan 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 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 Lür, with the same ratio of oxygen in the atmosphere, a similar amount of water, and 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, he 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 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 him a few seconds to recognize what he was seeing.

  The city spread out in a grid pattern, the tops of its boxy downtown office towers petering into larger, less-organized blocks as the roads moved away from the center. Hemmed in by a range of tall, jagged mountains, the heaviest density 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, and he raised an eyebrow at his sister.

  “I guess that means we have the upper hand.”

  A new voice interrupted him, resonating from the comms 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 just as packed as theirs.

  If Aeryn had any problem with Safya’s clan, she didn’t show it. She keyed throu
gh the data, barely glancing at the 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 as a slur against her people’s magical abilities.

  “It’ll be a problem later, if they learn,” said an elderly voice. The back of Aedynan’s 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.”

  His 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 Lür, but enough to interact with the deeper scans Safya had done. He was right, too, though. They would have the upper hand, especially since most of Lür’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 Kreena and the Bildanese Agnisimemnat—had kept their full military complements.

  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. Comms traffic from other ships seeped in through the network links. Behind his chair 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.

  As Aedynan sat back in his chair to wait, a dissociated calm slid over his mind. Watching the cluster of organized frenzy on the ground as the local airfield scrambled their jets into the air, it felt as if the entire world had quietened around him.

  It was out of his hands, now. He’d got them here. His job was finished.

  Ten minutes later, through a single ground-ship radio signal picked up and transcribed by the Agnisimemnat’s ship crystal, the first contact with the local population was made, and the Transition began.

  Chapter 1

  September 23, 2002 — Transition Year Twenty

  The bomb broke over Ryarne’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 smeared, 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 vibrate straight through her skin and rattle the marrow of her bones.

  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 her sixteen-year life—and Westray, her country, was not winning. Outside of Ryarne’s shield borders, only Terremain, the next city over and the one that guarded mouth of the mountain valley that led to Ryarne, remained unoccupied. Barely fifteen percent of what had once been Westran territory.

  But Ryarne’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 Ryarne 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 since she’d arrived. 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 Ryarne was still free, and so defensible, were the mountains. Young, steep, and sharp, Westray had demolished 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 the rest of their grade had been quick to echo. A couple inches shorter than Mieshka’s five-foot-eight, she shared the same pale skin tone, but they were otherwise opposites. 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.

  Robin 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 Ryarne’s blasé 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 of when the bombs did get through, the percussion of hundreds of bombs testing the weakening shield there 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 shutter on itself. 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 to a slate blue color in the shade of Uptown’s buildings, 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 moving 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 electrified middle one yellow where the paint had not turned into a dark rust brown. On the other side, a concrete wall rose, papered with recruitment posters. In each, a female soldier held a large gun, her rank and division sewn into her uniform.

  The one across from Mieshka was a sergeant. Artillery 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 a Westran 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 gaping, sucking hole of loss that threatened to empty her lungs.

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

  “Hey, Meese,” 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 now. Not here.

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